Axios reporter Jonathan Swan interviewed President Donald Trump and it did not go well for the president. The internet is ablaze with astonishment over how the Australian journalist decimated Trump, as the clip below demonstrates.
"We're going to look at some of these charts," Trump, who is sitting in a very low chair, says to Swan.
"I'd like to," Swan replies.
Trump is fumbling with color printouts of charts that look like they were made for an elementary school class.
Rather than admit Americans are dying at a rate of one every minute, Trump tries to convince Swan to "go by the cases," meaning, to look at how many people are dying as a percentage of how many people are infected.
Swan, without hesitation, says, "I'm talking about death as a percentage of population – that's where the U.S. is really bad."
Trump is reduced to babbling.
Republican turned Libertarian Congressman Justin Amash weighed in, calling it, "like an episode of Veep but real."
Watch the clip, which has been viewed nearly 14 million times in 8 and a half hours.
Such truth-telling patriots were called "hysterical" and "alarmist," or told they were "out of touch" and overly "bitter" about Hillary Clinton's defeat thanks to the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College and Russian interference. Those who first raised the alarm about Trumpism as a new version of fascism were also assured that "the institutions were strong" and fascism could never take hold in America — and most certainly not in the form of a proudly ignorant wrestling-heel wannabe and reality-TV huckster.
When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, there were some on the left eager to dance on Hillary Clinton's grave. A few even gave Trump the totally unearned benefit of the doubt: He claimed to oppose globalization, neoliberalism and "endless war," and to speak for the "white working class".
Centrist Democrats and the so-called mainstream American news media also rejected the existential threat to democracy that Trump represented. They convinced themselves, over and over, that the supposed power and gravity of the office would normalize and mature him. He was a "businessman" and a "pragmatist" eager to make deals, not an ideologue — so why worry? Trump was "brash" and "unconventional," but America's political institutions were strong.
Trump Derangement Syndrome was also a smokescreen for Donald Trump's wild success in advancing the agenda of the plutocrats, gangster capitalists, Christian nationalists and "Dominionists" — as well as overt white supremacists — in destroying the very idea of government itself as well as American multiracial democracy.
Of course, it was not Donald Trump's most vocal critics who were "deranged" but his followers, enablers and allies. As I explained in January 2017, shortly before his inauguration:
It is not those who oppose Trump who are deranged, but rather those voters who convinced themselves that a plutocrat authoritarian reality TV star con man and professional wrestler wannabe with no experience in government at any level was qualified to be president of the United States.
This is America's great national derangement. Those who stand against and oppose Donald Trump are patriots who are trying to return the country to sanity.
Now, some three months away from another Election Day, Donald Trump has finally arrived at the moment which those of us who were slurred as "hysterical" and "alarmist" have warned about for more than five years.
Last Thursday, Trump issued this now-infamous tweet:
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
That same afternoon, when questioned about Trump's threats to interfere with the 2020 election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.S. Senate: "In the end, the Department of Justice and others will make that legal determination." This is not true. The Department of Justice and the president possess no legitimate authority to delay or cancel a federal election.
Later in the day, Trump continued to work from the authoritarian's playbook, attempting to pivot away from his earlier statements. During a White House press event, Trump said:
Do I want to see a date change? No. But I don't want to see a crooked election.
What will happen in November – it's a mess. I want a result much more than you... I don't want to be waiting around for weeks and months.
This is a familiar strategy in which the authoritarian challenges norms and boundaries by floating trial balloons and then pretends to change his mind as a way to make the heretofore-unthinkable into something acceptable.
Trump's most recent threats are but another crescendo in he and his servants' efforts to subvert and eventually overturn secular multiracial democracy and the rule of law in America.
Only weeks ago Trump began deploying his own personal secret police force, hoping to enforce his will by suppressing dissent and free speech in Democratic-led cities all over the United States. The events in Portland, Oregon, are but a prelude to Trump's national terrordome.
Trump's own personal secret police force along with his civilian "watchdogs," may well be used to intimidate Democratic voters on Election Day and beyond. Trump has repeatedly asked hostile foreign countries to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf. He was impeached for doing just that with his attempt to blackmail the government of Ukraine to launch a phony investigation of Joe Biden.
Trump continues to threaten senior Democratic leaders, including Biden, Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others with treason charges, potential imprisonment and perhaps even execution. Former national security adviser John Bolton's recent book includes details of Trump's lurid fantasies about having journalists killed. According to Bolton, Trump supports imprisoning his "enemies" in concentration camps — something he is already doing with brown and Black migrants and refugees from Latin America, the Caribbean and other parts of the nonwhite world.
Donald Trump has repeated his threats, ever since the 2016 campaign, that he will not respect the will of the American people if he loses a presidential election.
In sum, Donald Trump is not pretending. None of this is a game. He is a neo-fascist. Such observations and warnings are not hysterical. They are plain observations based on a consensus of the available facts.
The strongman knows that it starts with words. He uses them early on to test out his plans to expand and personalize executive power on political elites, the press and the public, watching their reactions as they arrange into the timeless categories of allies, enemies and those who help him by remaining silent. Some say the strongman is all bluster, but he takes words seriously, including the issue of which ones should be banned.
Now what to do?
In a perfect and just world, the hope peddlers, professional centrists, stenographers of current events and others who maintain the boundaries of approved public discourse in America would go to the public square, prostrate themselves before the world and then beg forgiveness for how they, for years and by various means, empowered Donald Trump.
That will not happen. Instead, such voices will proclaim that they were sounding the alarm about Donald Trump years ago and are the real vanguard defenders of American democracy. In reality, such voices were enablers, far behind the truth if not actively running away it. They are now trying to position themselves on the correct side of history because their shame and failure to protect America from Donald Trump and his neo-fascist movement are so great.
In the weeks remaining before Election Day — which will certainly not be "free and fair" and when Trump's machinations will be at their most extreme — the mainstream news media and the American people must internalize the fact that the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution mean little for Trump and his regime.
Hopeful claims — or delusions — that the Constitution and state laws dictate the rules of Election Day must be viewed with extreme cynicism. Trump and his enforcers are not restrained by such arcane conventions.
If there is indeed an election on Nov. 3, Americans most vote against Trump in overwhelming numbers in order to force him to step down. Unless Donald Trump is convincingly vanquished at the polls, he will find some way to stay in office.
If Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr try to cancel the presidential election or interfere with it in any other way, Americans must take to the streets and engage in corporeal politics — including a national strike and other plans to disrupt day-to-day life and "business as usual" — on a scale so large that they make the George Floyd people's uprising look like a PTA meeting.
Ultimately, those of us who warned the American people for years, sometimes on a daily basis, about this Mad King and would-be tyrant take no joy from saying, We told you so. There is no satisfaction in being correct about such a horrible thing.
On this point, Jared Yates Sexton, author of "American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People," wrote last Thursday on Twitter:
Those of us warning that Trump is an authoritarian capable of destroying democracy haven't been doing it for profit or attention or out of unwarranted alarmism. None of this is hard to predict. They don't hide it at all. Stop expecting everything to be fine because "America."
To watch American democracy fall so ill so fast, and now to be on the verge of collapse — when such a thing could have been so easily prevented — is a world historical tragedy.
MSNBC host Chuck Todd was moved to an earlier timeslot where his show, "Meet the Press Daily," will likely earn lower ratings. Meanwhile, Nicolle Wallace seems to have been promoted to a two-hour timeslot leading into primetime.
Wallace, who has extensive experience in Washington, previously served in George W. Bush's White House until abandoning the GOP as the era of Trump came to power.
The staff change was a welcome one to those online who have called on MSNBC to be more open to women and people of color serving as show hosts. Weekend host Joy Reid was passed over previously when there were calls for MSNBC to add a Black host. Finally, she has been added to the prime-time lineup with her show "The Reidout."
The Todd move is another case where it seems MSNBC is willing to listen to demands from viewers.
I’m not sure what kind of game Steven Mnuchin is playing, but it’s pretty clear that it’s a game. Gross domestic product fell by nearly 10 percent in the second quarter, as all of us were forced to cut back on account of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The drop, according to the Times, was the equivalent of a 32.5 percent annual rate of decline, “the most devastating three-month collapse on record,” which wiped out five years of growth. All of this would have been worse without government stimulus.
If the president and the US Congress don’t want to see a depression that dwarfs the “Great” one that struck over 90 years ago, here’s what they must do next, according to economists interviewed recently by Businessweek: “a new round of direct payments, especially for those with low income; some extension of extra unemployment benefits; and a sizable chunk of aid to state and local governments,” which was missing from the last round of legislation. (The CARES Act appropriated some $150 billion for municipalities and states to fight Covid-19, but not to replace lost revenues.)
Yet here’s Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the United States Treasury, appearing on ABC’s “This Week” sounding as if the future of his boss, Donald Trump, is less certain than the future of the Republican Party—as if the president’s reelection were already lost and the time had come to re-lay ideological grounds anticipating a President Joe Biden. “There’s obviously a need to support workers and support the economy,” Mnuchin said. “On the other hand, we have to be careful about not piling on enormous amount of debts for future generations. … In certain cases where we’re paying people more to stay home than to work, that’s created issues in the entire economy.”
His remarks set off familiar ideological flare-ups. Mnuchin is the son of a Goldman Sachs banker, a millionaire hundreds of times over. For a man of the idle rich to suggest it’s bad for people to get a buck more than they’d normally earn, even as they stand in line at food kitchens, is a slap in the face. But while ideological flare-ups are today getting the attention, something important is getting lost. Mnuchin is making this out to be a conventional inter-party fight between the Democrats and the Republicans. It’s not, though. It’s really an intra-party fight. And Trump is losing.
Think about it. If you were a president who let a pandemic get out of control, because you thought it would hurt enemies more than friends, you’d want your team, in this case the Senate Republicans, to dump as much cash as possible onto the economy in the hope that saving it would bring victory. Knowing that’s your best shot (aside from cheating in various and sundry ways), you tell your team to stop bickering and vote for the Heroes Act, the $3.5 trillion aid package already passed by the House. But while your team was on board last time, pushing $2.2 trillion into the economy, almost certainly preventing a drop in GDP from being worse than nearly 10 percent, this time is different. This time, your team is worried about debt. It’s worried about people being “overpaid.” It’s worried about things getting in the way of your being reelected.
Something happened between last time and this time. That something is obvious: poll after poll showing the incumbent behind the challenger by double digits in swing states (or ahead of the challenger within the margin of error in normally safe states). The Republicans, especially in the Senate, seemed to be losing faith in this president and now are looking toward a day when they will need to stand on conservative ideology to oppose a Democratic agenda. The president, meanwhile, can’t see what’s happening, not even when his own Cabinet member goes on TV and uses the same talking points cosplay fiscal hawks use to justify why they won’t support any measure to batten the economy. (Maybe the president didn’t notice, because he was golfing!) Trump can’t quite see he’s being snookered into believing the House Democrats are threatening his reelection by holding things up. They are not. The Republicans are.
When the president suggested postponing the election last week, it was widely interpreted as a sign of weakness, especially after the Senate Republicans said no can do. The so-called reawakening of fiscal hawks is a more potent sign of Trump’s impotence, though. You can’t use ideology to justify postponing an election, but you can to position yourself in case he loses to Biden while also defending yourself against GOP interest groups who would scream if they knew you had lost faith. Either way, the Republicans win the game, which is likely the same one Steven Mnuchin is playing.
It’s the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. When Japan signed the instruments of surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, it was the last of a series of notable events that took place that year.
Post-Holocaust, the fervent credo of a Jewish community that witnessed approximately six million of its numbers perish in under five years — half of all European Jews and more than a third of Jews worldwide — has been “Never again!”
And yet …
● Oct. 27, 2018: A man armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh cut down 11 congregants in the worst killing of Jews in American history.
● Dec. 10, 2019: A gunman in a kosher deli in Jersey City, N.J., killed, among others, two Orthodox Jews.
● Dec. 28, 2019: A man wielding a machete in a rabbi’s home in Monsey, N.Y., wounded five during a Hanukkah celebration.
Planned Yom Kippur bloodbath
In Halle, Germany, in mid-October 2019, only an impassable synagogue door prevented a Yom Kippur bloodbath by a man armed with a machine gun and a video camera to stream the intended massacre for the world. In his online manifesto, he stated: “If I fail and die but kill a single Jew, it was worth it. After all, if every White Man kills just one, we win.”
Anti-Semitism has been on the rise globally, with the last few years witnessing a surge in anti-Semitic assaults — and the rhetoric that inspires them. The antagonism is coming from the far right, the far left and Islamists.
A biblical name
The word “Semitic” is derived from the biblical name Shem, one of Noah’s three sons. The “Shemitic” peoples are found throughout the Middle East, with the largest constituent group being Arabs. But “anti-Semitism” has always applied only to Jews within the larger Semitic population group.
The animus towards Jews has its roots in the first century of the Common Era (a major contributor being early Christians’ hostility towards their parent religion for refusing to accept Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah).
The term “anti-Semitism,” though, appears only in the second half of the 19th century. It was coined in Germany (“Antisemitismus”) in the 1879 work Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism) by journalist Wilhelm Marr.
Against the backdrop of a burgeoning focus on nationalism in Europe, Marr sought to target explicitly the ethnicity of Jews over and above their religious and cultural identity. “Antisemitismus” would come to supplant the previous, much cruder, German term “Judenhaas” (“Jew hatred”).
European Jews are worried
Following the Second World War, the expression of overt anti-Semitism was limited somewhat to the fringes of political and social discourse. But for the past few decades, European Jews have been keeping a wary and worried eye on it.
Across continental Europe, right-wing parties that have long voiced anti-Semitic rhetoric have lately been growing stronger.
In 2015, French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, born to Holocaust survivors, was asked whether Europe had again become inhospitable for Jews. “We should not leave,” he said. “But maybe for our children or grandchildren there will be no choice.”
Violence has increased
In 2017, anti-Semitism began its latest easily visible upsurge, with Germany, France, the United States and Canada witnessing a troubling climb in violent anti-Semitic episodes the next year. B’nai Brith Canada recorded 2,041 anti-Semitic incidents across the country (11 per cent of them violent), a 16.5 per cent increase from 2017.
In Britain, anti-Semitism has permeated the left-wing Labour Party under former leader Jeremy Corbyn, prompting a number of its Members of Parliament to denounce and depart the party. In the lead-up to the 2019 general election, Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Ephraim Mirvis castigated Corbyn and Labour. “A new poison — sanctioned from the very top — has taken root in the Labour Party,” he said.
A history of anti-Semitism
The Jewish community, of course, has seen and experienced this poison many times.
From the first accusation of deicide in the second century (due to the false claim that it was Jews who were responsible for the death of Jesus), the blood libel, the pogroms, the dissemination of the forged document commonly called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Nazi attempt to carry out Die Endlösung (“The Final Solution”), it has infused most of the last two millennia.
The poison has always surged to the surface in times of social, political and economic uncertainty — such as our current global context, now made much worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the fact that health authorities the world over unanimously agree that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in China, anti-Semites have found a way to blame the pandemic itself on Jews.
White-supremacist trope
Subsequent to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, anti-Semitism also took the form of claims on the American far right that powerful Jewish actors (supposedly led by billionaire George Soros) were inciting and guiding the Black Lives Matter protests for their own perverse purposes. This is a white-supremacist trope that dates back to the time of the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Still, it was specifically in 2017 that the most recent spike in anti-Semitic violence started. This has naturally made analysts search for a particular fount of the poison in that year. At least with respect to overt far-right anti-Semitism, they may have found the source: the start of the presidency of Donald Trump.
Correlation is, of course, not causation, but Trump has unabashedly practised the politics of hate and division, openly courting white nationalists and stoking the resentments of the far right.
This animus has also been directed against Muslims and non-white people in general, but it was the chant of “Jews will not replace us” that echoed chillingly through the night during the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
A vendor displays anti-Nazi buttons on the first anniversary of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where protesters chanted: ‘Jews will not replace us.’
(AP Photo/Steve Helber)
While anti-Semitism undeniably has its left-wing instigators, particularly in Europe, the Anti-Defamation League’s 2019 figures illustrate graphically that it is the far right currently animating animosity against Jews in the United States.
Appeals to conservative white Christians
Admittedly, Trump’s Middle East policies have greatly favoured Israel. But they are due primarily to his need to please his white conservative Christian base, who see full Jewish control and settlement of the biblical land of Israel as part of their apocalyptic road map.
Although Trump has himself employed anti-Semitic tropes, he is, in reality, not an anti-Semite. He is actually a philo-Semite — in this case a poisonous one. That is, he believes all of the toxic stereotypes about Jews — Jews are greedy, Jews are bent on domination, Jews are egocentric — but he sees those traits as admirable.
But philo-Semitism can so easily be inverted and weaponized against Jews. “Wealthy” and “good with money” becomes “avaricious” and “grasping.” “Ambitious” and “organized” morphs into “scheming,” “devious” and “domineering.” Hence the sardonic Jewish adage: “A philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who likes Jews.”
Which might also call to mind another well-worn maxim: “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”
Earlier this year, my college students and I joined our chaplain and a graduate student in traveling to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The insensitive treatment many attendees gave the terrors that the museum was trying to educate people about are being repeated in a new way: weaponizing the Holocaust against any mask mandates, social distancing, or other health regulations designed to combat the deadly spread of COVID-19. Amazingly, some of their targets are Jewish.
About a week ago, a couple went into a Minnesota Wal-Mart with swastika masks over their faces. The Minnesota GOP apologized this month for a Washaba County Republican Party meme comparing mask mandates to Jews having to wear yellow stars.
Earlier in July, a Kansas paper “published a cartoon depicting (Kansas Governor Laura) Kelly in a mask emblazoned with a Star of David, before a scene appearing to show Jewish people being deported to Nazi concentration camps,” wrote Business Insider. “The caption adds: ‘Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask…and step onto the cattle car.” Thankfully, the Kansas paper took it down, but after it became a national story.
It’s just one of many cases where critics of lockdowns and restrictions designed to save lives are likening such health policies of mask wearing and limiting indoor gatherings to the slaughter of more than six million Jews using the most brutal of methods.
In mid-April, Colorado’s first Jewish Governor had to answer questions on whether his response to the coronavirus was akin to draconian policies of Nazi Germany. As Matt Shuham reported in Talking Points Memo “Gov. Polis responds to accusations that his stay-at-home order is akin to Nazism: ‘As a Jewish-American who lost family in the Holocaust, I'm offended by any comparison to Nazism. We act to save lives; the exact opposite of the slaughter of 6 million,’” even tearing up that someone would even make such an odious comparison to target him.
In May, Carlie Porterfield with Forbes reported “The Auschwitz Memorial Museum criticized Illinois residents who used Nazi slogans Friday to protest the state’s coronavirus lockdown orders—not the first time it’s happened at such a rally—calling it “a symptom of moral [and] intellectual degeneration.’”
Porterfield added “a woman was photographed carrying a sign bearing the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei, JB,’ apparently referring to Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who comes from a prominent Jewish family.” A Southern politician made a similar analogy in July: masks = Holocaust.
We can attribute this ignorant behavior to a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust itself. NBC News reported how a school principal emailed a parent saying “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened, and he couldn’t say if it ‘is a factual, historical event,’” as his rationale for his policy on not requiring it to be taught in an area where many Holocaust survivors live. South Carolina originally left it off the schools’ teaching curriculum’s “original draft because department officials wanted to ‘broaden education standards,’” as Newsweek reported. The State noted that the Holocaust was not mentioned in the 124-page history guidelines report.
Such ignorance is fueling these incorrect Holocaust analogies which are not only painfully callous to the real victims and their descendants, but are encouraging people to engage in reckless health behavior which could harm themselves, family, and others they meet.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His Twitter account is JohnTures2.
Donald Trump isn't the first president to fail on a grand scale, and he certainly isn't the first to test the boundaries of the system to see what he can get away with. But he is unique in certain respects. The full panoply of grotesque personality defects and openly corrupt behaviors is something we've never seen before in someone who ascended to the most powerful office in the land. People will study this era for a very long time to try to figure out just what cultural conditions allowed such an advanced, wealthy nation to end up with such an ignorant, unqualified leader. But that's actually less interesting in some ways than how party officials came to support him so unquestioningly and why so few career bureaucrats and civil servants have publicly stood up to him. What kind of system produces that kind of loyalty for a man who never had the support of more than 45% of the country, and who won by virtue of an anachronistic electoral system that allowed him to take office with nearly 3 million fewer votes than his opponent? Trump may be a uniquely unfit leader, but the party that has backed him without question is not unique. In fact, the last Republican administration showed many of the same characteristics. Robert Draper's new book "To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq" reminds us that just 17 years ago, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration used propaganda and disinformation to persuade the American people to go along with a war that made no logical sense on its face.As almost the entire world looked on in astonishment, the U.S. — with the shameful cooperation of the U.K. under Tony Blair — invaded a country that had no involvement in that attack. A certain faction within the administration had come into office with the intention of finding a reason to do that if they could. They seized the moment, cooked up some flimsy evidence, constructed a convoluted rationale and just went for it.Draper goes into some detail about how the administration successfully brought the bureaucracy into line, illustrating the fact that it tends to serve any president, even when individuals may stand up or resist. In fact, he pretty much blows up the idea of an unaccountable "deep state," showing instead that it's pretty much impotent to stop a determined president from using the powerful levers of government when he wants to.
Trump hasn't attacked another country, thank goodness, although I think that's been a matter of luck more than anything else. We came extremely close last January when he decided to assassinate Iran's top general right before his impeachment trial was about to start. Iran didn't take the bait and we avoided that disaster.
As it turns out, the inevitable Trump catastrophe happened right here at home with his tragically inept management of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic crisis. But he has certainly done everything he can to stoke a war at home this summer as people took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd and show support for the Black Lives Matter movement. If Americans weren't already overwhelmed from the other two crises and Trump was even slightly more skilled, he might have pulled it off as deftly as Bush and Cheney.
Over the past several weeks Trump and his top henchmen, Attorney General Bill Barr and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, directed a disastrous paramilitary operation in Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to "protect" a federal building from protesters. This article in the Daily Beast by Asawin Suebsaeng and Erin Banco reveals chilling details of how Trump wanted to expand that operation into Chicago, and potentially other cities:
According to three people familiar with the president's private remarks, Trump previously envisioned an ostentatious, camera-ready show of force. He wanted to go after what he saw as violent gang leaders, flush them out of hiding in ways that would have them "shaking in their boots" like they never had before, and have alleged perpetrators marched out in front of the news cameras. Violent crime has long plagued Chicago, and murders are spiking to highs not seen in decades. But Trump insisted that with the right leader, and the right muscle, crime there could be reduced "very quickly."
The president said he wanted something similar to what his administration has done in Portland, an ongoing melee between protesters and rioters and unmarked federal authorities. Trump has been closely monitoring the conflict — largely on his favorite channel, Fox News — and trumpeting it as a sign of his own supposed strength.
Some senior members of the White House team reportedly realized that such an assault "would almost certainly result in extreme backlash and hellishly bad PR," so they ended up scaling back the plan to "Operation Legend," which is simply an expansion of earlier programs to lend federal investigative help to local jurisdictions.
This was described to the Daily Beast reporters as a pattern in which Trump demands "large-scale, draconian, and potentially disastrous action, with senior officials actively working to temper or inflame, those desires":
"There was rarely a time I spoke to him about violent crime when two things didn't come up: Number One, that it's all happening in Democrat-run cities, with Chicago being shorthand for that kind of [blight]," said one former senior Trump administration official. "And Number Two, if it were up to him, we would return to the old days where it was eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth — or we would forget about proportionality altogether. He would talk about lining up drug dealers and gang members in front of a firing squad ... If it were solely up to him, that is how the country would solve crime in Democrat-run cities [such as Chicago and Detroit]."
That's his impulse and it's been more or less kept in check, often by his own short attention span. Trump tweets something, and it makes him feel better for the moment. But what about the rank and file, the lower levels of officialdom? What do they do?
Judging from the Portland operation, they go along. Some go even further. Just this week the acting DHS undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, Brian Murphy, was removed from his job after he was found compiling "intelligence reports" about journalists and protesters in Portland. According to the Washington Post, "Murphy tried to broaden the definition of violent protesters in Portland, in a way that some officials felt was intended to curry favor with the White House," calling them "violent antifa anarchists."
If Trump wins the validation he craves by being elected to a second term, true believers like Murphy will be further empowered up and down the line. And we can expect that Trump's own Deep State will be more than happy to implement his program. It wouldn't be the first time.
Donald Trump knows he is losing, and that should make us all very afraid, regardless of our political views
On May 31st, The New York Times reported that Trump had been “rushed” into the White House bunker as protestors massed outside the White House in Lafayette Park. Trump was humiliated. It looked like he ran, like a coward, from the BLM protesters. To the jeers of comedians and Tweeters, he claimed he was only “inspecting” the bunker while demanding the leaker who revealed his bunker trip be criminally prosecuted.
With Trump that can only mean one thing. He had to strike back viciously.
“This isn’t going to stop until the good guys are willing to use overwhelming force against the bad guys,” Trump retweeted that day.
The next day, June 1, in a conference call with the nation’s governors about civil unrest around BLM protests, most were seeking a path to de-escalation. Trump was contemptuous and disgusted: “Most of you are weak. If you don't dominate…You're going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate."
That same afternoon, Trump followed his own advice. Unmarked federal agents violently cleared peaceful protestors from the park with tear gas. The tables had been turned. Instead of Trump hiding in his bunker, it was his enemies who had to run for cover in a panic. Trump walked triumphantly, military leaders in tow, from the White House to St James Church for a photo op where he awkwardly held an upside down Bible over his head, and grinned. He showed them who was boss.
We would like to suggest this timeline is no coincidence. We think there may be a cause and effect relationship between the two events. The clearing of Lafayette Square was triggered by Trump’s humiliation in the bunker.
We have argued before that Trump is a malignant narcissist, a diagnosis introduced by the famed analyst Erich Fromm, a refugee from Nazi Germany, to explain the psychology of Hitler, Stalin and other grandiose destructive dictators throughout history. It has four components: narcissism, paranoia, psychopathy and sadism. Malignant narcissists enjoy destroying their real and imagined enemies. It makes them feel powerful, they enjoy inflicting pain, and it is an effective gangster’s tool to intimidate others to do their bidding. If they have been publicly humiliated, made to look weak, they must exact revenge viciously, fiercely, dramatically and preferably publicly. Trump’s philosophy: “When somebody screws you, you screw them back in spades. …You’ve gotta hit people hard. And it’s not so much for that person. It’s other people watch.”
Since June 1, Trump’s polls have plummeted, he has been widely mocked and jeered for his dishonest and ineffective response to the pandemic, protestors have continued in the streets, and his humiliation has continued. His response has been to bring Lafayette Park to scale. Unmarked military have abducted protestors off the streets of Portland despite the outrage of local and state officials. Trump has signaled an intent to send troops to Albuquerque, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore—none of whom want them--arguing he must “dominate” US cities.
When a malignant narcissist like Trump says “Make America Great Again,” what he really means is make ME great--or else. Malignant narcissists will demonize and destroy anyone who gets in their way, and the list of enemies always grows both because they are paranoid, and because their behavior provokes real opposition. Staffs are purged over and over for disloyalty. And the categories of people in the population who are enemies grows. First, we were defending the border from “infestations” by immigrants, sadistically taking away their children and putting them into concentration camps in the desert. Now those same Border Patrol agents—who have shown their willingness to commit crimes against humanity for Trump-- are being drafted into service as Trump’s personal Republican Guard to attack our citizens in our streets.
On July 22, Trump announced Operation Legend, a plan to invade multiple large Democratic-led US cities, starting with Chicago, on the flimsy premise that they have had a recent rise in street crime. That night the mayor of Portland was tear gassed in his own streets.
There appears to be a strategy behind this escalation: provoke the protestors to violence, then use that as an excuse for an even more repressive military response. Some have wondered if this is Trump’s “Reichstag moment.” Hitler used a fire at the Reichstag Parliament building as his convenient excuse for imposing martial law. Many historians believe that the arson planned and ordered by the Nazis as a false flag operation to justify their putting troops in the streets.
Only with Trump, we have a Reichstag fire every night, as we watch a similar process take place in slow motion.
How bad can it get if Trump feels power slipping away? When Hitler knew his war was lost, he too went into a bunker. Before he committed suicide, he issued an order known as the “Nero Decree” calling for “scorched earth.” “All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory…will be destroyed.” Hitler told Speers, “It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival...it is best for us to destroy even these things” because “only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.”
In other words, they failed to make Hitler great, and so the surviving Germans deserved to perish alongside him. Like a homicidal abusive spouse, he was determined that if he couldn’t have Germany then nobody would.
Trump is not Hitler. But like Hitler, he is a malignant narcissist. If we don’t make Trump great, he will predictably use his power to punish us. And if we don’t submit--he may just try to destroy us. Tear gas in the streets and one hundred and fifty thousand dead would suggest that he has already begun.
John Gartner Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist. He taught in the dept. of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School for 28 years. He is the founder of Duty to Warn.
Alan Blotcky, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Birmingham Alabama.
Thinking of culture in the Third Reich conjures up images of mass rituals, swastika flags, and grandiose buildings. Makers of television documentaries and designers of book covers (admittedly including that of my own new synthesis) tend to look for visual material that is instantly recognizable as Nazi. However unconsciously, this reflects the ambition of the Third Reich’s leaders to bolster their rule through a clear cultural profile – an ambition that was only partially fulfilled. No one would doubt that public architecture by Albert Speer or the Nuremberg Party Rallies, enhanced by Speer’s light installations and prominently filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, mattered a great deal. But in other realms, a distinctive cultural profile proved far more elusive.
The careers of extreme-right composers, playwrights, and film directors often stalled owing to their cantankerous personalities, limited popular appeal, or works that were deemed too shocking for a wider public (such as antisemitic dramas featuring rape scenes). Others fell short of Adolf Hitler’s standards, which were as high as they were vague. In January 1936, his faithful propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels noted impatiently: “We don’t have the people, the experts, the Nazi artists. But they must emerge in time.” Behind the scenes, Hitler was unhappy with the heroically proportioned bodies, monumental landscapes, and idealized peasant scenes on display at the 1937 “Great German Art” exhibition in Munich. His opening speech consequently dwelled on nineteenth-century Romanticism and the nefarious influence of Jewish art dealers rather than elaborating on what “true new German art” was supposed to entail.
Should the Third Reich’s efforts at transforming German culture thus be regarded as a failure? This would be to distort the picture, for much of what was performed, printed, or exhibited after 1933 was not, and did not aim to be, specifically Nazi. As early as the 1920s, Hitler and his followers had posed equally as bold innovators and as staunch defenders of a tradition that was supposedly under threat from cosmopolitan Jews and left-wing modernists. Such overlaps between extremist and conservative beliefs increased their support among those sections of the German middle class that upheld nineteenth-century cultural tastes. During the Third Reich, this ensured a sense of continuity for a public that appreciated conservative interpretations of Beethoven’s symphonies, Schiller’s plays, and Wagner’s operas. In turn, many a theatre actor, orchestra musician, or opera singer benefitted from the generous flow of direct subsidies and the activities of the leisure organization Strength through Joy, which arranged ten thousands of special performances.
Popular culture during the Third Reich had a similarly conventional outlook. Most of the costume dramas and screwball comedies shown in cinemas evinced few, if any, traces of Nazi ideology. Germans consumed them as harmless entertainment, much like they did with low-brow novels and the light music that predominated on the radio channels. While they favored domestic offerings, before World War II they did not have to feel cut off from international developments. Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse series and Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind were widely popular. The Third Reich’s own movie stars included the Hungarian Marika Rökk and the Swede Zara Leander alongside domestic idols such as the cheerful comedian Heinz Rühmann and the ruggedly masculine Hans Albers.
If so much of culture in the Third Reich was conventional rather than identifiable as Nazi, then where does its political significance lay? Obfuscation is an important part of the answer. When seeing a trivial comedy or listening to a nineteenth-century symphony, few appear to have thought about those cultural practitioners who were defined as Jewish and were consequently eliminated from movie casts and symphonic orchestras. Audiences were well aware that the fringes of culture had changed, in favor of pseudo-Germanic plays and paintings and to the detriment of the ambiguity that had been at the heart of Weimar’s most fascinating art, music, and literature. But the ready availability of conventional fare made it easier not to care, in Germany as well as abroad: When the antifascist and modernist Kurt Weill performed a composition in Paris based on texts by Bertolt Brecht, the audience reaction was negative, in stark contrast to the enthusiastic welcome which the French capital gave to Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and one of the Third Reich’s cultural figureheads.
Beyond obfuscation, conventional culture in the Third Reich stood out for the ways in which it was marshalled politically. During World War II, when Germany occupied much of Europe, it promoted its own film industry by excluding Hollywood imports and those prewar movies in which Jews had had any involvement. While the occupiers paid respect to the culture of France, they despised that of Poland, citing even the most mediocre theatrical or musical performance as evidence of German superiority. The Nazi grandees were special not in their appreciation of Western European art from the middle ages to the nineteenth century but for their habit of looting widely and unashamedly, thereby treating museums and private collections in the occupied countries as personal hunting grounds.
All this backfired, inasmuch as the allies became increasingly uninclined to distinguish between ‘German’ and ‘Nazi’ culture. Nowhere did this become more apparent than in the British and American bombing campaigns that were inflicted on major city centers with their time-honored churches and town halls. This allowed the Nazi leaders to declare themselves the defenders of German culture against a lethal threat from the outside. After the Third Reich’s demise, conventionality once again ensured continuity. Now that the war was over, American, British, and Soviet occupiers gave ample room to an established version of German culture, out of long-standing respect and in an effort to win over a defeated people. To Germans, attending a conservatively interpreted Beethoven symphony or seeing an entertaining movie seemed apolitical. At the same time, it allowed them to preserve a sense of national identity in a situation of national disempowerment. The fact that specifically Nazi elements were marginal to the post-1945 cultural landscape made it all the easier to dissociate oneself from the Third Reich – a necessary step, but also a self-exculpatory one.
Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam and the author ofCulture in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who faces a tough re-election fight this year, received thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical companies while pushing Congress to fund a fast-tracked coronavirus treatment and vaccine development program that eventually awarded contracts to those companies, Federal Election Commission records show.
The $10 billion program, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, was Daines' marquee contribution to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), which President Trump signed into law on March 27.
In the days and weeks that Daines worked on the bill, PACs affiliated with the pharmaceutical corporations Pfizer and Sanofi gave his campaign $2,500 and $2,000, respectively. Four days before Trump signed the act, a Merck corporate PAC gave Daines $4,000.
In total, from the end of March to the end of June, Daines took a combined $24,000 from the corporate PACs of pharmaceutical companies involved with Operation Warp Speed.
In addition to Merck, Sanofi and Pfizer — which made two donations — Daines saw contributions from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, who in late June contributed $2,500 and $3,000, respectively.
While all these companies donated to senators and candidates on both sides of the aisle, these contributions are notable in that AstraZeneca tripled its other donations to Daines, and Johnson & Johnson had never given him money before.
For reasons that are still unclear, these pharmaceutical PACs all but stopped donations entirely through the month of April, before resuming in late May.
Operation Warp Speed was created as part of a "moonshot" joint public-private effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine by early 2021. The federal government announced Friday that it had reached a $2.1 billion agreement with drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi — a Daines donor — the largest contract awarded through the program yet. The week before, Pfizer, another Daines donor, won a contract worth nearly $2 billion.
Daines promoted the project as recently as last week, boasting about the initiative at a Senate Finance Committee hearing last Wednesday, along with legislation to bring drug manufacturing back to the U.S. from China.
In total, the Montana Republican has accepted nearly $140,000 from pharmaceutical companies over the years, FEC records show. Those companies have little to no presence in Montana.
Daines' 2018 financial disclosure form, the most recent available, shows that he has a Vanguard Health Care Adm Mutual Fund valued as much as $250,000. That fund includes slices of Teva and Amneal, pharmaceutical corporations that have promoted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, despite health warnings from federal regulators.
In the first quarter of 2020, pharmaceutical companies Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca reported spending more than $6.6 million to lobby Congress on various issues, including the CARES Act and COVID-19.
Congressional oversight bodies and watchdogs have expressed concerns about the lack of transparency surrounding the award of vaccine contracts under Operation Warp Speed.
Daines will face current Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, in November. Trump took the state by 20 points in 2016, but Montana has a record of electing Democrats in statewide races while favoring national Republicans. Recent polls show Bullock and Daines neck-and-neck, and Roll Call currently considers the race one of four "toss-ups" in the U.S. Senate.
The Daines campaign did not reply to Salon's request for comment.
Donald Trump is doomed, and he knows it — in the limited, animalistic way he ever knows anything. His electoral prospects are dwindling toward the mathematical vanishing point, and his historical legacy is now sealed. There is no possible future in which he will not be remembered as the most catastrophically corrupt and incompetent U.S. president of the past 100 years, and quite possibly ever. If it's any consolation to him, the damage he has done is enormous, and as Paul Rosenberg explored for Salon this weekend, it may never be undone.
No, I will not pause to listen to your sermon about "overconfidence," or your superstitious lamentations about the lingering trauma of 2016. I was there too, and it was nothing like this. In fact, I wrote two articles that year — after attending the Republican and Democratic conventions, respectively — arguing that it felt like Trump was winning and that the Hillary Clinton campaign seemed clueless.
But all of us who covered that campaign were torn between what we could feel was happening, on a sort of electrical level, and the normative logic that suggested only one plausible outcome. So the first response to your demand for wolfsbane and incantations is that the dynamics of 2020 are completely different, and the second is that I'm not running Joe Biden's campaign — which is a good thing for both of us — and if the Democrats find a way to screw up an election that's been handed to them on a silver platter, wrapped in crinkly designer paper with a Godiva chocolate on top, then the whole party should definitely be sold off for scrap but it won't be my fault.
Everything about Trump's behavior in recent weeks or months speaks to this dawning, if childlike, half-awareness that he is staring right in the face of doom, defeat and failure. He has played chicken with those things his entire life, and has convinced himself — and to a large extent, the rest of us — that he can evade them through sheer cunning and the most brazen, shameless forms of salesmanship, which he mistakes for intelligence. None of that is working now, and his desperation is palpable.
It seems clear that Trump believed he could suppress or prevent the coronavirus pandemic through sheer force of will, and when that failed he believed he could use his dipshit Jedi mind-tricks to convince people that it either didn't exist or didn't matter. He believed that the Black Lives Matter protests were playing into his hands, and that out there in what he regards as "real America," people remained hypnotized by the same provincial, racist anxiety and terror that was so potent from the late 1960s well into the '90s. (To be fair, numerous mainstream observers shared that view at first, and I don't mean to suggest that political current no longer exists.)
He believed his ludicrous Bible-clutching photo-op in front of St. John's Church would cause patriotic moms and dads in the heartland to weep and swoon at his godly power. (In fact, I believe a great many devout Christians, including some conservative evangelicals, felt profoundly insulted, and not for the first time.) He believed his Keystone Kops pseudo-military intervention in Portland, Oregon — mail-order fascism on the cheap, as Salon columnist Lucian K. Truscott IV has put it — would be a display of macho dominance that would make the notional "suburban housewives" he both desires and despises go wobbly in the knees.
Donald Trump still believes that he can grab 'em by the you-know-what, and until now has avoided coming to grips with the reality that he is a morbidly obese 74-year-old man with a spray-on tan and an ingeniously structured hairdo that could be dubbed the Sat-on Beehive. At this point, his erotic allure is limited to sad-sack middle-aged men with expensive divorces, expensive pickups, lowered expectations and too many guns. He may hold the title of commander in chief, for now — and let's not underestimate the danger in that — but he's more like the incel in chief.
None of it's working even a little, and after last week's report that the U.S. economy contracted at an annual rate of nearly 33 percent in the second quarter — which is three times worse than the second-worst quarter recorded in the 73 years that such statistics have been collated — the Trumpian narrative has been reduced to shameless buck-passing and whining about the unfairness of fate, which is the behavior of losers, and of abuse victims who have grown up into abusers. A massive economic recession, more likely a depression, and what could well be 180,000 to 200,000 Americans dead by Election Day are not the kinds of headlines from which a presidency recovers. Trump and his shrinking band of courtiers can blame Barack Obama and Tony Fauci all they want, but the delusional zeal of the early Trump era has vanished, and what's coming off those people now is the flop-sweat of desperation.
Trump's supposed Republican allies, while still fearful of his fanatical voter base, have begun to back away from him, none too subtly. Needless to say, that has nothing to do with any version of political principle or any respect for "democratic norms"; the Republican Party left those things by the roadside a generation ago. For so-called leaders like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the issue now is simply survival: Their immediate task is to limit the damage of what they clearly understand will be a November bloodbath, and then to position themselves amid the ugly intra-party power struggle that is sure to follow. Their union with Trump was always a marriage of convenience, and they always knew no actual loyalty was involved on either side. Now that the convenience has evaporated, it probably feels good — in a small-minded, sadomasochistic register — to be the ones dumping Trump rather than the other way around.
I'm quite sure that McCarthy and McConnell, along with many other prominent Republicans, cannot wait to be rid of Donald Trump and are already rehearsing various death-of-Stalin monologues that range from "well, he expressed the true greatness of America but" to "honestly, I never really knew the guy." What they may discover, however, is that the Republican Party after Trump is something like John Hurt's character in "Alien" after the face-hugger falls off. He seems fine and normal! But as the robot scientist knows, he's been impregnated with something awful, and once it gets a decent feed down there in the gummy darkness, it's bustin' out.
The remaining questions about Donald Trump are all much larger than he is, which is nothing new. One of the most striking peculiarities of this bizarre era is that such a small person, with such a limited understanding of reality, could command the national stage and a massive proportion of the media's attention for the better part of five years. All by itself, that fact does not speak well of the condition of American civil society, let alone "democratic discourse." Yet at the same time, the monotonous narcosis of the Trump years has also provoked a vigorous reaction, visible in different parts of society in different ways: #MeToo feminism, Black Lives Matter, the 2018 midterms, the upsurge of left-wing or "socialist" politics catalyzed by the Bernie Sanders campaign, which the Democratic Party has been startled to discover it cannot control or contain.
Will Trump try to delay or cancel the election? Will he try to rig the election by sabotaging the Postal Service or claiming premature victory based on partial results, or both? If and when he loses, will he protest that the whole thing was rigged and unfair, and announce that he's staying in the White House indefinitely while Bill Barr investigates Democratic voter fraud? I don't want to underestimate the inherent danger of this situation: We have a deeply wounded and profoundly delusional person at the head of the federal government, who is convinced that the world is unfairly stacked against him and does not care whether the things he says have any relationship to reality.
So, yes, Trump could try to do any or all of those things. But remember that he's a "sniveling coward," in the immortal words of Ted Cruz (who arguably turned out to be an even bigger one), not to mention profoundly ignorant and totally incompetent. Ultimately, I don't think Trump has anywhere near the courage, the confidence or the means to pull off any version of a coup with success. He'd need a posse of powerful allies — not just Barr, who might enjoy giving it a whirl, but Republican leaders in Congress, the military brass, the Secret Service and the FBI, the Supreme Court and, most important of all, the top one-tenth of the one percent in the investment and banking class.
You won't catch me claiming that "democratic institutions" or the "rule of law" will rescue us from Donald Trump. That manifestly has not happened, and any such hope rested on a set of charmingly old-fashioned assumptions in the first place. None of the people I just mentioned are greatly concerned with that stuff, but all of them — especially the last group, the financial and corporate overlords who control all the wealth and most of the power in our society — do not much care for chaos and disorder, and have seen about enough of it over the last four years.
No doubt Wall Street feels some collective concern about the potential cost of a Democratic presidency, especially under current social conditions — but Joe Biden, the longtime "senator from MasterCard," was the Democrat the Mr. Monopoly crowd wanted all along. After the disastrous meltdown of the Trump presidency, they'll welcome Biden with open arms, along with helpful dossiers of potential Cabinet nominees.
As Donald Trump has secretly known all along — stupid, injured manchild that he is — none of the people in the privileged classes of New York or Washington or California who pretended to love and admire him truly understood his greatness, and now that the waves are crashing over the bow they're scurrying off the deck. He'll be left at the end with the losers and incels and rubes in the red hats — stricken, lonely people who looked to him as a savior and for whom he feels only contempt. People he probably hates more than he hates Muslims or Mexicans or Black people, and possibly even more than he hates himself.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) was on the receiving end of attacks from supporters of Donald Trump after telling a reporter "I’m not concerned about mail-in voting in Florida," during a Trump 2020 campaign call -- contradicting a multitude of comments the president has made in the past few weeks.
As CBS News’ Nicole Sganga tweeted, "Asked on a Trump campaign call if he is concerned about mail-in voting in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio responds curtly, 'No, I’m not concerned about mail in voting in Florida.'"
That, in turn, set off, supporters of Donald Trump led by Fox News personality Mark Levin who responded, "Geez, the Republicans are so self-destructive. Obviously, mail-in voting is problematic on many empirical levels. But Marco’s not concerned so move along ..."
Fans of the president then chimed in -- and you can see some of their comments below:
Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.
It was an especially fascist-y week in Donald Trump's America.
His trial balloon about postponing the election drew rebukes from just about everyone, including his erstwhile defenders on the right. He vowed that he would cancel TikTok, whose teens have caused him so much consternation. We learned that the Trump regime had been content to let Covid-19 spread like wildfire across blue states because "[their] people" weren't getting sick and dying and they were eager to shift blame for the economic fallout to their governors. It was reported that the Department of Defense is referring to protesters as "adversaries," and that the Department of Homeland Security has been tracking and issuing intelligence reports about journalists covering the uprising against discriminatory policing. And Attorney General Bill Barr removed any lingering doubts--if there any remained--that he's become the latest in a long line of sleazy lawyers who have served as Trump's corrupt "fixers."
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If you get your news from Fox and the conservative media, you probably only heard about Trump's blather about postponing the election. But in less partisan outlets, all of these stories were relatively prominent, and caused rightful alarm. But every week, there are so many less prominent acts of corruption and authoritarianism that go largely unnoticed by the public.
Consider just a few examples from this past week. You may have heard that Trump installed Louis DeJoy, a wealthy GOP donor, to serve as Postmaster General, and that he immediately instituted organizational changes that are slowing mail deliveries and could undermine the integrity of absentee ballots this fall. But the fact that "DeJoy and his wife Aldona Wos, the ambassador-nominee to Canada, have between $30.1 million and $75.3 million in assets in Postal Service competitors or contractors," according to The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, has largely been absent from reporting on DeJoy's leadership.
"The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it will continue to defy a federal court order compelling the full restoration of DACA," reported Slate's Mark Joseph Stern. "By doing so, the administration has chosen to flout a decision by the Supreme Court, effectively rejecting the judiciary’s authority to say what the law is."
While Trump's argle-bargle about saving "the suburban lifestyle dream" for America's housewives got some attention, the policy change behind it didn't. The regime rolled back a rule "that requires communities that receive federal funds work to undo their patterns of residential segregation." And just as the Supreme Court overturned Trump's push to kill DACA because his staff didn't follow the procedures to rescind it that were required by law, they replaced the measure in the 1968 Fair Housing Act with a new rule while "bypassing all the required procedural hurdles for reviewing it first," according to Bloomberg.
The EPA Inspector General is opening up an investigation into Trump's rollback of a key Obama-era measure to curb greenhouse gas emissions, citing doubts about whether it was done “consistent with requirements, including those pertaining to transparency, record-keeping, and docketing, and followed the E.P.A.’s process for developing final regulatory actions.”
CREW alleges that Jared Kushner's Coronavirus Task Force is violating "multiple laws," including "both the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by using private email accounts with no assurance their communications are being preserved and by meeting in secret." (Private emails are a big nothingburger unless major news outlets call it a giant scandal for a year or two.)
Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee may have been “extremely alarmed” by news "that the American ambassador in Brazil had signaled to Brazilian officials they could help get President Trump re-elected by changing their trade policies," but that story will fly under the radar of most Americans.
There's a guy working as a White House lawyer named Michael Williams. He used to be the general counsel of the American Suppressor Association, which lobbies on behalf of silencers (because of course there's a silencer lobby). Did he play a key role in "the Trump administration’s decision to lift a ban on firearm silencer sales to foreign private buyers that had been enacted to prevent the devices from being used against American troops"? It's likely he did, but we'll surely move on to other things by the time the investigation is completed, if it ever is.
What Fresh Hell is a roundup of these kinds of less prominent stories of conflicts of interest and corruption and abuses of power throughout the federal government. But that is an impossible task. Every week, we begin by narrowing down our focus from 60 or 70 stories of graft and rule-breaking to a manageable number. You could write a book detailing this regime's under-the-radar outrages over a period of just a couple of weeks. Most of them pass unnoticed by the American people. It's just too much.
And with that, here's what made the cut this week...
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"A senior Department of Homeland Security official told a Senate committee earlier this month that the department had not collected, exploited or analyzed information from the electronic devices or accounts of protesters in Portland, Ore," reportsThe Washington Post. But now "an internal DHS document... shows the department did have access to protesters’ electronic messages and that their conversations were written up in an “intelligence report” that was disseminated to federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, as well as state and local governments."
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Following the federal crackdown in Portland and elsewhere, the Scottish government "has called for the immediate suspension of exports of riot gear, tear gas and rubber bullets to the United States," according to The Independent.
Last week, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights warned that Trump's goons were committing human rights violations by targeting journalists and peaceful protesters with violence.
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The Trump campaign reportedly continued to pay White House Spox Kayleigh McEnany after she took her government position, "a clear ethical breach" that "could indicate violations of the laws governing campaign finance and payments to political appointees," according to Salon.
Per The Wall Street Journal, "Trump’s re-election effort is alleged to have paid more than $170 million to companies affiliated with former campaign manager Brad Parscale without disclosing the ultimate recipients of the money," which would be a rather egregious violation of campaign finance disclosure laws.
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Javanka raked in "at least" $36 million in outside income last year, according to WaPo.The Daily Beast reports that Jared's haul included "as much as $3 million from projects benefiting from Trump administration initiatives in 2019, plus up to $1 million more in rent money from firms which later received COVID-related small business loans from the government."
And WaPo's editorial board blasted Trump for "blatantly boost[ing] his own hotel in the relief bill" floated by Senate Republicans this week.
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The House Foreign Affairs Committee subpoenaed records from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week, alleging that Pompeo is participating in the campaign to smear Joe Biden and that by turning over "documents to Senate Republicans but not House Democrats" he has "has turned the State Department into an arm of the Trump campaign."
"The Trump administration has lifted a major hurdle for development of a massive gold and copper mine in the wilds of Alaska despite fears that it will poison the world’s largest sockeye salmon run," according to The Los Angeles Times. "Pebble Mine, which would become an open pit the size of 460 football fields at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, has long been opposed by environmentalists and the commercial fishing industry." Under Obama, the EPA concluded that the mine would cause irreversible damage to an important fishery.
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Finally, The New York Timesreports that "Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said in a televised address that Iran will expand its nuclear program and will not negotiate with the United States, doubling down on his defiance of the Trump administration’s 'maximum pressure' policy." Having walked away from the historic multilateral agreement signed by his predecessor, Art of the Deal guy has little leverage and our traditional allies aren't eager to give him any.
