Bill Maher's $1 Million Offer For Trump To Resign May Be Best Way To Get Rid of the Loathsome Orange Cockroach

Wonder of wonders, President Donald J. Trump, aka Capt. Bonespurs,  said on Saturday that he would no longer hold next year’s Group of 7 meeting at his luxury golf club near Miami, a swift reversal after two days of intense criticism over awarding his family company a major diplomatic event.

Did Donnie Bonespurs do this out of a sober acknowledgement he was violating the domestic emoluments clause against presidential self- dealing?  I.e. selecting his own property as the venue for a major diplomatic event, and thus a "decision unprecedented in modern American politics with a president awarding himself a massive contract." (WaPo, Saturday).  

Of course not. This pinhead spouted about the "phony emoluments clause".  What do you expect from a dolt  that  has never read the Constitution and struggles with a 'Garfield' comic?  All Dotard knows is self dealing and hence actively embraces his own narcissism directed to self- enrichment. That is the sum and substance of his miserable existence.  If he can't make a deal that benefits himself he wants no part of it.   And bear in mind, like most grifters and criminal con men his "deals" are always inflated, exaggerated.  An AP examination of Trump's Twitter feed turned up 1,200 mentions of the words "biggest,", "smartest",  and "best".  (Denver Post, Oct. 20, p. 7A,  'With Trump It's Always 'The Art of the Big Deal'")  In his most recent transgression Trump claimed a crowd of 30,000 for a rally crowd in Dallas.  The Dallas Fire-Rescue Dept. made an actual count of 18,500 or below the 20,000 capacity of the American Airlines Center and 38.3 percent less than Trump claimed.

Why does this deranged man-baby employ such excess claims, hell outright LIES? Because like all practicing con men he understands that employing them is the best hook to sucker the gullible, lower IQ segment of the populace.  Thus, rather than offering solace to the Kurds slaughtered in the wake of his unseemly withdrawal of U.S. troops in N. Iraq, he chose to brag on his "deal"  as a "great day for civilization".  In fact, it was among the worst, and put a rubber stamp on allies' justified suspicion of the U.S. as credible partner in most global initiatives.

But as odious as Trump's withdrawal from Syria, it was not an impeachable offense.  However, his self- dealing to enrich himself via his Doral resort was.  As blogger Robert Weissman put it on smirkingchimp.com:

"President Donald Trump no longer sees fit even to pretend that he is constrained by the law or the U.S. Constitution. It’s hard to imagine a more blatant violation of the Constitution’s anti-corruption provisions than the president steering foreign governments to stay at his luxury resort.."

Nevertheless it took a firestorm of outrage to get  him to retract his decision, and even then it was done grudgingly and rife with serial insults and complaints at any critics.

 Trump wrote on Twitter  over the weekend, interspersing one tweet with the usual hyperbole, exaggerations and BS:

“I thought I was doing something very good for our country by using Trump National Doral, in Miami, for hosting the G-7 leaders.  It is  big, grand, on hundreds of acres, next to MIAMI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, has tremendous ballrooms and meeting rooms and each delegation would have ...its own 50 to 70 unit building.  Would set up better than other alternatives."

Let's pause here to note this is all horse manure   As Chris Hayes' guests pointed out on 'All In' Thursday, all the costs vis-a-vis Trump's Doral resort are already "sunk" - meaning underwater. In debt up to Miami's tallest condo. The Doral has struggled financially since the Trump family bought the resort out of bankruptcy in 2012, reportedly paying $150 million for the property. More than $100 million in loans to help finance the project came from Deutsche Bank. The property itself - as noted by Hayes -  has also been plagued with "flying vermin"  and had some not too good inspection reports of its facilities.

Given the conditions and  debt status at Doral,  having hundreds of  personnel from G7 advance teams first arrive to check it out and then return in June with their full delegations,  would merely provide a rescue for Trump to dig his sorry ass out of a financial hole. Problem is that G7 bunch would land in the midst of Miami's worst mosquito season - as noted by Hayes' guest Natasha Bertrand.  So, Trump isn't doing any "good" other for himself.  And as Ms. Bertrand also agreed,  any number of other places would be far superior alternatives.

Trump then carried on in his loopy rant tweet:

"I announced I would be willing to do it at no profit, or if legally possible at ZERO COST to the USA. But, as usual, the Hostile Media & Democrat partners went CRAZY!”

Ok, let's back up again to shovel more horse shit before moving on.  As Bertrand also reminded viewers there is no way profits would not accrue from the choice of the Trump dump. Especially as the arriving dignitaries would need several helipads - likely provided on the golf course. After the conference the helipads would then need to be removed and the golf course restored - all at cost to U.S. taxpayers.   Far from "going crazy" too many realized the fell, unconstitutional nature of Dotard's proposal and took him to task for it. Democrats (and many newspaper editors, e.g. The Denver Post)  immediately portrayed the plan as a blatant act of self-dealing corruption, and ethics lawyers said payments from the visiting delegations could violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which forbids the president from accepting gifts and funding from foreign governments.

Democrats in the House and Senate - to their credit- quickly introduced legislation intended to block the use of the Doral, a bill they called “Trump’s Heist Undermines the G7,” or the THUG  Act. The measure would have blocked the use of federal funds for the Group of 7 if the event were held at the Doral.

 The one who is crazy then, is Trump - for not grasping that is how his wacky nonsense would be received.

The fact this deranged  asswipe and certifiable moron could even be serious enough to write this claptrap shows he belongs in a straitjacket.  Do the country a favor? By letting foreign nationals stay at his flea and bed bug, mosquito -ridden dump that passes as a "resort"?  And then making the dignitaries pay for the privilege - to line his own pockets, of course.  (But one wonders if he'd pay their medical bills if they contracted dengue fever from a mosquito bite)

Trump added: “Therefore, based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020.”

In the wake of what we've seen the past week, let us accept as a proposition that things will only get worse in the next year - especially with impeachment hanging over Trump's head.   As NY Times political columnist Peter Wehner put it on 'Last Word' Friday night:

"Republicans to whom I've spoken have known from the start that this is a person who's really problematic, psychologically unwell. At the beginning it was wishful thinking that they could contain or control him... What's happening now is Trump's pathologies are getting worse  and the guardrails are disappearing. So what we're seeing now is the worst of Trump, but it's going to get worse going forward."

The problem is that if his Senate cult followers then fail to remove him, he will become vastly more emboldened and make even more atrocious decisions- say than the Kurd betrayal, the Ukraine shake down call to dig dirt on political opponents, and the Doral G-7 self dealing .  As WaPo columnist Ruth Marcus said on 'Last Word' Friday night, when asked if the "dam" would finally break in the wake of the week's events:

"No. The Republican lawmakers will just stick with Trump. They have a 'me first' approach and fear Trump's base and being primaried. Until Republican voters turn against Trump it is very very dangerous - no matter what they privately think, say about Trump giving himself this big contract, or Trump in Syria. So they're not going to break with him in public."

This fear is also what led HBO ('Real Time') comedian Bill Maher to warn at the end of September of the potential political ramifications of pursuing Trump's impeachment, but failing to remove him. As he observed:

"If we do this, the country is going to be paralyzed.  I'm not saying don't. ... It's going to be paralyzed for a very long time, and all of the oxygen in the room will be taken by this," 

But then voicing the much more ominous danger of the GOP -dominated Senate failing to do its constitutional duty to remove the thug (which requires a two-thirds majority, or 67 votes.)  So what other alternative is there, short of invoking the 25th amendment (even more improbable), or Trump losing the election next year.? (Still not a slam dunk by any means.)  And we know how the Trump cabal will stoke the "fear the socialists" meme.

By Friday night, Maher had conceived of potentially the only real solution to eliminate the orange fungal parasite and blight on the Republic.    He offered to pay  $1 million for the orange mold to leave the office. (Which in truth he ought to seriously consider after Admiral William H. McRaven torched the traitor in a NY Times op ed and accused him of being a "threat to the Republic".)

Maher, a long-standing Dotard critic who actually got a Trump-filed  lawsuit tossed out (after he vowed he could prove Trump was the spawn of an Orangutan) said:

"Just take my check for $1 million. I bet I could get another 1,000 people just from here to the beach — including Malibu, of course — who would pay that much to see you resign," 

Bill  concluded, "Mr. President, it is really very simple. You love money. We hate you."

At first blush I agree with Maher this plan could work - knowing Trump's mendacious nature. But is $1 million enough to get Trump to move his fat ass out of the Oval Office for good?  I doubt it. I suspect it would take at least $100 million - and I doubt all the actors' contributions in Hollywood would make that threshold.   Besides, most would- be contributors would justifiably worry that this slimeball would renege. After all, look how he stabbed the Kurds in the back barely a week ago.  He'd probably do the same for this effort then holler at one of his rallies: "Ya see what I did to them dumb liberals and Dems! I stiffed 'em good!"

So we are stuck with hoping, as Marcus went on to say, that the polls favoring Trump's impeachment and removal hit at least 52-55 % of Republican voters to force the Repuke Senators to have their 'come to Jesus' moment and ditch the Dotard.

Either  that, or find a candidate who can beat him next year in the general.

See also:

Robert Weissman

Donald Trump

The Antidote to Trump's Corrupt G7 Deal? Impeachment and Conviction

President's Day? Nothing To Celebrate Given The Nation Is One SC Decision From History's Scrap Heap - Thanks To Dictator Dotard.

"All the accounts together show that Trump is engaged in a serial murder of the Constitution and rule of law. He fires anyone investigating him who wants to seek the truth,  whether it's McCabe or whether it's Comey or even Jeffrey Sessions. He puts in place constitutional jokes like Matthew Whitaker.  He tries to discredit and destroy investigations.  He dangles pardons at people who could help him out in any trials. He declares national emergencies without warrant. He discredits judges. All together  this is someone who is unfit to discharge his duties as our chief executive officer."-   Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal  on MSNBC  'All In'


Even as we learned over the weekend that European leaders (at a global security conference in Munich) now regard Donald Trump as a bigger security threat than Putin, we've beheld the spectacle of more than a half dozen lawsuits being mounted in the U.S. against this renegade orange ape who dares call himself a human and president. Not in my book.  He's a traitor, swine and scumball and no more merits the presidency than being a dogcatcher.

So this President's Day is not a day to celebrate, but  to possibly prepare to mourn the downfall of the latest historical experiment in democratic governance. I refer, of course, to the specious declaration of a "national emergency" on Friday, with Trump even openly admitting he "didn't need to do this".  He just wanted his mythical wall done faster,  for a mythical crisis he fabricated.

Earlier I, like many, held out hope that  the National Emergencies Act of 1976 would have  allowed  the Dem House to short circuit the move.  Basically, nip it in the bud. Thus,an initial House vote to block Trump's folly and overreach would  automatically trigger a Senate  vote and there wouldn't be a damned thing Mitch McConnell  could  do to impede it.

But alas, we've since learned this presumptive check-and-balance mechanism was severely eroded by a 1983 Supreme Court ruling. It held that to have legal effect, such a congressional resolution must be presented to the president for signature or veto.  That would mean a 2/3 Senate majority (67 votes) would be needed to override it, not likely to happen with so many butt -licking Repubs still in Trump's orbit.  (Like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who now plans to take over Devin Nunes' role,  running interference for Trump while Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, i.e. against the Mueller probe and the FBI, e.g.a sneak peek:


Trump first, country second, even if it means the country going into the crapper. Think I'm exaggerating? Think again!  As legal expert Robert Weissman has pointed out:

"If this invocation of emergency on false pretenses is tolerated, it could justify almost limitless abuses of presidential and military power, including far-reaching clampdowns on civil rights ."

Adding:

"If the president can merely cry "emergency" to override national law and contravene explicit congressional action—particularly when the claimed emergency is transparently fraudulent—then it is hard to know what limits exist on presidential power. What's to stop the president from declaring an emergency and limiting the right to protest? To round up people of color en masse to combat purported gang activity? To deploy the military on the streets to maintain order? To censor social media and Internet conversations?"

Elizabeth Goltein, a specialist from the Brennan Center for Justice,  e.g

is also not sanguine about the Supremes putting a halt to this blatant destruction of constitutional checks and balances. As she writes in a recent post on (smirkingchimp blog -see link at the end):

"It might seem that the courts would put a quick stop to the president’s antics. But the National Emergencies Act, passed by Congress in 1976, will not make things easy for anyone preparing litigation to stop Trump. The law gives the president complete discretion to declare a national emergency; there is no definition of emergency and no criteria that must be met. As a result, most judges would tend to defer to the president’s determination that an emergency does exist, however much of a stretch it might seem.

That doesn’t mean the president has carte blanche to violate the Constitution under the guise of false emergencies. With sufficient evidence that Trump is acting in bad faith — that he is abusing the discretion Congress granted him for the purpose of subverting constitutional constraints, including the prohibition on spending funds that Congress has not appropriated — a judge could still find that the emergency declaration is invalid....'

But the kicker follows:

"Still, the Supreme Court has already shown its willingness to defer to Trump on claims of national security. When he invoked broad immigration powers to ban travel from majority-Muslim countries after revising the ban twice to deal with objections from lower courts, five Supreme Court justices were willing to credit paper-thin national security justifications and ignore obvious signs of an unconstitutional motive. There is a risk that the Supreme Court or other courts could take a similar approach here — and that they could choose to read the emergency powers themselves quite broadly.

And even if the current emergency is struck down by the courts, it could be a short-lived victory. The next time Trump concocts an emergency, he might be less vocal about his intent to circumvent Congress, and the laws he invokes might be a better fit for his goals. Some of these emergency laws confer extraordinary powers that are ripe for abuse, including laws that allow the president to take over ."

My take then is that if it comes to that fateful SC decision, and Justice Roberts doesn't stand with the court's liberals to oppose this perfidy, we are all for the high jump. Kiss this nation's democratic and constitutional future goodbye because, in effect, Adolf Dotard Drumpf could then even resort to a "national emergency" to halt or indefinitely postpone the next  general election.   One thing we've learned during Trump's vile occupation, never ever underestimate the degree of his reprehensible rat-like nature. 

 What about mass citizen protests across the land? Well, they might work but maybe not because so many citizens' brains, minds have already been sucked into Trumpism, at least to the point they are so weak on the outrage monitor they give it an effective pass.

This is one of the most egregious problems afflicting our nation currently or what NY Times Michelle Goldberg has called the "catastrophic awfulness" of his presidency. In a nutshell, it is that too many are becoming inured to it or desensitized. Indeed, some who were once sane and normal are extolling Trump as some latter day "savior" somehow rescuing our Republic. Others are reading this twaddle and letting it colonize their brains like one of the worst memes or mind viruses.  

 Of course, pro- Trump propaganda and outright balderdash often lies at the core of the subversion process.  For example, a recent National Review piece by one Victor Davis Hanson tops the cake in terms of sheer odious glorification of the mad swine fouling the White House.  This Trump butt kisser actually compared Trump to Shane in the movie by the same name. In fact, if one watched the movie, Shane (Alan Ladd's character)  had principles, self-respect, self-awareness,  intelligence and a moral compass - all attributes that Donnie Dotard lacks - in spades.  

In the film - part of which was shot on location in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming -   where we visited the cabin used on the set (while on our Yellowstone trip in 2000), e.g.

We see Shane protecting his homestead and hearth from all nefarious comers. In his piece, Hanson takes this as a cue to compare Trump to Shane, e.g.

"Daily, Trump tweets retorts to his myriads of attackers. No one is too big or small to win exemption.  All that mattered is if anyone drew first on Trump he would empty his six shooter back in a way quite disturbing even to those who invited him in...Trump could no more stop tweeting and ridiculing than Shane could put down his guns".

Truly, a gross and distorted analogy.  So it's well to  recall Shane protected and defended the vulnerable and dispossessed, including women and kids from the bad guys. He did NOT cage infants and have border troops fire tear gas at fleeing mothers with infants! He was never the bad guy himself wreaking havoc on one and all.   But this is what the nation has now come to: idiots like Hanson, Lance Morrow and others now making every excuse for Trump and comparing him to heroic figures, e.g.

But Trump is no heroic figure or even a decent human being, as Mick Mulvaney even admitted back in 2016 when the pestilence first seriously mounted a campaign,

Mulvaney calls Trump 'terrible' in 2016 video - CNN Video - CNN.com

https://www.cnn.com/.../mick-mulvaney-called-trump-terrible-video-daily-beast-newday...

Trump is an ongoing, uncontained national dumpster fire,  burning and disrupting every civilized norm, and spreading rot and disintegration to the Constitution itself. This is no longer a game - if it ever was- and has now mutated into an existential fight for the country's future.   As Ben Franklin once put it when asked by a woman if the United States was a monarchy or a Republic:

"A Republic...if you can keep it!"   

Well, we are now one Supreme Court decision away from abandoning the Constitution and any meaningful rule of law. 

 See also: 

Donald Trump

Presidents’ Day Can Kiss My Ass

by William Rivers Pitt | February 19, 2019 - 7:41am | permalink

— from Truthout

And:

Donald Trump

Trump’s Dictator Move Is the Real Emergency — and We Handed Him the Keys

by Will Bunch | February 19, 2019 - 8:10am | permalink

Excerpt:

"So this is how liberty dies — with a rambling, incoherent monologue. President Trump’s bizarre — and, to be brutally honest, frightening — Friday morning appearance in the Rose Garden of the White House to announce that he’s invoking extreme presidential powers to declare a “national emergency” and build border wall that Congress refused to authorize was, in many ways, that moment that Trump’s harshest critics warned about after his shock election as our 45th president.

And yet it was striking that when Trump’s dictator move finally came, there was a lot more banality than evil."

And:

Donald Trump | Law

The Courts Will Likely Let Trump Declare an ‘Emergency,’ Even If It’s Made Up

by Elizabeth Goitein | February 17, 2019 - 7:20am | 

And:

Michael Winship

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Donald Trump

Trump Is Our One-Man National Emergency

by Michael Winship | February 18, 2019 - 7:36am | permalink