2 mass shootings and a Category 5 hurricane, so of course Trump is very busy tweeting about how @DebraMessing once complimented him in 2005.
— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) September 1, 2019
She (and her Will & Grace co-star, Eric McCormack) are threatening the two things he cares about most — his current grift, and his access to the company of real celebrities / rich people:
I ?? @DebraMessing, and I look forward to celebrating with her via tweet when there’s a new president in the White House.https://t.co/SzOdxwlJ2n
— Michael S. Smith II (@MichaelSSmithII) September 1, 2019
Hey, @THR, kindly report on everyone attending this event, so the rest of us can be clear about who we don’t wanna work with. Thx. https://t.co/7W3xPG3bI2
— Eric McCormack (@EricMcCormack) August 30, 2019
I am proud to be a donor when I contribute to a campaign. I am happy to be listed when I attend a fundraiser. I am assuming anyone who donates to Trump’s fundraiser would feel the same. Why wouldn’t they?
— Debra Messing (@DebraMessing) September 1, 2019
As so often happens, Tang the Conqueror only drew more attention to the event he’d been trying to keep under the radar…
How to Find Who Donated to Trump in Your Area https://t.co/n8jQiYoowB
— Debra Messing (@DebraMessing) September 1, 2019
But he still has his loyalists — the “Director of Communications for @realDonaldTrump 2020 re-election campaign” wants to keep his job, even if it means working on the holiday weekend:
can anyone find really **any** campaign contributor who has ever been “or worsed” by anyone? Or frankly even harassed? this isn’t really my thing. but we have a system of largely unconstrained political giving on theory that in politics money is speech. https://t.co/mvYr46nMdO
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 2, 2019
3/ As I said, speech is inherently public. But even the premise here is bogus. The idea that anyone is being endangered is just baseless. And even public shaming is all but nonexistent. That may happen with mega-givers: the Kochs et al. But in most cases that operate outside …
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 2, 2019
That said, I think the public gains very little by knowing the names of small donors and thresholds for public disclosure should be raised considerably.
— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) September 2, 2019
The intentional conflation of doxxing (publishing addresses and phone numbers with the aim of harassing or harming a subject) and reporting (noting that a famous person went to a fundraiser) has become a cudgel used by powerful people to obscure their actions and flow of money. pic.twitter.com/t2mukgVJOr
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 1, 2019
Exactly like that. Doxxing was a word created by victims, later appropriated by those in positions of power who levied that abuse and later wanted the protections they did not provide to their victims.https://t.co/1L4y5ne0mH
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 1, 2019
I would be very happy to balance real and robust disclosure, including dark money, by raising the threshold for disclosure to $1,000.
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) September 2, 2019
Ruckus
I think it’s funny that he thinks there should be two worlds, the one he’d like to be part of and the one he actually is part of. He’d like to be one of the world’s richest. But he’s so lame that he couldn’t even take a rather substantial inheritance and do anything but throw it away. And now that he’s found a way to have people give him money, that he can’t legally spend in any way he wants, only for reelection, he’s getting pissed because he knows that if the people he hates know who gave him the money, the flow, that he can’t legally spend on himself will dry up. He’s so ignorant and dishonest, he thought he could run for office, with the help of a foreign power, and if he won, he’d get to keep all the funds to pay off the debts to the person who made sure his ignorant ass got elected. He thinks he knows power, and can manipulate power to his advantage. I’d bet he doesn’t have a clue how deep in he is. Either that or he does know to the penny and he’s trying to save his own ass. But his ass isn’t worth what’s been paid for it, not even for 1/10,000,000 of a cent/dollar invested, because it isn’t his ass nor the money that he’s worth. It’s how stupid he makes us look, it’s how many treaties he can destroy, how many countries he can screw, including this one.
I know, it’s a wild ass guess and minimal chance I’m right. But he sure is acting like I am.
Sm*t Cl*de
There it is again, the compulsive tic, the sound of the door closing as he retreats to his Citadel of Fantasy.
rikyrah
David Simon (@AoDespair) Tweeted:
Can we get a published guest list? THR? Life is short and I don’t want to work creatively with or for anyone who tolerates or normalizes white supremacy or the explicit assault on the governing norms of our republic. That shit isn’t ordinary politics. It matters.
https://t.co/VYAJt4imVe https://twitter.com/AoDespair/status/1168205183978856450?s=17
rikyrah
Yes…you want to aid this Administration, then you should be well known.??
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
That’s just it. Trump does know power, and he absolutely can manipulate power to his advantage. That’s kinda what being president is all about. Unfortunately, Trump is venal and incompetent, he wields power like a childish fool, but has a chorus of Republican fools sing his praises and pretend that he is guiding the country to greater glory.
More of his tariffs kicked in today, raising consumer prices on various goods, but I will bet that no conservative economist or pundit who backs Trump can give you an honest explanation of what Trump is trying to accomplish with his misguided trade war.
He is ignoring the terrible effects of more mass shootings, and golfing while a hurricane gathers strength off shore. His greatest display of power this past week was to fire an aide for revealing tawdry palace secrets. But this focus on the trivial is what we should expect a man who treats the presidency like one of his reality shows.
Possibly. Problem is, he may pull us all down with him. His demands that everyone accept his lies and praise him just ain’t working anymore as the negative effects of his bad decisions start to accumulate.
It is essential that we dump his sorry ass when election time rolls around. Meanwhile, I hope that Pelosi and other Democratic Party leaders are letting the GOP Congressional leadership know that they will not escape the consequences of protecting Trump and betraying the country.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I see we are on the same page.
tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)
@Brachiator:
What do you think she can do? I am really curious to hear ideas. It always seems like the Rs slide out from suffering any consequences at all.
hells littlest angel
Next: No one gets harasses more than candidates for political office. Let’s not publish their names! Elections can be just as fair and transparent if voters can just choose between “Candidate A” and “Candidate B.”
OzarkHillbilly
These new Nazis… They just don’t seem to have the same confident swagger the old Nazis had. Back in the day, the old Nazis walked around wearing uniforms tagged with SS and and a red armband with a swastika on it, proudly goose stepping around Berlin and “Heil Hitlering” everyone they see.
These new Nazis don’t seem to even want anyone to know they are Nazis.
JPL
@tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat): Talk radio without a blink of an eye, complain if a democrat plays golf. The next democratic president will be blamed for the debt and deficit. You are right that there are no consequences.
Chyron HR
@hells littlest angel:
I think you mean “Candidate A” and “Candidate B, who’s campaign has been plagued by dark clouds of scandal”.
Alex
Certain people in this doxing debate are disingenuously pretending not to notice obvious differences in the power dynamics in the situations they are comparing. It reminds me of the outing debates of the late 80s and early 90s. Some people argued that a person’s non heterosexual behavior should never be revealed against their will. So, exposing hypocrites in positions of power who were contributing to an epidemic that was literally killing gay men and trans women wholesale— that was the equivalent of the police publishing the photos, addresses, and workplaces of men caught up in entrapment raids of cruising spots. Most people in the gay community rejected this argument because it was clearly a bunch of self-serving bullshit from folks who wanted to screw over their own people.
PST
@OzarkHillbilly: Speaking of new Nazis, it’s not hard to figure out who is on Richard Evans’s mind in this piece. As the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, he knows what he’s talking about.
Zinsky
Here’s hoping that Hurricane Dorian levels Mar-A-Lago and all of the insurance companies that Trump, the serial rapist, has defrauded over the years, refuse to pay the insurance claims!
Zinsky
@Brachiator: Well stated! I would argue that Democrats form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission post-Trump. Lay out all the filth, lies and corruption that this reptile has left behind for all the world to see. Make McConnell pay too – for stealing Merrill Garland’s SCOTUS seat. Long prison sentences for Trump, his family and business associates seem inevitable.
jonas
@Brachiator:
Oh, that’s not too hard. China steals IP and other technologies when foreign companies do business there and they sell us a lot of cheap shit. So Trump figured he could go for an easy win by threatening China’s huge trade surplus with us and force them to knock off the technology transfers. What he and his dim-bulb advisers didn’t expect was for China to reply “See you in hell,” and then slap retaliatory tariffs on our farm commodities. They read Sun Tzu. Trump…can barely read.
SFAW
@PST:
I could only read the first 10 or 20 paragraphs of the Evans article before I got (even more) depressed by the current state of affairs, and the parallels, and had to stop. Not sure whether the Liar-in-Chief has just one “Goebbels” on staff, but however many there are (fuck you, Steven Miller), I hope the Truth and Retribution Commission gives him/them appropriate punishment. If we make it that far. I hope I live long enough to see it.
SFAW
@Zinsky:
Fuck Reconciliation. I want Retribution for Moscow Mitch, Lying Lindsey, the Liar-in-Chief, Kapo Miller, consigliere Bill Barr, and a raft of others.
Reconciliation will allow them to continue on without serious consequences. We’ve seen how well that works: great for them, but shitty for America.
chopper
@jonas:
yeah china has the chess set out and trump’s all playin’ whack-a-mole.
BruceFromOhio
@OzarkHillbilly: They saw what happened to those other guys. Who wants that?
feebog
Oh Annie. Totally stealing that one.
kindness
I don’t think they should raise the disclosure amount. Since donor money is now unregulated because of free speech it should be completely transparent without any threshold.
If you are going to run with Chief Justice Roberts’ insane theory of money being speech we should adhere to his fundamental principle that that speech is open to anyone who wants to know. Don’t let them have it both ways, neither of which helps the public.
Calouste
@rikyrah: At a minimum, this will have the effect of scaring off some people from attending. Of course not the Ted Nugents of Hollywood, but other people are going to do a risk/benefit analysis and see that the numbers don’t look good.
Skepticat
@kindness:
This!
jl
@Skepticat: I agree completely.
I don’t know about the issue of raising the threshold for small donations. I think there are both cost and complexity issues in reporting every small dollar contribution, and need to protect ordinary people who can only contribute five or ten bucks from retaliation by employers. So, I can only speak for myself. I only contributed small amounts to candidates like Abrams, Scholten, Katie Porter, Spanberger, Davids (and Welder in the primary) and AOC in her primary. I don’t care who knows, I don’t care if every dollar is reported in a public data base. Maybe I should go through the my records and make a list and post in my front door.
Mary Ellen Sandahl
@feebog: I saw “the Emperor Tang” used for the first time today. It’s a flexible term!