Donald Trump

[Dougie Do'ins]

5 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Ivana mate - Ivanka is the daughter.

 

Nothing kept them together, they divorced the next year.

Ah, OK. So who won the case over the prenup ?

[sir roger]

Wasn't there a story that Melania got a pre-nup altered or cancelled as a negotiation for agreeing to move into the White House.

[PestiRed]

2 hours ago, sir roger said:

Wasn't there a story that Melania got a pre-nup altered or cancelled as a negotiation for agreeing to move into the White House.

Supposedly, and I’d imagine that remaining with him whilst he is President to save the embarrassment of an in-term divorce was part of the deal. Presumably she is now donating heavily to the Biden campaign

[Anubis]

5 hours ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

 

 

 

 

 

“Trumper, no trumping!”

[Duff Man]

Wall's looking good

 

 

[Anubis]

 

[Dougie Do'ins]

Robert O'Brien, key Trump adviser, tests positive for Covid-19

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53557447

[Mudface]

We're all going to burn, aren't we? We're having to rely on the US electorate- of all people- to give Biden- of all candidates- enough votes to beat this cunt so soundly that he's shamed out of office.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/27/trump-loses-election-what-happens-possibilities

 

What if Trump loses but refuses to leave office? Here's the worst case scenario
Lawrence Douglas
The risk of an electoral meltdown is ordinarily rather small, but this November promises a combination of stressors that could lead to epic failure and chaos


While working on a book about the peaceful succession of power, I came to realize that built into our system of presidential elections is a Chernobyl-like defect: placed under the right conditions of stress, the system is vulnerable to catastrophic breakdown. The risk of such an electoral meltdown ordinarily is rather small, but this November promises – in a manner last seen in 1876 –to present a combination of stresses that could lead to epic failure.

The problem begins – but does not end – with President Trump, who, in his recent interview with Chris Wallace, once again reminded the nation that losing is not an option. He will reject any election that results in his loss, claiming it to be rigged. Alarming as this may be, Trump alone cannot crash the system. Instead, an unusual constellation of forces – the need to rely heavily on mail-in ballots because of the Covid-19 pandemic; the political divisions in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; and a hyper-polarized Congress – all work together to turn Trump’s defiance into a crisis of historic proportions.

 Should Trump lose decisively – not only in the popular vote, but in electoral college, too – his capacity to engage in constitutional brinkmanship will be limited
Consider the following scenario: it’s 3 November, 2020, election day. By midnight, it’s clear that former Vice-President Biden enjoys a substantial lead in the national popular vote but the electoral college vote remains tight. With the races in 47 states and the District of Columbia called, Biden leads Trump in the electoral college vote 252 to 240, but neither candidate has secured the 270 votes necessary for victory. All eyes remain on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and their 46 electoral college votes.

In each of these three states, Trump enjoys a slim lead, but the election-day returns do not include a huge number of mail-in ballots. Some states, such as Colorado, have been counting their mail-in votes from the day they arrived, but not Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. These states do not allow elections officials to begin the task of counting the mail-ins until election day itself. It will take days, even weeks, for the key swing states to finish their count. The election hangs in the balance.

Only not for Trump. Based on his November 3 leads, Trump has already declared himself re-elected. His reliable megaphones in the right-wing media repeat and amplify his declaration, and urge Biden to concede. Biden says he will do no such thing. Biden knows that the bulk of the mail-in ballots have been cast in heavily populated urban areas, where voters were unwilling to expose themselves to the health risks of in-person voting. And he is keenly aware that urban voters vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, this phenomenon, in which mail-in and provisional ballots typically break Democratic, has been dubbed “blue shift” by election law experts.

The count of the mail-in ballots in the three swing states is plagued by delays. Overworked election officials, slowed by the need to maintain social distance, struggle to process the huge volume of votes. Trump’s lawyers, aided by the Department of Justice, bring multiple suits insisting that tens of thousands of votes must be tossed out for having failed to arrive by the date specified by statute. All the same, as the count creeps forward, a clear pattern emerges. President Trump’s lead is shrinking – and then vanishes altogether. By the time the three states complete their canvass of votes nearly a month after the election, the nation faces an astonishing result. Biden now leads in all three. It appears he has been elected our next president.

Only Trump tweets bloody murder. All his most dire predictions have come to pass. The mail-in ballots are infected with fraud. The radical Democrats are trying to steal his victory. The election has been rigged, he says.

Now things take an ominous turn. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all share the same political profile: all three states are controlled by Republican legislatures faithful to Trump. And so Republican lawmakers in Lansing, Madison and Harrisburg take up the fight to declare Trump victorious in their state. Citing irregularities and unconscionable delays in the counting of the mail-in ballots, state Republicans award Trump their states’ electoral college votes.

Yet all three of our crucial swing states also have Democratic governors. Outraged by the actions of Republican lawmakers, the Democratic governors of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania announce that they will recognize Biden as having carried their state. They certify Biden as the winner, and send the certificate cast by his electors on to Congress.

It is now January 6, 2021, the day on which the joint session of Congress opens the states’ electoral certificates and officially tallies the votes. Normally this is a ceremonial function, but not today. Suddenly Congress is confronted with the astonishing reality that Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have each submitted conflicting electoral certificates –one awarding its electoral college votes to Trump; the other, to Biden. The election hangs in the balance.

Seems far-fetched? And yet the nation faced a nearly identical crisis in the notorious Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, when three separate states submitted conflicting electoral certificates. With neither Hayes nor Tilden enjoying an electoral college majority, a divided Congress – a Democratic House and a Republican Senate –fought bitterly over which certificates to recognize. Congress tried to resolve things by handing the problem to a one-off special electoral commission, but partisan rancor plagued the work of that body, too. Inauguration Day neared and the nation had no president-elect –or rather, it had two rivals both claiming victory. President Grant weighed declaring martial law.

Catastrophe was avoided only by a last second disastrous compromise between the parties: Republicans agreed to remove Federal troops from the South, paving the way to Jim Crow, and in return, Samuel Tilden, the Democrats’ candidate, agreed to concede. Chastened by that experience, Congress passed a law –the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA) –meant to guide Congress should a state ever again submit more than one electoral certificate. Since its passage, the provisions of the ECA have been triggered only once – that was back in 1969, and the issue was trivial, with no bearing on Nixon’s victory.

In January 2021, however, the nation finds itself in a true electoral crisis and lawmakers quickly realize that the 1887 law is glaringly deficient, failing to anticipate the most destabilizing contingencies.

And so Congress descends into acrimonious debate, with each side charging the other with attempting to steal the election. The chambers vote on which certificates to accept, the outcome foreordained. The Senate, which after the 2020 vote remains in Republican control, rejects the governors’ certificate and accepts the legislatures’; the Democratically controlled House votes in precisely the opposite fashion.

Stalemate. Both parties appeal to the US supreme court, but the Court – in sharp contrast to its intervention in 2000 in Bush v Gore – proves unable to solve the crisis. Experts insist that the court has no role to play in resolving an election dispute once it reaches Congress, a view that finds support in the ECA itself. With lawmakers in both party declaring that they would not abide by an unfavorable holding, the court chooses not to intervene.

Congress remains deadlocked, with neither party prepared to concede. As protests roil the country, President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, deploying the military to protect his “victory.” The nation finds itself in a full-blown crisis of succession from which there is no clear, peaceful exit.

Electoral Armageddon can be avoided. Should Trump lose decisively – not only in the popular vote, but in the electoral college, too –his capacity to engage in constitutional brinkmanship will be limited. This is not to say that he won’t claim the election was rigged, only that his claim will probably not trigger a larger constitutional crisis. But should Trump’s defeat turn on the count of mail-in ballots in our crucial swing states, prepare for chaos. Our nation could witness dark times.

[Dougie Do'ins]

33 minutes ago, Mudface said:

We're all going to burn, aren't we? We're having to rely on the US electorate- of all people- to give Biden- of all candidates- enough votes to beat this cunt so soundly that he's shamed out of office.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/27/trump-loses-election-what-happens-possibilities

 

 

 

Democracy eh.

[Section_31]

To be honest, the fact it's even a close run thing is testimony to how fucked we are. He advocated injecting bleach to cure a virus and as the death toll rocketed posed with tins of beans on his desk for an advert. Trump and Johnson aren't the problem, the fact that enough people exist on earth to consider them viable options, is.

[Dougie Do'ins]

 

 

 

 

 

[Mudface]

That painting is hilarious.

[Anubis]

4 minutes ago, Mudface said:

That painting is hilarious.

 

 

[Bjornebye]

2 minutes ago, Anubis said:

 

 

Stood with Johnny Depp, Lou Diamond Phillips and Kenny off Phoenix Nights by the looks of it. 

[Anubis]

Harold Shipman and Andres Breivik. Crying laughing here. Some nice additional touches in this one.

 

[Anubis]

It seems McNaughton has unleashed Twitter’s creativity.

 

[Tj hooker]

 

[TheHowieLama]

John Lewis lying in state at the Capitol - pretty much everyone in da gubmint going to pay their respects.

 

Except one fella.

[Bjornebye]

Sweet baby jesus and the orphans... seriously if you thought them dancing young girls on the stage were mental 

 

 

 

 

[Section_31]

Never knew what this Qanon bollocks was until I read this recent explainer from the Beeb.

 

"At its heart, QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that says that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.

QAnon believers have speculated that this fight will lead to a day of reckoning where prominent people such as Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed."

 

 

 

 

[Anubis]

QAnon^[a] (/kjuːəˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy theory^[7][8] detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters.^[9] The theory began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by someone using the name Q, who was presumably an American individual initially,^[10] but probably later became a group of people,^[11][12] claiming to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. Analysis by NBC News found that three people took the original Q post and expanded it across multiple media platforms to build internet followings for monetization. QAnon was preceded by several similar anonymous 4chan posters such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon (high level insider), CIAAnon and WH Insider Anon.^[13]
 

Q has falsely accused many liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking officials of being members of an international child sex trafficking ring. Q also claimed that Donald Trump feigned collusionwith Russians to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the ring and preventing a coup d'état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros.^[14][15][16] 

 

"Q" is a reference to the Q clearance used by the Department of Energy. QAnon believers commonly tag their social media posts with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, signifying the motto "Where We Go One, We Go All".

 

QAnon adherents began appearing at Trump re-election campaign rallies during the summer of 2018.^[17] TV and radio personality Michael "Lionel" Lebron, a promoter of the theory, was granted a photo opportunity with President Trump in the Oval Office on August 24, 2018.^[18] Bill Mitchell, a broadcaster who promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory, attended a White House "social media summit" in July 2019.^[8][19] According to analysis conducted by Media Matters, through July 7, 2020 Trump had amplified QAnon messaging at least 185 times by retweeting or mentioning 114 QAnon-affiliated Twitter accounts, sometimes multiple times a day.^[20][21]

 

At an August 2019 rally, a man warming up the crowd before President Trump spoke used the QAnon motto "where we go one, we go all," later denying it was a QAnon reference. This occurred hours after the publication of a report stating that the FBI determined QAnon to be a potential source of domestic terrorism — the first time a fringe conspiracy theory had been so rated by the agency. ^[22][23]

Into 2020, the number of QAnon adherents was unknown and appeared small, but had an outsize presence on social media, particularly Twitter. Followers had also migrated to dedicated message boards such as Endchan and 8kun, where they organized to wage information warfare to influence the 2020 elections.^[24] On June 24, 2020, Q exhorted followers to take a "digital soldiers oath," and during ensuing weeks many did, using the Twitter hashtag #TakeTheOath.^[25] In July 2020, Twitter banned thousands of QAnon-affiliated accounts and changed its algorithms to reduce the spread of the conspiracy theory.^[26]

 

 

US Vice-President Mike Pence with members of the Broward County, Florida SWAT team on November 30, 2018; the man at the left of the image is displaying a red and black "Q" patch used by believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Photo was tweeted, removed and then substituted in Pence's feed.

Detail from photo showing the QAnon patch. The black-and white patch to the left has been reported to be that of the SWAT team. Regulations forbid the wearing of either patch, and the deputy was reprimanded and removed from the SWAT team as a result.^[1]

[Bobby Hundreds]

I wish these aliens would hurry up and invade.

[Bruce Spanner]

10 minutes ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

I wish these aliens would hurry up and invade.

 

[Dougie Do'ins]

 

 

 

 

 

[Section_31]

There are no depths....

 

 

President Donald Trump’s campaign group has been accused of violating federal election law, by funnelling $216m (£166.6m) through private companies to hide payments to family members and other organisations.

The campaign has been accused of funnelling payments to family members of Mr Trump, including $180,000 (£139,037) to Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and to Lara Trump, the wife of his other adult son Eric Trump, according to HuffPost