UPDATE: Donald Trump Takes Office as the 47th US President
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Damn...that is a dimension I did not examine. Thanks.
Well then he's going to jail because Harris will win.
Well...add that to every other venture with his name on it that flopped...
For the record, here are some of Trump's noteworthy business failures.
Trump Airlines — Trump borrowed $245 million to purchase Eastern Air Shuttle. He branded it Trump Airlines. He added gold bathroom fixtures. Two years later Trump could not cover the interest payment on his loan and defaulted.
Trump Beverages — Although Trump touted his water as "one of the purest natural spring waters bottled in the world," it was simply bottled by a third party. Other beverages, including Trump Fire and Trump Power, seem not to have made it to market. And Trump's American Pale Ale died with a trademark withdrawal.
Trump Game — Milton Bradley tried to sell it. As did Hasbro. After investment, the game died and went out of circulation.
Trump Casinos — Trump filed for bankruptcy three times on his casinos, namely the Trump Taj Mahal, the Trump Marina and the Trump Plaza in New Jersey and the Trump Casino in Indiana. Trump avoided debt obligations of $3 billion the first time. Then $1.8 billion the second time. And then after reorganizing, shuffling money and assets, and waiting four years, Trump again declared bankruptcy after missing ongoing interest payments on multi-million dollar bonds. He was finally forced to step down as chairman.
Trump Magazine — Trump Style and Trump World were renamed Trump Magazine to reap advertising dollars from his name recognition. However, Trump Magazine also went out of business.
Trump Mortgage — Trump told CNBC in 2006 that "I think it's a great time to start a mortgage company. … The real-estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come." Then the real estate market collapsed. Trump had hired E.J. Ridings as CEO of Trump Mortgage and boasted that Ridings had been a "top executive of one of Wall Street's most prestigious investment banks." Turned out Ridings had only six months of experience as a stockbroker. Trump Mortgage closed and never paid a $298,274 judgment it owed a former employee, nor the $3,555 it owed in unpaid taxes.
Trump Steaks — Trump closed Trump Steaks due to a lack of sales while owing Buckhead Beef $715,000.
Trump's Travel Site — GoTrump.com was in business for one year. Failed.
Trumpnet — A telephone communication company that abandoned its trademark.
Trump Tower Tampa — Trump sold his name to the developers and received $2 million. Then the project went belly-up with only $3,500 left in the company. Condo buyers sued Trump for allegedly misleading them. Trump settled and paid as little as $11,115 to buyers who had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Trump University or the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative — Trump staged wealth-building seminars costing up to $34,995 for mentorships that would offer students access to Trump's secrets of success. Instructors turned out to be motivational speakers sometimes with criminal records. Lawsuits and criminal investigations abound.
Trump Vodka — Business failed due to a lack of sales.
Trump Fragrances — Success by Trump, Empire by Trump, and Donald Trump: The Fragrances all failed due to being discontinued, perhaps as a result of few sales.
Trump Mattress — Serta stopped offering a Trump-branded mattress, again likely due to slacking sales.
Truth Social — This existing Trump business owes big money, and may well be breathing its last.
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Analysis: John Roberts remains confounded by Donald Trump as election approaches
Analysis by Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst
8 minute read
Updated 8:04 AM EDT, Tue October 8, 2024
President Donald Trump, right, shakes hands with Chief Justice John Roberts as he arrives to deliver his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill i in Washington on February 4, 2020.
Gripas Yuri/ABACA/Shutterstock
CNN —
From the moment he was confirmed in 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts made it his mission to differentiate the Supreme Court from the political branches. Yet, the court is ensnared in politics perhaps more than ever – and by the chief’s own hand.
The former star appellate lawyer who allies once cast as the smartest person in the room remains confounded by the realities of Donald Trump.
Roberts was shaken by the adverse public reaction to his decision affording Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. His protestations that the case concerned the presidency, not Trump, held little currency.
Related articleSupreme Court signals it may uphold Biden’s regulations on ‘ghost gun’ kits
Unlike most of the justices, he made no public speeches over the summer. Colleagues and friends who saw him said he looked especially weary, as if carrying greater weight on his shoulders. On Monday, after he ascended the bench to formally open a new session, Roberts hewed to a familiar script and kept any emotion in check.
This is a fraught time for America’s highest court, as divisive rulings mount and controversy persists over the justices’ lack of an enforceable ethics code.
Roberts, who will turn 70 in January, faces a new slate of major cases to be heard in the coming months, including disputes over transgender rights, gun control, the death penalty and a possible return of Trump litigation. But perhaps the more significant immediate test of Roberts’ leadership will be litigation around the November 5 presidential election and the counting of votes.
The Roberts Court has been in sync with the GOP political agenda largely because of decisions the chief justice has authored: For Trump and other Republicans. Against voting rights and racial affirmative action. Against federal regulations over environmental, public health and consumer affairs.
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Roberts’ pattern of favoring GOP interests has been entrenched by his decisions in such cases as the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder (gutting part of the Voting Rights Act) and the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause (preventing US courts from stopping political parties from gerrymandering voting districts to their advantage).
But the politically charged valence deepened in the justices’ resolution of the case against former President Trump on election-interference charges from 2020. The court’s protracted action, even before its July 1 decision, ensured that Trump’s trial would not occur before his renewed bid for the White House, now against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
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How Amy Coney Barrett broke away from Chief Justice Roberts on Trump immunity ruling
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The Supreme Court’s stature has shrunk, according to multiple polls. In July, for example, after the Trump immunity decision was released and the annual session ended, fewer than half of Americans (47%) expressed a favorable opinion of the court, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Related articleSupreme Court declines to hear First Amendment challenges in gun display and Confederate statue protest cases
That favorable rating was 23 percentage points lower than in August 2020, when the conservative supermajority on the nine-member bench took hold. Part of the drop no doubt tracks the court’s 2022 decision overturning abortion rights, a decision to which Roberts partially dissented.
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Responses predictably differed based on people’s politics. Republicans held a far more favorable view of the Supreme Court than Democrats did, Pew reported.
Now, as a new term begins and a new round of election litigation looms, the question is whether Roberts will reinforce his conservatism or whether he will recalibrate as he has at other times. In 2020, for instance, he hedged on his opposition to abortion rights and retreated from prior sentiment against Obama-era protections for certain familial immigrants without documentation.
He is plainly mindful of his legacy.
“You wonder if you’re going to be John Marshall or you’re going to be Roger Taney,” Roberts told a law school audience in 2010, referring to the great 19th century chief justice and the latter chief who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that slaves were not citizens. “The answer is, of course, you are certainly not going to be John Marshall. But you want to avoid the danger of being Roger Taney.”
Roberts declined a CNN request for an interview.
Is another Bush v. Gore moment approaching?
Trump, whose pending criminal prosecution arises from his 2020 effort to overturn the valid results giving Joe Biden the White House, has already engaged in a series of lies about state ballot rules and other election procedures this cycle. In one of his especially audacious falsehoods, he has proclaimed that Harris will beat him only if she cheats.Dozens of Republican-generated lawsuits against state election practices are making their way through lower courts. Any litigation that is truly consequential in the Trump-Harris battle is likely to force the justices into rapid decision-making against tight deadlines.
The possibility of another Bush v. Gore hangs over the court. In that 2000 case testing which candidate could claim Florida’s crucial electoral votes, the court ruled for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush over then-Vice President Al Gore. The 5-4 decision fell along the justices’ ideological, if not political, lines.
Related articleNew documents show how Sandra Day O’Connor helped George W. Bush win the 2000 election
Roberts, who had served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and was in private practice at the time, assisted George W. Bush’s legal team. After Bush took the White House, he appointed Roberts to a US appellate court. In 2005, he elevated Roberts to the Supreme Court to succeed William Rehnquist, for whom Roberts had once worked.
In one early interview, Roberts told C-SPAN: “The most important thing for the public to understand is that we are not a political branch of government. They don’t elect us. If they don’t like what we’re doing, it’s more or less just too bad.”
In 2018, when Roberts tried to counter disparaging statements by Trump against federal judges, the chief justice proclaimed that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges,” rather “dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
“Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts,” Trump shot back that same day, “but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”
That November 2018 clash, sparked by controversy over federal asylum policy, showed Trump’s readiness to one-up any perceived adversary. Roberts said nothing more against Trump at the time, and he has since avoided any similar public reproach.
Roberts’ defenders say Trump immunity ruling is misunderstood
In an era of increased polarization and rising public distrust of government, Roberts does not inhabit the world he apparently envisioned when he first took his seat.As he was seizing the majority at the court for the most important decisions last session, his power to persuade the public was dissolving, evidenced by reaction to the Trump immunity case.
Special counsel Jack Smith has accused Trump of engaging in multiple crimes to stay in office, including lying to state officials to ignore true vote counts, trying to organize fake slates of state electors and directing a mob to march toward the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, where election results were to be certified.
Roberts, joined by his five fellow conservatives, found that the former president was entitled to presumptive, if not absolute, immunity for actions related to his official acts. Roberts’ view of official acts, as opposed to private ones, was vast.
Related articleSpecial counsel Jack Smith provides fullest picture yet of his 2020 election case against Trump in new filing
But the chief justice said such sweep was important to protect the office of the presidency: “(U)nlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies. … Our perspective must be more farsighted.”
Dissenting justices said the majority’s reasoning flew in the face of established precedent that would hold a president accountable.
“Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the liberal dissenters.
Law professors excoriated the majority’s reasoning, and Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz, writing in the New York Review of Books, went so far as to compare the decision to the Dred Scott case. He declared Trump v. United States “the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history.”
Roberts’ former law clerks have defended him to varying degrees. “I think a lot of reaction to the decision is somewhat overblown,” said lawyer Erin Murphy, now in private practice.
At a recent Georgetown University Law Center session, she said, “the Trump immunity case is less about Trump and more about not opening the door to” successive administrations “coming after previous presidents.”
Roman Martinez, also a former Roberts clerk in private appellate practice, said the decision was more open-ended than has been widely construed.
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New evidence about Trump’s alleged response when he found out Pence was in danger on Jan. 6
02:36 - Source: CNN
“There’s ambiguity as to the scope of the immunity,” he said. “There’s sorta question marks across different aspects of the opinion on what it means. … We haven’t seen the ending yet.”
Smith has recast the indictment, highlighting the nonofficial nature of Trump’s campaign efforts from the last election, as he now argues before US District Judge Tanya Chutkan that the case can proceed. Chutkan will decide which parts of the Smith indictment can go to trial, without breaching the court’s decision that declared the former president immune from prosecution for official, as opposed to private, conduct.
Last week, Chutkan released Smith’s 165-page motion for immunity determinations on Trump’s actions attempting to reverse the 2020 election results. Smith has argued that Trump’s challenge of the results stemmed from his private actions as a candidate desperate to keep the White House.
Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, a longtime friend of Roberts, spent time with him in July immediately after the Trump decision was issued. They taught together in Galway, Ireland, as part of a New England Law Boston program.
In an August essay for The Washington Post, Lazarus said the Roberts opinion “offers a surprisingly clear road map for the successful prosecution of Trump.”
“The bottom line is clear,” Lazarus wrote. “Whether you are outraged by or sympathetic to the surprising sweep of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, it nevertheless leaves the former president very much open to a successful felony prosecution.”
Whether that happens is beyond the hands of Roberts and the Supreme Court at the moment as Chutkan considers new filings. And it may be that Trump’s case is more truly in the hands of the voters.
They’re still bad. Liz and Dick Cheney are bad. George Bush is bad. Mitt Romney is bad. The Republican Party was awful before Trump and Democrats rehabbing their image is dumb.
You should be smarter than that. I would criticize Bernie if he was elected president but I didn’t like what he was doing. Criticism doesn’t mean you don’t support at the end of the day. I’ve been solidly pro-Kamala longer than anyone on this board. Cultists were calling me MAGA on a daily basis when I was saying Biden had to step down and the only alternative was Kamala.
I hear you on all that.
Kamala saying this doesn't move me personally.
But we have to acknowledge the 2 things that she is trying to do with this and let's discuss the best way for her to do it.
1. She is trying to find a way to break the social division in America. Or at least, portray herself as a unity candidate. I think it's a worthwhile goal to have. Well meaning Americans have had enough of how polarized and toxic have become. They want a return to normal and sane politicians/politics.
2. I bet that internally, her Intel is showing that the far left affiliations leave her vulnerable to attacks. I think she is trying to distance herself from them without saying it. Progressives think their ideas are always super popular but they don't realize how they can be turned into attacks from the other side afterwards.
So in your opinion what's the best way for her to do these two things?
And yet what I said is still true. What Cheney understands that you guys don't is that winning this election is more important than any of your causes or crusades. Cheney knows she will have 4 years to criticize Harris, but right now what's important is to go all in on winning.
Not shitting on Harris and saying how you will reluctantly vote for her anyway.
But then you guys don't know shit about winning elections.
Harris-Walz Campaign Partners With Stars, Filmmakers and Former Presidents for Video Series
The series features Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Doug Emhoff, Spike Lee, Stevie Wonder, Kerry Washington, Ava DuVernay, Eva Longoria, J.J. Abrams and more.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
Harris-Walz Campaign Partners With Stars, Filmmakers and Former Presidents for Video Series
The series features Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Doug Emhoff, Spike Lee, Stevie Wonder, Kerry Washington, Ava DuVernay, Eva Longoria, J.J. Abrams and more.By Chris Gardner
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October 11, 2024 10:04am
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris, Democratic vp nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minnesota first lady Gwen Walz celebrate after Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at Chicago's United Center on August 22, 2024. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign for the White House maximized its time in Chicago during August’s Democratic National Convention with production on a video series featuring some big-name Hollywood talent both in front of and behind the cameras.
Shot behind-the-scenes during the DNC, the video series is the brainchild of Tinseltown insiders and was created to showcase “unscripted and deeply personal” conversations from trusted voices about such topics as Harris’s bid for president, issues that matter most to voters, stakes of the upcoming election and more, per the campaign. The series will be rolling out in the coming days on the campaign’s platforms, all leading up to the Nov. 5 election.
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Those who helped produce the series include Kerry Washington, Alicia Keys and Oscar-winning producer Bruce Cohen. Those who directed their segments include J.J. Abrams, Oscar winner Spike Lee, Oscar nominee Ava DuVernay and Eva Longoria. As announced separately today by BET, Lee caught up with Stevie Wonder. The veteran filmmaker also sat for a candid conversation with President Bill Clinton.
Other conversations captured for the series include Abrams with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Longoria with President Barack Obama and DuVernay catching up with the Exonerated 5, a group she’s tight with after having created the Emmy nominated limited series When They See Us.
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Many of those involved in the series had high-profile roles at the DNC. Obama, Clinton and Emhoff all spoke during the program while Washington served as one of the week’s official hosts alongside Mindy Kaling, Tony Goldwyn and Ana Navarro who filled the slots on other nights. Longoria also had a featured role as a speaker during the final night of the convention, helping to coin a phrase voters in presidential elections know well by switching “yes, we can” to “she se puede.”
Dana Carvey says smashing ice cream into Maya Rudolph's face on 'SNL' was unplanned
Dana Carvey says he improvised smashing ice cream into Maya Rudolph's face during 'Saturday Night Live' cold open as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: 'I thought of it, and did it within two seconds.'
You know those idiots will say unless it says "Black men only" it doesn't count - even if they will benefit from it.
Yup. 1000%.
Just off the assistance with home down payment could make some a millionaire if you play it correctly....
Damn I didn't know Roland got an interview lined up with the VP for Sunday, good shit. That Crackkka tried his best to frame the argument and Roland steamrolled him
