President Biden and US politics catchall

[Paddington Bear]

Seeing pictures of the very small demonstrations around the US at the weekend I still can't helped but be shocked at folk wandering around with assault rifles perfectly legally. Absolute madness.

My view is that the fact they speak English, we import a lot of their culture and most of us have been to New York means we have a blind spot to just how different their culture is to ours.

[Rhubarb & Custard]

Pardons have to be registered by the DoJ, even if the' aren't published - as it needs to be established that they were issued at a point in time where the issuer (ie Trump) actually had the power to pardon someone. They also HAVE to be accepted by the recipient, as the recipient has the right to refuse the pardon; it is effectively an admission of guilt that has other legal implications (not least losing the 5th amendment) - this was established by SCOTUS

Beyond that, there aren;t many limitations to what Trump can or cannot do, and Congress has little power to limit any President in this area. Cash for pardons would probably fall foul of Bribery laws, but that's never been tested; and there's nothing stopping an unscrupulous lawyer taking money from a client in return for his direct influence on the President to seek a pardon

I can't find where they have to be registered. Which doesn't mean that's incorrect, just I can't find it beyond there's a general convention. Though I also can't find anything (based on a quick search) saying other than he can pardon secretly in theory, based on his broad powers. Perhaps because this is simply untested law.

About the only restrictions I can see on Trump are the crime must have been committed, though there's nothing about it having been prosecuted or even charged, it only pertains to federal crimes, and it cannot be for case of impeachment

Think about this logically FFS.

How does any court of police officer know that your pardon is real and when it was granted?

It'd be signed and dated.

How it'd be entered into proceedings and verified I don't know. And I'm not saying it can be done, merely the constitution would suggest it could, and absent of there being a specific set of limitations having been approved by Congress (and with all the talk about what Trump might do nobody mentioning that change) the law would be on the side of the person with the pardon.

So the question remains, for me, where in the law does it stipulate limitations on presidential power in this area. If people don't know that's fine, I don't, but admin quibbles and general conventions aren't what I'm after

[Rhubarb & Custard]

Also is if I was to think about this logically then for me pardon powers granted to governors at state level or the president at the federal level don't make sense, period. So I'm not starting with a view the law in this area is going to be logical and sensible, even before there are a loads of instances in law where you might think the law's not sensible

[Saint]

Even if he can't backdate, and I'm not sure on what's stopping him other than his honest disposition, that still leaves signing pardons and keeping them wholly undisclosed even to the recipient or issuing to the recipient but not establishing any public list or even list known to the DoJ, and they could then be used to block/frustrate future legal actions. And there are reasons you wouldn't a paper trail around who's got a pardon.

If Congress have acted to stop any shenanigans being possible, and they might have done, it'd have to be a fairly recent thing and I'm thus assuming given everything that's going on somebody would have mentioned it in coverage. If Congress have acted my question is not so much when and how did I miss it, but more what limits have they actually placed on the President?

Pardons have to be registered by the DoJ, even if the' aren't published - as it needs to be established that they were issued at a point in time where the issuer (ie Trump) actually had the power to pardon someone. They also HAVE to be accepted by the recipient, as the recipient has the right to refuse the pardon; it is effectively an admission of guilt that has other legal implications (not least losing the 5th amendment) - this was established by SCOTUS

Beyond that, there aren;t many limitations to what Trump can or cannot do, and Congress has little power to limit any President in this area. Cash for pardons would probably fall foul of Bribery laws, but that's never been tested; and there's nothing stopping an unscrupulous lawyer taking money from a client in return for his direct influence on the President to seek a pardon

I can't find where they have to be registered. Which doesn't mean that's incorrect, just I can't find it beyond there's a general convention. Though I also can't find anything (based on a quick search) saying other than he can pardon secretly in theory, based on his broad powers. Perhaps because this is simply untested law.

About the only restrictions I can see on Trump are the crime must have been committed, though there's nothing about it having been prosecuted or even charged, it only pertains to federal crimes, and it cannot be for case of impeachment

They have to be registered/recorded somewhere, in order to guarantee their validity. Trump only has the power to issue pardons during his time as President, which means that there is a burden of proof on whoever is using the pardon as a get out of jail card to show that it was issued during that period.

Also the recipient has to know and accept that they are being pardoned. That has been tested already.

You;re right that the crime must have already been committed, so you can't pardon someone for future acts - and you're also correct that he can pardon someone for an act that hasn't even been investigated, let alone charged. The real untested part is actually whether he can pardon himself. The general thought is not, but until it's tested in court it will remain a grey area

[Biffer]

I can't find where they have to be registered. Which doesn't mean that's incorrect, just I can't find it beyond there's a general convention. Though I also can't find anything (based on a quick search) saying other than he can pardon secretly in theory, based on his broad powers. Perhaps because this is simply untested law.

About the only restrictions I can see on Trump are the crime must have been committed, though there's nothing about it having been prosecuted or even charged, it only pertains to federal crimes, and it cannot be for case of impeachment

Think about this logically FFS.

How does any court of police officer know that your pardon is real and when it was granted?

It'd be signed and dated.

How it'd be entered into proceedings and verified I don't know. And I'm not saying it can be done, merely the constitution would suggest it could, and absent of there being a specific set of limitations having been approved by Congress (and with all the talk about what Trump might do nobody mentioning that change) the law would be on the side of the person with the pardon.

So the question remains, for me, where in the law does it stipulate limitations on presidential power in this area. If people don't know that's fine, I don't, but admin quibbles and general conventions aren't what I'm after

I think I see the problem.

You're taking a point of view that if the constitution doesn't say you can't do it, then you can do it. That's not the way law works.

Generally you have primary legislation passed by Parliament or whatever the legislature is at the time. The constitution is one of these.

But whatever primary legislation is, there are always gaps. That's where the judiciary comes in, interpreting the intent of the legislation where it isn't explicit. I believe this is actually what the term Common Law means, although I might be wrong. This is built up over time becoming precedent and stands as law until primary legislation is passed in the legislature to supercede it.

So in this case, because the legal process built by the judiciary and precedent says they must be registered, an unregistered pardon would not hold up in a court of law du to common-law and precedent.

[JM2K6]

A good read....

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dona ... -x7sp2lr6d

Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it

Spoiler

Show

Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
JIM BOURG
Christopher Caldwell
Sunday January 17 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
In early November, on the eve of the American elections, editorial pages and Democratic politicians backing Joe Biden sought to rally the country against Donald Trump, whom they called the “worst president ever”. At the time, it wasn’t even true. Trump was arguably not even the worst American president of the 21st century. Remember George W Bush, who started two wars, lost both and presided over the near-ruin of the global economy?

But Trump has managed to alter his historic legacy considerably since election day. On January 2 he made an hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he intimated it might be “dangerous” and “a big risk” for Georgia officials to deny that Democrats had committed crimes in the election, and asked Raffensperger to tip the election to him by helping him “find 11,780 votes”.

That may be the most serious documented constitutional violation in the history of presidential elections — but the president was only getting warmed up. On January 6 he urged a mob he had summoned to the National Mall to march on the US Capitol. He didn’t tell them to sack it, but sack it they did, with the help of some poor police work, and sent the senators cowering into a secure room when they were supposed to be tallying the electoral votes that would show Trump the loser.

Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
LEAH MILLIS
This may not have been the “insurrection” alleged in the impeachment charge quickly filed by Democrats, but the rioters were a threat to the safety of the senators at the moment when they were performing one of their most solemn duties.

One cannot really speak of Trump’s record as marred or besmirched by recent events because the people who will write his record are the very academics, journalists and high-tech “influencers” who oppose him most vehemently. For them, there’s no room for his reputation to get worse. It is the many Americans without any particular antipathy to Trump who have reassessed his character and drawn a stern lesson from it.


The lesson of Trump is that Americans have lately cared too much about ideology and too little about character. The Chicago Tribune opines that the storming of the Capitol was “only surprising if you weren’t paying attention”, as if the new year’s events vindicate the earlier attempts to remove Trump from office. That is only partly true. The early “Russiagate” inquiries, attempting to link Trump to both Julian Assange’s 2016 Democratic national committee email leaks and to Russian intelligence, had their origins in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, just as Trump claimed.

The Democrats’ first impeachment trial in 2019, over Trump’s attempts to gather dirt on Hunter Biden in Ukraine, was secretive and staged, and probably harmed the Democrats more than the Republicans. Nonetheless there really is a vindication for Trump’s foes in the events of recent weeks. If they were wrong on some of the details, they have been proved right in essence. Trump is more the man detractors warned against in 2016 and 2020 than the man his supporters hoped he would be.

Play Video
Security tightened around Capitol
Much more often than we are comfortable admitting, democracy places voters before calculated risks, including risks to democracy. Lincoln, Obama, Trump ... Americans often vote for people conspicuously short of the usual political experience for president, laying a bet that they will grow into statesmanship. Usually it works. Americans also vote for people who show signs of not caring about democratic niceties. Franklin Roosevelt concluded his first inaugural address saying he might ask Congress for “broad executive power” to make economic policy without it. Again, usually it works.

The public had to steel itself for Trump and his crew. The classicist Victor Davis Hanson likened him to a Sophoclean tragic hero, or a cowboy who blows into town to clean up the bad guys. Hanson rightly predicted — although he was a Trump supporter — that Trump’s presidency would end in his repudiation by a lot of the people who had thought it most necessary to rally to him. Trump’s enemies were often under the impression his supporters had been hoodwinked or inattentive, but no. The whole country saw the same Trump. They just differed in their risk assessments.

SPONSORED


Trump was elected for a reason. He spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class that had been forgotten by the elites raking in money from the global economy. By re-engaging these outcasts with the political system, he was able to win certain states that had suffered industrial decline: Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania. That turned politics upside down. The question was whether he was in any position to do anything for these people.

It turned out he was. Trump had shifted the economic playing field in non-elites’ favour. Policy-makers in both parties became more sceptical about free trade and more hostile to China. Incomes rose modestly for the lowest-paid workers, although this may have been due to minimum-wage laws passed in several states. These gains went unnoticed in print because the people who write about politics tend not to know many people who hang plasterboard and install air-conditioning systems.

Trump had laid an economic foundation for re-election that was much stronger than non–working-class people understood. Covid-19 washed these efforts away and delivered the economy back to the coastal investment bankers and internet moguls, exacerbating the inequality that Trump had come to office promising to fix. He was just unlucky.

There is another way to look at Trump’s election in 2016. Voters, not all of them poor, perceived American democracy as having been corrupted. Their perception was correct. Increasingly, regulators and judges were being empowered to overrule the things the public voted for, often making use of civil-rights laws.

The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
MICHAEL REYNOLDS
Through a process that no one fully understood, second-rate professors now had veto power over what people could and could not say. Litigious “anti-racist” foundations had acquired the power to instruct businessmen on whom to hire, and women felt threatened by men, no matter what men did. Their ideas of efficiency and fairness were abstract and elitist. They spurned the culture of those white voters in the declining states. Hillary Clinton was a personification of these elites’ attitudes, their power, their competence.

The dynamic was similar to Brexit, another battle against a labyrinthine power structure that could be made to disappear and reappear and that sometimes worked through invisible pressures on non-governmental actors. Unseating America’s guardians of political correctness would have required either a capacity for sustained work or an aide with the brilliance of Dominic Cummings. Trump had neither. He didn’t know where the power was that was stymieing his every plan and he had no one to tell him.

Trump’s personnel policy was chaotic. When his lawyer Michael Cohen testified against him in the summer of 2018, the most alarming revelation concerned not Trump’s ethics but his judgment in entrusting his most treasured projects and secrets to such a low-life. His hiring of his son-in-law Jared Kushner as an all-purpose consigliere was the most brazen act of White House nepotism in memory. Trump had a way of exiling people of independent judgment, such as his early backer Steve Bannon.

For all the talk of “extremism” that accompanied Trump through four years, his largest problem was never so much extremism as incompetence. No national candidate had ever calumniated political correctness with such contempt, and yet no president had ever permitted political correctness to tighten its hold so much on the lives of citizens.

The intimidation and censorship of common people as sexists and racists grew under Trump. After the #MeToo movement, mandatory anti-sexism workshops proliferated. After last summer’s riots over the death of George Floyd, anti-racism slogans were painted over football fields. Scarcely had Americans figured out what “transphobic” meant before they discovered it was something they could be sued for being, after the 2020 decision in Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia (written by a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court). By the end of Trump’s term his tweets were being censored, and so were the Facebook accounts of supporters who even mentioned the slogan “Stop the steal”.

For all the recent talk of incitement, Trump got his enemies considerably more riled up than his friends. In this his presidency resembled the high point of the American comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Held at bay by an armed robber, Blart succeeds in using the only weapon he has — a bottle of hot sauce, which he squirts into the assailant’s eyes. The man collapses into a chair, blinded, and over the 15 or so excruciating seconds that it takes him to recover his vision, Blart, urged on by his daughter, his girlfriend and other hostages, does ... nothing. The robber recovers and trains his gun back on everybody. “Probably should have capitalised on that,” Blart mutters.

The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
DREW ANGERER
Trump didn’t have the skill to dismantle the power structures that were ruining his voters’ lives, but he did leave them feeling they’d never walk alone. (“Hear these words,” he said at the end of his inauguration address. “You will never be ignored again.”) The question is whether that will be enough to allow him to dominate the party in the future. Should he be convicted in an impeachment trial, he would probably be barred from politics for life, but such a conviction is unlikely.

Most analysts think it will be easy for him to keep his grip on the party. They are probably wrong. Trump will be seeking to avoid prosecutions by state justice departments that are well organised and in some cases vindictive. He will also be dealing with the chaotic state of his investments and properties, as activist investors have divested and clients have cancelled contracts. Among Republicans, Trump’s influence rests on the value of his endorsement and likelihood that he will be president again one day. Both are shrinking.

Trump may have given American populism its characteristic expression, but he didn’t unleash it and it won’t end with him. Many of the grievances that brought him into the political arena have, as we say, worsened. His Democratic tormentors have learnt little from their early debacles. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, complains about “white supremacist” colleagues in Congress; Zoe Lofgren, the California congresswoman, describes the Capitol marchers as “right-wing terrorists”. That leaves Republicans worried that, once Democrats are done with Trump, they will come for his rank and file. This diminishes the likelihood that Democrats will be able to win a conviction of Trump in the Senate in the coming weeks.

The global populist movement, as opposed to Trump’s American fans, may indeed suffer a setback in the coming months. A good relationship with the US remains an asset for any European head of state, and Trump’s departure makes it less likely that, say, Marine Le Pen or Marion Maréchal will have a friend in the White House in 2022. The same goes for Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and others. In America, all the grievances that created populism remain. Trump was effective in rallying populists together but wholly incompetent in carrying out their programme. Even to his followers, his departure might be a liberation.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the author, most recently, of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster)

This is not a good article at all. It's never a good sign when someone trots out the factually incorrect clichés about how Trump supporters are working class, and that Trump was responsible for meagre gains in their economic position. Who the fuck does he think passed the minimum-wage laws he grudgingly acknowledges might have had something to do with it??

This is a fucking whiplash too:

Trump had a way of exiling people of independent judgment, such as his early backer Steve Bannon.

For all the talk of “extremism” that accompanied Trump through four years, his largest problem was never so much extremism as incompetence.

That's Steve Bannon, far-right white supremacist, currently awaiting trial for major fraud and money laundering.

This piece is a bizarre rewriting of history.

[Rhubarb & Custard]

Think about this logically FFS.

How does any court of police officer know that your pardon is real and when it was granted?

It'd be signed and dated.

How it'd be entered into proceedings and verified I don't know. And I'm not saying it can be done, merely the constitution would suggest it could, and absent of there being a specific set of limitations having been approved by Congress (and with all the talk about what Trump might do nobody mentioning that change) the law would be on the side of the person with the pardon.

So the question remains, for me, where in the law does it stipulate limitations on presidential power in this area. If people don't know that's fine, I don't, but admin quibbles and general conventions aren't what I'm after

I think I see the problem.

You're taking a point of view that if the constitution doesn't say you can't do it, then you can do it. That's not the way law works.

Generally you have primary legislation passed by Parliament or whatever the legislature is at the time. The constitution is one of these.

But whatever primary legislation is, there are always gaps. That's where the judiciary comes in, interpreting the intent of the legislation where it isn't explicit. I believe this is actually what the term Common Law means, although I might be wrong. This is built up over time becoming precedent and stands as law until primary legislation is passed in the legislature to supercede it.

So in this case, because the legal process built by the judiciary and precedent says they must be registered, an unregistered pardon would not hold up in a court of law du to common-law and precedent.

In the UK that'd be more of a thing. We don't have a constitution, we do have the House of Lords, we do have some idea of convention providing governance. The USA however is very much a constitutional democracy, and one where many of the judges can be described as intentionalist or textualist when it comes to the constitution, so what the constitution says pretty much goes

[Rhubarb & Custard]

Pardons have to be registered by the DoJ, even if the' aren't published - as it needs to be established that they were issued at a point in time where the issuer (ie Trump) actually had the power to pardon someone. They also HAVE to be accepted by the recipient, as the recipient has the right to refuse the pardon; it is effectively an admission of guilt that has other legal implications (not least losing the 5th amendment) - this was established by SCOTUS

Beyond that, there aren;t many limitations to what Trump can or cannot do, and Congress has little power to limit any President in this area. Cash for pardons would probably fall foul of Bribery laws, but that's never been tested; and there's nothing stopping an unscrupulous lawyer taking money from a client in return for his direct influence on the President to seek a pardon

I can't find where they have to be registered. Which doesn't mean that's incorrect, just I can't find it beyond there's a general convention. Though I also can't find anything (based on a quick search) saying other than he can pardon secretly in theory, based on his broad powers. Perhaps because this is simply untested law.

About the only restrictions I can see on Trump are the crime must have been committed, though there's nothing about it having been prosecuted or even charged, it only pertains to federal crimes, and it cannot be for case of impeachment

They have to be registered/recorded somewhere, in order to guarantee their validity. Trump only has the power to issue pardons during his time as President, which means that there is a burden of proof on whoever is using the pardon as a get out of jail card to show that it was issued during that period.

Also the recipient has to know and accept that they are being pardoned. That has been tested already.

You;re right that the crime must have already been committed, so you can't pardon someone for future acts - and you're also correct that he can pardon someone for an act that hasn't even been investigated, let alone charged. The real untested part is actually whether he can pardon himself. The general thought is not, but until it's tested in court it will remain a grey area

Which still leaves me wondering under what law they have to be recorded, and how that works in practice.

This has come up on a few conference calls at the end of meetings as those in Europe give their take on the goings on in the US, and some of the US lawyers on the calls do seem to think he (Trump) can pretty much do what he wants in all this. That might not be correct, I'd just like to see what actually stops that other than the hope the President respects the country and the oath they took

[Blake]

A good read....

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dona ... -x7sp2lr6d

Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it

Spoiler

Show

Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
JIM BOURG
Christopher Caldwell
Sunday January 17 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
In early November, on the eve of the American elections, editorial pages and Democratic politicians backing Joe Biden sought to rally the country against Donald Trump, whom they called the “worst president ever”. At the time, it wasn’t even true. Trump was arguably not even the worst American president of the 21st century. Remember George W Bush, who started two wars, lost both and presided over the near-ruin of the global economy?

But Trump has managed to alter his historic legacy considerably since election day. On January 2 he made an hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he intimated it might be “dangerous” and “a big risk” for Georgia officials to deny that Democrats had committed crimes in the election, and asked Raffensperger to tip the election to him by helping him “find 11,780 votes”.

That may be the most serious documented constitutional violation in the history of presidential elections — but the president was only getting warmed up. On January 6 he urged a mob he had summoned to the National Mall to march on the US Capitol. He didn’t tell them to sack it, but sack it they did, with the help of some poor police work, and sent the senators cowering into a secure room when they were supposed to be tallying the electoral votes that would show Trump the loser.

Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
LEAH MILLIS
This may not have been the “insurrection” alleged in the impeachment charge quickly filed by Democrats, but the rioters were a threat to the safety of the senators at the moment when they were performing one of their most solemn duties.

One cannot really speak of Trump’s record as marred or besmirched by recent events because the people who will write his record are the very academics, journalists and high-tech “influencers” who oppose him most vehemently. For them, there’s no room for his reputation to get worse. It is the many Americans without any particular antipathy to Trump who have reassessed his character and drawn a stern lesson from it.


The lesson of Trump is that Americans have lately cared too much about ideology and too little about character. The Chicago Tribune opines that the storming of the Capitol was “only surprising if you weren’t paying attention”, as if the new year’s events vindicate the earlier attempts to remove Trump from office. That is only partly true. The early “Russiagate” inquiries, attempting to link Trump to both Julian Assange’s 2016 Democratic national committee email leaks and to Russian intelligence, had their origins in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, just as Trump claimed.

The Democrats’ first impeachment trial in 2019, over Trump’s attempts to gather dirt on Hunter Biden in Ukraine, was secretive and staged, and probably harmed the Democrats more than the Republicans. Nonetheless there really is a vindication for Trump’s foes in the events of recent weeks. If they were wrong on some of the details, they have been proved right in essence. Trump is more the man detractors warned against in 2016 and 2020 than the man his supporters hoped he would be.

Play Video
Security tightened around Capitol
Much more often than we are comfortable admitting, democracy places voters before calculated risks, including risks to democracy. Lincoln, Obama, Trump ... Americans often vote for people conspicuously short of the usual political experience for president, laying a bet that they will grow into statesmanship. Usually it works. Americans also vote for people who show signs of not caring about democratic niceties. Franklin Roosevelt concluded his first inaugural address saying he might ask Congress for “broad executive power” to make economic policy without it. Again, usually it works.

The public had to steel itself for Trump and his crew. The classicist Victor Davis Hanson likened him to a Sophoclean tragic hero, or a cowboy who blows into town to clean up the bad guys. Hanson rightly predicted — although he was a Trump supporter — that Trump’s presidency would end in his repudiation by a lot of the people who had thought it most necessary to rally to him. Trump’s enemies were often under the impression his supporters had been hoodwinked or inattentive, but no. The whole country saw the same Trump. They just differed in their risk assessments.

SPONSORED


Trump was elected for a reason. He spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class that had been forgotten by the elites raking in money from the global economy. By re-engaging these outcasts with the political system, he was able to win certain states that had suffered industrial decline: Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania. That turned politics upside down. The question was whether he was in any position to do anything for these people.

It turned out he was. Trump had shifted the economic playing field in non-elites’ favour. Policy-makers in both parties became more sceptical about free trade and more hostile to China. Incomes rose modestly for the lowest-paid workers, although this may have been due to minimum-wage laws passed in several states. These gains went unnoticed in print because the people who write about politics tend not to know many people who hang plasterboard and install air-conditioning systems.

Trump had laid an economic foundation for re-election that was much stronger than non–working-class people understood. Covid-19 washed these efforts away and delivered the economy back to the coastal investment bankers and internet moguls, exacerbating the inequality that Trump had come to office promising to fix. He was just unlucky.

There is another way to look at Trump’s election in 2016. Voters, not all of them poor, perceived American democracy as having been corrupted. Their perception was correct. Increasingly, regulators and judges were being empowered to overrule the things the public voted for, often making use of civil-rights laws.

The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
MICHAEL REYNOLDS
Through a process that no one fully understood, second-rate professors now had veto power over what people could and could not say. Litigious “anti-racist” foundations had acquired the power to instruct businessmen on whom to hire, and women felt threatened by men, no matter what men did. Their ideas of efficiency and fairness were abstract and elitist. They spurned the culture of those white voters in the declining states. Hillary Clinton was a personification of these elites’ attitudes, their power, their competence.

The dynamic was similar to Brexit, another battle against a labyrinthine power structure that could be made to disappear and reappear and that sometimes worked through invisible pressures on non-governmental actors. Unseating America’s guardians of political correctness would have required either a capacity for sustained work or an aide with the brilliance of Dominic Cummings. Trump had neither. He didn’t know where the power was that was stymieing his every plan and he had no one to tell him.

Trump’s personnel policy was chaotic. When his lawyer Michael Cohen testified against him in the summer of 2018, the most alarming revelation concerned not Trump’s ethics but his judgment in entrusting his most treasured projects and secrets to such a low-life. His hiring of his son-in-law Jared Kushner as an all-purpose consigliere was the most brazen act of White House nepotism in memory. Trump had a way of exiling people of independent judgment, such as his early backer Steve Bannon.

For all the talk of “extremism” that accompanied Trump through four years, his largest problem was never so much extremism as incompetence. No national candidate had ever calumniated political correctness with such contempt, and yet no president had ever permitted political correctness to tighten its hold so much on the lives of citizens.

The intimidation and censorship of common people as sexists and racists grew under Trump. After the #MeToo movement, mandatory anti-sexism workshops proliferated. After last summer’s riots over the death of George Floyd, anti-racism slogans were painted over football fields. Scarcely had Americans figured out what “transphobic” meant before they discovered it was something they could be sued for being, after the 2020 decision in Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia (written by a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court). By the end of Trump’s term his tweets were being censored, and so were the Facebook accounts of supporters who even mentioned the slogan “Stop the steal”.

For all the recent talk of incitement, Trump got his enemies considerably more riled up than his friends. In this his presidency resembled the high point of the American comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Held at bay by an armed robber, Blart succeeds in using the only weapon he has — a bottle of hot sauce, which he squirts into the assailant’s eyes. The man collapses into a chair, blinded, and over the 15 or so excruciating seconds that it takes him to recover his vision, Blart, urged on by his daughter, his girlfriend and other hostages, does ... nothing. The robber recovers and trains his gun back on everybody. “Probably should have capitalised on that,” Blart mutters.

The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
DREW ANGERER
Trump didn’t have the skill to dismantle the power structures that were ruining his voters’ lives, but he did leave them feeling they’d never walk alone. (“Hear these words,” he said at the end of his inauguration address. “You will never be ignored again.”) The question is whether that will be enough to allow him to dominate the party in the future. Should he be convicted in an impeachment trial, he would probably be barred from politics for life, but such a conviction is unlikely.

Most analysts think it will be easy for him to keep his grip on the party. They are probably wrong. Trump will be seeking to avoid prosecutions by state justice departments that are well organised and in some cases vindictive. He will also be dealing with the chaotic state of his investments and properties, as activist investors have divested and clients have cancelled contracts. Among Republicans, Trump’s influence rests on the value of his endorsement and likelihood that he will be president again one day. Both are shrinking.

Trump may have given American populism its characteristic expression, but he didn’t unleash it and it won’t end with him. Many of the grievances that brought him into the political arena have, as we say, worsened. His Democratic tormentors have learnt little from their early debacles. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, complains about “white supremacist” colleagues in Congress; Zoe Lofgren, the California congresswoman, describes the Capitol marchers as “right-wing terrorists”. That leaves Republicans worried that, once Democrats are done with Trump, they will come for his rank and file. This diminishes the likelihood that Democrats will be able to win a conviction of Trump in the Senate in the coming weeks.

The global populist movement, as opposed to Trump’s American fans, may indeed suffer a setback in the coming months. A good relationship with the US remains an asset for any European head of state, and Trump’s departure makes it less likely that, say, Marine Le Pen or Marion Maréchal will have a friend in the White House in 2022. The same goes for Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and others. In America, all the grievances that created populism remain. Trump was effective in rallying populists together but wholly incompetent in carrying out their programme. Even to his followers, his departure might be a liberation.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the author, most recently, of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster)

Articulating the problems with the world is easy.
Communicating solutions is hard; because all the problems are tightly coupled and interdependent.
Things need to be prioritized and trade-offs need to be made.

Trump's real gift was convincing millions of people that complex problems have simple solutions.
Sometimes they do, but in many cases they don't, or they have massive knock-on effects downstream.

[Saint]

I can't find where they have to be registered. Which doesn't mean that's incorrect, just I can't find it beyond there's a general convention. Though I also can't find anything (based on a quick search) saying other than he can pardon secretly in theory, based on his broad powers. Perhaps because this is simply untested law.

About the only restrictions I can see on Trump are the crime must have been committed, though there's nothing about it having been prosecuted or even charged, it only pertains to federal crimes, and it cannot be for case of impeachment

They have to be registered/recorded somewhere, in order to guarantee their validity. Trump only has the power to issue pardons during his time as President, which means that there is a burden of proof on whoever is using the pardon as a get out of jail card to show that it was issued during that period.

Also the recipient has to know and accept that they are being pardoned. That has been tested already.

You;re right that the crime must have already been committed, so you can't pardon someone for future acts - and you're also correct that he can pardon someone for an act that hasn't even been investigated, let alone charged. The real untested part is actually whether he can pardon himself. The general thought is not, but until it's tested in court it will remain a grey area

Which still leaves me wondering under what law they have to be recorded, and how that works in practice.

This has come up on a few conference calls at the end of meetings as those in Europe give their take on the goings on in the US, and some of the US lawyers on the calls do seem to think he (Trump) can pretty much do what he wants in all this. That might not be correct, I'd just like to see what actually stops that other than the hope the President respects the country and the oath they took

He has to PROVE that he was President when he signed the pardon. Ordinarily that would involve registering it with the DoJ.

Now I suppose that there's nothing really stopping him from getting it witnessed by a lawyer and notarised that way, except that I can guarantee that it would be questioned in court as to it's validity, and thereby would potentially nullify it's value. When it comes to pardons in particular there are very few limitations to his powers, but he does have to show he had the powers when he issued the pardon - that onus is on him

[Biffer]

It'd be signed and dated.

How it'd be entered into proceedings and verified I don't know. And I'm not saying it can be done, merely the constitution would suggest it could, and absent of there being a specific set of limitations having been approved by Congress (and with all the talk about what Trump might do nobody mentioning that change) the law would be on the side of the person with the pardon.

So the question remains, for me, where in the law does it stipulate limitations on presidential power in this area. If people don't know that's fine, I don't, but admin quibbles and general conventions aren't what I'm after

I think I see the problem.

You're taking a point of view that if the constitution doesn't say you can't do it, then you can do it. That's not the way law works.

Generally you have primary legislation passed by Parliament or whatever the legislature is at the time. The constitution is one of these.

But whatever primary legislation is, there are always gaps. That's where the judiciary comes in, interpreting the intent of the legislation where it isn't explicit. I believe this is actually what the term Common Law means, although I might be wrong. This is built up over time becoming precedent and stands as law until primary legislation is passed in the legislature to supercede it.

So in this case, because the legal process built by the judiciary and precedent says they must be registered, an unregistered pardon would not hold up in a court of law du to common-law and precedent.

In the UK that'd be more of a thing. We don't have a constitution, we do have the House of Lords, we do have some idea of convention providing governance. The USA however is very much a constitutional democracy, and one where many of the judges can be described as intentionalist or textualist when it comes to the constitution, so what the constitution says pretty much goes

The US works hugely by convention as well. And I'm not aware of any dispute between intentionality and textualists about pardons being secret.

You're really chasing something that doesn't exist.

[Raggs]

He has to PROVE that he was President when he signed the pardon. Ordinarily that would involve registering it with the DoJ.

Now I suppose that there's nothing really stopping him from getting it witnessed by a lawyer and notarised that way, except that I can guarantee that it would be questioned in court as to it's validity, and thereby would potentially nullify it's value. When it comes to pardons in particular there are very few limitations to his powers, but he does have to show he had the powers when he issued the pardon - that onus is on him

Video of him doing it in the oval office, with staff members walking by, waving etc etc, tv on with latest news? Lawyer stating the date? He has to prove it was signed whilst he was president, not that it was handed over right?

Could have a load of them signed, and just waiting for the $2m payment before giving them to the person who wants them?

[JM2K6]

They have to be registered/recorded somewhere, in order to guarantee their validity. Trump only has the power to issue pardons during his time as President, which means that there is a burden of proof on whoever is using the pardon as a get out of jail card to show that it was issued during that period.

Also the recipient has to know and accept that they are being pardoned. That has been tested already.

You;re right that the crime must have already been committed, so you can't pardon someone for future acts - and you're also correct that he can pardon someone for an act that hasn't even been investigated, let alone charged. The real untested part is actually whether he can pardon himself. The general thought is not, but until it's tested in court it will remain a grey area

Which still leaves me wondering under what law they have to be recorded, and how that works in practice.

This has come up on a few conference calls at the end of meetings as those in Europe give their take on the goings on in the US, and some of the US lawyers on the calls do seem to think he (Trump) can pretty much do what he wants in all this. That might not be correct, I'd just like to see what actually stops that other than the hope the President respects the country and the oath they took

He has to PROVE that he was President when he signed the pardon. Ordinarily that would involve registering it with the DoJ.

Now I suppose that there's nothing really stopping him from getting it witnessed by a lawyer and notarised that way, except that I can guarantee that it would be questioned in court as to it's validity, and thereby would potentially nullify it's value. When it comes to pardons in particular there are very few limitations to his powers, but he does have to show he had the powers when he issued the pardon - that onus is on him

It needs to be publicly accepted for it to have any validity. Accepting a pardon after the power of pardon has expired wouldn't work.

[JM2K6]

Guys there's a reason why everyone is talking about a rush to get pardons before Trump leaves office. Hint: it's not because he'll run out of the special You Got A Pardon sticker. It's because once he leaves office, that's it.

[Biffer]

He has to PROVE that he was President when he signed the pardon. Ordinarily that would involve registering it with the DoJ.

Now I suppose that there's nothing really stopping him from getting it witnessed by a lawyer and notarised that way, except that I can guarantee that it would be questioned in court as to it's validity, and thereby would potentially nullify it's value. When it comes to pardons in particular there are very few limitations to his powers, but he does have to show he had the powers when he issued the pardon - that onus is on him

Video of him doing it in the oval office, with staff members walking by, waving etc etc, tv on with latest news? Lawyer stating the date? He has to prove it was signed whilst he was president, not that it was handed over right?

Could have a load of them signed, and just waiting for the $2m payment before giving them to the person who wants them?

Doubt that would stand up. How do you prove what he's signing? If you show it to the camera you have to have the name, so no pile of blank ones.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the wankpuffin would do it if he could I just don't see how he could provide one which would hold up in court.

[Hal Jordan]

Can we get back to DC Comics?

I watched Wonder Woman 1984 at the weekend, distinctly underwhelmed, especially given how good the first one was. I didn't even realise Pedro Pascal was Maxwell Lord until the bit in the Smithsonian. At least we were spared him shooting poor old Ted Kord in the face.

Nice cameo at the end, though.

[Sandstorm]

Trump's real gift was convincing millions of people that complex problems have simple solutions.

Trump's message is pure propaganda: "It's not your fault, it's the Jews/Mexicans/Democrats"

[Hal Jordan]

Guys there's a reason why everyone is talking about a rush to get pardons before Trump leaves office. Hint: it's not because he'll run out of the special You Got A Pardon sticker. It's because once he leaves office, that's it.

The other reason is that Orange may be the new Orange once he is out from under his shield of Presidency.

[JM2K6]

Can we get back to DC Comics?

I watched Wonder Woman 1984 at the weekend, distinctly underwhelmed, especially given how good the first one was. I didn't even realise Pedro Pascal was Maxwell Lord until the bit in the Smithsonian. At least we were spared him shooting poor old Ted Kord in the face.

Nice cameo at the end, though.

It's a real mess of a film. Pretty disastrous.

[Hal Jordan]

Can we get back to DC Comics?

I watched Wonder Woman 1984 at the weekend, distinctly underwhelmed, especially given how good the first one was. I didn't even realise Pedro Pascal was Maxwell Lord until the bit in the Smithsonian. At least we were spared him shooting poor old Ted Kord in the face.

Nice cameo at the end, though.

It's a real mess of a film. Pretty disastrous.

Suffered badly from the notion that Kristen Wiig in a pair of glasses still isn't an extraordinarily beautiful woman, for one thing.

[Blake]

Trump's real gift was convincing millions of people that complex problems have simple solutions.

Trump's message is pure propaganda: "It's not your fault, it's the Jews/Mexicans/Democrats"

Which, according to him at least, have simple solutions...drain the swamp, build a wall, lock them up...respectively.

[Sandstorm]

Trump's real gift was convincing millions of people that complex problems have simple solutions.

Trump's message is pure propaganda: "It's not your fault, it's the Jews/Mexicans/Democrats"

Which, according to him at least, have simple solutions...drain the swamp, build a wall, lock them up...respectively.

Not arguing with you. But there's only 1 of those he could have tried to do successfully while President....if he wasn't already King of the Construction Industry Swamp....

[JM2K6]

I watched Wonder Woman 1984 at the weekend, distinctly underwhelmed, especially given how good the first one was. I didn't even realise Pedro Pascal was Maxwell Lord until the bit in the Smithsonian. At least we were spared him shooting poor old Ted Kord in the face.

Nice cameo at the end, though.

It's a real mess of a film. Pretty disastrous.

Suffered badly from the notion that Kristen Wiig in a pair of glasses still isn't an extraordinarily beautiful woman, for one thing.

Yup!

[Rinkals]

A good read....

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dona ... -x7sp2lr6d

Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it

Spoiler

Show

Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
JIM BOURG
Christopher Caldwell
Sunday January 17 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
In early November, on the eve of the American elections, editorial pages and Democratic politicians backing Joe Biden sought to rally the country against Donald Trump, whom they called the “worst president ever”. At the time, it wasn’t even true. Trump was arguably not even the worst American president of the 21st century. Remember George W Bush, who started two wars, lost both and presided over the near-ruin of the global economy?

But Trump has managed to alter his historic legacy considerably since election day. On January 2 he made an hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he intimated it might be “dangerous” and “a big risk” for Georgia officials to deny that Democrats had committed crimes in the election, and asked Raffensperger to tip the election to him by helping him “find 11,780 votes”.

That may be the most serious documented constitutional violation in the history of presidential elections — but the president was only getting warmed up. On January 6 he urged a mob he had summoned to the National Mall to march on the US Capitol. He didn’t tell them to sack it, but sack it they did, with the help of some poor police work, and sent the senators cowering into a secure room when they were supposed to be tallying the electoral votes that would show Trump the loser.

Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
LEAH MILLIS
This may not have been the “insurrection” alleged in the impeachment charge quickly filed by Democrats, but the rioters were a threat to the safety of the senators at the moment when they were performing one of their most solemn duties.

One cannot really speak of Trump’s record as marred or besmirched by recent events because the people who will write his record are the very academics, journalists and high-tech “influencers” who oppose him most vehemently. For them, there’s no room for his reputation to get worse. It is the many Americans without any particular antipathy to Trump who have reassessed his character and drawn a stern lesson from it.


The lesson of Trump is that Americans have lately cared too much about ideology and too little about character. The Chicago Tribune opines that the storming of the Capitol was “only surprising if you weren’t paying attention”, as if the new year’s events vindicate the earlier attempts to remove Trump from office. That is only partly true. The early “Russiagate” inquiries, attempting to link Trump to both Julian Assange’s 2016 Democratic national committee email leaks and to Russian intelligence, had their origins in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, just as Trump claimed.

The Democrats’ first impeachment trial in 2019, over Trump’s attempts to gather dirt on Hunter Biden in Ukraine, was secretive and staged, and probably harmed the Democrats more than the Republicans. Nonetheless there really is a vindication for Trump’s foes in the events of recent weeks. If they were wrong on some of the details, they have been proved right in essence. Trump is more the man detractors warned against in 2016 and 2020 than the man his supporters hoped he would be.

Play Video
Security tightened around Capitol
Much more often than we are comfortable admitting, democracy places voters before calculated risks, including risks to democracy. Lincoln, Obama, Trump ... Americans often vote for people conspicuously short of the usual political experience for president, laying a bet that they will grow into statesmanship. Usually it works. Americans also vote for people who show signs of not caring about democratic niceties. Franklin Roosevelt concluded his first inaugural address saying he might ask Congress for “broad executive power” to make economic policy without it. Again, usually it works.

The public had to steel itself for Trump and his crew. The classicist Victor Davis Hanson likened him to a Sophoclean tragic hero, or a cowboy who blows into town to clean up the bad guys. Hanson rightly predicted — although he was a Trump supporter — that Trump’s presidency would end in his repudiation by a lot of the people who had thought it most necessary to rally to him. Trump’s enemies were often under the impression his supporters had been hoodwinked or inattentive, but no. The whole country saw the same Trump. They just differed in their risk assessments.

SPONSORED


Trump was elected for a reason. He spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class that had been forgotten by the elites raking in money from the global economy. By re-engaging these outcasts with the political system, he was able to win certain states that had suffered industrial decline: Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania. That turned politics upside down. The question was whether he was in any position to do anything for these people.

It turned out he was. Trump had shifted the economic playing field in non-elites’ favour. Policy-makers in both parties became more sceptical about free trade and more hostile to China. Incomes rose modestly for the lowest-paid workers, although this may have been due to minimum-wage laws passed in several states. These gains went unnoticed in print because the people who write about politics tend not to know many people who hang plasterboard and install air-conditioning systems.

Trump had laid an economic foundation for re-election that was much stronger than non–working-class people understood. Covid-19 washed these efforts away and delivered the economy back to the coastal investment bankers and internet moguls, exacerbating the inequality that Trump had come to office promising to fix. He was just unlucky.

There is another way to look at Trump’s election in 2016. Voters, not all of them poor, perceived American democracy as having been corrupted. Their perception was correct. Increasingly, regulators and judges were being empowered to overrule the things the public voted for, often making use of civil-rights laws.

The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
MICHAEL REYNOLDS
Through a process that no one fully understood, second-rate professors now had veto power over what people could and could not say. Litigious “anti-racist” foundations had acquired the power to instruct businessmen on whom to hire, and women felt threatened by men, no matter what men did. Their ideas of efficiency and fairness were abstract and elitist. They spurned the culture of those white voters in the declining states. Hillary Clinton was a personification of these elites’ attitudes, their power, their competence.

The dynamic was similar to Brexit, another battle against a labyrinthine power structure that could be made to disappear and reappear and that sometimes worked through invisible pressures on non-governmental actors. Unseating America’s guardians of political correctness would have required either a capacity for sustained work or an aide with the brilliance of Dominic Cummings. Trump had neither. He didn’t know where the power was that was stymieing his every plan and he had no one to tell him.

Trump’s personnel policy was chaotic. When his lawyer Michael Cohen testified against him in the summer of 2018, the most alarming revelation concerned not Trump’s ethics but his judgment in entrusting his most treasured projects and secrets to such a low-life. His hiring of his son-in-law Jared Kushner as an all-purpose consigliere was the most brazen act of White House nepotism in memory. Trump had a way of exiling people of independent judgment, such as his early backer Steve Bannon.

For all the talk of “extremism” that accompanied Trump through four years, his largest problem was never so much extremism as incompetence. No national candidate had ever calumniated political correctness with such contempt, and yet no president had ever permitted political correctness to tighten its hold so much on the lives of citizens.

The intimidation and censorship of common people as sexists and racists grew under Trump. After the #MeToo movement, mandatory anti-sexism workshops proliferated. After last summer’s riots over the death of George Floyd, anti-racism slogans were painted over football fields. Scarcely had Americans figured out what “transphobic” meant before they discovered it was something they could be sued for being, after the 2020 decision in Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia (written by a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court). By the end of Trump’s term his tweets were being censored, and so were the Facebook accounts of supporters who even mentioned the slogan “Stop the steal”.

For all the recent talk of incitement, Trump got his enemies considerably more riled up than his friends. In this his presidency resembled the high point of the American comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Held at bay by an armed robber, Blart succeeds in using the only weapon he has — a bottle of hot sauce, which he squirts into the assailant’s eyes. The man collapses into a chair, blinded, and over the 15 or so excruciating seconds that it takes him to recover his vision, Blart, urged on by his daughter, his girlfriend and other hostages, does ... nothing. The robber recovers and trains his gun back on everybody. “Probably should have capitalised on that,” Blart mutters.

The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
DREW ANGERER
Trump didn’t have the skill to dismantle the power structures that were ruining his voters’ lives, but he did leave them feeling they’d never walk alone. (“Hear these words,” he said at the end of his inauguration address. “You will never be ignored again.”) The question is whether that will be enough to allow him to dominate the party in the future. Should he be convicted in an impeachment trial, he would probably be barred from politics for life, but such a conviction is unlikely.

Most analysts think it will be easy for him to keep his grip on the party. They are probably wrong. Trump will be seeking to avoid prosecutions by state justice departments that are well organised and in some cases vindictive. He will also be dealing with the chaotic state of his investments and properties, as activist investors have divested and clients have cancelled contracts. Among Republicans, Trump’s influence rests on the value of his endorsement and likelihood that he will be president again one day. Both are shrinking.

Trump may have given American populism its characteristic expression, but he didn’t unleash it and it won’t end with him. Many of the grievances that brought him into the political arena have, as we say, worsened. His Democratic tormentors have learnt little from their early debacles. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, complains about “white supremacist” colleagues in Congress; Zoe Lofgren, the California congresswoman, describes the Capitol marchers as “right-wing terrorists”. That leaves Republicans worried that, once Democrats are done with Trump, they will come for his rank and file. This diminishes the likelihood that Democrats will be able to win a conviction of Trump in the Senate in the coming weeks.

The global populist movement, as opposed to Trump’s American fans, may indeed suffer a setback in the coming months. A good relationship with the US remains an asset for any European head of state, and Trump’s departure makes it less likely that, say, Marine Le Pen or Marion Maréchal will have a friend in the White House in 2022. The same goes for Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and others. In America, all the grievances that created populism remain. Trump was effective in rallying populists together but wholly incompetent in carrying out their programme. Even to his followers, his departure might be a liberation.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the author, most recently, of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster)

This is not a good article at all. It's never a good sign when someone trots out the factually incorrect clichés about how Trump supporters are working class, and that Trump was responsible for meagre gains in their economic position. Who the fuck does he think passed the minimum-wage laws he grudgingly acknowledges might have had something to do with it??

This is a fucking whiplash too:

Trump had a way of exiling people of independent judgment, such as his early backer Steve Bannon.

For all the talk of “extremism” that accompanied Trump through four years, his largest problem was never so much extremism as incompetence.

That's Steve Bannon, far-right white supremacist, currently awaiting trial for major fraud and money laundering.

This piece is a bizarre rewriting of history.

Quite.

I was riled to the point of appoplexy a couple of months back when my gf played me a podcast of Russel Brand eulegising on how eloquently Trump spoke to the working classes and this arrouses much the same.

[Biffer]

I watched Wonder Woman 1984 at the weekend, distinctly underwhelmed, especially given how good the first one was. I didn't even realise Pedro Pascal was Maxwell Lord until the bit in the Smithsonian. At least we were spared him shooting poor old Ted Kord in the face.

Nice cameo at the end, though.

It's a real mess of a film. Pretty disastrous.

Suffered badly from the notion that Kristen Wiig in a pair of glasses still isn't an extraordinarily beautiful woman, for one thing.

Yep. Hollywood does this all the time. Take a gorgeous actress and pretend she isn't good looking by putting a pair of glasses and less make up on.

The only one that was even a bit convincing in doing this was Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich, and you still know its a deliberately frumpy look.

[Sandstorm]

The only one that was even a bit convincing in doing this was Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich, and you still know its a deliberately frumpy look.

Julia Roberts does a great frump in Homecoming on Netflix.

[Slick]

The only one that was even a bit convincing in doing this was Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich, and you still know its a deliberately frumpy look.

Julia Roberts does a great frump in Homecoming on Netflix.

Have to say, I've never found her very attractive

[Raggs]

She's one of those odd actresses that sometimes doesn't look attractive at all (despite perhaps playing a role where she's supposed to), and sometimes she's absolutely stunning, at least for me. She's also 53 now, which probably makes it easier...

I find it amusing that there's fixed tropes for making an actress look unattractive, but so often when you see them without make-up, with regular hair, and regular clothes, half the time they could pull off the role without the tropes. It's like they insist on being attractive, even when being madeup to look plain, so the wardrobe department has to fight back.

[Grandpa]

A good read....

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dona ... -x7sp2lr6d

Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it

Spoiler

Show

Donald Trump was inept — but his instincts weren’t wrong
The president was right to argue America’s democracy has become corrupted, writes Christopher Caldwell. Clearly he lacked the ability and appetite to fix it
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
Donald Trump at his inauguration: ‘You will never be ignored,’ he told his supporters
JIM BOURG
Christopher Caldwell
Sunday January 17 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
In early November, on the eve of the American elections, editorial pages and Democratic politicians backing Joe Biden sought to rally the country against Donald Trump, whom they called the “worst president ever”. At the time, it wasn’t even true. Trump was arguably not even the worst American president of the 21st century. Remember George W Bush, who started two wars, lost both and presided over the near-ruin of the global economy?

But Trump has managed to alter his historic legacy considerably since election day. On January 2 he made an hour-long phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he intimated it might be “dangerous” and “a big risk” for Georgia officials to deny that Democrats had committed crimes in the election, and asked Raffensperger to tip the election to him by helping him “find 11,780 votes”.

That may be the most serious documented constitutional violation in the history of presidential elections — but the president was only getting warmed up. On January 6 he urged a mob he had summoned to the National Mall to march on the US Capitol. He didn’t tell them to sack it, but sack it they did, with the help of some poor police work, and sent the senators cowering into a secure room when they were supposed to be tallying the electoral votes that would show Trump the loser.

Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
Trump didn’t tell the mob to sack the Capitol on January 6, but sack it they did
LEAH MILLIS
This may not have been the “insurrection” alleged in the impeachment charge quickly filed by Democrats, but the rioters were a threat to the safety of the senators at the moment when they were performing one of their most solemn duties.

One cannot really speak of Trump’s record as marred or besmirched by recent events because the people who will write his record are the very academics, journalists and high-tech “influencers” who oppose him most vehemently. For them, there’s no room for his reputation to get worse. It is the many Americans without any particular antipathy to Trump who have reassessed his character and drawn a stern lesson from it.


The lesson of Trump is that Americans have lately cared too much about ideology and too little about character. The Chicago Tribune opines that the storming of the Capitol was “only surprising if you weren’t paying attention”, as if the new year’s events vindicate the earlier attempts to remove Trump from office. That is only partly true. The early “Russiagate” inquiries, attempting to link Trump to both Julian Assange’s 2016 Democratic national committee email leaks and to Russian intelligence, had their origins in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, just as Trump claimed.

The Democrats’ first impeachment trial in 2019, over Trump’s attempts to gather dirt on Hunter Biden in Ukraine, was secretive and staged, and probably harmed the Democrats more than the Republicans. Nonetheless there really is a vindication for Trump’s foes in the events of recent weeks. If they were wrong on some of the details, they have been proved right in essence. Trump is more the man detractors warned against in 2016 and 2020 than the man his supporters hoped he would be.

Play Video
Security tightened around Capitol
Much more often than we are comfortable admitting, democracy places voters before calculated risks, including risks to democracy. Lincoln, Obama, Trump ... Americans often vote for people conspicuously short of the usual political experience for president, laying a bet that they will grow into statesmanship. Usually it works. Americans also vote for people who show signs of not caring about democratic niceties. Franklin Roosevelt concluded his first inaugural address saying he might ask Congress for “broad executive power” to make economic policy without it. Again, usually it works.

The public had to steel itself for Trump and his crew. The classicist Victor Davis Hanson likened him to a Sophoclean tragic hero, or a cowboy who blows into town to clean up the bad guys. Hanson rightly predicted — although he was a Trump supporter — that Trump’s presidency would end in his repudiation by a lot of the people who had thought it most necessary to rally to him. Trump’s enemies were often under the impression his supporters had been hoodwinked or inattentive, but no. The whole country saw the same Trump. They just differed in their risk assessments.

SPONSORED


Trump was elected for a reason. He spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class that had been forgotten by the elites raking in money from the global economy. By re-engaging these outcasts with the political system, he was able to win certain states that had suffered industrial decline: Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania. That turned politics upside down. The question was whether he was in any position to do anything for these people.

It turned out he was. Trump had shifted the economic playing field in non-elites’ favour. Policy-makers in both parties became more sceptical about free trade and more hostile to China. Incomes rose modestly for the lowest-paid workers, although this may have been due to minimum-wage laws passed in several states. These gains went unnoticed in print because the people who write about politics tend not to know many people who hang plasterboard and install air-conditioning systems.

Trump had laid an economic foundation for re-election that was much stronger than non–working-class people understood. Covid-19 washed these efforts away and delivered the economy back to the coastal investment bankers and internet moguls, exacerbating the inequality that Trump had come to office promising to fix. He was just unlucky.

There is another way to look at Trump’s election in 2016. Voters, not all of them poor, perceived American democracy as having been corrupted. Their perception was correct. Increasingly, regulators and judges were being empowered to overrule the things the public voted for, often making use of civil-rights laws.

The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
The president spoke to a downwardly mobile, mostly white working class forgotten by the elites
MICHAEL REYNOLDS
Through a process that no one fully understood, second-rate professors now had veto power over what people could and could not say. Litigious “anti-racist” foundations had acquired the power to instruct businessmen on whom to hire, and women felt threatened by men, no matter what men did. Their ideas of efficiency and fairness were abstract and elitist. They spurned the culture of those white voters in the declining states. Hillary Clinton was a personification of these elites’ attitudes, their power, their competence.

The dynamic was similar to Brexit, another battle against a labyrinthine power structure that could be made to disappear and reappear and that sometimes worked through invisible pressures on non-governmental actors. Unseating America’s guardians of political correctness would have required either a capacity for sustained work or an aide with the brilliance of Dominic Cummings. Trump had neither. He didn’t know where the power was that was stymieing his every plan and he had no one to tell him.

Trump’s personnel policy was chaotic. When his lawyer Michael Cohen testified against him in the summer of 2018, the most alarming revelation concerned not Trump’s ethics but his judgment in entrusting his most treasured projects and secrets to such a low-life. His hiring of his son-in-law Jared Kushner as an all-purpose consigliere was the most brazen act of White House nepotism in memory. Trump had a way of exiling people of independent judgment, such as his early backer Steve Bannon.

For all the talk of “extremism” that accompanied Trump through four years, his largest problem was never so much extremism as incompetence. No national candidate had ever calumniated political correctness with such contempt, and yet no president had ever permitted political correctness to tighten its hold so much on the lives of citizens.

The intimidation and censorship of common people as sexists and racists grew under Trump. After the #MeToo movement, mandatory anti-sexism workshops proliferated. After last summer’s riots over the death of George Floyd, anti-racism slogans were painted over football fields. Scarcely had Americans figured out what “transphobic” meant before they discovered it was something they could be sued for being, after the 2020 decision in Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia (written by a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court). By the end of Trump’s term his tweets were being censored, and so were the Facebook accounts of supporters who even mentioned the slogan “Stop the steal”.

For all the recent talk of incitement, Trump got his enemies considerably more riled up than his friends. In this his presidency resembled the high point of the American comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Held at bay by an armed robber, Blart succeeds in using the only weapon he has — a bottle of hot sauce, which he squirts into the assailant’s eyes. The man collapses into a chair, blinded, and over the 15 or so excruciating seconds that it takes him to recover his vision, Blart, urged on by his daughter, his girlfriend and other hostages, does ... nothing. The robber recovers and trains his gun back on everybody. “Probably should have capitalised on that,” Blart mutters.

The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
The Capitol rioters threatened senators as they performed one of their most solemn duties
DREW ANGERER
Trump didn’t have the skill to dismantle the power structures that were ruining his voters’ lives, but he did leave them feeling they’d never walk alone. (“Hear these words,” he said at the end of his inauguration address. “You will never be ignored again.”) The question is whether that will be enough to allow him to dominate the party in the future. Should he be convicted in an impeachment trial, he would probably be barred from politics for life, but such a conviction is unlikely.

Most analysts think it will be easy for him to keep his grip on the party. They are probably wrong. Trump will be seeking to avoid prosecutions by state justice departments that are well organised and in some cases vindictive. He will also be dealing with the chaotic state of his investments and properties, as activist investors have divested and clients have cancelled contracts. Among Republicans, Trump’s influence rests on the value of his endorsement and likelihood that he will be president again one day. Both are shrinking.

Trump may have given American populism its characteristic expression, but he didn’t unleash it and it won’t end with him. Many of the grievances that brought him into the political arena have, as we say, worsened. His Democratic tormentors have learnt little from their early debacles. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, complains about “white supremacist” colleagues in Congress; Zoe Lofgren, the California congresswoman, describes the Capitol marchers as “right-wing terrorists”. That leaves Republicans worried that, once Democrats are done with Trump, they will come for his rank and file. This diminishes the likelihood that Democrats will be able to win a conviction of Trump in the Senate in the coming weeks.

The global populist movement, as opposed to Trump’s American fans, may indeed suffer a setback in the coming months. A good relationship with the US remains an asset for any European head of state, and Trump’s departure makes it less likely that, say, Marine Le Pen or Marion Maréchal will have a friend in the White House in 2022. The same goes for Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and others. In America, all the grievances that created populism remain. Trump was effective in rallying populists together but wholly incompetent in carrying out their programme. Even to his followers, his departure might be a liberation.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the author, most recently, of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster)

This is not a good article at all. It's never a good sign when someone trots out the factually incorrect clichés about how Trump supporters are working class, and that Trump was responsible for meagre gains in their economic position. Who the fuck does he think passed the minimum-wage laws he grudgingly acknowledges might have had something to do with it??

This is a fucking whiplash too:

Trump had a way of exiling people of independent judgment, such as his early backer Steve Bannon.

For all the talk of “extremism” that accompanied Trump through four years, his largest problem was never so much extremism as incompetence.

That's Steve Bannon, far-right white supremacist, currently awaiting trial for major fraud and money laundering.

This piece is a bizarre rewriting of history.

Quite.

I was riled to the point of appoplexy a couple of months back when my gf played me a podcast of Russel Brand eulegising on how eloquently Trump spoke to the working classes and this arrouses much the same.

The only thing I saw positive in that article about Trump.. is that he was the budgie in the coalmine for endemic corruption... but completely out of his depth to do anything about it...

[Niegs]

To transition out of that transition, AMERICA Ferrera was made to look incredibly average in Ugly Betty, whereas she's really lovely.




... anyhoo, politics!

[Hal Jordan]

I will say that when Ms Wiig was trying on those shoes I was so consumed with lust at her transformation into a hot babe that I immediately leapt on my wife and ravished her. Dramatisation. May not have happened.

I did draw the line at the furry stuff, though.

[Openside]

DoJ have to publish who's been pardoned

I think the whole presidential pardon thing is very odd, if they have committed a crime and been convicted they should serve the time. Its fraught with potential for corruption.

It's a power that was directly replicated from the UK. There are supposed to be checks in place to prevent pardons for cash

Who pardons in the UK? I assume this was a Royal thing?

[sturginho]

I think the whole presidential pardon thing is very odd, if they have committed a crime and been convicted they should serve the time. Its fraught with potential for corruption.

It's a power that was directly replicated from the UK. There are supposed to be checks in place to prevent pardons for cash

Who pardons in the UK? I assume this was a Royal thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon#United_Kingdom

[Uncle fester]

The only one that was even a bit convincing in doing this was Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich, and you still know its a deliberately frumpy look.

Julia Roberts does a great frump in Homecoming on Netflix.

Have to say, I've never found her very attractive

Yep, her niece is genuinely smoking though.

[Trapper]

And this thread is why NPR is better than PR. It’s a shit show over there.

[JM2K6]

Yes, I had reason to look and saw mightyred's post. He's always been a bizarre conspiracy theorist but he's properly off the deep end now. A genuine lunatic. I hope he gets help.

[Sinkers]

Did the F-wit really just sign an exec order lifting the travel ban from UK, Europe & Brazil?

[laurent]

Yes

Really just pissing everywhere

[Rinkals]

Did the F-wit really just sign an exec order lifting the travel ban from UK, Europe & Brazil?

He's getting his revenge.

[Saint]

Did the F-wit really just sign an exec order lifting the travel ban from UK, Europe & Brazil?

Yes. He's putting Biden in a position where he's going to have to reverse a lot if stuff very rapidly, so he can then point at how Biden's undoing all the "really good stuff" he did.

His base will eat it up