We Must Remember: Trump Was a BAD President

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Jonathan Bernstein in his Good Politics/Bad Politics Substack reminds us of just how bad a president Donald Trump was, and how we have forgotten so much ….

Jonathan Bernstein: “I was one of the political scientists who participated in a ‘rank the presidents’ survey and it was easy to place Trump dead last, given everything. But the truth is that even if Trump had followed and accepted the law, including the Constitutional “emoluments” provision, and even if he didn’t provoke an insurrection in support of his bid to overturn an election he lost, and even if he didn’t have a history of sexual assault, and even if he didn’t regularly make bigoted remarks and encourage bigotry…he was still quite a bit worse at the regular parts of presidenting than any of the modern presidents, at least.”

“It’s hard to know where to begin, and I’m obviously not going to convince anyone in a few short paragraphs or even a full item, but even given how important all that other stuff is his gross incompetency at the job is worth remembering.”

Trump Would Not Be the First Presidential Candidate to Campaign from Prison

Jon Ponder
Socialist Party 1920 presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, Convict #9653

Donald Trump recently announced that he was eager to go to jail for violating the gag order in his criminal trial in Manhattan.

Trump has whined about the gag order on a daily basis since before the trial began. But on May 6, 2024, in his daily televised courthouse address to his cult, he added a note of false bravado to the whine. “And frankly, you know what,” he said, “our Constitution is much more important than jail. It’s not even close. I’ll do that sacrifice any day.”

Trump is notorious for hiding behind the Constitution when it can be construed to support his scams but shredding it when it gets in his way, as he did on January 6, 2020, in his uncountable ethical violations as president and in other areas.

The fact is he is a career criminal conman who has lived a life of luxury for nearly 80 years. There is zero chance he’d give up his solid gold toilets for an lid-less aluminum basin on Rikers Island.

If Trump were to go to prison, he would be the first U.S. ex-president to get locked up, but he wouldn’t be the first presidential candidate. That title goes to Eugene V. Debs, who campaigned for president from prison on the Socialist ticket in 1920 and received more than 1 million votes. He was serving a ten-year stretch in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for violating Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s World War I Sedition Act of 1918.
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MAGA Senator Introduces Bill to Create Pregnancy Database

A baby step closer to Gilead

Jon Ponder
Sen Katie Britt introduces MOMS Act
Sen. Britt in her cringe-worthy promotional video for the MOMS Act (Click to view video)

In a follow-up to her disastrous response to Pres. Biden’s barnburner 2024 State of the Union speech, Sen. Katie Britt (MAGA-AL) has introduced a bill that would use federal resources both to discourage abortion and to create a database of pregnant people.

The More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act (MOMS Act) provides online pregnancy resources through a new website, pregnancy.gov, but it also funds anti-abortion organizations and offers no resources on abortion.

Users of pregnancy.com can opt to have their contact information compiled into a federal pregnancy database. The government may use the data to “conduct outreach via phone or email” to share “additional resources that would be helpful.”

But critics fear that the government database may be used to discouraged abortion. Troy Matthews at Meidas Touch News suggested that, “It’s very likely the government staffer that follows up with the website users will also be tasked with pressuring them out of seeking proper healthcare if it involves an abortion.”

Britt was famously caught lying during her MAGA State of the Union rebuttal. She claimed she met with a woman who was sex trafficked in the United States as a result of Biden administration policies. In fact, the woman was trafficked in Mexico City decades before Biden became president.

Anti-Vaxxer RFK Jr. Tried to Give His Children Fake COVID Vaccination Cards

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The Daily Beast provided this excerpt of an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Pushing the Limits podcast with Brian Shapiro on KHSP radio in Las Vegas:

“Listen, I have adult kids. I don’t know how old your kids are … believe me, your ability to influence your kids after a certain age basically approaches zero.”

Kennedy said he raised his kids “to disagree with me, to challenge me, but also to tell the truth.”

Then the story took a twist.

“I offered my kids vaccine cards and said, ‘I don’t want you to take this product,’ because I had read the clinical trial data,” Kennedy added in the interview. “And they said, no, they didn’t want to do it, because they didn’t want to lie. They didn’t want to lie to their friends. So, they made their own decision—that they wanted to go to law school, they wanted to go to school, and that they had to take this risk. And they did it.”

The Daily Beast reported that the Kennedy campaign did not answer a request for comment on how the candidate procured the bogus vaccine cards.

Under federal law, as well as state and some local laws, obtaining and presenting a fake vaccine card is illegal.

Florida CFO Urges Trump to Collect $54k Held by the State

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Everyone is talking about how Donald Trump is struggling to pay his enormous legal bills, but one man is actually doing something about it. Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis is urging Trump to claim $54,000 the state is holding in Trump’s name.

That’s the total amount of unclaimed funds that belong to either Donald Trump or his businesses or properties, reported the Orlando Sentinel.

“There are some very, very nasty people coming after you, and every dollar matters in your efforts to fight back against these radical state attorneys who have weaponized the courts,” Patronis wrote in a fawning letter to Trump on official state letterhead bearing the CFO seal.

“In January, [Patronis] promoted a bill to create a ‘Freedom Fighters Fund’ that would provide up to $5 million in ‘financial support to Florida residents running for President who face legal, partisan, political attacks by the Department of Justice or State Attorneys.,'” reported the Sentinel.

Florida Gov. and former Trump Republican primary rival Ron DeSantis threatened to veto the bill if it came to his desk, and it died in committee.