President Donald Trump was ridiculed for being slapped with Twitter restrictions on Wednesday.
The president's campaign tweeted out his video appearing on "Fox & Friends" in which he claims that children can't get the coronavirus, or if they do, it isn't that bad. Not only is the comment a lie, but it's also a dangerous one that is so bad that Facebook removed Trump's video and Twitter demanded the campaign delete the video or it would remain in "Twitter jail," suspended from tweeting.
Trump reposted the video to his personal account, and the video appears to still be online. Social media sites have come under fire from users as Trump is allowed to lie about key facts of the virus, endangering lives.
It was a point of news that many flocked to Twitter to mock the president and his campaign, which was, until recently, being run by his social media staffer.
With nothing real to hang on to, it's no surprise that conservatives — already prone to spreading misinformation — are increasingly addicted to conspiracy theories, wallowing in paranoid fantasies to justify the ludicrous notion that there's any reason to keep on supporting Trump and the Republican Party.
Unfortunately, this turn towards even greater conspiratorial thinking on the right is also extremely dangerous. There's already a strong link between right-wing paranoia and right-wing violence. Add the increasing likelihood of Trump's defeat, the rising stress from the coronavirus, and a blitz of violent propaganda, and there's a real chance that right-wing conspiracism will lead to even more domestic terrorism, hate crimes and neofascist goons in the streets.
Jones claimed to have reports that "Maoists" (which is fringe-right code for anyone to the left of Republicans) are stockpiling "explosives and weapons and trucks loaded with ammonium nitrate and chlorine gas" in the cities in preparation to wage war against all true-believing Americans. So "the best thing to do in a defensive way," Jones said, "is kill as many of them as quickly as possible."
Jones of course insisted that he was only talking about "defensive" tactics and warned viewers about not "jumping first," but that rhetoric is mostly a weak attempt at ass-covering to disguise an effort to incite terrorist violence from the right.
For one thing, Jones is just making up the threat that his audience is supposed to be "defending" themselves against. No leftists are not stockpiling weapons or bomb-making materials, and there is no progressive conspiracy to wage war on right-wingers. For another thing, Jones painted a clear picture of the kinds of people he imagines killing as quickly as possible, specifically naming "the establishment perverts and pedophiles" who he believes run society, as well as people who "show up in black uniforms and burn down your local courthouse."
The former is a reference to Democratic politicians, whom far-right conspiracy theorists have been accusing, under the banner of "Pizzagate," of running a secret pedophile ring for at least the last four years now. The latter is a reference to Black Lives Matter protesters and anti-fascist activists, the vast majority of whom are peaceful. The right has been demonizing them as violent because of some graffiti and sporadic episodes of vandalism. Neither group is involved in a plot to kill conservatives (or anyone else), but by claiming that they, Jones is setting up a narrative clearly meant to incite or justify violent attacks.
On the Christian right side of things, similar conspiracy theories about progressives are spreading. As Right Wing Watch has documented, popular Christian right activist Scott Lively has claimed that "Democrat-controlled population centers" will soon be burned to the ground, as part of an elaborate conspiracy by liberals to get out of paying pensions to police officers.
Online searches for QAnon have reportedly exploded tenfold. Similarly, "QAnon pages and groups on Facebook had nearly 10 times more likes at the end of last month than they did last July" and there has been "a 190% increase in the daily average number of tweets with popular QAnon hashtags since March as compared to the seven months prior."
QAnon followers believe that a shadowy "elite" — which they conflate with Democrats — runs both the country from the shadows and, oh yeah, that they also have a massive pedophilia ring, and that Trump is secretly masterminding a plot to destroy this elite cabal. (In real life, Trump's reaction to people who run pedophile rings is to say they like "beautiful women" on "the younger side" and also to say "I wish her well.") It's a testament to the kinds of pretzels people will tie themselves into in order to believe that there's anything noble or moral about Donald Trump, or some valid reason to support him.
The rise in interest in QAnon isn't surprising, as the White House is actively encouraging their voters to get involved with this unified-field conspiracy universe. As Media Matters has reported, Trump has retweeted QAnon Twitter accounts at least 185 times, and "members of Trump's family, his personal attorney, current and former campaign staffers, and even some current and former Trump administration officials have also repeatedly amplified QAnon supporters and their content."
Honestly, the supposedly mainstream conservative network Fox News is just as dangerous at this point. Most Fox News hosts are careful to avoid overtly endorsing QAnon, but network content in recent weeks has been perfectly situated to validate and amplify the paranoia about Democrats and progressives who are supposedly gearing up to wage war on conservatives.
Day in and day out, Fox News has broadcast scary images of protesters fighting with police, clouds of tear gas and people running through city streets in the middle of the night, all to make rural and suburban viewers, who are even more shut-in than usual, believe that American cities are war zones right now. Fox News is also blatantly lying to its viewers, blaming "radicals" and "antifa" for the scary images, and not telling viewers that in most cases what they're seeing is cops provoking conflict, often by chasing down, beating and tear-gassing peaceful protesters.
As those of us who actually live in American cities can attest, they don't look like war zones, but pretty much like the same places they were before the pandemic and the protests (with a lot less traffic). Even when it comes to the protests themselves, despite some looting and vandalism back in early June, the vast majority of protests have been entirely nonviolent, at least as long as law enforcement isn't attacking protesters without cause.
In spreading this bald-faced propaganda, Fox News — which tries to position itself as the voice of the Trump-era mainstream right — is working in tandem with cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs conspiracy theorists like QAnon and Alex Jones. Fox News viewers see all these misleading images and hear all this talk about "antifa" and the "radical left," and it feels like concrete evidence that the conspiracy theorists are right and that "progressives" or "radicals" are starting a civil war. This not only reinforces conspiratorial thinking, but encourages more conservatives to seek out these outrageous theories.
Taken together, the Trump White House, the online conspiracy fringe and Fox News are enveloping Republican voters in this paranoid fantasy that they're under violent assault from the leftists — and that they need to "defend" themselves through pre-emptive action. There's already been a rash of violence against protesters, who have been run over with cars or shot down in the streets. Rather than toning it down, Trump and his allies in both "mainstream" and fringe right-wing media have ramped up their rhetoric, painting a lurid and entirely false picture of the supposed threat. Either implicitly, as on Fox News, or explicitly, as with Alex Jones, conservatives are being encouraged to respond to this imaginary threat with violence.
There's no reason to expect this situation to improve as the November election nears — or after that either, quite likely. Right-wingers are sore losers on a good day, but now they've whipped themselves into a paranoid frenzy that is utterly detached from reality and could lead to tragic violence.
On Feb. 4, 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush was campaigning for reelection at the National Grocers Association convention in Orlando. There, the president “grabbed a quart of milk, a light bulb and a bag of candy and ran them over an electronic scanner,” wroteTimes correspondent Andrew Rosenthal. “The look of wonder flickered across his face again as he saw the item and price registered on the cash register screen.”
“This is for checking out?” asked Mr. Bush. “I just took a tour through the exhibits here,” he told the grocers later. “Amazed by some of the technology.”
Rosenthal said this small moment was symbolic of something larger: The president, he wrote, “seems unable to escape a central problem: This career politician, who has lived the cloistered life of a top Washington bureaucrat for decades, is having trouble presenting himself to the electorate as a man in touch with middle-class life.” The Times’ frontpage headline—“Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed”—was enough to set off a wave of news stories about Bush’s alleged remoteness from Americans worried about an economic recession that defined the election.
I’ll return to this. For now, I couldn’t helping thinking of this moment in campaign history after watching the current president’s Axios interview. In a long and winding exchange, Donald Trump claimed that the new coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed 160,000 Americans and infected almost 5 million—with no end in sight—is under control. “Under the circumstances right now, I think it’s under control.”
Jonathan Swan, stunned, asked: “How? One thousand Americans are dying a day.” To which the president said: “They are dying. That’s true. And it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.” To which Swan, giving Trump room to back away from it is what it is, asked: “You really think this is as much as we can control it? One thousand deaths a day?” To which Trump said—well, nothing really, except more of the same, by which I mean blaming other people for his problems.
It makes no sense whatsoever to say things are under control while at the same time blaming others for letting things get out of control. That’s not my point, though. My point is the president’s perfect absence of human emotion. One thousand deaths a day. That’s one Sept. 11, 2001, every third day. (Globally, someone dies every 15 seconds from Covid-19, according to Reuters.) In a previous America, a previous American president encountered a supermarket check-out and expressed a bit of amazement at some newfangled technology. We were told it captured something bigger. We were told he’s out of touch. In this life, this president feels nothing in the face of death and disease. He’s not astonished. He’s not shocked. And it is what it is. Has any president been as out of touch? The headline should be: “Trump Encounters Suffering, Unamazed.”
The thing about President’s Bush’s amazement in 1992 is there was a good reason for it. The Associated Press ran a story a week after Rosenthal’s appeared in the Times, explaining that the check-out technology was novel at the time. Bush wasn’t amazed by the sight of a supermarket scanner. He was amazed that the supermarket scanner could read bar-code labels that had been “ripped and jumbled,” a true advancement.
Maybe Andrew Rosenthal just got it wrong, but I suspect something else. The press corps often wants to tell a certain kind of story, a story that will get attention, and it searches for opportunities to tell it. In his case, Rosenthal probably wanted to tell a story about a cloistered incumbent grown distant from the little people, and “the look of wonder” that flickered across Bush’s face was all the prompting he needed.
The same goes for Trump. Even now, the press corps maintains the story of a rich populist with the common touch, because maintaining it mangles political stereotypes in ways wholly satisfying to professionals wholly bored by political stereotypes. That might not be so bad if it did not also undermine previous criteria for being out of touch. Trump has never cooked his own meals, washed his own clothes, paid his own bills, or ever raised his own kids. He sure as hell never went grocery shopping. Yet Bush was out of touch and Trump isn’t, even as this president stares blankly at mass death.
I think we’re seeing less storytelling and more truth-telling. CNN’s Jim Acosta reported this morning what “a source familiar with Trump’s Tuesday Oval Office meeting with his coronavirus task force said” about the president. Trump, the source said, “is still not demonstrating that he has a firm grasp of the severity of the pandemic in the US. ‘He still doesn’t get it,’ the source said. ‘He does not get it.’”
Acosta said that even when the team “tried to stress the dire nature of the situation to the president during the meeting, the source said Trump repeatedly attempted to change the subject.” That’s what you do when you’re out of touch. That’s what you do when you’ve never been in touch. That’s what presidents do when they just don’t care.
Let’s say so.
John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of the Editorial Board, a newsletter about politics in plain English for normal people and the common good. He’s a visiting assistant professor of public policy at Wesleyan University, a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative, a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly, and a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches.
I’m not being hyperbolic or melodramatic when I say that democracy itself is on the line on November 3. Donald Trump has been on a mission to subvert our democracy and to push it toward an autocracy. No president has ever disavowed democracy like Trump. No president has ever wanted to change our democratic way of life like Trump.
Trump has shown little interest or intent in following our Constitution. He is not abiding by the emoluments clause. He breaks norms and rules at will. He does not recognize that the three branches of government are co-equal. He operates as if the executive branch has total power. Our democracy is not based on the executive branch having absolute power. It requires that the three branches have separate powers in a check-and-balances system. Trump impugns democracy because it limits his power and requires him to be held accountable.
Trump has crossed boundaries and politicized the Justice Department. He has finally “hired” an attorney general who functions as his personal attorney rather than the top judicial official for the country. Trump has done this so that he can stop any criminal investigations into his behavior. This allows his corruption to run rampant. That’s not how the judicial branch of government is intended to function in our democracy. It is designed to be independent with its own power. But not according to Trump.
A free press is guaranteed in the first amendment of the Constitution. But Donald Trump has systematically tried to undermine our free press from the beginning. The press’ role is to be a watchdog of government and to provide information to the public. Trump hates the press because he does not want to be watched, examined, scrutinized, or challenged. Whenever he does not like a story, he calls it “fake news” in order to minimize its importance to the public. Trump hates journalists, calls them “the enemy of the people,” and believes he can jail them. A free press is critical in a democracy. It keeps our elected officials earnest and honest. That’s why Trump is so disdainful and dismissive of the press. The irony is that it is the free press that helped to elect him in 2016.
The right to peacefully protest is protected in the Constitution as well. Violent protests are against the law, but non-violent protests are a part of our country’s heritage and are clearly protected In the first amendment. I wish Congressman John Lewis could once again talk to us about the importance of peaceful protests in the civil rights movement. But Trump has not be able to tolerate peaceful protests against him or his policies. In fact, he has sent federal troops into American cities to provoke aggressive conflicts with protestors so that he could flex his presidential muscle. The right to peaceful protests must be protected at all cost in our democracy. Trump has disowned that part of our Constitution. He just cannot personally endure a protest against him; it shakes his fragile ego and triggers his hostile urges.
Presidential corruption is antithetical to our democratic way of life. Trump’s associates and cronies are now convicted felons because of their activities in his administration. Trump himself is an unindicted co-conspirator. He is facing other criminal charges after he leaves office. Criminality in our president chips away at our democracy. It must not be tolerated. Let’s not forget that Trump was impeached in late 2019 for his corrupt behavior.
We live in a representative democracy. We elect our representatives at the voting booth. Trump is up for re-election on November 3. He has condoned and fueled a campaign of voter suppression that is anti-democratic in its intent. All Americans have the right to vote. But Trump is in favor of limiting polling booths, having restrictive rules, and not allowing mail-in voting. Trump’s voter suppression tactics are unconscionable in a democracy. And, again, an irony is that Trump votes by mail.
Finally, Trump floated the idea of postponing the Nov 3 election because of the pandemic. That, too, would be contrary to our Constitution. And it would be disruptive and unacceptable because it would be solely for Trump’s political and personal advantage.
Trump has spent the past four years attacking our democracy for his own personal and political gains. He is a malignant narcissist with antisocial leanings. His psychopathology is what underlies his dictatorial and autocratic preferences. His psychiatric disturbance won’t just disappear magically. Its influence is severe and constant.
As my colleagues and I have written, Trump in a second term would feel empowered and emboldened to erode democracy even further. The result would be a dictatorship in an autocracy if it is left up to him. That is Trump’s intent. Do not be misled or fooled by his words. Look at his deeds.
Make no mistake about it, Donald Trump is attacking our democracy like no president in the past. Please don’t ignore it or minimize it. It is a full-frontal assault that will have disastrous consequences for decades and even generations to come.
Vote on Nov 3 for our democracy. It is on the ballot.
Alan D. Blotcky, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in Birmingham, Alabama.
One of the most frustrating things, for both Democrats and the investigative journalists who worked tirelessly to expose Donald Trump's seemingly unending frauds, was how little Trump's base seemed to care that he was a liar and a cheat. The evidence of Trump's sociopathic disregard for business ethics, or any ethics at all, is overwhelming.
There are easily a dozen more examples of the various ways that Trump has shamelessly lied, distorted numbers, cheated other people and generally committed fraud with the ease most of us would pour a cup of coffee. It was inevitable that he would do the same thing as president — but with the coronavirus statistics, that has turned deadly.
In an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios that aired Monday night, Trump showed up with a bunch of fraudulent charts and made the preposterous claim that "we're lower than the world" when it comes to the coronavirus.
But Trump, using the flimflam talents of a lifelong tax cheat, insisted that the only number that counts is the ratio of deaths to infections, which ignores the fact that millions more people have been infected than would have been under a moderately competent administration, of whatever party or ideology.
Trump is "applying salesmanship that works in the worlds of real estate and reality television to the worst pandemic in the century," Swan said about his own interview with Trump.
Honestly, he was understating the case. Trump's instincts towards fraud didn't "work" all that well in the world of real estate, as evidenced by his multiple bankruptcies. Arguably, Trump and other members of his family should have already been sent to prison for using these tactics in the business world, since it's clear he went well beyond legal puffery into outright fraud and tax evasion. The fact that Trump has so far managed to survive his own lengthy history of fraudulent behavior only speaks to the toxicity of an economic system that allows white men born into wealth to fail endlessly upward.
It's no surprise that Trump is lying about this. He's always been a liar and a fraud. It's not like his own voters are ignorant of this well-documented fact.
But Trump's voters have never minded that he lies and cheats. In fact, that was exactly what they liked about Trump. As I argued in my book "Troll Nation," Trump's voters knew he was a raging asshole, but were convinced he'd be their asshole, a guy who would stick it to the people they viewed as enemies (immigrants, liberals, feminists, journalists and so on) and that he'd leverage his skills at cheating and defrauding others to their benefit.
Trump himself leaned into this narrative hard during the 2016 campaign, reveling in his own history of corrupt behavior but promising his voters that his evil ways made him the best champion for their interests.
"All my life, my whole life I've been greedy, greedy for money," Trump told attendees as a 2016 event in Des Moines, Iowa, before promising, "but now I want to be greedy for the United States."
During an October 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, when she highlighted Trump's long history of fraudulent tax avoidance, Trump retorted, "That makes me smart," arguing that if he had paid his fair share in taxes, they "would be squandered, too, believe me."
He played a similar game when Clinton brought up his multiple bankruptcies, portraying these not as business failures but clever ways to cheat the system. He even argued that he could use trickery to "renegotiate" the U.S. government's debt by half. (This is not possible.)
It's a turn as unsurprising as Darth Vader choking one of his own soldiers to death: Trump is only too happy to use his instincts to defraud and lie to the very people he promised he'd fight for. Unfortunately, Trump isn't just lying about his sketchy personal finances anymore. He's lying how many people are dying due to his negligent and even malicious handling of a major public health crisis.
It was inevitable that Trump would do this to his own voters sooner or later. His assurances that he would be a lying fraud, but one who was always on their side, were always the empty promises of a con man to his marks.
"If he can in any way profit from your death, he'll facilitate it, and then he'll ignore the fact that you died," Trump's niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, writes in her book "Too Much and Never Enough."
In this case, it's not so much that Trump thought he would directly profit from people dying. It was more that he convinced himself that any measures taken to mitigate the pandemic — whether that meant a rigorous lockdown, mask mandates or a serious nationwide testing regimen — would hurt his chances of re-election, and he'd much rather see people die in large numbers than let that happen.
But perhaps this is splitting hairs: However you slice it, millions of people have gotten sick and more than 155,000 are dead because Trump thought he could cheat on the coronavirus numbers the same way he cheated on his taxes, cheated his customers, cheated charities and cheated the so-called students at his so-called university. His voters elected him because they admired his sleaziness, and thought they would benefit from his cheating ways. But now they're just as likely to get sick or die as the liberals they were so eager to enrage and humiliate.
We can't expect some mass exodus back to reality among Trump supporters, of course. It's very common for people who have been defrauded to refuse to admit it, and to defend the con man who targeted them, rather than admit that they were wrong in the first place. This is visible in cults like Jonestown or Heaven's Gate, where members may be willing to die before conceding they should never have followed their cult leader. Trump's approval rating remains stuck at a stubborn 40%, so now we know: That's the proportion of Americans who would rather risk death from a pandemic than admit that maybe the liberals were right all along.
In a time of instability and uncertainty, there's one thing we can count on: Donald Trump will do everything he possibly can to retain power through the forthcoming election and beyond. His motives are well-known: If he loses the election, he'll not only go down in history as a one-term loser, which is anathema to his ridiculously hyperbolic puffery, but it's likely he'll face indictment on myriad criminal charges, while fighting off an avalanche of lawsuits aimed at his criminal negligence.
How do we know he's capable of anything? For starters, he already tried to cheat in this election. He was impeached and put on trial in the Senate for doing it. Before that, he tried to cheat in the 2016 election, too, with the help of Russia and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen, who funneled campaign cash to buy the silence of women Trump awkwardly screwed while married. If he's willing to risk impeachment and other ramifications in order to suppress the vote, there's definitely no off-position on his self-destruction switch.
And self-destruction might be the upshot of his latest plot. We'll get to that part in a second.
Trump and his postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, are busily dismantling the U.S. Postal Service at a time when more Americans rely upon the USPS for deliveries of supplies while isolating in place: everything from prescription drugs to household necessities to paychecks to absentee ballots.
It's the absentee ballots in particular that are motivating Trump and DeJoy to do what they're doing, and — as a bonus — they might finally get to privatize the USPS in the process.
By way of background, the Postal Service is faced with unfunded healthcare and pension liabilities for former postal workers due to the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, passed by the lame-duck Republican Congress of 2006, which caused a $120 billion cash crunch. Meanwhile, however, second-quarter 2020 revenues for the USPS grew by more than $300 million from the second quarter of the previous year, totaling $17.8 billion. Likewise, 2019 revenues for the entire year were up more than $500 million over 2018. It turns out that e-commerce from corporations like Amazon (and Walmart and Target and so on) has significantly helped the USPS, with operating revenues growing every year since 2012. That's not to downplay the pension deficit, merely to say that mail delivery has been robust.
So why did DeJoy decide to eliminate overtime for USPS workers last month?
As you might have noticed, the lack of overtime has slowed mail delivery to a virtual crawl, which has the deliberate effect of consumer confidence in the USPS, convincing Americans that the postal mail is shoddy and unreliable at a time when Trump desperately wants people to stop using it — and to stop using it for one specific purpose: voting.
The head of the American Postal Workers Union, Mark Dimondstein, recently observed: "These changes are happening because there's a White House agenda to privatize and sell off the public Postal Service."
To achieve full privatization and vote suppression, USPS management under Trump is rigging the game by holding back deliveries and deliberately pissing people off. People who are angry at the Postal Service are less likely to use it, opting for FedEx, UPS or another competitor, which will affect USPS revenue while disincentivizing absentee voting by convincing people their ballots are likely to arrive late, or not at all.
Dismantling the USPS is part of a larger effort to rig the vote using the courts. Trump tweeted on Monday: "In an illegal late night coup, Nevada's clubhouse Governor made it impossible for Republicans to win the state. Post Office could never handle the Traffic of Mail-In Votes without preparation. Using Covid to steal the state. See you in Court!"
While we're here, what happened in Nevada — a vote by the state legislature to send mail-in ballots to all voters, not an edict by the governor — was neither illegal nor a coup. Trump lies and exaggerates everything. Duh. Furthermore, in 2018, the Postal Service deployed a system known as Service Type Identifiers (STIDs) — a barcode tracking system for absentee ballots that allows for point-to-point monitoring of each and every ballot sent through the mail.
Regarding the threat about "court" in Trump's tweet, the president's re-election campaign has already spent more than $20 million on lawsuits against absentee balloting. (All "mail-in" ballots are actually absentee ballots, but Trump doesn't want you to know that.) According to Rolling Stone's Andy Kroll, the Trumps have filed lawsuits in "more than a dozen states, including the battlegrounds of Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida." Nevada's in there too, of course. The legal fund itself is being supplied by the usual array of pro-Trump Batman villains: Coal tycoon Bob Murray, Charles Schwab, Woody Johnson (of Johnson & Johnson), Marvel Entertainment chair Ike Perlmutter and so on.
The high-priced mission is as old as Madison Avenue marketing: manufacture a problem, then prescribe a solution. The nonexistent problem is "voter fraud," and the solution is to exploit the legal system to block absentee ballots and other services like ballot drop-boxes.
Naturally, the war against absentee voting joins other pointless yet suppressive solutions like Voter ID laws, voter purges and other suppression tactics, predominantly aimed at traditionally Democratic voters, especially people of color. Contrary to what the world's most notorious liar repeats on endless loop, statistically, there's virtually no such thing as voter fraud — not with absentee ballots, not with in-person voting, not at all. It doesn't exist, other than as rare, anecdotal episodes amounting to a tiny handful of the hundreds of millions of ballots cast in recent years. And in those anecdotal cases, the perpetrators are almost always nabbed and prosecuted.
Speaking of money, we only need to see that DeJoy, the recently-appointed postmaster general, gave Trump $1.2 million in campaign donations to understand where his loyalties are. By the way, prior to running the USPS, DeJoy was tasked with raising money for the ill-fated Republican National Convention this month (the one that was first in Charlotte and then moved to Jacksonville and now is happening nowhere in particular). He has also donated millions to the broader GOP.
In other words, DeJoy has invested a mountain of cash in Trump's re-election and he's not about to let something like efficient mail delivery stand in his way. If they can privatize the entire shmear along the way, well, that's a cherry on top.
Vaporizing the USPS and selling the parts for scrap, while suppressing absentee ballots, is only the beginning. As we discussed several weeks ago, it's inevitable that Trump will try to exploit the courts to block the count of absentee ballots after Election Day, targeting "too close to call" precincts that could shift the electoral votes for an entire state. The result could either be another Bush v. Gore-style Supreme Court decision or a lengthy delay in reporting the results, during which time Trump could try to declare victory, hurling the entire process into a cauldron of chaos. The current slate of lawsuits is just the beginning. The true mayhem has yet to begin.
Now for the self-destructive aspect of Trump's absentee gambit.
When you consider that 33 states, plus the District of Columbia, already offer absentee voting without an excuse, Trump is shotgun-blasting the service in a way that could also inadvertently thwart his own fanboys from casting ballots as well. The Washington Post reported this week:
[S]tate and local Republicans across the country fear they are falling dramatically behind in a practice that is expected to be key to voter turnout this year. Through mailers and Facebook ads, they are racing to promote absentee balloting among their own.
Womp womp.
By the way, one of the Republican campaigns that appears to be defying Trump's war on absentee ballots is — yes! — Trump's own campaign. In fact, his operation sent out at least one email to Pennsylvania supporters urging them to get their evil absentee ballots in time for the primary election. The email even promoted a Trump-branded web page meant to assist voters with the process. No wonder the Red Hats are going indiscriminately bonkers these days, given the whiplash-inducing mixed messages. Nevertheless, it might be too late for Republican voters, at least the ones who believe every word belched by their mendacious clown dictator.
As for the rest of us, the only way to overcome DeJoy and Trump's malfeasance is to get your absentee ballots and mail them right away as soon as early voting begins, state by state. The sooner ballots are in the hands of your county board of elections, the more likely they'll be counted before Donald Trump's lawyers step in. We're not powerless here. Trump can't stop you from voting unless you wait until the last minute. Don't. The mail may be crippled by Trump's cheating and conniving, but we don't have to be caught in his trap. Not this time.
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.
