Dark Brandon Godfather Moves
Sixteen things Biden, Harris & the Dems can—but would never—do in the next six weeks to stymie Trump, thwart the rise of U.S. fascism, protect the American people, and safeguard global democracy
With just six weeks remaining in office, and democracy in the United States and possibly the entire world hanging in the balance, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wasted an entire evening this weekend at an awards ceremony. Granted, the Kennedy Center Honors is a big deal. And I’m sure the two leaders enjoyed the rousing ovations they both received. But, like, come on, guys! We’re dyin’ over here!
The 47th Kennedy Center Honors revolved around The Godfather. This was fitting because, first of all, I have been fantasizing since 2017 about the DOJ unleashing a simultaneous mass arrest of all the Trump villains, in the manner of the classic Francis Ford Coppola film’s climactic Baptism Scene, where every last piece of Corleone family business is handled in one fell swoop. And, second, because The Godfather ends with the mob boss winning—just like the 2024 election!
Conventional wisdom holds that this is the “lame-duck” period of the Biden presidency—that he is too weak politically to get anything new off the ground. I hear that. But in 2024, this is objectively untrue. Joe Biden is the Chief Executive for 41 more days, and, thanks to the Supreme Court gifting him total immunity for all “official acts,” he is more, not less, powerful than he was when he took office in 2021. As I will explain, there are plenty of things he could still do to stymie Trump, thwart the rise of U.S. fascism, protect the American people, safeguard global democracy, and bring the evildoers to justice.
Below are 16 suggestions. Let’s begin with three action items we have been calling for on these pages since the first time Trump was president:
1. Release the Trump files
As LB has been patiently explaining for lo these many years, Donald Trump is 1) a creature of organized crime; 2) a confidential informant for the FBI; and 3) a Kremlin asset. The FBI is well aware of nos. 1 and 2; for all we know, Trump appointed Kash Patel as FBI Director just to destroy those incriminating files. The Intelligence Community is well aware of No. 3; for all we know, Trump appointed Putin groupie Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence just to destroy those incriminating files.
In a pre-emptive strike, Joe should declassify all of this material and then share it with us. He and Kamala might sit by the fireplace—the same fireplace, perhaps, where Biden hosted Trump and pretended he was a normal successor—and walk us through the highlights.
And don’t lecture me about sources and methods. Trump has already, multiple times, delivered classified intelligence to the Russians that directly led to sources being killed. We think, what, that this won’t happen again in Term #2? Redact what needs to be redacted, but out with it. Let the American people have no doubt that they elected a mobbed-up Putin puppet.
2. Ram through legislation gathering dust in the Senate, and all stalled nominations
As Lisa Marie Kerr wrote on these pages four full fucking years ago, the Vice President of the United States is also the President of the Senate. Kamala Harris has enormous power, if she chooses to use it:
The Standing Rules of the Senate give its presiding officer abundant power. But they do not require the Majority Leader to be that presiding officer. Delegation of priority recognition from the Vice President to the Majority Leader is not required by any written Rule of the Senate, or by any of its Standing Orders. As Vice Presidents took on greater executive duties, they simply began delegating the chair to chosen Senators. The Senate’s official history acknowledges that this “informal practice” crystalized into ongoing delegation to the Majority Leader in 1937, thus creating an “emperor without clothes.”
Delegation of presiding power has become a habit that none question—like cigarette smoking in the 60s. But the malignant cancer of delegation to Mitch McConnell is not required by the Constitution—and I argue that when delegation is chronically abused to block bills from the Senate floor, it is the duty of the Vice President to reclaim her presiding power. Obstructing is not presiding. It is blocking the air from our legislative lungs.
Basically, MVP can waltz in there, seize the gavel from Mitch McConnell—oh, wait, I forgot; Chuck Schumer is actually still the Senate majority Leader; oops, my bad—blow up the filibuster, and demand up-and-down votes on judicial appointments, stalled legislation, and anything else she damn well pleases. While she’s at it, she can read stuff into the record and force a vote on the Fourteenth Amendment, Article 3 (see #10, below).
3. Sic the IRS on Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh
On these very pages, also four full fucking years ago, my man Moscow Never Sleeps (MNS) laid out a plan to fix the Supreme Court. He focused on the activities of Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas, who, he writes,
has managerial responsibility over PAC money in her various organizations with alt-right dogwhistles like “Liberty” and “Heritage” in their names. Maybe she’s not raising it, or spending it, or even getting any of it paid to her. Not actually relevant. Under various lobbying, tax, and corporate laws, as a founder, spokesperson, and/or manager of these 501(c)(3) money sponges, she is still potentially personally responsible for how these tax-exempt First Amendment cash machines record and report their finances. . .
Tax-free status is a benefit provided by law, but it requires regular documentary proof that the organization claiming it is legally entitled thereto. Fraud in those documents is a felony, and the person guilty of that felony can be anyone involved in their preparation above a simply clerical level.
In the, again, four full fucking years since MNS wrote that, it has been meticulously reported, in Pro Publica and elsewhere, that Clarence Thomas covertly accepted breathtaking sums from Harlan Crow and other “friends.” So those Thomas joint tax filings are potentially extra radioactive. The reporting suggests that the same is true of Thomas’s fellow traveler in Opus Dei and graft, Sam Alito.
As for Brett Kavanaugh, LB and I covered his shady finances on these pages four fucking years ago this February. MNS, making the argument that Kavanaugh had run afoul of the law with regards his finances and his sworn statements thereto, had this to say:
The Kavanaughs paid $245,000 in a down payment for their house in 2006. According to Judge Kavanaugh’s financial disclosures for 2006 and afterwards, he borrowed only approximately $50,000 of that under a down payment loan program available to him as a federal employee. Where did the other almost $200,000 in down payment cash come from?
The mortgage payments—P&I alone, no property tax or insurance—for that house beginning in 2006 were approximately $55,000 a year. For at least the next two years, this was greater than the Kavanaughs took home net of taxes, and did not take into account any other housing costs, utilities, automotive costs, tuition, food, clothing, country club membership fees, etc. Other than going into significant debt, how did they afford to pay these bills?
What have we done about any of this? Not a God damn thing, of course. MNS ends his Clarence Thomas installment thusly:
If the Treasury and Justice Departments of the Biden/Harris Administration do not do a top-down review of the monetary reporting practices of every PAC from the NRA down to the National Association To Protect Televangelists From Tax And Fraud Laws, then I did not get the President I voted for, and neither did you.
[Narrator voice]: He did not, and we did not.
4. Send troops to defend Ukraine
The best way to defeat Putin is to [checks notes] defeat Putin. That means doing everything in our considerable power to help Ukraine kick his bony little behind.
Take a map of Ukraine. Draw a red line from the city of Kherson, in the south of the country, up the Dnipro River to the city of Dnipro, and from there north to Kharkiv. Send in U.S. troops—Western coalition/NATO troops, even better—to defend all of Ukraine west of that line, including Kharkiv, Dnipro, Kherson, Kyiv, Odesa, and the territory around the nuclear plant in Zaporizhia. Make it clear that that is de facto NATO territory. This will free up the Ukrainian army to win back Crimea and the eastern part of the country. If Putin rattles his nuclear sabres, roll in our own weapons to ensure he won’t use them.
Would this start a war with Russia? What do you mean, “start”? Guys, Russia has been at war with us for at least the last eight years. Best to acknowledge it and do what we can to win. Because the stakes could not be higher. As Molly McKew writes in Great Power,
there is no future for democracy — any of our democracies — if we are not willing to hold Russians accountable for their illegal war of aggression in Ukraine, which is based on genocidal intentions, and do it for as long as it takes…
Either we put Russia on trial in a generational justice initiative for all the war crimes they have committed in Ukraine since February 2022 — and use this as a vehicle to document the century of crimes for which Moscow will never stand trial — or we admit that we are too tired to defend the rules-based order any longer, and accept the century of chaotic nonlinearism that will come.
And don’t lecture me about escalation. Instead, ask the residents of Kherson or Mariupol for their thoughts on the subject.
Taking military action now would make it almost impossible politically for Trump to withdraw troops come January. And, best case scenario, the Ukrainians win the war in the next five weeks. That’s entirely possible, given that Putin’s vaunted army is either dead or in quagmire in the Donbas, leaving the vast expanse of Russia undefended. Here’s the thing: The only way to win the war with Russia is to, you know, fight the war with Russia.
But fear not, ye pacifists! There is a greater chance of Dark Brandon flying to Ukraine like Superman and laying waste to the Russian army with Cyclops death rays coming out of his eyes than for Biden to commit U.S. troops this late in the game.
5. Tell us what was in the top secret documents that Trump stole
Since we’re not going to get the trial Jack Smith worked so hard to bring about, we should at least get to see the evidence. This needs to be a fireside chat, or, better, a slickly-produced video special that interrupts programming on every network.
Instead, assuming we see the report at all, it will be in the form of a voluminous and heavily redacted ream of paper that Merrick Garland will release the Friday before inauguration, that Trump will call fake news, and that no one will bother to read.
Speaking of which. . .
6. Fire Merrick Garland
Let’s audible to a sports analogy. Fear and favor and football! With Garland behind center, we have endured some of the worst quarterback play in recent memory. Get Lisa Monaco throwing on the sidelines. Enough Kirk Cousins; let’s see what we have in Michael Penix!
Too little, too late, I realize, but, if nothing else, pulling the AG now gives the stadium crowd one last chance to boo him mercilessly.
7. Expose Trump/Russia election fuckery
On December 20th, the Director of National Intelligence will deliver unto Biden, per Trump’s Executive Order 13848, a report on foreign interference in the 2024 election. Spoiler alert: Russia interfered, or tried its damnedest to interfere, in the 2024 election. We know this because, a) Russia engaged in election fuckery in 2020 and 2016, and b) the stakes for Putin this time around are so high as to be existential.
As Christopher Steele writes in Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy, the 2024 election
represent[ed] Putin’s best and probably only shot at saving his regime and likely his life. As a result, he will be doing all he can to get a Republican isolationist elected to the White House. Again. It is sometimes easy to forget that Putin helped Trump to become president before, in 2016, as the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller made clear. And in 2016 the stakes for Putin were much lower. He is now desperate to have Trump back in the White House.
Just the purchase of Twitter by a traitorous Putin-fluffing South African Nazi-loving nepo baby in frequent communication with the Russian strongman, its rebranding as a single letter that is a halfway to a swastika, and its repurposing as a safe space for Nazis, MAGA, and Nazi MAGA…just that comprises, all by itself, a form of Kremlin interference. The artificial amplification of rightwing podcasts and YouTube shows via Tenet Media was also Kremlin interference. Ditto the fake bomb threats made to all those polling places in all those swing states on Election Day.
And that’s just the stuff we know about. What did Trump discuss with Putin in Helsinki? The translator knows; the NSA as well as allied intelligence services also likely know. How about those seven calls Citizen Donald made to the Kremlin leader Bob Woodward told us about? Enough MAGA gaslighting. Spill it, Joe.
8. Deny Trump intelligence briefings
Is there a constitutional amendment that says we are legally obligated to feed classified intelligence to a disgusting traitor who will forward said intelligence directly to his whoremasters in the Kremlin? No? Then maybe stop doing that.
9. Charge Elon Musk with violating the Logan Act
Just so you know, this pudgy, pasty, creepy, eugenics-loving fake cowboy apartheid Bond villain, whose 63 kids all hate his guts, and who received zero electoral votes, and who talks to Putin and Xi and MBS on the regular, is going to be our shadow president. This is catastrophic. Musk and his “broligarchs” are literally planning to boost the gold out of Fort Knox, y’all. That’s not economic policy; it’s a Goldfinger reboot. Indict this fraudulent motherfucker, publish the transcripts of his hotline bling with Putin, cancel his government contracts, and send his flabby ass back to Jo’Burg.
10. Bring up a bill in the Senate to offer Trump amnesty
As an insurrectionist, Donald Trump is ineligible to take office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, unless Congress grants him amnesty. Until that happens, he cannot be sworn in as POTUS. That’s the law of the land.
As the columnist and podcaster Kaitlin Byrd helpfully points out:
First, the Court was presented an argument for innocence in the Trump v. Anderson case where they made up their very terrible rules. Trump’s lawyers argued that Section 3 does not apply. The Court did not even touch it. The key aspect of the entire decision, in fact, supports the idea that Section 3 is valid and does apply, and as such, states cannot implement any efforts to enforce it. That’s for Congress alone to determine.
So my suggestion is that Congress already determined that Trump was an insurrectionist disqualified from the ballot — via impeachment.
She continues:
None of the defenses offered for the “not guilty” votes were that Donald Trump was innocent. There was the fact that he was no longer in office; there were questions about the Constitutionality of the Senate trial; there were calls for him to face criminal charges instead of political ones; there were people who said that the trial was a distraction from important pandemic response. But every single Republican Senator agreed that the events of January 6th were an insurrection. The only question was whether they would (or could) hold Trump accountable for it.
So, with that established, Democrats in the Senate now should take advantage of their slim majority, and bring up a bill to offer Trump amnesty, saying that it is necessary for Trump to be inaugurated. January 6th and his rejection of the peaceful transfer of power has never been properly handled by the system, and it needs to be cleared before we (collectively) let him take the oath again, especially since he demonstrates he has every intention of breaking it.
The Senate Democrats need to stop Chuck Schumering already and make this happen. Do exactly what Byrd suggests! There’s absolutely nothing to lose—other than, you know, American democracy.
11. Pardon everyone on the MAGA hit lists
Both crazy-eyed Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to head the FBI, and self-styled “Secretary of Retribution” Ivan Raiklin, Mike Flynn’s wingless Flying Monkey, have compiled “hit lists” of prominent people the incoming administration plans to have the MAGA feds go after. On those lists are, among many other people, Biden, Harris, Hillary Clinton, Liz Cheney, and anyone else of prominence who dared attempt to bring convicted felon Donald Trump to justice—or whose jib Patel and Raiklin don’t like the cut of.
As anyone who consumed any legacy media in the last couple of weeks well knows, because these MSM stunads can’t resist promoting false equivalencies about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden issued his kid a broad pardon. (He also pardoned a turkey for some reason.) He needs to do the same for every person on these hit lists. (Note: I was skeptical that accepting a preemptive pardon required admitting guilt, but Laurence Tribe, the nation’s foremost constitutional legal scholar, seems to think it doesn’t.)
12. Safeguard the civil service
Trump plans to impose Schedule F, which is the legal mechanism by which he can pink-slip tens of thousands of federal employees, and either eliminate those jobs entirely or fill them with unqualified MAGA sycophants. Biden needs to set up guardrails to protect these career civil servants.
I’m not well-versed enough in the legal machinations to know what Joe might do, but if Trump can implement a legal mechanism to do this, it follows that Biden can implement a preemptive legal mechanism to prevent it from happening. There’s a city full of policy wonks on the Potomac. Figure it out.
13. Refuse to certify the vote
MAGA has been insisting for four years that the VP has the ability to refuse to certify the results of a presidential election. Great! Kamala Harris should do just that. Or, if she doesn’t want to go that far, just don’t show up to work that day. Call in sick. Say you have covid. Resign in disgust. Ghost. Just don’t give these bullies the satisfaction of watching you humiliate yourself by handing over the White House to a rapist traitor.
14. Decline Trump’s request for Lincoln’s Bible
Trump put his short fingers on a Bible belonging to Abraham Lincoln at his first inauguration. (It was this sacrilege, this desecration, that inspired my friend Stephanie Koff to use “Lincoln’s Bible” as her Twitter handle.) Donald will likely ask again to borrow Abe’s Good Book. Tell the traitor no effin’ way, and that he should use one of the Trump-branded copies he had printed in China instead.
15. Refuse to swear him in
John Roberts could do this, citing the aforementioned Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3. We are more likely to see the Chief Justice molt, discard his robe and his human skin, and get beamed up to one of the drones over New Jersey than do something this ballsy and patriotic and right. But he could. And he should.
16. Boycott the inauguration
You’d have to strap me down and force open my eyelids like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange to get me to watch even 30 seconds of Trump’s second inauguration, not least because I can’t bear to see Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris smiling and nodding as a slurring Donald promises more American carnage. If it gets this far, they should all make like it’s the 1980 Moscow Summer Games and boycott. After all: if it gets this far, President Biden will have already stopped doing his job. He may as well punch out early and go home.
So, as you see, there are plenty of things Joe Biden could still do to stymie Trump, thwart the rise of U.S. fascism, protect the American people, safeguard global democracy, and bring the evildoers to justice. Will he do any of these things? Not a chance. At most he’ll hand out pardons like Rick Nielsen throwing guitar picks into the crowd at a Cheap Trick concert. The rest of this stuff? Not happening.
I’d love to be wrong, believe me, but from the looks of things, Biden has already waved the white flag. He’ll leave quietly, without a fight, like Sally Tessio at the end of The Godfather. And we’ll never hear from Dark Brandon again.
Photo credit: Dark Brandon and Michael Corleone at the baptism.
Someone needed to do this TY!! 👏 I think we’re Dark Brandon😎, not him. He’s ignoring us.
It’s TUESDAY!🎉I’d be happy just with 1-5!