The Homan bribe cover-up: It's become a threadbare cliche to ask "what would happen if a Democratic president did this?" By Hal M. Brown

Tue, Aug 26 at 5:23 AM

The title of the two articles, one above the other from The NY Times (above) tell a story even without my inserted words from and photos of Trump. 

MSNBC and other media covered the first story about Trump’s Truth Social post, so I didn’t have to read that Time’s article.

The Homan bribe story was all over the news yesterday (articles here).

Homan’s Wikipedia page is keeping up with this:

There’s not much to say about what the these stories tell about Trump’s obessive need for revenge and his corruption.

He’s going after people he considers enemies for (the following word is so appropriate) trumped up or non-existent crimes and allowing actual crimes by his allies, in this case bribery, to be covered up. This is so obvious we know what Garfield would say:

RawStory, in Trump's 'impeachable offense' sparks fury: 'Most corrupt thing I've seen from a president', published some reactions from social media.

When it comes to Trump, it has become a threadbare cliche to ask “what would happen if a Democratic president tried to do this?” For example, this is what Ron Filipowski posted this morning:

I don’t think that it remains to be seen whether or not Homan gets his just rewards. I very much doubt that he will. All I am curious about is what happens on what will prove to be the irrelevant edges of this story. I hope we’ll see congressional hearing over this. I want to see how Pam Bondi and Kash Pattel answer quesitons about why this never went anywhere. I want to see the FBI agents involved testify. I really want to see Homan himself under oath asked about it.

This bounced the Bondi and Homan and articles off the top of HUFFPOST:

Excerpt:

“To be very clear, [say] the president orders troops to go to every polling place in the United States on Election Day,” Bernstein ( Richard Bernstein, is an appellate lawyer focused on election issues and a former clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia) said. “According to the government’s argument, no federal court could enjoin it, the president would be immune and the president could pardon all of the people he ordered to break the criminal law. If that’s not a prescription for how to lose our republic, I don’t know what is.”

So many anti-Trump journalists and pundits are hinging their hopes on the Democrats winning back control of Congress. Don’t think Trump isn’t well aware that this would be possible if there are free and fair elections. He may not want to take his chances on the success for gerrymandering and the usual Republican cheating. 

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My early nomination for the Time Person of the Year and the Nobel Peace Prize

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, and the even more lofty Nobel Peace Prize, are the most prestigious and coveted awards that recognize the endeavors or accomplishments (outside of science) benefiting mankind by a person or a group of people.

As I despair about what is happening, both to our country and the world, where authoritarianism is taking or has taken hold, I wish one or both of these awards could be awarded to the people who are trying to fight it. 

It may not be a universal aspect of human nature, but most people crave or at least appreciate recognition for efforts they’ve expended to achieve, or are trying to achieve. People like Trump lust after it. Most others, from Time’s award to the Nobels, to winners of Oscars, Emmys, or Pullitzers, at least get a rush when they win one.

My nomination for the Time/Nobel can be divided into categories, though this really isn’t necessary. It includes everyone who participated in a demonstration against an authoritarian leader, everyone who shared by talking or writing about what was happening, and in a different way, everyone who risked or gave their lives fighting it in Ukraine.

I wish one or both of these awards could be given now. I have no doubt that millions of us are despairing. We need a boost. 

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Jimmy Kimmel may have his name become a verb. It could be the new word of the year. So far Trump is killing democracy by kimmelling it.

Tue, Aug 26 at 5:23 AM

 

In 2024 the Oxford new word of the year was term, not a word. It was brain rot (click here). Now we have a possible 2025 word of the year thanks to Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmelled, to be kimmelled, and kimmelling arent listed as newly coined words in the Oxford English Dictionary, at least not yet. However, they may very well be added before long. The defintion of “to be kimmelled” barely needs to be spelled out. Starting now Trump has a list of people, TV personalities and shows, and organizations he wants to be kimmelled.

What Trump said on Air Force One as he departed from the UK is making the news:

The word itself sounds ominous. Take out three letters in the middle…

and we see what it spells.

Being kimmelled will end up meaning something short of being literally killed. Trump’s psychopathy (pronounced as "sigh-KOP-uh-thee) isn’t at the level of those of despots who order enemies actually killed whether formally or clandestinely by their agents. He is “merely” content to ruin lives.

If the word gains traction I can see someone who was fired because of their criticizing Trump saying “I’ve been kimmelled” or those involved in a TV show like, for example, The View” saying “we’ve been kimmelled.”

This is far more than an assault on the First Amendment. This is an assault on the entire US Constitution. It makes sense to begin with the amendment the Founders thought important enough to put as number one before moving onto the other nine in The Bill of Rights. 

Above is actually still on this US government website for children called Ben’s Guide. Ben of course, is Ben Franklin.

Trump has used coercion and lawsuits to try to impose his will. Trump has only employed hard force in his anti-immigrant mania. He has used ICE and other armed agents, including soldiers, rather than the equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo. He is wearing velvet gloves to keep the blood of his victims off his hands. He has a sanitized version of a blitzkrieg.

What Trump and his toadie enablers are doing is killing democracy and replacing it incrementally with a dictatorial autocracy. Ben, in Heaven, would not be happy if he could see what was happening.

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Kimmel may have gotten fired for a telling a joke about Trump, ABC should now stand for Always Bow and Cower.

Most people have heard of the stages of grief even if they aren’t familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (article). Jimmy Kimmel certainly knows about it because he referenced it in his monologue. Playing psychologist, he altered the fourth stage just for Trump and showed how quickly he moved to the final stage of acceptance.

If you haven’t seen or read the portions of the Jimmy Kimmel monologue that led to him being fired click 1 here 1

Sabrina Haake has a great first sentence in her Substack “Jimmy Kimmel has a First Amendment claim against Trump's FCC. (here)” It is “If Trump’s skin gets any thinner the US will have its first translucent president.” 

She goes on to say:

Trump, who relishes belittling people with unpresidential insults, like calling democrats ‘scum’ and ‘the enemy within,’ can’t take it when his slurs boomerang back at him.

Instead of accepting that jokes, jabs and insults come with the territory—satirizing presidents is an American tradition— Trump reacts like an enraged teenager when anyone insults him. Whenever the media fail to fawn, or worse, accurately report Trump’s unprecedented corruption or ineptitude, his first instinct is to use federal resources to seek retribution against them.

She then goes on to focus both on legal issues (she’s an attorney) and Trump’s psychology which covers much of what I planned to write about this morning.

My premise is that the real “crime” that led to Kimmel’s dismissal wasn’t what he said about Charlie Kirk. It is what he said about Trump. I am not alone in this. Others commenting on the firing have been expressing this opinion.

We’ll never know whether Trump himself pushed hard to have him fired. It may not matter since ABC knew how he felt about Kimmel and what would make him happy. 

When it comes to Trump unless they keep Kimmel’s show the letters ABC forever will mean Always Bow and Cower.

Unless he’s really thick Trump had to know he waded into the shit when he saw the monologue. If he realized this he’d have been triggered when Kimmel talked about the fourth stage of grief after he played the clip of his bragging about his glorious ballroom. This is where he plans to have Trumpian Big Balls which he can show off to prove how great he is - make of that what you will.

He may have thought “enough is enough” and picked up the phone and called Bob Iger and told him to get rid of that Kimmel guy.

Trump set himself up. Not being the most self-aware person in the room he may not have realized that he made himself the butt of the joke with his own words. We know he boycotts that White House Correspondents Dinner because he had to sit through being mocked there by Barack Obama (see article which has a video). 

Trump made himself the butt of Obama’s jokes by promoting the Obama birth certificate conspiracy (see Wikipedia).

That took some thought and planning. He spontaneously made himself the butt of Kimmel’s joke just by being himself.

In fact, in some ways Trump is the most unfunny joke in American history but if he wasn’t about to destroy democracy we would find his antics hilarious. Now when we hear well crafted jokes about him the saying “that’s so funny it hurts to laugh” applies.

Still, whenever possible those with a platform must keep mocking him. 

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What Jimmy Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk

"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was, uh, grieving on Friday − the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.

Then he showed the clip of what the president said after a reporter asked him how he was holding up after the death of his friend Charlie Kirk and Trump said “I think very good” before going on to brag about the new White House ballroom he was having built:

“And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”

The this is what Kimmel said:

Yes, he's at the fourth stage of grief: construction. Demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend; this is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK? And it didn't just happen once. And then we installed the most beautiful chandelier. Responses you wouldn't believe. Who thinks like that, and why are we building a $200 million chandlier in the White House? Is it possible that he's doing it intentionally so he can be bad about that instead of the (Jeffrey) Epstein list? …

There was more:

“And it didn’t just happen once,” Kimmel continued, throwing to a clip from Fox and Friends, where the President again responded to a question about Kirk’s death by talking about his ballroom.

“Oh, when I heard it? I was in the midst of building a great… for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right?” Trump said before going on to reveal that the architects informed him of Kirk’s shooting.

“There’s something wrong with him, there really is,” Kimmel stated. “I mean, who thinks like that?”

More importantly, the late-night host questioned, “Why are we building a $200 million ballroom in the White House? Is it possible that he’s doing it intentionally so we can be mad about that instead of the Epstein list?”

TV Insider has an article about this which incudes his entire 16 minute monologue.