It’s still too much Trump. There’s a slow dribble of information about just how repulsive he was as president, and I only want to hear it in the context of court transcripts during his treason trial.
The top US general repeatedly pushed back on then-President Donald Trump’s argument that the military should intervene violently in order to quell the civil unrest that erupted around the country last year. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley often found he was the lone voice of opposition to those demands during heated Oval Office discussions, according to excerpts of a new book, obtained by CNN, from Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender.
Titled “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” the book reveals new details about how Trump’s language became increasingly violent during Oval Office meetings as protests in Seattle and Portland began to receive attention from cable new outlets. The President would highlight videos that showed law enforcement getting physical with protesters and tell his administration he wanted to see more of that behavior, the excerpts show.
That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,Trump told his top law enforcement and military officials, according to Bender.Crack their skulls!
Trump also told his team that he wanted the military to go in andbeat the f–k outof the civil rights protesters, Bender writes.
Just shoot them,Trump said on multiple occasions inside the Oval Office, according to the excerpts.
When Milley and then-Attorney General William Barr would push back, Trump toned it down, but only slightly, Bender adds.
The only time I want to hear about these assholes is when they’re getting punished, like Giuliani losing his right to practice law in New York. It is extremely frustrating to read about Trump using his power to push for murder on the streets, and yet nothing is ever done.
“Just shoot them.” That’s exactly what they should have done to the traitors who invaded the Capitol on January 6 but I guess the military is more civilised than Trump.
[missing quotation mark in cnbc link]
This would have been good to know at the time, or during the second impeachment, or anytime when he was still president. It doesn’t do us any good now.
If BLM people HAD stormed the Capital, there would be no prosecution. There would only be a pile of corpse. Pro life my ass.
#3. Ray Ceeya
I don’t think it would have made a difference. The Senate didn’t convict after Trump sent a violent mob on them.
I don’t think Trump will see a day in prison.
*Capitol
Yeah, after last summer in Portland, I can’t take this shit any way but dead serious. No laughing, no shrugging it off & chatting about the day Trump pays for his crimes, no changing the subject to Giuliani.
I watched people get clubbed. Hundreds (including me) were gassed repeatedly. They shot hundreds of pepper balls per night, affecting I don’t know how many people. They shot tear gas canisters down at me and others from the 13th floor, one time missing me by about 4 feet. I don’t have any doubt that if the Border Patrol SWAT team sent to Portland had been ordered to use live ammunition against me, they would have.
This shit is way too real for me.
The National Guard with their APCs were frequently in the streets when I was growing up. There were a lot of riots in Black neighborhoods in the 1960’s.
They were also called out for the anti-Vietnam war protests often.
The National Guard killed 4 students in Kent, Ohio for no real reason. Most of the people they killed weren’t even protesters. One was in ROTC.
Nothing ever happened to any of the officials or soldiers involved.
In general, it is illegal to use the US military for domestic law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act.
There are exceptions for things like domestic revolts etc..
@Raven:
Then there’s the Jackson State mass shooting, which we don’t remember because
1) Kent State happened first (by 11 days)
2) The Jackson State shootings were performed by locals, not national guard, which made it possible to portray it as a local problem with local bad actors
and
3) It’s an HBCU with 2 Black students killed and the 12 injured were probably all or at least mostly Black as well.
Demanding the execution of political protestors: the last checkbox on the Trump-fascist bingo card.
He was obviously repulsive, after his TV shows. His electorate voted him in because he was repulsive. That speaks volumes about them.
Crip Dyke @7:
We still don’t know what all the chemicals that got used by the cops were, but we do know that some of them have been banned because of their long-term effect and that the residues got washed into the Willamette River.
Yeah, jail Trump.
The Jeff Epstein Suite was renovated for multi-millionaire comfort, and is available for Trump to hang out in for the rest of his ill-begotten life.
“…dribble of information about…”
Nothing surprising about Trump there. The more repetitive the message the lower the overall quality of information per volume over time–or that’s how it seems to me. It’s been firehoses blasting crap for so long…
What a fucking mess.
Gotta love the “charge him with treason” crowd, wanting to ignore the Constitution as thoroughly as Trump wanted to.
Treason is very narrowly defined in the Constitution as, “treason is specifically limited to levying war against the US, or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort”.
Did Trump order armed forces into war against his own government? No, he did spur an insurrection, but that’s at most sedition, not treason.
As for Jackson State and Kent State, the Guard at the time was legendary in its lack of quality training and absolute dearth of crowd control training. That’s been changed, decades ago, with those driving the change remembering the horror of seeing unarmed students gunned down by the weapons of war wielded by soldiers who were entrusted with protecting them. Indeed, there was quite the delay in responding to the 6 Jan insurrection, both to reequip the troops and to figure out the rules of engagement.
Well, once the leadership actually decided to lead…
Another interesting tidbit was Gen Milley telling Miller to STFU, when the idiot proclaimed that the cities are all burning nightly. How does one burn ashes, which became gospel for all of the Russian stooge outlets like OAN, Newsmax and Fox.
I’m still trying to figure out that whole burning ashes nightly in the absence of a much stronger oxidizer than puny oxygen… I guess a few cities were misnamed, as obviously we need to name a bunch of cities phoenix.
Oh, one big tipoff that the bullshit being spouted originated from Russia is when they mention the PRC, then go on and on about the CCP.
Rather like calling the US the GOP when Bush and Trump were in office.
Still, circling back to Trump’s desire for summary execution, who is actually surprised? He’d repeatedly transparently suggested such while running for amateur night at the White House. Is your attention span as short as our media thinks that it is?!
wzrd, you wrote, “Gotta love the “charge him with treason” crowd, wanting to ignore the Constitution as thoroughly as Trump wanted to.” That’s a ridiculous false equivalency about the use of a legal term that does seem altogether inappropriate, “adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” That would not pass muster in a courtroom, but feels about right. At minimum, the advocacy is for a court trial, not exactly what Trump was pressing.
Does “not” seem inappropriate.
Well the good news is that Chauvin got 22.5 years. He should have gotten more due to a very public murder of a man that traumatized a lot of people.
Trump has always been a sadist and a racist along with being a con artist . It’s why his hometown overwhelmingly didn’t vote for him
There must be many minefields left over from the proxy wars in Angola, Cambodia and Afghanistan. The exercise of minefield clearing will do Trump good.
wzrd1–
Nothing against occasionally and gently reminding people that Trump’s actions around the Capitol Riot do not meet the constitutional definition of treason and in the unlikely event of a prosecution he would be charged with sedition instead. But I can’t really admire (a) your failure to appreciate that most people are using the term in the general sense rather than the strict legal sense — I would of course be highly critical of a prosecutor being this loose with language, but as far as your everyday internet commentator goes, this is trivia, (b) your failure to appreciate that there are plenty of other Trump actions unrelated to the Capitol Riot that do meet the definition of treason (e.g. shredding solid US intelligence advice/undermining the NATO agreement/etc. just to curry favour with Putin for the purposes of engaging Russian disinformation during the election) so it’s perfectly reasonable to want him charged for those treasonous actions (again, unlikely), and worst of all (c) your statement that not knowing the very specific US consitutional distinction between treason and sedition is the same as “ignor[ing] the Constitution as thoroughly as Trump wanted to”…in a story about Trump making his admin staff watch fan videos of police violence and demanding the police straight up assault and murder BLM protestors. Fuck that equivalence.
Re: chrislawson @ #22…
The one incident that I think could, completely legitimately, get Trump charged with treason was his kissing up to Kim Jong Un. Since we are still at war with North Korea, that was actually giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy of the US.
Another recent story — just an allegation at this point, but totally believable to me:
whheydt–
What the constitution defines: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
While the first part is limited to levying war, the second part simply talks about giving aid and comfort to “enemies”, not limited to those the US is formally at war with. Americans have been convicted of treason under the second part even during peacetime. Job Shattuck, John Fries, and Thomas Dorr were all convicted of treason despite neither levying war nor engaging with foreign powers (let alone enemies). And of course, there is that cravenly useful backdoor to treason in the Espionage Act against the Rosenbergs, Emma Goldman, Victor Berger, and the Pentagon Papers publisher and whistleblower among many others. Which is to say, there is plenty of precedent.
wzrd1,
During the insurrection, Trump forbid nearby states from sending in milary forces to quell the insurrectionist because he wanted the insurrectionists to win. That’s aiding and abetting an armed revolt while the revolt is in progress. That’s treason.
So… let me see if I’ve got this right.
During the Trump presidency, there was (entirely understandably) civil unrest, much of it against policy which dated from the Obama era but somehow only started getting protested against under Trump. Much of this happened in cities and states where the city and state governments were majority-Democratic. In those cities, there was heavy police violence against protestors, on the orders of Democratic mayors and governors. Trump literally watched video of this and told his staff “this is what I want you to do”, but somehow this is proof that Trump is the worst and has to go? What am I missing, here? I mean, we’re talking about Portland, Oregon (Democratic Mayor, Democratic Governor) and Seattle, Washington (Democratic Mayor, Democratic Governor). Trump’s white vans filled with goons didn’t show up until long after the police were beating people on Democratic orders.
And both Trump and the Democrats who sicced the cops on the protestors are going to get away with it. If we wanted Trump to actually pay any sort of penalty at the federal level, or for there to be any change in the Democratic Party’s craven policies, we had to elect a President who was willing to confront Republicans, not one who has spent his entire career enabling them and who thinks bipartisanship is inherently virtuous, and who is cranking up funding for the police and apparently has just let the military declare socialism a “terrorist ideology”. Biden has already backed off on every campaign promise he made to the base (except, of course, letting trans people into the military and the “nothing substantial will change” he told his billionaire backers) and now we’re going to see another push for “unity” and bipartisanship, because of course if you’re an idiot and a traitor and a centrist — forgive the redundancy — that’s far more important than justice or sustainable policy. Trump, if he doesn’t actually pop his clogs (which I still think is likely), will be back in 2024, and the “blue no matter who” crowd will point fingers at everybody but themselves again trying to figure out why. It’s because “no matter who” meant Biden and Manchin and Sinema, and unconditional support will always encourage worthless bad-faith candidates.
The Vicar
You’re still delusional if you think that Democrats are as bad as Trump’s party, and you’re still delusional if you think that we think that Democrats are flawless.
GerrardOfTitanServer, #28:
Rather than merely conceding that they’re not flawless, you could argue that when those Dems (mayors and such) allowed/supported the police violence and suppression of the protestors in question — which Trump approved of, while also publicly attacking those Dems to score points with his rabid base — those Dems should also be thrown in jail and forgotten about. I mean, I’m not sure if you’d agree with that particular response, but at any rate, it is a position that one could consistently take.
You’re not saying that Trump is merely “flawed” because of things like that, right? That would be some awfully weak tea, and quite admirably I would say, you tend not to hold back when you really believe something. So why would you stop there when the subject turns to the others?
edit: “you could argue that because those Dems”
Meh. What’s weaksauce is the whataboutism put forth by Vicar (specific).
consciousness razor
It could be true that certain Democrats are more to blame for this one specific thing compared to Trump, and Vicar would still be wrong because Trump and Trump’s party (e.g. the Republican party) is so much worse in totality compared to the Democratic party. I saw no need to dissect this one particular thing because it was not necessary to make my point, as per my explanation in the previous sentence. Further, I was not prepared to dissect that point at length, and I didn’t feel like doing enough research to wade into it. Further, it should have been obvious that I abhor the way that police treated these protestors, and that anyone responsible should lose their jobs, and the written rules (laws) should be changed so that going forward these sorts of police actions are unlawful.