Ron Watkins [CodeMonkeyZ], [10.10.21 21:56]
Always spread truth, no matter the consequence.
https://t.me/CodeMonkeyZ/1905
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Joe Bidenâs Vaccine Mandate Doesnât Exist. Itâs Just A Press Release
Americans are no longer living under representative government. We are living under government by the screen people, of the screen people, for the screen people.
Joy PullmannBy Joy Pullmann
OCTOBER 7, 2021
Yes, weâve heard all about Joe Bidenâs alleged vaccine mandate for private companies employing 100 or more people. It was all over the news even before he announced it on September 9. His announcement has jeopardized the employment of millions of Americans and increased worker shortages in critical domains such as health care.
Thereâs only one problem. Itâs all a mirage. Bidenâs so-called vaccine mandate doesnât exist â at least, not yet. So far, all we have is his press conference and other such made-for-media huff-puffing. No such rule even claiming to be legally binding has been issued yet.
Thatâs why nearly two dozen Republican attorneys general who have publicly voiced their opposition to the clearly unconstitutional and illegal mandate havenât yet filed suit against it, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General confirmed for me. There is no mandate to haul into court. And that may be part of the plan.
According to several sources, so far it appears no such mandate has been sent to the White Houseâs Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs yet for approval. The White House, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Department of Labor havenât released any official guidance for the alleged mandate. There is no executive order. Thereâs nothing but press statements.
Despite what you may have been falsely led to believe by the media fantasy projection machine, press statements have exactly zero legal authority.
âThere is nothing there yet that gives employers any mandate,â Stephanie McFarland, spokeswoman for the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told me Oct. 6. âThe president made an announcement on this asking OSHA to do it, but weâve not yet seen anything come from it yet,â she also said. When the state agency gets any further information, she said, theyâll review it.
To impose the public perception of a mandate, the Biden administration is following an unusual rule-making process it also employed earlier this year, called an emergency temporary standard (ETS). The spring ETS rule took nearly six months to issue. Meanwhile, companies are telling reporters their vaccine mandates will have at the latest December deadlines. (For those who canât calendar, thatâs four months after Bidenâs non-existent mandate was proclaimed. According to OSHA, an ETS takes up to six months to go into effect after the initial mandate is issued in the Federal Register â which, again, for the proclaimed 100-employee mandate hasnât happened yet.)
Lawyers for big business were blunt about their love for this mandate mirage: âEverybody loves this cover,â Minneapolis employment lawyer Kate Bischoff told Bloomberg Law in September. âMany were already looking down the road at doing this, but the fact that they get to blame Biden is like manna from heaven.â
Using the ETS procedure instead of normal federal rule-making processes both allows the Biden administration to push its demands faster and without any public input or requirement of responding to public input, which is normally required of even legally laughable federal rule-making like this one would be. That is part of why ETS rules have been overwhelmingly overturned in courts.
âOSHA has used that legal authority only 10 times in 50 years,â David Rivkin Jr. and Robert Alt wrote in the Wall Street Journal in September. âCourts have decided challenges to six of those standards, nixing five and upholding only one.â
There are many other reasons any federal vaccine mandate would be obviously illegal and unconstitutional, Rivkin and Alt write, including that âThe states have plenary police power to regulate health and safety. Congress has only those limited powers enumerated in the Constitution. That wouldnât include the authority to impose a $155 fine (todayâs equivalent of the $5 at stake in Jacobson) on an individual who declines to be vaccinated, much less to prevent him from earning a livelihood.â
But who needs the Constitution when you have an American people conditioned for compliance with even wildly outlandish things the screen people insist they must think and do?
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Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from Bruce Atkinson making several excellent observations about the nonexistent mandate, including the following:
The mandateâs nonexistence shields the Biden administration from legal challenges that may ultimately restrict the Occupational Safety and Health Administrationâs authority. Yet the mandate is still effective at compelling industries and companies into compliance, as it leaves room for any eventual issuance to target noncompliant entities. This implied cudgel is particularly effective on industries and companies that are dependent on federal spending or the goodwill of federal regulators. The nonexistent mandate also allows so-inclined state and local governments and companies to issue their own mandates, seemingly in lockstep with Washington.
seemingly in lockstep with Washington
seemingly in lockstep with Washington
seemingly in lockstep with Washington
The Biden White House has been well-served by presenting a nonexistent mandate as a done deal.
Now, let me see, what presidential administration does all this remind you of? Why, that of Mr. âPen and Phoneâ himself, Barack Obama.
His also wildly unconstitutional Deferred Action for Child Arrivals was simply a two-page memo, for example, but it is still allowing some 616,000 people to simply ignore major U.S. laws, and could easily be reinstated by courts as litigation continues nearly a decade later. It seems that, given such unchecked gains from openly lawless actions Democrats have turned into standard operating procedure over the years, Joe Biden feels free to reduce that constitutional contempt to simply a phone now.
What this âgovernment by press releaseâ also allows is for Republicans like Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb to complain about Bidenâs tyranny while using zip, nada, zilch of their elected authority to stop it. Holcomb has used the same executive rule-by-decree throughout the lockdown era without effective restraint by a supermajority-Republican state legislature, even telling the press churches were required to deliver Christâs Body and Blood his way while quietly keeping that part out of his executive orders, surely because government dictating religious exercise is obviously unconstitutional and would quickly have generated lawsuits.
All this allows weak Republicans and evil Democrats to shadowbox each other for the cameras while ordinary Americans suffer under their abdicated leadership. By the time Republican attorneys general get around to filing lawsuits over any eventually issued legal documents that fulfill Bidenâs promises, the vast majority of people not wanting government to force them into medical procedures will likely be unemployed, forcibly injected with treatments that have almost no track record, forced from their education paths, provided with fake documents like these citizens are beneath COVID-rule-exempt illegal aliens, and all the rest.
This is how weak Republicans keep letting Democrats go right on gleefully disemboweling our rights just like they have nearly 50 million of the American unborn. Gee, thanks, âpublic servants.â Tell me another one about how you love American liberties and the Bill of Rights. Iâll believe that when I see you sacrificing anything substantial to fight for them.
What Democrats are doing as Republicans stand down yet again is a moral and constitutional abomination. Not even the fig-leaf pose of a pen signing balderdash-filled documents is needed for todayâs Democrats. Whatever they say, you do. You have no rights or say in the matter, no possibility for objecting to even them forcibly injecting things into your own body and the bodies of your children.
These people believe they are royalty, and too many Americans are acting like theyâre these losersâ serfs instead of citizens endowed by God with inalienable rights, including the right to consent â through elected representatives, not never-elected dictatorial bureaucrats â to rules that restrict our rights, everyday lives, and human dignity.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/07/joe-bidens-vaccine-mandate-doesnt-exist-its-just-a-press-release/
I Interviewed Trump For 5 Hours. Hereâs What He Told Me About âStupid Fâerâ McConnell, McCarthyâs Bromance With Luntz, And The Fake News That Bothered Him The Most
In multiple interviews, Former President Donald Trump unloads on the rigged 2020 election, Republicans who screwed him, and why he regrets elevating Anthony Fauci during the pandemic.
Mollie HemingwayBy Mollie Hemingway
OCTOBER 8, 2021
What follows is adapted from three interviews of President Donald Trump for Mollie Hemingwayâs latest book âRigged: How The Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,â out October 12.
âI donât like her ⌠and I donât like me.â
Former President Donald Trump was looking at a photo of the two of us that his assistant had just taken on my phone. It wasnât up to his specifications. Weâd just completed the second of three interviews Iâd have with him for my new book, âRigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.â
As we walked outside one of the buildings at Mar-a-Lago, his palatial home on 20 acres of Palm Beach Island, Florida, he bragged that he had the only property on the island that faced both the ocean and the lake, thus the name. âThatâs what Mar-a-Lago means â ocean to lake,â he translated, more or less.
Given the setting on the beautiful late March date, I asked if I could take a picture of him. Iâd interviewed him a few times in the Oval Office and once already in Florida, but had never taken his picture. He suggested we take one together.
He didnât like the first photo. âI donât like her ⌠and I donât like me,â he said, suggesting we move to a different location out of the sun. His capable aide Margo Martin took another photo and turned it around to show him. âI like me, but I still donât like her,â he said.
Trump dropped everything and decided to teach me how to take a picture. Somehow Iâd reached my 40s without knowing how.
He walked us to an impeccably manicured, grassy area in front of the historic main building, explaining that you should always think about the background of a photo and not just the people in it. A massive flag flying at half-mast, in remembrance of victims of a shooting in Colorado, was behind us. The flag had also been lowered when I was there a month prior, in honor of Palm Beachâs Rush Limbaugh, who had then recently died. Trump had bestowed a Presidential Medal of Freedom on the conservative icon the year prior.
He told me to angle my body, put my hand on my hip, and a few other tricks. âYou can trust me: my wife is a supermodel,â he said, as if I were unaware. Margo showed him the resulting picture.
He looked at it, paused briefly, and said, âWell there you go,â clearly pleased with the result. He was right, it looked much better.
The interview had been all over the place. Trump is a bizarre combination of an open book and difficult to nail down. When my husband listened to tapes of the interviews, he seemed almost shell-shocked at how much Trump hopped around from one topic to the next.
While I like to think Iâm an excellent listener, Iâm not a fan of the interview style that requires badgering a source for a preferred outcome. As in the other interviews I had with him, I was just as curious about what he wanted to focus on as what I needed to find out from him.
At one point, he noticed a large bandage on my forearm, which covered a burn I received while cooking dinner for my children. âDid you have a tattoo put on?â he asked, in the midst of listing off detailed election irregularities in Pennsylvania and Michigan. âMollieâs going into the tattoo stuff? Whoa, thatâs a big step.â
As we sat down in his second-floor office, the former president was watching Fox News, where Iâm a contributor. He asked me what I thought of various Fox personalities. When he got to Bret Baier, who hosts âSpecial Report,â I complimented him.
Trump went on a riff about what a good golfer Bret is. âHeâs a bull. Heâs strong as hell.â Trump had recently played with Bryson DeChambeau, and talked about how he drove the 18th green at his Palm Beach course, which is about a 370-yard carry â even longer than Bret could, he said.
President Joe Biden had held his first press conference earlier that day, more than two months after heâd been inaugurated. Even with obsequious questions from an adoring press corps, heâd struggled to complete answers, getting lost and referring to his notes.
âHe looks fragile up there. Heâs not a long-ball hitter. I can tell you that. He does not hit the long ball,â Trump said. âItâs hard to watch. I mean, to be honest with you, itâs hard to watch. Youâre on pins and needles. âCause you just donât know. When does the blow-up occur? Heâs not the sharpest guy.â
âIt was a little bit different with me,â he noted dryly.
Trump was much less troubled by the disparate treatment from the press than I was, but he noted how deferential theyâd been to Biden a few days prior to our interview when he fell down three times while walking up the stairs to board Air Force One. âHow come it wasnât covered on the evening news?â he asked.
As for the press conference, âTheyâre almost apologizing for asking even an easy question. Itâs incredible. You didnât see that too much with me. The apologies, you know, it was a little bit different with me,â he noted dryly. Later, he would say of the corporate press, âItâs just like theyâre one amorphous monster. Just horrible. Almost uniformly.â
A few weeks after Biden was inaugurated, I told Trump during a phone call that I was going to write a book about the 2020 election. He invited me to come see him.
Thatâs how I ended up in Florida in late February, for our first interview. The moment you land at the Palm Beach International airport, people joke about having made it to the Free State of Florida, but thatâs exactly how it feels compared to D.C.
My friend Karol Markowicz, a writer who escaped Brooklyn for an area near Palm Beach just so her children could attend school during the lockdowns, describes the area as âThe Hamptons, but colorful and risk-taking. Everyone is rich enough that they donât care what anyone else thinks of them.â
âEveryone is rich enough that they donât care what anyone else thinks of them.â
Palm Beach in the winter is just perfect. The town is full of beautiful men and women who seem to have the right balance of work and leisure. With the blissfully temperate climate and the gorgeous â and yes, colorful â homes and lawns, I began to fantasize about what life-changing events would have to occur for me to be able to make the move also.
For our first meeting, we sat in the 60-foot long Mar-a-Lago central room. Built by Post cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and meticulously restored and renovated by Donald Trump, the gold-leafed ceiling towers above ornate furnishings and tapestries. A massive window overlooks the expansive lawn in front of the ocean. On the other side, the open doors lead out to the large patio where members of the private club there have dinner each night.
At a later meeting I was told that President Trump preferred a seat with its back to the ocean side, but this day he was in the seat facing the ocean. Behind him, an open door showed a room with video equipment and a large TV, playing Fox News.
Baier was interviewing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. I would later learn it was the interview in which McConnell told Baier heâd âabsolutelyâ support Trump if he ran again. But Trump was still frustrated with McConnell and how heâd mismanaged the Trump era, calling him a âstupid f-cker.â
Before the meeting, personal aides and staff of the club milled about. Many people let me know that Trump was in a great mood, in that way that clearly showed his mood hadnât been great when they first arrived at Mar-a-Lago weeks prior.
I was curious about how he viewed his legacy, but he wasnât interested in talking about anything more than two years out. For a guy known for his self-obsession, he was remarkably knowledgeable and focused on midterm elections and how to strengthen the Republican Party. He took me through what he thought was important in various races to ensure victory, noting arcane rules about primaries, conventions, and how they would affect his involvement.
We discussed what went well in the 2020 campaign and what didnât, along with his view that heâd done what was necessary to win in a free and fair fight. âIt hurts to lose less than to win and have it taken away,â he said. He reminisced about his triumphant 2020 State of the Union Address, given just as he had defeated Democratsâ first impeachment effort, where he could boast of a roaring economy, a secure border, and peace breaking out globally. âGeorge Washington, with Abraham Lincoln as his running mate, could not have beaten me. I was up so much.â
âIt hurts to lose less than to win and have it taken away.â
He reminded me that his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton had repeatedly said he was âillegitimate,â and that the media hadnât criticized her for a second. Instead they worked with her team for three years to push the lie that heâd stolen the election by colluding with Russia. Democrats â and some Republicans â assisted the operation and gave it credence and legitimacy.
The media partisans won Pulitzers for spreading the lie, but moved on when it came out that it was a Democrat setup. Now they were complaining that heâd questioned the integrity of the next election. Throughout our interviews, heâd note how frustrating it was that he had to simultaneously run the country and survive the establishmentâs onslaughts against him.
He downplayed the importance of Twitter deplatforming him, one of many moves tech oligarchs had made to suppress their political opposition. Again, he was unfazed. âSome people said they didnât enjoy the tweets. Sometimes it got to be a bit much,â he admitted, adding that he didnât even enjoy the last six months of tweeting.
As I left, an aide asked me how the interview went and what the terms of the discussion were â off-the-record or on background, perhaps? It was the only interview we were not speaking with aides present. No terms had been set. She sighed.
As I waited for my Uber to come pick me up at the valet, the club was filling with well-heeled members and guests. A gorgeous Rolls-Royce with suicide doors pulled up. Guests poured out of Bentleys, Lamborghinis, Teslas, and McLarens. Rod Blagojevich stepped inside.
I had come back to Palm Beach in March, still in the midst of my book research. When talking about the 2020 election, Trump liked to talk about fraud, but the truth of what happened was so much worse.
People, including the president, colloquially use the term âfraudâ to refer to any type of election rigging, but technically it only refers to actions that affect the election that are not just illegal but committed knowingly. Itâs almost impossible to find conclusive evidence of election fraud, particularly after ballots are counted. But that didnât mean the election had been conducted without widespread interference.
In early February, political reporter and Nancy Pelosi biographer Molly Ball published a Time magazine article detailing how, as she put it, âa well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of informationâ had rigged the election to secure a Biden victory.
While she was whitewashing what the cabal had done â asserting unconvincingly that it wasnât rigging but âfortifyingâ â she revealed that these powerful elites, funded by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, had been able to embed left-wing activists into election offices to assist Democrats with their get-out-the-vote efforts and the Democratsâ push for mail-in balloting.
âThey spent four years working on rigging the election.â
Despite her best efforts to make it seem less nefarious than it was, it confirmed Republicansâ worst suspicions that things hadnât been free or fair. Likewise, Trump was pleased to be vindicated in his view that, well, a âwell-funded cabal of powerful peopleâ had in fact rigged the election.
âThe only good article Iâve read in Time magazine in a long time â that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that â about how they stole the election,â he said. âThey just couldnât keep it in. You know what I mean? They just couldnât keep it in. They had to let it out a little bit,â he said.
My book explains, among other things, how Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars targeting Democrat counties in ways that significantly drove up Bidenâs margin, enabling his victory. The funds werenât for campaign spending, mind you, but for a targeted private takeover of the government administration of election operations.
âWe got them by surprise the first time,â Trump said, explaining why he was allowed to win in 2016 and not in 2020. âAnd the second time, they spent four years working on rigging the election,â he said. âThey were willing to do anything they could, and it started from the day I took office or before I took office. It started from right after the election with the Russia hoax.â
He knew also that the global pandemic had helped Democrats take over the administration of elections. âWell, they used COVID to rig the election. There was nothing I could do. They were using COVID and the Republicans have bad leadership with guys like Mitch McConnell. And they allowed them to give these hundred million ballots out,â he said, referring to widespread mail-in balloting, with all of its known threats to election security.
Despite his hyperbolic and imprecise rhetoric, and in our meetings it was regularly that, Trump understood the big picture problems with the 2020 election better than many of his critics. He knew that many of the changes that had been forced through states in 2020 were unconstitutional.
âThe constitution of the United States says you cannot change any of your rules, regulations, or anything else, unless you go through the state legislatures,â he said, referring to Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which leaves the power to the state legislature to make the election laws. Pennsylvania had been one of the states that made major changes to election laws, arguably in violation of both the federal and state constitutions.
Trump told me a story about how Sen. Ben Sasse annoyed him right after the 2016 election by being unduly hostile at his initial meeting with the Senate GOP conference. âTerrible senator. This started right at the beginning,â he said, remembering how much time, in his view, the Nebraska senator had spent sniping in the wrong direction. âHeâs actually stupid, âcause you know the problem with the Republicans is they donât stick together. You donât have Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse in the Democrat Party,â he said, while admitting Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., occasionally played a minor version of that role in his party.
âThe problem with the Republicans is they donât stick together.â
A few years later, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz asked Trump to give Sasse another chance. âI say, âKeep him out. Guyâs a loser.â So they said, âNo, no, no. He wants to make peace.ââ Sasse was trying to avoid a primary challenge at the time. âHe was like a little boy. He was so well behaved. He didnât say a word. And they made a case as to why I should let him back into the fold,â Trump said.
Combined with Sasseâs change of behavior to avoid a primary, Trump went on to endorse him. As soon as he won his primary, the old Sasse returned.
âAnd he made stuff up about, he said terrible things. He made stuff up about Christians, about this, about that, about evangelicals. He made it up,â Trump said, although really it was the left-wing publication The Atlantic that had created the story, using some of their anonymous sources and creative writing, to allege Trump had said monstrous things about key constituencies.
Later, the Atlantic would invent a story about Trump disparaging World War I dead, despite it being refuted by dozens of on-the-record sources and contemporaneous government evidence. Sasse, who claims he opposes conspiracy theories, has declined to speak against those The Atlantic has published, and regurgitated their claims in a call to donors that he had leaked to a NeverTrump conduit at the Washington Examiner just as tens of millions of Americans were voting by mail in the tight 2020 presidential election:
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, in a private call with constituents, excoriated President Trump, saying he had mishandled the coronavirus response, âkisses dictatorsâ butts,â âsells out our allies,â spends âlike a drunken sailor,â mistreats women, and trash-talks evangelicals behind their backs. Trump has âflirted with white supremacists,â according to Sasse, and his family âtreated the presidency like a business opportunity.â
It was a classic example of how NeverTrumpers gave aid and comfort to Democrats at crunch time, moves that demoralized Republican voters and suppressed votes for Trump.
âHe was on a phone call to his donors that he essentially leaked to the press. Okay. You know, heâs a sleazebag,â he said. Trump knew Sasse was reverting to his old ways shortly after the Nebraskan won his primary, when he viciously criticized Trump for a plan to draw down troop size in Germany.
âHe is a better baseball pitcher than he is predicting what to do with peopleâs health.â
âI want to bring troops out of Germany. You know, some of them, because weâve got 54,000 troops in Germany costing us billions of dollars. Germany treats us badly on trade and many other things. And so Iâm going to reduce it by 25,000. And I hear Little Ben Sasse is chipping away saying how we shouldnât do it. You know, he wants to stay in Afghanistan, let soldiers stay there and get their faces blown off, and their arms blown off for another 19 years and die,â Trump said.
Then Trump regaled me with detailed stories of how various Nebraska Republicans yelled at him for endorsing Sasse when he was somewhat vulnerable. âI said, uh, no kidding,â explaining that he made other similar mistakes in an effort to avoid having too many primary battles.
âSo I end up supporting a guy whoâs a sleazebag. By the way, you can quote me on all this stuff. A very dishonest guy, because at least go out there and you know, play who you are,â Trump said in our interview. âYouâve got to see him at that meeting. He was like a quiet little boy who just sat there. And they did all the talking on his behalf and you know that he couldnât have been better. He didnât say a bad thing about me for two years.â
I peppered Trump about why he had enabled Anthony Fauci, who relished his role in advocating lockdowns and other authoritarian responses to the COVID pandemic. Trump defended him in part, as did so many others I spoke with in the Trump administration. But Trump conceded Fauci had faults.
âWell, who knew that he knew so little? Anthony Fauci is a good promoterâheâs a great promoter. He is a better baseball pitcher than he is predicting what to do with peopleâs health,â Trump said, needling him about the wild first pitch he threw at a Major League Baseball game during his 2020 publicity tour.
I asked Trump at a later interview whether he ever got suspicious about what was by that point acknowledged to be a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Trump had been excoriated by the press for suggesting COVID-19 had leaked from the lab, disagreeing with the cover story from China and the World Health Organization that it had been initially spread via a nearby wet market. A year later, many in corporate media begrudgingly acknowledged his suggestion was accurate.
Wasnât it interesting how devastating the virusâs impact was globally compared to how it had affected China, I asked. Did he ever wonder if it was intentional?
âNo, I never thought China did it on purpose. I thought it was done out of incompetence and I may be wrong because they were the biggest beneficiaries. I felt it came from the lab from day one. I think it was an accident,â he said, rejecting any grander conspiracy theory.
âI never thought China did it on purpose.â
Trump acknowledged his public health messaging about COVID had not been handled well, but he was clearly proud of what he accomplished in the big picture.
âOne of the things that Iâm disappointed about is that I think we did a great job with COVID,â said Trump. âWith the vaccine, thatâs such a game-changer and nobody else would have done that. And I did something else. I went out and bought hundreds of thousands of doses before we knew that we had a vaccine. That was a big risk.â
âNobodyâs ever treated the FDA the way I did, because this was life and death,â Trump said. âI was really almost bad to them, but I wasnât bad because Iâm trying to save lives.â
âI found them to be not incompetent but unbelievably bureaucratic,â he said, noting that in meetings Food and Drug Administration officials would talk about how many years it would take to get treatments and medications approved.
He wondered if Biden had a âsenior momentâ when he claimed there was no vaccine when he came into office. âHe got shot, meaning jabbed, on December 21st, apparently. Now, do you think he didnât know where he was? That was a little scary,â Trump said.
Trump also expressed concern about Pfizer, the drug company that he said âhas great power, in my opinion, over the FDA.â He worried that Pfizerâs financial concerns were affecting decisions made at the FDA.
I asked him about reports that the vaccine approval had been inappropriately delayed until after the election. He seemed to agree that it may have happened, but wasnât too concerned. âI donât feel badly about that,â he said. âIf they would have done it before election, fake news media would have made it a tiny story, so it wouldnât have had the impact. Because it was after election, the press made it massive.â He figured that was better for everyone.
Fred Barnes once commented about how weird it was to interview Trump, because heâs far more genteel in person than he is in public. Usually politicians kiss babies and are saccharine sweet in public, but revert to their natural state in less public situations. Trump is something different. Heâs the same guy on and off stage, but much kinder in smaller groups.
Heâs profane, yes, and full of insults. But he even goes off the record to praise individuals, as he did with several frequent objects of his scorn. And heâd go off the record to criticize individuals he praised publicly. He dished excellent gossip, which Iâm not at liberty to share. He was even an incisive critic of public officialsâ rhetoric, noting Gov. Mario Cuomoâs overuse of language related to stars and suns.
âI could do without, you know, standing up there for an hour and doing what I do.â
The only time he really ducked answering was when I asked him if heâd had COVID during his first debate, marked by belligerence from everyone on stage: âThatâs a very interesting statement. Iâve had other people say that. That was the area of time, right?â Others around the president also ducked the question. Later he would tell me that Regeneron was a cure, as far as he was concerned. Thatâs the monoclonal antibody treatment he received when he got hit with COVID.
In between my second and third interview, I also ended up getting COVID. Iâve had worse flus, but the duration of recovery was long, particularly as I was trying to write a complicated book under an incredibly short deadline. Even though I was no longer contagious, the famously germaphobic president actually scooted away from me when I told him.
Of course, relative to much of the left these days, Trump doesnât seem to be nearly the germaphobe he was criticized for being just years ago. Of his COVID experience, he dryly remarked, âThat was interesting.â Having just gone through it, I understood.
We discussed Kanye Westâs idiosyncratic run for president in 2020. Democrats, led by Marc Elias, had successfully kept him off the ballot by hook and by crook. In Wisconsin, he was supposedly 14 seconds too late in filing his paperwork. Trump had kind words for West, but said he had âloony tendencies.â
Trump thought billionaire former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg would have a stronger run in the Democratic primary, just based on his spending. But he bombed his first debate, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she wanted to talk about running against a billionaire who speaks disparagingly of women. Not Trump, she said, but Bloomberg.
âOne question, he was taken out. Remember the question? âAnd it wasnât Donald Trump.â How do you respond? Heâs going âHoly sâ! Get me out after the first question.â That was Pocahontas. She took him out. Oh wow. You remember that?â Trump asked.
The night before our May interview, Iâd seen Trump address the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. The next morning, Ted Cruz had given a rousing speech in which he talked frankly about how weird it was that Trump had done so much for the movement. He told a great, self-deprecating story about how he was a young policy advisor on George W. Bushâs first presidential campaign and didnât realize that meant he was just supposed to regurgitate talking points from conservative organizations.
There was a tough issue going on related to a regulation that had been enacted by President Bill Clinton on behalf of abortion groups. The campaign pledged to rescind it if elected, but Bush never touched it, not even in his second term. When Cruz opposed Trump in 2016, it was in part because he didnât trust him to enact pro-life regulations. Yet he succeeded beyond anyoneâs expectations. He said courage was the key ingredient missing from many GOP politicians.
âWhatâs that all about?â Trump asked, adding he was pretty sure McCarthy isnât gay.
Trump was engaged in front of the crowd of pro-life legislators and supporters the night prior. He seemed like he was having fun. I asked him the next day about his late-in-life conversion to politics.
âYou know, itâs very interesting. People think I have a good time. I could do without it. I could do without, you know, standing up there for an hour and doing what I do, but I like getting the word out. I think itâs important to get the word out because the press doesnât put it out,â he said. It was one of several times where he suggested he was engaged in politics because he genuinely cared about the direction of the country.
By our May interview, Trump was still disappointed in McConnell, who he called âa disgrace to the Republican Party. Heâs gutless. He should have fought for us on the rigged election. Can you imagine Schumer saying âWe have to declare Trump the winner to get the country goingâ?â
âThe problem with the Republicans is they donât know who to fight,â Trump said.
I asked him who he thought might make a better leader for Republicans. He discussed a few names off the record, and said, âLeadership is a very funny thing. Oftentimes you donât know whoâs going to be a good leader until theyâre there. Itâs like you throw the baby into the water and they turn out to be an Olympic champion, or maybe it wonât work out so well. Iâve watched people that have such capability, and they turn out to be lousy leaders. You never know.â
Right before our May interview, Fox Newsâ Tucker Carlson had revealed that House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy was close friends with Frank Luntz, an advisor to various left-wing groups, who is regularly, if inexplicably, invited to tell Republican officials what their messaging should be. Whatâs more, they had recently become roommates.
âUh, that Luntz thing is weird, right? Whatâs that all about?â Trump asked, adding he was pretty sure McCarthy isnât gay. âI donât think itâs a romance. I think itâs just, they know each other or something. I canât imagine. I donât think â I mean, if youâre thinking it â but it is weird.â He advised against the living arrangement. âYou know, weâre past the age of roommates. You donât do that.â
At our May meeting, Biden hadnât yet botched the countryâs exit from Afghanistan. Trump said heâd really wanted to get out before he left office, but that it took time to secure the safety of Americans and the proper handling of military equipment. If only heâd known that Biden and his generals wouldnât feel the need to worry about those things at all.
âYou know, I think 19 years is enough,â he said at the time of Afghanistan. He said that âgetting the fâ out of these warsâ was vitally important. At all three interviews, Trump talked about how much he hated soldiers losing life or limb, particularly in nation-building wars.
âI greet those parents when their kids come in, in the coffin at Dover, and youâve never seen anything so sad in your life. People standing there with an easel and a picture of this beautiful boy with a crew cut and heâs all set,â he said, imitating the tight posture of a Marine. âAnd he comes in a coffin, or he goes alive to Walter Reed without arms and legs. And you know, itâs the saddest thing youâve ever seen.â
That may have something to do with why he particularly hated The Atlanticâs story, in which editor Jeff Goldberg claimed without evidence to have anonymous sources saying Trump called war dead âsuckersâ and âlosersâ and âdid not believe it important to honor American war dead.â
While
While the story had no basis in fact and was refuted by dozens of on-the-record sources, it was widely accepted by corporate media and was even mentioned in a presidential debate.
âThat was the one that angered me the most,â he said, visibly pained.
âThat was the one that angered me the most,â he said, visibly pained. If heâd ever said anything like that in front of members of the military, there would have been a fight, he said. âThink of it. Iâm standing there with generals and people in the military. Just from a common-sense standpoint, weâre all smart people,â he said. âIf I said that in front of generals, I would say, despite the fact that Iâm president of the United States, there would be fisticuffs. You understand that?â
After each interview, President Trump invited me to stay for dinner at the club. I had previously declined, but the night of my final interview I was supposed to have dinner with Karol. I wondered if sheâd like to do so at Mar-a-Lago. I was pretty sure she hadnât voted for Trump, but she wasnât deranged about it, unlike some of our other acquaintances. I called her and she eventually made her way over. We ended up being the last people seated.
Trump was having dinner with Cruz. They were the center of attention. When they finished their dinner, Trump stood up to walk the Texas senator out. The diners all applauded. As he made his way to our side of the patio, Trump said to Karol and me, âHow is everything? Amazing?â
But we hadnât even been served water by that point. He motioned to someone to take care of us.
He made some nice comments about Cruz, before bringing up his 2016 convention speech, in which he excoriated Trump. âThe way he got out of that race,â he said, laughing. âHeâs a worse loser than me!â
âThe way he got out of that race,â he said, laughing. âHeâs a worse loser than me!â
Swarmed by diners asking for pictures, he finally made his escape.
Our meal turned out to be great. The lump crab and a pasta dish with an exquisite sauce was extremely well prepared and flavorful. We were both a bit surprised, having read disdainful media reports of similar dining experiences.
Then again, these same reporters suggested that Mar-a-Lago was gauche. It was a reminder of how extremely negative feelings about the former president colored how the media covered him and anything he touched.
When it came time to pay, our waiter told us the president had picked up the tab.
Karol immigrated to the United States from the USSR as a child. And now the former president had bought her dinner.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/08/i-interviewed-trump-for-5-hours-heres-what-he-told-me-about-stupid-f-er-mcconnell-mccarthys-bromance-with-luntz-and-the-fake-news-that-bothered-him-the-most/
Bun for baker
>>14763015, >>14763023, >>14763031, >>14763044, >>14763062, >>14763065, >>14763068, >>14763070 I Interviewed Trump For 5 Hours. Hereâs What He Told Me About âStupid Fâerâ McConnell, McCarthyâs Bromance With Luntz, And The Fake News That Bothered Him The Most
EWillHelpYou, [10.10.21 09:35]
If the US Gov extradites Assange, you lose everything.
That is important to understand.
You wont be able to speak out freely without being arrested.
Exposing the crimes of the government will be effectively criminalized.
That's it.
Game over.
-â
The full extradition appeal hearing is on the 27th of this month, and if you are wise, it will dominate your focus between now and then.
EWillHelpYou, [10.10.21 09:44]
The CIA is working overtime to convince people extraditing Assange is fine.
â
Let me tell you what will happen if he is extradited:
He will be held in a supermax facility where even his own lawyer wont have access to him, in total solitary confinement. He will be tried by secret grand jury out of the public eye, there will be no media coverage and no details made public; with a jury pool selected from the highest per capita population of former intelligence officials in the country. In this secret grand jury, there is no right to evidence from the defense. Only the prosecution will have that right.
It's a huge scam.
Dont drink the CIA koolaid.
Extradition of Assange means you lose your right to free speech altogether.
It means you will never again stand a chance of beating them or exposing them. Period.
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They are after a legal precedent here that is terribly dangerous. They will gain the right to imprison anyone on earth, regardless of country of origin, or citizenship status, simply for publishing their crimes.
It isnt just about punishing the founder of Wikileaks, YOU are their target, and they are at your door.
--
The FBI hired a pedophile and murderer, and gave him immunity in this case, in a failed attempt to frame Assange in the first place.
They have spent billions on this effort altogether. Illegal IMF loans, the illegal spying through Operation Kudo, the UC Global/CIA plot to assassinate him from within the embassy, and now; the endless cycle of appeal meant to slowly torture and break him as they push for their extradition again and again.
â-
Do not let them win.
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Call the EDVA (they oversee the case) at (+1 703-299-3700) and demand they drop the case. Add your voice to the growing weight of people everywhere.
We are the last line of defense for a free world.
EWillHelpYou, [10.10.21 17:51]
[ Photo ]
EWillHelpYou, [10.10.21 19:24]
"Almost all "terror" plots are created by the FBI as part of its business model. What is the business of the FBI? Extracting tax. What does it need to do that? A stable threat. Prob? Real terrorists are sporadic & make FBI look weak. Solution? Make them.
The FBI is giving guns to the mentally ill to attack people then leaping in to save the day, cameras rolling. What a bunch of jerks."
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Julian Assange
https://t.me/TheOfficialE/834
Peanut Butter Secret Crime: Navy Engineer Charged for Sandwich "Dead Drop"
The engineer who hid a memory card with classified files (https://www.yahoo.com/news/sticky-situation-navy-engineer-accused-195300390.html) đin a peanut butter sandwich in West Virginia has been charged with attempting to sell nuclear submarine secrets.
It's alleged Jonathan Toebbe received cryptocurrency payments worth around $100,000. It's said he sent restricted data to an unidentified country last year, before selling secrets to an undercover FBI agent who posed as a foreign official. (DOJ (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/maryland-nuclear-engineer-and-spouse-arrested-espionage-related-charges) đ)
In one instance, the 42-year-old hid a digital memory card with details about nuclear reactors in half a sandwich at a drop point, while his wife stood as a lookout.
âThe complaint charges a plot to transmit information relating to the design of our nuclear submarines to a foreign nation,â said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.
https://t.me/georgenews/2682
Can bakeâŚ
Using this banner
? it came from anons that bake, was given to me
going old school, took the one from this bread