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REVEALED: Trump spent flight to Georgia Senate rally asking allies if his coup would succeed
January 19, 2021
Two days before the infamous riots at the United States Capitol building, President Donald Trump flew down to Georgia to campaign for Sens. David Perdue (R-GA) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) in two races that would determine control of the United States Senate.
However, according to new reporting from Axios's Jonathan Swan, Trump was totally unenthusiastic about campaigning for the two Republican senators and was instead obsessed with overturning the results of the 2020 election.
<p>At one point during his flight down to Georgia, Trump asked Federalist Society co-founder David McIntosh to assess his chances of remaining in power despite the fact that he had definitively lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden.</p><p>"What do you think my odds are?" Trump asked him.</p><p>"It doesn't look great, sir," McIntosh replied.</p><p>"Yeah, you're probably right," replied a sullen Trump.</p><p>Trump apparently didn't remain depressed for long, however, as two days later he would encourage his followers to march to the Capitol building, where they would start a riot that would leave five people dead.</p>
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Trump constantly humiliates his followers when his conspiracy theories fall apart: Morning Joe
January 19, 2021
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough bashed the latest conspiracy theory going around among President Donald Trump's supporters as he prepares to leave office.
The "Morning Joe" host said he's heard that some Trump backers are convinced that President-elect Joe Biden won't even serve his term and will instead abandon Washington, D.C., almost immediately after Inauguration Day and hand over the office he won to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other Fox News villains.
<p>"A good friend of ours has a friend who is caught up in all the conspiracy theories, and now the new conspiracy theory is Joe Biden is going to move back to Delaware on the 21st of January and he's going to basically turn the government over to AOC and everybody," Scarborough said, "and there are educated people who believe this. There are former elected officials of large cities who believe this, and they're always made a fool of, because these conspiracy theories never come true. That was Donald Trump's whole presidency."</p><p>"The evangelical community is split in half because people believed the lies for four years, only now are they waking up to realize they have been lied to by someone they set up as an idol," he added. "These lies, it's not a bug. It's the feature of the Trump presidency."</p><p>Scarborough wondered why they keep enduring the humiliation of believing in lies.</p><p> "There was a column this weekend, I'm not sure who it was, maybe you can remind me, of someone saying how humiliating it was to be a Trump follower, Qanon follower, because your entire life is telling people of a cataclysmic event, and it never comes," Scarborough said, "and you're humiliated. Then you have to talk about the next end-of-the-world moment, and those never come, as well. That was Donald Trump's policy."</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
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Banana Republic or nut country? Capitol riot puts 'American Exceptionalism' in historical perspective
January 19, 2021
Horrorstruck by last week's terrorist attack on our nation's capital by Trump's willing executioners, former president George W. Bush, Republican Wisconsin congressman Mike Gallagher, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demurred the idea that the United States resembled a Latin American "banana republic."
Their reactions exhibited a white supremacist hubris in and of itself. For them, only the brown people of Latin America revolted in such a way.
<p>Alzheimer's may explain the three forgetting the extremism of this past May and October in Michigan where Trump loyalists stormed the state's capital with assault rifles in the first instance and plotted to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the second. Nor did they recall other racists marching with tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017 chanting "Jews will not replace us."</p><p>Then there is our nation's granddaddy of rebellions: the American Civil War that started in 1861 as secessionist forces attacked the US base that was Fort Sumter. Why did southern Confederates secede? Because President Abraham Lincoln would not allow the further expansion of slavery.</p><p>I will give non-students of history a pass for not considering Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. The former involved insurrectionists, many armed revolutionary war veterans, attacking Massachusetts courts and a federal arsenal to stop the foreclosures of farms in 1786. The latter entailed a federal excise tax on whiskey that prompted western Pennsylvania distillers to assault tax collectors in 1791.</p><p>In 1794, President George Washington led 13,000 federalized soldiers into Pennsylvania's backcountry to quash the rebellion. Later that year in an address to Congress, he characterized the whiskey insurrection as "fomented by combinations of men who…have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole Government."</p><p>My point is that there is a notion that the US is above socio-political upheaval. This is grounded in the portrayal of brown "other" nations as culturally, if not racially, prone to political violence. Indeed, that is how media conditioned me in my youth.</p><p>As I came of age in the 1980s, I did not read much but viewed a lot of television. As a latchkey kid, I watched reruns after school: Hogan's Heroes, MASH, and Baa Baa Black Sheep. Living in Greater Los Angeles, I also killed time with Channel 7's KABC Eyewitness News, which featured debates between Bruce Herschensohn and John Tunney.</p><p>Herschensohn was a conservative commentator who served in the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Tunney was a one-term California U.S. Senator connected to the Kennedys who championed the liberal perspective.</p><p>In covering US foreign policy, the two regularly argued about the incessant wars and coups in the Caribbean and Central America, particularly the revolutions of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.</p><p>Back then these governments were popularly labeled "banana republics." The origin of the epithet stemmed from the region's economic dependency on the export of this fruit and other commodities such as coffee and sugar as dictated by US financiers and corporations such as Chiquita (formerly United Fruit) and Dole dating back to the early twentieth century.</p><p>The cognomen is also drenched with racist assumptions of American exceptionalism. As the City Upon the Hill, the US held felt obligated to mentor such nations, while "protecting" them from European interference as declared in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Ostensibly, Latin Americans, as a race, were too unstable and corrupt to govern themselves without the tutelage of the United States.</p><p>As I watched Herschensohn and Tunney reprise a nightmare of death squads, strongmen, assassins, "freedom fighters," and insurgencies, I ignorantly bought into this epistemology and thought to myself, "Why can't these countries just get their act together like the USA?"</p><p>Then in college I was assigned Walter Lefeber's <em>Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America </em>(1983), which detailed a long history of US interventionism, both overt and covert, to install vicious rulers throughout the region by way of cunning regime change that entailed coups, military advisors, naval and marine invasion, and contrived elections.</p><p>If a nationalist government with ambitions of self-determination emerged, the US systematically attempted to destabilize it. Think Cuba historically and Venezuela in the present.</p><p>Further reading revealed the Central Intelligence Agency's sponsorship of the murderous coups of the democratically elected presidencies of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Their crime: the pursuit of their citizens having greater control of their lands' resources at some expense of US conglomerates.</p><p>Hence, the respective installation of the merciless military dictatorships of Carlos Castillo Armas and Augusto Pinochet. To paraphrase President Franklin Roosevelt's alleged description of the US supported Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, the two were sons of bitches, but they were our sons of bitches.</p><p>Although the ideological pretext for US interventionism was to combat the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere, the material motive was to maintain commercial hegemony while smothering alternative autochthonous economic models that privileged the social needs of Latin Americans over US business interests.</p><p>In sum, the history of the US is anything but one of continuity and tranquility. So, while we may not be bananas, history and the pro-Trump sedition of last week reminds us that we have a fair share of nuts.</p><p><em>Frank P. Barajas is a Professor of History at California State University Channel Islands. He has a forthcoming book with the University of Nebraska Press titled </em>Mexican Americans with Moxie: A Trans-Generational History of El Movimiento Chicano in Ventura County California, 1945-1975<em>.</em></p>
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