It's Orca Week, because Trump jumped the shark and he's violating the Emoluments Clause. So sad! Too bad!
Trump leads the morning with unhinged logic about the tapes confirming the “catching and killing” the story of his Free Willy, just as his attempt to profit while being in the White House loses in court...
But the real story is explained by Ivanka’s prescience in abandoning her eponymous brand...
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected President Trump’s latest effort to stop a lawsuit that alleges Trump is violating the Constitution by continuing to do business with foreign governments.
The ruling, from U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte in Greenbelt, Md., will allow the plaintiffs in the case — the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia — to proceed with their case, which says Trump has violated the Constitution’s little-used emoluments clause.
The plaintiffs now want to interview Trump Organization employees and search company records to determine which foreign countries have spent money at Trump’s hotel in downtown Washington.
[Just how much are the Trumps making off the presidency?]
The decision, running over 50 pages, is an impressive, detailed analysis of the Constitution and 18th century language. This is a judge who did his homework. The ruling is the inevitable result of Trump’s decision to maintain ownership of his far-flung business operations and to continue to reap the benefits, foreign and domestic, resulting from his presidency.
(Ivanka Trump sure seems prescient in her decision to dump her clothing business, which raises many of the same issues of conflicts of interest and foreign emoluments as her father faces.)
The court held: “Plaintiffs have convincingly argued that the term ’emolument’ in both the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses, with slight refinements that the Court will address, means any ‘profit,’ ‘gain,’ or ‘advantage’ and that accordingly they have stated claims to the effect that the President, in certain instances, has violated both the Foreign and Domestic Clauses.” In doing so, the court rejected Trump’s argument that an emolument is only an emolument if the president gives the foreign government something in return.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
Fascinating how Trump’s lawyers argued that only the specific exchange as quid-pro-quo gifts counted rather than the use of benefits as exchange itself such as brand value as fungible.
This resembles the bad faith and false consciousness to promote hiring Americans while off-shoring manufacturing of signature goods, or hiring foreign workers for one’s hotels.
Earlier in the day, Ivanka Trump had acknowledged that she would be closing her apparel-and-accessories business, IT Collection, and laying off its employees. Trump publicly blamed her hectic schedule as an adviser to her father, President Donald Trump: “After 17 months in Washington, I do not know when or if I will ever return to the business,” she said, “but I do know that my focus for the foreseeable future will be the work I am doing here in Washington.” But the closure also comes at the end of an undeniably bad run for the fashion line, during which Nordstrom and other retailers stopped selling it, citing poor performance. In the end, it seemed, Ivanka Trump could not handle the heat.
Every Trump needs a personal brand, and, for the longest time, Ivanka’s has been as the Platonic ideal of the modern working woman—one who, through sheer determination, will have it all.
[...]
There’s nothing wrong with being good at multitasking, except when one of your tasks is to profit from a Trump-branded business, and another is to help run a Trump-branded White House. Trump made her first high-profile faux pas as the president’s daughter days after Donald Trump won the election, in November 2016, when she appeared on 60 Minutes wearing a $10,800 gold-and-diamond bangle from her own jewelry line, and, a day later, her brand’s marketing department sent an email blast publicizing the bracelet’s cameo.
[...]
All this comes at a moment when the line between politics and culture, if there ever was one, has utterly vanished. Corporations have demonstrated that they are susceptible to hashtag campaigns and public outcry.
www.theatlantic.com/...
The “architected” idealism of neoliberal feministic capitalism embodied in #PermitPatty, #BBQBecky, and #SidewalkSusan, reaches its withering away point. Such supply-side cultural economics inevitably makes class and race intersections more critical when daddy is a fascist and hubby is a crook. Like Woody Allen opines about relationships in Annie Hall: “I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark”
Enough with the media pilot fish (Maggie?) , we need an Orca Week because Trump has jumped the shark. He’s been trial ballooning so many memes like Putin being pro-Democrat, even as he stated clearly in Helsinki his Trump preference, which the WH tried to erase from the official record.
Constitutional Orcas, left and right working in concert….
Nicknamed 'Port' and 'Starboard' due to the respective directions in which their dorsal fins droop, the presence of the two orcas has also led to a decrease in shark sightings during the cave diving trips, indicating that the great whites have fled the area as a result.
'This is the fourth documented deceased white shark since May that we can connect to orca predation,' said Towner. Necropsies on the carcasses of the great whites washed ashore in early May confirmed that the great whites had been attacked by orcas, with bite barks on their pectoral fins confirmed to be those of orcas, and in all four cases now, the nutrient rich livers have been removed 'with surgical precision', but with the rest of the carcass mostly intact.
Orcas (also known as killer whales) are the only known predator of great white sharks, but the recent spate of attacks are the first time that the great white's carcasses have been washed ashore and therefore been available for more detailed study.
divemagazine.co.uk/...