To get to the main point right up front: I believe that the gag order Judge Juan Merchan has imposed on Donald Trump during the contrived “hush money” trial is election interference to the core, and unconstitutional when applied to a Presidential candidate in an election year. The ACLU l declared another judge’s gag order on Trump as unconstitutional last fall, and you know what it takes to make the ACLU side with the “bad guys” in the 21st Century. Nonetheless, I believe any and all gag orders that could be enforced on Trump would benefit the nation, Trump supporters and Donald Trump himself.
If he could just keep his big trap shut and stop the ALL CAPS Truth Social posts he would breeze to victory. The man has no filters, wretched judgment, and the mastery of the English language of a Brooklyn street urchin on the autism spectrum. Who knows what he’ll say between now and November that will be either misreported as an admission of evil intent, or will in fact be so awful that it loses him millions of votes overnight? Continue reading →
Yes, I know I’m breaking my own rule about not using unflattering photos of Hillary Cinton, a pledge I made during the 2016 Presidential campaign I think—it might have been earlier. She deserves it in this instance.
I feel genuine compassion for Hillary, just as I do for Al Gore (and Samuel J. Tilden) up to a point. It must be terrible to win the popular vote for President of the United States and lose the election. I think it must be a little like what I am trying to deal with right now after waking up one morning and finding my wife dead.
Hillary is bitter and angry, and I understand that. The ethical mandate in such a situation is to strive to deal with these emotions with dignity, and, in her position as a public figure that many Americans admire and respect (mistakenly), to serve as a role model for everyone else who finds themselves suddenly losing something or someone that assumed they had firmly and safely in their embrace.
She’s failed that mandate spectacularly and repeatedly. Clinton lost the Presidency, not only by the quirk of the Electoral College, but also through her own perfidy, arrogance and incompetence, yet she refuses to take responsibility for any of that. In her view, at least publicly, it is all Donald Trump’s fault, along with the”deplorables” who voted for him. From the moment she learned that she had lost the 2016 election in a stunning upset, Clinton has set out to do everything and anything she can to hurt him, beginning with declaring his election illegitimate, spawning the Russian collusion investigation that crippled his Presidency, and using every opportunity to trigger the Trump Deranged with inevitably diminishing returns.
As I noted in an earlier post today, extreme Trump Derangement rants are less tolerable from genuine professionals of whom the public reasonably expects better than from the Robert De Niro, Bette Midler, Jimmy Kimmel, Rob Reiner, and “The View”-type celebrity pundits who are loud of mouth, large of ego and megaphone, and short of wisdom. Thus the letter Steve-O-in NJ reveals and critiques in his Comment of the Day is particularly disturbing. As you will see, it is sloppy, miserably researched, steeped in emotion and bias, and, frankly, I’m embarrassed for my profession after reading it. That the writer, as he informs us by way of appealing to his own authority, was on short lists for a cabinet position either speaks to the incestuous nature of our political elite, or the frequency of age-triggered cognitive decline. And he wants this self-indicting swill widely circulated! The lack of self-awareness among the Trump Deranged is a source of wonder.
I also need to say that I have not recognized Steve’s often detailed, erudite and perceptive comments frequently enough. I attribute this to taking blessings for granted (one of my myriad flaws): so many of his posts are outstanding that I’m not sufficiently impressed by them any more. My fault, and my apologies to Steve.
Paul Grossman, supposedly a conservative, wrote the following, which should tell you all you need to know about Trump Derangement. He’s is a nationally known employment defense lawyer at Paul Hastings and a Republican. He has encouraged that it be shared.
“April 5, 2024TO:
My Friends and Acquaintances
FROM: Paul Grossman
SUBJECT: The Upcoming Presidential Election
In most elections, candidates differ in philosophical approach regarding how best to solve commonly appreciated issues and shared challenges such as the large federal deficit.In 2024, we are faced with a departure from this normal paradigm in which we can presuppose the integrity of the candidates and their desire for a better United States now and in the future.
For the first time in my lifetime, one of the two major candidates for President of the United States has proven himself to be not just unfit for office but affirmatively evil. I am a Republican. Until our former President came along, based on the issues, I voted for The Republican candidate for President. Ronald Reagan wanted me to run the Department of Labor forhim. I had serious hopes of being Mitt Romney’s Secretary of Labor. I would have happily voted for Nikki Haley over Biden, with whom I differ on numerous policy issues. But for the reasons set forth below, in this election differences in character are more important than the underlying policy issues.
Please vote. Sitting out this election is not a reasonable choice.Is the former President evil? Yes. There can be no doubt. Consider the following: He incited the January 6th riots. He refused to take action for hours that day while watching the riots on television. He has promised to pardon the convicted rioters despite the deaths and destruction they caused. He calls racists “good people.” He still claims the 2020 election was “stolen” – he lost it by 7 million votes. He calls his opponents demeaning nicknames – a tactic used by grade school bullies. He is a serial liar. His trade policy is protectionist – he ridicules serious economists. He has engaged frequently in unwanted sexual touching of females – as he put it in a recorded statement, he “grabs pussy.”
He has been found by a court to be guilty of sexual assault. He avoided military service; at a military cemetery he labeled those who served “suckers.” He initially denied the existence of the recent pandemic. He rejected medical evidence in relation to the recent pandemic and demeaned medical experts. He makes fun of climate change. He embraces nonsensical conspiracy theories.
[My problems with Biden include his age, immigration, the Afghanistan exit, unconditional sympathy for trade unions, overspending, and contentions the wealthy are not paying their “fair share” of taxes. But I must admit despite my reservations about Biden, the economy is doing quite well.]
[Donald Trump] makes fun of people with disabilities. He dehumanizes immigrants – all four of my grandparents were immigrants. Those who have worked most closely with the former President are unstinting in their assessments: He has been privately labeled a “moron” by his First Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. He has been called dangerous by his former Secretary Of Defense, Mark Esper, who will not vote for him. He has been accused of undermining our NATO alliance by his former Secretary of Defense, James Mathis. His Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao resigned in protest of his January 6th related actions and inactions.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the January 6th mob violence a “failed insurrection.” He tried to bully his vice president to refuse to perform his vice presidential duty and certify the election results:Mike Pence, an honorable conservative, has announced he will not vote for the former President. He used to be pro-choice – he switched when he became a Republican and needed the evangelicals. He admires Putin and for good reason – both are evil and serial liars.
He could not care less about Ukraine’s heroic stand against Putin and Russia.Please join me in voting for the candidate who is a decent human being, and against the candidate who is evil.
Please forward this email to your circle of friends. I truly fear for our democracy if the evil candidate again becomes President. I think it possible, perhaps likely, that if elected in 2024, as the 2028 elections approach, despite the Constitution, he will do whatever he deems necessary to stay in power. Prominent conservatives including Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Lisa Murkowski have publicly announced they will not vote for the former President. It is not clear whether they will abstain. But an abstention or a vote for a candidate who has no chance makes it easier forthe evil candidate to win. Thank you for considering my views.”
In August, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan M. Merchan, tasked with presiding over the criminal case against Donald Trump in Manhattan for 2016 “hush money payments” in violation of election laws, rejected Trump’s lawyers’ claims that the judge had disqualifying conflicts of interest and should recuse himself. The reasons for the recusal seemed a stretch at the time, easily the weakest being that, during the 2020 presidential campaign, Justice Merchan had donated the grand total of $15 to Joe Biden. Another was that the judge’s daughter, the president and chief operating officer of a digital marketing agency that has clients who are Democratic candidates, was obviously going to benefit financially Merchan’s decisions in the case.
Justice Merchan ruled, relying, he said, on the guidance of a state advisory committee on judicial ethics, that his impartiality could not “reasonably be questioned” based on “de minimus political contributions made more than two years ago” or his daughter’s business. The latter, he said, could not be substantially affected by the trial. Trump’s attorneys had “failed to demonstrate that there exists concrete, or even realistic reasons for recusal to be appropriate, much less required” because of his daughter’s activities.
I was teaching another legal ethics course today and had occasion to muse about what a foolish ethical system consequentialism is, as I have periodically discussed on EA. The short version is that deciding whether an action was right or wrong, ethical or unethical depending on what the eventual results flowing from it are is both foolish and illogical: an action can only be judged based on what is known at the time the action is taken. What occurs as a result of the action is vulnerable to chaos: once those metaphorical billions of billiard balls start rolling around on the theoretical infinite pool table, anything can happen and frequently does. People habitually say that a decision was “a mistake” or “wrong” when it was neither, just because the results of the decision were the opposite of what was intended.
Think of “The Simpsons'” master of mockery Nelson Muntz above as the spokesperson of the cosmos, and as Donald Trump as his unwitting agent. The previous, pre-Musk proprietors of Twitter, full allies that they were in the coordinated (and unethical) effort by the Axis of Unethical Conduct to bring Donald Trump to ruin for all time, kicked him off the ubiquitous social media platform for insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen, a plausible but unprovable thesis. (I quit Twitter in protest, as the move was totalitarian, reflecting the totalitarian drift of the entire political left—which has continued.) The Trump Haters and Trump Deranged cheered. Trump, given no outlet for his annoying but often effective outbursts, juvenile jibes, rants and trolling orgies, responded by setting up his own pseudo-Twitter platform, Truth Social. It was and is cheesy, but it did its main job, which was to provide the ex-President with a web platform from which he could not be censored or silenced.
Big Tech is all in with the rest of the Axis (“the resistance,” Democrats and mainstream media) to rescue President Biden from his own blunders and ineptitude by bringing Donald Trump down by any means necessary. This is no conspiracy theory: they may not “steal” the election, but we can already see that they are doing anything they can think of to rig it. Here’s an example so flagrant that it is almost funny, or would be if it wasn’t emanating from the same people who claim to be “saving democracy.”
On March 16, Trump made his “bloodbath” comment, discussed on Ethics Alarms here and here. Even though his metaphor was unambiguous in its context (the economic plight facing American auto manufacturers if Biden remained President) a memo went out to the Left’s cabal dictating that the comments should be reported as a threat by Trump to encourage violence should Trump not prevail in November. On March 18, FactCheck.org, still biased leftward but perhaps the closest we have to an objective fact-checking service, pointed out that among “bloodbath’s” definitions was “a major economic disaster.” At that time the Google online definition of the word included “a period of disastrous loss or reversal,” and the sentence used to illustrate it was, “A few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market.”
But that definition exonerated Donald Trump. Thus Google, being good patriots and all, changed the definition! See..
The latest kerfuffle spawned by Donald Trump’s loose lips ensnared Keith Olbermann. In an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly last week, Trump blathered about persecuted Presidents, “I was always told that Andrew Jackson was treated the absolute worst. I heard Abraham Lincoln was second. I don’t care,” Trump said. “Andrew Jackson or anybody else. Nobody, when you think of the fake things, nobody’s been treated like Trump in terms of badly.”
Olbermann, being the jerk that he is, re-tweeted the Biden Campaign’s “Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated,” with the comment, “There’s always the hope.” This isn’t the point of this post, but 1) Trump was referring to Lincoln’s vilification in both the South and much of the North when he spoke of bad treatment, and 2) Olbermann’s snark was inevitable, in character, and obviously not a “true threat.”
But then people, including some Fox talking heads, started calling for him to be kicked off Twitter/”X,” and Keith pulled his tweet. Then he lied about what he meant, tweeting, “I know nobody with an IQ greater than a halibut’s has believed @FoxNews since 1996 but even from their whores this is idiotic The RT clearly shows I’m hoping Trump’s right, that he IS treated worse than Lincoln. As I’ve said for 9 years: THAT HE’S CONVICTED, THEN DIES IN PRISON ”
Sure Keith. Do you really believe anyone but a few halibut, Fox News, and the nearly million idiots who follow you on Twitter give a fig what you tweet, ever?
But I digress. What I want to point out is that neither Lincoln nor Andrew Jackson top the list of mistreated Presidents. It’s an especially dumb thing to say about Jackson. Jackson was the most popular President since George Washington, cruised to re-election, and left office an icon. I assume what Trump is alluding to is the scandal over Jackson’s wife Rachel, because of her inadvertent bigamy when she eloped with Andy. Jackson didn’t take any criticism well, but he was still mostly worshiped as President, though roundly hated by his political foes for consistently besting them.
Trump has a slightly stronger case with Lincoln, but Abe still was re-elected, and almost immediately deified after he was killed. The following Presidents were treated much worse than Jackson; whether they were treated worse than Lincoln is a matter of perspective: John Adams, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. I could even make an argument for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Trump has a strong case that he was the most unfairly and viciously treated of all, but the two Johnsons, Hoover and Nixon have strong cases as well. I do give Trump the award for knowing less about American Presidential history than any other POTUS.
A dissent from a well-respected contributor here spawned this post. The mainstream media is still pushing the Big Lie (discussed in this post)that Donald Trump promised to unleash a “bloodbath” if he lost the upcoming election (MSNBC mentioned it several times this morning). As I was pondering the argument (prompted by this post) that Elon Musk does not deserve the RBG Leadership Award for rescuing Twitter, now “X” from the Left-wing biased and censorious cabal that had captured it, I encountered the sequence below on the platform. Musk’s version of Twitter does not ban the progressives from spreading their “misinformation,” and he allows the crucial opportunity for countering the news media that is on display. This is undeniably a good thing. And I believe the the Notorious R.B.G. would agree.
Ugh. How many times will we have to go through this farce? Trump says something off the cuff using gratuitously inflammatory language, Democrats and the Trump Deranged pretend he meant the words in the worst way imaginable, and the biased and dishonest mainstream media tries to bombard the public with the latest “Trump is dangerous and a threat to democracy!” narrative. Will it happen ten more times? Fifty? A hundred?
The current Axis fake-freakout is typical of the script. Trump was riffing yesterday about how countries like Mexico and China are making money from President Biden’s electric vehicle obsession. “Mexico has taken, over a period of thirty years, 34% of the automobile manufacturing business in our country. Think of it, it went to Mexico,” Trump told the crowd. “China now is building a couple of massive plants where they’re gonna build the cars in Mexico and think, they think that they’re gonna sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border.”
“Let me tell you something. To China, if you’re listening, President Xi — and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal,” he continued. “Those big, monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re gonna get that, you’re gonna not hire Americans; and you’re gonna sell the cars to us — no. We’re gonna put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line. And you’re not gonna be able to sell those cars. If I get elected — now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. Its gonna be a bloodbath for the country, that’ll be the least of it. But they’re not gonna sell those cars, they’re building massive factories,” Trump said.
So “bloodbath” clearly meant a financial and commercial bloodbath, using the term metaphorically, like the news media does all the time. They even used it last week: Multipleoutlets described the change in leadership and subsequent layoffs at the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a “bloodbath.” What? You mean they were actually claiming that the GOP was slaughtering people? Of course not, but never mind: the Democratic Party-bolstering news media has no shame, so they immediately pretended—and wrote—that Trump had threatened a literal blood bath if he lost the election again.
“You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign event. “Hundreds of billions of dollars came into NATO, and that’s why they have money.” He also claimed that he told NATO members this when he was in office. This was the part that really caused Trump’s foes (and some of his supporters) apoplexy:
“One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”
Ethics Alarms 