Nope. I mean sure tax breaks for the rich, but trump goes his merry trump/MAGA/right wing populist way, not the GOP way. They sometimes intersect, sure.
Tax breaks for the rich.
He hasn’t ‘tariffed Russia’ though, just threatened to do so on September 1st.
He will taco on those threats as well.
I think most rich people understand that you don’t really gain anything from going past the point of good returns. An unstable government causes loan rates to go up, so you just get screwed in a different way.
To be sure, there’s a lot of small business owners that probably back the position but the top level Republicans understand that the real meat is in shrinking government expenses so that taxes can be lowered and that you’re just playing populism and using government spending/debt to buy votes by artificially lowering taxes to unsustainable levels. That’s Bill Clinton, Socialist BS.
Trump has increased spending by trying to increase government worker count. That’s the exact opposite of what we’re going for. Turning civilian insurance into government workers - let alone to try and create a police state - is horrific.
These two bits of news feel related:
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5413487-house-oversight-subpoena-ghislaine-maxwell/
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5413078-ghislaine-maxwell-jeffrey-epstein-doj/
In essence, the House and the Executive Branch are in a race to talk with and make some deal with Maxwell.
Obviously, just speculative on my part but my read of this would be that Trump wants to encourage her to keep quiet, play down their friendship, etc. since, after all, the President has the power to end her ordeal. Meanwhile, the House wants to collect some dirt that they can use to negotiate with the White House on whatever next big beautiful bill they plan to do together, and so as to not totally lose their seats to Democrats who offer to release everything during the midterms. They can point and show how they’ve been working for the people to get the goods, too.
In that, though, I can really think of what the House could offer Maxwell to win her to their side. Trump would probably offer a pardon, contingent on leaving the country and never coming back. You can’t really ask for more than that.
Thus, it merits noting again that the people who signed the Constitution all held and believed that the House was similar to a grand jury and had the power to block a person from evading justice, when it came to impeachment. I.e., they should be able to do things like block someone from leaving the country or, in the case of the President, to block the pardon power:
And, subsequently, to suspend the President from office entirely if they doubt him sufficiently.
It would be quite straightforward for them to open an investigation, blocking pardons of Maxwell as a part of that. A failure to do so is a political decision, not one based on law or pragmatics. Pragmatically, barring the President from pardoning one person with whom he has a questionable connection is precisely what the House is expected, by the founders of our nation, to do.
So if she testifies before Congress, there are a few random things that come to mind.
How many questions will Democrats be able to ask? Also, who will be asking? AOC was great when she questioned Michael Cohen. No grandstanding, no bullshit, just “where are the bodies buried and if you don’t know then who does?” I have a favorable impression of Jasmine Crockett as well although I distinctly remember her doing some grandstanding with a legendary diss of MTG.
What kinds of shitbaggery should we expect from Republicans who don’t like the questions Democrats will ask? Is someone going to blast an airhorn every time Trump’s name comes up? Will they end up pulling the fire alarm? I assume the usual rules of decorum will be flagrantly disregarded as Republicans cover up for their child molesting boss.
Is someone going to ask Maxwell about suicide? Specifically, if she has any plans for it? Hey Ghislaine, if you’re found dead in a jail cell, should we be suspicious of that? Also, do you have a safety deposit box somewhere that you’d like us to open in the event of your death?
Along the same lines, I want someone to ask Maxwell if she has been approached, coached, bribed, threatened, etc. by Trump or anyone who resembles a Trump lackey. If she is being coerced into saying nice things about Trump, I want that to be known. It would be great if she would play along with any such attempt right up until she’s answering questions in Congress and then for her to blow the lid off.
Ask her who else should be in jail for things they did on Epstein Island. If that includes Bill Clinton, so be it. He can afford a lawyer. Let’s name some names. Be specific. If anyone was close enough to Epstein to fall under that cloud of suspicion, I don’t want these people to be able to pretend they didn’t know him. They’ve had the safety of obscurity and cover-ups for years now. Time to prepare to answer questions about why they were friends with a pedophile. It’s a reasonable question to ask.
I think the wisdom of your whole last paragraph depends on whether the goal is to unseat trump for his crimes, or to take a general swipe at now-aging fat cats who once enjoyed underage women.
Every name that comes out that isn’t trump will dilute the message to the public that trump is unfit to be president. That’ll be true if all the other names are just tycoons, not politicians. At the opposite extreme, if Bill Clinton is named, that essentially gives trump a “get out of jail free” card. The Rs will totally claim that if Clinton served out his presidential term without consequence, there’s nothing wrong with trump doing the same.
For exactly that reason I think every R question will be aimed at learning about everyone Epstein played with except trump, while every D question will be about learning only of trump’s antics w Epstein.
Technically, Clinton appears to have been well out of office by the time he started to socialize with Epstein.
But, personally, I couldn’t give two shits about Clinton and whether he goes down or not. In my mind, Clinton just slots in there like Trump’s executive order to defund the police. It’s not politically advantageous to either party to say certain things about Trump’s true political activities, and so he gets a pass and scarce mention.
Trump’s social circle seems to be pretty close as makes no difference perfectly composed of sex addicts. His politics tend to lean more towards the left (populism, pro-worker, isolationism, etc.) than the right (republicanism, free markets, globalism, etc.) That his social circle should include Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein doesn’t seem out of line.
Refraining from going after Bill Clinton - a man who is no longer politically meaningful - doesn’t buy the Democrats anything. The person that matters in 2025 is Donald Trump. Being willing to connect him to one of the most tarnished Democrats out there doesn’t cost you a thing, and in return it just allows you to immediately glue a thousand pounds of swamp and muck to Trump’s back.
I say, by all means, tear Clinton a Prince Andrew sized hole. Just do it with the care to ensure that you’re attaching it to Trump and the people that he likes to associate with.
You expect the GOP controlled House to start Impeachment proceedings vs trump? And if I read the article correctly, it only applies to pardons directly connected to the impeachment charges.
Naw, Maxwell will not implicate trump, and good things will happen to her due to that.
Why would you trust her testimony?
For the same reason you trust anyone else who is offering testimony. I assume there is a penalty for lying to Congress (bearing in mind that I expect this to be selectively enforced during this administration) and I assume they might ask her questions they already know the answers to. Or, as with AOC and Cohen, they might simply ask her for specifics on where to find the next puzzle piece.
Yes, she can lie and she can cover up for Trump in the hopes that he’ll make pedophilia great again but I wouldn’t count on it as a winning strategy. I am assuming the Dems will win the House in 2026 and if so, they will probably remember being lied to in 2025. They can do to Maxwell what the Republicans did to Hillary Clinton over Benghazi. After the eleventh all-day Congressional Committee hearing into the Special Secret Friendship between Trump and Epstein, Maxwell will be begging to serve out the rest of her sentence.
Agree.
But this is impossible within the MAGA sphere. All they will hear is “Clinton+ Epstein Clinton+ Epstein Clinton+ Epstein Clinton+ Epstein” over and over with zero awareness of trump’s role. The only possible route to propaganda success is when the only possible message on the airwaves is “trump + Epstein trump + Epstein trump + Epstein” with no confounders or distractors.
This is not about a full airing of all the facts. This is not really about justice.
This is about finding something factual that finally can penetrate the MAGAsphere’s hermetic love of all things trump. If that balloon gets harpooned, maybe, just maybe, the scales will start to fall from the Right’s eyes enough to save our country.
I have no idea where that notion that the House has that faculty comes from. Any sort of cite, Sage_Rat? The bar on pardons is an explicit textual limit on executive power, specifically for those persons on whom there is a case of impeachment, NOT an enumerated House discretional power.
I did give a cite (?) but this post includes more of the discussion that we have from the Framers:
Thank you — though in the end The Federalist is not binding law/precedent, now I’m curious to what extent those various “framers’ thinking” references would be considered vs. plain interpretation of plain text. Sounds like it would make for a fun day for court “originalists” if it ever comes to that.
I don’t know whether Clinton is on the Epstein list but I’m guessing that there are probably some current big-name Democratic donors on it.
Let 'em burn, say I.
I’d say that the enumeration of capabilities and the suggestion that there is a solution, in the debates prior to ratification, is the key element.
But, as said in the other thread, the whole power of the Supreme Court to clarify the Constitution is not mentioned nor elided to in the Constitution. It’s a power generated from the fact that the job needs to get done and the Court is the clear person to do that job.
Likewise, the House needs to be able to impeach the President. That’s not practical if the President can simply pardon everyone who might be involved in his activities.
So, either the Constitution is dumb and the people who ratified the Constitution were lied to in front of a secretary, taking a transcript for posterity (in which case, the whole “ratification” thing is slightly shaky) or… The general belief was that the House had the powers that it needed to practically undertake and achieve a successful impeachment - like a grand jury can do for an indictment.
The third possibility is nobody was lied to, and nobody noticed the whole of the words are not quite hermetic enough, and there is a legit question of fact and of precedent about whether the house really has the paper-based authority to impeach the president.
Oops.
Oh to be sure, it would be challenged in the Supreme Court and may fail. But, there’s more evidence for it than for Trump’s birthright Executive Order, if you go into the historic record and apply Originalism.
But I’m not seeing any reason that the House should want to be weaker than stronger, as a general principle. For example, would you rather have a million or a billion dollars? And let’s say that you’re guaranteed to get no less than the million, whether you make a move for the full billion or not. Why wouldn’t you at least ask for the billion?
Agree the House should have the power, should want to have the power, and should want to exercise the power when it’s so clearly appropriate to do so. I also think they factually do have the power properly granted to them by the Constitution.
My objection was solely to what looked to me like a false dichotomy in your final paragraph.
We know many people took advantage of his Private jet, but any “list” would only be useful if it had men who took advantage of the underaged girls on the island- and i doubt if any such list exists. . I dont give a rats ass if Clinton or even trump got a free jet ride.
This is pretty damning from 2010, before Epstein had any reason to fear Trump’s wrath. Sounds like covering up to me.