#resistance is not futile.... it is survival. We will not go back. We will fight until the cult has crawled back under the rocks they came from. #Nevertrump
If you vote for Donald Trump in November, I will not judge you for your choice of political party. I will judge you for your lack of morals, ethics and humanity. I will judge you for your support of racism, misogyny, and fascism. So will others. So will history.
I just convinced a few Republicans to join me in trying to block Bill Pulte from being DNI…. But the rest couldn’t find a spine.
Disappointing and dangerous, but I’m still fighting.
Ryan Fournier, 30 yr old co-founder of ‘Students for Trump’ was arrested for domestic violence. After being drunk & passed out, he punched his girlfriend 2-3 times with a closed fist when awakened and made threats including “I will kill everyone here.” https://t.co/eBUH1dRSn3
🚨 Jason Galanis stole $60 million from Indigenous tribes, among other crimes.
Trump commuted his sentence allowing him to keep $80 million of stolen funds.
Trump’s budget director Russ Vought is the most dangerous person you’ve never heard of.
And he just proposed turning every federal grant into a loyalty test.
His plan would make funding for cancer research, housing, transportation, and public health depend on one thing: whether it “advances the President’s policy priorities.”
Not whether it works.
Not whether Congress authorized it.
Whether it pleases Trump.
This is the appropriations power. It belongs to Congress and to the people.
To my Republican colleagues: where are you?
Congress passed this funding. You voted for it.
Vought is telling you to your faces that your votes do not matter, that he and his enablers will override the law whenever it suits them. Every day you stay silent, you give away the institution you were elected to defend.
Grow a spine.
This is not about left or right.
It is about whether Congress still exists as a coequal branch, or whether we have quietly surrendered the purse to an unelected hack who holds the Constitution in contempt.
History will remember who stood up and who looked away.
https://t.co/2yHKBTNLbj
Yesterday Donald Trump tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government. Illegally. And almost no one noticed.
Here's what happened:
He signed an order converting ~8,000 of the most senior career officials in government into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.
These aren't rando's. They're the directors, chiefs of staff, and the people who write the rules or decide who gets federal money, i.e. the lieutenants right below his political appointees.
Until yesterday, they answered to the law. Now they answer to him.
A president normally gets ~4,000 political appointees. People he can bring into government and fire at will. I was one of them at DHS. You serve at his pleasure, full stop -- so if you're gonna speak truth to power, you're prepared to quit (or get fired if he doesn't like it).
The rest of the federal government is PROTECTED from firing if they tell the truth.
But Trump just stripped those protections. Adding 8,000 more people to his personal army. Overnight. Without asking Congress.
With the stroke of a pen, those people now serve at the pleasure of the president. They're "his" people, whether they like it or not.
And the chilling effect is real. An official who can be fired this afternoon for "subversion of presidential directives" (the order's own words) doesn't need to be hand-picked to know what's expected of him or her.
The threat does all the work.
By the way, this order is illegal. The law only lets Trump reclassify jobs when "necessary" in exceptional circumstances. And this blows an 8,000-person hole in the merit hiring / firing system created by Congress.
Without permission, Trump has created a whole new category of stormtroopers inside the Executive Branch.
If this doesn't get challenged in court, you're going to see the U.S. government become a very different place.
Here's the full story: https://t.co/mJzrvzhxGR
Trump hasn’t made a public appearance in 8 days. This after an unscheduled visit to the hospital- because he “likes getting check ups.” Thank God Jake Tapper (or as I like to call him- the Brick Tamland of his generation) is on the case hunting down clues in a book about my mom’s experience as First Lady four years ago.
.@JuddLegum on Kushner/Ivanka's luxury island project facing protests: "A report found it involved a network of shady individuals- businessman accused of Italian mafia links, judge who resigned, company of a murdered businessman, links to an Albanian oligarch..." https://t.co/VRc7RZZyHl
Jennifer Welch: “Boycott every fucking thing on CBS News. From the morning all the way through to the evening. These are the same people that fired Stephen Colbert because Trump got his feelings hurt by a comedian. These people are the biggest bunch of pussies that masquerade with these grandstanding letters like they’re such badasses. These people don’t care about the truth, they don’t care about journalism, they don’t care about the Constitution, they don’t care about a free press. It’s just absolutely devastating what these oligarchs have done to our country”
🚨BREAKING: The Secretary of Homeland Security just admitted, on camera, that he is going to violate your First Amendment right to free speech.
He said, “I have ZERO tolerance. If you verbally assault our officers… we will find you, we will arrest you.”
Except… that’s not how the First Amendment works.
Unless someone is making a credible threat of violence, speech… even rude, angry, or insulting speech… is still protected.
That’s the whole point of a free speech clause… to protect the people from situations where those in power don’t like what’s being said.
So, when a top federal official starts framing “verbal assault” as something you can be arrested for, without clearly defining it as an actual threat…
It stops sounding like protecting officers, and starts sounding like a government trying to silence people who speak out against it.
Pay attention.
Late last night the Trump-packed Supreme Court issued an UNSIGNED order to help Republicans erase Black voters and keep a congressional seat.
The Court's legitimacy is earned and they are burning it to the ground.
MAGA is rigging our democracy in real time!