Tag: Dictator Trump

  • Getting the journalists out

    Apparently the Trump administration has done a purge of journalists who report on the Trump administration? That’s what Dana Milbank says.

    The White House eliminated most briefings and severely restricted access to official events. And this week came the coup de grace: After covering four presidents, I received an email informing me that Trump’s press office had revoked my White House credential.

    I’m not the only one. I was part of a mass purge of “hard pass” holders after the White House implemented a new standard that designated as unqualified almost the entire White House press corps, including all seven of The Post’s White House correspondents. White House officials then chose which journalists would be granted “exceptions.” It did this over objections from news organizations and the White House Correspondents’ Association.

    What’s the qualification they lack? I’m guessing it must be Worshipful Attitude to Trump?

    The Post requested exceptions for its seven White House reporters and for me, saying that this access is essential to our work (in my case, I often write “sketches” describing the White House scene). The White House press office granted exceptions to the other seven, but not to me. I strongly suspect it’s because I’m a Trump critic. The move is perfectly in line with Trump’s banning of certain news organizations, including The Post, from his campaign events and his threats to revoke White House credentials of journalists he doesn’t like.

    …

    Now, virtually the entire White House press corps is credentialed under “exceptions,” which means, in a sense, that they all serve at the pleasure of press secretary Sarah Sanders because they all fail to meet credentialing requirements — and therefore, in theory, can have their credentials revoked any time they annoy Trump or his aides, like CNN’s Jim Acosta did.

    Another arm of the dictatorship monster.

  • Because he knows that no one will stop him

    Will Bunch on Trump the norms-buster.

    The main reason that Trump violates long-standing norms and established rules, or tells so many easily disprovable lies from the presidential podium, is because he knows that no one will stop him. And that exercise of unchallenged power isn’t just a weird quirk of the Trump presidency. It is, rather, its driving force.

    …

    I’m talking about forbearance, and if that word lulls you to sleep, maybe that’s part of the problem. What that term means — and it’s laid out brilliantly by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their 2018 best seller with the chilling title, How Democracies Die — is “not deploying one’s institutional prerogatives to the hilt, even if it’s legal to do so.” In other words, an American president can launch a nuclear first strike, add justices to pack the Supreme Court, fire prosecutors investigating him or his family or, failing that, issue full pardons to his allies or even perhaps himself. There are no laws and clauses in the Constitution to stop him from doing these things. Only tradition and a sense of what’s right and what’s good for America.

    And Trump, of course, has absolutely no interest in either.

    Trump’s lawyers are now out there openly saying they believe the president of the United States is above the law. This weekend, the New York Times published a 20-page letter that Trump’s personal attorneys sent to special counsel Robert Mueller seeking to avoid an interview with the prosecutor, which includes the stunning claim that it’s impossible for the White House to obstruct justice because, in the end, the president is justice.

    The secret letter, drafted in January, argues that Trump has sweeping constitutional powers, including the ability to kill off a probe into criminality in his own campaign — to, “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.” That means, they argue, it’s also within Trump’s rights to fire Mueller or the prosecutors overseeing him — even though a similar move by Nixon in 1973 triggered a flurry of impeachment resolutions.

    L’Etat, c’est moi. Trump and his lawyers are claiming the rights, and the powers, of a king — not a democratically elected president.

    And a king of the absolutist kind, not the constitutional kind we’re familiar with now.

    Trump is wearing down the American people, one lie at a time. He is chipping away at our notion of what constitutes American justice, one crony pardon at a time. And he is eroding the foundation of our democracy, to make it so weak that by the time he makes his inevitable moves to nullify the Mueller investigation, the remaining frayed house of cards may be too weak to fight back.

    Trump is doing very little with his presidency but to dictate things. He wakes up every morning and dictates lies, then he dictates arbitrary justice, and then he dictates unilateral policies — trade wars with our allies in Canada or in Europe, requiring power plants to burn dirty fuels like coal, or ripping little kids from their mommies and daddies at the border — that could never win political or legislative support, because they lack common sense or morality, or both.

    Hour by hour, lie by lie, dictate by dictate, Donald Trump is becoming an American dictator. And recent days have proved what many of us have long feared: That no one knows how to stop this. Not the Republicans or Democrats on Capitol Hill who, for different reasons, are too cowed politically to take substantive action. And not a news media that doesn’t have the mechanisms for informing the public when a president is a compulsive liar. Maybe things will change after the November midterm election — but there’s no guarantee, and that feels like a long time away.

    People are patronizingly telling me they’re not surprised by Trump’s announcement that he has the absolute right to pardon himself, but surprise isn’t the issue. I don’t really care whether or not you’re surprised that the house is burning down; the issue is how the fuck do we get out of here?

  • The constitutional conservatives don’t much care

    Jennifer Rubin points out that Republicans have done everything they can to enable Trump so far – refusing to legislate to protect Mueller, refusing to remove Nunes from the House Intelligence Committee – with the result that Trump is seizing even more rope.

    Trump and his legal team seem to have drawn the lesson from Republicans’ muteness that there is little Trump could do or say that would cause Republicans to stop his executive overreach and attacks on the rule of law. Seeing no objection, Trump and his legal team now feel comfortable throwing around talk of self-pardon or making claims that he is beyond the reach of laws prohibiting obstruction of justice.

    And the world seems to be yawning and turning over in bed. Trump has just declared himself beyond the reach of the law.

    David Frum has an excellent thread on how the Stuart kings tried to do exactly that.

    There’s more, and I didn’t know any of it; I need to read up on the 17th century.

    How did Trump get the idea he has powers that allow him to fire anyone, even for an illegal reason (e.g., a bribe)? We’re only talking about self-pardon (Trump tweeted this morning, “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?”) because Republicans were largely indifferent to pardons of cronies such as Joe Arpaio and right-wing race-monger Dinesh D’Souza. When reports suggested that the president’s team might have dangled pardons in front of key witnesses, you did not see Republicans in Congress leap to object.

    This is what I’m saying. Everyone should be highly alarmed right now, but apparently not everyone is.

    To be sure, Democrats are speaking up. “Donald in Wonderland: through a legal looking glass, no President can be prosecuted because whatever he says is the law. Too absurd even for fiction. In fact, no one is above the law,” tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). In a similar vein, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), pointed out, “The President’s legal arguments would render whole sections of the Constitution moot, and allow a president to engage in any form of criminality and obstruct an investigation into his own wrongdoing. Nobody is above the law. Not this President. Not any president.”

    But Democrats are the minority, and the Republicans are looking fixedly out the window and whistling.

    In short, the reason Trump feels emboldened to make frightful claims of vast executive power is that the constitutional conservatives don’t much care about the Constitution and aren’t conservative in any meaningful sense of the word. Elected Republicans created a constitutional monster — and, along the way, violated their oaths and their moral authority to govern. The larger conservative media have become cheerleaders for an executive power grab they would never tolerate in a Democratic administration. The voters in November will get to decide if that’s the sort of government — absolute power for Republicans — they want.

    If the voters are still allowed to vote by then.

  • Evil

    This country has been pulled into the filth and it will never get all the way out. Never. This is terminal.

  • There is no law now

    He did it. That racist lawless sack of shit pardoned Arpaio. Judges might as well not bother while he’s in the White House.

    Arpaio, who was a sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona, was found guilty of criminal contempt last month for disregarding a court order in a racial profiling case. Arpaio’s sentencing had been scheduled for October 5.

    “Not only did (Arpaio) abdicate responsibility, he announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise,” wrote US District Judge Susan Bolton in the July 31 order.

    Including a federal judge, and that sack of shit in the oval office just endorsed him. It’s a dictatorship. A racist dictatorship.

  • Hours after Trump delivered a slashing attack on the news media

    Robert Reich on the orange monster’s attack on the press:

    This is how authoritarian regimes operate:

    Hours after Trump delivered a slashing attack on the news media today in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference – denouncing news organizations as “dishonest” purveyors of “fake news,” and mocking journalists for claiming free speech rights – the White House barred journalists from The New York Times, CNN, the LA Times, and Politico from attending a briefing by Trump’s press secretary. The White House only allowed in reporters from a handpicked group of news organizations, including Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings.

    “Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don’t like,” CNN said in a statement. The executive editor of the New York Times said “Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties. We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”

    Reporters from Time magazine and The Associated Press, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House’s actions. Good for them.

    But journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Fox News who were allowed in didn’t join Time and the AP in boycotting it. I can understand Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and Wall Street Journal cooperating with Trump, but why ABC and CBS?

    The only way to fight authoritarianism is for everyone who believes in freedom and democracy to stick together.

    They must be stopped.

  • “They always bring up the First Amendment,” Trump said to cheers

    Wow.

    Once again, they manage to surprise me. And horrify and frighten. They’ve gone from verbally abusing the news media to shutting them out. The Times, one of the shut out news organizations, reports:

    Journalists from The New York Times and several other news organizations were prohibited from attending a briefing by President Trump’s press secretary on Friday, a highly unusual breach of relations between the White House and its press corps.

    Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times and Politico were not allowed to enter the West Wing office of the press secretary, Sean M. Spicer, for the scheduled briefing. Aides to Mr. Spicer only allowed in reporters from a handpicked group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed.

    Those organizations included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Fox News also attended.

    Reporters from Time magazine and The Associated Press, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House’s actions.

    They think they can do anything they want to. I hope someone makes clear to them that they can’t, very soon. A small minority of eligible voters voted for them, and nobody voted for them to establish a dictatorship.

    “Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. “We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”

    Not acceptable.

    The White House move came hours after Mr. Trump delivered a slashing attack on the news media in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The president denounced news organizations as “dishonest” purveyors of “fake news” and mocked journalists for claiming free speech rights.

    “They always bring up the First Amendment,” Mr. Trump said to cheers.

    Yes, they do, you miserable lying cheating assaulting wannabe-dictator pig. They bring it up and it exists, and nobody gave you permission to flout it, let alone demolish it.

    It’s a god damn outrage.