Tag: Trump

Trump is now openly inciting violence against news outlets, law enforcement, and Democrats.

At his rally on Thursday night in Indiana, President Trump unleashed his usual attacks on the news media, but he also added a refrain that should set off loud, clanging alarm bells. Trump didn’t simply castigate “fake news.” He also suggested the media is allied with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe — an alliance, he claimed, that is conspiring not just against Trump but also against his supporters.

“Today’s Democrat Party is held hostage by left-wing haters, angry mobs, deep-state radicals, establishment cronies and their fake-news allies,” Trump railed. “Our biggest obstacle and their greatest ally actually is the media.”

In case there is any doubt about what Trump meant by the “deep state” that is supposedly allied with the news media, Trump also lashed out at the FBI and the Justice Department, claiming that “people are angry” and threatening to personally “get involved.”

It’s who will rid me of this turbulent priest territory.

Robert D. Chain, who was arrested this week for allegedly threatening to murder journalists at the Boston Globe while mimicking Trump’s language, also connected Mueller’s investigation to the media. “You’re the enemy of the people, and we’re going to kill every f–––ing one of you,” Chain snarled into one employee’s voicemail, according to FBI documents. “Why don’t you call Mueller, maybe he can help you out.”

It’s weird, watching all this. It’s like watching Hitler in March 1933 except it’s different because there are more and stronger constraints on Trump than there were on Hitler. More and stronger, but not infinitely more and stronger. That’s what makes it weird to watch: I don’t feel the stark terror appropriate to watching Hitler in 1933, but at the same time I’m aware that there’s plenty of reason to feel that stark terror.

I’ll tell you one reason to feel calm there isn’t: any idea that Trump is fundamentally different and more innocuous. No, not at all; Trump is every bit the howling moral desert that Hitler was.

Jonathan Chait picks up on the Politico mention of Trump’s disdain for Sessions’s accent and lack of an Ivy League degree, and points out that Trump is one of them there coastal elite types himself.

Conservatives have spent decades depicting liberals as coastal snobs. Entire campaigns were built from this theme, from Michael Dukakis’s “Harvard Yard boutique” to various Democrats failing to display the requisite enthusiasm for Nascar. Every image of Barack Obama in the right-wing media cast him gazing downward imperiously, a pose that conservatives seemed to think captured his contempt for the good people of the heartland.

Given the attention they have lavished on such picayune details as John Kerry’s failure to order cheesesteak properly, it’s not even possible to imagine what they would do with direct evidence of a president disdaining his attorney general’s University of Alabama law degree and regional accent.

In other words it’s a reverse victim and offender scenario again.

But as is so often the case, the accusation that was made falsely against Democrats turns out to be true of Trump. For all his vaunted populism, he is filled with contempt for average people in general and his own supporters in particular.

Well duh. He is filled with contempt for people who don’t have gilded bathroom faucets.

Trump is the ultimate snob. He has no sense that working-class people may have equal latent talent that they have been denied the chance to develop. He considers wealthy and successful people a genetic aristocracy, frequently attributing his own success to good genes.

Attempting to explain his penchant for appointing plutocrats to his Cabinet, Trump has said, “I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?” It makes sense if you assume a person’s wealth perfectly reflects their innate intelligence. Trump has repeatedly boasted about his Ivy League pedigree and that of his relatives, which he believes reflects well on his own genetic stock. He has fixated on the Ivy League pedigree of his Supreme Court appointments, even rejecting the credentials of the lower Ivys as too proletarian.

Trump has built a brand on attracting working-class strivers. But the relationship he cultivates is unidirectional admiration. Trump gives his supporters a lifestyle they can enjoy vicariously. He views them as suckers. The Trump University scam was premised directly on exploiting the misplaced trust of his fan base. The internal guidance for salespeople trying to drain the savings accounts of their targets explained, “Don’t ask people what they think about something you’ve said. Instead, always ask them how they feel about it. People buy emotionally and justify it logically.”

Never mind though. He’s make it ok to be racist again, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Politico reports that Trump is getting closer to firing Sessions; the resistance of Republican senators is weakening.

The willingness of Republican senators to turn on Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the result of a furious lobbying campaign from President Donald Trump, who for the past 10 days has been venting his anger at Sessions to “any senator who will listen,” as one GOP Senate aide put it.

And not just senators.

He’s worn down his lawyers, too, according to two Republicans close to the White House. Though they once cautioned him that dismissing Sessions would feed special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s potential obstruction of justice, these people say, Trump’s legal team has become increasingly convinced Mueller will make that case regardless of whether the president fires Sessions or leaves him in place.

So might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb? Ok.

“There’s the belief that if the president taking action with respect to Sessions is going to be an important part of the Mueller obstruction case, most of that case has already been made. Things that the president has already done privately that have been reported, but also things that the president has done publicly that could be characterized as bullying or intimidating, all of that case is already there ready to be made, such that firing him is almost like an afterthought,” said one person familiar with the conversations among members of the president’s legal team.

He’s already screwed himself so it won’t matter if he adds another turn.

Seized by paroxysms of anger, Trump has intermittently pushed to fire his attorney general since March 2017, when Sessions announced his recusal from the Russia investigation. If Sessions’ recusal was his original sin, Trump has come to resent him for other reasons, griping to aides and lawmakers that the attorney general doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree the president prefers, that he can’t stand his Southern accent, and that Sessions isn’t a capable defender of the president on television — in part because he “talks like he has marbles in his mouth,” the president has told aides.

Oh gawd – has Trump ever looked at his own performance? He’s not what you’d call a skilled speaker.

The drumbeat of presidential tweets denigrating Sessions as “weak” and calling on him to “stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now” have also shaped the view among the president’s legal team. They have come to believe that if Mueller wants to build a case that the president has intimidated his attorney general, he can do so given the voluminous public record created by the president — and that firing Sessions won’t change much.

It would be funny if it weren’t so disgusting – Trump has already made it so obvious that he’s doing everything he can to obstruct justice that there’s really no point in trying to prevent him from doing more. That ship has sailed.

The Times gives us a glimpse into the cozy little gathering of evangelicals and Trump on Monday.

President Trump warned evangelical leaders Monday night that Democrats “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently” if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections.

Violently. Violently. This is the guy who ranted about “American carnage” at his inauguration. This is the guy who, days into his administration, slapped an instant ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, which meant that people who were on the way here at the time were caught up in the ban. This is the guy who instituted a policy to steal children from their parents at the border. This is the guy who did as little as possible to help Puerto Rico after the hurricane, and threw rolls of paper towels at them in a photo op.This is the guy who brags about grabbing women by the pussy and getting away with it. This is the guy who bullies and threatens people on live tv. This is the guy who punched his own son to the floor because he wasn’t wearing a suit.

Reverse Victim and Offender.

“They will end everything immediately,” Mr. Trump said. “When you look at antifa,” he added, a term that describes militant leftist groups, “and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people.”

Reverse Victim and Offender.

The blunt warning — delivered to about 100 of the president’s most ardent supporters in the evangelical community — was the latest example of Mr. Trump’s attempts to use the specter of violence at the hands of his political opponents and to fan the flames of cultural divisions in the country.

In other words of his mob boss-style lies and threats.

…once reporters and television cameras were ushered out of the room, the president turned to the more pragmatic concerns, including how evangelical leaders can use their pulpits to help Republicans win in the midterm elections.

“I just ask you to go out and make sure all of your people vote,” Mr. Trump said. “Because if they don’t — it’s Nov. 6 — if they don’t vote we’re going to have a miserable two years and we’re going to have, frankly, a very hard period of time because then it just gets to be one election — you’re one election away from losing everything you’ve got.”

But churches are exempt from taxation, and that exemption is conditional on staying out of politics. Trump however claims he has fixed that.

Mr. Trump spent most of his private remarks to the group bragging about having gotten “rid of” the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 provision of tax law that threatened religious organizations, like churches, with the loss of tax-exempt status if they endorse or oppose political candidates.

…

The president recalled how he first learned about the Johnson Amendment at a meeting during the 2016 campaign, when several dozen pastors and ministers came to see him at Trump Tower in New York. He said he was pleased by the meeting because the religious leaders seemed to like him.

“I know when people like me,” Mr. Trump said. “I know when people don’t like me. You know, pretty good at that stuff. A lot of them like, and some don’t and that’s O.K. But this group really liked me.”

…

Mr. Trump said he told the religious leaders at that campaign meeting that he would oppose the Johnson Amendment if he won the presidency and “fight very hard to make sure that provision gets taken away.”

In fact, the president has fallen short of that promise.

Eliminating the provision in the law would require Congress to act. Instead, Mr. Trump signed an executive order in May 2017 directing the Internal Revenue Service not to aggressively pursue cases in which a church endorses a candidate or makes political donations.

Legal experts have said the I.R.S. has very rarely pursued such cases against churches, and religious leaders have often been outspoken about politics even if they have had to stop short of officially endorsing a candidate.

Which is scandalous, but hey, they’re religious leaders, so we have to pander to them at all times.

Trump’s mobster mentality is drawing attention.

President Trump on Wednesday praised his just-convicted former campaign chairman for refusing to “break” and cooperate with federal prosecutors investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, expressing appreciation for the personal loyalty of a felon found guilty of defrauding the United States government.

In a series of tweets the morning after an extraordinary day in which Paul Manafort, his former campaign chief, was convicted of tax and bank fraudand his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations he said were directed by Mr. Trump, the president appeared to suggest he was more concerned with the fallout for himself than with the crimes.

He compared Mr. Cohen unfavorably with Mr. Manafort, attacking Mr. Cohen as a bad lawyer who had caved to pressure from biased federal prosecutors while lauding Mr. Manafort as a “brave man” with a “wonderful family” who had stood strong.

Yeaaaaah, he stood up ta dem, see? He ain’t no snitch, see? He’s a straight-up guy, see?

Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts on Wednesday seemed to raise the possibility of a presidential pardon for Mr. Manafort, and appeared intended to be a reminder of how highly he values loyalty.

And in them, the president resorted to language more familiar to a police procedural than to the Oval Office, describing Mr. Manafort’s refusal to “break” under pressure to cut a deal with prosecutors.

He never can keep straight what movie he’s pretending to be in.

In recent days, he has also referred to John Dean, the White House counsel who worked with Watergate investigators to reveal Richard M. Nixon’s role in the crimes and cover-up, as a “RAT.” And he has alluded to the possibility that Mr. Cohen might “flip,” or switch his loyalties away from the president and cooperate with prosecutors.

Calling John Dean a RAT is particularly striking. Apparently he’s a RAT for telling the Justice Department the truth about Nixon’s illegal actions. It’s helpful of him to inform us so bluntly of where he thinks his duties lie.

Some legal experts said the president’s words and his view on the predicaments of members of his inner circle were striking for their similarity to the culture of organized crime.

“By crediting Paul Manafort for not ‘breaking’ and chastising Michael Cohen for showing an interest in cooperating, he’s really adopting the language and the sentiment of prizing what the mob would call a ‘stand-up guy’ — someone who takes your rap and goes to jail because of your loyalty to the mob, rather than to your own family,” said Daniel S. Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on organized crime cases in the Southern District of New York. “The parallel is to a mob boss who expects the loyalty oath from his soldiers.”

Not the Hollywood mob, not the Bugs Bunny mob, but the real mob, that does real harm to real people – that’s where Trump is placing himself.

Trump last night:

I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018

Bruce Gorton emailed me about it this morning and I requested and got permission to share what he wrote.

The point on farm deaths, according to AgriSA farm murders are at a 19 year low.

Even before that claims of “white genocide” have been considered largely the ramblings of a lunatic fringe within South Africa, considering how high the murder rate is generally.

Anyway it looks like it is in response to a report by Tucker, the man whose only expression is ‘confused’, Carlson which otherwise I would have written off as being from a man who doesn’t know what the words “exclusive” or “investigative” mean. The news has been all over South African media for months, I don’t think typing “Ramaphosa” into Google news quite cuts it as investigative work.

This report is wrong. The constitution has not been amended, and land seizures have not begun yet. What has happened is that some farms have been identified for expropriation without compensation as test cases to see if the constitution even needs to be amended to allow for that.

I suspect a lot of what I’m feeling right now is the sort of thing you Americans have to deal with on a daily basis. I don’t know where it is a sort of tired “No, that is not what is going on” or a sinking dread that this is what is leading the world’s largest nuclear power.

Yes, both of those – weary disgust mixed with terror.

Amid everything else we mustn’t lose sight of Trump’s dedicated work to make climate change worse faster.

Amid heat waves, wildfires, droughts and Arctic ice melt, President Trump has taken aim at the two central pillars of his predecessor’s ambitious efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. After proposing in early August to freeze a scheduled increase in fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks, the Trump administration on Tuesday said it would seek to significantly weaken the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Because climate change is already so pleasant and healthy and salubrious, he’s working to intensify it and speed it up. Thanks, Don.

In taking on the Clean Power Plan, Mr. Trump says he wants to save coal, but the reality is that coal is not coming back. Market forces conspire against it. Even without any policy, the economic imperatives driving the transition to cleaner fuels are expected by 2030 to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the power sector by 33 percent of their 2005 levels, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. With the Obama plan, the reduction would be 36 percent; with the Trump administration’s new Affordable Clean Energy Rule, it would be 33 to 34 percent.

Not a huge difference, so why does it matter?

First, firm policy direction from the government provides investors and utilities with certainty about the investment outlook and ensures emissions reductions even if the market shifts. Just as few predicted the collapse in natural gas prices a decade ago, there is a wide range of uncertainty about what energy prices will look like in the future.

…

Second, the right way to assess whether a policy makes sense is not just to look at its emissions impacts but also to compare its costs with its benefits. Even by the current E.P.A.’s own analysis, which makes assumptions that play down the climate benefits and increase the implementation costs, the Clean Power Plan delivered far more net benefits for the American people than the proposed replacement. That is because reducing coal use in the power sector not only delivers carbon emission reductions but also lower levels of local pollutants like particulate matter.

Third, and most important, even though the Clean Power Plan fell far short of the emission reductions needed to avoid severe climate change impacts, it was a starting point to clean up the power sector. It would send investment signals and provide a foundation for deeper reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to meet the globally agreed upon target of limiting temperature rise to well below two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Whereas now the signals are all “Oh fuck it let’s just do whatever we want and let the future take care of itself.”

Neutering the Clean Power Plan is a major step backward. But what’s most important to remember is that even if a future president puts back in place Mr. Obama’s climate policies, more comprehensive and stringent policies are still needed to deal with the rising threats of climate change that we see all around us. That reality is understood by the American public and increasingly even among oil companies and some Republicanswho have come out in favor of a carbon tax.

The damage done by the Trump administration’s reversal of Mr. Obama’s climate policies is less a sharp rise in carbon emissions than it is the loss of American leadership and missed opportunity to save future generations from climate change’s severe impacts.

But future generations are future generations and we care only about our own selves right now – that’s Trump’s message.

Now there is a front page.

This is page one of tomorrow's print edition of The New York Times, soon to be landing with a thump at the White House. pic.twitter.com/4uUnXkDXOI

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) August 22, 2018

Trump’s mature and level-headed response to yesterday’s double whammy:

If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018

I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. “Justice” took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to “break” – make up stories in order to get a “deal.” Such respect for a brave man!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018

A large number of counts, ten, could not even be decided in the Paul Manafort case. Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018

Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime. President Obama had a big campaign finance violation and it was easily settled!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018

Not a crime? Cohen pleaded guilty to two felonies. In what dictionary are felonies not a crime?

But overall it’s really very restrained for Trump. I wonder how many staffers had their faces bitten off to make that restraint possible.

Today Trump is mad at (and lying about) the New Yorker.

Fake News, of which there is soooo much (this time the very tired New Yorker) falsely reported that I was going to take the extraordinary step of denying Intelligence Briefings to President Obama. Never discussed or thought of!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 21, 2018

So I found the offending piece: Adam Entous on Brennan’s choice to be publicly critical of Trump.

Naturally, Trump lied about the piece. Entous doesn’t say Trump was going to, he says some advisers wanted to.

As Trump stepped up his public and private attacks on Obama, some of the new President’s advisers thought that he should take the extraordinary step of denying Obama himself access to intelligence briefings that were made available to all of his living predecessors. Trump was told about the importance of keeping former Presidents, who frequently met with foreign leaders, informed. In the end, Trump decided not to exclude Obama, at the urging of McMaster.

See? That does not say he was going to. A president ought to be careful to get his accusations right, if he’s going to make accusations on Twitter at all.

So, to the Entous piece. It starts with Brennan joining intel friends to watch Trump’s inauguration.

As Trump delivered his Inaugural Address, the mood at the viewing party darkened to “one of great worry,” one participant recalled. Brennan found the President’s message “disgraceful,” a view that he thought, as a career intelligence professional, he would keep to himself.

The next day, Trump delivered a campaign-style speech at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and Brennan’s phone lit up with text messages and e-mails from former agency colleagues who, like him, were outraged. After going to the gym to burn off steam, Brennan drafted a statement decrying Trump’s “despicable display of self-aggrandizement,” which Nick Shapiro, his former deputy chief of staff at the C.I.A., e-mailed to news organizations.

He’d meant to stay out of it but Trump made it impossible. Brennan had always considered himself apolitical…until Trump.

The first public clash between the two men occurred the week before Trump was sworn in as President. In a tweet, Trump falsely blamed U.S. intelligence agencies for leaking Christopher Steele’s dossier to the press and asked, “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” In an interview on Fox News, Brennan said, “What I do find outrageous is equating an intelligence community with Nazi Germany. I do take great umbrage at that, and there is no basis for Mr. Trump to point fingers at the intelligence community for leaking information that was already available publicly.” Trump, in turn, attacked Brennan on Twitter: “Was this the leaker of Fake News?”

Trying to ignore Trump is like trying to ignore a bear that is tearing your front door apart.

A turning point for Brennan was a tweet from the President on March 4, 2017, in which Trump falsely claimed, “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” A friend said Brennan was appalled that Trump would use the word “sick” to describe the former President. It was a moment that Brennan told me he remembered “very, very vividly” as he weighed going public with his views about Trump.

At the time, some of Trump’s most fervent supporters in the White House saw former Obama Administration officials as powerful enemies who threatened the new President’s rule, and they agitated for punishing them by revoking their security clearances. The idea was rebuffed by the national-security adviser at the time, H. R. McMaster, who signed a memo extending the clearances of his predecessors at the N.S.C., Republicans and Democrats alike.

That’s where the bit about some advisers wanting to revoke Obama’s comes in.

In September that year Brennan took a deep breath and made himself a Twitter account.

“What I decided to do is not just limit my criticism to his policy choices,” Brennan said. The former C.I.A. director wanted to zero in on what he saw as Trump’s “lack of character,” adding, of his choice, “I really have taken great offense at his personal demeanor, his lack of integrity and his dishonesty.”

What I keep saying. It’s not even necessarily political: he’s a terrible human being.

On December 21, 2017, Brennan tweeted for the first time, about a subject that he cared deeply about—the Lockerbie bombing. When he served as Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, Brennan met with the families of those killed in the terrorist attack, in 1988. “May the 270 innocent souls lost in the PanAm 103 bombing 29 years ago today never fade from our national memory,” he wrote.

Minutes later, Brennan fired off his first Twitter attack on Trump, in reaction to the President’s threat to punish countries at the United Nations that opposed his decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (Earlier that month, Brennan issued a written statement calling the decision “reckless” and warning that it would “damage U.S. interests in the Middle East for years to come.”) In the tweet, Brennan compared Trump to a “narcissistic, vengeful” autocrat who “expects blind loyalty and subservience from everyone.”

Brennan told me that he made a conscious decision to make his attacks personal in nature. “I did it knowingly and I did it being aware that it was going to have certain repercussions about how I was going to be perceived,” he said. Brennan said that his goal was to “call out” Trump for being “small, petty, banal, mean-spirited, nasty, naïve, unsophisticated . . . a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman, a schoolyard bully . . . an emperor with no clothes.”

Exactly. That’s certainly why I do it. Of course it’s easy for a blogger who doesn’t have to appease any institutions, but my point is that it needs doing. All the better that someone like Brennan is willing to do it.

As Brennan’s rhetoric escalated in the spring of 2018, Trump complained to senior advisers about his tweets, officials said. McMaster, who opposed revoking the clearances of his predecessors, ended his tenure as national-security adviser in April. And as time passed Trump felt increasingly embittered and less restrained, former aides told me. One former Trump adviser said that Brennan’s rhetoric fed into the President’s narrative. “He has a tremendous sense of being wronged already, just in general. This is part of it,” the former adviser told me.

It’s amazing how narcissists can invert things, isn’t it.

After trading attacks on Twitter with Trump for months, Brennan, on the morning of August 13th, submitted an Op-Ed that he wrote for the Times to the publication-review board at the C.I.A. Former intelligence officers are required to submit their articles and books to the board before they are published so C.I.A. officers can remove any classified information. Brennan’s Op-Ed was particularly critical of Trump, dismissing his frequent claims about there being “no collusion” with the Russians as “hogwash.”

A few hours after Brennan submitted the article to the publication-review board, the White House announced that Trump had decided to strip Brennan of his security clearance. Two U.S. officials called the White House’s timing “a coincidence,” but others said they believed Trump found out about Brennan’s Op-Ed and decided that it was time to act against him.

And here we are.