Last week, I walked over to Black Lives Matter Plaza in front of the White House to clear my head and draw some inspiration. When I arrived at the north end of the square, the line of people waiting to climb up a stepladder so they could get a better picture of “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in bright yellow letters heartened me. They were so obviously proud and energized by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s act of defiance against Donald Trump itself, but also I expect by what that act represented: That the people still own this nation and still have power to move it where it needs to go.
I made my way south towards the White House to drink in the atmosphere. When I got to the corner of 16th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue (where Trump’s Bible fiasco played out), I came upon a scene that spoke volumes about where we are as a nation and where Trumpism is as a force. Approximately 20 shirtless, apparently impaired white supremacists were lurching back and forth between the encamped BLM supporters and a cordon of DC police -– attempting to provoke either or both parties into a Fox News-ready response.
This group was the most pathetic collection of human beings I have ever encountered in my sixty years on this earth. They made me ashamed to be an American, just like Trump has succeeded in making me feel totally differently about the flag and even the word “American.” And I say this as a Veteran, a retired career government official and someone who used to tear up at the national anthem as a young boy.
When you connect the fact that this pitiful group of fascist provocateurs was the best that this movement could get in front of the President’s own home to Trump’s Tulsa rally debacle, his obvious fatigue and dejection after the event, recent Supreme Court rulings rebuking his regime and pushback from government officials, it’s fairly clear that Trumpism has passed its high water mark and is rapidly declining.
Contrast that with the positive energy that gave us Black Lives Matter Plaza and you might conclude that barring some unforeseeable game-changer emerging this summer, the Republicans are going to lose big time in the 2020 elections, and even if Trump, Barr and McConnell attempt a coup to remain in power they will be thwarted. They know it – or at least feel it – themselves.
But let’s be sober about what the fight ahead of us looks like. Germany was all but defeated in the spring of 1945, but thousands of Americans still lost their lives to a dedicated group of fanatical German soldiers – a mix of old men and young boys. Following the American Civil War, the South turned decisive battlefield defeat into an insurgency that lasts to this day in some form. Black Americans have paid a disproportionate price of permitting this for 150 years, and what we are experiencing today is a direct outgrowth of that failure to reinforce the Union’s victory.
What was the difference between Germany and the Confederacy? The Allies pursued de-Nazification vigorously if imperfectly, and we “softly” occupied Germany for 45 years (until the end of the Cold War). Conversely, after the half-hearted Reconstruction program, we let the Southern states resume governing themselves while we rapidly got the economy back up and running (sound familiar?) in the North.
I lived in Germany for six years and maintain continuing relationships with friends there. And I’ve lived 40 years in the American South. I can say unequivocally that Germany is a more evolved country than the American South as a region. Like all nations, Germany is a work in progress, but its lived values and quality of life far surpass those in the American South. It’s not treason to point this out – it would be journalistic and political malpractice not to.
Trump and his supporters are going to go down swinging after the Elections. Or maybe I should say, “shooting.” They’re not going to walk away from 400 years of cultural instinct and material advantage because ‘snowflakes’ outvoted them.
Trump’s dismal poll numbers are just starting to register broadly with Republicans, and we’re already seeing white supremacist terror attacks by the Boogaloo Bois and other groups, massive voter suppression efforts from state government officials, the demonization of Democrats and delegitimization of peaceful protesters and the ginning up of a coordinated propaganda campaign of fear that that makes the Willie Horton ads that sank Michael Dukakis’s candidacy 30 years ago look like child’s play.
That said, America can’t go back to business as usual after we stave off a potential Trumpian coup. If Democrats manage to sweep the 2020 elections, progressives need to “occupy” the American information and political battle-spaces, reform the police and secure justice and equal access for all citizens. Most importantly, we will need to remain vigilant, and continue to stamp out and suppress all anti-democratic ideologies and movements. We forced the Germans to adopt a law that specifically outlaws the use of symbols of fascism – one that has been applied quite broadly and effectively. I am saddened and ashamed to admit this, but we need such a law in the U.S.
Like Abraham Lincoln, I do fondly hope and fervently pray that this mighty scourge may speedily pass away. But as he also knew, hope and prayer must be augmented by decisive action. Let us seize the tremendous, and undeserved, opportunity presented to us by our fellow African-American citizens, eject the cancer of Trumpism from the body politic, and, as Lincoln said in his second Inaugural Address, “strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Or reap the whirlwind.
Mark Hill is a career U.S. Intelligence Officer and former National Security Senior Executive, and Chief Innovation Officer of Revelatur, Inc., a progress accelerator whose mission is to measurably advance Democracy in the United States and globally.
Trump will do anything to be re-elected. His opponents are limited because they believe in democracy. Trump has no limits because he doesn’t.
Here’s Trump’s re-election playbook, in 25 simple steps:
1. Declare yourself above the law.
2. Use racist fearmongering. Demand “law and order” and describe protesters as “thugs”, “lowlife” and “rioters and looters”. Describe Covid-19 as “Kung-Flu”. Retweet posts from white supremacists. In your campaign ads, use a symbol associated with Nazis.
3. Appoint an attorney general more loyal to you than to America, and politicize the Department of Justice so it’s lenient on your loyalists and comes down hard on your enemies. Have it lighten the sentence of a crony convicted of lying under oath. Order investigations of industries you dislike.
4. Fire US attorneys who are investigating you.
5. Fire independent inspectors general who are looking into what you’ve done. Crush any whistleblowers you find.
6. Demean and ignore the intelligence community. Appoint a director of national intelligence more loyal to you than to America. Demand that the head of the FBI pledge loyalty to you.
7. Pack the federal courts with judges and justices more loyal to you than to the constitution.
8. Politicize the Department of Defense so generals will back whatever you order. Refer to them as “my generals”. Have them help clear out protesters. Order the military to surveil protesters. Tell governors you’ll bring in the military to stop protesters.
9. Purge your party of anyone disloyal to you and turn it into a mindless, brainless, spineless cult.
10. Get rid of accumulated experience and expertise in government. Demean career public servants. Hollow out the state department, the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, and public health.
11. Reward donors and cronies with bailouts, tax breaks, subsidies, government contracts, regulatory rollbacks and plum jobs. Put their lobbyists in charge of your agencies. Distribute $500bn in pandemic assistance to corporations in secret, without any oversight.
12. Coddle dictators. Don’t criticize their human rights abuses. Refuse to work with the leaders of other democracies. Withdraw from international treaties.
13. Create scapegoats. Demonize migrants and lock up asylum-seekers at the border even if they’re children. Put a whitenationalist in charge of immigration policy. Blame Muslims, Mexicans and Chinese.
14. Denigrate and ridicule all critics. Describe opponents as “human scum”. Attack the mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news” and “enemies of the people”.
15. Conjure up conspiracies against yourself supposedly led by your predecessor and your opponent in the last election. Without any evidence, accuse your predecessor of “treason”. Fabricate a “Deep State” out to get you.
16. Downplay real threats to the nation, such as a rapidly spreading pandemic. Lie about your utter failure to contain it. Muzzle public health experts. Urge people to go back to work even as the pandemic worsens in parts of the country.
17. Encourage armed supporters to “liberate” states from elected officials who disagree with you.
18. Bribe other nations to investigate your electoral opponent and flood social media with lies about him.
19. Use rightwing propaganda machines like Fox News and conspiracy theory peddling One America News to inundate the country with your lies. Ensure that the morally bankrupt chief executive of Facebook allows you to spread your lies on the biggest media machine in the world.
20. Suppress the votes of people likely to vote against you.Intimidate voters of color. Encourage Republican governors to purge voter rolls, demand voter ID and close polling places.
21. Seek to prevent mail-in ballots during the pandemic. Claim they will cause voter fraud, without evidence. Threaten to close the US postal service.
22. Get Vladimir Putin to hack into US election machines, as he did in 2016 but can now do with more experience and deftness. Promise him that in return you’ll further destabilize America as well as Nato. Allow him to put a bounty on killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
23. If it still looks like you’ll be voted out, try to postpone the election.
24. If you’re voted out of office notwithstanding all this, refuse to leave. Contest the election, claim massive fraud, say it’s a conspiracy, get your cult of a political party to support your lies, get your propaganda machine to repeat them, get your justice department to back you, get your judges and justices to affirm you, get your generals to suppress any subsequent rebellion.
25. Declare victory.
Memo to America: Beware Trump’s playbook. Spread the truth. Stay vigilant. Fight for our democracy.
It's safe to say that few things have obsessed Donald Trump more than his outrage at professional athletes who have chosen to kneel during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. Particularly in the fall of 2017 — while he was still smarting from the national outrage at his description of the white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville as "very fine people" — Trump went on a rampage against the NFL kneelers, trying to position his racist response as patriotism and love for U.S. troops.
"Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag, to say, 'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He's fired. He's fired,'" Trump ranted at an Alabama rally in September 2017.
He was so committed to this idea that kneeling during the anthem was an insult to the troops and the nation that he sent Vice President Mike Pence to an Indianapolis Colts game for the specific purpose of staging a walkout the moment players took a knee during pregame ceremonies.
Trump has been back at it again lately, tweeting angrily and ranting during his disastrous Tulsa rally that the NFL will regret it if players continue their kneeling protest in the season that may or may not occur this fall.
It was always preposterous that Trump's antipathy to the kneeling athletes was about patriotism and "supporting the troops," rather than flat-out racism. Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who started the kneeling tradition (and who lost his job in the NFL for it), came up with the idea of taking a knee after consulting with a friend who was a Green Beret on the best way to speak out against racism without insulting the troops or the flag.
But in case there was any lingering doubt that Trump's claim to love U.S. troops is all an act, consider the damning reports from the New York Times and other news organizations this week that Trump ignored his own intelligence agencies when they told him Russian agents were likely paying bounties to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump not only didn't pay any attention to these reports, he continued to push for Russia to rejoin the G7, likely because of his continued admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump adored even before Putin ordered his own intelligence to meddle the 2016 election on Trump's behalf.
Trump denied those initial reports, claiming he hadn't been briefed at all, even though intelligence officials were so concerned that the National Security Council reportedly held an interagency meeting in late March to come up with options to push back against Russia — none of which Trump adopted. In response to Trump's denials, anonymous intelligence officials have since told the Times that Trump received a written briefing on the matter, with one citing a date of Feb. 27.
Furthermore, the AP has reported that White House officials "were aware in early 2019" — a full year earlier — that classified intelligence indicated "Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans," and that then-national security adviser John Bolton personally briefed Trump on the matter in March 2019. (Bolton has declined to comment.)
Since these revelations have hit the headlines, a rowdy debate has erupted in the political-junkie world over whether Trump actively chose to ignore intelligence that Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill American troops, or he simply didn't understand the intelligence because he doesn't read written briefings and doesn't pay attention to oral briefings.
There are indications that intelligence officials are afraid to tell Trump anything that might threaten his love affair with Russia and specifically with Putin. But in a sense, this is all just hair-splitting. Either Trump is so in love with Putin that he refuses to act on any negative information about him, or he's so in love with Putin that intelligence officials have concluded that sharing negative information about Russia is wasted effort. Either way, Trump cares so little for the lives of American troops that he has done nothing to protect the lives of soldiers from Russian machinations.
Trump's disregard for the life and safety of American soldiers has been made even more clear in his response to the breaking story about the Russian bounties for American lives. As Heather Digby Parton pointed out in Salon on Monday, Trump reacted to the story by playing golf all day, complaining about "fake news" on Twitter, and obsessing about how this makes him look bad — all without showing even a milligram of concern about the U.S. soldiers who may have died thanks to Russian bounties.
Trump's flag-hugging and anthem-adoring routine was never about "the troops," obviously. It was all a pretext for his real agenda, which was to gin up racist resentment against people engaged in peaceful, silent protest against racism and police violence. This reflects both Trump's obsessive racism and his evident belief that conservative voters will excuse any amount of incompetence and malice so long as he keeps stoking their bigotry.
After all, it isn't just that Trump doesn't care about American soldiers dying. Trump has also shrugged off the deaths of more than 126,000 Americans from the novel coronavirus, and is continuing to push the message that the virus is behind us, even though new cases are spiking in many places around the country and several states that "reopened" too hastily are being forced back into partial shutdown.
Trump is no patriot and he never has been. "Patriotism" is a mere fig leaf for his real agenda, white supremacy. This should have been obvious all along, but is now undeniable in light of his unwillingness to push back against Russia even after it bribed enemy forces to kill American troops. Trump's believes that American voters — or at least enough of them to swing the Electoral College — are driven more by racist fears than by concern for the lives of American soldiers. We'll have to wait until November to find out if he's right.
On June 22, U.S. President Donald Trumpordered the temporary suspension of new work visas for temporary workers, including highly skilled workers (H-1B visa). Trump’s decision may appear to be based on his claim to protect American jobs, but the realities are more disturbing.
Trump’s actions are in line with his racist, anti-immigrant, white nationalist agenda. While this move will surely solidify Trump’s support among his voting base, it will likely come at the expense of the U.S. economy and STEM research.
The current decision invokes that history as it disproportionately denies entries to migrants of colour.
Hope and panic
More than 75 per cent of temporary workers come to the U.S. from countries of the Global South. The U.S. grants more than half of all H-1B visas to workers from India, followed by eight other Asian countries.
Trump has made spectacular public endorsements of merit-based immigration policies, implying that the U.S. especially values H-1B visa holders.
At the same time, however, he has sporadically threatened to rescind the Obama-era ruling that allows work permits for spouses of H-1B workers. He has also signed executive orders like “Buy American, Hire American” designed to shrink H-1B and other temporary worker programs.
This inconsistent signalling to the H-1B visa holders serves a dual purpose. Firstly, it keeps Trump’s nationalist, predominantly white voter base satisfied. Secondly, it keeps temporary workers in a limbo state between panic and hope, unsure of their footing and constantly anxious about their status.
The politics here leverages a particular element of human rationality that sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva calls racialized emotions. These are feelings and emotions that help perpetuate racist sentiments and racial segregation. These are emotions President Trump has used effectively since the early days of his campaign.
Undermining the economy
Trump’s political calculus becomes evident in these decisions. Despite the concerns expressed by major tech CEOs, Trump is willing to undermine the national economy to satisfy his nationalist base. For Trump, the marginal value of suspending work visas lies in its ideological alignment with the white nationalist rhetoric he regularly espouses. This decision seemingly seeks to tap into the same racist furor mobilized against Latinx and Muslim immigrants that was instrumental in getting him elected in 2016.
Since the inception of the H-1B program in 1998, the U.S. government has taken in over US$5 billion in mandatory payments from employers. These funds contribute toward supporting STEM research and workforce preparedness programs. By suspending the H-1B visa program, Trump has also effectively suspended this revenue stream. This is particularly striking at a time when scientific research is critical for fighting the pandemic.We also see the timing of this latest curb on visas as an attempt by the president to shift media attention away from a sinking economy, Black Lives Matter protests and his struggling reelection campaign.
The suspension of work visas will also result in the loss of human capital, as some international students studying in the U.S. may be forced to return to their home countries. U.S. companies, despite having vacancies, have already become wary of hiring qualified international students who seek to remain in the country after they graduate.
Trump’s actions further reveal their vulnerability. Their legal status can be revoked by the stroke of a pen without any concern for their livelihoods and families, under the guise of a pandemic.
Trump’s actions reveal that despite their contributions to the economy, skilled workers and international students are mere pawns in his white nationalist political circus.
Freedom is impossible for everyone when viewpoints prevail that dehumanize anyone. And it appears that several big social media platforms agree, judging from recent bans or suspensions of racist accounts across YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit.
For those who are dehumanized — whether by racism, sexism, classism, ableism, anti-LGBTQ sentiment or any other prejudices — their voices are diminished or outright silenced, and in the process they lose their ability to fully participate in our democracy. We all need to live in a society where hate is discouraged, discredited and whenever possible scrubbed out completely from our discourse. This doesn't mean we should label all ideas as hateful simply because we disagree with them; to do that runs afoul of President Dwight Eisenhower's famous statement, "In a democracy, debate is the breath of life." When actual hate enters the dialogue, however, it acts as a toxic smoke in the air of debate, suffocating some voices and weakening the rest.
This brings us to a series of recent decisions by big tech companies:
Twitch, a popular video streaming service associated with the gaming community, temporarily suspended President Donald Trump's account because the company claimed it violated their policies on hate. Trump had posted a video of a speech claiming undocumented Mexican migrants are more likely to be rapists and criminals, as well as a video in which he spoke hypothetically about "a very tough hombre" breaking into the house of a "young woman."
"Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch," a spokesperson for the company told Salon. "In line with our policies, President Trump's channel has been issued a temporary suspension from Twitch for comments made on stream, and the offending content has been removed."
Similarly, YouTube banned several explicitly white supremacist channels for hate speech including those associated with American Renaissance, David Duke, Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer. In addition, Reddit banned a popular pro-Trump forum called r/The_Donald along with roughly 2,000 other forums, including the prominent left-wing community r/ChapoTrapHouse. And this doesn't even include Trump's current war with Twitter, one that culminated in him retaliating against the company and threatening free speech.
"We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies," a spokesperson from YouTube told Salon in a statement. "After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies."
Reddit referred Salon to a statement explaining,"We committed to closing the gap between our values and our policies to explicitly address hate" and that "ultimately, it's our responsibility to support our communities by taking stronger action against those who try to weaponize parts of Reddit against other people."
No one who understands Constitutional law can argue that these corporate decisions violate the First Amendment, which only protects speech from government repression. Professor Rick Hasen at the University of California, Irvine Law School told Salon by email that "private companies running websites are not subject to being sued for violating the First Amendment. The companies are private actors who can include whatever content they want unless there is a law preventing them from doing so."
UCLA School of Law Professor Eugene Volokh echoed Hasen's observation, but then encouraged Salon to evaluate the issue from a different point of view through a thought experiment.
"It doesn't violate First Amendment rights. It doesn't violate any statute that I know of. It doesn't violate any common law principles because Twitch is a private entity and Amazon, which owns it, is a private entity at the same time," Volokh told Salon. He then said that the decision could be considered problematic if one compared it to a hypothetical scenario in which Harvard fired a professor for being too left-wing.
"You might say there are broader free speech principles that are being violated here, though that of course is not a legal argument," Volokh said. "That's an argument you might think of in Harvard's context as being about academic ethics, that academic institutions shouldn't try to censor speech to or by their students. Likewise, you might say this is a matter of kind of media ethics, and in particular, that a platform like Twitch or like YouTube or like Facebook shouldn't restrict important speech that people are trying to convey."
This is where I must respectfully disagree with this argument. And to explain why, I must make reference to personal experience.
When I was 12 years old, I was nearly murdered in an anti-Semitic hate crime. For the next 18 years, I rarely experienced anti-Jewish prejudice, but when Trump's presidential campaign was gathering steam and he made anti-Semitic comments during a speech, I felt the need to speak out against them. In response, Andrew Anglin — the same prominent neo-Nazi who later became infamous for mocking the death of leftist protester Heather Heyer for speaking out against the bigots at Charlottesville — wrote an article that attacked me in an anti-Semitic fashion. I was described as a "Jew parasite" and a member of an "evil tribe," while others who circulated the article called me a "demonic kike" and "filthy Jew rat."
Two years after that, I was harassed and doxxed by a white nationalist who posted anti-Semitic memes on my Facebook page because I wrote an article criticizing Trump. After I figured out who he was and asked him for an interview, he doxxed me and lied by saying he had only criticized Israel (the article he challenged had nothing to do with the Middle East).
I tell these stories because, after each of those incidents, I wound up on the receiving end of some of the most vile attempts at bullying and intimidation that I've ever experienced. The people who did these things did not do so because they wanted to engage in an honest debate, or because they merely disagreed with me about specific issues. They had decided that, because I am a Jew, they had a right to demean me and strip away my humanity simply for expressing views that they did not share. From the perspective of a bigot, people who are not members of the groups they deem worthy of respect should be grateful for whatever rights their would-be (or actual) oppressors are willing to give them. If that means they get none at all, including the right to life, then so be it.
Ethically speaking, media platforms have a responsibility to create a culture in which all voices are welcomed. There should be a diversity of people and a diversity of viewpoints, with the only restrictions being on thoughts and words that could limit one or the other. It is for this reason that kicking those racists off of their platforms doesn't make us less free, but more so.
I will close by noting the response of Raheem Kassam, a former Breitbart News London editor-in-chief Raheem Kassam who co-hosts a podcast with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. When I asked for his views, he replied, "Imagine running a company and not understanding the unnecessary risk you're taking with people's jobs and livelihoods by taking partisan positions against someone who – if re-elected – is going to pursue you with the full force of the U.S. government for censoring conservatives. Live by the sword, and all that . . ."
"The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual's religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government."
There is no threat to legal free speech by private companies deciding to rein in the hate speech being spewed by Trump and many of his far right supporters. There is also no threat to the spirit of free speech by those companies doing these things.
Trump threatening to use the government power to retaliate against those companies, on the other hand, is a threat to both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment. He and his supporters are not being stopped from disseminating their views on other platforms, and Trump himself is one of the most powerful people in the world. When they talk about getting back at those who hold them accountable, it isn't because they care about free speech. In fact, Trump has engaged in various wars against free speech. It is because they don't want to be held accountable for what they say.
A nation founded on the principle of human equality, and depends on a quality marketplace of ideas in order to flourish, deserves better than this. And my hope is that Trump will someday realize that good leadership comes not from avoiding accountability, but by embracing it. To quote a popular superhero movie in which Captain America sounded so much like Trump (which I criticized at the time) that he needed to be checked by Iron Man, his refreshingly intellectual counterpart:
"If we can't accept limitations, we're boundaryless, we're no better than the bad guys."
When White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany took to the lectern on Monday to address reporters, it was presumably her intention to defend President Donald Trump. That is, as she sees it, her job. But whatever her intentions, the defense she offered of the president was anything but.
She portrayed the president as uninformed, steadfastly resistant to new information, and recklessly bumbling his way through presidential duties.
Addressing the most recent international scandal plaguing the White House, McEnany said the president was never briefed on intelligence reports that Russia put bounties on the heads of American soldiers to incentivize Afghanistan fighters to kill them. She said the intelligence community did not have a "consensus" on the reports of the Russian bounties.
"This has not been briefed to the president, because it was not, in fact, verified," she said.
But CNN's Kaitlan Collins pointed out that "not everything in his daily briefings, or in the presidential daily brief, that's the written document, is airtight. They let the president know about what they're hearing."
McEnany responded by saying the intelligence agencies brief the president "as necessary," but didn't explain why it wouldn't have been necessary to brief the president on these findings. Asked if the president has a specific message for Moscow in light of the reports, McEnany said no, "because he has not been briefed on the matter." She said there were "dissenting opinions."
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There's reason to doubt McEnany's denials — it's quite possible Trump was briefed on the findings about the Russian plot, and he simply dismissed them because of his fondness for President Vladimir Putin. Her remarks could indicate that Trump clung to qualifications and caveats of uncertainty in the reports, even if the overall conclusions of the intelligence community on the matter were solid.
But even if we accept McEnany's claims as true, they're a damning indictment of the president. They suggest he has no interest in hearing intelligence reports with any nuance in them, and that he insists on not being briefed about facts unless they're entirely certain. This is a disastrous position for a president to take because presidents must always act with some level of uncertainty. Not being briefed about uncertain matters is a childish and frankly negligent practice for a president to engage in.
One plausible interpretation of McEnany's defenses of the president is that, while the reports about the bouties were made available to the president in written form, no one ever verbally briefed him on the matter. This, too, would be another damning fact about the president, because it implies his lack of interest in reading prevented him from knowing vital information as he has been in repeated contact with Putin.
The idea that Trump is simply too lazy or incompetent to be fully informed about matters he should know came up in another McEnany defense of the president. Discussing the fact that the president shared a video on Twitter of his own supporter cheering the words "white power" at a counter-protester, McEnany said the president was unaware these words were in the video.
"Does the president retweet other people's tweets and video without knowing the full contents of what he's retweeting?" asked a reporter.
"He did not hear that particular phrase," she said.
"Did he listen to the video before he retweeted it?" the reporter asked again.
"He did, and he did not hear that particular phrase," said McEnany.
This is hard to believe because the chants of "white power" occurred after less than 10 seconds into the short video. Again, the most likely interpretation seems to be that Trump and McEnany are lying. But even if McEnany is telling the truth, it again suggests an ignorant, bumbling president who can watch a video of his own supporters and not even realize that they're spewing vile racist slogans. This may be better than a president who is intentionally spreading racist vitriol, but it's still deeply disturbing and disqualifying for the office.
But perhaps worst of all was the White House's response to the raging coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
Tamara Keith of NPR noted that "cases are on the rise, this is a very serious time," and asked: "What is the president's message to the American people, and why aren't we seeing him publicly talk to the public, encourage them to do things to stay safe?"
McEnany played down the dangers, noting (correctly) that the population of those infected appears to be younger than has previously been the case, meaning the risk of death is much lower. But she didn't acknowledge that these spikes in cases are likely to spread to more vulnerable members of society, and she referred to the intense flare-ups as mere "embers that need to be put out." She gave no indication that the president is going to take any personal steps to address the rising crisis, such as by personally embracing the use of masks to prevent the spread.
Once again, this message — put out by the White House press secretary — reflected a president who is disengaged, ignorant of the risks, and unwilling to put in the effort it would take to acknowledge and address a major crisis. Instead, he seems to be hoping everything will just work itself out without his having to make any sacrifices or work hard at all.
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Now, to repeat, McEnany is a known liar. Trump lies constantly. So there's no reason to believe that the White House's excuse-making is anything more than the lastest round of intentional deceptions. McEnany's claims about Trump not being briefed, in particular, seem to contradict his own Sunday night tweet. But even if McEnany's assertions were true, they make the president look terrible. So what must they be hiding if they prefer telling such lies instead of admitting the truth?
Wearing a mask has somehow become part of the Republican Party's ongoing war against science and facts. For some reason, President Donald Trump refuses to wear a mask and has mocked some of those who do so. He hasn't mandated masks at his events and at a GOP conference in Arizona.
Supporters have been dogged about their stance against masks, taking to municipal meetings to clutch their throats and pretend they are somehow suffocating.
Public opinion has turned against the mask-phobic and many have posted videos of irate white women having public meltdowns when asked to put one on. Since the winds shifted, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has decided that masks are important.
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Predictable, Republicans unleashed on McConnell treating him like a traitor to their pro-COVID advocacy.
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On the other side, it prompted many to ask where McConnell has been for the last 75 days and why McConnell has been so unwilling to weigh in on the mask battle until now.
The US presidential election is being shaped by the two crises that have defined 2020 so far: the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning over police brutality and racism.
The term “unprecedented” has been used widely to describetheseevents, but they are just the latest versions of the two oldest and biggest problems in American politics: government dysfunction and racial injustice.
The “winning” years
In 2016, Donald Trump presented appealingly easy solutions to these problems.
Untainted by government, he would “drain the swamp” of bureaucrats and his business acumen would fix problems that conventional politicians could not, from trade deficits to crumbling infrastructure. Harnessing racialresentment and a backlash against Black Lives Matter, Trump promised white Americans an end to the painful reckonings of the Obama years, instead offering them a fantasy of black gratitude for white success.
For three years, Trump crafted a re-election narrative around his “winning” approach, based mainly on an economy that was already booming by the time he became president. The partisan polarisation of the 2016 election continued into his presidency.
Trump’s approval rating has always been relatively low despite the strong economy, but it has also been resilient in the face of scandal. Trump faced few crises in this period not of his own making, although there was one that foreshadowed the disasters to come: Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.
The federal government response to the hurricane was slow, uncoordinated and under-resourced. Trump showed little interest in it and took no responsibility for it. He briefly appeared on the island to congratulate himself and throw paper towels to residents. When the death toll was revealed to be nearly 3,000, revised up from initial reports of 64, Trump claimed Democrats made up most of the deaths “to make me look as bad as possible”.
Pandemic politics
The Puerto Rican tragedy was largely ignored and forgotten, but COVID-19 has replayed many of its themes on an even bigger scale.
Even now, as experts stress the need for widespread testing, Trump complains that testing inflates coronavirus numbers, and says it should slow down.
You can’t fight a pandemic with racial slurs. After a very brief “rally round the flag” boost in polling, voter ratings of Trump’s handling of the pandemic have been poor, and are dropping.
Meanwhile, the kinds of experienced public servants Trump and his allies deride are enjoying much higher approval as Americans rediscover the virtues of scientific expertise.
The pandemic itself may be less electorally consequential for Trump than its economic effects. It is very rare for presidents to win re-election during a recession.
The wave of Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis has damaged not just Trump’s electoral prospects, but the political order he represents.
For decades, conservatives have used the prospect of black unrest to scare white moderates, and Trump’s Nixonian rhetoric suggests he expected the same effect this time.
Instead, public opinion has solidified in support of the large, multiracial protests. The protests have changed minds, including white minds, about the systemic nature of racism in the United States. Racist backlashes may be less potent when there is a polarising white president in power.
Trump has floundered in response to the protests. He has paid lip service to the cause of justice for George Floyd, but has shown more genuine sympathy for those who worry about being called racist.
Ultimately, he has retreated to his comfortable daydreams of black gratefulness. When announcing better-than-expected job numbers, Trump said:
Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country.
Biden is hard to paint as a radical. He has been quick to distance himself from proposals such as defunding police, and he has never supported “Medicare for all”, despite its popularity with the Democratic base and relevance during the pandemic. As president he would be unlikely to bring the kinds of lasting changes that most Democrats want to see.
This is why Trump and his allies cast Biden as “sleepy” and senile. They warn that he would easily be manipulated by radicals, and Trump is really running against the “far left”. So far, however, this approach has compelled Trump to talk a lot about his own physical and mental fitness.
Biden, whose support stems from a perception that he is safe and familiar, having served as vice president in the Obama adminstration, chooses instead to display certain vulnerabilities. This helps explain his rising support among older Americans during the pandemic.
And in a year when race is a defining election issue, Biden has a vast advantage with African American and Hispanic voters, despite parts of his legislative record and his cringeworthy “you ain’t black” interview. He also owes his nomination to African American voters. As Juan Williams put it bluntly, “Joe Biden would be retired if not for the black vote”.
The polls look bad for Trump, but the race remains unpredictable
Averages of national polls currently show Biden leading Trump by between nine and ten points. Even without the pandemic, Trump was never going to have an easy contest against Biden.
Polls still show Trump’s supporters are a lot more enthusiastic about voting for Trump than Biden’s supporters are about voting for Biden, which could be important if voting becomes a health risk.
But enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate may not matter. The 2018 midterm was effectively a referendum on Trump, and the 2020 election will be an even more focused one.
There is reason to believe the race could tighten, if only because no candidate has won a presidential election by more than 9% since 1984, and partisan divisions have become a lot sharper since then. Many conservative-leaning Americans who are undecided about the election may return to Trump. Closer to the election, many pollsters will restrict their samples to people who they believe are likely to vote, rather than just able to vote. These likely voter screens may reveal Trump’s standing is stronger than it currently looks.
Of course, the election isn’t decided by a national popularity contest. Democrats are haunted by the 2016 election, in which Hillary Clinton got 2.8 million more votes than Trump but still lost the state-based electoral college. Currently, The Economist’s election forecast gives that scenario about a 10% chance of happening again.
Polls show Biden leading in most of these contests, but these leads are smaller and more volatile than his national lead. The quality of many state polls has also been questionable, raising the possibility they will repeat the same mistakes as last time.
Biden is discouraging complacency. Referencing a recent NYT/Siena poll that showed him leading Trump nationally by 14%, Biden tweeted:
COVID-19 has sabotaged the usual election-year registration drives that bring millions of new voters into the electorate, which could disadvantage Democrats who traditionally benefit from younger voters.
An uncertain result hinging on a prolonged mail ballot count could lead to the nightmare scenario of a disputed election outcome.
Would Trump accept defeat?
Trump already seems to be preparing to dispute the election. He has repeatedly claimed, with no evidence, that mail voting will facilitate massive voter fraud.
These fraud claims have been repeatedlydebunked, and Twitter was so worried about Trump attacking the electoral process that, for the first time, it flagged two of his tweets as misleading.
Trump may believe, with reason, that Republicans could benefit from in-person voting disarray on election day. Minority voters are far more likely than white voters to have to wait for long periods in lines at polling places.
In 2018, a federal court ruled for the first time since 1982 that Republicans could mount “poll watching” operations without prior judicial approval. This involves organising volunteers to challenge the eligibility of voters at polling places. Courts have previously found these tactics are used to intimidate and exclude minority voters, and they result in even longer delays. Republicans reportedly want to recruit 50,000 poll watchers for the 2020 election, including retired military and police officers.
These claims have also been thoroughly debunked, including by Trump’s own lawyers.
Trump’s resistance to the factual possibility that he could lose has raised fears he might not accept a defeat. Biden, noting that military leaders criticised Trump’s handling of Black Lives Matter protests, has fantasised that the military would escort him from the White House if he tried to “steal the election”.
Extensive lawsuits are a more likely scenario than military intervention, but there is also the danger Trump’s supporters would not accept the legitimacy of a Biden victory.
Given Trump has oftenwarned his supporters that their enemies will take away the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms), there is a possibility of a violent backlash, even if it only consists of isolated incidents.
At the same time, it is increasingly normal that large parts of the population dispute the legitimacy of the president. From Bill Clinton’s impeachment to George W. Bush’s contested victory; from Trump’s “birther” conspiracies about Obama to his own impeachment last year, refusals to accept the lawfulness of the presidency, on grounds real or imaginary, have become a standard part of America’s political repertoire.
A lot can happen in four months, as we’ve already seen this year. The outcome of this race is far from certain, but its ugliness is guaranteed.
When the University of Waterloo, where I teach and research, issued a statement to the media saying that the university “unequivocally believes that there is no place for the use of the N-word in class, on campus or in our community,” I felt — as we say in Black culture — “some type of way.” By this I mean I was stunned, confused, misunderstood and scared. I immediately stopped teaching. No, I didn’t quit my job. I stopped doing my job because I wanted to keep it. Ironic, I know. The statement placed me in a veritable Catch-22.
That very week, I was preparing my lecture on Sharon Bridgforth’s novel love conjure/blues. This Black cultural performance text features a character named “Nigga-Red” — a queer, masculine, Black woman. Further, the white sheriff in the text uses the N-word once in a derogatory way.
My dilemma doesn’t end here, as it might for a white professor. After all, I am a Black man, born in the United States, living in Canada. I belong to multiple Black communities, where we use the N-word in six or seven culturally rich ways, as beautifully explained by novelist Gloria Naylor in a 1986 essay published in the New York Times: “What’s in a Name?” I can’t help but bring my Black body, Black voice, Black speech and Black soul to work.The university’s pronouncement that there is “no place for the word in class,” chilled me. I froze when I reviewed my assignment: Bridgforth describes her text as a “performance literature/a novel that is constructed for breath,” which means students must read the book out loud. How could I continue to teach?
After the university released its statement, however, I struggled with a hurtful and completely preventable question — am I even welcome?
Cultivated ignorance
Professionally, I am a scholar of speech communication. My research squarely theorizes the N-word. For example, my first book is titled Your Average Nigga. A full half of the book’s six chapters deal with the N-word. Part of the book is used in my department’s public speaking curriculum.
If the university finds no place on campus and community for the N-word, then the statement censors my language, and constructively banishes me, not only as a Black man, but also as a Black studies scholar. I refuse to accept that the problem is my research or me; nor do I believe that if I stop using the word in my personal life, teaching and research that white supremacy and anti-Blackness will end. The problem is just the opposite.
Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy and Masculinity by Vershawn Ashanti Young.
To forbid the N-word actually serves the purposes of white supremacy and resuscitates racism rather than defeat it. I say this because we know our society oppresses Black people. But do you know that we are also culturally suppressed in predominantly white spaces? Barring the N-word functions as a too-easy way to quash the six or seven insightful ways the word functions in Black culture.
The university’s proscription, to be blunt, is a form of cultivated ignorance about Black lingo. The university is a microcosm of society, and neither seems eager to do the interesting and important work to understand Black peoples, Black communities and Black rhetoric. Anthony Stewart calls Canadians out in this regard in his book Visitor: My Life in Canada.
Stewart, a Black Canadian, says he has always “felt like a visitor,” although he had never lived anywhere else. “That is a conversation Canadians have avoided having in public and need to begin having if Canada,” he says, “is going to live up to its claims of diversity and tolerance.”
Lack of consultation with Black faculty
If society were interested in Black culture then prohibiting the N-word would never be the first thing that comes to mind. I direct this specifically to my university community. If the university were truly interested, it would have consulted scholars of Black language before issuing its uninformed and consequentially harmful statement. Kofi Campbell, a University of Waterloo vice-president and dean who is Black, penned a letter to the university president, calling for such a consultation.
I am one of five or six tenured Black faulty on a campus that employs hundreds of educators. I think I am the only African American. The absence of and lack of conference with what amounts to a mere handful of Black people does not occur by chance. My friend and scholar Joni L. Jones explains more about how this power dynamic works in her speech and essay “Six Rules for Allies.” This lack of consultation says unequivocally that Black voices and our presence do not matter.
‘Six Rules for Allies’ by Joni L. Jones.
Forbidding the N-word is like trying to squash unequivocal racists, which is unproductive because racism is now a neoliberal problem that we all traffic in daily. Racisms are part of our policies and everyday — even liberal seeming — behaviour. This is what institutional and systemic racism means. Please, don’t get this twisted.
Everyday racism
Everyday seemingly innocent policies and procedures that negatively and disproportionately affect Blacks is what the #BlackLivesMatter protests around the globe are about.
I believe we should leave the Black cultural uses of the N-word relatively alone. I personally do not say the word when I teach unless it is a direct quote from a text. I know words can abuse.
From a rhetorical perspective, I refer to the Greek term apophasis, a device wherein the speaker brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be used. In other words, a white teacher could use the word in a lecture, saying it should not be casually uttered, while fully intending to spread its derogatory shame.
Because of this, and also knowing there are multiple sensitivities, misunderstandings, and intentional illiteracy about the word, I stick to my notes and refer to the word as the N-word. I think that is respectful in mixed company.
When I assign literature that uses the word, I do not censor students’ reading the word aloud. Many decline. That’s their academic choice. My Black students may use the word in discussion if they, like me, belong to cultures that embrace the multifarious positive cultural meanings of the word. Non-blacks, and whites especially, may not casually use the word. I agree with linguist John McWhorter that “whites who ask, ‘Why can’t we use it if they do?’” are simply disingenuous.
I understand that the university thought that it was being an ally when it took its abrupt step to bar a word. But true allies treat Blacks as partners, not patrons. They do not demand that Blacks abandon our culture, and certainly do not suppress our language. Allies consult! They don’t just take over.
President Donald Trump promoted a video on Twitter Sunday morning showing a man in a golf cart with Trump campaign gear shouting "white power."
The video, which Trump said was from the Florida retirement community known as The Villages, featured a parade of golf carts, some with pro-Trump signs, driving past anti-Trump protesters who were shouting curses at them. The man who is heard shouting "white power" was responding to protesters shouting "racist."
The tweet was removed from his feed hours later.
"Thank you to the great people of The Villages," Trump had written. "The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!"
Deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere attempted to clean up the president's mess by saying, "President Trump is a big fan of the Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters."
On CNN's Sunday talk show "State of the Union," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar tried to make excuses for Trump's tweet by saying that "obviously neither the president, his administration nor I would do anything to be supportive of white supremacy or anything."
The facts: Sunday was hardly the first time that Donald Trump has shared white supremacist, anti-Semitic or other kinds of hateful messages on Twitter.
Through his behavior, words and public policies he advances, Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be a white supremacist.
The phrase "white power" is a racist slur and a threat of violence against nonwhite people. Innumerable Black and brown people, and many others as well, have been killed under its banner.
Trump recently visited Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of one of the United States' worst instances of white-on-black terrorism, for his first "comeback rally," which was originally scheduled for "Juneteenth."
Trump believes that Hispanics and Latinos are a natural-born race of rapists and murderers who only want to come to America to brutalize white people. Trump has repeatedly sought to enact policies that bar Muslims from entering the United States. He has tried a series of maneuvers to minimize or eliminate immigration to the U.S. from nonwhite countries.
Trump and his regime have imprisoned tens of thousands of nonwhite migrants and refugees. Cruelty against nonwhite people continues to be the Trump regime's unifying political strategy.
Donald Trump obsessively threatens Barack Obama, the country's first black president, with charges of treason and then imprisonment or worse. (Traditionally, treason was punishable by death.) Trump was also a key voice in the racist "birther" conspiracy which claims that Obama was not a "native-born" U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to be president.
As revealed by a series of lawsuits in the 1970s, Donald Trump and his father would not rent apartments to Blacks and Latinos.
Trump and the Republican Party have enacted public policies aimed at restricting the civil rights and human rights of Black and brown people.
Trump infamously described the white supremacists and racist hoodlums who rampaged through Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others, as "very fine people." Not surprisingly, when the president Trump the "white power" video on Twitter he also described his supporters seen in the clip as "great people."
Ultimately, "white power!" is Donald Trump's value system and brand name. The same is true of today's Republican Party. But even in his moment of "white power" honesty, Trump cannot escape the lies.
Whiteness itself is a lie. There are no "white" people. As historians, social scientists and others have exhaustively documented, whiteness is a socially constructed identity that first came into existence in the 15th and 16th centuries, but was not fully solidified until the 18th and 19th centuries. Throughout its history, the definitions and boundaries of who counted as "white" have constantly shifted. Historian Nell Irvin Painter, author of "The History of White People," explores this in a new essay for NBC News:
White identity didn't just spring to life full-blown and unchanging, which is what most people assume. Whiteness is severely under theorized, leaving millions unaware of a history whose constant characteristic is change. Whiteness has changed over time, over place, and in the myriad situations of human ranking.
Let me say it again: Whiteness has a history whose meanings change. Neither scholars nor ordinary people have been able to agree upon the definition of white people — who is white and who is not — nor on the number of races that count as white. Disagreement reigns and has reigned since the modern scientific notion of human races was invented in the 18th-century Enlightenment. Nota bene: invented in the 18th century.
Before the Enlightenment, people classified themselves and others according to clan, tribe, kingdom, locale, religion and an infinity of identities dependent on what people thought was important about themselves and others. Before the Enlightenment, Europeans could see human difference, they could see who was tall, who short, who light-skinned, who dark, differences they explained according to religion, cultural habits, geography, wealth and climate, among the most usual characteristics, but not race.
In the most fundamental ways, white-on-black chattel slavery, European colonialism and imperialism helped to establish whiteness as a meaningful social identity in the West and other parts of the world.
White people are not victimized or otherwise discriminated against in America as a group because of their racial identity. In reality, white people as a group control every major social, political, economic and cultural institution in this country.
Trump's most recent endorsement of white supremacy through his sharing of a "white power" message on Twitter is not, contrary to what some have suggested, a preview of his 2020 re-election strategy. He campaigned on racism and white supremacy in 2016, and that lifted him to the presidency. Trump is simply continuing with the only strategy he understands, and the one he knows will appeal to his supporters. In all, white supremacy is the connective tissue of the Age of Trump.
The commentariat often describes Donald Trump's racism and white supremacy as an example of "dog whistle politics" or, alternatively, "air raid sirens" and "foghorns" directed at his base. That is true enough. But there is also a better description.
Trump may be best understood as a white supremacist flasher who leaps out of the bushes and opens his trench coat, exposing his ugliness to hapless passersby. Then he flees and denies it ever happened, relishing the thrill of what he just inflicted on the public.
But in a most unfortunate situation for America and the world, the deviant is not hiding behind a dumpster in a fetid alley. Instead he is in the Oval Office and has an audience of tens of millions who are titillated by his vile performances.
It seems as if it happened ages ago, but you may recall that at the beginning of the year the United States came very close to going to war with Iran. There had been a number of skirmishes over the previous months and Iran's proxies had been lobbing rocket attacks at bases in Iraq, none of which was particularly unusual. But after an American contractor named Nawres Waleed Hamid was killed in one of those attacks, the Trump administration decided to retaliate by assassinating Iran's most illustrious military leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani. It was an extreme provocation and only the surprising forbearance of the Iranian leadership prevented the region from being plunged into war.
After some very tense days in both countries, the crisis passed and we immediately turned our attention to President Trump's impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.
At the time, Trump was reported to have been so upset by the death of this American contractor that he simply couldn't let it pass, so he almost launched a major new war in the Middle East. It's interesting, then, that the New York Times reported this past weekend that Trump was told that Russian agents had put a bounty on American soldiers' lives in Afghanistan and didn't even bother to issue a warning to the Russian government.
Of course, Trump's record on empathy for the deaths of American troops, even soldiers in distant lands, isn't exactly stellar, so isn't entirely surprising. His excuse for the Soleimani assassination was an anomaly. But still, putting a bounty on Americans is an extremely provocative act; one would expect some kind of response.
According to the Times, and as later confirmed by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, Trump was briefed on this in March, but made a great show of insisting that Russia be allowed back into the G7 throughout this past spring so he didn't seem overly concerned. Setting aside the pretext for the Soleimani assassination, he is typically very cynical about these things. (Recall that he excused Russian President Vladimir Putin's killing of journalists by saying, "Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too.")
Since the story broke, Trump and the White House have offered a number of responses. Trump tweeted that he knew nothing about this and was never briefed. He also mischaracterized the story and said, oddly, that "there have not been many attacks on us." Is the thinking here that even if it did happen, we didn't lose many people, so what's the big deal?
The president carried on with his weekend, playing golf with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tweeting incessantly about the arrests of four people for defacing a monument, and otherwise acting entirely unconcerned about this story.
His completely unqualified and sycophantic minion John Ratcliffe, the new director of national intelligence, weighed in to say that Trump hadn't actually been briefed. The White House did the same. You'll note that Ratcliffe didn't deny that the story was accurate, which means the intelligence community really dropped the ball if they didn't bother to tell the president about it, especially while he was out there pushing hard for Russia to be allowed back into the G7.
Trump finally stepped up on Sunday night and suggested that the whole thing is a hoax, as we all knew he would.
Since Graham had spent the day on the golf course with Trump, this is a strange exchange. Did the subject not come up? But more importantly, in none of these tweets and statements does the president indicate even the slightest interest in finding out more about this. Nor does anyone seem even slightly interested in why the intelligence professionals wouldn't tell the president about such a thing, even if it were just a rumor. The story says they found piles of American money — and you know Trump would at least be interested in that.
We know for sure Trump doesn't read his daily briefings, and we know that he gets angry whenever someone brings up Russia in the truncated oral briefings he prefers. You may remember that he also wanted to personally hold peace talks with the Taliban at Camp David, planning a surprise summit that fell apart after the Taliban killed an American and 11 other people in a car bombing just before the meeting. (I wonder if that one was part of the bounty scheme?) Perhaps intelligence briefers didn't want to combine bad news by suggesting that Russia and the Taliban, Trump's supposed partners in peace, were actually sabotaging him.
It's also possible that, just as Trump was so consumed by his "big trade deal" with Chinese President Xi Jinping last January that he ignored all the alarm bells about the growing threat of a pandemic, this spring he was obsessed with planning his big G7 pageant hosted by the U.S. (but sadly, not at his Doral golf resort, as he had once proposed). He wanted to show off for Putin, get him back in the club and put on a big extravaganza just before his convention. He didn't want to get into a beef over something silly like a few dead American soldiers. How would that help him get re-elected?
Considering Trump's total lack of empathy for the 128,000-plus people who have died of COVID-19 in just four months, I think there's also a good chance that his aides told him about this, he only halfway listened and didn't much care. After all, it's obvious that Trump is more concerned about saving the statues of dead Confederate generals than he is about saving the lives of American citizens.
Little did we know, back in 2016, that when Trump blithely excused Putin's assassinations of his own people by saying "our country does plenty of killing, too," he saw that as part of his job description.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) gave a passionate floor speech in the fall of 2018 where she proclaimed that as a Supreme Court judge, Brett Kavanaugh would vote to uphold existing caselaw about a woman's right to choose. Suffice to say, Monday it became clear Kavanaugh would not be doing that.
"Interest groups have speculated that Judge Kavanaugh was selected to do the bidding of conservative ideologues, despite his record of judicial independence," Collins said on the Senate floor. "I asked the judge point-blank whether he had made any commitments or pledges to anyone at the White House, to the Federalist Society, or to any outside group on how he would decide cases. He unequivocally assured me he had not.
"Lisa Blatt, who has argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other woman in history, testified: 'By any objective measure, Judge Kavanaugh is clearly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.' 'His opinions are invariably thoughtful and fair….' Ms. Blatt, who clerked for and is an ardent admirer of Justice Ginsburg, and who is, in her own words, 'an unapologetic defender of a woman’s right to choose,' said that Judge Kavanaugh 'fit[s] in the mainstream of legal thought.' She also observed that 'Judge Kavanaugh is remarkably committed to promoting women in the legal profession.'”
It's clear that all of those who question Collins' support turned out to be correct, and Collins' years of experience in politics didn't prevent her from being duped.
One day after expressing concern that the Trump administration might have been aware of an offer by the Russians to pay a bounty for the murder of U.S. military members by terrorists, the South Carolina Republican was seen heading out for a round of golf with the embattled president.
Following the bombshell report from the New York Times, Graham tweeted, "Imperative Congress get to the bottom of recent media reports that Russian GRU units in Afghanistan have offered to pay the Taliban to kill American soldiers with the goal of pushing America out of the region."
Those concerns didn't seem to be enough for Graham to keep his distance from the president who was implicated in the report, with CNN's Kaitlan Collin's tweeting, "Dressed for golf, President Trump just left the White House with Sen. Lindsey Graham."
That, naturally, set off Twitter users wondering what the two would be talking about on the greens with one commenter labeling it "Treason on the links."
