Raw Story

Donald Trump Jr., son of the former president and convicted felon, celebrated the future of American Democracy Monday when a judge his father appointed tossed a case involving classified documents stored in a Florida social club bathroom.

His MAGA followers responded with calls for retribution.

"Documents case dismissed!" Trump Jr. told his X followers. "Another example of weaponized injustice down the tubes."

Trump Jr. made this claim moments after Judge Aileen Cannon ruled special counsel Jack Smith had not been properly appointed to bring Espionage Act violation charges against Trump in Florida's federal court.

The Trump-appointee's timing stunned critics, who note it arrived opening day of the Republican National Convention where Trump is predicted to win his party's nomination.

Two days after a gunman aimed a semi-automatic rifle at the presumed Republican nominee's head, Trump's son celebrated victory against a liberal "henchman" whose work the former president's son said he wanted to "eliminate."

"Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, and their Democrat henchman take another L," Trump Jr. wrote. "If we eliminate this nonsense once and for all this incredible country still stands a chance! Can’t stop winning!!!"

EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested

Trump Jr. followers responded with angry messages calling for Smith to face criminal prosecution, declarations of war and the resurfacing of the conspiracy theory that the Justice department had plans to assassinate Trump.

One follower replied with an image of Trump with laser red eyes and the message "THIS IS WAR."

"Trump and we the people are unstoppable!" replied X user Thomas Paine Band. "Jack Smith needs to be prosecuted!"

"Now it's time to lock Jack Smith up," wrote @AmericanRebel.

"Jack Smith was hired as a DOJ hitman to take out Trump," wrote @SaveLibertyUS. "Jack Smith has always been a hitman. He was hired as a hitman before. He was hired as a hitman to destroy Trump.

"When Attorney General Merrick Garland, top DOJ officials, and Joe Biden’s handlers met to plan their next assault on the former president they all agreed on one thing. They needed to destroy President Trump completely and ensure that he never makes it to Election Day."

Video released Thursday by state troopers in Maryland shows the police response to a crash involving Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, with one officer reportedly sharing a witness's shocked statement that, “He was flying, and she wanted to merge, and he just smashed her.”

In the video, obtained by The Washington Post, a Maryland State Trooper is recorded on body camera saying: “The black car is, it’s actually, I think the senator of Pennsylvania — the real big, tall guy. ... He just ran into that red car."

The officer then shared a statement from a witness who said Fetterman was speeding and collided with the sedan as she tried to merge.

A first responder is also recorded on camera telling chuckling officers that he saw Fetterman in his classic shorts and sweatshirt combination, and said, "Good morning, senator."

“In 20 years of doing this, I’ve never had a politician," the first responder can be heard saying.

Fetterman and his wife Gisele were taken to the hospital after the crash, in which the senator was driving a Chevrolet Traverse when he rear-ended a Chevrolet Impala in northern Maryland near the Pennsylvania and West Virginia border. The Fettermans were driving in Hancock, Maryland, when the crash happened around 8 a.m.

"'John was treated for a bruised shoulder and they were discharged that afternoon," said a spokesperson, adding that both of them were "doing well" and "happy" after they returned to their home in Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Fetterman, a former mayor and lieutenant governor who was elected to the Senate in 2022, has struggled with health issues since suffering a stroke during the primaries.

The illness left him with impaired auditory processing capabilities, although he has since improved considerably.

A Long Island county leader and ally of former President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to recruit dozens of armed citizens to create an "emergency special deputy" force that can be mobilized whenever he needs it, such as during a blackout, hurricane or riot.

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican executive of Nassau County — once dubbed the safest county in America — put out a call in March for about 75 recruits with gun permits, and separately said he aimed to create "another layer of protection” for Long Islanders.

“I didn’t want to be in a situation where we had a major emergency and we needed help and people were not properly vetted or trained,” he said.

Blakeman's group of armed citizens, the first 25 of whom were said to be possibly ready by late May, raised questions such as: "Is that a militia?"

“Whose command will this militia be under? How much coordinating with the police will they do? How much training will they get? Will they be given other weapons when they are activated?” questioned a spokeswoman for the Nassau County Civil Liberties Union, according to WPIX.

Read also: 'Scary as hell': Militia expert says Trump tweet from GOP's Clay Higgins is call for 'civil war'

Blakeman said the force is not, in fact, a militia, and said they need to be armed during an emergency.

“How could you protect infrastructure if you’re not armed?” he said, according to The New York Times, adding, “What should we do? Hide under the covers?”

Blakeman — with recruits by his side — told protesters at a news conference that these people "will have firearms training, as well as the penal law — and "use of deadly force.” They would not, however, wear body cameras, and many would have previous police and military chops.

The members will receive $150 in tax money per day for each day they're activated.

Critics, including Nassau County legislator Delia DeRiggi-Whitton, have questioned the motives behind the force, with some implying it's a political stunt.

“It’s fear-mongering, and it’s very damaging to people,” DeRiggi-Whitton, the county's Democratic minority leader, told the Times.

Critics on social media openly questioned whether this construes a "Trump militia?"

"An 'emergency'. Do you see where this can lead?" asked @ReformedActuary on X.

"Nassau County exec, ex-hubby of Mrs. Paul McCartney, Bruce wacko Blakeman, avowed Republican and Trumpophile is creating a mini-militia," wrote @heyjudenyc. "Is it a precursor to Project 2025, a bit of a head start for the takeover?"

Following President Joe Biden's 58-minute long unscripted, solo press conference without a teleprompter, fielding questions from reporters and responding with nuance and depth on a range of issues including foreign and domestic policy, some critics are calling on his opponent, ex-president Donald Trump, to do the same.

It's been a long time since Trump has held an actual unscripted, lengthy, solo press conference, with questions from reporters, and well-over a year since he did one that wasn't centered on his legal crises.

"When is last time Trump did an hour long press conference? Anyone know?" asked Bloomberg News' Steven Dennis Thursday night after the President's press conference.

"So now the media will demand that Trump hold an hour-long press conference on complex foreign policy issues — right?" snarked attorney and legal commentator Tristan Snell, who headed the successful New York State civil prosecution of Trump University.

READ MORE: ‘Dead Heat’: Biden Ahead or Tied With Trump in Two New Post-Debate Polls

"Trump is getting a free pass just like he did in 2016. No way he could do a press conference for 40 minutes after 3 long days with world leaders. He is incoherent most of time when he’s not spewing bile," declared CNN Political Commentator Karen Finney Friday morning.

"It's now time for the corporate media to dissect every word Trump says for the next two weeks, have debates on his mental state, amplify the small number of Republicans who want Trump to drop out and demand he hold a press conference where we can dissect him even more," remarked attorney and SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah Friday morning.

"Per CSPAN last time Trump held a press conference that approached an hour in length at which he took questions from reporters, he was still president," observed Aaron Fritschner, Deputy Chief of Staff for U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) Friday morning.

READ MORE: ‘Betrayal’: Trump Hosts ‘Russian Puppet’ Viktor Orbán as Biden Hosts NATO Leaders

He adds, "Per the CSPAN archive, the last time Donald Trump took questions from reporters in a press conference was on February 8th. National and campaign reporters made an issue of the lack of press conferences with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. To date, they have not done so with Trump."

Per CSPAN last time Trump held a press conference that approached an hour in length at which he took questions from reporters, he was still president.
It was September 16, 2020. Some headlines from that press conference: https://t.co/3NcVDI0dpy pic.twitter.com/nNAQgGJgL9 — Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) July 12, 2024

On November 8, 2022, from Mar-a-Lago, after polls closed, Donald Trump delivered remarks discussing the midterm elections. He spoke for about four minutes to supporters and took no questions from reporters, whom he mocked. (Full C-SPAN video.)

Semafor's David Weigel argues, "A lot of the 'whatabout Trump' stuff is cope, but he really is getting an easy ride with interviewers compared to 2016 or 2020."

"Most of his interviews are softball-fests. When he did All-In the campaign had to clean up his green card/diploma answer."

READ MORE: ‘No Change’: Biden Debate Performance Has Had ‘Almost No Impact’ on 2024 Race Report Finds

While writing Criminology on Trump (2022) and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024), I had never imagined that even this extreme Supreme Court supermajority would rule in favor of Donald Trump’s quest for presidential immunity.

Alas, after the Court’s outrageous decision on July 1 that eviscerated the Constitution and confirmed Trump is not subject to the criminal law, I know that the wannabe dictator — Teflon Don — has been feeling legally, if not politically, vindicated. I also know that our Founding Fathers, informed that a president of their democratic republic had been granted the status of a king, would spin somersaults in their graves.

Because of the long-coming decision of this Supreme Court’s Christian nationalist MAGA majority, justice in Trump’s four separate criminal cases have been delayed, and possibly, eliminated altogether. More importantly, the justices’ legal chicanery has retroactively allowed a former president and all future presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions by untenably conflating “private interests” with “official duties.”

In very different words, these Supreme Court justices have “nullified” Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

Ideally, a decision of this magnitude should have been a unanimous one — 9-0 — with justices across the ideological spectrum speaking with a unified and principled voice.

READ: The risk of dumping Biden

Instead, the three justices that Trump nominated “cemented a 6-2 conservative majority that pushed the court further right, not only in embracing a broad view of presidential immunity, but also on an array of other topics – most notably, reducing the power of federal agencies, a long-favored target of conservative lawyers and legal scholars,” in the words of former Supreme Court litigator Amy Howe.

Certain justices themselves agreed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for one, wrote in her powerful dissent, the Supreme Court has made “a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law,” noting that the Court gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

As she opined, we should all fear for our democracy.

The question for this criminologist became: “How or why did crime and criminality – specifically a criminal conspiracy to overturn a presidential election – become the official business of a constitutionally empowered president of the United States?”

To find out how the Supreme Court avoided the answer to my question, obstructed justice or impeded due process, and eventually rendered such an absurd and perverted decision, you will have to read their convoluted logic for yourself and attempt to make sense of text that stubbornly defies logic, legal foundation or conservatives’ beloved principle of “originalism.”

Or, less painfully, you can read about it from Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama who’s now a distinguished professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama School of Law. As she wrote in Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance: “Presidents are kings” in the Supreme Court’s estimation.

To summarize Vance’s key takeaways:

The Supreme Court's decision “signals that they believe it’s more important to create a powerful presidency … then it is to be concerned with how a president could abuse that concentrated power, including to try and overturn an election.”

This was “a long decision with lots of moving parts” because there were five separate opinions written. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote a concurrence, as did Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “who joined most of Justice Roberts’ majority opinion, but not all of it.” Sotomayor wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who also wrote a separate dissent.

As Vance underscores, “the opinion itself is hard reading, even for appellate lawyers or those used to contemplating constitutional issues.” It is not law “written for the public, and that is an abdication of the Court’s responsibilities. Speaking of abdication of responsibility, both Justice Thomas and Justice Alito participated in the decision, an ongoing sign of the ethics dysfunction at the Court.”

Once more, the “Court has frittered away public confidence in its integrity as a democratic institution just when it’s needed the most, as the 2024 election, which like the one in 2020” may also end up in the courts.

The issue that the Supreme Court agreed to decide — which it never should have after trial judge Tanya Chutkan and a three-judge appellate panel had ruled unanimously that Trump could be prosecuted for actions undertaken while in the White House and in the run-up to Jan. 6 — was this: whether, and to what extent, Trump enjoyed “presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

As Vance writes below, the conservative supermajority issued a fairly direct answer finding that there were “three different categories of presidential conduct, and a different rule about immunity applies to each one,” as follows:

1.) “A former President has immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken with his ‘conclusive and preclusive’ constitutional authority — his official authority stemming from the Constitution and our laws. This is for the exercise of his core constitutional powers.”

2.) “He had presumptive immunity from prosecution for other official acts, unless the government establishes that permitting them to prosecute will not create a danger of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch. The Court calls this the ‘Twilight Zone’ of official acts, which includes areas where a president has shared immunity with Congress.”

3.) “There is no immunity for unofficial acts. [However,] there may be an issue about how to decide whether conduct is official or unofficial, but if it’s the latter, no immunity.”

Vance notes that had President Richard Nixon known he had this type of immunity, “he wouldn’t have resigned” from the presidency in 1974.

It also turns out that Nixon, during one of his exclusive 1977 interviews with David Frost, foreshadowed the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling 47 years in the future.

In response to Frost’s query about him having broken the law in relation to “a president believing that something is in the best interests of the nation,” Nixon legendarily replied: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

The three dissenting Supreme Court justices, Vance and this criminologist are hardly alone in our dismay. When I hunted through Google News for any commentaries that concurred with the Supreme Court’s pro-MAGA decision, I could not find any — save for Fox News, New York Post and several pro-MAGA publications.

Here are representative samples of what I did find:

From The Bulwark: “The Supreme Court is protecting the president from you. It should be the other way around.”

From The Washington Post: “Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling poses risk for democracy.”

From the Los Angeles Times: “We should all dissent from the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and not respectfully.”

From CNN Politics: “The Supreme Court just gave presidents a superpower.”

From PBS: “A President could pocket a bribe for a pardon, stage a military coup to retain power, order the killing of a rival by the Navy’s SEAL Team Six – and be protected.”

From Project Syndicate: “The US Supreme Court has now ruled that the Constitution entitles former President Donald Trump to “presumptive immunity” from criminal prosecution for actions related to his efforts to overturn the November 2020 election.”

From Talking Points Memo: “The Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to American democracy.”

From Slate: “In its awful immunity ruling… benefitting Donald Trump, the court seems so worried about future threats to democracy that could come from the possibility of bogus future criminal prosecutions of former presidents [that have never happened before in US history] that it is willing to let a legitimate election prosecution over a current threat against democracy go by the wayside.”

From The New York Times: “The Supreme Court creates a lawless presidency.”

From Salon: “The Supreme Court rules that Donald Trump can be a dictator.”

From Politico: “The Supreme Court gave Trump a stunning Gift – and rewrote the Constitution.”

From Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid: “Raise your hand if you remember learning about the separation of powers, and the fact that we have a democratically elected President with limited powers, not a fascist empowered dictator with unlimited powers?”

From Mother Jones: “The Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution is only guaranteed to fuel Democrats’ fear of a second Trump term and its impact on everything from the justice system to immigration to LGBT and other civil rights.”

Last month, in another assault on constitutional democracy, a 6-2 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts for the Supreme Court concluded in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo that the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine is dead, and that the era of executive branch agency rule is effectively over.

Elie Mystal, writing for The Nation, underscored the danger of this anti-scientific decision by detailing how it represents the unifying mission of The Federalist Society, Project 2025 of the Heritage Foundation, Trumpism and the Supreme Court supermajority.

“We just witnessed the biggest Supreme Court power grab since 1803,” Mystal lamented.

Mystal, a constitutional scholar, was referring to the fact that the Supreme Court “has given itself nearly unlimited power over the administrative state, putting everything from environmental protections to workers’ rights at risk.”

One might say that the “deconstruction of the administrative state” dreamed of and advocated by Steve Bannon, the once pardoned and now federally imprisoned advisor to the former president, is well on its way — especially should the felon and corruptor-in-chief return to the White House this coming January.

After all, the ideologically driven and anti-constitutional Supreme Court supermajority has now transformed itself and the presidency into imperial powerhouses. In the process, they have abandoned any semblance of legal principle and cultural tradition while setting both the First Amendment and stare decisis on fire.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.

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A Republican lawmaker appeared on Newsmax on Friday to warn his party about the possibility that Democrats may switch out President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

However, in the process, he inadvertently make a strong case for Biden's record while in office.

During the interview, Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) was asked about the dangers that someone such as Vice President Kamala Harris could take over from Biden at the top of the ticket and experience a media honeymoon that could last right up until the presidential election in November.

McCormick agreed with this assessment about the media environment surrounding Harris, and then added a bunch of positive economic indicators that could further cloud Republicans' efforts to win in November.

"If you look at what's going on in the markets, the stock markets have set several records in the last month," he said. "If you look at interest rates, they're probably going to come down in September, not really enough to affect the market, but you're going to have still a low unemployment rate."

ALSO READ: ‘Gonna be insanity’: Inside how Milwaukee Police will secure the Republican convention

Added to this, he said, the falling number of illegal border crossings in recent months could give Biden an argument that he "quote-unquote did something about the border."

Despite a lot of positive economic news in recent months -- including cooling inflation, continued strong job growth, and a strong stock market -- Democrats have struggled to get credit for it.

Watch the video below or at this link.

GOP lawmaker accidentally makes a good case for Biden's record www.youtube.com