RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/the-trump-bragg-merchan-chess-game/

Is the president-elect being played?

It is rare to witness such a disconnect between pro-Trump media commentators and the Trump defense team as we’re seeing in today’s news: Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg agrees that Trump’s sentencing must be postponed while other proceedings — in particular, Trump’s posttrial motion to vacate the jury’s guilty verdicts — continue. There is outrage in the commentariat, yet Trump and his lawyers are spinning this development as a great victory.

There is a chess game going on here. Bottom line: I believe Bragg is trying to manipulate Trump into asking that the prosecution be suspended for four years.

Despite the Democrats’ campaign rhetoric, Trump is not a convicted felon now, a jury’s guilty verdict notwithstanding. Only the court’s formal entry of a judgment of conviction after sentencing makes a defendant a convicted felon. Bragg knows Trump does not want to be sentenced and have the judgment of conviction entered on the court’s record (and thus on Trump’s personal record). I wager that the DA is calculating that if the president-elect is given the choice of either a four-year suspension of the case or a sentencing so that Trump can eventually appeal the conviction, Trump will choose the former.

If it is Trump himself who asks for that outcome, all the people complaining about the unfairness and harm to the public interest of having a criminal case hanging over a sitting president’s head for four years will have to mute their outrage. And I think Trump is going to ask for that outcome — which is why his lawyers are already equating postponement with victory.

Let’s try to break it into the three relevant stages: (1) Trump’s posttrial motion to dismiss the guilty verdicts based on the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling (which is now on the table); (2) sentencing and entry of the judgment of conviction (which would happen if Judge Juan Merchan denies the posttrial motion); and (3) appeal, which most close observers experienced in criminal law issues believe Trump has a good chance of winning.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/is_burgum_the_right_choice_for_interior_secretary_and_energy_czar.html

From running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination himself, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum has proven himself a Trump loyalist who commands the president-elect’s trust. Announcing Burgum’s appointment at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump said, “He’s going to head the Department of Interior, and he’s going to be fantastic.”

However, given Burgum’s background, affiliations, and views on important issues, is he the right choice for Secretary of the Interior? Trump has also made him the nation’s energy czar by appointing him chairman of the newly formed National Energy Council. But is Burgum fit to chair the council and, under that post, take a seat on the National Security Council?

A close look at Burgum’s origins, career, political and policy plays, and most importantly, his association with people and ideologies in line with leftist-globalists is called for. The facts will make it evident that it won’t be unreasonable to ask if he will serve the interests of “We, the people” in the new Trump administration.

Burgum, a native North Dakotan, grew up in the small town of Arthur and earned a BA from North Dakota State University and an MBA from Stanford. His family had a thriving agribusiness started by his grandfather. His father’s death when he was in high school deeply affected him, and, showing initiative, he started a chimney-sweeping business while still an undergraduate. As an adolescent, he ran his own newspaper. These early efforts impressed his professors at Stanford.

After working as an analyst at McKinsey & Company, he adopted a data-driven approach to business and other decisions, which he still adheres to. In 1983, he invested in Great Plains Software, which he built into a billion-dollar business and sold to Microsoft in 2001. His Stanford classmate and friend Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft. He is also friends with Bill Gates, the Black Rock group, and many deep-pocketed energy industry CEOs.

Today, he’s one of the wealthiest and shrewdest politicians in the U.S. During his short-lived run for president, he spent more than $2.9 million on ads, more than any other politician or group. To reach the quota of donors who would take him to the debate stage, he offered $20 gift cards to each person who donated $1.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-two-american-nations/

In 1845, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations, a literary exposition of the social and economic changes that followed the industrial revolution, especially the travails and squalor of the urban working class set off against the aristocracy–– or ‘“the rich and the poor.’”

These two classes, as one character famously describes them, comprise “‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’”

The political polarization graphically on display during the recent presidential election season–– particularly the unhinged hysteria of the “woke” Democrats after Trump’s victory ––calls to mind Disraeli’s influential novel, for it captures our country’s great divide between not just the economic classes and political ideologies, but also mores, morals, values, tastes, cultures, and sensibilities. Not since the Civil War have such stark differences among the pluribus threatened the American unum.

America, of course, has always been divided by its complex diversity of ethnicities, languages, dialects, manners, customs, faiths, beliefs, cultures, and numerous other defining folkways. Our Constitutional structures are the Framers’ response to that contentious diversity: the Bill of Rights to protect diverse citizens, federalism to protect the diverse states, and a tripartite national government divided and mutually balanced to protect our freedom from the tyranny of any concentrated power attempting to dominate everybody else.

Starting in the later 19th century, for a while, new technologies both of communication such as radio, movies, and television; and of transportation like railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, distributed regional and ethnic cultures across the nation through entertainment, magazines, and tourism. Also, consumer capitalism and mass advertising more widely sold products and fashions that now became the tokens of identity in the homogenizing of America’s regional cultures, and the weakening of all those myriad ethnicities and their distinctive folkways accelerated this process.

Another change that contributed to the refashioning of identities was the postwar expansion and availability of higher education to a more diverse citizenry. Moreover, by the Sixties, colleges and universities were more liberal and left-wing than the nation as a whole, making a college education another marker of identity as well as social status. The influence of the left increasingly made political affiliations signs of elite status too, one with its own tastes and fashions in entertainment, clothes, travel, cuisines, and especially more liberal and hedonistic habits and behavior regarding sex and drugs.