Trump faced his first setback this week when his choice for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew just before CNN published new allegations about his potentially criminal relationship with a 17-year-old girl. The replacement came within hours. Trump and his team have now settled on Pam Bondi, the Attorney General for Florida. It didn’t take long for the media to dig out stuff on her. In 2013, when the Florida AG’s office was considering joining New York in launching legal proceedings against Trump University for fraud, she blocked it after her re-election campaign received $25,000 from Trump. New York carried on alone and eventually, Trump lost and settled all claims for $25 million.
Can anyone explain the difference between Mafia bosses decades ago paying secret bribes to judges and politicians to get favourable treatment, and what's happening now in plain sight? It is openly corrupt. Trump has single-handedly turned politics into something like The Sopranos.
Politicians are either clearly complicit and making money out of Trump, or they’re worried about themselves or their families being targeted by Trump’s deranged MAGA cult members, or both. The terrible thing is that nearly all of them hate Trump and have attacked him in the past. His latest Secretary of State Marco Rubio described him as a “con artist” in 2016 and said if he hadn’t inherited a fortune he’d be hawking watches in Manhattan.
Robert F Kennedy Jr once claimed Trump was like Adolph Hitler. Someone at MSNBC has produced a video of some senior Republicans who have previously criticised Trump but have now fallen in behind him, starting with his own VP JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio:
MSNBC put together a collection of videos showing Republicans flipping their position on Trump
Now a lot of them are serving in his cabinet and expect us to believe everything has been forgiven and it’s all sweetness and light now. Don’t believe it. I guarantee that his administration will look completely different this time next year, assuming he’s still POTUS which must be doubtful.
Trump at 78 is a bit older than me and I know how quickly you deteriorate when you get into your late seventies. I know my mind isn’t as sharp as it once was, I can’t do physical things that I could do quite easily even five years ago, and certainly not for as long. And I’m nowhere near as overweight as Trump is. I wouldn’t mind betting he spends half the day nodding off, napping, or thinking about sleep unless he’s on some sort of stimulant, which wouldn't surprise me.
And even when he’s alert and paying attention, his contribution to meetings is almost certainly negative. I don’t see how any of his cabinets could ever function properly.
Pam Bondi, likely to be America’s senior law officer in a couple of months, was talking openly just last year about using the Department of Justice against the people who investigated and prosecuted Trump for insurrection and withholding classified documents!
🚨 HOLY SMOKES!!! Pam Bondi in August 2023, saying on live TV that when Donald Trump wins, he will weaponize the Department of Justice. Matt Gaetz is irrelevant right now. We must focus on the real danger, Pam Bondi.— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@calltoactivism.bsky.social) 22 November 2024 at 03:07
Now she will be in charge of the DoJ. I suspect this is the main reason she has been selected. Trump is going to spend years harassing the lawyers and civil servants who tried to bring him to justice for serious crimes against the state. It is just unbelievable.
His latest best friend Elon Musk looks like a megalomaniac and has started to name civil servants that he intends to fire as soon as he can, according to the Wall Street Journal. The article is behind a paywall so I can't see the details but it doesn't look good to me.
Musk is now targeting individual federal employees by name on X, subjecting them to ridicule from his hoard of followers— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) 22 November 2024 at 18:39
Russell Vought, his choice for director of the Office of Management and Budget, a role he had in Trump's first term, has described how he's been "crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions." He has called for the Environmental Protection Agency to be defunded and for career civil servants to be put “in trauma.”
Americans are going to be treated to the bizarre spectacle of their own freely elected government dismantling civil society in order to bring about a new 'Golden Age.' It really is amazing. Government has ceased to be a tool to raise living standards and the quality of life and is now a weapon to club your personal and political opponents including those in your own party.
For an example of how stupid all this has become, some recent polling by YouGov in the USA shows that the number of Republican voters who say that they’re worse off financially than they were a year ago is already down 15% since the election even though nothing has changed!!!
And even crazier, the number of Republicans who say the economy is getting worse has dropped by a massive 30% since 5 November! What are these people thinking? It is blindingly obvious the economy and inflation were never the real reason they elected Donald Trump.
At the end of January Trump could declare he has Made America Great Again and his followers would probably accept it.
