Trump Can Still Win. NOT!

 Some people just won't take no for an answer.

Donald Trump, who still can't believe that he lost to Joe Biden - the same Joe Biden who accidentally appropriated a British politician's' life story in his first bid for the Presidency and once referred to Franklin Roosevelt addressing the nation on television from the White House after the 1929 stock market crash - is still contesting the election after nearly a month since Biden was declared the winner.  When he got a recount of votes in two countries in Wisconsin, Biden ended up getting more votes to add to his statewide popular victory.  Trump then sued to get 20,000 ballots in Wisconsin thrown out after the results were certified.  He did that even as Arizona certified its results for Biden.  After failing to get thousands of votes thrown out by a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania, his lawyers vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court.  No such appeal has since been filed.

And now that Georgia's presidential vote has been counted thrice and certified, Trump is suing that state and complaining about how Republicans there have run the election, raising the possibility that Republicans in Georgia won't come out to vote in the U.S. Senate double runoff in January because they don't trust the system - because Trump told them not to trust it.

This all prompted Gabriel Sterling, prompting a Republican electoral official in Georgia, to tell Trump to cut it out or someone could get hurt by some reactionary nut out to take action against GOP "traitors" who won't help Trump overturn the election - an election that even Attorney General William Barr says was free of mass voter fraud.  This puts him in concurrence with Chris Krebs, the former Trump Administration cybersecurity official who got fired for saying that the election was safe and secure.  Even Lindsey Graham is telling Trump to put up or shut up in regard to offering proof that the election was stolen.  And yet Trump went online for over 45 minutes to talk about how there was fraud, and no one cared a twit about a word he said.   

You think it was bad that Trump lawyer Joe DiGenova saying that Krebs should be executed (and Krebs is looking at suing him)?  Consider the freshly pardoned Michael Flynn calling for martial law to allow the election to be done over.

Give it up, Donald - haven't you done enough already?  

The Latest On Trump

After hearing about the court memos thanking Michael Flynn for his cooperation in the Trump case and recommending little if any jail time and insisting that Michael Cohen should get lots of jail time for his various crimes - including the funneling money to keep two of Trump's affairs hush-hush and lying about when a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow was terminated - the news that Paul Manafort has broken his plea deal, and the growing evidence of possible collusion with Russia on the part of someone in the Trump presidential campaign if not Trump himself, along with several other things that don't seem right, I have come to a decision. 

I can't comment on any of this; the whole thing is such a mess that the fact that Trump is in such hot water over everything pertaining to his various dealings as President and possibly as a private citizen has long since convinced me that he needs to be driven from office somehow - if not through impeachment and removal from office, then definitively in the next election - so why bother picking apart all of this news?  It's making my head spin.

By the way, I wouldn't have had to talk about this if the Democrats had nominated Martin O'Malley for President.  The end.

Flynn and Taxes

Michael Flynn, Donald Trump's former national security adviser, agreed with special counsel Robert Mueller to plead guilty to lying about his contacts with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, after it turned out that he had asked the ambassador on December 29, 2016 to, as CNBC reported, "refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia that same day" while Barack Obama was still President.  Trump had opposed the sanctions and Flynn apparently was trying to tell Kislyak to stay calm and wait for the incoming administration to take charge and initiate a friendly relationship.

Even if you don't think Russian intervention caused Trump to win the Presidency - I think they intervened in the election but I don't think they were instrumental in Trump's victory -  Flynn has been under investigation for allegedly planning a kidnapping and a Turkish cleric living in exile in the U.S. and having him sent back to Turkey.  And if all that weren't mind-boggling enough, Trump has now tweeted that he fired Flynn for lying to the FBI about his meeting with Kislyak, suggesting that he knew all along that Flynn had lied when he asked then-FBI Director James Comey and was therefore trying to obstruct justice.  Then, of course, he later fired James Comey.

Trump could be forced out of office soon.  But as far as preventing him from doing irreparable damage to the country, it's already too late.

Because the Senate just passed its tax reform bill by a 51-49 margin. Bob Corker of Tennessee was the only Republican to vote against it.  They got it through after last-minute revisions to the bill that, I understand, were written on the back of a Chinese takeout menu.  And even though the differences between the Senate bill and the House bill have to be worked out in a bicameral conference, no one thinks there'll be any problems with that.  And Trump, the chief instigator of tax reform, will proudly sign it before the first day of Kwanzaa and rhetorically ask black voters what they could possibly have to lose.

The final bill will likely eliminate state and local tax deductions and possibly also eliminate the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate and thus possibly eliminate . . . the Affordable Care Act.  The biggest benefits go to the wealthy, and the pressure on the deficit will mean cuts to public assistance and the sort of amenities that make a country worth living in.  

Because of procedural rules, there's nothing the Democrats could do to stop this bill, and to be fair, they didn't have the time or the ability to digest or even read the last-minute changes to it.  But the Democrats did a lame job in opposing it, concentrating more on the deficit than on the threat to domestic spending and, as a result, arguing against the tax bill on the basis of Republican talking points, which did the Democrats no favors.  They only tipped the scales to the GOP in the debate, and scale-tipping is something Hillary supporters know a thing or two about.   The pressure this tax law will put on expensive, Democratic-leaning states will short-circuit the progressive agenda and doom incoming New Jersey governor Phil Murphy to failure before he's even sworn in.

Thus, despite Democratic victories in  2017 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, the party has gone back to going full Whig. 

On the bright side, now that tax reform is all but done, maybe Republicans, no longer needing Trump to pass their agenda, will go ahead and help remove him from office.

An Open Letter To Donald Trump

Dear Mr. President: You're pissing me off.

Do I mean your policies?  No, of course not, even though I oppose all of them, except your infrastructure program, because apart from you being for what used to be called "internal improvements" in the nineteenth century, I really didn't expect you to be any worse than Reagan or the younger Bush.  No, you're pissing - er, ticking - me off because you're giving me way too much to talk about!  I mean . . . I mean . . . I mean . . . I mean, I'm sitting here at my computer, trying to comment on your general incompetence as a leader, and then your national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigns when it's revealed that he had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador a month before you even moved into the White House!  And if that weren't enough, then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates - the same woman you fired for not enforcing your faulty executive order on immigration - warned you that Flynn may have opened your administration to blackmail by misleading officials, including Vice President Pence, about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.  Mr. President, what am I supposed to say about that?  I'm at a loss for words! And before I can even find the right words, your choice for Secretary of Labor, Andrew Putz or whatever his name is - a fast-food executive who advocated relying more on automation than on real, live human burger flippers - had to step down after having hired an illegal immigrant to clean his house!

Mr. President, you're giving me too much material!  I can't keep up!

And your press conference . . . well that was so bizarre.  You showed the attention of a goldfish, your hair showed the color of a goldfish, you kept questioning the veracity of thoroughly researched news reports, and you thought that black reporter April Ryan was friends with the Congressional Black Caucus - and expected a tough question with her - on the basis of her race?  You actually asked her to help set up a meeting with black lawmakers because you figured that she, being black, must know them personally?  The only time you seemed engaged is when you talked about your wife.  Which is ironic, because your wife has been seen less often in the past month than Elvis.  Yeah, it's my second Elvis reference in regard to your White House this month, but what the hay . . . 

Look, Mr. President, I don't want to have to talk about you all the time, even though I know you'd love to have me talk about you all the time, because even bad press for you is good press, but I would rather talk about other things - competitive swimming, Volkswagens, adorable kittens, ice cream with chocolate syrup, anything - than your screw-ups.  I have enough time trying to avoid typos and misaligned paragraphs in this one-man show that is my blog without you giving me enough material to keep the entire Huffington Post staff working overtime.  So please, Mr. Trump, I beg you . . . if you're going to be a lousy President, show some restraint in your lousiness and give me a break!  You're killing me, man!

And next time you have dinner with a foreign leader at a public gathering space, feel free to talk about an international crisis all you want . . . but don't leave classified information lying around for all the world - and Melania - to see!

Sincerely, 

Steven Maginnis

P.S.  Regarding the inauguration . . . Tony Orlando?  Really?