It’s insane to me that they’re not charging him with treason in the documents case. There are ties to Russian intelligence as well as sale of confidential submarine plans.
It’s strategic. Why set the bar any higher than it needs to be to put him away for life?
That’s a fair point, but only treason would exempt him from holding office again.
Put him behind bars, THEN charge him for treason. Make him show up to court in handcuffs and an orange jumper, to match his face.
Dude is gonna look like Palpatine when he can’t get bronzer anymore.
Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3:
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Insurrection and rebellion, not treason.
Look up what the constitutionally enumerated definition of treason is, then re-read the second to last sentence of your quote. You have to try to commit treason in the US. This is a winner winner chicken dinner situation.
To set an example for the next treasonous, racist piece of shit that the GOP nominates.
And maybe as a warning for Clarence Thomas and company.
And maybe to pave the way for charging Kushner and the rest of Trump’s nepotistic administration.
See, there are lots of reasons to throw the book at Trump.
I think the concern is inciting retaliatory violence.
I don’t think that should be a concern of a prosecuting authority. If people break the law, especially at the scale and severity that Trump did, they need to be prosecuted. If other people retaliate, then prosecute them accordingly. We didn’t stop prosecuting Jan 6 insurrectionists just because of inflammatory rhetoric, and we shouldn’t hold back here.
I agree. But if I was the prosecutor, I would be doing my best to make sure everything is rock solid. Even then, it might not be enough.
I really really want to believe people are over Trump, but somehow so many are hook, line and sinker.
I agree that the case needs to be airtight, and I agree that the most slam-dunk offenses should be prosecuted first. I was just taking issue with the “why bother prosecuting for treason when lesser offenses are enough to put him in jail for the rest of his life” logic
He still has 100s of millions supporters. That’s the part that scares me.
That can’t be a concern. The government can be fully able to prepare and handle any sort of MAGA uprising.
Oh how I would love to see a wobbly pack of Oatkeepers try to break him from jail. Need to stock up on snacks.
But a disturbing amount of Lemmy is ready and willing to risk making him President because of one issue that Trump would also do nothing to fix.
*Because of one issue that Trump explicitly said he would do much much worse with
I’ll never fucking understand it. They claim to care, but he will be substantially worse, and also make their lives directly worse on top of it.
I get it. Nobody wants to actively vote for a guy supporting genocide. But they need to grow up and realize that if they can’t make a good choice, they need to make the better choice, no matter how much it sucks that we’re at this point.
One supports it (probably because he can’t please everyone)
The other would gleefully assist in the genocide
I think Biden would please a lot more people if he just didn’t pick a side. Nobody I talk to, no matter where on the political spectrum they land, likes him supporting Israel.
I haven’t heard about this in YEARS but wasn’t there something about us having to support Israel to have a friend in the Middle East?
Also why haven’t I heard about that in years 🤔
(For the record, I’m pro-no-more-dead-kids, and anti-famine.)
I’m not sure if you mean on main stream news or not but I see that sentiment here daily
Sadly the side was chosen before he was even VP. The U.S. has been sending money and weapons for decades.
Biden is already assisting it.
And “he can’t please everyone” is not a good excuse for it.
If you don’t want to actively vote for a guy supporting genocide, then exercise your right to not do that by picking a third party candidate that best aligns with your interests and vote for them. Disparaging the people whose votes you absolutely have to have isn’t going to persuade them to vote for the person you’re voting for. Just makes you look silly.
It’s the Bernie Bros all over again. No need to bother they’re almost as cultish as maga
It’s #walkaway all over again.
Sad how shortsighted we as a nation have become
Nailed it.
I’m not continuing to participate in this failed system brah!
Seems to be the best argument they can come up with… As if 4% voting third party would make a difference except to help elect a full on fascist
As if 4% voting third party would make a difference except to help elect a full on fascist
Aye, there’s the rub
You guys should really think about changing your voting system.
Our voting uses something called a Single Transferable Vote. You can rank candidates in order of preference - last place gets eliminated and any votes they got are instead transferred to each voters’ next preference. Repeat until there’s only one left.
It cuts out most of the stupid games and you get to see people’s positions more honestly.
In this case it’d let people vote for an anti genocide candidate and still indicate that they’d prefer Biden over Trump.
You guys should really think about changing your voting system.
Lmao – ooooohhhh why didn’t we think of that!
Just snap our fingers and change the system!
You can’t just snap your fingers, but you could try to get ranked choice voting approved locally, which would make it easier to get it state wide which would make it easier to get it federally.
My city just passed that if no candidate gets at least 50% they drop the lowest voted people and everyone votes again. It’s not perfect, but it’s progress!!
In many red states, republiQans are passing laws to specifically prevent this change.
We have to vote them out first, and that is unfortunately under the FPTP system. After that, we have to save the planet and restore women’s bodily autonomy. Then we have to kill the Slaver’s College. then we can get to ranked choice. It’s a full slate.
The year Trudeau first ran he talked a big game. The Conservative party was unpopular after being in power for a decade and the NDP and Greens were in the best shape they’d been in for quite a while and for the first time it seemed like anybody’s game. The NDP/Greens with McNair and May respectively spoke eloquently about the need for representive voting systems and Trudeau on national television during debate made it an election promise for the Liberal party he represented (Liberal here is a brand though the party is pretty generally pretty lower case liberal as well). When he got in despite the support of those other parties it never materialized.
Here in British Columbia trying to capitalize on the sentiments the Provincial government ran a lame horse of a referendum campaign where they brought forward three really complicated systems that largely dealt with how ridings were weighted by representation which was better than nothing but because it took two hours to explain how the three systems worked most people checked out of it and voted for first past the post to remain. It was like it was constructed by acedemics who had never spoken to a person before. They didn’t need a referendum. They could have just passed something, any of the three options and we would be better off than we were.
I have remained salty about this since 2017.
Understandably!
Same. I don’t think think I’ve liberal since.
This is not a system where institutional changes have much chance of occurring, especially where “tradition” is involved.
Half of the voting population is against anything resembling reform or progress, and only “for” regressive draconian changes. The other half has such a broad difference of opinion on what should be addressed first that they waste their time squabbling about it even when they have control of the executive branch and both parts of the legislative branch. When they do make changes, they make so many compromises and concessions that the changes are effectively small.
You guys should really think about changing your voting system.
Single Transferable Vote, Preference Vote, basically anything works better than FPTP.
This is something that could be fixed at a state level no less, since the states run the elections subject to a handful of federal requirements none of which mandate FPTP voting.
I haven’t seen a single person say they’ll vote for Trump because of the genocide in Gaza. I’m sure they exist, I just haven’t seen it yet…
It’s not about those voting for him, they’re a lost cause.
It’s the fact that if you don’t vote for Biden, based on the current options and possible outcomes available, you are saying that you’re okay with Trump beating him.
US elections basically come down to turnout of Democrat voters.
The GOP has baked in voting as a civic duty and party loyalty as core values, so GOP votes mostly change one casket at a time.
Dem voters are a lot more flighty, and a lot more willing to refuse to vote or vote third party if the Dem candidate isn’t everything they want. There are more Dem voters than GOP voters, but fewer of them actually vote in any given election.Which means that GOP turnout is pretty stable and Dem turnout is all over the place.
A big part of why Trump lost in 2020 is that Dem messaging was all about inspiring terror in their own voters that Trump might win again, so get your asses out and vote or else! Same as now, and it might hold as a tactic until there’s a GOP candidate they can’t successfully work the fear angle on, and then the GOP will win and if the US isn’t destroyed in the ensuing four years Dems will have a hard time winning again until they find a new tactic.
Correction: trum claimed he would fix that issue. By basically eradicating Gaza, but still…
Constituents don’t have many cards they’re allowed to hold. So the ones we can, we will clutch with a death grip.
Some of us refuse to let anyone know who we vote for until the pen meets the paper. Because the President is supposed to work for the people, so we’ll make them work for it as long as we can.
That’s great.
I’m talking about the people specifically saying they will not vote for Biden.
Those are likely Russian trolls or those who drank the trolls’ piss-saturated Kool-aid, hun. You can’t expect them to have sound reasoning.
And? I’m saying I’m disturbed by the volume of them, hun.
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Nice obvious troll my man but you gotta put in a little more effort.
I’m not even sure it’s nice? Wasn’t funny and really not even poignant. I give it 1/10.
Nah, I’d imagine he’s also voting Democrat.
I was about to say “Holy shit, that’s impressive. I need a source for that” and you got one ready. Good job, OP!
This is just one of meetings that happened before the mentioned time frame (still bad though).
Here’s what I found when trying to check it:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1UR36H/ (note this, like many other of his meetings with putin, was posted first by Russian media and our media reported based on their reporting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/19/white-house-isnt-worried-about-telling-public-who-trump-is-talking-when/).
I got a paywall, how do you view the archive version of this?
Thank you!
If anyone thinks that the CIA and deep state is still secretly controlling the United States, picking the leaders, influencing media to present only the narrative that they want to see presented… well, now you got your answer. They’re not. If they were, every single TV news show every single night would be running stories about this kind of thing, and good things Biden has done, and associates of Trump who need to be in prison who aren’t yet.
The irony is that some version of that influence and control campaign actually is happening now, on behalf of other countries, on social media. Their propaganda is getting presented front and center and getting tons of traction, and the US is in the unusual position of playing catch up on the influencing-mass-opinion game.
I feel there’s an element in the CIA that’s totally OK with Trump being in power, because it means they get everything green-lit (or Trump simply handwaves them gaining semi-autonomy again, like the bad old days). Remember, the years where they could simply launch a completely unauthorized coup in a foreign country are still within living memory, and well within institutional memory, and I’m sure there’s enough spooks that absolutely want that sort of power back.
I think it’s more like the CIA is just running a completely different game. They wouldn’t dare want to bring any attention to themselves. The last thing they want is national scrutiny, even if it begins with the public on their side all it does is open the door for more probes and questions about where their money goes and what they’ve been doing.
Remember, the years where they could simply launch a completely unauthorized coup in a foreign country are still within living memory, and well within institutional memory, and I’m sure there’s enough spooks that absolutely want that sort of power back.
I thought that was within living memory because that shit was still happening right now, and they just tend to declassify shit that’s like 50 years old that they don’t care about anymore, so that’s why we only ever hear about the ones that happened 50 years ago.
I say the CIA never had any meaningful domestic power. They were a convenient place for J Edgar Hoover to point at when he didn’t want scrutiny on his agency and the secret nature of their work in addition to the considerable power of the FBI under Hoover kept them from defending themselves.
I say the CIA never had any meaningful domestic power.
crack epidemic?
George HW Bush was director of the CIA before President, but i guess that doesnt count as meaningful enough for you?
Since we’re big fans of attributing causation to correlation here, he was also captain of his HS varsity baseball team, and I think that’s what really got him the presidency.
And before that, his family got rich aiding the Nazis.
He was also Vice President to a very popular President immediately before being elected. I think that had more to do with his becoming President than his time as director of the CIA.
It doesn’t count as the CIA. When HW became President, HE had the power, not the CIA.
Carter: Tell me about the UFOs.
Bush the I: not until you make me CIA director for life.
Carter: That’s not happening.
Bush the I: sucks to be you then. click
Maga: OK, but look what Biden did!!
What did he do?
Maga: OMG how can you not know sheeple?
Ok, but what did he do? Did he leak classified information? Did he try to overthrow our government?
Maga:…
MAGA: No, worse, he’s cancelling student loans!
And letting tRaNs people use restrooms that match their gender identity!
of which were then shutdown about 6 months after. And reinstated later on…
He smoked crack with a hooker!
And how does that affect the rest of us?
…
he’s old!!!
“Muh Hunter Biden laptop.”
Being completely serious about the laptop, the most serious allegations against Joe Biden from all their obsessing over Hunter Biden is a claim that he had been engaging in essentially pay-for-access while in office (as VP and/or as a Senator), using family as intermediaries to facilitate it.
Replace “family” with “hotels” and you’ve got something we’re all pretty sure Trump was also doing as president.
Also, official MAGA lore is that there’s like 5 laptops now 🤣
More, DOJ: “Hey listen, we’ve known about this for four years straight but our hands are tied until after the election. Maybe hope that SDNY case about hush money to a sex worker pays off.”
He will get a fine. There’s a near zero chance he would ever get anything more besides fines.
The US justice system is the best in the world and completely above reproach praise be
i think beyond possibly getting paid for it, trump also wanted to pull a kissinger except with russia this time.
also the fact he isnt already in jail gives me strong “not a real democracy” vibes from the US.
Can you elaborate on “pull a Kissinger?”
i mean his strategy to try and approximate with china, ussr’s biggest ally at that time, to make it easier to overthrow/control them. basically divide to conquer, but swap out the countries.
the republican narrative in general seem to be very anti-china and hint a lot about war with them, but not so much with russia which can be considered just as much of a rival if not more. especially right now with the ukraine war. i’m thinking republicans want to be on good terms with russia and ukraine be damned so they can more easily isolate what its currently a huge economic partner from china. they are currently doing this in india apparently successfully. so they are getting cozy with russians and being quiet about it to try and have them as semi-friends somehow.
big disclaimer though: i think this strategy is very dumb, and i doubt this will work. i don’t think trump is capable of the evil genius villian shit kissinger was. just the comically evil dumb fascism we expect from him, and that no head of state not already aligned with the specific brand of us-republican fascism will take.
at best they will get used for russia’s benefit. which is looking like the case already with all the suff coming out about it in the investigations lololololol
This line of reasoning is inspired by a theory in international relations called “realism”, with Mearsheimer, Mordhaus, etc. as their core theorists.
It states that the world is divided by superpowers, fighting for power constantly, with all other countries being mere poker chips for them to divide amongst themselves. What countries or people in them want is largely irrelevant.
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gives me strong “not a real democracy” vibes from the US.
Your vibes are indeed correct.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Oh, that’s what the final straw was for you? Been here long?
oh no, just one of the straws you can point at when someone tries to argue the us has freedom or democracy.
Fair. I know that straw well, among others. It’s been our biggest export for generations! 😅😶 Don’t let the local Democracy Officer hear you, though. 🤫
He’s checks notes creating jobs!
Creating job openings***
Just in case anybody doesn’t know, and really just for the fun of saying it, the reason he’d help putin is that putin most likely has a recording of trump having sex with underage russian girls… also something about getting peed on as well.
Non-“presidential” material, in any case.
To give Trump a bit of credit, I cannot see his ego being willing to suck a dick as hard as he’s sucking the russian’s without there being an absolute need to stoop that low. But maybe he’s just a grade A POS instead of the second-rate hack he appears to be.
Is that any worse than stuff he’s actually done? I don’t see why he’d care about this particular instance of being a thunder cunt.
You’re assuming under age as in mid teens. I’m pretty sure we’re talking prepubescent.
mid teens would still be pedophillia though, so.
Yes but that’s not how the media refers to it. You’ll notice that the media often refers to “underage women” when referring to teenagers. But you can’t do that when the girls are still in primary school.
well i mean, underage would be a general term referring to people under the age of 18, so that makes sense. Unless they’re children i would kind of expect that to be the case. Nobody refers to children as “under aged individuals” we refer to them as children lol, and teens aren’t generally considered to be children.
I don’t think the pee tape exists, and I think the dirt Putin has is much less juicy.
I think Trump is getting out of debt, and literally nothing else. He’s an easy man to buy. He’s pathetically simple and mercantile in his approach to diplomacy, for lack of a better word, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to manipulate him.
Trump owes Russian Banks money, Putin is willing to make the payments if Trump is compliant, that’s all it takes for Trump to commit treason.
For the record, the rumor is that he watched prostitutes pee on the bed that Obama slept on when he visited.
Using prostitutes to get important people in compromising situations is a well worn KGB trick and obviously standard practice for Russia to put recording equipment anywhere they think they can get away with it.
So really the question is whether you think it’s plausible Trump would want to watch such a thing or at least be ok with staying in the room while it happened. If he was there, it was almost certainly done by prostitutes and almost certainly recorded.
And the so called patriots are cheering him on. What a world we live in.
Those who are pleased to describe themselves as patriots are, almost every man jack of them the most self-aggrandising, vacuous, cruel, and dishonourable villains ever to fold a protein.
- country
I dunno, it seems to be in UK, AUS, NZ and India as well.
The absolute devastation to peace in Western Europe if this fuckwad wins in November. WW3 incoming
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Don’t be a twat. The russians are obliterating entire towns for literally no reason other than Putin wants more territory. They’ll rape and torture their way across the whole continent if they’re not stopped.
Western European culture isn’t perfect but it’s a lot better than blind obedience to the tzar. If you love Russia so much, fucking move there. Who knows maybe you can help take chasiv year and your tzar will reward you with plenty of babies to rape.
Twat
Do you sign up to be first in line?
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Nah if it starts you’re going to be among the targets
I promise the world will make more sense when you grow up.
sadfsdfasfasf
I didn’t say anything about their culture, it would persist or even strengthen with a war. Deterioration of peace is scary though
i guess we should obliterate the eastern europeans as well. They haven’t seen one in a while, i think they might be over due in terms of cultural evaporation by now.
I recall back in the day that Dutch intelligence agencies hacked their way into cameras in the buildings of the cozy bear hackers that hacked the DNC. they shared their findings with the US and then Trump used that info publicly to try and kick the Democratic party. This in turn caused the hacks to be fixed, and the Dutch agency losing their access. There is some more detail about it that I don’t recall, but I do recall the director of the Dutch agency stating they would no longer share information like this with the US as they can’t be trusted with it.
Yeah I remember that story as well.
I mean I can imagine him doing that, but wyere source?
Plenty of articles on Trump his private meetings with Putin. A short one: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/us/politics/trump-putin-meetings.html
The CIA circumstantially complaining and warning their agents of an increase of dead informants: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/575384-cia-admits-to-losing-dozens-of-informants-around-the-world-nyt/
Apart from leaking, Trump also erroneously declassified secret documents, leading to the disappearance (and likely deaths) of some informants. Best case was that the western agency was able to extract their informant in time, but that still means that there is 1 less informant. Here’s one case, but there were more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/17/russian-sources-disappeared-after-trump-declassified-ex-spys-evidence-uk-court-told
Trump his public obeisances towards Putin are also clearly recognizable as such. Trump Putin meetings are not meetings of equals, but one is clearly there to do the bidding of the other.
Put 1, 2, 3 and 4 together and there are many who believe that it was Trump who purposefully gave top secret information to his master. Including basically all western spy agencies, who now no longer can trust the USA with secret information. Trump is a traitor and everyone knows it.
thx
Haha I love the reverse psychology
what?
My bad i misread. I though you said “I can’t believe that what your source”. (Which was great reverse psychology) The good thing with Lemmy is you have real people, the bad thing with Lemmy, you got real people.
and there are many who believe that it was Trump who purposefully gave top secret information to his master.
Being able to prove this last part beyond a reasonable doubt is the key and important part. Like the line at which you can start genuinely talking about charging him with treason.
I doubt that any evidence will ever be enough for republicans, I expect that they would just move the red line again, they know that Putin’s Russia is their ally too.
I can only see evidence that is really salacious or visceral work, something like Russia’s 1980s kompromat on Trump for example. Everything else would need a bit of explaining and the right wing media would then be able to muddle it.
Trump’s presidency was such a travesty, that without Roger Alles successful transformation of the media landscape, no other politician could have been seen to support Trump. But since Roger Ailes media plan has been brought to fruition, republicans know that facts are now optional.
The official version of the conversation between trump and Putin doesn’t include any mention of the spy list or anything sus.
Without looking into that because it doesn’t really solve the issue, there are people who claim the primary source for what was said, would be a daily caller journalist. If that claim is true and the implications are up to you to figure out, as it doesn’t really change anyway.
The request seems to be real while he didn’t technically asked for spies. Spies aren’t usually on the payroll as a spy either.
Trump himself didn’t had to provide putin with the list directly anyway as marolago isn’t fort Knox.
In short, a shit Tonne of what ifs and maybe, where a trump is an idiot that thought “Putin wants list of spies? I want list of spies” and stored it in a hotel, would be enough.
Why then wouldn’t the CIA just whack Trump like they did Kennedy?
They arent nearly as fucken nuts as they once were, that was the same era where they were dosing eachother with LSD.
When did they stop being nuts and what happened to cause it?
They grew old and died.
So nothing changed institutionally, and the people now still have the power to do all the stuff the older generation did, and choose not to because they just happen to be better people?
I’m guessing this supposed change happened right around the time when documents would be too recent to be declassified, yeah?
I’d argue it’s a result of the wider world figuring out how crazy they were and thus being subject to more scrutiny. Also, changing attitudes: there’s not quite the “nuclear war is imminent and we’re all going to die” mindset.
All that, combined with it being easier to get away with the “loud and crazy” things because information was easier to control before the internet.
Are they subject to more scrutiny? What oversight do they have now that they didn’t have then? What protections do whistleblowers have when they come out? What consequences do they face if illegal activities are exposed?
Not all of their shady activity was “loud and crazy.” The CIA covered up their involvement in Operation Ajax, the 1953 coup against Iran’s peaceful and democratic government, until 2013. There are countless examples like that.
I’m not saying they stopped doing fucked up shit. I’m saying they stopped doing weird fucked up shit.
They could just stare at him like they did with goats.
Maybe that megalomania didn’t get handed down.
Citation needed. But not wanted.
It’s impossible to prove because the CIA has the means to cover it’s tracks, but there are circumstantial reasons to think that’s what happened. At the most basic level:
- CIA directer and founder Allen Dulles, who’s job involved assassinating world leaders around the world, had a major dispute with Kennedy not long before the assassination, which led to Dulles getting fired.
- Despite the conflict of interests, Dulles was on the investigative committee into Kennedy’s assassination.
- Said investigation involved all kinds of “mistakes,” including breaches in the chain of custody of key evidence (the bullet).
The intelligence community had both means and motive to commit the assassination, and the ability to cover their tracks. That’s not enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law, but it is enough to establish a reasonable possibility, especially considering the absence of serious, compelling evidence.
Is it falsifiable? Or is all evidence that it’s not true actually fodder for a bigger conspiracy that eventually triggers 1-e^tφ via Grimes’ conspiracy collapse theory?
Theoretically, sure it’s falsifiable. Practically speaking, not really. Intelligence communities, not just of the US but also of any country, objectively have more capability to hide the truth than an average citizen has to expose it, especially when they have decades to have covered it up.
If I write a word on a piece of paper and then burn the paper, then I would have a belief about what was written on it, but that belief would not be practically falsifiable because no evidence exists to prove what was on it. Science cannot reconstruct everything that has ever happened everywhere.
The reason falsifiability is a standard in science is because science is concerned with making accurate predictions about the future. My broader theory is that the intelligence community was acting and continues to act according to it’s own agenda, wielding significant power that isn’t adequately checked by the civilian government. That’s definitely falsifiable. I predict that first off, no president will act against the interests in a significant, meaningful way, and if they did, they would die, and high ranking members of the intelligence community would be placed on the investigative committee and find themselves innocent. If that didn’t play out that way, it wouldn’t definitively prove that that didn’t happen with Kennedy because circumstances could have changed, but it would make it much less plausible (strict falsifiability isn’t really how science generally operates, theories just become less likely until they’re not worth considering).
Yawn
Fredo Corleone would have figured out that, as President, he was in a much stronger position and could extort billions from Putin.
Any Scooby-Doo villain would have figured it out.
James from Team Rocket would have figured it out.
Don Poorleone is all about himself and himself he owes a lot to putin.
I think you mean “Cheeto Poorleone”, but that was close.
Don Cheeto Poorleone would be correct.
Don Cheeto PoorSnoreleone
“Boycott,” “Guillotine,” and “Lynch” were all the surnames of men whose actions made them notorious.