Tag: donald trump
White Supremacist terrorist group

Historian: Trump's Third Term Yearning May Provoke 'January 6 Scenario'

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump once again flirted with the idea of running for a third term, not ruling it out entirely in an NBC News interview.

But on Monday, presidential historian Tim Naftali told CNN that after the ratification of the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, term-limited presidents have no legal way to stay in power. He pointed out that short of the arduous process of amending the Constitution (which involves getting two-thirds support among state legislatures and two-thirds support from both chambers of Congress), Trump will have no choice but to leave the White House in January of 2029.

"President Trump does not have the Constitutional cards in this case," Naftali said. "There are only two scenarios by which you could constitutionally alter the the Constitution and allow him to run for a third term, and they both involve finding 38 states. Donald Trump knows that there aren't 38 red states."

CNN host Brianna Keilar then asked Naftali about the scenario in which Trump could mimic Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister under Dmitry Medvedev and ran the government behind the scenes before once again ascending to the presidency for yet another term. Keilar posited that Trump could run as Vice President JD Vance's running mate in 2028, only for Vance to then resign if elected and allow Trump to once again occupy the White House for four more years. However, Naftali threw cold water on that idea.

"The 12th amendment of our Constitution stipulates that no one can be a vice presidential candidate if they're not Constitutionally eligible to be president," he said. "That kind of Putin-Medvedev scenario is not possible in our country."

But the historian and New York University associate professor then pivoted to what he viewed as the most pressing question, which is: "Why is he talking this way?" Naftali explained that Trump "knows he doesn't have 38 states" and said that his talk of a third term has just three possible explanations. He added that the third option had particularly dark implications.

"One: Political theater. Donald Trump likes attention. He likes the fact we're talking about him right now. Maybe he's also hoping some people are going to say some things that are a little bit outrageous, which he can use to fundraise," he explained. "Number two, we're living in a in an increasingly evident culture of impunity. The president is using fear to get his way with universities, to get his way with law firms, to get his way with Congress, to get his way with Canada and Greenland and Panama and Ukraine. He's on a roll. And so why not talk about what he really wants, which is to stay in office as long as he can? The third is the January 6th scenario that the president, when he was in his first term, was capable of pushing for an unconstitutional and/or illegal way of staying in office. And maybe he is signaling to his supporters: 'Start thinking about ways we can stay through 2028 and 2029.'"

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert

MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert

Welcome to the final installment of your Freakshow guide to the extremely online Nazi influencers of Trumpworld. It’s been a sickening tour, so take your anti-nausea meds one more time, and let’s get cracking...

First, an update on Canadian racist Geoff Martin, who we covered two weeks ago. Martin, who calls himself Captive Dreamer, includes Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and other high-profile Trumpies among his fans. But you will recall that Dreamer/Geoff’s day job was office drone at Canada’s largest Christian university, Western Trinity – an institution presided over by his own father.

After Geoff was outed, his father Todd Martin renounced his spawn’s views, albeit without naming him. In a video posted online, the senior Martin said, in part: “I reject white supremacy and any ideology that elevates one group of people over another. I denounce the use of derogatory and disparaging labels and language and any attempts to dehumanize another individual or group. I strongly oppose the use of social media as a means of spreading such harmful ideas.”

(FWIW, your Freakshow author reached out to the university’s media office inquiring about whether Geoff Martin is still employed. Their reply: “As a matter of policy and in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act, we cannot disclose personal information about current or past employees. However, we can confirm that no individual by that name is employed by the university.”)

Dad’s renunciation didn’t sit well with Dreamer’s online fans. American racist influencer Mike Cernovich called Martin’s video “a degrading struggle session imposed on him.” As if the president of a university (“Christian,” no less) that advertises its “inclusivity” could maintain his position without denouncing the odious public views of his spawn.

Dreamer belongs to a pack of non-American influencers with advanced degrees who don’t all vote here but who have been drooling over the prospect of a fascist America for years. We’ll have one more quick look at two of them here before we bid them all good riddance (for our reading purposes at least – when it comes to the Trump administration, they don’t seem to be going anywhere).

The king of MAGA’s online fascists is a Romanian named Costin Vlad Almariu. Almariu, born in Bucharest in 1980, is a greasy hyper-misogynist racist, with a Yale PhD in political science, who posts a lot of photographs of oiled-up bodybuilders in Speedos. He argues that modernity has stripped (white) men - especially progressive men - of their manliness.

No “I like beer” Trumpworld frat boy’s shelf is without his best-selling 2018 manifesto, Bronze Age Mindset. The tome has been compared to a modern, non-German Mein Kampf. His ideas have even earned him an ism - BAPism, which stands for “Bronze Age Pervert” per Almariu’s Xitter handle. Bronze Age Mindset’s ironic tone and elevated vocabulary gild the savagery of his ideas (boiled down by him to “the desire to be worshipped as a god”).

Like last week’s Freak, Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie, Almariu believes anyone who isn’t white is naturally inferior, and that “Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.”

BAPists also presume self-reliant women are the cause of all modern male problems. Almariu’s personal misogyny is bottomless. He loathes us, routinely referring to us as “grils” or with the obscene insult “roasties” or, if he paid one, “prosties.” On International Women’s Day last week, he tweeted a picture of a woman eating raw tuna, with the caption: “Highly repulsive. I will generally not see a gril again after she eats in front of me. I stopped seeing a favorite prostie after I made the mistake of having delivery sushis with her at my place.”

Almariu’s 186,000 followers include Trump Junior, Vance, and many mod Nazi fellow travelers like Charles Cornish-Dale, another offshore fascist who spews into the U.S. radicalization pipeline under the username Raw Egg Nationalist on Xitter. “Yes, disgusting’” Raw Egg responded to BAP. “Eating is a big test of compatibility. How a woman holds a knife, whether she takes time eating her food, small gestures like using napkin properly, etc.”

Delicate, napkin-noticing Brit Cornish-Dale is another MAGA favorite (followed by Musk, Vance, Trump Junior, and Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen). As recently as last fall, Trump Junior was retweeting Raw Egg’s bullshit about FEMA and DEI programs.

He has an Oxford PhD (his thesis was on the religious history of an English parish), and now edits and writes a hilariously homoerotic (given Cornish-Dale’s other sentiments) magazine called Man’s World, with covers that include AI-generated classical male nude sculpture with futuristic eye beams and an apparently erect member. A British anti-hate group that outed him reports that he lives at home with his mommy in England.

Devoted to the goal of “superlative male flourishing,” Cornish-Dale advocates “slonking” 36 raw eggs a day among other wackadoodle muscle-building cures. Tucker Carlson featured him in his ball-tanning documentary on men not long before Fox sacked him.

Cornish-Dale has promoted Mein Kampf, eugenics, and the great replacement conspiracy theory. In a recent issue of his magazine, he posted a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream - Panzerschokolade - a concoction of cocoa powder and speed that gave the brave frontline Nazi tank troops more energy! (see below)

Last week, Cornish-Dale posted an AI “portrait” of JD Vance, his pudgy face slimmed down and decked in mutton chops and 19th-century colonial uniform, leaning on a sword, with an Indian woman coiled at his feet.

Cornish-Dale, Almariu and Martin, all born or living abroad, are invested in the American fascist experiment and are engaged with, platformed, and retweeted by men with immense power over global affairs, national policy, and American people’s freedom of speech, assembly, and the pursuit of happiness. They radicalize American Trump racists suffering from the Obama Derangement Syndrome that has motivated MAGA since 2015.

For decades after 9/11, the U.S. government blew tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into anti-radicalization efforts aimed at Islamic extremists. Meanwhile, this clan formed and spewed scholarly Nazism and Euro-fascist crap into the American mainstream. They are empowered by and influencing an administration that claims to see anti-Semitism on every campus and is weaponizing that accusation to deport people, all while refusing to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute.

These freaks remind us that whatever the appeasers (ADL, Bari Weiss) want to pretend, the sieg heil means exactly what it always has: jackboots, thugs, and mass murder.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.


Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.


Shrinking American Culture To Fit Those Small MAGA Minds

Shrinking American Culture To Fit Those Small MAGA Minds

So much of the American character is in peril, including the cultural touchstones I often reference, probably more often than my column editors would like. But I believe most Americans’ lives are enriched by the TV shows and music, theater and films that make skeptics and even hate-watchers tune in for the Academy Awards or Super Bowl halftime show.

I long ago embraced the fact that the arts (high and low) bring joy, knowledge and — often, just in time — an escape. But to Donald Trump they have become yet another part of American life he can control.

His administration is eviscerating the division that preserves and maintains more than 26,000 art pieces across the country, including renowned paintings and sculptures, owned by the government.

Under Trump’s influence, museums are canceling exhibits that feature diverse artists, films are stripping out characters that represent the underrepresented, and internships and scholarships that expose all communities to the arts are ending.

In just one example, the young musicians who auditioned for and won a coveted learning experience with the U.S. Marine Band were disappointed when an executive order canceled their workshop and “Equity Arc Wind Symphony.” This time, military band veterans stepped up, and the story and tuneful results were seen by the millions who watched and listened on “60 Minutes” on CBS.

However, not every Trump-induced nightmare has a fairy tale ending.

In Washington, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, under the new Trump-appointed management and a board that shockingly elected him chair, intends to narrow the kinds of work it will present in the future, a scary thought even if you adore the Trump-favored musical “Cats.” How many times can a person hear “Memory”?

Isn’t the beauty of culture choice? With diverse offerings available, there is bound to be something that’s appealing to every individual taste.

The president gave away the game when he admitted that in all his years in Washington, he had not been a fan of the Kennedy Center. “I didn’t go,” he said when asked. “There was nothing I wanted to see.”

Nothing piqued the president’s curiosity? Nothing that might inspire, surprise or simply entertain?

Maybe that’s why Trump never laughs, or hardly smiles, unless it’s that weird smirk that spreads across his face when he thinks his sophomoric insults are somehow witty. A hint: Just because sycophants guffaw, it doesn’t mean you’ll be the next recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded from that Kennedy Center stage.

Oh, wait a minute.

So, exactly what “woke” shows did the president reject, sight unseen? Perusing the programming when he was in office, I wondered. Was it touring productions of The Book of Mormon or Hello, Dolly! ? Maybe On Your Feet! the story of Cuban American musicians Emilio and Gloria Estefan? Didn’t Cuban Americans turn out for him in Florida?

Considering Trump’s coziness with Vladimir Putin, you’d have thought Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, performed in conjunction with the English company of Cheek by Jowl and the Pushkin Theatre Moscow, would have caught his eye.

But, no. With all those varied shows on the schedule, as well as the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, the uninterested Trump mostly decided to pass.

In 2017, he did attend a Fourth of July concert at the Kennedy Center hosted by First Baptist Church Dallas, reported NPR. But when the main event is a performance by the choir and orchestra of a song that includes the lyrics “Make America Great Again” and Trump squeezes in a slam on the “fake media,” I’m not sure that counts.

Now, he wants to deny everyone else, dictating what Americans will see and hear, starting but I fear not ending at the Kennedy Center.

The insistence on seeing art and culture through Trumpian eyes means Kennedy Center audiences will miss the MacArthur “genius” and Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, who has canceled her show in response.

Having seen Giddens with the Carolina Chocolate Drops delightfully play an eclectic brand of roots music, which elevates the contributions of African Americans, I can say missing a Giddens performance is Trump’s loss.

Giddens has the rare gift of entertaining while teaching you something — in her case, something about America.

I count myself lucky to have had parents who found every free concert, lecture or film at the library. Community programs offering dance and music lessons are disappearing, I fear. Theater and opera tickets didn’t put too much strain on the purse — if you were willing to sit up in the nosebleed section.

My young life included arts and culture, things that I loved and hated and had questions about, that were interesting and fun, that enhanced rather than distracted from the reading, writing and arithmetic many of our leaders would like to solely revert to in public schools.

Though lacking the wealth of the Trump family, my parents realized the importance of a complete education.

I’m certain the president would not have approved of the last show I saw at the Kennedy Center,A Soldier’s Play, Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, set on a segregated Army base in the South during World War II. It’s grounded in the history Trump and his followers are trying to erase.

Yet, a packed audience was thrilled, a difference in opinion on what is and is not proper art that should be allowed in anyone’s America, even Trump’s.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call


Trump: 'Not Joking' About Plans For Unconstitutional Third Term

Trump: 'Not Joking' About Plans For Unconstitutional Third Term

President Donald Trump on Saturday once again floated running for a third term as president, telling NBC News he’s “not joking” when he suggests he might run again despite the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment that says “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.”

“A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker on Sunday. “But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”

Trump added he’s “focused on the current” administration.

According to a transcript of the conversation, Welker gave Trump a scenario where Vice President JD Vance “would run for office” and “if he won, at the top of the ticket, would then pass the baton to [Trump]."

“Well, that’s one,” Trump replied. “But there are others too. There are others.”

Welker asked Trump if he could “tell [her] another” scenario where Trump could run for and win a third term.
“No,” Trump replied.

“Okay. So, but but sir, I’m hearing — you don’t sound like you’re joking. I’ve heard you joke about this a number of times,” Welker said.

“No, no. I’m not joking,” Trump replied.

“Amending the Constitution to abolish the two-term limit would be exceedingly difficult, requiring either a two-thirds vote of Congress or two-thirds of the states agreeing to call a constitutional convention to propose change,” NBC News reports. “Either route would then require ratification from three-quarters of the states.”

Still, according to Trump “a lot of people would like [him] to” seek a third term.

Read the full report at NBC News.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World