Rawhide said:
J.B.Katz said:
Oldbear83 said:
Stalin Jr. "The very least that should come out of these hearings is that Trump should be ineligible to run for office in any capacity."
Go suck a lemon. If you don't believe you can beat him in an election, too freaking bad for you.
The idea that you want to rig things to keep any candidate from running, tells me a lot about you that is pretty low-life.
Trump lost the presidential election and tried to overturn the results when he knew he lost.
You and everyone else on this forum who still support Trump represent Judge Luttig's "clear and present danger."
Why would you continue to support a former president who lost an election because of his nasty behavior and then tried to stage a coup?
Doesn't the fact that Trump tried to put Pence in harm's way because Pence wouldn't violate his oath of office to do Trump's bidding give you any pause?
If Trump's on the general ballot. I have zero problem voting for him.
After seeing dementia joe and is cohorts screw this country like a ***** in heat, I don't know how dumb you have to be to think he's anything other than a **** up.
How the hell do you even live in America? Our founding fathers staged their very own coup. A real one, not a fake one like you try to push. Hell, they even had firearms.
I think Biden's a good president. Not great, but good. I voted for him because I supported most of his policy positions and thought he was a decent guy. Those both still hold true.
America would be in a much darker place had Trump been re-elected or had his coup succeeded. You and other Trump supporters on this forum have convinced me this is the case. Before Trump, you felt superior and entitled to treat anyone who doesn't share your views with contempt. Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me, right?
Now, thanks to his coup attempt, you feel entitled to impose your narrow and sometimes hate-fueled religious and political views on a majority of Americans even if and when you lose an election at any level--state, local, national. Trump's coup attempt has really hurt America as a nation. Thank God for Cheney, Luttig and the Pence and Trump staffers who are contributing, however grudgingly, to holding him accountable.
If you want to vote for a traitor, then you own that. My hope is that these hearings will prevent Trump from getting on any ballot ever again.
A Tom Nichols column from the Atlantic that describes the people who tried to engineer this coup and gives some insight into Trump's supporters, too.
The Quiet Ones
Donald Trump, a petty and small man, is nonetheless a larger-than-life public figure. Investigating his attack on our elections is like staring into a klieg light: It is unpleasant, doesn't reveal very much, and leaves you temporarily blinded to everything around you.
The January 6 committee, however, deserves a great deal of credit for illuminating the dangerous mediocrities on whom Trump relied for his mischiefthe men and women who were certain that their moment had finally arrived. These peoplecall them the Third Stringthought that they were finally going to The Show, and they were going to burn the Constitution if that's what it took to stay there.Consider, for example, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, a minor Justice Department official who sought to oust his own boss and get Trump to make him the attorney general, after which Clark would try to overturn the election results. (Clark has denied that he attempted the ousting.) "History is calling,"
Clark told Trump, in what must have been his most Very Serious Adviser voice.
What kind of person does that? The kind considered "quiet" and "nerdy" by his colleagues, according to a 2021
New York Times profile, but who apparently thought he was slated for greater things. He was "not known for being understated on the topic of himself," the
Times noted. "Where the typical biography on the Justice Department website runs a few paragraphs, Mr. Clark's includes the elementary school he attended in Philadelphia, a topic he debated in college and that he worked for his college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson."
Well. (For the record, I went to
Lambert-Lavoie Elementary in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Take
that, elitists.)
Clark got his comeuppance in a
meeting in the Oval Office when Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue warned Trump that any such appointment would lead to mass resignations, and told Clark: "You're an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we'll call you when there's an oil spill."
And then there's John Eastman, the former Clarence Thomas clerk, unsuccessful congressional candidate, and former dean of the law school at Chapman University in California who immersed himself in the kookiness of Trump World and ended up having to resign his teaching post days after speaking at the January 6 rally. His "departure closes this challenging chapter for Chapman,"
the school said, and then noted that no one would be suing anyone. As a recently retired professor myself, I can tell you this is not usually the preferred exit from the faculty.
(Eastman's crackpot legal theories are being eviscerated in the House today by retired
Judge J. Michael Luttigfor whom Eastman also clerked. Ouch.)
Yesterday,
The New York Times reported that emails obtained by the January 6 committee revealed that Eastmanwho was in close contact with Justice Thomas's wife, Ginniclaimed to know that there was a "heated" fight inside the Supreme Court about election cases. He stated this in an email with another pro-Trump lawyer who said the odds of the Court acting would increase if they thought there was a danger of public "chaos."
Greatness called; if it took intimidating the nation's highest court with civil disorder, well, eggs must be broken, and all that.
Clark and Eastman were among the brigade of mediocrities who saw in Trump a kind of patron saint of the Third String, the outsider who would sweep away the elites who controlled Washington and replace them with a new elitenamely, themselves. No more working in cubicles, hustling for grants, or sucking up for gigs with minor campaigns. The former White House spokesperson Stephanie Grisham was among the most honest of the lot when
she wrote in her memoir how Trump was her ticket to D.C., and that she couldn't just walk away: "I was a single mom with no trust fund. If I had quit earlier, where would I have gone?"
The big, room-filling figures like Trump or Steve Bannon or Rudy Giuliani are, of course, dangerous even if they are also pathetic. (As
The Bulwark's
Charlie Sykes
once put it,
"A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.") But these showboaters were doing their damage in full view of the public. A constitutional democracy, in a way, is built to withstand such frontal assaults because we have a safety net in the web of laws and norms that are observed by civil servants and ordinary citizens.
But
democracy is in severe danger when that net is cut, thread by thread, by a gray, resentful Third String that believes that greatness, unjustly denied for so long, is finally within reach.