Donald Trump

"[S]o we have Candidate Trump who's saying "I have no dealings with the Russians," but if the Russians had a tape recording, they could expose that, could they not?"

"The year 2020 will be remembered in the American epoch as one of anguish and abject failure. The coronavirus pandemic killed more than half a million people in the United States and infected tens of millions more, the deadliest health crisis in a century. Through the administration's Operation Warp Speed helped produce vaccines in record time, its overall coronavirus response was mismanaged by the president and marred by ineptitude and backbiting. The virus was only one of the crises Trump confronted in 2020. The pandemic paralyzed the economy, plunging the nation into a recession during which low-wage workers, many of them minorities, suffered the most. The May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a white police officer ignited protests for racial justice and an end to police discrimination and brutality. Yet Trump sought to exploit the simmering divisions for personal political gain, quickly declared himself "your president of law and order" and relentlessly pressured Pentagon leaders to deploy active-duty troops against Black Lives Matter protestors. The worsening climate crisis, meanwhile, was almost entirely ignored Trump, who earlier in his term had rolled back environmental regulations and withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement. The president was instead preoccupied with stoking doubts about the legitimacy of the election. After he lost to Joe Biden, Trump fanned the flames of conspiracies and howled about fraud that did not exist. His false claims of a "rigged election" inspired thousands of people to storm the Capitol in a violent and ultimately failed insurrection on January 6, 2021."

"That's the stuff of counterintelligence nightmares, is it not?"

"The Times story outlined his 2025 road map to implement this command-and-control model of executive authority and centralization of power if he’s returned to the Oval Office. In effect, the article described how his team would replace our constitutional republic with an authoritarian state. Such a state seeks to eliminate the independence of civil servants. Saying good things about bureaucracy may be unpopular, but federal employees' competence, expert judgment and commitment to governance by law is essential to democratic government. One definition of an authoritarian state is that it is characterized by the consolidation of power in a single leader, "a controlling regime that justifies itself as a 'necessary evil.'" That kind of control necessarily features "strict government-imposed constraints on social freedoms such as suppression of political opponents and anti-regime activity." Those characteristics describe the contours of the 2025 blueprint that the Trump campaign wanted the public to see via the Times' report. As the story notes, they are setting the stage, if Trump is elected, “to claim a mandate” for the goal of centralizing power in him. The Times quoted John McEntee, Trump’s 2020 White House director of personnel, defending the rejection of checks and balances on a president: “Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. ... What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”"

"BREAKING: The U.S. Capitol is on lockdown after pro-Trump protestors breached the building as Congress began to certify Electoral College votes for Biden."

"Supreme Court eras are often identified with their chief justices, as is true of the current period that began with Roberts nearly two decades ago. But the Court can be measured also by presidential influence. Certain presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed eight justices in his twelve years in office, had a disproportionate effect on the Court. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon also stood out for their imprint. The Trump effect, especially in terms of the individuals chosen and the resulting shift in the balance of power, has been incomparable. He is gone from office and they are here for life."

"Trump's advisers believed his ego and pride prevented him from making sound, well-informed judgments. His management style resembled a carnival ride, jerking this way and that, forcing senior management officials to thwart his inane and sometimes illegal ideas. Some of them concluded that the president was a long-term and immediate danger to the country that he had sworn an oath to protect, yet they took comfort that he had not had to steer the country through a crisis. Trump's actions and words nevertheless had painful consequences. His assault on the rule of law degraded our democratic institutions and left Americans reasonably fearful they could no longer take for granted basic civil rights and untainted justice. His contempt for foreign alliances weakened America's leadership in the world and empowered dictators and despots. His barbarous immigration policies ripped migrant children out of the arms of their families. His bigoted rhetoric emboldened white supremacists to step out of the shadows. But at least Trump had not been tested by a foreign military strike, an economic collapse, or a public health crisis. At least not until 2020."

"[Y]our report describes a sweeping and systematic effort by Russia to influence our Presidential election. Is that correct?"

"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."

"His ingenuity, genius, and creativity earned him immense wealth, but his character and philanthropic generosity his great name. Sheldon was also a staunch supporter of our great ally the State of Israel"

"I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack on the United States Capitol. Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness, and mayhem. I immediately deployed the National Guard and Federal law enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders. America is and must always be a nation of law and order. The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay. We have just been through an intense election, and emotions are high. But now tempers must be cooled and calm restored. We must get on with the business of America. My campaign vigorously pursued every legal avenue to contest the election results. My only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote. In so doing, I was fighting to defend American democracy. I continue to strongly believe that we must reform our election laws to verify the identity and eligibility of all voters and to ensure faith and confidence in all future elections."

"So the follow up question that should be concerning is what if a president serves beyond the statute of limitations?"

"I'd like to turn your attention to the June 9th, 2016 . Slide two... [Vol. I. p. 113] is part of an e-mail chain between... Donald Trump Jr. and a publicist representing the son of a . The e-mail exchange ultimately led to the now infamous June 9th, 2016 meeting. The e-mail from the publicist... reads... "The Crown prosecutor of Russia... offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and... is part of Russia and its government's support of Mr. Trump." In this e-mail, Donald Trump Jr. is being told that the Russian government wants to pass along information which would hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. Is that correct?"

"was trying to make money from Turkey?"

"We will be back in some form"

"That language comes from Volume 1, page 54. Apart from the Russians wanting to help Trump win, several individuals associated with the Trump campaign were also trying to make money during the campaign and transition. Is that correct?"

"[T]op Trump campaign officials learned that Russia wanted to help Donald Trump's campaign by giving him dirt on his opponent. Trump Junior said, loved it. Then he and senior officials held a meeting with the Russians to try to get the Russian help, but they were disappointed because the dirt wasn't as good as they hoped. ...[D]id anyone to your knowledge in the Trump campaign ever tell the FBI of this offer?"

"Why should it matter whether Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the Republican Party he’s largely taken over represent a kind of fascism? The answer: because the logic of fascism leads so inexorably to the politics of extermination. Describing his MAGA movement as fascism makes it easier to recognize the existential threat it truly represents—not only to a democratic society but to specific groups of human beings within it. I know it may sound alarmist, but I think it’s true: proto-fascist forces in this country have shown that they are increasingly willing to exterminate queer people, if that’s what it takes to gain and hold on to power. If I’m right, that means all Americans, queer or not, now face an existential threat.<br<For those who don’t happen to fall into one of MAGA’s target groups, let me close by paraphrasing Donald Trump: In the end, they’re coming after you. We’re just standing in the way."

"One day when I was about 6, I was walking with my dad in New York City. We noticed that someone had stuck little folded squares of paper under the windshield wipers of the cars parked on the street beside us. My father picked one up and read it. I saw his face grow dark with anger. “What is it, Papa?” “It’s a message from people who think that all Jews should be killed.” This would have been in the late 1950s, a time when the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews in Europe was still fresh in the American consciousness. Not, you might have thought, a good season for sowing murderous antisemitism in lower Manhattan. Already aware that, being the daughter of a Jewish father and gentile mother, I was myself a demi-semite, I was worried. I knew that these people wanted to kill my father, but with a typical child-centered focus, I really wanted to know whether the gentile half of my heredity would protect me in the event of a new Holocaust. “Would they kill me, too?” I asked. Yes, he told me, they would if they could. But he then reassured me that such people would never actually have the power to do what they wanted to. It couldn’t happen here. I must admit that I’m grateful my father died before Donald Trump became president, before tiki-torch-bearing Nazi wannabes seeking to “Unite the Right” marched through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” before one of them drove his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, and before President Trump responded to the whole event by declaring that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” Maybe the grubby little group behind the tracts my father and I saw that day in New York would have let me live. Maybe not. In those days home-grown fascists were rare and so didn’t have that kind of power."

"When your investigation looked into these matters, numerous Trump associates lied to your team, the grand jury, and to Congress?"

"And when this was revealed, that there were these communications, notwithstanding President's denials, the President was confronted about this and he said two things. First... that's not a crime. But I think you and I have already agreed that shouldn't be the standard. Right, Mr. Mueller?"

"One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything to overturn the election"

"Rudy, you did a great job. He's got guts. You know what? He's got guts, unlike a lot of people in the Republican Party. He's got guts. He fights, he fights. .. Our brightest days are before us, our greatest achievements still wait. I think one of our great achievements will be election security because nobody until I came along, had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And again, most people would stand there at 9:00 in the evening and say, “I want to thank you very much,” and they go off to some other life, but I said, “Something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened.” And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. .. After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections, but whether or not they stand strong for our country, our country. Our country has been under siege for a long time, far longer than this four-year period. we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."

"Paul Manafort... went so far as to encourage other people to lie?"

"So dead people voted. And I think the number is close to 5,000 people [in Georgia] .. [There] were thousands and thousands of ballots in a box that was not an official or a sealed box. They ran out because of a water-main break. And there was no water main, there was nothing. There was no break. You had out-of-state voters - they voted in Georgia but they were from out of state - of 4,925 They're shredding ballots. And you should look at that very carefully. Because that's so illegal. We have not gone through your Dominion [voting machines], so we can't give them blessing. I mean, in other states, we think we found tremendous corruption with Dominion machines..."

"Republican leadership only wants the path of least resistance. Our leaders (not me, of course!) are pathetic."

"Well, your investigation is not a witch hunt. Is it?"

"As it was, Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand. Trump's schedule was the easiest anomaly to deal with. One of the hardest was his vindictiveness, as demonstrated by the constant eruptions against John McCain, even after McCain died and could do Trump no more harm. Another example of his vindictiveness was Trump's August 15 decision to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance. Now, Brennan was no prize, and during his tenure the CIA became more politicized than at any other time in its history. He denied any improper behavior, but Trump was convinced Brennan was deeply implicated in abusing the FISA surveillance process to spy on his 2016 campaign, all of which was exacerbated by his constant presence in the media criticizing Trump after he took office."

"So, look, all I wanna do, is I wanna find 11,780 votes."

"Weak and tired Republican “leadership” will allow the bad Defense Bill to pass."

"Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"

"And when he told it to Putin, that was false, too, wasn't it?"

"The fact that the Supreme Court wouldn’t find standing in an original jurisdiction matter between multiple states, and including the President of the States, is absurd. It is enumerated in the Constitution... .They just “chickened out” and didn’t want to rule on the merits of the case. So bad for our Country!"

"I saved at least 8 Republican Senators, including Mitch, from losing in the last Rigged (for President) Election. Now they (almost all) sit back and watch me fight against a crooked and vicious foe, the Radical Left Democrats. I will NEVER FORGET!"

"Russia informed campaign officials of that? ...through an intermediary that informed Papadopoulos that they could help with the anonymous release of stolen emails?"

"In short, your investigation found evidence that Russia wanted to help Trump win the election, right?"

"It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court decided not to take this case and determine the constitutionality of these four states’ failure to follow federal and state election law,"

"Donald John Trump is way out of his league playing a clever usurper of power. If it appears that we have been hard on him, listen to the people who do. As humans being go, he is a sorry specimen. His driveway has not reached the main road for a long, long time. He is incapable of fixing his own life, which is deeply scarred by escarpments of chutzpah and pitted with bottomless potholes of ignorance and self-deception, so he is incapable of repairing the damage he has done. If he becomes a monarch, we can brag that it did not take us generations of inbreeding to produce an imbecile king. We shall have started with one. Even sadder, Trump might not be made dictator by a distinct minority of the country. Most Americans will not have voted for him; they simply did not vote. In short, we could lose what our forebearers fought for and won and preserved and rightly celebrated because most of us would not even go to the polls in 2020 to keep them."

"Even if Donald Trump leaves office peacefully in 2021 his base will remain intact and be available to him to hobble his successor as it did his predecessor. Or, should Trump slip inexorably, that base is available to whoever can capture it for themselves. Someone smarter than Trump and championed by Fox News and the right-wing media echo chamber, could pose a much greater threat down the road. You can bet that various Double Highs have already begun thinking how to get incarnated as the next messiah. You can also bet the "king-makers" are studying the field right now too, including the leaders of the religious right who might sense Trump losing a bit of his hold on their believers."

"And then they lied to cover it up."

"The case wasn’t rejected on the merits, the case was rejected on standing. So the answer to that is to bring the case now to the district court by the president, by some of the electors, alleging some of the same facts where there would be standing,” he said in a Friday interview on Newsmax."

"There’s nothing that prevents us from filing these cases immediately in the district court in which the president of course would have standing, some of the electors would have standing in that their constitutional rights have been violated."

"My administration has taken the most aggressive action in modern history to prevent the spread of this illness in the United States. We are ready. We are ready. Totally ready. On January 31st, I ordered the suspension of foreign nationals who have recently been in China from entering the United States. An action which the Democrats loudly criticized and protested and now everybody's complimenting me saying, "Thank you very much. You were 100% correct." Could've been a whole different story. But I say, so let's get this right. A virus starts in China, bleeds its way into various countries all around the world, doesn't spread widely at all in the United States because of the early actions that myself and my administration took against a lot of other wishes, and the Democrats' single talking point, and you see it, is that it's Donald Trump's fault, right? It's Donald Trump's fault. No, just things that happened."

"On January 28, 2020, when Trump's national security adviser and his deputy warned Trump that the virus would be- not might be, but would be- the biggest national security threat to his presidency, the leadership clock had to be reset. It was a detailed forecast, supported by evidence and experience that unfortunately turned out to be correct. Presidents are the executive branch. There was a duty to warn. To listen, to plan, and to take care. For a long time Trump hedged, as did others, and said the virus is worrisome but not yet, not now. There were good reasons to ride both horses, but there should have been more consistent and courageous outspokenness. Leading is almost always risky. The virus, the "plague," as Trump calls it, puts the United States and the world in economic turmoil that may not be just a recession, but a depression. It is a genuine financial crisis, putting tens of millions out of work. Trump's solution is to try to recreate what he believes is the economic miracle he created in the pre-virus time. Democrats, Republicans and Trump did agree to spending at least $2.2 trillion on recovery, which will create its own future problems with growing deficits. The human cost has been almost unimaginable, with more than 130,000 Americans killed by the virus by July and no real end in sight."

"The U.S. Supreme Court has been totally incompetent and weak on the massive Election Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election. We have absolute PROOF, but they don't want to see it - No 'standing', they say. If we have corrupt elections, we have no country!"

"John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020), p. 226"

"We’re not finished. Believe me."

"The standard behavior for a presidential candidate, or any candidate for that matter, shouldn't be merely whether something is criminal, it should be held to a higher standard... I'm just referring to ethical standards. We should hold our elected officials to a standard higher than mere avoidance of criminality, shouldn't we?"

"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of law and order – respect the law and our great men and women in blue. Thank you!"

"If the Supreme Court shows great Wisdom and Courage, the American People will win perhaps the most important case in history, and our Electoral Process will be respected again!"