I wrote weeks ago that House managers would have to be prepared to establish links between Trump's team and the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters or else lines of argument like these by Trump would go unresponded to
Mind you, his argument fails for other reasons too
(PS) People have to remember that it's not just the *facts* included in a defense, but what picture you are painting with that defense. What Trump is implying here is that the insurrection would have happened even if he had never spoken. That's outrageously false and he knows it.
(PS2) Unfortunately, many don't understand what a complete defense looks or sounds like because they've never watched a trial start to finish. So some will think that evidence certain Trump supporters wanted to breach the Capitol before Trump spoke is an actual defense. It's not.
(PS3) And it's *especially* not a defense—let alone a complete defense—when Trump's political and legal teams were in contact pre-January 6 with the *very people* that Trump is now saying had plans to breach the Capitol that had nothing to do with him or anything he said.
(PS4) And I say all this putting *aside* for the moment the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who breached the Capitol *did* hear Trump speak and did hear/see his pre-January 6 statements urging people to come to Washington.
Heck, many arrestees *told the feds* that.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Imagine being a 42 year-old pleading with a known pedophilic sex criminal to fly you to his island so you can party with girls he assures you will be 25 or younger.
Then imagine lying about it to hundreds of millions. Even after your lies are caught.
You don't hate Elon enough.
Instead of saying—as honor demands—"I made horrible mistakes for which there's no excuse, I'll take time away from public life to reflect on them," he's kept lying, attacked media, tried to distract, and obscenely said he worked harder than Epstein's victims to get the Files out.
Now imagine that this happens during the same 12-month period this man gleefully—without having any idea what he was doing, or even *caring* if he had any idea—cut a massive foreign aid program whose erasure is projected to cause *more than 10 million deaths* in the years ahead.
This major report on the Greg Bovino-to-Tom Homan handover in Minneapolis at once reveals that the Trump regime hasn’t changed its plans for ICE *and* serves as a primer on the many aspects of the criminal justice system Homan lied about today.
It can't be sufficiently emphasized that the Trump regime has at all points lied about every aspect of its immigration agenda, every aspect of how immigration enforcement works and every aspect of the justice system that touches upon immigration enforcement.
It's all a long con.
No one is saying that every American must understand the justice system.
That would be ideal, but it's impractical.
The problem is that our justice system lies at the center of our politics—which means ignorance about how it works is ripe for abuse by an authoritarian regime.
I shouldn't even have to say this, but precisely *no one* in the independent journalism sphere is saying that Trump can *legally* cancel the midterms.
So corporate media should put on its thinking cap and ask themselves what independent journalists *are* saying.
Yes.... *that*.
It's Month 1 of a 10-month plan and they're already illegally invading countries, illegally occupying U.S. cities, posting Nazi memes from government accounts almost daily, and publicly saying there should be no elections anymore. You think their plan is to do *anything* legally?
So I've no idea why corporate media keeps sanctimoniously reminding us of something we already know—that Trump can't *legally* cancel elections. Because that's not where the debate or mystery is now. The question is whether he thinks he can wait until 2028 to declare martial law.
The question media should be asking: if Minneapolis only needs 600 police officers to perform all general law enforcement activities in the city, why did Trump send 3,000 federal agents to execute a statutorily and constitutionally *much* smaller task?
Answer? He wanted a *war*.
Based on the size of the task and authority ICE actually has—merely executing judicial warrants for already-identified undocumented persons—we'd expect an ICE "surge" in Minneapolis to be about 100 agents.
Trump sent *30 times that*.
Because he wants to declare an insurrection.
So if you're an American paying only small attention to Minneapolis and wondering why things are crazy there, imagine *your* town being the target of an *unprecedented* federal op.
Big deal, right?
Now imagine the feds sending *30 times* too many men—most *virtually untrained*.
(🧵) THREAD: There’s no purpose in debating Trump supporters on Venezuela. They lack the background to participate in a coherent conversation. Do they know Trump is backing a socialist despot over a capitalist who won the 2024 election by 34 points? No.
It gets worse from there.
1/ People without principles, like MAGAs, desperately alight on random anecdotes to try to “prove” points—as they don’t know how to *actually* prove a point, make an argument, hold a consistent position, marshal evidence, or maintain logical throughlines across diverse scenarios.
2/ So for instance, they’ll tell you that the justness of what Trump did is “proven” by how some Venezuelans reacted to it. But these are the same folks whose political ideology has long been grounded in denying international law and the sovereignty or interests of other nations.
As detailed in 2020 bestseller Proof of Corruption, Trump used Erik Prince, Rudy Giuliani and a megadonor to launch clandestine negotiations in Venezuela that would've effectuated some version of the deal. America is being lied to every which way.
What the NYT-bestselling Proof Series has shown—across 2,500 pages and over 15,000 reliable major media citations from around the world—is that what we think of as many different scandals is *one* scandal: the Trump-Russia Scandal. Ukraine, Israel, KSA, Venezuela... even Epstein.
The Trump-Russia Scandal, as a research topic, is so vast—it covers so many continents, decades, and scandals in various nations—that we can analogize being a scholar of it to being a scholar of the Cold War or the Gilded Age.
We keep speaking of trees without seeing the forest.