Donald Trump’s Dream – The First President for Life

Trump on China’s Xi consolidating power: ‘Maybe we’ll give that a shot some day’

Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping

(CNN)President Donald Trump bemoaned a decision not to investigate Hillary Clinton after the 2016 presidential election, decrying a “rigged system” that still doesn’t have the “right people” in place to fix it, during a freewheeling speech to Republican donors in Florida on Saturday.

In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn’t mind making such a maneuver himself.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, delivered a rebuke of President Trump on the Senate floor Wednesday, in a speech that drew a comparison between Mr. Trump and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and called for greater protections of the truth and members of the press around the world. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeff-flake-full-transcript-speech-senate-floor-trump-sustained-attack-on-press/

New York Times commentator just warned us about Trump on February 18, 2018

August 19, 1934 was the date that Adolf Hitler, already chancellor, was also elected president of Germany.

WAKE UP AMERICA! TODAY’S PRESIDENT DREAMS OF BEING OUR FIRST DICTATOR.

Killing in America

I am tired of listening to the talk show guest congressman and senators who are calling for stronger protection for students in the wake of repeated mass shootings. None of these elected representatives that I have heard are willing to confront the fact that the killing is not just in schools. It is happening in malls, churches, and entertainment venues. Most of the killers were not 18, 19 or 20 years old. They were adults aged 25 to 64 years old and many with no prior criminal history.

The best example is the killing of 58 people at a concert in Las Vegas. Stephen Craig Paddock was an American mass murderer responsible for the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, during which he fired into a crowd of approximately 22,000 concertgoers attending a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. He was a graduate from California State University, Northridge (CSUN). He was 64 years old when he conducted the attack. He had no criminal record.

Killer in San Bernardino was 28 years old and his wife was 29.

Killer in Orlando night club shooting was 29.

Sutherland Springs, Texas at the First Baptist Church killing was committed by a gunman clad in all black, with a ballistic vest strapped to his chest and a military-style rifle in his hands. The killing was done on a Sunday morning. Of the 26 fatalities, 23 people were found dead inside the church, two were found outside, and one died later at a hospital. The killer was 26 years old. He did have a criminal past but was still able to obtain a weapon.

So while killings at schools is an utterly horrible thing there have been many other killings at many other places.

The answer is a prohibition placed on the ownership of assault weapons. I do not care whether they are identified as automatic or semi-automatic. These weapons are meant for killing people.

When do the words “never again” apply? Why are we tied to an amendment to the constitution that was written in 1789?

Destruction of the American Democracy

The first amendment to the United States Constitution.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The American democracy depends on a free press. Donald Trump continuously attacks the press. His favorite words are “fake news” whenever the press reports something that puts him in a bad light.

His admiration for Vladimir Putin (President of Russia), Saddam Hussein (deceased dictator of Iraq), Moammar Gaddafi (deceased dictator of Libya), Xi Jinping (president of China), and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (President of Turkey) to name just a few tells us what kind of presidency Trump wants in the United States. All of these government leaders have one thing in common. They have or had no opposition. There is no press to report on their misbehavior. That is Trump’s dream.

The National Review, a conservative publication, posted the following on its website
Our First Amendment freedoms give us the right to think what we like and say what we please. And if we the people are to govern ourselves, we must have these rights, even if they are misused by a minority.

The ACLU says we must defend free speech even when we disagree with the speaker. That organization did defend the KKK when it wanted to march through Skokie Illinois, a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago.

There was no free press in Nazi Germany. There is no free press in China, Russia and Turkey today. Donald Trump’s war on the press is the first steps to end our democracy. CNN’s “This is an Apple” campaign is an effort to tell all viewers that they will defend their right to report the facts. Everyone should be applauding their efforts.

We must all join hands to defend freedom of the press or soon there will be no free press. The day there is no free press a dictator will be on the rise.

Donald Trump as Absolute Ruler

Donald Trump seeks to make himself an absolute ruler of this nation in a form similar to Vladimir Putin in Russia. His objective is to end all opposition to his goal. The evidence is everywhere. Trump’s claim of massive voter fraud and his demand for voter information was his first step. A warrant seeking the names and personal information of those viewing the anti-Trump website Dreamhost is a perfect example of the behavior of Putin or Turkey’s president Erdogan. Trump’s threat to deny licensing for NBC is further evidence of his desire to have absolute control over the media. Erdogan like Putin now has authority to issue law, declare a state of emergency, dismiss parliament and to appoint ministers, public officials and judges. There is no limit to the number of times they can be elected to office. Trump has two dictator/ presidents to emulate. Too many Americans seem willing to surrender their freedom to an autocrat. However many of us, like the Von Trapp family in Austria, will be wise enough to depart before Trump reaches his objective.

Treason

Russia wants to destroy western democracies. Not just the United States. There has been media reports of Russia’s efforts to impact elections in France, Germany, Belgium, and other nations. Their reason, I believe, is that Vladimir Putin is a dictator and the success of western democracies is demonstration to his countryman that the will of the people results in a more successful nation. National leaders like Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, and Hassan Rouhani of Iran are the dictatorial leaders that Putin admires.

I believe that Donald Trump, his son Donald Junior, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort are all guilty of treason. They all colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 presidential and have continued to collude since Donald Trump’s election. I suspect their reason for the collusion is to earn money for themselves. They have little or no regard for American democracy.

Update 7-18-2017:

Trump and Putin spoke a second time for nearly an hour at G20 summit, White House says. Apparently the only people at that meeting were Trump, Putin, and a Russian translator. As this was not a meeting that Trump wanted to be known, isn’t this another piece of proof of collusion?

Trump’s repeated claims of fake news and his contention that everyone does the things he and his inner circle have done are all part of politics strains credulity beyond what any reasonable person would expect.

Read this definition of treason from thefreedictionary.com
n. the crime of betraying one’s country, defined in Article III, section 3 of the U. S. Constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Treason requires overt acts and includes the giving of government security secrets to other countries, even if friendly, when the information could harm American security. Treason can include revealing to an antagonistic country secrets such as the design of a bomber being built by a private company for the Defense Department. Treason may include “espionage” (spying for a foreign power or doing damage to the operation of the government and its agencies, particularly involved in security) but is separate and worse than “sedition” which involves a conspiracy to upset the operation of the government.

I know that as of today the Republican Party is not ready to charge Trump or his inner circle with treason. I predict that the day is coming.

The Trump 100 Day Legislative Disaster

Mexico is not paying for the wall. The Trump travel ban has twice been blocked by the courts. Trump has failed to mobilize a Republican monopoly on power in Washington and his big legislative goal — repealing Obamacare — crashed.

Not one single major piece of legislation has been passed by congress and signed into law.

Most of what Trump has accomplished has been through executive order.

Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter was his 100 day action plan. The plan was announced on October 26, 2016.

How did he do?

Six measures to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC:

★ FIRST, propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress. NOT DONE.

★ SECOND, a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health). THE FEDERAL HIRING FREEZE WAS IMPOSED IN JANUARY. IT WAS LIFTED ON APRIL 14.

★ THIRD, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated. DONE.

★ FOURTH, a five-year ban on White House and Congressional oﬃcials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service. DONE.

★ FIFTH, a lifetime ban on White House oﬃcials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. DONE.

★ SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections. DONE.

Seven actions to protect American workers:

★ FIRST, I will announce my intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205. DONE. HE WILL RENEGOTIATE.

★ SECOND, I will announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. DONE.

★ THIRD, I will direct the Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator. NOT DONE. REVERSED OPINION.

★ FOURTH, I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately. NOT DONE.

★ FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal. DONE.

★ SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward. DONE.

★ SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure. DONE. EXCEPT NO WATER AND INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS HAVE BEEN BUDGETED.

Five actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law:

★ FIRST, cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama. NOT DONE.

★ SECOND, begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia from one of the 20 judges on my list, who will uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. DONE. MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENT.

★ THIRD, cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities. NOT DONE.

★ FOURTH, begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back. DONE.

★ FIFTH, suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered “extreme vetting.” NOT DONE.

No Mr. Trump you are not all powerful. This is a democratic republic.

The failure of Trumpcare was good news for some. Doctors didn’t like it. Nurses didn’t like it. The AARP was one of the biggest critics.

If nothing else Mr. Trump has learned that being president of the United States is nothing like owning your own company. You cannot make demands of the people and expect they will follow your orders merely because you are president. As the owner of your own company you can give directions to your employees and know they will be carried out.

So promising to repeal and replace Obamacare was a winning promise on the campaign trail. As president Trump has learned that making promises is easy but fulfilling them takes another set of capabilities. Donald Trump has not yet learned that he is confronted with a set of circumstances that are entirely different than those he faced as the head of his company.

It’s not just his health care proposal that did not pass the House of Representatives that has been a challenge. He has seen his immigration executive orders stopped by the courts, faced questions about his proposal to defund domestic programs in order to raise defense spending, and learned that foreign affairs are far more complicated than he imagined.

It seems that when things don’t go his way he finds someone else to blame. The Democrats are to blame for the health care defeat. “So called judges” are to blame for the hold on his immigration ban. There are leakers who are to blame for information going to the press who only deal in fake news.

As Charles Krauthammer pointed out in his latest column the country’s checks and balances really do work. This is a feature of government that Donald Trump either does not understand or hopes will go away. It won’t go away.

Mr. Krauthammer listed these checks on the usurping of power.

1. The courts.

2. The states.

3. Congress.

4. The media.

The End of Free Speech in America

Does anyone understand the first amendment to the constitution of the United States? Does anyone understand the intent?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

A Vietnamese woman came to this country when she was five years old. She was part of the “boat people” who escaped Vietnam when the United States abandoned its efforts to stop the spread of communism. That was at the end of the Vietnam War that ended in defeat for the United States.

That woman is now Senator Janet Nguyen, R-Garden Grove, California. She is the first Vietnamese American in the country elected to a state senate seat. She dared to criticize late state Sen. Tom Hayden’s, D-Santa Monica, support of the communists in Vietnam. California State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles had Senator Nguyen physically dragged off the Senate floor for pointing out that Tom Hayden was in fact a traitor to the United States.

Fires burned in the cradle of free speech, University California Berkeley. Furious at a lecture organized on campus, demonstrators wearing ninja-like outfits smashed windows, threw rocks at the police and stormed a building. The speech? The university called it off. The university was under siege for canceling a speech by the incendiary right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos and words like intolerance, long used by the left, were being used by critics to condemn the protests on February 3 that ultimately prevented Mr. Yiannopoulos from speaking.

In April 2014 Ayaan Hirsi Ali was invited to Brandeis University’s commencement festivities and then she was uninvited. So, what’s all that about? Well, Hirsi Ali is a figure of some controversy, don’t you know! She has been a strong voice against such barbaric practices as female genital mutilation, and the more totalitarian aspects of Islamic sharia law that oppress women, such as so-called “honor killings.” Personally speaking, I am glad she has done such things. However, she is not of the mind that Islam is a legitimate religion that has been, in some instances, tragically co-opted in some benighted corners of the world by nihilistic death-cults. She does not believe it is possible for a moderate or Westernized form of Islam to exist. She has said so: “There is no moderate Islam.” And so, she has called for the complete destruction of Islam existentially.

In September 2011 jurors on found 10 of the “Irvine 11” Muslim students guilty on charges that stemmed from the disruption of a speech by the Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren, to the United States when he visited UC Irvine in February of 2010.

What do all of these incidents have in common? The denial of freedom of speech. How did we get here? We have come to a time when we insist not to hear any opinions that do not coincide with our own. We want an echo chamber that returns all of our thoughts and all of our ideas. We have come to believe that no other thoughts and no other ideas are worth considering. We are so sure that our ideas are the right ideas that we want to deny anyone from hearing other ideas.

Where do we go from here?

How to Destroy the Republic

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. listens during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 28, 2012, to discuss a Congressional resolution condemning the government of Syria for crimes against humanity and supporting the right of the people of Syria to be safe and to defend themselves. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Senator John McCain, a conservative Republican from Arizona, slammed President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media this week by noting dictators “get started by suppressing free press.”

“I hate the press,” the Arizona Republican sarcastically told NBC News’ Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” “I hate you especially. But the fact is we need you. We need a free press. We must have it. It’s vital.”

But he continued, “If you want to preserve — I’m very serious now — if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press,” McCain said in the interview. “And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.”

“They get started by suppressing free press, in other words, a consolidation of power — when you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press,” McCain said. “And I’m not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I’m just saying we need to learn the lessons of history.”

Imagine if President Trump announced that he wanted to oust California from the United States. If it weren’t for us, after all, Trump would have won the popular vote he so lusts after by 1.4 million votes. Trump just might be happy with the Calexit petition. Petition signature gathering for a “Calexit” vote was approved by the California Secretary of State on January 27. If approved by California voters it would begin the long, multi-step process for withdrawing California from the United States.

Read those 14 Characteristics Of Fascism listed on this web site and elsewhere and tell me Donald Trump is not on the path to creating a dictatorship.

Chelsea Manning is a Traitor to the United States

I am aware that President Barack Obama wants to leave a legacy. That appears to have been the wish of every president in the past 100 years. The president has that legacy in creating the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare). So why would he besmirch his legacy by commuting the prison sentence of Bradley Manning, who through a sex change operation, is now known as Chelsea Manning? I do not know the answer.

Manning was United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly three-quarters of a million classified or unclassified but sensitive military and diplomatic documents.Manning was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years’ imprisonment, with the possibility of parole in the eighth year, and to be dishonorably discharged from the Army.

There is no doubt that Manning committed the crimes. She pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the charges. The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30, she was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but was acquitted of aiding the enemy. She was sentenced to serve a 35-year sentence at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

The decision — which a senior defense official told CNN was made over the objections of Secretary of Defense Ash Carter — immediately touched off a controversy in the closing days of the Obama administration.

In my opinion, comparing his crime to General James Cartwright or General David Petraeus is inappropriate. Cartwright lied to an investigator and Petraeus told some secrets to his mistress. Manning stole 750,000 documents and gave them to Wikileaks.