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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Trump: Pardon Me
Decorum has never featured highly among Donald Trump’s characteristics. If you view life rather like a computer game where the High Scores are measured in dollars and ratings, and any casulaties along the way can be dismissed as casually as a pixellated image, norms of behaviour are of little consequence. And decorum is certainly not what to expect should Trump lose in November.
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Picking up on something from the last thread, it's my cursory analysis that voting intention figures lag. It wasn't for a month after Black Wednesday that the real fallout began to show in voting intention opinion polls. Even then, it took six months for the full impact to reveal.
As I mentioned at the time of the Cummings saga, I expect Labour to take the lead in at least one national opinion poll within 3 months i.e. end of August. Since the tories were leading by at least 20% prior to this omnishambles, that's seismic.
PS It's a very old-media move by Trump trying to obstruct prosecution of his crimes on a Friday night, it doesn't work so well when everybody's stuck at home squinting at the internet.
I don't see why Trump *wouldn't* pardon himself in the lame-duck period, assuming he can do it in the preemptive way David Herdson suggests. What's he got to lose?
Of course, this only helps with federal crimes, they can still get him in state courts.
You're both applying your own moral code to a man that has none. He will never admit he has done anything that requires pardoning.
Bet away but Shadsy will be the one having the last laugh on this one I fear.
I have wondered of late whether he actually wants to win in November but the signs are that he does, even if he has his own peculiar way of showing it. I suspect he will have to win without much help from his old mate Putin this time. Russia is reporting 8,000 new C-19 cases a day. Vlad has his own problems.
Btw, Kamala Harris's price in the VP stakes seems to have settled around 10/11. The cause of the betting rush seems to have been a tweet to the effect that Biden has it down to two, Harris and Demmings. If that is so, Demmings should be shorter than 5/1.
I have no idea whether there is any substance in the story. I would guess that if there is, both Candidates would be shorter than they are.
In Trump's case, I'd have thought civil suits and extradition applications for breaches of other countries' laws would tie him, and his finances, up for the rest of his life as well.
Catherine Belton's recent book "Putin's People" for example, indicates hair-raising complicity by Trump in financial rackets in Russia. And though we might not expect any action from Putin, those allegations inevitably involve abuses of financial rules in the major European economies - and in the archipelago of British-ruled tax havens whose governments could easily turn against ex-President Trump given the right pressure from the US, EU or UK.
Because one of the few certainties of the next five months is that Trump will piss off the Brits and the EU even more than he'll piss off the incoming Democrat administration.
This is a man who has utterly corrupted the Justice Department, and is happy to tell the most outrageous and transparent lies. He doesn’t give a damn about public opinion as long as he has sufficient acolytes around him.
Justifying pardoning himself would be a piece of cake.
https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1274160817345302528
And I don't think pride would stop him pardoning himself. First he hasn't any (see all his tweets ever) and secondly if he gets into the prison system he is in very grave danger, like Epstein was.
Boris Johnson has delayed the formation of parliament’s intelligence watchdog after removing a provisional member for disloyalty.
The government has been questioned over why the intelligence and security select committee has yet to be reconvened more than six months after the election. Other select committees that scrutinise departments have been working for months.
Its formation has been delayed after Theresa Villiers, the former environment secretary, was barred from joining after defying the Tory whip in a vote on food standards.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/theresa-villiers-axed-from-intelligence-committee-for-disloyalty-3gws00lt7
The one reservation I have is:
Can a president actually pardon himself?
I remember a lot of debates about this, but I can’t remember what conclusion was drawn.
Barr attempts to fire person. Person says fuck you to Barr.
Possibly Trump could fire him but that would open up Trump to liability.
I was struck by just how closely Johnson and his gang are following the script. Some posters on here see Cummings as a cunning bastard. I see him as somebody who is just blindly carrying out its suggestions.
The law seems clear (28 USC 546(d) ) that the temporary appointment stays in post until a replacement is confirmed. So it will require the connivance of the Senate first.
I’m sure this is completely unconnected:
Barr echoes Trump's concerns about mail-in voting, says it could 'open the floodgates of potential fraud'
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/503679-barr-echoes-trumps-concerns-about-mail-in-voting-says-it-could-open
So the question is - why did he try it? Was he ordered to, or did he genuinely think Berman would just accept it?
Isn't it less than that? Nov 3rd is about four and ahalf months away.
He's got long enough to cause an uptick in Covid-19 in Tulsa.
BLM is about more than being shot or choked by the local coppers. It is about getting rid of the existing Jim Crow attitudes in large swathes of the US
I think there's a lot of wishful thinking about the likelihood of Trump losing, though, just as there was four years ago. Predicting Amercan elections before the public starts focusing on them durnig or after the conventions is a mug's game, especially now with the uncertainty caused by Chinese flu.
It’s pretty likely he was acting at his client’s behest - he is, after all Trump’s lawyer rather than an Attorney General as normally understood. He quite effectively dealt with the Mueller investigation by grossly mischaracterising the report before it was published; the power of official bluster is considerable.
So perhaps he thought there was a chance it could work.
It does, after all, take quite some guts to stand up to the full power of a corrupt administration, particularly if you’re not an ideologically committed opponent. It could easily have gone the other way.
https://us.cnn.com/2020/06/19/politics/van-jones-trump-voters/index.html
Trump is so comprehensively trashing their brand, at some point you would think some of them might try and put some distance between them, but no...
Berman is being invited to testify.
There is the US Senate Primary for both GOP and Dem and there is a slate of Kentucky statewide races including judicial appointments to be voted on.
There’s also the point that making people realise now how hard it is going to be to vote, will tend to act as vote suppression in November. Hence the current effort to limit postal voting.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/19/trump-interview-mail-voting-329307
... Trump is keenly aware of how he stacks up against other Republicans on the ballot this fall. At one point during the interview, White House Political Director Brian Jack handed the president a document showing how he had fared better in several primaries this spring than a handful of Republican senators he shared the ballot with in their home states. Included on the chart was North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents up for reelection this November. While Tillis received 78 percent in the state's March primary, Trump got 94 percent, it noted.
"Wow, that’s great in North Carolina, huh?" Trump remarked as he looked over the sheet....
https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/1274190483804184583?s=21
When Trump is fully investigated without the protection of Barr, all sorts of stuff is going to come out.
The earliest Republicans to distance themselves will have an advantage
Dr David Rosser, who heads the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB), said there were signs that infected patients “don’t seem as sick, on average, as they were”. "
(Telegraph)
Three years ago 25% of Americans supported BLM, now it is 52%.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/503671-susan-rice-calls-trump-administration-racist-to-its-core-says-senate
Still in running for Veep.
So if you’re like me the first thing you think of when hearing that term is the motion picture, The Deer Hunter. We’ve all seen it. It’s a modern classic. It was on again last week and I watched it, this time with a focus not on the plot and the dialogue – which I know backwards – but on what it tells us about this year’s presidential election.
It’s set in Pennsylvania where Trump is defending a margin of 0.72%. Polls have him losing it but we don’t need polls when we can listen to real flesh & blood residents of the state and we have a solid sample of them here. We have Michael (Robert de Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), Stevie (John Savage), Fredo (John Cazale), and of course Linda (Meryl Streep). Blue collar. Steel. Backbone of America. Woke? Give me a break.
In 2016 they voted as follows. Linda for Clinton (swayed by pussygate). Fredo for Trump (also influenced by pussygate – at last a politician he could relate to). Walken and Stevie for Trump (jobs mainly plus time for something different). De Niro, as one would expect, saw through the Donald, could see he was a phony, but felt Hillary Clinton had nothing to say to people like him. So despite being interested in politics, he didn’t vote. He went hunting in the mountains (for deer) instead.
So what do they plan to do in 2020? Have they made their minds up yet? Turns out they have and the results are striking.
Linda and Fredo are unchanged and further entrenched. She hates Trump with a passion, he is looking forward to the rallies and breaking out his cap again. Since his accident at the plant which left him in a wheelchair Stevie has become a rather serious-minded person. In particular he no longer finds Donald Trump remotely funny. He’s had his fill of him and will be voting Dem. As will Walken, who is bitterly disappointed by Trump’s response to the coronavirus. “Shit, the guy can’t tell his ass from his windpipe,” as he put it. De Niro smirks and nods at that. But Biden looks like a crock of shit to him so once more, his interest in politics notwithstanding, he won’t be voting. Plans to spend polling day as he did in 2016 – up in the mountains shooting deer.
Scores on the doors. In 2016 this group delivered 3 votes for Trump and 1 for Clinton. In 2020 it’s the exact opposite, 3 for Biden and only 1 for Trump. Just Fredo with his MAGA gear and conspiracy theories about “lizards” and “globalists” and all the rest of it. The basest of the base.
Conclusion? Too obvious to bother spelling out beyond “landslide”.
Nap of the day. You can back Biden to take Penn at 1.65. There are worse bets.
Surely that should read "Nobody dared to mention that Dominic Cummings could have had something to do with it". Spineless lackeys...
"I'm only a Cabinet Minister!"
(The Thick of It.)
The Applebaum article remains by far and away the best commentary:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/
Reading her conclusion, I can only reflect that decency is in short supply in the Republican corridors of power...
... In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.
It's quite possibly the worst regulatory response to a claim of mega fraud I've seen, @Cyclefree may have seen worse though.
Genuinely shocked at how BaFin closed ranks and protected it's own instead of getting to the bottom of fraud allegations that are now going to sink the company and has damaged the German financial sector and their reputation.
Frankfurt, definitely not going to be where investors go with their billions on this evidence.
https://twitter.com/haveigotnews/status/1273932484963680257
Back on topic. The voter suppression device in Kentucky could be a handy dry run for November in Red marginal states.
Subsequent attempts seem tired by comparison.
Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation.
Or something like that.
I haven't actually seen the Deer Hunter, but am thinking that November might conceivably be more like another Pennsylvania-based movie - Groundhog Day.
Telling people to stay at home to 'protect the NHS' was the wrong strategy.
Using "moral code", "intellectual" and "consistency" in a sentence referring to Donald Trump.
naaaaaahhhhhhhhhh.
Sounds terrible...
Because of the end of slavery, the 3/5ths rule was rescinded. So the electoral power of the Southern states was increased.
As she left she thought that she would hear no more.
However, two days later she received a reply from Cummings which she was pleased and surprised with. A little while later Boris introduced the bubble.
Maybe Cummings is not all bad, but Boris should not have allowed him to stay in post and he has taken a huge hit for his bad judgement
Chuck Aspegren as Peter "Axel" Axelrod. Aspegren was not an actor; he was the foreman at an East Chicago steelworks visited early in pre-production by De Niro and Cimino. They were so impressed with him that they offered him the role. He was the second person to be cast in the film, after De Niro.
That being said, the poll strongly suggest that a chunk of his core vote has gone.
At least for the purposes of answering polls.
The worry now is that we are seeing "Shy Trump" voting intentions.
It was a genuine story narrated by the single mother herself and did show how Cummings has influence over Boris
She makes the case for reform of the HoL all on her own.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/19/rolls-royce-civil-service-has-found/
Rather than casting the net widely at the outset, recruiting across industry and universities, deigning to copy other countries, filling in quickly for our lack of institutional experience, the system promotes its own and sticks to processology.
But in reality anything above 45% was, is and always will be froth.