Category: politics

Was Melania Trump Replaced by a Decoy? Let’s Check the Evidence

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

Would anyone notice if Melania Trump was replaced with a double?

While President Donald Trump is something of an open book, Melania Trump is more enigmatic than any recent First Lady. She says little in public, makes few appearances, has no personal cause that we know of, has hired scant staff, and we know little about the relationship she has with Donald – and what we know isn’t good. We also have very little knowledge of how she wants to use her lofty status to make the U.S. a better place.

So when a conspiracy theory recently sprung up about Melania being “replaced” with a body double to stand next to Donald while he bloviates, it had at least a patina of plausibility to it.

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The Nullification Eagle Will Not Save Us

Mike Rothschild

Donald Trump is the President of the United States.

Yeah, I know.

But no matter what you think of that fact, the fact remains that it is a fact. He was elected by a majority in the Electoral College, and his election was certified by Congress. He was sworn in, and in that moment, his arc as president fell under an umbrella of laws set down by the writers of the Constitution, and refined over the centuries.

There are five ways for a president to lose their status as president. They can:

  • be voted out of office in the ensuing election
  • resign
  • die in office
  • be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate
  • be removed by the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet via the 25th Amendment

Donald Trump will be in office unless one of these things happens.

Or, maybe the Supreme Court will just nullify the whole thing as Trump is buried under a blizzard of indictments and arrest warrants.

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The Questions We Dare Not Ask

Mike Rothschild

This week, a juicy and horrifying story from Vanity Fair portrayed President Trump as a man quickly and graphically spiraling out of alignment with reality.

The story described President Trump as isolating himself behind a wall of Fox News bullshit, consumed by darkness.  At one point, the piece describes a conversation Trump had with Steve Bannon, who described the risks of Trump being removed from office by a majority of the cabinet via the 25th Amendment. As one of the more troubling nuggets in the story claims,

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Trump, the NFL, and the Streisand Effect

Mike Rothschild

In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued a photographer taking pictures for an endeavor called the California Coastal Records project. Meant to document the erosion of the state’s beaches, the CCRP took one photo approximately every 500 feet all up and down California’s coast.

One of those pictures showed a particularly ritzy part of the Malibu coast, which happened to house Streisand’s mansion. The picture had been downloaded six times before Streisand’s suit, which alleged that the CCRP had violated her privacy, demanded the image be suppressed. The publicity brought by the suit brought a massive spotlight to the image, and it was downloaded nearly half-a-million times over the next month. In attempting to erase the image, Streisand brought it far more attention than it ever would have had otherwise.

This “Streisand Effect” is now cited whenever an attempt to stamp out information only makes that information more available.

Over the weekend, President Trump employed a version of the Streisand Effect to bring a massive spotlight to something that, before, had almost totally faded away from the public eye: NFL players taking a knee during the singing of the National Anthem.

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Here’s How President Trump Can Be the Hero of Harvey

Mike Rothschild

On my last appearance on the late, lamented Got Your Attention podcast (did I mention I make a charming and erudite podcast guest?) I mentioned that the drama in the White House mattered because it reflected the Trump administration’s ability to handle a crisis.

If President Trump couldn’t keep his own organization free of personnel churn, leaks, and factional warfare; how could he handle something truly dangerous like a pandemic, sudden foreign war, or natural disaster.

Well, we’re getting the answer to that question, because Hurricane Harvey is unquestionably the biggest event of the Trump era so far.

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