“The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to ‘avoid protracted litigation,'” The New Republic reports.
News
Biden Channels Lincoln in Address on Trump Assassination Attempt: ‘We Are Not Enemies’
Echoing President Abraham Lincoln‘s first inaugural address, President Joe Biden in a rare primetime Oval Office address Sunday night told Americans “we are not enemies,” as he urged the nation to tone down political rhetoric in the wake of the assassination attempt of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by a 20-year old registered Republican at an outdoor Trump rally in Pennsylvania one day earlier.
It was the third time in 24-hours President Biden spoke to Americans via a televised address about the shooting in which Trump’s ear was nicked, some reports say from shards of glass from his teleprompter, while the ex-president claimed it was from a bullet. The eight bullets from the gunman’s legally-purchased AR-15 rifle killed a 50-year old former volunteer fire chief who shielded his daughters with his body, and wounded two others.
“While we may disagree, we are not enemies. We’re neighbors, we’re friends, coworkers, citizens. And most importantly, we are fellow Americans. We must stand together,” President Biden reminded the nation, as he announced “the need to lower the temperature in our politics.”
President Biden urges the nation to “lower the temperature” after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump:
“Remember, though we may disagree, we are not enemies.” https://t.co/8LUiW4dKjL pic.twitter.com/r8xGRbdG2r
— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 15, 2024
Biden said the “shooting calls on all of us to take a step back.” Earlier, on Sunday afternoon in his nationally-televised remarks the President said, “We must unite as one nation. We must unite as one nation to demonstrate who we are.”
READ MORE: ‘Supposed to Be Hard’: Political Experts Explain Their Thinking on Biden and the Election
In denouncing political violence, President Biden cited some of the most critical recent examples in America.
“We can not, we must not, go down this road in America. We’ve traveled it before throughout our history,” the President warned. “Violence has never been the answer, whether it was with members of congress of both parties being targeted and shot, or a violent mob attacking the capitol on January 6th, or the brutal attack on the spouse of the former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, or information or intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against the sitting governor, or the attempted assassination on Donald Trump, there’s no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever. Period. No exceptions. We cannot allow this violence to be normalized,” Biden said resolutely.
Biden: Violence has never been the answer, whether it was with member of both parties of congress being shot or a violent mob attacking the capitol on January 6th or the brutal attack on the spouse of the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.. pic.twitter.com/dC4IS5x12U
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 15, 2024
“In America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box, that’s how we do it, at the ballot box, not with bullets,” the President also declared, as some on the right, including far-right wing websites, quickly mocked and attacked him for his speech impediment, claiming he had said, “battle box.”
Pointing to Biden’s “desire to protect democracy,” NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander Sunday night reminded that the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville was “really the motivating factor” for his decision to run for President in 2020.
Indeed, Biden has a strong record of fighting against political violence and hate. On Sunday he declared that in America, “hate must have no safe harbor,” which echoed his 2023 State of the Union Address in which he said: “There’s no place for political violence in America,” and, “We must give hate and extremism in any form no safe harbor.”
“Democracy must not be a partisan issue, it’s an American issue. Every generation of Americans has faced a moment where they have been called to protect our democracy Defend it, stand up for it. And this is our moment,” Biden had also said.
Former South Carolina Democratic Congressman Bakari Sellers judged Biden’s six-minute Sunday evening speech to be “pitch perfect. Great sharp message, tone, and leadership.”
READ MORE: Critics: Where’s Trump’s Hour-Long Press Conference With Policy Questions from Reporters?
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin called Biden’s remarks “eloquent and sobering.”
“Biden speech was eloquent and sobering. It is the time for experienced, reassuring and mature leadership. We need to be called to follow the better angels of our nature not the darkest impulses. There is nothing more important.”
“Just watched Joe Biden’s speech. He just won the election,” announced SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah.
“President Biden used the pulpit well tonight. He did what a president should do: seek to calm the country, seek to calm each of us,” declared award-winning journalist Maria Shriver.
“This is an excellent speech,” rhetoric scholar and professor of communications Jennifer Mercieca wrote. “Biden is good at what scholars call the ‘priestly role of the president,’ which is when the president is called upon to speak to a nation in crisis and remind us of our values and explain why our American values will see us through hard times.”
Even Fox News’ chief political analyst Brit Hume praised President Biden’s speech Sunday night declaring his “message was just right,” as Mediate reported.
President Biden Full Oval Office Address following Assassination Attempt against former President Trump: “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.” pic.twitter.com/IkhCZn8Fn0
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 15, 2024
Watch clips from the President’s remarks and his full address above or at this link.
READ MORE: ‘Betrayal’: Trump Hosts ‘Russian Puppet’ Viktor Orbán as Biden Hosts NATO Leaders
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President Donald Trump is now in “discussions” with his own government to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, a federal agency he exercises limited influence over, after a contractor released 15 years of his tax returns in 2019, which were published by The New York Times two months before the 2020 election.
“Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued, TNR notes. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”
TNR also repots that legal experts “have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.”
Critics allege a conflict of interest in the case.
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
“Right out in the open, Donald Trump is suing his own IRS to try to steal $10 BILLION taxpayer dollars,” charged U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who notes she has introduced legislation to prevent “this theft.”
Political scientist Brendan Nyhan described the situation as Trump “Negotiating with himself to loot the US Treasury.”
“Nothing beats reaching into the taxpayers’ pocket and helping oneself to $10 billion,” wrote Richard Field, the Director of the Institute for Financial Transparency.
“Trump is suing the federal government and cashing in. Who approves these settlements? HE DOES of course. There is no bottom to his shamelessness. Meanwhile American families suffer,” wrote U.S. Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL).
“Trump is just stealing $10 billion from taxpayers! That’s very MAGA,” charged Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
MAGA has made a deal with Donald Trump, and the deal is that “the humiliation is the point,” argues Republican former U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger. In short, he says, “humiliating the MAGA faithful only binds them more tightly to Trump.”
Kinzinger, a never-Trump Republican who acknowledged last year that his politics are now probably closer to the Democrats, says that to “understand what Trump is doing, you have to stop thinking about each outrage as a separate event and start seeing them as a sequence.”
He walks through a timeline of humiliations.
Trump asked MAGA to believe the 2020 election was stolen, so they did, “including many who knew better.”
Trump asked MAGA to excuse the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a mere tourist visit, and they did.
“He asked them to accept that his 91 criminal indictments were a political witch hunt — and they did, turning his mugshot into a fundraising image,” he writes. “Each ask was larger than the last. Each capitulation required more of them — more willingness to contradict their own eyes, their own values, their own stated beliefs.”
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
Kinzinger reveals the psychology of what he believes is actually happening here.
“Every time MAGA accepts something they previously would have considered unacceptable, Trump’s hold on them gets stronger, not weaker. Because now they’ve paid a price. They’ve told their neighbors, their families, their coworkers, that they believe this. Walking it back would mean admitting they were wrong. And the movement doesn’t allow that.”
What does this mean for the future?
“Don’t expect a wholesale collapse in Trump’s support,” he predicts. “Some will leave, others have tied their conscience to his success. Those will double down, again and again.”
Kinzinger expects that MAGA is not breaking apart. “I don’t think there’s some dramatic rupture coming where the movement looks in the mirror and decides enough is enough. That’s not how this works,” he writes. Because Trump has trained his movement to accept humiliation as “proof of loyalty.”
“The more outrageous the thing he asks them to believe, the more committed they become,” he explains, “because disbelief now would mean admitting everything they’ve already accepted was wrong. It’s a trap that gets harder to escape the longer you’re in it.”
But, he says, “the humiliation ritual works until the day it doesn’t.”
“Until the day enough people decide that the price of belonging is higher than the price of leaving. We’re not there yet,” he explains. “But we’re closer than Trump wants you to think.”
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
The Trump regime has an “erratic” and “theologically incomprehensible” preferred religion, a “bellicose, nationalist Christianity,” that is organized along various “fiefdoms,” argues Sarah Posner at Talking Points Memo. Those spheres of control and influence are “aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.”
Posner writes that the “goal of the Christian nationalist project is to subvert democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
She posits that during Trump’s second term, the White House and federal agencies “have been bludgeoning federal employees, the press, and the public with religious pronouncements of moral superiority to perceived enemies.”
On Easter Sunday, several administration agencies posted social media messages “heralding Christ’s resurrection,” the Associated Press reported.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth.”
READ MORE: ‘Incurable Conflict of Interest’: Kushner Under Sweeping Investigation by House Democrats
“He is risen,” was the message from both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
The Department of Justice went even further.
“Today, as millions of Christians gather in their churches across the nation to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, this Department —- is proud to protect and defend religious liberty,” the message read.
Posner argues how various administration officials use religion.
JD Vance “starts fights with the pope over his anti-war statements (even as Vance leaks to the press, with an eye to 2028, that he was against the war).”
Through his prayer meetings and press conferences, Secretary Hegseth “aims to compel Americans to embrace his Christian nationalist bloodlust and war crimes, and this week compared reporters to Pharisees for insufficiently cheerleading for the military.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer “has promoted her Catholicism in prayer meetings modeled on the ones Hegseth hosts at the Pentagon.”
“All these moves,” Posner writes, “are designed to crush dissent, marginalize other Christianities and religions, and empower government officials to violate the law. The fiefdoms, in different ways, prop up the would-be king’s corruption, and that of his allies.”
READ MORE: Conservative Christian Broadcaster Slams Franklin Graham’s ‘Embarrassing’ Defense of Trump
Image via Reuters
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