Trump News

Former President Donald Trump has set off alarm bells among experts for anti-democratic proposals, including ideas to transform the entire civil service into a partisan army, strip independence from federal agencies, and use the Justice Department to go after political enemies.

But to hear it from Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley, President Joe Biden is has made the exact same threat to democracy — because of various executive orders he's made and because Trump has been charged with crimes while Biden happened to be in office.

The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg on Monday described “a level of absurdity” in the 2024 presidential race as Republicans turn a blind eye to Donald Trump's promise to rule as dictator “for one day” should he win reelection.

The Atlantic’s January/February 2024 issue focuses on how a second Trump term “could shatter norms with the courts, education, the military, foreign policy, immigration, abortion rights, science, gender.” In the issue, The Atlantic editors warn “the next Trump presidency will be worse.”

Discussing the January/February issue with CNN’s Dana Bash, Goldberg jokingly noted the editors took the time to “put out a special issue, and then he goes and says it.”

“We put a lot of work in there to try to prove that he has dictatorial tendencies and then he just goes ahead and says it,” Goldberg said. “It's kind of his superpower in a way. Unlike other politicians who, when they say something outrageous, they walk it back, he goes further.”

"This is part of a pattern,” Goldberg continued. “He neutralizes the serious criticism by embracing it and he overturns the traditional rules of political physics.”

“He's embracing this idea that he's going to be a dictator, and I think that American citizens who take politicians and politics seriously ought to consider the fact that the putative nominee of one of the two major parties is promising to rule as a dictator,” Goldberg added. “I know he says, ‘for one day,’ I don't even know what that means … We are at a level of absurdity here, and he's telling us what he's going to do.”

Bash then played a clip of Republicans dismissing Trump’s promise to rule as a dictator, with reactions ranging from "it’s entertainment” to “Trump uses unique expressions when he explains things.”

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“Two quick points about the reaction that you played there from members of Congress,” Goldberg said. “The first is that you and I both know plenty of Republicans in Congress, and we know how they actually feel about Donald Trump. They are scared of Donald Trump. They are repulsed by him, they don't like antidemocratic language, most of them at least, but they are frightened for their jobs.”

Goldberg then offered a “second point” which described “a double standard” in how Republicans approach Trump’s language compared with how they interpret language from other political parties.

“Believe people when they tell you what they want to do,” Goldberg said.

“We already have January 6th as evidence that Donald Trump does not want to conform to the norms of democratic behavior,” Goldberg said. “And so, I find their dismissal disconcerting.”

Former President Donald Trump is running a "scam PAC" and misdirecting his supporters about where the money they are contributing to him is actually going, a former GOP operative alleged Monday.

Tim Miller, a former Republican insider turned Never Trumper, who weighed in on the situation on MSNBC as Trump continues to funnel more and more money into his civil and criminal court cases.

Legal experts are applauding special counsel Jack Smith’s move to “leapfrog” a Trump effort to delay his D.C. case by claiming he has immunity from prosecution and appealing the decisions by asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on that major question.

Trump is claiming he cannot be prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election because he was president at the time, and is also claiming he cannot be prosecuted because he was impeached by the House but not convicted by the Senate.

A criminal defense attorney who opposes Donald Trump's prosecutions said that he expects special counsel Jack Smith to prevail in his plea for the Supreme Court to allow the case to move forward.

Hours after Smith took his case to the Supreme Court, attorney Ken Belkin explained why the special counsel would likely prevail. Trump has appealed the case, claiming he is immune from prosecution for election interference because he was president at the time of the alleged crime.

Juggling multiple trials in four jurisdictions, Donald Trump and his affiliated PAC are shelling out millions of dollars in legal fees with no end in sight, reports ABC News.

With a racketeering trial ramping up in Georgia, federal cases in both Florida and Washington, D.C., plus a financial fraud civil suit, the E. Jean Carroll defamation case and the hush money trial taking place in Manhattan, the report states that the embattled former president has had to pay legal fees into the tens of millions.

Special counsel Jack Smith filed motions aimed at keeping Donald Trump's criminal trial on schedule to start in March 2024.

The special counsel's office filed the motions Monday with the U.S. Supreme Court and a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court seeking to fast-track a hearing of Trump's appeal of a ruling against his claim that he has presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, reported The Messenger.

House Speaker Mike Johnson's support for an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden by the GOP majority House of Representatives has drawn renewed scrutiny into how he felt about Donald Trump's two impeachments and his remarkable change of heart about the "damage" — his words — it would inflict on the country.

The Louisiana Republican, who rose from obscurity to become the top Republican in the House after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was dethroned by a far-right faction in his own caucus, was initially skeptical about a Biden impeachment back in November, reportedly agreeing with some colleagues "that Biden's poll numbers are already weak, so there's less of a need politically to impeach him."

The two top officials heading up Donald Trump's third campaign for the presidency are being placed in the unenviable position of having to issue statements clarifying his planned policies because he can't stop talking about being a "dictator," according to a columnist Monday.

What started as comments by some of the ex-president's former aides about plans to use the power of the presidency to go after his perceived enemies in Congress and in the press has taken on a life of its own, wrote Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton.