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    The butt of the joke: David Cay Johnston explains how the Dems can beat Donald Trump in 2020

    David Cay Johnston, DCReport @ RawStory
    July 30, 2019

    Thanks for your support!

    This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates.

    KellyAnne Conway and Donald Trump at the Mercer family's 2016 "Heroes and Villians" costume ball on Long Island.

    This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

    David Cay Johnston, DCReport @ RawStory

    When will the Democrats realize that Donald Trump's Twitter rants create an opportunity to stop his drive to become our Emperor? It's an opportunity the Democrats (and the few Never Trump Republicans) squander every time they respond with moral outrage.


    The opportunity is to mock Trump, which will goad him into ever more crazy behavior. In turn, that will eat away at the facade that got him into the White House.

    To be sure, Trump's flocks of tweets attacking minority members of Congress and Baltimore, a predominantly black city, are moral outrages. So were his racist attacks on Chicago and Detroit, on African countries. Ditto every other time he associated non-white people or places with rats.

    Democrats should create their own game, by goading Donald. He doesn’t know how to respond to a smart one-liner, a well-crafted joke, a disarming parody.

    No decent person behaves the way Trump does. But Trump has never been a decent person so trying to shame him will never work. Outlandish claims, nonsense claims, racist claims, vicious attacks on critics, calling neo-Nazis “fine people” and attacking law enforcement—that is Trump's shtick. His attacks on what makes America America are what endear him to his base, sickening as that is to contemplate.

    Significantly, millions of Americans who have no interest in racial equality, write off his racist rants, his crazy statements and his fake "facts." They buy to his nonsense claims of the "greatest economy ever" because it justifies their support, even it is begrudging.

    His supporters fail to see how reckless deficit spending to pump up the economy today is creating disaster down the road. They don’t see how freeing polluters to poison the air and water that we spent decades cleaning up will cause misery and death because those butchers bills won’t come due for decades.

    By going into high dudgeon when Trump starts a tweetstorm, the Democrats only deepen Trump's ties to these voters. Their smug responses virtually force news organizations into pointless "is he, or isn't he, a racist" coverage.

    Trump wins this game because he designed it. He decides when to move the pieces. He writes the rules. His task is to get his critics and opponents to alienate voters, driving them to him. He’s good at his own game.

    A Better Game

    A smarter strategy? Stop playing Donald's game. Stop being reactive. Start making Trump play your game. Instead, learn to be political entrepreneurs—see a need and fill it.

    Democrats should create their own game, one where America wins by goading Donald into ever crazier conduct. How? By forcing him to deal with what he cannot stand—poking fun at his foibles. He doesn’t know how to respond to a smart one-liner, a well-crafted joke, a disarming parody.

    Let's call this new game Fun With Donald. The keys to winning are humor and class.

    Donald, whom I have covered for more than 31 years, is a mess of insecurities. He is 73 years old but emotionally stunted.

    He turned 13 the summer he was shipped off to a military academy known for humiliating younger boys. Since then Trump has endured six miserable decades in a Dantesque version of Groundhog Day. Bill Murray's weatherman, Phil Connors, eventually grows into a complete human being. But Trump remains trapped in his own dystopian nightmare. Unable to connect emotionally, he remains empty inside, self-absorbed, treating women and everyone else as mere objects.

    Laughter the Best Political Medicine

    Probe your memory for the last time you heard Trump laugh.

    You won't find a video showing him chuckle. James Comey realized this the night that Trump tried to lure the FBI director into serving Trump rather than America.

    "Months later, the thought of a man whom I had never seen laugh stayed with me. I wondered if maybe others had noticed it or if in thousands of hours of video coverage, he had ever laughed," Comey wrote in A Higher Loyalty.

    "I suspect his apparent inability to do so is rooted in deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others," Comey wrote. That is "really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president."

    This inability to laugh, to tell a joke, is indeed sad. For more than 31 years, I've always felt sorry for Trump because I realized early on that he is incapable of joy. He has never experienced joy’s more durable companion—contentment.

    A few videos do show Trump laughing. It is obviously forced laughter, not an emotional release and certainly not an uncontrollable belly laugh.

    Trump can't tell a joke, either. Now and then he throws off one-liners that in the shorthand of news reports are labeled jokes. They're not.

    He rarely gets jokes—and never when he is the butt of the joke.

    Consider the sublime words of Barack Obama, roasting Trump ever so delicately at the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner:

    "Donald Trump is here tonight. Now I know that he's taken some flak lately. But no one is happier—no one is prouder—to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter: Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?

    "All kidding aside, obviously we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example [laughter] just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, at the steakhouse the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around, but you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. So ultimately you didn't blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf, you fired Gary Busey."

    For eight years Trump has stewed over those words, determined to exact revenge. In his book Think Big, Trump says his life philosophy boils down to a single word: revenge.

    This is the time to take advantage of Trump's inability to laugh at himself. For Democrats (and the dwindling numbers of principled Republicans) here's some advice: don't get mad, get funny.

    Make fun of Trump and his hyper-inflated ego, but do it with flair the way Obama did. This may require hiring some great speechwriters who can come up with smart and funny lines in a hurry. [Hint: A former head writer for Saturday Night Live, a very smart guy by the name of Al Franken is available.)

    When Trump fires back with vile words, which he must, don’t take the bait. Just laugh it off. Just make the laughter at Trump’s expense.

    Spitting righteous blood may feel good. It may engender a sense of moral superiority. But it won't get the job done. The job is not to feel justified. It's to vanquish Donald Trump at the polls in 2020 and save our Republic from this kleptocratic wannabe dictator so our progeny enjoy individual liberty.

    There are other ways to play this game than with humor. But the surefire way to lose in 2020 is to continue playing Trump's game by Trump’s rules.

    This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

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    … then let us make a small request. The COVID crisis has slashed advertising rates, and we need your help. Like you, we here at Raw Story believe in the power of progressive journalism. Raw Story readers power David Cay Johnston’s DCReport, which we've expanded to keep watch in Washington. We’ve exposed billionaire tax evasion and uncovered White House efforts to poison our water. We’ve revealed financial scams that prey on veterans, and legal efforts to harm workers exploited by abusive bosses. And unlike other news outlets, we’ve decided to make our original content free. But we need your support to do what we do.

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    Report typos and corrections to: corrections@rawstory.com.
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    Facebook's disturbing news blockade shows how tech giants are swallowing the web

    The Conversation
    March 02, 2021

    When Facebook disabled Australians' access to news articles on its platform, and blocked sharing of articles from Australian news organizations, the company moved a step closer to killing the World Wide Web – the hyperlink-based system of freely connecting online sites created in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

    Though the social media giant has said it will return to the negotiating table and restore news for now, the company has shown its hand – and how it is continuing to reshape the web.

    As a social media scholar, I see clearly that the internet in 2021 is not the same open public sphere that Berners-Lee envisioned. Rather, it is a constellation of powerful corporate platforms that have come to dominate how people use the internet, what information they get and who is able to profit from it.

    Paying for news

    The Australian government's legislative efforts aim to support the news industry by helping to broker a deal whereby Facebook would pay Australian news organizations for content posted on its platform by users. Right now, Facebook isn't required to pay for news in any way, and the company objected to this new potential cost of business.

    Berners-Lee warned the Australian government the proposed law could undermine free linking, which he called a “fundamental principle of the web." Facebook's own statement of self-defense focused on Berners-Lee's argument, saying Facebook provides value to news organizations by linking to them. But their statements show that neither has acknowledged that Facebook has, for many people, effectively become the web.

    Back in the 1980s, Berners-Lee envisioned the web as a network of community-minded academic researchers sharing their knowledge quickly and conveniently across the world. The main mechanism for this was the hyperlink – text that, when clicked on, led readers to something they were interested in, or to supporting material on the actual source's website. This meant information was freely exchanged, with attribution. The priority was helping users find the material they wanted, wherever it was online.

    Berners-Lee's design serves the reader, but not everyone was as public-spirited: Companies like Facebook have been moving away from this principle since the web's founding. These corporate platforms are designed to capture and dominate users' attention – and turn it into money.

    Keeping users on the site

    When a user posts a link on Facebook, it's not just a hyperlink as Berners-Lee envisioned. It's much more advanced, displaying information from the linked page, including, for news stories, a headline, a main image and sometimes a summary of the news users might see if they clicked the link. In this way, users can get a lot of the information without ever leaving Facebook, hurting news organizations' revenues.

    On Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, users' options are even more restricted. People can post photos and text, but cannot directly share links to other websites. The only active links in a post are internal, for tagging others on Instagram and hashtags.

    In my view, both cases show that Facebook doesn't really want an interconnected web: It wants to keep its users on its own platforms. Facebook displays valuable information, but if people don't click through, or there is nothing to effectively click on, then those who actually created the content will continue to have a hard time making money off their work.

    Possible ways forward

    The situation in Australia is a significant opportunity to examine how much power Facebook has over the ways people can seek information online.

    News media may decide to bid farewell to Facebook, which provides about one-fifth of traffic to media sites in Australia, and not necessarily much revenue in other parts of the world. They might seek other options for digital distribution of their content. But in the near term they may need financial help from somewhere if they have become too dependent on Facebook.

    Or news organizations could negotiate with Facebook directly in deals and avoid restrictive laws, as the proposed legislation is not even final yet.

    News publishers could also ask regulators to help them gain more control over how news content is presented on platforms to increase link referral traffic, which is key to generating revenue. A return to simpler hyperlinks – and adding them to Instagram – could help more users click through on news stories while preserving the principles of the web. Just because advanced technology exists doesn't mean it's helpful in all situations or good. But then again, a basic old-timey solution may not work for those trapped in the “attention economy.

    Editor's note: The Conversation U.S. is an independent media nonprofit, one of eight news organizations around the world that share a common mission, brand and publishing platform. The Conversation Australia has publicly lobbied in support of the Australian government's proposal.The Conversation


    By Jennifer Grygiel, Assistant Professor of Communications (Social Media) & Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, Syracuse University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    New details revealed in Proud Boys plot to storm the Capitol and keep Trump in power

    Travis Gettys
    March 02, 2021

    A Proud Boys leader was nominated to carry out "war powers" intended to stop the certification of President Joe Biden's election win, according to federal prosecutors.

    U.S. prosecutors asked a federal judge to keep Ethan Nordean, the right-wing organization's Washington state leader, in jail until his trial, alleging in a 24-page court filing that the 30-year-old Proud Boy led a plot to split into groups to break into the U.S. Capitol from as many points as possible, reported the Washington Post.

    "By blending in and spreading out, Defendant and those following him on January 6 made it more likely that either a Proud Boy — or a suitably-inspired 'normie' [nonmilitant Trump supporter] — would be able to storm the Capitol and its ground in such a way that would interrupt [Congress's] Certification of the Electoral College vote," prosecutors alleged in the filing.

    Prosecutors said Nordean was nominated from within to lead the plot after group chairman Henry "Enrique" Tarrio was arrested two days earlier by Washington, D.C., police in connection with a church's Black Lives Matter banner during a previous Proud Boys demonstration.

    Nordean, who goes by Rufio Panman online, was arrested Feb. 3 on charges of aiding and abetting the destruction of government property, obstructing an official proceeding, trespassing and disorderly conduct on restricted Capitol grounds.

    A federal magistrate granted Nordean's release on Feb. 8, but he remains jailed while prosecutors appeal the ruling.

    Top Trump adviser ruined colleague's career with false allegations of disloyalty to the president: report

    Tom Boggioni
    March 02, 2021

    According to a report from Politico, one of the top advisers to Donald Trump accused one of his colleagues of disloyalty in a 15-page memo, effectively ruining her career and exiling her to a department away from the White House.

    The document, written by then-trade adviser Peter Navarro and obtained by Politico, accused then-Deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates of being "Anonymous," the White House insider who was leaking behind-the-scenes details of turmoil in the Trump administration.

    In fact, "Anonymous" turned out to be Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security who wrote a column for the New York Times where he described Trump as "impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective"

    That column, which rocked the White House was titled, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration."

    As Politico reported, Navarro took it upon himself to discover the identity of "Anonymous" and inaccurately accused Coates of being the culprit.

    "The December 2019 memo goes into great detail to make the case that Coates — who was then a deputy national security adviser — was the author of both the New York Times op-ed and a tell-all book that described a resistance force within the administration aiming to undermine President Donald Trump," Politico's Daniel Lippman reports while noting that she was "not named in the memo but is clearly identified through specific information."

    She subsequently was fired from the White House and placed in a position at the Department of Energy.

    "The memo — which was riddled with incorrect theories — shows how Anonymous set off significant turmoil inside the White House and also how senior officials were eager to go after their colleagues," Politico reports. "Besides pushing a populist trade agenda for Trump, Navarro focused heavily on trying to figure out who Anonymous was. Ironically, for a dossier discussing who Anonymous was, the memo is unsigned. But three former Trump administration officials said that Navarro had written it. Two officials said that he gave it to then-White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in January, who never believed Navarro's findings."

    As for Taylor, he was recently in the news hinting that he is part of a group of Republicans about to launch a campaign against the former president that, he promised, would have "Trump shaking in his boots."

    You can read more here.

     
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