Tag Archives: Trump

Trump should insist that both candidates take a post-debate drug test

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Failing in his efforts to bribe or dope people into voting for him, and falling even further behind in the battleground states, a desperate Joe Biden has agreed to a high-risk gambit that must give his handlers nightmares.

He has agreed to debate Donald Trump.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Biden actually will. His word is worth nothing, as people around the country and the world will tell you – most recently the Israelis. It’s quite possible that he’ll find an excuse to back out, and it’s possible that he already has the excuse pre-planned. But the dates for the debates have been set, and the first is only six weeks away.

Biden will be energized for the debates, just as he was for his State of the Union address a few months ago. And I do mean “just as.”

The SOTU address showed semi-somnolent Joe shouting at the teleprompter like an old man shouting at a cloud. He veered off-script once and had to backtrack for days within his own party.

That was when he accidentally called illegal aliens “illegals.” There were two things bad about that. The first is that “illegals” is a term that his party has deemed offensive (even though “illegal alien” is used in many federal laws and regulations) because it accurately describes the immigration status of the person referenced.

The second thing bad about Biden’s reference is that he used “illegals” in making the point that the murder of a young woman by an illegal wasn’t such a big deal because, after all, people get murdered all the time by legal citizens too.

I’m sure that made the woman’s parents feel better.

The shouting, the gaffe and the sick trivialization of a young woman’s murder suggested to me that Biden had been drugged up. That wasn’t Joe Biden, it was Amphetamine Joe. It was Speedy Joe. It was Juiced Up Joe.

Donald Trump should condition his participation in the debates on the following.

At the conclusion of the debate, the candidates remain on stage while a simple blood draw is taken from each. The blood draw then is treated as evidence. A chain of custody is established and each candidate can have an aide accompany local law enforcement to deliver the blood draws to a local testing company. There, they can be tested for the presence of mood-altering drugs.

The people have a right to know whether the president needs drug stimulants to perform the duties of the presidency.

I expect Biden’s team to decline this condition, undoubtedly with an indignant huff. (I can imagine Biden’s press secretary with her patented “How dare you!” that she must practice in front of a mirror for those frequent occasions when a reporter dares to ask a question she doesn’t like.)

But apart from that press secretary, most Americans will see this as a reasonable condition. Biden does, indeed, behave like a man in need of drug stimulants, and at the SOTU he looked like that need had been fulfilled.

If Biden refuses the condition, as I expect he will, the people can rightly draw what the lawyers call “an adverse inference” from that refusal. A fair inference will be that he needs drug stimulants to function, and he doesn’t want us to know it.

This piece was suggested to me by an alert reader. I’ve also noticed that Jesse Watters made a passing reference to drug testing Joe Biden as part of the debates. 

Will the terrorist sympathizers be awarded honorary PhDs?

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For months, “mostly peaceful” protesters have harassed and harangued Jewish students at what used to be our best universities, all on the grounds that, this time, Jews on the other side of the world are defending themselves against barbarians right out of the 11th century.

The protesters’ mini-pogroms are not retribution for the Jewish students’ support of Israel – the protesters have no idea of whether those Jewish students support Israel or not – but are retribution for Jews being Jewish. This has happened before.

The protesters set up tents in the university commons, with all the deliberate connotations of military encampments. I remember when tents were set up in the woods, but now tents are a symbol and reality of anti-Americanism. You got a gripe? Get a tent. Put it up in the park and poop in the gutter.

That’ll convince everyone that you’re right. Or it will at least convince yourself that you’re a victim, which in today’s so-called society is better than being right.

When not pooping in the gutter, the dirty miscreant quasi-military university tent campers chanted antisemitic slogans at Jews as they made their way to class, and anyone else unfortunate enough to happen by.

Meanwhile, they demanded that the universities make meaningless gestures amounting to a statement that when light-skinned people defend themselves against dark-skinned terrorists, or any other circumstance involving light-skinned people and dark-skinned people, the former are oppressors and the latter are oppressed.

The faculty were not exactly the grown-ups in the tent. Some joined the terrorists sympathizers and became terrorists sympathizers themselves. Others expressed sympathy for the terrorist sympathizers. Sympathy is almost as good as victimhood nowadays, and requires just as little effort.

Some of the terrorism majors demanded room service – breakfast in bed in their tents. They complained that it was inhumane for the university to deny them food and drink during their trespass. They opined that it might even be a breach of contract. After all, they or their dark money sponsors had paid good money for a dormitory meal plan, right?

They expressly compared themselves to the protesters at Kent State. Being denied breakfast in your tent bed isn’t exactly like being shot, but it’s a start – and a lot less painful.

The Democrats initially applauded all this as an exercise of “free speech,” which is what Democrats call an insurrection when it’s committed by Democrats. President-ish Joe Biden had a “fine-people-on-both-sides” moment where he mumbled that both sides were right or perhaps both sides were wrong and in any event there are fine voters of both sides . . . and . . . look, a squirrel!

Then he fell down.

OK, he didn’t fall down that time but his poll numbers did. In all the battleground states, he’s now trailing a guy who’s been indicted 847 times, most recently for paying off a blackmailing slut but failing to use campaign money to do so.  

The terrorist sympathizers and their terrorist sympathizer sympathizers not only got away with all this, but seemed to be having a splendid time of it until those election polls woke up the “woke” Democrats and the barbarians burst the gate at the Columbia Dean’s Office. Setting up tents in the commons to threaten the extermination of the Jews while simultaneously accusing them of genocide is one thing, but setting up a tent in the Dean’s Office and driving down the approval ratings of a Democrat president in an election year is something altogether worse.

So, Columbia finally sent in the newly un-defunded cops. It took the cops just a few minutes to clear the grounds, reclaim the Dean’s Office for the absent Dean, and replace the Palestinian flag with Old Glory.

The usual suspects have already announced that in five years the terrorists, their terrorist sympathizers and the terrorist sympathizer sympathizers will be seen as courageous and sympathetic heroes. Whenever the left loses an argument, you see, they revert to boasting that they’re nonetheless on the right side of history.

Uh huh. Sort of like the Soviet Union in 1917. Or Fidel Castro in 1959. Or Pol Pot in 1976. Or the BLM riots of 2020. Or the defunding of police departments in 2021. Or Oregon’s legalization of hard drugs in 2022. Or genital mutilation of children and cross-dressing men competing as women in 2023.

On the other hand, bear in mind that history is written by historians – mainly university professors. It is indeed possible that history as written by those historians will heroize the terrorist sympathizers, even if the rest of us see them for the spoiled, foreign-funded, violent, antisemitic and anti-American anarchists that they are.  

They probably won’t be awarded honorary PhDs, but I wouldn’t rule it out. That’s a measure of how far the left has taken America down.

The Manhattan case against Trump is a travesty

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“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”

– Lavrentiy Beria, Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief

The facts of the case starting this week are simple. It’s the legal theories that are convoluted.

Donald Trump paid a porn star named Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about their affair. (Leave aside for a moment whether it’s possible to have an “affair” with a porn star, and leave aside whether Stormy blackmailed him into making the payment.)

Despite the opprobrious term “hush money,” this type of payoff is perfectly legal and happens all the time. In fact, it’s the most frequent outcome of a sexual harassment case, where it’s politely termed a “confidential settlement agreement.”

You might think the objection is that Trump used campaign money from donors to make the payment. But it’s undisputed that he didn’t. Trump instead used his own money through his lawyer to whom he paid monthly retainers. (Imagine the outcry if he had used campaign money.)

As businesses often do in these circumstances, Trump characterized the payments as an expense in his business records. The prosecution says that characterization was incorrect.  

Maybe, and maybe not. But even if so, such a mischaracterization is only a misdemeanor, at most, for which the penalty would be a simple and small fine.

The Democrats want more than that. They want Trump in jail.

Enter the new District Attorney for Manhattan, a place that went 85-15 against Trump in the 2020 election. The DA explicitly campaigned on a promise to put Trump in jail, without ever telling the voters what crime he had committed. He must have concluded, apparently correctly, that the voters didn’t care what crime Trump committed so long as he was punished with a jail term.

But even in deep blue Manhattan they don’t send people to serve jail time without charging and convicting them of crimes. So, the DA ginned up a crime.

It goes like this. The DA says Trump’s campaign benefited from his personal payment to Stormy. Because Trump made the payment personally for this benefit to his campaign, he should have reported it as a campaign contribution under the federal campaign finance laws.

Consider the irony. The DA says Trump violated federal campaign finance laws because he didn’t use campaign money from donors for this payment, but instead did use his personal money.

The lesson is, if you’re running for office and pay someone to keep quiet about your affair, be sure to use campaign money from donors to make the payment.

As to whether this payment by Trump benefitted the campaign, I suppose it did in a sense. Whatever expenditures a candidate makes with his own money to make himself more palatable as a candidate, benefits his campaign.

A campaign is benefited when a candidate uses his own money to get a nice haircut or make a publicity-generating charitable donation. (The DA has taken no position yet on nice haircuts or publicity-generating charitable donations, because Trump didn’t commit those “violations.”)

But such expenditures have never been considered reportable campaign contributions. Nancy Pelosi’s face lifts to make her more palatable (maybe) as a candidate were never reported as campaign contributions.

Ah, but Trump is a special case. Sui generis. Orange Man Bad. Trump Derangement Syndrome. He’s such a threat to democracy that there is no alternative but to jail him for . . . whatever.  

Ah but there’s another problem with the creative DA’s case, for which he has yet another solution. The problem is that the DA is a state prosecutor with no jurisdiction over federal campaign finance laws. Several of the Feds, who do have jurisdiction over the campaign finance laws, unanimously declined to bring charges.

The DA’s novel solution to that problem is as follows. Although he has no jurisdiction to bring a charge for violation of the federal campaign finance laws, he says that the trivial state law misreporting violation was a scheme to violate those federal laws.

That, he says, serves to elevate the state law violation from a misdemeanor to a felony that . . . [drum roll] . . . puts Trump in jail!

To succeed with these theories, the prosecutor must prove the federal campaign violation. That’s a violation he has not charged Trump with since he has no jurisdiction over it, and a violation that prosecutors who do have jurisdiction have declined to charge Trump with.

Unsurprisingly, the DA’s own predecessor expressly declined to pursue the current DA’s theories.  

Speaking of putting Trump in jail, the judge’s daughter is a Democrat activist who once published a photoshopped picture of Trump behind bars. Her father has slapped a gag order on Trump for the duration of the trial.

In summary: An arguable small-time misdemeanor is inflated into a jail-time felony on the prosecutor’s theory – rejected by the prosecutor’s predecessor – that the alleged misdemeanor was for the purpose of committing a federal offense over which the prosecutor has no jurisdiction and which the feds explicitly declined to prosecute. The trial will be to a jury in deep blue Manhattan presided over by a judge who has gagged-ordered Trump and whose daughter is a Democrat activist who has published a fake picture of Trump in jail.

Whether you love or hate Trump, the politicization of our legal system is a travesty.

Glenn Beaton practiced law in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission gets schooled on the First Amendment in the wedding website case

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Remember the wedding website case that came out of Colorado and went all the way to the Supreme Court? It’s finally over, and it ended beautifully. Bigly beautifully.

I’ll let the district court describe the facts:

“Plaintiff Lorie Smith . . . offers a variety of creative services, including website design, to the public. Ms. Smith intends to expand the scope of [her] services to include the design, creation, and publication of wedding websites. However, [Smith] will decline any request to design, create, or promote content that promotes any conception of marriage other than marriage between one man and one woman. [Smith has] designed an addition to [her] website that includes a statement that [she] will not create websites “celebrating same sex marriages or any other marriage that contradicts God’s design for marriage.”

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission decided that Smith’s exercise of her First Amendment right to decline to perform services in violation of her religious beliefs, and that her words so stating, were, ironically, in violation of the First Amendment. The Commission said (1) Smith was required to design websites celebrating marriages other than between a man and a woman, and (2) she was prohibited from stating that she wouldn’t.

Smith sued the Commission in Federal Court. It was a smart move to go to Federal Court because state court would have ensnarled her for years in the swamp of the Democrat-controlled Colorado state judiciary – the one where the state supreme court tossed Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot only to be unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court last winter.

The district court dismissed her case on procedural grounds. She appealed to the federal appellate court. They overturned the dismissal on procedural grounds, but, worse, dismissed her case on substantive grounds.

She appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court held 6-3 last year that both dismissals were wrong. They held that the Commission’s insistence that she perform services in violation of her religious beliefs, and insistence that she refrain from stating that she wouldn’t, were in violation of her First Amendment rights.

In short, she won.

The case was then remanded back to the lower courts to work out the details. It came back to a different district court judge. (The first judge, a former bankruptcy judge, had taken “Senior” status while the case was on appeal. That’s a gravy train for federal judges where they get full pay, the same plush courtrooms and chambers, a full complement of law clerks to kiss the back of their robes, and invitations to the right (er, left) cocktail parties. But they work just part-time by taking on only the particular cases they want. No, this “job” is not available for you.)

The details remaining to be worked out on remand to the district court were the exact language of the court’s order, and the payment of attorney fees. The Commission wanted a cramped order with little precedential significance and minimal further embarrassment to them. Smith of course wanted a broader order protecting her against infringements on her First Amendment right to exercise and state her religious beliefs.

This week, the new judge sided with Smith. The court’s order states:

“ORDERED that the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause prohibits Colorado from [compelling Smith] to create custom websites celebrating or depicting same-sex weddings or otherwise create or depict original, expressive, graphic or website designs inconsistent with her beliefs regarding same sex marriage.”

Then there was the attorney fees issue. The civil rights laws provide for an award of attorney fees and costs to a prevailing plaintiff. Smith was the prevailing plaintiff, though she had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to become one.

The Commission argued that she was actually only a partially prevailing plaintiff because she didn’t win on every single claim she made. Accordingly, the Commission contended, attorney fees should be prorated.

The district court rejected the Commission’s argument, and instead correctly held that “prevailing” in this context simply means the side that basically won, even if they didn’t win on every single claim. Attorney’s typically throw in lots of claims of dubious merit in a lawsuit. The fact that some get thrown out along the way doesn’t mean their client isn’t the prevailing party at the end of the day when they are awarded the remedy they seek.

The judge concluded with an invitation to Smith’s attorneys to file a motion for their costs and attorney fees.

Those costs and fees are likely to be into seven figures, since they include the original district court proceedings, the appeal to the appellate court, the appeal to the Supreme Court, and the current remand to the district court.

That is all good news. Smith is now playing with the house’s money. The bad news is that the “house” is, at the end of the day, the taxpayers of the State of Colorado.

Mind you, my objection here is not to gays getting married. I’m OK with that, though it took me a few years to get there. My objection is to the government telling everyone that they’re required to think it’s OK. Many people have sincere religious or other beliefs objecting to gay marriage. It’s wrong — and a violation of the First Amendment — to force them to abandon their beliefs.

As a matter of strategy, I also think it’s a grave mistake for gays to force this issue. People tend to get entrenched when their religion is attacked. But very often, when the left can choose between effective persuasion and ineffective coercion, they choose the latter. Because, at heart, they want to boss people around. They’re totalitarians.

I wish there were a way to hold these totalitarian bureaucrats personally liable in cases like this. A million-dollar judgment against them personally, and a seizure or their residences, might make them think twice next time. How about an $83 million judgment and $92 million bond? Better yet, how about a $464 million judgment secured with a $175 million bond?

Glenn Beaton practiced law in the Federal Courts, including the Supreme Court.

Paul Krugman is angry at farmers

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Former Enron advisor and current New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is angry at farmers. What’s earned his wrath is that they vote for Donald Trump. He says they vote for Trump because they’re afflicted with “white rural rage.”

Let’s examine the components of Krugman’s catchy phrase “white rural rage.”

As for rural, it is certainly true that Trump does better in rural areas than in, say, downtown Chicago or Baltimore. Then again, everybody does better – wherever they are – than they would in the toilets of downtown Chicago or Baltimore.

It’s not obvious that the politics of these rural folk are dictated by their Green Acres. Plenty of suburbanites vote for Trump too. After all, farmers comprise fewer than six million people in the U.S., while Trump won over 74 million votes last time. If every single farmer voted for Trump, that would still leave him more than 68 million short of the votes he actually received.

So, are the suburbanites and urbanites angry too? Maybe.

As for white, it’s true that Trump does better with white people than with BLack people. But there’s a couple hundred million white people in America, and Trump got only those aforementioned 74 million votes.

OK, maybe more, but let’s not go there today. In any event, Trump clearly isn’t getting all the white vote.

Compared to most Republicans, Trump is doing quite well with racial minorities. Millions of the people who voted for him are Black or Hispanic or Asian. His supporters are – dare I say it? – diverse. Is this entire multicolored constituency full of rage?

Maybe.

Which brings us to the last of Krugman’s angry accusations about Trump voters – that they’re full of rage. That, he says, is because they’re losers in a changing economy and changing world. They’re deplorable. They’re bitterly clinging.

Indeed, many Trump voters are angry, but not for the reasons that Krugman suggests. They’re angry that their country’s borders are left undefended; they’re angry that the military is well woke but can’t even lose a war gracefully, much less win one; they’re angry that Biden runs up trillion dollar deficits and double-digit inflation to pay for “free” stuff for his favored constituencies; they’re angry that the whole Biden family sells political influence to foreign governments for millions; they’re angry that Biden wants to throw the Israelis into the oven in order to bribe a few terrorist sympathizers in Michigan to vote for him; they’re angry that Joe himself is obviously non compos mentis while his caretakers gaslight us with preposterous stories that he’s sharp as a tack as soon as the cameras are turned off.

Yes, it’s fair to say that many Trump voters are angry.

But note this, Mr. Krugman. You’ve probably never met a farmer, but they deal with their anger straight up. If they’re angry, they’ll express that anger by voting against Biden and for Trump.

What they won’t do is invent pop psychology to demonize those who disagree with them. None of these voters you diagnose as afflicted with “white rural rage” will diagnose you as being afflicted with “Jewish urban anger.”

They’re smart and decent enough to know that your religion, your place of residence, and your emotional state are not particularly relevant to their political disagreement with you. To them this is not a cafeteria food fight and not a jihad.

You could learn something about manners, Mr. Krugman, from these farmers you look down upon. Keep Manhattan, just give us this countryside.

An AI-generated speech shouted at the teleprompter by an angry old man on amphetamines

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This week was the ridiculous annual spectacle where the president is supposed to tell us the state of our so-called union, as if we don’t already know. That’s a particularly appropriate topic for the current president who was elected on the promise that he would be a “uniter, not divider” who would bring normalcy and decency back to the office.

A few seconds into it, this “uniter, not divider” was implying that the people who currently disfavor his re-election, a cohort comprising over half the country – and especially his “predecessor” whose name must not be spoken – were in league with Vladimir Putin.

It almost made me miss the good old pre-1989 Democrats who liked Russia.

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The Democrats believe Trump is a witch

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When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.

Émile Cammaerts

I suppose technically speaking, he would be a warlock. Unless he has undergone that “gender affirmation” mutilation that the Democrats promote for other people’s children.

Which I doubt.

The ancient notion of witchcraft was an understandable aspect of the pre-Enlightenment inability to understand the connections between natural causes and effects, together with the absence of a scientific method of data-gathering and experimentation to discover those connections.

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The Colorado Secretary of State says she now trusts the people to make the decision she didn’t trust them to make four months ago

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The cabal that calls itself the Democratic Party of Colorado nearly pulled a coup last fall. Unburdened by any inconvenient process that might have been due, a Democrat state judge decided that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. Therefore, under a clause of the 14th Amendment designed to prevent former Confederates from running for federal office, Trump was ineligible to run for president.

Never mind that Trump had never been convicted or even charged with the crime of insurrection.

On appeal, four of the seven Democrat-appointed justices on the Colorado Supreme Court agreed. The other three in their strident dissent all but wondered out loud what kind of Colorado-legal weed the majority was smoking.

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My apology to President Trump

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I voted for Donald Trump twice. But I’ve never used the words “altruistic” or “generous” to describe him. In fact, whenever my support for Trump came up, I always hastened to add, a little sanctimoniously, that I don’t like the man personally.

I might be changing my mind. Here’s why.

Trump didn’t need to go into politics. He’s a billionaire. He had everything a man could want, including a gorgeous ex-model for a wife. (Money is a more potent aphrodisiac than power. Sorry, Henry Kissinger – you’d have known that if only you’d had money.)

Trump went into politics anyway. Sure, there was an ego factor. I hope it doesn’t surprise you that successful men have egos. So do successful women.

But Trump could have exercised that healthy ego in many other ways involving less risk and less cost. He could have bought a cruise ship, or a gold-plated 747, or donated a billion dollars to get a medical center named after him, or started a charitable foundation – a real one, not like the Clinton Foundation.

He instead chose to run for president back in 2016. That doesn’t make him Mother Teresa, but it makes him a lot closer to Mother Teresa than to Joe Biden – the guy who has spent a lifetime in politics because he’s been a failure at every other thing in life, including parenting, and whose lifetime in politics has been primarily for the purpose of lining the greasy, grafty and grifty pockets of himself and his cheesy, sleazy family.

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Fani for Vice President!

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The sun is setting on Fani’s career as a lawyer, and she’ll be seeking other career opportunities.

First, let’s recap why her law career is ending.  

Fani’s case against Donald Trump includes a preposterous RICO charge for violating the racketeering laws. Fani has no expertise in that arcane law, so she hired her boyfriend and paid him three-quarters of a million taxpayer dollars for his expertise. Never mind that he, too, has no such expertise, having never tried a RICO case.

The scheme worked well for Fani and the boyfriend, for a while. The boyfriend took Fani on expensive vacations to exotic places, paid for by the taxpayer money he received from Fani’s office. Fani says she always paid him back for her half, but the payback was in untraceable cash that she kept around the house. There’s no bank record of her withdrawing that cash, and no bank record of him depositing that cash.

To casual observers, and, more importantly, to the judge, this all looked a little crafty and grafty.

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