A couple of weeks ago I wrote about President Trump's defense strategy in the Ukraine scandal, noting that he's basically running the same play that he ran during the Mueller investigation. He finds a few catchphrases to use on Twitter and during interviews and just repeats them over and over again. It's a crude salesman's trick and not one you'd expect to be effective in dealing with a legal and political scandal, but Trump thinks he was able to survive the Russia probe by yelling "No collusion, no obstruction!" and denigrating the press and the investigators.
He will almost certainly go with his gut instinct again and there's probably nothing anyone can do about it. But that doesn't mean there isn't a very lively debate among Republicans about the right course of action.
Trump's allies have complained for weeks about his stubborn refusal to have an impeachment "war room," as Bill Clinton did back in 1998. The fact is that it wouldn't do much good. Its efficacy under Clinton depended on message discipline and a president who could at least pretend that the process wasn't interfering with his ability to do the job. Obviously Trump would be unable to do either of those things. But he has brought in a couple of spokespeople to deal with impeachment questions, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Treasury Department spokesman Tony Sayegh. (Bondi is uniquely qualified for this gig, since she herself was credibly accused of a quid pro quo with Trump during the 2016 campaign.)
The Trump supporter who seems most at sea with all this is Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, perhaps the president's most loyal minion. Graham started out denying the whole thing outright, just as Trump did. On Sept. 25, he told reporters:
It turned out that absolutely did exist. Yet Graham still seemed to think that was all there was to it. On Oct. 20, he told Axios on HBO:
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More than half a dozen witnesses have now testified that the quid pro quo was discussed constantly and caused a full-blown uproar among the Foreign Service professionals. Graham remained the good soldier, parroting Trump's language but not sounding terribly convincing. On Oct. 25, he said: "He's telling me that the phone call was perfect. I'm saying the phone call was OK with me."
On Tuesday of this week, Graham finally threw up his hands, saying, "I've written the whole process off. I think this is a bunch of BS," telling reporters he won't even read any of the transcripts — the same ones he had previously clamored for Democrats to release. But by Wednesday, he was taking yet another tack:
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This has become known as the "moron defense," which holds that the president is too dumb to commit all the crimes it appears he has committed. So far, Graham's the only one I've heard articulate that defense in this case and I would guess that's because it's bound to make Trump livid. You may have noticed that he sees himself as a "very stable genius" and he'd probably rather be impeached than hear Republicans say that he was too stupid to have committed a crime. Which really is stupid, but there we are.
The other defense that's apparently being discussed among the senators who will supposedly be the jurors in an impeachment trial is the one that says, "Yeah, he did it, but it doesn't rise to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor." Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told the Washington Post that Trump had no corrupt intent when he did what did. Kennedy said, “To me, it all turns on intent, motive. ... Did the president have a culpable state of mind? … Based on the evidence that I see, that I’ve been allowed to see, the president does not have a culpable state of mind.”
According to the testimony of former State Department official George Kent, the White House insisted that the president of Ukraine go on CNN and use three particular words: investigation, Biden and Clinton. What could possibly be the corrupt intent in that?
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is pushing the idea that Trump's defense team in a Senate trial should call Joe and Hunter Biden to testify in public. So far, other Republican senators haven't seemed too keen on that idea, but seeing as they're all afraid to cross Trump it's possible that if he decides he wants this, they will follow his orders. He seems to like the idea:
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Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that there is a brewing battle between White House counsel Pat Cipollone and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, with each demanding to be in charge of impeachment strategy. Mulvaney should probably be careful what he wishes for: Along with EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, he's on a House GOP list of possible scapegoats to take the fall for Trump's corrupt bargain with Ukraine.
Richard Nixon tried that by throwing his two most trusted aides, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, over the side. They did it gladly. They'd been with him for years and were his loyal Praetorian guards. Somehow, I doubt that these three amigos feel that way about Trump. Sondland and Mulvaney hardly know him, and it's hard to imagine Giuliani falling on his sword and winding up in federal prison, as Haldeman and Ehrlichman did. Anyway, we all know what happened to Nixon, don't we?
Finally, we have the working White House impeachment war room that will almost certainly handle Trump's defense on an official basis. Its two arms would be Fox News and the Twitter feed of Donald Trump Jr. The New York Times did a deep dive into the swift-boat campaign against Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in the impeachment inquiry last week. Trump Jr and Fox News host Pete Hegseth played a big part in spreading an easily rebutted smear that bubbled up through the right-wing fever swamp. Don Jr. has also tweeted out the name of the purported CIA whistleblower, whom Trump and his henchmen have been trashing nonstop. Whatever happens going forward, we can be sure that Trump family Twitter feeds will play a big part in defending the president throughout the impeachment process.
Lindsey Graham says Trump's Ukraine policy was incoherent. It wasn't. He knew what he wanted. But the strategy to defend the president in this impeachment proceeding is certainly incoherent at this point. He will probably survive a trial in the Senate, but none of his defenders are going to come out looking any better than he does. The central fact they can't accept is that his behavior was indefensible.
In the hours after the slaughter in El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3, a final toll emerged: 22 dead, most of them Latinos, some Mexican nationals. A portrait of the gunman accused of killing them soon took shape: a 21-year-old from a suburb of Dallas who had been radicalized as a white supremacist online and who saw immigrants as a threat to the future of white America.
While much of the country reacted with a weary sense of sorrow and outrage, word of the mass killing was processed differently by members of Patriot Front, one of the more prominent white supremacist groups in the U.S.
In secret chat forums, some Patriot Front members embraced the spirit of the anti-immigrant manifesto left behind by the accused gunman. Others floated false conspiracy theories: the CIA was behind the murders; the accused killer was actually Jewish. Still other members cautioned that the group had its own “loose cannons” to worry about. It would be a bad look if the next mass murderer was one of their own.
But there was little, if any, regret over the loss of life.
“It shouldn’t be hard to believe that the group facing the harshest oppression from our ruling elite are producing shooters,” one Patriot Front member wrote. “White men are being slowly destroyed in a way calculated to produce resentment and a sense of helplessness. Of course, some of them decide to lash out.”
Several Patriot Front members alerted others to the need to be careful, for the killings in El Paso would likely make the group a target of the FBI.
“Watch your backs out there,” one wrote.
Patriot Front was formed in the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. While many on America’s far-right cheered the rally, its violence struck others as a public-relations debacle for the white nationalist brand that was sure to attract greater oversight by law enforcement.
Patriot Front aspired to help chart a new way forward: spread propaganda espousing its version of a nascent American fascism; quietly recruit new members worried about a nation overrun by immigrants and a world controlled by Jews; avoid talking about guns or violence online, but engage in a mix of vandalism and intimidation to foster anxiety; wear masks in public and communicate secretly.
“The organization is not about its members,” the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, once wrote to its members in the secret chats. “It is about its goals. Each person behind the mask is just another awoken member of the nation, who could be anyone who’s had enough.”
ProPublica spent several months examining the makeup and operations of Patriot Front, which records suggest numbers about 300 members.
While the group is careful not to talk about guns online, two members in the last year have been arrested with arsenals of illegally owned high-powered rifles and other weapons. While many of the group’s propaganda “actions” are legal exercises of free speech, its members have been arrested in Boston and Denver in recent months for acts of vandalism. In Boston, three members engaged in a nighttime propaganda effort last winter were arrested on suspicion of weapons possession and assaulting a police officer. What the group touts as political protests have felt to those targeted like acts of menace, as was the case in San Antonio, Texas, last year when Patriot Front members filmed themselves trashing an encampment of immigration activists.
One person whose establishment was targeted by Patriot Front in recent months spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing the group’s return.
“Ordinarily would you call the police if somebody put a big sticker on your door? No,” the person said. “However, once you find out what this is all about, and who is involved, and what they are promoting? Then, yeah, now we are in hate speech space.”
To the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front is a white hate group and a genuine criminal threat. To some of the more avowedly violent neo-Nazi groups in the U.S., Patriot Front is a laughable collection of clowns and cowards, content to chat online and put up stickers while a race war awaits.
But for law enforcement, gauging how serious a threat Patriot Front might pose is difficult. Patriot Front shares qualities both with groups engaged in real domestic terrorism and with fringe political groups.
Asked about the group, the FBI issued a statement that reflected these complexities and the limitations they place on police agencies.
“When it comes to domestic terrorism, our investigations focus solely on the criminal activity of individuals — regardless of group membership — that appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce the civilian population or influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion. We would encourage you to keep in mind that membership in groups which espouse domestic extremist ideology is not illegal in and of itself — no matter how offensive their views might be to the majority of society.”
Rousseau, a Boy Scout and high school journalist before he founded Patriot Front, has much the same profile as the accused gunman in El Paso, Patrick Crusius: both grew up in middle-class suburbs of Dallas — Crusius in Allen, Rousseau 35 miles away in Grapevine; both were seen as unremarkable teenagers before being inculcated in their racist ideology online; both talk of a desire to reclaim America for “true” or “pure” patriots; both regard immigrants as a poisonous and present danger.
In the days after the rampage in El Paso, Rousseau told his members in the secret chats that such acts of wholesale violence were not for him. While fascist causes like Patriot Front’s could survive the blowback from such killings, he said, real success for the group would come from spreading its ideology and increasing its numbers. Of the alleged El Paso shooter, Rousseau wrote in a chat, “He’d have made more progress toward his goals by swallowing the first round in his magazine instead.”
In the months of chats obtained by ProPublica, Rousseau is by turns amateur philosopher and historian, as well as the group’s sole spokesman and its online policeman. He warns members that they will be kicked out if they don’t stay busy — pasting up flyers and conducting banner drops, joining street actions and posting regularly in the chat forums. He has put together a security guide to help Patriot Front members stay anonymous. He waxes admiringly about certain far-right groups in Europe, and he sees them as a model for how to become more serious political players in the years ahead. He has the secret chats routinely deleted, and he tells members to avoid ever writing or saying anything that might later be of interest to a prosecutor.
“It should be known,” he wrote to members recently, “that political dissidents are subject to unjust scrutiny.”
Pete Simi, a professor at Chapman University in California and an expert on white supremacists in the U.S., said Rousseau’s stewardship of Patriot Front is deeply familiar.
“It is very common for the leadership of these groups to disqualify violence, while doing things that are encouraging violence,” Simi said. “It is part of their strategy to avoid liability, while simultaneously promoting hate. When they say they are not violent, this is a lie. They are promoting violence by their goals.”
“Thomas’ Biggest Fear Is Someone Doing Something Crazy”
To gain an understanding of Patriot Front — its origins and ambitions, both the careful talk and the criminal behavior of its members — ProPublica examined hundreds of online postings, interviewed a person who infiltrated the group, obtained police records, reviewed its leader’s public statements online and in a variety of far-right podcasts, collected video material recorded both by the group and members of the public, and traveled to the homes of its founder and two of the members who had recently been arrested.
The person who infiltrated Patriot Front in recent years — posting in the group’s chats and accompanying it in its propaganda actions — sketched out a portrait of its members, which appear to be exclusively male:
They come from seven or eight regional “networks,” and the vast majority of them are recruited online; the typical member is around 25 years old and can be from blue-collar backgrounds or be working as “white-collar tech geeks”; many of them are gamers; few have wives or girlfriends; they can look like “the nerdy boys that sit next to you in high school,” but they clearly sympathize with “right-wing terrorism.”
The person who infiltrated Patriot Front said he applied for membership on the group’s website — the one with the mission statement written by Rousseau. American democracy was dead. The government had been taken over by Jews and other “elites.” Land claimed by descendants of the country’s original white settlers had been surrendered to immigrants of color. The dream was of a white ethnostate, in which all that was good and true and pioneering about the America of long ago could be restored.
The person who gained entrance to the group said Rousseau was one of three Patriot Front members who interviewed him on the telephone when he applied. He was asked to explain his political evolution, to say which political figures he hated and admired most, to state the circumstances in which the use of violence would be OK and to articulate the greatest threat to America. He was told Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism” would be required reading.
The chats reviewed by ProPublica show Rousseau spends lots of time online pressing members to take part in targeting streets, parks and colleges with the group’s propaganda. He and others delight in seeing their actions reflected in the SPLC’s nationwide map recording acts of hate and in the media. Last spring, the group tried to stage protests in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s offices in multiple cities, including New York.
“One minute of action is better than 10,000 books on ideology,” Rousseau told his members.
Rousseau, still a teen when he founded Patriot Front, makes clear in the secret chats reviewed by ProPublica that he is in charge, though he’s happy to go without a formal title.
“The title commander gives me bad flashbacks,” he wrote in a chat once. “If I absolutely had to have a title, it would probably be general director. But my name works just fine for now.”
The chats show some members regard Rousseau as a disciplined and effective spokesman for the group, and they appear to heed his repeated scoldings about preserving their anonymity.
“The enemy cannot attack you if they do not know who you are,” Rousseau wrote.
Using the pseudonym Samuel, a member from New York expanded on the idea in response.
“I would say the biggest accomplishment of masking up is obfuscating our total numbers,” he wrote. “We can make them feel as if there are thousands of us when it’s only a few hundred, and we could be anyone and no one. Next time they are at the CVS and see a white kid with a neat haircut, it could be us. Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.”
Examples of Patriot Front flyers and stickers. Patriot Front’s messaging features symbols like flags, bald eagles, and red, white and blue motifs, in an effort to hide its white supremacist views. (Via Facebook)
Rousseau, when he isn’t criticizing members who violate the ban on talking about guns or violence, can often be found policing the group’s ideological thinking. Nazism, however popular among members, can’t now be the goal, Rousseau said.
“This is not Germany, this is not the 1930s,” he chastised. “Get a grip on the fact that we’re activists, not re-enactors trying to scratch some self-indulgent itch for a political fantasy.”
Rousseau conducts his online leadership from the home he shares with his divorced father in Grapevine, a largely white, solidly middle-class city between Dallas and Fort Worth. ProPublica went to see Rousseau there this summer, and we found the shades drawn in every window and a rusting boat filled with fallen leaves on the property.
Rousseau came to the door, but he closed it quickly and would not talk. The following day, the red sports car in the driveway had been reparked, making it hard to see the lone license plate on its rear end.
Interviews with people in and around Grapevine — those who went to school with Rousseau, those who participated in the Boy Scouts with him, a man who dated his mother — produced a unanimous sense of surprise that he’d started an organization committed to an all-white America.
He’d mixed easily with the diverse array of students at his high school, and while he was against gay marriage, he was regarded more as a nice, conservative boy than a threat. He wore his hair long, in braids or a bun, and was obsessed with working out and the state of his physique.
At the student newspaper, he wasn’t regarded as an impressive writer, but he won a national award for editorial cartooning. Classmates saw him as a lazy student and a bit of a loner, but he had a knack for argument and a stubborn streak about never being wrong. The school had its share of racial incidents, but he was never involved and wasn’t seen as condoning them.
When Donald Trump was elected president, some senior boys at the school made a show of chanting, “Build a wall.” Rousseau, for his part, was certainly an ardent Trump supporter — he wore a Make America Great Again hat and carried a Trump lunchbox. But his enthusiasm wasn’t seen as menacing.
“He seemed Republican, but he didn’t seem crazy, said one fellow student.
To someone who was with him in Boy Scouts, Rousseau seemed serious about the organization, and he was elected patrol leader. At the same time, Rousseau could be difficult with adults, developing what the person called an “authoritarian defiance.”
“I’m saddened,” the person said of Rousseau’s embrace of white supremacy.
Simi, the professor at Chapman University, said enough research exists on modern-day white supremacists to develop a profile: young men, isolated and angry in some way despite their relatively privileged upbringing in middle class or affluent circumstances, and vulnerable to invitations to join up with others with similar grievances.
In years past, Simi said, groups like Patriot Front used to recruit potential new members by waiting outside schools for the last children to leave, the loners wandering off long after the final bell. Now such groups don’t have to work so hard to find targets. They have the internet, Simi said.
“It is a central aspect of these groups to take the frustration and anger and combine it with the special feeling and insights of being part of a group,” he said.
Rousseau, then just 18, was in Charlottesville in 2017, marching in the “Unite the Right” rally as a member of Vanguard America. The Anti-Defamation League calls Vanguard America a neo-Nazi group formed in 2016 that, like Patriot Front after it, was chiefly engaged in spreading propaganda. James Fields, the white supremacist convicted of murdering a young protester at the Charlottesville event, was photographed there carrying a Vanguard America shield, though he was not a member of the group.
Vanguard America splintered after the debacle in Virginia. Some wanted to abandon efforts to disguise their Nazi leanings and simply be brazen in their public look and violent aims. Rousseau took a different tack, and he started Patriot Front as an ostensibly more strategic, savvy, careful alternative. It would embrace more homegrown symbols — the flag, the bald eagle and patriotic language. Such shifts might attract a wider membership.
“I did go to Charlottesville. Some bad activism there,” Rousseau wrote in one of the secret chats. “I’ve done my part to learn from my mistakes.”
While Rousseau publicly and in the chats reviewed by ProPublica disavows violence, some Patriot Front members have shown support for a white supremacist group that embraces it: the Rise Above Movement. Eight RAM members have been arrested on charges related to violence in Charlottesville and in California.
“Gotta love RAM,” a Tennessee member said in the chats. “I hope they see us as 100 percent allies.”
In the chat logs, a Patriot Front member from Texas provides a list of addresses for 11 people in prison or under house arrest, referring to them as “POWs.” The list includes four members of RAM, numerous men arrested for violence in Charlottesville including Fields, and an imprisoned white supremacist in California. The Texan urged Patriot Front members to write to the prisoners and provided links to send some prisoners money directly. He also listed a donation link for a fund tied to Augustus Sol Invictus, a lawyer known for defending white supremacists.
Later in the chats, a member from New York shared a link to a white supremacist online fundraiser, saying proceeds would be given to a legal fund for RAM. He then chimed in that nearly $2,000 had been donated. “When they crack down we double down and become stronger,” he said. “Hail Victory!”
Observers of white hate groups credit Rousseau as a talented in-fighter, and they portray his breakaway from Vanguard America as a shrewd coup.
According to the person who infiltrated Patriot Front, Rousseau worries greatly about his members making the worst strategic mistake: carrying out an act of terrible violence. It would end his group, he has said.
“Thomas’ biggest fear is someone doing something crazy,” said the person who infiltrated Patriot Front.
“We Are Regular People”
Jakub Zak was in bed in the Chicago suburb of Vernon Hills when police, accompanied by his father, shook him awake. The police had been told that Zak, 19, was a member of Patriot Front, and that he might have a stash of illegal guns.
“He appeared nervous and tried to cover a few items on his bed as he put on his blue jeans,” police records say.
The police, though, had a clear view of what couldn’t be hidden: a gun safe meant for rifles, as well as magazines of ammunition on the bedroom floor.
Zak asked his father to make the police leave. His father would not.
“I advised Jakub that we would like for him to be cooperative, and explained to him cooperation goes a long way,” one detective wrote in a formal report, dated April 2018. “I explained to him the decision is for him to make, and he should think what is best for him.”
Zak spoke with his father and then offered the code for the safe. If there were guns in the house, the police wrote, Zak’s father wanted them out.
The police found a loaded 9 mm pistol and then, in a second safe, four more guns, including three high-powered semiautomatic rifles. The police records show Zak’s only concern was whether he could get his case for carrying the guns back after their confiscation.
It is unclear when or how Zak joined Patriot Front. The initial tip sent to law enforcement identified him as a member, one who often posted in the secret chats under the pseudonym “Hussar.” Postings under that name — portions of which were first published by Unicorn Riot, the activist group — suggest Zak was a frequent participant in the group’s propaganda efforts in the streets.
Online, Zak posted a mix of Patriot Front slogans and images — “America: Revolution is tradition”; “Deport them all.” But there was also much more explicitly violent material: a young black man lying prone on the street and about to be stomped; a Glock pistol.
Zak, who had no prior criminal record, ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor gun possession charge and was sentenced to probation. Whether local police referred his case, and his affiliation with Patriot Front, to any other law enforcement agency is unclear.
But the basic facts of Zak’s case amount to one of the hard-to-identify, hard-to-quantify, hard-to-assess threats in the U.S. today: an enthusiastically racist young man exposed to a steady diet of like-minded white supremacists, who doesn’t find it terribly hard to get his hands on dangerous weapons. Crusius, the accused El Paso killer, had no prior record; he lived with his grandparents; his mother is reported to have anonymously called law enforcement, worried once her son had bought a gun, even if it was legal; the parents of a classmate of Crusius’ told a local news organization in Dallas that their son had been encouraged by Crusius to join him in a white supremacist group.
In a brief interview at their home in Vernon Hills, Zak’s parents would not let him be interviewed.
“There is nothing to talk about,” his mother said, claiming he was not a member of any white hate group. “He is going through rough times, and he is in a better place now. I don’t want to start anything. He is getting his life together and planning [for] the future.”
“We are regular people,” his father added.
Concerns about how effectively federal authorities have been in thwarting the threat of white supremacists extends back years, covering both Democratic and Republican administrations. In recent months, though, there has been a series of arrests suggesting that federal and local authorities are being more aggressive.
In a recent report, the Department of Homeland Security took care to restate the balance law enforcement has to strike.
“The Department must take care, while addressing the scourge of violence, to avoid stigmatizing populations, infringing on constitutional rights, or attempting to police what Americans should think,” the report said.
Last February, a Patriot Front member, Joffre Cross, was arrested on gun charges in Houston. At a probable cause hearing, authorities said they got on to Cross through phone records belonging to a white supremacist in Texas who was convicted on assault charges this year.
Cross, 33, fits what experts see as another familiar profile for potentially violent white supremacists: a former Army soldier whose association with white supremacists dates back to his active-duty days. Disaffected former soldiers are a prime recruiting target for white hate groups, prized for their gun and bomb training and their possible access to weapons. Cross, while on active duty, was convicted on drug charges and imprisoned for five years. As part of the investigation, the authorities developed information that he was eager to secure weapons for white supremacist groups.
Cross, who has pleaded not guilty, was charged with felony weapons possession after police found guns and body armor in his home.
“If you don’t know me,” Cross once posted on Instagram, “consider this your trigger warning.” Cross and his attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Cross is a regular participant on the Russian social media platform VK, whose terms of service about extremist content are not strictly enforced. His posts are rife with Nazi videos, Holocaust denial material and white supremacists beating protesters.
One post reads: “Help more bees; plant more trees; save the seas; shoot refugees.”
In the Patriot Front chats, Cross continued to post even after his arrest.
“We have to build a foundation that can weather any storm, anything they throw at us,” he wrote last April. “We just have to keep pushing.”
“In the Aggregate They Are Disturbing”
It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 2019 when 20 or so masked members of Patriot Front made their way onto a corner of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. They set off flares and smoke devices, delivered a short speech using a megaphone and fled. The police report said it lasted all of three minutes.
Blakely Lord, a high school English teacher, managed to capture the incident on video. In brief, she called the episode “profoundly disturbing.”
“I chose to film because you feel helpless,” Lord said. “I’m a dumpy middle-aged English teacher. I’m not going to get out my sword and face them down.”
She added, “I do think it’s a narrative people need to be thinking about: these little incidents may seem unimportant, but in the aggregate they are disturbing.”
Such disturbances — masked flash mobs, defacing property, distributing propaganda — are the day-to-day work of Patriot Front. Screaming outside an anarchist book fair in Texas. Plastering stickers across multiple store fronts on a busy block in Denver. Parading with flares at night in apublic park in Boston. Posting an “America First” sticker at a gay pride center in Vermont. All in the last year.
Members give one another tips about where to place posters and stickers legally, and they urge one another to wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. But in practice, Patriot Front members frequently target storefronts or places of worship, which is vandalism. Additionally, many colleges and universities, another favorite target for postering, prohibit flyers from nonstudent groups. White supremacists see campuses as a strategic location for flyering: a place to recruit potential members while attracting press coverage to amplify their propaganda.
In Columbus, Georgia, three months ago, two Patriot Front members posted flyers on and around a local synagogue, Temple Israel. “Reclaim America,” read one. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of victory,” read another. And the address of Patriot Front’s website was printed at the bottom of the flyers. The temple’s leadership became aware of Patriot Front’s history and said it was clear the synagogue and its members were targeted because of their faith.
“To me, the sinister aspect is this particular group disguises themselves as patriots, Tiffany Broda, the temple’s president, told the Ledger-Enquirer last July. “Yet they are a hate group, a nationally recognized hate group. And though we don’t want to give them publicity, we think that it’s important to bring this out of the shadows.”
“Jews have been a part of Columbus almost since the founding of our city, which is almost 200 years ago,” Rabbi Beth Schwartz added. “We will remain vigilant as a congregation, vigilant as a Jewish community. We don’t hide our heads in fear.”
Patriot Front members make clear in their chats that such actions — almost always recorded by one of the masked members — have multiple aims: to frighten, to provide material for their own propaganda efforts on social media, and to recruit. The drive to recruit might help explain why college campuses are Patriot Front’s most common targets.
Late last month, Patriot Front launched what it claimed were coordinated actions to distribute flyers and stickers and posters at more than 100 campuses across the country. The group posted on Twitter what it said was evidence of success at 90 schools.
Michael Loadenthal, a visiting professor of sociology at Miami University in Ohio, said Patriot Front had recently been targeting the school.
“Fascists having a public presence is organizing; this is recruitment,” Loadenthal said, adding that the simple idea that “white supremacists are individually radicalized people in their basement at home is wrong.”
“They are a network,” he said. “No particular node is dangerous until they are.”
Simi, the professor in California, said Patriot Front had hit the campus of Chapman University three times in a single month recently. The school, he said, had set up a permanent conference dealing with the nation’s southern border, and Patriot Front had singled out posted materials related to the conference to be defaced or covered up.
“People on the campus get intimidated,” Simi said.
He said the school had to add security cameras and police protection.
“This is part of their strategy,” Simi said of Patriot Front. “These are things they want to happen.”
Thalia Beaty and Lucas Waldron contributed to this report.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas openly called for President Donald Trump to send military forces across the U.S. border into Mexico to address cartel violence in the region while he was speaking to Fox News on Wednesday.
Cotton was addressing the recent horrific killing of at least nine Americans, including six children, in what has been described by media reports as a “highway ambush.”
The slaughter rightly raised alarms, but Cotton’s reaction constituted a staggeringly overblown and perilous response.
“This is the deprave massacre of three women and six children,” he said. “Cartel violence in Mexico has reached an all-time high over the last year, murders have surged under President López Obrador’s policy of ‘hugs not bullets.’ I mean, that may be nice for a children’s fairy tale, but in the real world when the bad guys and cartels have .50 Caliber Machine Guns, the only answer is more bullets and bigger bullets. And if Mexico can’t protect American citizens in Mexico, then we may have to take matters into our own hands.”
He continued: “Look, our special operations forces were able to take down al-Baghdadi in Syria a couple of weeks ago. They did it to Osama bin Laden in Pakistan eight years ago. I have every confidence that if the president directed them to do so, they could impose a world of hurt on these cartels a few dozen miles away from the American border.”
What this constitutes — sending military units in an attack on Mexican soil as we “take matters into our own hand” — is an invasion of a sovereign country and a friendly U.S. neighbor. And while the attack that inspired Cotton’s attack was indeed devastating, it must be remembered that the United States has little high ground to stand on in this regard. Thousands are murder by gun violence every year in the United States, including in massacres that are frequently larger than the Mexican attack Cotton is referring to. When these attacks are carried out by Americans on American soil, Cotton and the rest of the GOP shrug their shoulders and say that nothing can be done to stop gun violence in the U.S. But apparently if they happen just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, it gives Trump a license to invade the country, in Cotton’s view.
I guarantee you’ve never seen a political ad like the video Jeff Sessions posted on Thursday as he launched his bid to reclaim his old Alabama seat in the U.S. Senate.
The announcement of his campaign had been expected after multiple reports found that he was looking to run despite consternation from his fellow Republicans. Sessions had been the senator from deep-red Alabama before he joined President Donald Trump’s Cabinet as attorney general. So in some ways, he’s a natural fit to take on Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who won a fluke special election by running against the catastrophic candidate Roy Moore in 2017. Moore faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with young women and girls in that campaign.
But Sessions was unceremoniously ousted by Trump right after the 2018 midterm elections, and the president had long made his anger at Sessions widely known. He fumed at the attorney general for recusing himself from the Russiainvestigation, even though ethics rules obligated Sessions not to participate in a probe of the Trump campaign after serving as the president’s surrogate ahead of the election. Trump’s firing of Sessions — a clear attempt to wrest control over the investigation — has been an under-discussed instance of potential obstruction of justice or impeachable offense by the president.
All this baggage brings us to Sessions’ surreal campaign video. Knowing he is bound to face criticism from Trump, and knowing that he needs the support of Trump’s base to win 2020, Sessions’s ad pushes a bizarre argument that, despite the fact that the president clearly doesn’t like him, Republican voters should.
He sidestepped the fact that he was fired by Trump in humiliating fashion, saying: “When I left President Trump’s Cabinet, did I write a tell-all book? No. Did I go on CNN and attack the president? Nope! Have I said a cross word about our president? Not one time. And I’ll tell you why: First, that would be dishonorable. I was there to serve his agenda, not mine. Second, the president’s doing a great job for America and Alabama. And he has my strong support.”
The video cannot be fully explained in words, though, because Sessions’ facial expressions and tone add a ridiculous and absurdist element that defies description.
But beyond the aesthetics, the message is just a staggeringly blunt and humiliating one. Sessions knows Alabama voters will know who he is, and he knows they know Trump doesn’t like him. His pitch is: Vote for me anyway, because I won’t let the president’s ferocious personal contempt for me stand in the way of pledging my undying support for him.
Sessions will prostrate himself at the altar of Trump, no matter the cost to his dignity. It’s yet to be seen if that turns out to be a winning campaign message.
A new book by the anonymous Trump administration official who wrote the famous New York Times op-ed detailing a “resistance” to the president with the government is set to be released soon, and the Washington Post has obtained an early copy. It published an article describing the controversial book, which the White House called a “work of fiction.”
It’s hard to know how seriously to take the book or its author. There’s little reason to doubt that the opinion editors at the Times genuinely published the writing of an actual administration official, but without a more rigorous reporting operation behind the book, we shouldn’t be confident its contents aren’t exaggerated or even perhaps fabricated at times.
The official defended their decision to stay anonymous — though not persuasively — and suggested they might eventually come forward, the Post reported:
“I have decided to publish this anonymously because this debate is not about me,” the author writes. “It is about us. It is about how we want the presidency to reflect our country, and that is where the discussion should center. Some will call this ‘cowardice.’ My feelings are not hurt by the accusation. Nor am I unprepared to attach my name to criticism of President Trump. I may do so, in due course.”
More interestingly, the author admitted that the central thesis of the original Times column was mistaken:
“I was wrong about the ‘quiet resistance’ inside the Trump administration. Unelected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer Donald Trump the right direction in the long run, or refine his malignant management style. He is who he is.”
This passage, however, undermines the argument for staying anonymous. It would make sense to say that, while the truth about Trump should be made public, a high-ranking official who is concerned about the president’s conduct would be best to stay anonymous and therefore retain a position to mitigate the damage coming from the White House. But if Trump can’t be mitigated, why stay anonymous? Cowardice, indeed, seems like the most natural explanation.
The book also suggests that other officials in the administration are disturbed by Trump. For example, it recounted:
Senior Trump administration officials considered resigning en masse last year in a “midnight self-massacre” to sound a public alarm about President Trump’s conduct, but rejected the idea because they believed it would further destabilize an already teetering government, according to a new book by an unnamed author.
And:
The book contains a handful of startling assertions that are not backed up with evidence, such as a claim that if a majority of the Cabinet were prepared to remove Trump from office under the 25th Amendment, Vice President Pence would have been supportive.
But these claims warrant the most skepticism. (Pence has denied the specific allegation.) A single person can always misunderstand a situation or make faulty inferences about others’ intentions, so relying on this account to draw conclusions about other officials is dicey business.
Some of the book, however, rings true. It said that the president is suspicious of coups, doesn’t like staffers taking notes, and once yelled at an aide who was writing something down during a meeting. This is reminiscent of a section of the Mueller Report in which Trump questioned White House Counsel Don McGahn’s taking of notes. The book also said that officials sometimes wake up “in a full-blown panic” to discover Trump has tweeted something explosive that they need to clean up — this is something we have all seen many times. It also says Trump has a habit of being condescending and misogynistic toward women who work for him, which is hardly surprising and gives a devastating account of his mental health that is consistent with his public appearances:
“All I can tell you is that normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. Those who would claim otherwise are lying to themselves or to the country.”
But this just raises the question: If the most reliable parts of the book are the things we can already assume are true, what’s the point?
With the impeachment inquiry leveling up this month as public hearings begin, and with an election that might actually be the end of Donald Trump now less than a year away, the campaign to let Trump's Republican allies — even the most villainous offenders — move on and pretend this never happened is already underway.
Sadly, the clearest articulation of the let-bygones-be-bygones mentality has come from a Democrat — unsurprisingly, former Vice President Joe Biden.Biden, who is still, somehow, the frontrunner in Democratic primary polling, spoke at a chi-chi fundraiser on Wednesday, and dropped this pearl of wisdom: "With Donald Trump out of the way, you’re going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany."
The people Biden is talking about, let us remember, are not only fully capable adults, but people who believe they are qualified and deserving national leaders. They're not a bunch of adolescents who are just going through a temporary goth-libertarian phase or whatever. But there's no doubt that many Republicans are taking stock of the current political situation, in which Trump is daily cementing his historical legacy as the most embarrassing president ever elected, and plotting how to escape any and all reputational accountability for their role in our current national nightmare.
On Wednesday evening, the Washington Post published a story claiming that Attorney General Bill Barr, who has been the luckiest of Trump spittles since his appointment as Trump's main clean-up guy in February, declined to offer the same level of cover-up services on Trump's current Ukraine scandal that he previously provided on the Russia scandal:
President Trump wanted Attorney General William P. Barr to hold a news conference declaring that the commander in chief had broken no laws during a phone call in which he pressed his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate a political rival, though Barr ultimately declined to do so, people familiar with the matter said.
It's not surprising that Trump wanted Barr to stage a spectacle in which he lies to the American people to cover up for Trump's crimes. After all, Barr did exactly that in the ancient past of, oh, last April, when he embarked on a spin campaign to distort the findings of Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's relationship with a criminal Russian conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election. First though an alleged summary and then through a press conference — both before the release of Mueller's actual report — Barr went hard on the claims that there was nothing of great importance in the document. This turned out to be flat-out false, as Mueller found both extensive efforts at collusion and obstruction of justice and documented them in considerable detail in the novel-length report.
But now there are "people familiar with the matter" who want to make sure the press understands that Barr is suddenly none too keen on helping Trump cover up criminal conspiracies involving foreign governments.
Why "people familiar with the matter" would want to get the word out is not mysterious. "People familiar with the matter" can clearly see that the overwhelming evidence against Trump, coupled with Trump's increasingly frantic behavior, means this situation may be unsalvageable. It's time for "people familiar with the matter" to start looking into life after Trump, and getting in on pretending that all this never happened so that folks like potential President Joe Biden can forgive and forget.
The story about Barr turning his nose up at this particular criminal cover-up spread rapidly, often aided by left-leaning publications. Which is all understandable, since we all enjoy watching rats flying off a sinking ship and Trump flinging the word "fake" around in his usual pathetic response. But it's also unsettling, because Barr — sorry, "people familiar with the matter" — is only doing this because he wants a piece of that sweet post-Trump bygones action that Biden is proposing.
If our political class had any love for this country, they would not let Barr get away with this. The man is a lifelong opponent of democracy who hitched his wagon to Trump because he correctly assessed that Trump shared his love of authoritarian rule. If he abandons Trump, it will only because Trump no longer serves this goal, not because Barr suddenly had an "epiphany".
A similar situation is going on with the anonymously written upcoming book "A Warning," purportedly by the same "senior administration official" who wrote an op-ed for the New York Times last year. The book isn't out yet, but the tidbits being released appear geared towards the goal of making sure that many of the people who enabled and protected the Trump presidency can escape any kind of public accountability after he flames out.
The first bit of the book to be leaked suggests that "Anonymous" is casting a wide net of desired redemption. As reported by Yashar Ali of the Huffington Post, "highly placed White House officials did a back-of-the-envelope tally of which Cabinet members" would be willing to invoke their constitutional right to remove Trump and replace him with Vice President Mike Pence.
Pence himself is cast in a redemptive light in this telling, with the claim that "high-level White House aides were certain that Vice President Mike Pence would support the use of the 25th Amendment to have President Donald Trump removed from office because of mental incapacity."
All of this should be taken with a many-carat grain of salt, as this supposed plot to remove Trump never actually happened and Pence continues to be an eager proponent of whatever nonsensical lies the White House tells on any given day to defend Trump's corruption. Moreover, Pence may be neck-deep in this Ukraine scandal himself, casting serious doubts about the veep's eagerness or ability to stay outside the Trumpian blast zone.
And, of course, we now also have Jeff Sessions, having disgraced his already disgraceful career by being Trump's attorney general for a time, eyeballing a return to his Senate seat, where he can pretend none of this ever happened.
Sadly, we will see more of these attempts at rehabbing various high-level Republicans as Trump's apparent implosion continues. The more likely it is that Trump is sent packing to Mar-a-Lago — or better yet, to federal prison — the more Republicans are going to pretend they barely knew the guy.
Unfortunately, as Biden's comments show, too many people are ready and eager to help Republicans out in their quest to recover their reputations, post-Trump. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted on Twitter, "there will be a lot of 'respectable' voices urging us to 'look forward not back.'"
Just as happened after the debacle of the George W. Bush administration, the rehab process will probably work. Soon enough, we'll be seeing Pence, or possibly even Trump himself, hanging out with Ellen DeGeneres or some other liberal celebrity. A lot of powerful people have a lot of interest in making sure that those who aided and abetted this criminal presidency get away scot-free.
That doesn't mean that the rest of us should give in so easily. Refusing, every step of the way, to pretend that everything is cool and normal now and it's just like Trump never happened is critical. The more we refuse to play along with this charade, the more likely it is there will be real consequences for the people who did this to us. More important still, there will be less chance that they'll try to do it again.
Your government at work: Members of Congress were hot on both sides of the aisle last week about air safety, relentlessly attacking Boeing over safety lapses on the 737 Max.
But they were pretty silent about our government’s role altogether in giving the job of supervising new technology to the air manufacturers themselves.
In other words, it was a lousy review of those charged with keeping us safe—because de-regulation, rocket-fueled by the Donald Trump administration—is the word of the day. Too many rules for safety might affect jobs, they tell us.
So, last week, Boeing and its CEO, Dennis Muilenberg, apologized publicly again, even before sign-carrying family members, for mistakes that led to two international crashes of its 737 Max aircraft. Muilenberg owned up to the fact that Boeing set aside a test pilot’s warning—something information that the company had not described in previous testimony.
What did Congress think was going to happen when they gave the regulatory keys to the companies themselves?
The apologies came before a Senate committee investigating the safety concerns that were unusual for their bipartisanship and their fierceness towards the company. The testimony came on the anniversary of the first of the crashes in Indonesia, and the planes in question are still not flying.
The messages, which date back to November 2016, were given to the Department of Justice investigators in February but were not released to the Federal Aviation Administration or other regulators until after the second 737 Max crash, months after their discovery. They suggest Boeing may have tried to hide the safety concerns from regulators.
Then House members followed with disclosure of key documents from their own investigation that included an email in which a Boeing engineer questioned in 2015 whether the Max was vulnerable to the failure of a single sensor—the scenario that led to crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
By contrast, Boeing this week said 50 other 737 NG plans should be grounded after discovering structural cracks.
No FAA Review
But there has been little congressional concern about the Federal Aviation Administration process itself. Those regulatory procedures were changed to allow companies like Boeing much more responsibility for conducting its own safety concerns. Boeing, meanwhile, was busy trying to introduce its new plane before Airbus’ alternative.
You’d think that Congress would care more about what the government is doing to protect the consumer, the flying customer, than about jumping on the company. What did Congress think was going to happen when they gave the regulatory keys to the companies themselves?
A report earlier this month together by representatives of the FAA, NASA and nine international regulators, provided the first official detailed account of how federal regulators certified the Max. Lawmakers and federal investigators are still conducting their own inquiries into the design and approval of the jet.
That report found a breakdown in the regulatory system and poor communication from Boeing, which did not adequately explain to federal regulators how a crucial new system on the plane worked, the report says.
The report found that the FAA relied heavily on Boeing employees to vouch for the safety of the Max and lacked the ability to effectively analyze much of what the company did share. It also found that Boeing employees who worked on behalf of the FAA faced “undue pressures” at times during the plane’s development because of “conflicting priorities,” according to the report.
“This report confirms our very worst fears about a broken system,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said at the time. “To put the fox in charge of the henhouse never made any sense, and now we see the deeply tragic consequences.”
Boeing’s board has stripped Muilenberg of his title of chairman of the board, but he remains as president of the company.
Added Needed Scrutiny
The review scrutinized the FAA’s certification of the Max’s flight control system, including the new automated system, MCAS, which played a role in both crashes. The report found that while the FAA had been made aware of MCAS, “the information and discussions about MCAS were so fragmented and were delivered to disconnected groups” that it “was difficult to recognize the impacts and implications of this system.” The report said if FAA technical staff had been fully aware of the details of MCAS, the agency would probably have required additional scrutiny of the system that might have identified its flaws. The task force recommended that the FAA review staffing levels at its Boeing office in Seattle and review the Boeing office that allows company employees to perform certification work.
You might be interested in seeing the various FAA statements along the way here.
My question here is simple: Who besides the mavens in the White House thinks that stripping away regulation from oversight responsibilities in the environment, health, and transportation actually believes that we are safer as a result?
The 2020 presidential campaign is starting to feel a lot like 2016. This is a good thing for Donald Trump and his Republican Party. It is a bad thing for the Democrats.
During the 2016 campaign, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton seemed almost predestined to defeat Donald Trump. Clinton was a former secretary of state, a former first lady, a person who had devoted much of her life to public service, is highly intelligent and an expert on public policy. She was also buoyed among Democratic voters and many others by the fact that she would be America’s first woman president. Trump, meanwhile, was viewed by the news media and most serious political observers as a buffoon, the gimp at a political freak show. Voting models and public opinion polls showed Hillary Clinton easily winning the White House.
In the end Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump by close to 3 million votes, but would lose the Electoral College and therefore the presidency.
Trump's won because of several key reasons. His skill at developing and manipulating a cult-like following, his authoritarian and fascist appeal to racist, nativist and sexist voters, his deft use of social media including Facebook and Twitter, the Fox News right-wing propaganda machine, and illegal Russian interference on his behalf gifted him the White House.
As the 2020 presidential election approaches, with the third year of Trump’s reign coming to an end, all signs again seem to point toward a Democratic victory.
Trump is remarkably unpopular. More Americans want Trump impeached than wanted Richard Nixon impeached in 1974. Public opinion polls show a general level of discontent and disgust with Trump, both as a person and as president. Public opinion polls generally show the Democratic presidential nominee — whoever that may be — defeating Trump easily.
The Democrats have finally decided to impeach Donald Trump for his many crimes and other misdeeds, including obstruction of justice, abuse of power including bribery and extortion (as seen in the Ukraine scandal), his rampant corruption and violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and his general betrayal of the presidential oath of office.
Trump’s overt embrace of white supremacy and racism, his disregard for the rule of law and the Constitution, and his threats of violence against the American news media, leading Democrats and various private citizens are also impeachable offenses.
On a near-daily basis, Trump’s many political scandals are multiplying like bacteria in a petri dish. He will almost certainly become the first president to run for re-election after having been impeached.
For these and many other reasons, Donald Trump should be doomed. But Donald Trump is not a normal political candidate. He is a political version of James Cameron’s “Terminator” or a zombie ghoul from George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Donald Trump is almost unstoppable. Despite all of the evidence suggesting otherwise, Trump will likely win in 2020.
While public opinion polls and other research show that the American people are turning against Donald Trump at an increasing rate, his support among Republicans and right-leaning independents remains remarkably high. A new poll from Monmouth University reports that 62 percent of people who approve of Trump say they will continue supporting him no matter what he does.
Donald Trump also has the highest level of baseline support for an American president in the history of modern public opinion polls.
In national polls, Mr. Trump’s political standing has appeared to be in grave jeopardy. His approval ratings have long been in the low 40s, and he trails Mr. Biden by almost nine points in a national polling average. But as the 2016 race showed, the story in the battleground states can be quite different. Mr. Trump won the election by sweeping Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina — even while losing the national vote by two points.
Democrats would probably need to win three of the six states to win the White House, assuming other states voted as they did in 2016 — an outcome that is not at all assured.
The Times/Siena results and other data suggest that the president’s advantage in the Electoral College relative to the nation as a whole remains intact or has even grown since 2016, raising the possibility that the Republicans could — for the third time in the past six elections — win the presidency while losing the popular vote.
Donald Trump leads a political cult. His members will not abandon him for any reason, because they are enmeshed together in a state of collective narcissism and other mental pathologies. Right-wing Christian evangelicals are among Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. According to a recent Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) report, 99 percent of white Christian Evangelicals report that they will never defect from Donald Trump’s cult.
This is an even greater percentage than overall Republicans, 94% of which oppose the impeachment and removal of Mr. Trump. (Ninety-nine percent of Republicans who watch Fox News, a subsection that likely overlaps with white evangelical Protestants, also oppose impeachment and removal.)
The new PRRI report also shows that Republicans have sealed themselves into a right-wing echo chamber of lies and disinformation. BuzzFeed explains:
Fox News viewers are remarkably, and unrelentingly, loyal to Trump. Fifty-five percent of Republicans who get their news from the network said there was nothing Trump could do to lose their approval, a recent study found. This was in contrast to just 30% of Republicans who don’t get their news from the network. In a new Suffolk poll, only 9% of people who trust Fox News the most said they believed Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president is an impeachable offense, compared to 72% of people who trust CNN the most. And 78% of Fox watchers said they agreed with Trump’s assessment that the impeachment proceedings constitute a “political lynching.”
Donald Trump is also very popular among “blue-collar” working-class white women, the largest single voting bloc in America. They are Trump’s human shields in the impeachment fight. Washington Monthly reports:
Democrats face two key questions: who are Trump’s most stalwart defenders, and can they be persuaded to abandon him?
New research suggests an answer to the first of these queries. It’s a group that Democrats should — and could — be winning over: blue-collar white women. While Democrats made crucial gains among these voters in the 2018 election, these women may now be rallying to Trump’s defense… .
As of October 21, Trendency found that a solid majority (54 percent) of non-college-educated white women either outright oppose or lean against impeachment, while just 37 percent strongly support it. In fact, blue-collar white women are the strongest opponents of impeachment among all white voters (see chart below). This opposition is in stark contrast to college-educated white women, among whom only 26 percent indicated “no support” for impeachment as of October 21.
Why does this group of white women support Donald Trump? White women, like white men, have both historically been deeply invested in white supremacy. Non-college-educated white women’s support for Trump is also a function of internalized hostile sexism where his misogyny, dozens of alleged sexual assaults, and efforts to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedoms are not viewed as disqualifying and may in fact be understood as reasons to vote for him.
What if Donald Trump is in fact defeated in 2020? He, his supporters and their captive news media will claim that he is a victim of a coup. This will make governance all but impossible for the new Democratic president. With Trump and his allies already engaging in stochastic terrorism and talk of “civil war,” right-wing political violence on an escalating scale will then be more likely than not.
As Tom Nichols observed in a recent column in USA Today, the modern Republican Party has decided to destroy itself as proof of its loyalty to Donald Trump and American fascism. Like its leader, the present-day Republican Party represents an existential threat to American democracy.
Nichols writes, “The House Republicans have clearly decided to throw themselves on the pyre of Donald Trump’s burning presidency. The last act of this tragedy — and impeachment, no matter how it turns out, is a national tragedy — will be when Senate Republicans meekly submit to the will of Donald Trump and acquit him, like terrified jurors under the glaring eye of a Mafia boss who knows their names.”
Nichols then sounds this alarm:
There isn’t much more ground to cover between the historic Halloween vote and the final immolation of the Republican Party. The GOP will fail this test of character. What is more important is whether the American nation passes it and demands the impeachment and removal of the greatest threat to the United States Constitution ever to come from the Oval Office.
Former high-ranking and other distinguished members of the United States military and the intelligence community have also warned the American people and the world that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Speaking to that point, retired Adm. William H. McRaven, former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, even wrote an op-ed in the New York Times to suggest where that Donald Trump is “destroying” the United States.
As should be obvious to everyone, the 2020 presidential election is not politics as usual.
The re-election of Donald Trump will mean that basic human and civil rights, the rule of law, the Constitution and other central aspects of American democracy — such as freedom of the press, free and fair elections and the right to vote — will be imperiled.
Trump and his allies will take a 2020 victory as an endorsement of the "unitary executive" theory, which holds that the president — as long as he or she is a Republican — is more like a king or an emperor than a democratic leader accountable to the Constitution and the rule of law. Such an outcome is a betrayal of the best core democratic values of the United States established at the founding and enshrined in the Constitution, values for which millions of Americans, both at home and abroad, have struggled, fought and died.
Ultimately, the 2020 presidential election will be one of the most important moments in American history. Like the Civil War and the civil rights movement, it is a referendum on the country’s democracy and its centuries-long journey to become a “more perfect union.” In its national myth America is a shining city on the hill. A vote for Donald Trump in 2020 is a decision to transform that shining city on the hill into a stinking outhouse and an embarrassment before the world. This is the choice that the American people will make in 2020.
Defeating Donald Trump requires full knowledge of the facts. They must not be ignored in favor of overly optimistic predictions meant to buoy the spirits of the “resistance.” Vanquishing President Trump and his movement is urgent and necessary. It will not be easy, and victory is by no means certain.
Transcripts of testimony in the impeachment inquiry have been coming fast and furious this week and they have been electrifying. EU ambassador Gordon Sondland even made a late addendum in which he admitted to presenting the Ukrainians with the quid-pro-quo deal that Donald Trump denies ever happened.
But after first demanding to see the transcripts and complaining they've been left out of the process, Republicans have now decided to hold their breath until they turn blue.
— (@)
One of the most important revelations in these depositions is the fact that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr are up to their necks in this mess. As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent notes, this story shows the remarkable "degree to which this whole scheme is corrupting multiple government agencies and effectively placing them at the disposal of Trump’s reelection effort."
The New York Times took a long look at Pompeo's involvement, making the important point that he had accepted the CIA's conclusion on Russian interference when he was the director of that agency, but since he became secretary of state he's acted as an accomplice to Trump and Giuliani's addled conspiracy theory and has thrown one career State Department employee after another under the bus. As Sargent puts it, Pompeo is "a secretary of state who is essentially perverting the State Department and subverting the national interest to carry out Trump’s sordid political project."
Meanwhile, we have Barr running all over the world also trying to prove Trump's daft Ukraine conspiracy theory and show that the FBI and intelligence agencies went rogue and infiltrated the Trump campaign without good reason. One would have thought the Mueller report had dispatched such concerns, but Barr is apparently determined to prove that investigation was tainted as well.
Many people are wringing their hands and scratching their heads, wondering how the once staunch defenders of law and order in the GOP have suddenly turned into bleeding-heart libertarians, railing against the Deep State, standing up for the rights of the poor lone individual, Donald J. Trump. What happened to the Republican Party?
Well, as with everything else in this strange political era, the truth is that none of this is exactly unprecedented. Much of what is happening is just a funhouse-mirror version of Republican politics over the past 50 years.
Take, for instance, Mike Pompeo's obvious disregard for the career diplomats and foreign service personnel at the State Department. I wrote the other day about Sen. Joseph McCarthy's attacks on Gen. George Marshall and his hearings about alleged Soviet infiltration of the U.S. military. But the opening salvo of his Red Scare was against the State Department. In his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy said that he had a list with the names of more than 200 members of the Department of State who were “known communists."
In fact, Cold War hawks were always suspicious of the State Department because they saw diplomacy as soft at best and traitorous at worst, and often took the opportunity to blame that department for foreign policy failures, periodically purging the department of people they suspected of not holding "Americanist" values. (Today they are accused of being "globalists.") As recently as the Bush administration there was a move to "reform" the State Department in the wake of 9/11, led by none other than Newt Gingrich. He gave speeches and wrote articles in 2003 attacking "The Rogue State Department" for having produced honest intelligence assessments in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
That attitude also explains a strange dichotomy with respect to how the right and left view the CIA. A couple of weeks ago Salon's Andrew O'Hehir wrote a piece reminding people on the left about the CIA's history of undemocratic and underhanded activities over the years, so we don't lose perspective as we watch this Trump debacle unfold. He was right, of course. The left has traditionally been rightfully skeptical of CIA activities, particularly after the revelations of the 1970s showing that it had essentially operated as a shadow government, carrying out assassinations and interfering in domestic political matters. Along with the FBI, the CIA was shown to have operated illegally and unethically for decades, behavior that hawks in both parties endorsed as necessary to fight "the evil empire." The reforms of the Church Commission in the 1970s, among others, were enacted to rein in the agency. But our experience with Central America in the 1980s and the torture, black sites and rendition programs of the War on Terror made clear that those reforms were only as good as a government that believed in them.
But there was another side to that story. During the 1970s, the CIA was also producing analysis showing that the Soviet military was a much less formidable threat than was being portrayed. This information was rejected by Cold War hawks who persuaded Gerald Ford to bring in "outside experts," including people like two-time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who naturally found that the CIA's estimates were all wrong and the Soviets were on the verge of taking over the world. For years the hawks created a series of "alternate" analyses under the auspices of groups with names like "Team B" and Committee on the Present Danger. History has shown that the CIA analysis was much closer to the truth.
The right's unwillingness to accept the findings of actual intelligence continued all the way to the Iraq war, when Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director George Tenet refused to accept the conclusion that Saddam Hussein likely did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and almost certainly had no nuclear weapons. Instead, they "stovepiped" only the intelligence that would back up their desired goal to invade Iraq. We know how that worked out too.
All the way back to the 1970s, even as the left was rightly skeptical of CIA covert activity, it has accepted that the CIA's analysis of various threats was far more reliable, if imperfect, than anything that came out of the right-wing hawks' mouths. We find ourselves in a similar position today. The intelligence community's analysis of the 2016 election interference appears to be backed up by many foreign allies, press accounts and personal testimony, while the right's absurd counter-narrative is once again made up out of whole cloth.
So supposed pillars of the GOP establishment, like Mike Pompeo trashing his own State Department and Bill Barr running around the world trying to discredit intelligence analysis is not nearly as strange as people think. They are following a well-worn path. The only difference is that this time they're not doing it for any recognizable ideological or geopolitical purpose. They are doing what they always do, but putting it in service of Donald Trump's massive ego.
Just what do Republicans gain by unveiling the whistleblower?
Conservative news media are circulating—without confirmation—the identity of a CIA operative who had been assigned to Donald Trump’s White House, and outspoken Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are joining with Trump in seeking to publicize the name. Paul, by the way, would be an “impartial” juror in any impeachment trial.
I don’t get the move, except as a deflection.
Disclosing the name runs counter to the spirit of the law meant to protect federal whistleblowers. Indeed, the law was passed to encourage people to come forward with reports of wrong-doing without fear of retribution.
Calling for the name of the whistleblower is a sure threat against other would-be whistleblowers.
Moreover, disclosure of the name of the whistleblower doesn’t change the information that was forwarded to Michael K. Atkinson, the Trump-appointed Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, who decided it was worth actual congressional investigation. Nor does it change the several testimonies of witnesses, including people who sat in on the July 25 phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or otherwise posted in Ukraine.
These witnesses have told a consistent story of extortion by Trump, including in revised testimony by Trump-appointed ambassador Gordon Sondland released yesterday.
Of course, calling for the name of the whistleblower is a sure threat against other would-be whistleblowers.
The Republican Argument
It is clear that Trump, Paul and the others want to discredit the person, probably looking for party affiliations as a Democrat, or assignments under the previous administration.
But other than serving as a target for personal insult—and possible violence at the hands of Trump loyalists—what possible difference could it make it the whistleblower is a registered Democrat. So am I. Trump insists that “reading the transcript”— the redacted summary of the July 25 phone call—would make it obvious to anyone that he had a “perfect” phone call without a quid pro quo.
But a reading of the note does show the deal being sought as dirt on Joe Biden’s family in return for the release of lethal military aid to Ukraine. And more, the phone call is hardly the substance of the impeachment matter any longer since it is clear that the efforts toward the deal were months-long.
I do understand—though I do not agree—the Republican argument that there may have been a quid pro quo but that it does not rise to the level of impeachment. But even more, then, what possible gain could come from the release of the name of the whistleblower?
The important thing is that the whistleblower report started a process that was pushed by the named inspector general to the Department of Justice, the CIA and Congress, and that process has brought forth people who were in the center of the issues being considered that lap any “second-hand” information reported by the whistleblower.
For what it is worth, the named witnesses to the House Intelligence Committee each have proved a target for Republican insult and discredit rather than congratulations and thanks for stepping up to testify both in private and, shortly, in public.
More of the Same
At the same time, the Department of Justice is going after the identity of Anonymous, a self-described White House insider who has written a new book awaiting publication. Justice, through Atty. Gen. William P. Barr, is using a combination of executive privilege, non-disclosure and intelligence community protocols in an effort to unearth the name.
Once again, the goal seems more about setting up the author, who last year had published a New York Times op-ed criticizing chaos in the White House, for public insult and abasement.
Indeed, the White House has demanded non-disclosure form signatures from all whom it has hired, in a blatant attempt to keep critical words from emerging from his administration.
I would understand all these efforts if they actually had something for you and me to gain from the disclosure. But knowing the name of the whistleblower or Anonymous or any of the named witnesses to date has not changed the underlying facts.
Republicans should drop this silly line and decide whether they want to defend bending U.S. foreign policy for the perceived political gain of a president who has no respect for the law or the Constitution.
The Senate Republicans came up with a new strategy over the weekend to defend the president against accusations of abusing the authority of his office for personal gain.
The plan goes like this: OK maybe it was quid pro quo when Donald Trump asked Ukraine’s president to investigate his American rivals in exchange for military aid, but it wasn’t the bad kind. The bad kind is corrupt. The good kind is what America has been doing since World War II, nudging nations toward just governance. Trump was only asking Ukraine to fight corruption. The Bidens just happened to be in the mix is all.
Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said, per the Post, that “there’s lots of quid pro quos” in US foreign policy. “We’ve done quid pro quos a lot of times,” he said. “The question isn’t whether it was quid pro quo; the question is: Was it corruption?” Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said the US puts conditions on foreign aid all the time. “Those are legitimate reservations. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s not impeachable.”
Well, it turns out the president’s hand-picked ambassador said nuh-uh. Actually, he said Tuesday to House investigators, Trump was quite explicit about what he wanted from Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s new leader. In fact, Trump didn’t want him to really investigate Joe and Hunter Biden for corruption. All he wanted was for him to merelysay he was. The key was Zelensky himself saying it publicly and loudly, probably so Trump could later point to it as evidence of whatever false accusation he invents.
Gordon Sondland is Trump’s ambassador to the European Union. “I now recall speaking with Mr. [Andrey] Yermak, where I said that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Sondland said in an update, referring to an aide to the Ukrainian president. “Soon thereafter, I came to understand that, in fact, the public statement would need to come directly from President Zelensky himself.”
So, yeah, that’s the bad kind of quid pro quo. It’s, you know, what they call extortion.
When all is said and done—that is to say, when the Republicans have stopped lying so much—a pattern should become clear. This is how Donald Trump operates. It’s what he’s done since taking office. It’s what he did as a businessman. It’s what he did just days ago when he floated the idea of shutting down the federal government unless the House Democrats quit trying to impeach him. For the president, all quid pro quo is corrupt quid pro quo, because every exchange is to benefit him personally. This pattern is difficult to see under a mountain of Republican lies. But that’s not the only pattern.
The Republicans said recently that the impeachment inquiry was illegitimate as long as the House hasn’t authorize it. So the House authorized it. Is it now legitimate? Nope. Then they said Trump’s actions were impeachable if they were corrupt. So we know they were sooper corrupt. Are they now impeachable? Don’t hold your breath.
The Republicans can’t be trusted to commit to a clear standard of what counts as impeachable conduct. You could say their faithlessness was pre-ordained. Lindsey Graham, the president’s staunch defender, led the GOP’s prosecution of Bill Clinton’s Senate trial in 1998 when he was a House member. The standard then was lying. Lying!
Clinton lied to a grand jury about his sexual relationship with an intern. Then he dragged his feet when cooperating with investigators. That counted as obstruction! So lying and obstruction (sorta) were enough for Graham to lead the way in “cleansing the office.” “Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office,” he said. “Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.” And now? “I've written the whole process off,” he said. “I think this is a bunch of BS.”
Given that Donald Trump has lied more than 13,000 times since 2017, and given that even the US Department of Justice is activelyobstructing justice, it’s fair to ask at what point would Trump meet the Republican standard of impeachable conduct. The signs are not encouraging. Some Republicans appear willing to look treasonous to save the president, suggesting that even treason would fail to meet their so-called standard.
Rand Paul said he’d be willing to name of the whistleblower whose complaint is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. That would be illegal, for one thing. For another, Paul’s statement appeared coordinated with Russian state news outlets. Julia Davis, an expert of Russian media, wrote in the Daily Beast Wednesday that as soon as Paul asked the US press corps Tuesday to unmask the whistleblower, the “Kremlin-controlled heavy hitters—TASS, RT, Rossiya-1—disseminated the same information.”
The move, she said, was “a 2019 re-play of ‘Russia, if you’re listening.’”
How far are the Republicans willing to go? It doesn’t look good.
Today is Election Day here in New Haven and in cities and towns around the country. It’s what some call an off-off-year election, meaning that it’s between a midterm—midway through a four-year presidential term—and the next presidential election.
Off-off-year elections are notorious for having low turnout, and low turnout is bad for democracy. For this reason, some political scientists argue that democracy would be better served if more elections were more in sync, and there’s something to that. If municipal elections were held at the same time as statewide and congressional elections, there might be more participation. Democracy would be in better health.
Like I said, there’s something to do that, but only something. I’ve always found that argument to be rather wooden, bloodless and amoral, as if democracy were in service to questions of convenience. Mind you, I understand that when voting is more convenient, people vote more. I don’t begrudge anyone for trying to create systems that encourage voting. I want barriers to be torn down with extreme prejudice. But I don’t think the discussion should stop at mechanisms. It should include values. It should include a vision of a just society. In short, it should be small-r republican.
Another way of putting this is that we need to cultivate a democratic culture, one in which Americans vote because voting is what Americans do, and it’s what Americans do, because a democratic culture compels them to. I don’t think we have anything close to that, not even here in New England, the cradle of American democracy. New Haven is run by Democrats, has been for ages. The question isn’t whether a Democrat will win, but which Democrat, so party primaries draw a modest amount of attention but general elections generally don’t. By Election Day, the fight’s been over for weeks.
A democratic culture reveres the rights of citizens but also their duties, and the overwhelming duty of each and every citizen is to participate in the exercise of self-government not only for their own good but for the greater good. I respect the argument against compulsory voting (forcing people to vote or pay a fine), but compulsory voting is attractive to republican liberals like me, because it has the potential, at least, to snap citizens out of the idea that voting is something you did if you feel like it. I don’t think we’d be talking about compulsory voting if we had a democratic culture making demands of citizens. In the absence of that, many of us dwell on compulsory voting.
With this in mind, consider two reports, one from the Times and one from the Post, that assessed where we are one-year from the next presidential election. In both, Donald Trump is unpopular—his approval rating is under 50 percent—but the states in which he’s well-liked create conditions in which he could lose the national popular vote by even more than he did last time but still win thanks to the Electoral College.
These reports collectively shocked some people, if my Twitter feed is any indication. Some were amazed he could win again, seemingly under the impression that a president mired in scandal can’t be reelected or that a Democrat is a shoo-in. I don’t know. But the reaction suggests to me a couple of things. One, that people do not understand that people don’t vote for presidents—states do—and they don’t know this, because we don’t have a democratic culture that would inform them of the truth.
Moreover, the reaction suggests something terrifying—that people are so convinced Trump can’t win reelection they won’t bother showing up next November. So let me clear: Donald Trump can absolutely win reelection. He is the incumbent. Incumbents have a colossal advantage. He is a Republican. He has an Electoral College advantage. He has a money advantage. He is also a narcissist. An international right-wing media apparatus will repeat every lie. So will our enemies in places like Russia, China and Iran. Trump is indeed a criminal. We believe crime doesn’t pay. In 2020, it could.
But voting Trump out should not be a voter’s animating principle. The animating principle should be voting for its own sake because that’s what Americans do, and that’s what Americans do because a democratic culture compels them. Ideally, it would compel them so much few racist barriers would be strong enough to stop Americans filled with the righteous spirit of democracy from having their say.
We aren’t there yet. We may never be. But we need to do the work.
Transcripts of closed-door testimony in the Trump impeachment investigation show a disturbing pattern of behavior by Republican lawmakers, not one of whom expressed concern about our national security, White House undermining of our diplomats or their safety.
Maria Yovanovitch, who got a middle of the night call from the State Department telling her to be on the next plane out of Kyiv, told in vivid detail how the Trump Administration's actions are “hollowing out” our State Department and benefitting our adversaries, notably Russia.
She predicted that the damage already done will last for decades and may be irreparable, undoing the influence American won with blood and treasure by defeating its enemies in World War II and then building a global community to replace the war-ravaged past.
Republican lawmakers are less concerned about loyalty to country than to their own grasp on power.
Asked if she feels threatened, Yovanovitch said. “Yes.”
Then, bit by bit, the former ambassador was asked to flesh out her concerns. She testified of her worries that she may be under FBI investigation for who knows what, may be fired, may lose her pension.
Q: Do you have concerns about your personal safety?
A: So far, no.
Q: But you hesitate in saying, "So far, no," or you condition that on what might happen in the future. So what…
A: Well, I would say a number of my friends are very concerned.
Rep. Mark Meadows, a Trump loyalist from North Carolina, raising a point of order, asserted that “there are no rules that would give the authority of you to actually depose this witness.”
Out of Order
Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, referred Meadows House deposition Rule 11. It states that House committees may “require, by subpoena or otherwise, the attendance and testimony of” witnesses.
So, Meadows either was a) ignorant of the rules, b) too lazy to read the nearly eight pages of relevant rules or c) acting in bad faith. We’ll go with c.
The Republican effort to derail the deposition continued. Representative Lee Zeldin from outer Long Island, New York, raised the same issue as Meadows. Schiff cut him off: “We won' t allow any further dilatory motions.”
When public hearings begin, we can anticipate more such tactics at least until the final date for challengers to file papers in Republican primary elections. Many Republican lawmakers are less concerned about loyalty to country than to their own grasp on power, their conduct shows.
Should any Democrats act this way, we will tell readers all about it.
Meadows shows up later in the transcript (p. 297) trying to put words in Yovanovitch’s mouth. He fails.
Jordan Plays 'Gotcha,' Misses
A few pages later Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, asks how extraordinary, and by implication improper, it is for current State Department officials to discuss Ukraine issues with former State officials.
Jordan, who as a college gym coach claims to be unaware of numerous complaints of sexual abuse of wrestlers, was taken aback to learn that experts in and out of government share information.
Jordan: Has that ever happened before, to your knowledge?
In the infamous July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine Trump denounced our ambassador, calling Yovanovitch “bad news.”
Yovanovitch testified that diplomats who are posted abroad expect that “our government will have our backs and protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests.”
She continued in words worth reading and pondering:
“That basic understanding no longer holds true. Today, we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within. State Department leadership with Congress needs to take action now to defend this great institution and its thousands of loyal and effective employees. We need to rebuild diplomacy as the first resort to advance America' s interest, and the front line of America' s defense.
"I fear that not doing so will harm our Nation's interest, perhaps irreparably. That harm will come not just through the inevitable and continuing resignation and loss of many of this Nation's most loyal and talented public servants. It also will come when those diplomats who soldier on and do their best to represent our Nation , face partners abroad who question whether the ambassador really speaks for the President, and can be counted upon as a reliable partner."
The Real Harm
The harm will come when private interests circumvent professional diplomats for their own gain, not for the public good.
The harm will come when bad actors and countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system.
In such circumstances, the only interests that are going to be served are those of our strategic adversaries like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the U. S. helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.”
Yovanovitch testified that no previous White House had done anything like Trump in pursuing a president’s personal and political interests rather than our national interests.
She also told of baseless news stories about her, the kind Trump never calls “fake news” because they spread falsehoods he favors.
“I have heard the allegation in the media that I supposedly told our embassy team to ignore the President's orders since he was going to be impeached. That allegation is false. I have never said such a thing to my embassy colleagues or anyone else.”
She also said these words which serve as a reminder of why the rule of law and respect for people who act with decency, dignity and integrity matters:
“Ukraine is full of people who want the very things we have always said we want for the United States, a government that acts in the interest of the people, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. The overwhelming support for President Zelensky in April's election proved that. And it was one of our most important tasks at the embassy in Kyiv to understand and act upon the difference between those who sought to serve their people and those who sought to serve only themselves.”
We can only hope that in the glare of television lights and national broadcasts of the impeachment public hearings that all members of Congress will seek to serve the people and not only themselves.
But other than serving as a target for personal insult—and possible violence at the hands of Trump loyalists—what possible difference could it make it the whistleblower is a registered Democrat. So am I. Trump insists that “reading the transcript”— the redacted summary of the July 25 phone call—would make it obvious to anyone that he had a “perfect” phone call without a quid pro quo.