Tag: presidential election
Vance Invented A 'Fact' About Harvard To Make Himself Really Mad

Vance Invented A 'Fact' About Harvard To Make Himself Really Mad

Vice President JD Vance is either secretly Charles Xavier and can read the mind of every Harvard University employee, or he is making shit up again in order to push a MAGA talking point.

The self-proclaimed hillbilly boldly compared Harvard University to North Korea at the American Compass anniversary gala Tuesday, claiming that “at least 90—probably 95 percent” of Harvard’s faculty voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

"But if you ask yourself—a foreign election, a foreign country's election, you say 80% of the people voted for one candidate. You would say, 'Oh, that's kind of weird,’ right? That's like, not a super healthy democracy,” he babbled.

“If you said, 'Oh, 95 percent of people voted for one party's candidate,' you would say, 'That's North Korea,” right, Vance said. “That is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen."

If you’re wondering how Vance acquired these completely made-up voting statistics and decided to draw these connections, you are not alone. Even Fox News noted that the vice president made the claim “without evidence.”

Then again, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just released an official government report citing fabricated sources, so it’s not unheard of for people in the Trump administration to pull data from thin air.

As for our eye-lined darling, using made-up information to push his longtime vendetta against higher education is just another example of his awkward attempts at being a relatable human.

When Vance was penning thoughts for conservative website National Review, he used vague sources he referred to as “friends” he knew to justify his narrative of the “college trap.”

And when the highly hypocritical Yale Law School grad is not dogging on Harvard, he is struggling to form sentences while interacting with workers at a donut shop to show voters that he, too, is a normal everyday guy who does normal, everyday things.

Then again, Vance can’t even keep his own family or sports fans on his side—so his historic unpopularity makes a lot of sense.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Imitating Foreign Despots, Trump Aims To Shut Democrats' ActBlue Site

Imitating Foreign Despots, Trump Aims To Shut Democrats' ActBlue Site

President Donald Trump is set to sign a presidential memorandum Thursday targeting ActBlue, the fundraising platform that powers Democratic campaigns and causes. This is Trump’s latest attempt to neuter political opposition.

It's unclear what exactly the memorandum will do, but according to Politico, it claims that ActBlue accepts foreign contributions—which the platform vehemently denies.

Of course, Trump himself has been hit with allegations of accepting Russian bribes. In fact, a political consultant who worked for Great America PAC, which backed Trump’s 2016 campaign, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2023 for illegally accepting Russian contributions.

What’s more, Trump is currently taking in millions from cryptocurrency investors, who are buying his meme coin for a chance to meet with Trump. It’s a blatantly corrupt pay-to-play effort, in which foreigners could be personally funneling money to Trump.

“The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote on X.

Similarly, Massachusetts Democrats Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jake Auchincloss joined together to demand an investigation into Trump’s meme coin, though it’s unlikely that the Department of Justice run by the nakedly partisan Pam Bondi would actually prosecute.

“Anyone, including the leaders of hostile nations, can covertly buy these coins, raising the specter of uninhibited and untraceable foreign influence over the President of the United States, all while President Trump’s supporters are left to shoulder the risk of investing in $TRUMP and $MELANIA,” they wrote in a letter in January.

And while ActBlue is being targeted by Trump’s memorandum, the Republican fundraising platform WinRed will seemingly go unscathed, despite its many actual issues—including coming under fire after the 2020 election for tricking people into unknowingly making recurrent donations to Trump’s campaign.

But this despotic attack against what Trump deems a “political enemy” is nothing new.

For example, Trump has stripped Big Law firms of their security clearances and government contracts because they employed lawyers who have investigated him or have sued to block Trump’s illegal actions. As a result, firms have halted pro bono work that might anger Trump.

ActBlue raises massive amounts of money for Democrats and Democratic causes, taking in nearly $500 million in 2025 alone. And its lawyers have been gearing up for a fight against Trump.

“Every one of our clients is concerned about being arbitrarily targeted by the Trump administration. We are going to great lengths to help clients prepare for or defend themselves,” said Ezra Reese, political law chair at Elias Law Group, which represents many Democrats and Democratic organizations.

And ActBlue says that it will not be scared into submission by Trump's bullying.

"Nothing will deter or interrupt ActBlue’s mission and work to enable millions of Americans to participate in our democracy," ActBlue President and CEO Regina Wallace-Jones wrote in an email to Democrats.

"There is an ongoing and persistent effort to weaken the confidence of the American people in what’s possible,” she added. “This is the next version of ‘the big lie.’”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Donald Trump

Could Trump Actually Pull Off An Authoritarian Third Term?

The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

Seems pretty clear-cut, right?

But read carefully—”no person shall be elected” to the office. And therein lies the keys to Donald Trump’s fantasies of a third term, saying to NBC’s Kristen Welker. “There are methods which you could do it.”

So how exactly would Trump become president without being elected president?

One way, Trump said, would be to swap tickets with Vice President JD Vance. He would run on a ticket with Vance and get elected vice president. Then, Vance would give up the office out of the goodness of his heart and resign, or maybe Trump would just shiv him, who knows. Trump wouldn’t care either way. Regardless, he would then become president.

Except that won’t work.

The 12th Amendment says, “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”

Well, that seems pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, that’s not the only avenue for Trump to try and sneak in.

The current order of presidential succession is:

  1. Vice President
  2. Speaker of the House
  3. President Pro Tempore of the Senate
  4. Secretary of State

We’ve already noted that the first is clearly off the table. However, the rest are not.

The Constitution doesn’t actually set requirements for speaker of the House, saying only, “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”

While every speaker has been a member of the House, it’s clear that there’s nothing requiring that to be the case. Hence, a Republican House could simply elect Trump as speaker, and then elevate him after both the president and the vice president resigned to pave his return to power.

A plain text reading of the Constitution makes this absolutely possible, though the courts would have to wrestle with the intent of both the 12th and the 22nd Amendments—which collectively make clear that really, two presidential terms is enough. But in this case, Trump wouldn’t be elected to the presidency, he would be elevated to the job.

The more practical impediment to this scenario is that two people would now need to surrender their chances to be president of the United States so fucking Trump could continue trashing the country and the world. People don’t want that, not even Republicans, and that’s before Trump’s policies really do a number on our economy.

Not to mention, those two people will both have gone through a grueling national campaign, won the votes of tens of millions, and for what? To quit and give it all up right after taking the oath to office?

Moving down the list, president pro tempore of the Senate is supposed to preside over the Senate in the absence of the vice president (hence the Latin “for the time being”), which the Constitution pretends is the president of the Senate (and in practice, just means a tie-breaking vote if necessary).

Like the House speaker, the Constitution doesn’t provide any qualifications for the role, so by tradition, the majority party picks its oldest member for the mostly ceremonial position. It is currently Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.

Presumably a Republican Senate could pick Trump as president pro tempore. But that would require the House to be in Republican hands as well, otherwise a Democratic speaker would ascend to the top. At that point, assuming the whole Republican Party is singing from the same choir book, it would just be easier for the House to make him speaker.

And finally, there’s that secretary of state job. Imagine Trump as secretary of state? Dear god. In any case, it would be a short-term charade. But now you’re talking about four people giving up their chance to be president—the elected president, the elected vice president, the speaker of the House, and the president pro tempore of the Senate. Trump may be deluded enough to think that many people would clear the path for him, but that would fly in the face of human nature. A not-president Trump would have zero leverage over an actual president.

And of course, that’s still assuming that the effort would survive legal challenges based on the 22nd Amendment. After all, it’s clear what the framers of that amendment intended—to prevent another Franklin D. Roosevelt from happening. That is, to prevent another president from entrenching themselves in the Oval Office.

But it does say a lot about Trump that rather than focus on the job at hand, he’s obsessing over a third term. He wants power for the sake of power itself, jealous of despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Of course, he’s going to indulge in these sorts of fantasies.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Thanks, Chief Justice! How Trump Plans To Defy Court Orders With Impunity

Thanks, Chief Justice! How Trump Plans To Defy Court Orders With Impunity

Easy: He’s going to use John Roberts’ gift of presidential immunity and his power to issue pardons granted by the Constitution.

Friends, we have arrived at a place that I think it's safe to say the founders never contemplated. Donald Trump has crafted for himself a form of absolute rule by twisting the rule of law the founders thought they were writing into the Constitution. The rule of law establishes a set of boundaries outlining what is permissible and what is not for our government. The Constitution sets it up this way: the Congress passes bills; the president signs the bills into law and is sworn to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed; the courts interpret the laws and either uphold or overturn them.

We should have been paying closer attention on the night of January 20th when Trump pardoned the nearly 1,600 insurrectionists who were convicted of committing crimes in his name on January the 6th, 2021. What Trump did with the stroke of a pen amounted to what his so-called border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News this morning: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

He was talking about the administration’s open defiance of a federal judge’s court order on Saturday night that attempted to stop the deportation of more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members. Judge James E. Boasberg told the lawyer for the Department of Justice if the alleged gang members were being deported by plane, that the planes should be turned around and the deportees returned to American soil until he could sort out whether Trump's actions under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 are legal.

In a hearing late this afternoon, the DOJ lawyer refused repeatedly to answer questions from the judge about the deportation flights on Saturday night, saying he wasn't authorized to reveal details because of national security.

The movement of the Venezuelan migrants, whose heads were shaved and were attired in white pajama-like shorts and shirts, was all over Fox News and other conservative outlets almost in real time, and clips of the deportees being loaded onto and taken out of planes were shown repeatedly on television news today. So, the national security claim of the DOJ lawyer was bogus on its face, because the Trump administration made no attempt whatsoever to hide what it was doing or how.

Judge Boasberg gave the DOJ lawyer until noon tomorrow to come up with an answer to one of the judge’s questions that the lawyer refused to respond to today, namely what time on Saturday that the Department of Justice believes the judge’s order went into effect. Establishing that time is necessary for the judge to determine whether the Trump administration defied his order, which would subject anyone involved in the defiance to a contempt citation by the judge.

There was a bunch of back and forth between the judge and the DOJ lawyer this afternoon, with the lawyer asserting that the judge’s order only went into effect when he put it in writing, and not when he issued it orally from the bench earlier.

None of this is ad hoc. Trump clearly set out to defy the order of this judge, and he will defy any others he disagrees with. White House officials have told reporters that they want this case or another one to end up before the Supreme Court, where they think they will win.

It is apparent that Trump plans to take the position that the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity allows him to do anything he wants so long as it is an official presidential act. Trump will contend that anyone acting on his orders is protected by his presidential immunity, and if any court, including the Supreme Court, says otherwise, Trump will pardon anyone who is found to have broken the law or is declared in contempt of court. In an authoritarian state, contempt for the law comes down from the top, and that is exactly where we find ourselves today.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.



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