To understand R’s narrative capabilities versus D’s narrative capabilities, look no further than R’s ability to make Hunter Biden into a full blown “Biden crime family” scandal vs D’s inability to focus relentlessly on Trump & Co’s mind-bending corruption. Everyone should post their favorite insane Trump grift to celebrate the 4th.
One reason elected officials are lining their pockets is because of what can be called a "cowardice problem" - a fear of enforcing laws and standing up to criminal behavior. It's explained in my latest newsletter:
https://t.co/73ufe4Wg6i
Liz Oyer, former Pardon Attorney, describes how Todd Blanche fired her when she refused to do a dangerous official favor for Trump friend Mel Gibson. The actor lost his federal firearm rights after committing domestic violence. Gibson assaulted his girlfriend while she was holding their baby daughter, smashing her in the mouth, breaking her teeth, threatening her with his gun. Gibson asked Trump’s DOJ to reinstate his federal firearm rights despite his criminal conviction. Although Blanche had the power to do it on his own, he tried to force Oyer to give her stamp of approval. Not convinced of Gibson’s rehabilitation or his lack of dangerousness, and knowing that over half of women murdered in the United States are killed by a current or past intimate partner, and the presence of firearms in an abusive household increases the risk of murder by 500%, Oyer refused to have anything to do with Blanche’s dangerous and unethical suggestion. Blanche sacked her.
Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb on Trump earning over $1 billion last year from crypto ventures: “We are seeing the greatest onslaught of corruption in the history of mankind.”
To everyone celebrating the first flight on Qatar Force One today, understand what you are actually applauding.
A foreign government handed the sitting President of the United States a $400 million plane. American taxpayers then paid to retrofit it, with an estimated cost of at least another $400 million (some estimates far higher), for security and communications work in a Texas hangar since last September.
When Trump leaves office, the plane does not stay with the government. Ownership transfers to his presidential library foundation. In other words, he keeps it.
You are being asked to treat pure corruption as normal, to shrug at a President personally profiting from a foreign gift the taxpayers paid to upgrade.
In any other administration this would be the scandal that ends a presidency.
With Trump, it’s Wednesday.
https://t.co/qAfVUp8KBd
Watching a President of the United States fly a plane personally gifted to him by a foreign government isn’t just corrupt, it makes us look weak to the world.
Left: JD Vance claiming he'd love "if Democrats were willing to work with us on lowering housing prices" to have some "real bipartisan compromise"
Right: Trump refusing to sign the bipartisan bill to lower housing prices, calling it "unimportant" and a "big yawn"
Elon Musk lies and claims that not one child has died because he decided to destroy USAID and feed it "into the wood chipper." @NickKristof went to South Sudan and Uganda and saw for himself. Share this to push back on Musk's gaslighting.
Theodore Roosevelt said the national parks were the greatest gift this country ever gave itself, and the greatest idea we ever gave the world.
More than 100 nations copied it.
Donald Trump looks at that gift and sees a piggy bank for his own pet projects.
This week we learned where our national park money has been going. Not to Yellowstone. Not to Yosemite. To the walkway outside his office, where Trump ripped out American flagstone and laid down Italian granite at a cost of $689,000 to taxpayers. He said he paid for it himself.
That was a lie.
To cover his vanity projects, they are robbing the parks. Spending on parks outside Washington is down $854 million. More than 900 projects went unfunded. They even pulled money from a guardrail on a Colorado cliff that the Park Service flagged as a safety hazard.
I serve on Appropriations.
The power to spend belongs to Congress, not to a king redecorating his palace. These parks are not Trump’s to loot.
They belong to all of us, and I will fight for every dollar.
The House just passed my resolution to provide greater transparency into how taxpayer dollars were spent to resolve congressional sexual misconduct claims.
The vote was 420-0. Americans deserve to know precisely how their money is spent.
Rep. @Grace4NY: If you are born in America, you are American. Today, the Supreme Court upheld the promise of birthright citizenship, which was established more than 150 years ago by the 14th Amendment. As we celebrate today's ruling, I have a message for President Trump. You may believe you are above the law, you are not. You may try to divide Americans based on race, religion, or their country of origin, and you will fail. You may try to redefine what it means to be an American and you will fail. We are American.