Opinion

With President Donald Trump in the White House, so many scandals and outrages pour forth every day that the news media has difficulty keeping up, let alone focusing on what is most important.

We are in the middle of a slow-motion coup in the United States of America. Even the phrase itself is banal, which is itself a symptom of our moral and political exhaustion. But sometimes clichés are on the money. Most of this coup is happening right out in the open, where those of us who are somewhat paying attention can notice it, bemoan it and then move on to the next day’s real or manufactured outrage. That doesn’t seem to be helping.

Amidst a roiling hurricane and another fusillade of Texas gunshots, like many, I was struck by a statement in the new memoir, Call Sign Chaos, written by former Trump Defense Secretary James Mattis with former Reagan Assistant Defense Secretary Bing West. Both men began their careers of public service as US Marines.

If you believe even a scintilla of the Chinese trade talk from the White House, you likely accept the notion that these trade disputes are bringing companies and jobs back to the United States.

“Brother pastors?” Kelvin Gemstone (Adam Devine) says as he smiles to a group of four men waiting in his church lobby. He leads them into the auditorium, a massive structure that looks more like an NBA arena, packed with navy blue folding chairs, flanked by two-story balconies.

This Labor Day will be a historic one for a coalition of organized labor and immigrant rights advocates in New York. In January, both camps celebrated the passage of the state DREAM Act, which made undocumented immigrants eligible for in-state college tuition assistance. Several months later, the state legislature overcame bipartisan resistance to authorize driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, a critical measure for migrant workers in upstate New York. And in the closing days of the legislative session, the legislature passed the landmark Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act, which, as one bill sponsor put it, will “end Jim Crow-era working conditions and provide overtime pay, a day off, unemployment benefits, and the right to organize.”

There’s a segment of the American left that believes we’re in no position to be outraged over Russia’s multifaceted campaign to swing the 2016 election to Trump because the U.S. has meddled in its share of elections in other countries. Setting aside the fact that this is a prime example of the tu quoque fallacy, it ignores the specific context of that intervention. The Kremlin didn’t help elect a generic Republican who is sympathetic to their interests–they worked on behalf of a clownish and corrupt narcissist who has no clue whatsoever about how to govern and has emboldened an ethno-nationalist movement that’s ripping the country apart.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

It is always difficult to know what is in someone’s heart and mind. This is particularly true of Donald Trump, whose insecurity, narcissism, megalomania, recklessness, impulsiveness, pathological lying, and cruelty is unprecedented among American presidents.    Does Donald Trump hate Jews?  That’s an impossible question to answer -– and in some ways irrelevant.  What’s clear is that Trump has consistently expressed anti-Semitic stereotypes throughout his adult life. When expressed by the President of the United States, they have dangerous consequences, including stoking the upsurge of white supremacist and anti-Semitic hate groups and individuals who engage in violence and terrorism.

Let’s go back and have a look at the early days of Trump’s campaign for president the last time around and see what it tells us about this time. Trump announced he was running for president on June 16, 2015. After famously descending the Trump Tower escalator with his wife, Melania, Trump went right after Mexicans and immigrants. “They’re bringing crime, they are rapists,” he bellowed to the first crowd of his formal campaign for president. He promised to build a “great wall” along the border with Mexico to keep them out. His crowd howled their approval. So the racism and the xenophobia were there right from the start. He would expand on both with his promised “Muslim ban.” He quickly held rallies in New Hampshire, Arizona and South Carolina, where he repeated the themes to crowds screaming for more.

Since leaving the Justice Department tarnished by his complicity in Attorney General Bill Barr's deceptions, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has taken to the habit of journalists, people who have too much time on their hands, and presidents of the United States: being snide on Twitter.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a scathing report Thursday on the conduct of former FBI Director James Comey during the first few months of the Trump administration detailing his actions that violated FBI and DOJ policy. But despite its harsh tone, the narrowly tailored report failed to find Comey guilty of any serious criminal wrongdoing while revealing the IG’s actually rather thin basis for criticizing him.

Not the first time he has done this, President Donald Trump on Friday morning insinuated he would like to extend his term beyond the four years granted by the nation's constitution when he posed as a question the idea of being granted back "stolen time" that was taken from him because of the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and accusations of misconduct by former FBI head James Comey.