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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on October 13, 2020 at 1:03 am
There were at least five instances when the Obama administration could have disqualified Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate—or secured his indictment. Yet it did neither.
Case #2: The Justice Department did not indict Trump for threats that he made—or inspired—against Republicans and Democrats throughout the 2016 campaign.
- On July 29, 2016, Roger Stone, a notorious Right-wing political consultant acting as a Trump strategist, told Breitbart News: “The first thing Trump needs to do is begin talking about [voter fraud] constantly. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.”
- At a town hall meeting where Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence appeared, a woman named Rhonda said: “For me personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in, I myself am ready for a revolution.”
- In Cincinnati, a Trump supporter threatened to forcibly remove Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, from the White House if she won the race: “If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” said Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take….”
Even Fergus Cullen, former chairman of the New Hampshire GOP, expressed fear of what might happen if Trump lost the election:
Fergus Cullen
“That’s really scary,” Cullen said, recounting the violence at Trump rallies around the country leading up to the Republican National Convention. “In this country, we’ve always had recriminations after one side loses. But we haven’t had riots. We haven’t had mobs that act out with violence against supporters of the other side.
“There’s no telling what his supporters would be willing to do at the slightest encouragement from their candidate,” he said.
Trump even began encouraging his mostly white supporters to sign up online to be “election observers” to stop “Crooked Hillary from rigging this election.” He urged them to act as poll watchers in “other” [non-white] communities to ensure that things are “on the up and up.”
Many of his supporters promised to do so.
“Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure,” said Steve Webb, a 61-year-old carpenter from Fairfield, Ohio.
“I’ll look for…well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”
Knowing that large numbers of angry—and possibly armed—Right-wingers planned to descend on polling places could only have had a chilling effect on untold numbers of Democratic voters. And this would have been especially true in heavily conservative states.
Both the USA Patriot Act and the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act have statutes dealing with making terrorist threats against government institutions to influence their members.
President George W. Bush signing the USA Patriot Reauthorization Act of 2005
If Trump’s remarks did not violate one or both of those laws, certainly remarks made by his surrogates did.
Thus, the Justice Department could have cited the Patriot Act in indicting Trump and/or any number of his followers for “activities that…appear to be intended…to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion [and]…occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”
The Justice Department could have also demanded that the results of the election be invalidated on the basis that widespread voter and candidate intimidation played a massive role in it.
But of course this did not happen.
Case #3 Making threats against anyone under protection by the U.S. Secret Service is a felony. Yet Donald Trump was never held legally accountable by the Justice Department.
- On August 9, 2016, Trump told a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina: “Hillary [Clinton] wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
- Reacting to Trump’s “dog-whistle” threat against Clinton, Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) said: “Well, let me say if someone else said that outside of the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now, with the Secret Service questioning him.”
Case #4: The Justice Department did not invalidate the results of the 2016 election, despite overwhelming evidence that Russia intervened to elect Trump as Vladimir Putin’s chosen candidate.
In October, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) issued a joint statement: The Russian government had directed the effort to subvert the 2016 Presidential election.
On December 16, 2016, FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. agreed with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the White House.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on October 12, 2020 at 12:05 am
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
So wrote Edmund Burke (1729-1797) the Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher. And history has repeatedly proved him right.
One such example was the rise of Adolf Hitler as Germany’s Fuhrer.
Writes historian Volker Ullrich, in his monumental new biography, Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939: “Historians have perennially tried to answer the question of whether Hitler’s rise to power could have been halted….
“There were repeated opportunities to end Hitler’s run of triumphs. The most obvious one was after the failed Putsch of November, 1923. Had the Munich rabble-rouser been forced to serve his full five-year term of imprisonment in Landsberg, it is extremely unlikely that he would have been able to restart his political career.”
But that didn’t happen.
Tried for and convicted of treason, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
At Landsberg Prison, in Bavaria. he was given a huge cell, allowed to receive unlimited visitors and gifts, and treated with deference by guards and inmates.
Nine months later, he was released on parole—by authorities loyal to the authoritarian Right instead of the newly-created Weimar Republic.
Hitler immediately began rebuilding the shattered Nazi party—and deciding on a new strategy to gain power. Disdaining armed force, he would win office by election—or intrigue.
On January 30, 1933, those intrigues bore fruit: Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
Future historians may one day write that what didn’t happen played at least as great a role in electing Donald Trump President as what actually did.
There were at least five instances where the Justice Department of President Barack Obama could have utterly changed the outcome of the 2016 election. Yet, for reasons still unknown, it chose to do nothing.
Donald Trump
Case #1: The Obama Justice Department did not indict Trump and/or the Attorney Generals of Texas and/or Florida for their roles in the Trump University scandal.
- Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump around the same time her office deliberated joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates.
- After Bondi dropped the Trump University case against Trump, he wrote her a $25,000 check for her re-election campaign. The money came from the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
- Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to muzzle a former state regulator who says he was ordered in 2010 to drop a fraud investigation into Trump University for political reasons.
- Paxton’s office issued a cease and desist letter to former Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection John Owens after he made public copies of a 14-page internal summary of the state’s case against Donald Trump for scamming millions from students of his now-defunct real estate seminar.
- After the Texas case was dropped, Trump cut a $35,000 check to the gubernatorial campaign of then-attorney general and now Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
But New York’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, pressed fraud claims against Trump—and forced the real estate mogul to settle the case out of court for $25 million on November 18, 2016.
There have been no press reports that the Justice Department investigated these cases to determine if Trump violated the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act statutes.
If the Justice Department did not investigate these cases, it should have. And if he did violate the RICO statutes, he should have been indicted, even as a Presidential candidate or President-elect.
Even if an indictment had not produced a conviction, the mere bringing of one would have cast an unprecedented cloud over his candidacy—let alone his being sworn in as President.
Case #2: The Justice Department did not indict Trump for the series of threats that he made—directly and indirectly—against Republicans and Democrats throughout the 2016 campaign.
Threatening political opponents with violence is a crime under Federal law. Yet making threats against his Republican and Democratic opponents played a major role in Trump’s Presidential campaign.
- On March 16, he warned Republicans that if he didn’t win the GOP nomination in July, his supporters would literally riot: “I think you’d have riots. I think you would see problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen. I really do. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.”
- An NBC reporter summed it up as: “The message to Republicans was clear on [March 16]: ‘Nice convention you got there, shame if something happened to it.’”
- That Republicans clearly saw this as a threat is undeniable. Paul Ryan, their Speaker of the House, said on March 17: “Nobody should say such things in my opinion because to even address or hint to violence is unacceptable.”
- Philip Klein, the managing editor of the Washington Examiner, wrote on the eve of the Republican National Convention in July: “Political commentators now routinely talk about the riots that would break out in Cleveland if Trump were denied the nomination, about how his supporters have guns and all hell could break loose, that they would burn everything to the ground. It works to Trump’s advantage to not try too hard to dispel these notions.”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary, Uncategorized on October 9, 2020 at 12:32 am
By January, 2020, President Donald Trump knew how deadly Coronavirus was.
On February 7, during a taped interview with Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward, he said: “It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. The touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed….It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flues.”
Even worse, he repeatedly downplayed the virus in a series of public appearances.
- January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
- February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”
- February 26: “The 15 cases within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
- February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
- February 28: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus….We did one of the great jobs….One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia’….They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax….It’s all turning, they lost….And this is their new hoax.”
- March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country of keeping it down. A tremendous job of keeping it down.”
Now, with more than 212,000 Americans dead and 7.58 million infected—Trump’s fanatical defenders are desperate to rewrite history.
The outbreak of Coronavirus, first detected in Wuhan, China, in late December, 2019, has taken more American lives in the 21st century than any other disaster—natural or man-made.
Consider:
- 9/11: 2,977 deaths
- Hurricane Katrina (2005): 1,836 deaths
- Benghazi Embassy attack (2012): 4
- Ebola (2013): 2
- Hurricane Maria (2017): 2,982,
- Coronavirus (2020): 212,000 (by October 8, 2020)
One of these defenders is Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
On April 9, appearing on the Fox News network’s “Sean Hannity” show, Graham said: “The first thing I want to do is get the United States Senate on the record where we don’t blame Trump. We blame China.
“The Chinese government is responsible for 16,000 American deaths and 17 million Americans being unemployed. It’s the Chinese government and the way they behave that led to this pandemic. This is the third one to come out of China.
Lindsey Graham
“I want to make our response to this so overwhelming that China will change its behavior. I want to get the medical supply chain back into the United States, and I want to stop cancelling some debt that we owe to China because they should be paying us, not us paying China.”
Graham said that the “wet markets” in China should be shut down, because they have been the source of three pandemics that originated in China.
[As for “getting the medical supply chain back into the United States”: In 2018, China accounted for 95% of American imports of ibuprofen, 91% off hydrocortisone, 70% of acetaminophen, 40% to 45% of penicillin and 40% of heparin, according to Commerce Department data. Eighty percent of the American supply of antibiotics are made in China.]
Seventy-three years earlier, Chief United States Counsel Robert H. Jackson had been assigned to prosecute the major Nazi defendants for war crimes at Nuremberg.
On July 26, 1946, Jackson delivered his closing remarks to the court. He might as well have been speaking about Donald Trump and his cheerleading—and misleading—chorus on Coronavirus:
“Lying has always been a highly approved Nazi technique. [Adolf] Hitler, in Mein Kampf, advocated mendacity as a policy. {Foreign Minister Joachim] Von Ribbentrop admits the use of the ‘diplomatic lie.’
“….Nor is the lie direct the only means of falsehood. They all speak with a Nazi double talk with which to deceive the unwary….’Final solution’ of the Jewish problem was a phrase which meant extermination. ‘Special treatment’ of prisoners of war meant killing. ‘Protective custody’ meant concentration camp.
Robert H. Jackson
“Besides outright false statements and double talk, there are also other circumventions of truth in the nature of fantastic explanations and absurd professions.
“[Rabid anti-Semite Julius] Streicher has solemnly maintained that…his reason for destroying synagogues…was only because they were architecturally offensive….
“This was the philosophy of the National Socialists. When for years they have deceived the world, and masked falsehood with plausibilities, can anyone be surprised that they continue their habits of a lifetime in this dock?
“It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs.”
Citing William Shakespeare’s play about the murderous Richard III, Jackson concluded:
“They stand before the record of this trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: ‘Say I slew them not.’ And the Queen replied, ‘Then say they were not slain. But dead they are…’
“If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.”
If Americans find Donald Trump blameless, it will be as true to say:
- There has been no plague
- There are no hundreds of thousands of dead Americans
- There has been no dereliction of Presidential responsibility.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on October 8, 2020 at 12:16 am
What began as the gloating jubilee of an expected Right-wing triumph has turned into a COVID-19 nightmare for the Trump administration.
On September 26, President Donald Trump hosted festivities in the Rose Garden to celebrate his Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.
Amy Coney Barrett
Rachel Malehorn / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)
Trump had already put two Justices—Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—on the Court. Gorsuch was nominated as a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia, who had died in 2016.
President Barack Obama had sought to confirm his own nominee, Merrick Garland, to the Court. But 2016 was a Presidential election year. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked giving Garland even the courtesy of a Senate hearing.
“The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next President nominates, whoever that might be,” claimed McConnell.
When Trump won, the way was clear for him to nominate his own candidate—who turned out to be Neil Gorsuch.
Then, in 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy decided to retire after spending 20 years on the Court. This gave Trump the chance to replace him with Brett Kavanaugh.
Then, on September 18, 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suddenly died of cancer. Appointed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, she had been the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O’Connor.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Her death offered Trump his third chance to shift the Court decisively to the Right for decades to come.
Stacking the Court with Right-wing judges has long been the goal of Republicans. And their two most important priorities:
- Overturning Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in 1973; and
- Gutting the Affordable Care Act, the single most important achievement of the first black President of the United States.
So on September 26, Donald Trump hosted festivities in the Rose Garden to celebrate his third Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump assembled his guest list, and the major domos of the Right showed up.
They knew–or should have known–that a deadly pandemic called COVID-19 was ravaging the country. They knew—or should have known—it had already killed more than 200,000 Americans.
But Trump had spent the year telling them there was nothing to worry about. The virus, he had said repeatedly, was no worse than the common flu. He had ridiculed those who wore masks, and had made not wearing one a sign of macho solidarity with himself.
Coronavirus
So they showed up without masks, and crammed together in folding chairs. And now many of them are dropping like poisoned Tsetse flies.
Among the casualties of the celebration so far:
- President Donald Trump
- First Lady Melania Trump
- Presidential Aide Hope Hicks
- White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany
- United States Senator (R-UT) Mike Lee
- United States Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC)
- United States Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI)
- Former Presidential adviser Kelleyanne Conway
- White House Assistant Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
- Trump Presidential Campaign Manager Bill Stepien
- Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel
- Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
- White House Senior Adviser for Policy Stephen Miller
For Trump, the Rose Garden celebration has turned into a nightmare.
First, it thrust the issue of the dreaded Coronavirus—and his administration’s failure to effectively combat it—to the front of the Presidential campaign.
Donald Trump
Trump had been desperate to avoid talking about this subject—and with good reason.
When the virus struck the United States in January, Trump quickly learned how deadly it was. As he admitted to Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward: “It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch.
“The touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flues.”
But Trump didn’t share that warning with the American people. When Woodward published his book, Rage, in September, Trump was mortally embarrassed at having that conversation revealed.
Instead, Trump attacked the wearing of masks and maintaining social distancing. When states ordered businesses to close to halt the spread of COVID-19, Trump ordered his followers to protest in the streets. When businesses reopened, COVID rates spiked and so did unemployment rolls.
Second, the sidelining of so many top Republicans—including Senators—threatened to at least temporarily halt Senate confirmation hearings on Amy Coney Barrett.
Third—and probably most important: Trump himself was rushed to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 2 after he tested positive for Coronavirus.
For the image-conscious Trump, press reports that he received oxygen and experimental drugs proved highly embarrassing. On October 5, still highly infectious, he demanded to be returned to the White House.
With less than a month to go before the November 3 Presidential election, Trump found himself overwhelmed by media reports that the White House was now the Number One Coronavirus hotspot in the United States.
A celebration of hatred and arrogance has turned into a COVID-19 nightmare for the Trump administration. It’s a irony the ancient Greeks, with their understanding of hubris, would have appreciated.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Politics on October 7, 2020 at 8:27 am
Donald Trump was in a hurry to leave Walter Reed National Military Medical Center—where he’d been taken on October 3 owing to COVID-19.
So on October 6—just three days after being hospitalized, and still highly infectious—he demanded that he be returned to the White House.
Once ensconced in the Executive Mansion, Trump proceeded to make two deadly mistakes.
Mistake #1: He tweeted a one-minute long video from the White House balcony, saying he “learned so much about coronavirus,” and believed that he was possibly immune to the disease.
“One thing that’s for certain: Don’t let it dominate you,” he said of COVID-19. “Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it. We have the best medical equipment, we have the best medicines, all developed recently. And you’re going to beat it.
“We’re going back, we’re going back to work,” Trump said. “We’re going to be out front. As your leader, I had to do that. I knew there’s danger to it, but I had to do it..”
Coronavirus
Trump’s upbeat message about COVID-19—“Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it”—alarmed and angered many infectious disease experts.
“It’s an unconscionable message,” said Dr. Sadiya Khan of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “I would go so far as to say that it may precipitate or worsen spread.”
“We have to be realistic in this: COVID is a complete threat to the American population,” said Dr. David Nace, an expert on infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
“Most of the people aren’t so lucky as the president,” with an in-house medical unit and access to experimental treatments, he added.
Especially outraged by Trump’s comment was Amanda Kloots, who lost her husband, Broadway actor Nick Cordero, to the virus.
Nick Cordero
“Unfortunately not everyone is lucky enough to spend two days in the hospital,” she tweeted, referring to Trump’s short stay for COVID-19 treatment. “I cried next to my husband for 95 days watching what COVID did to the person I love. It IS something to be afraid of.”
Mistake #2: Always wanting to appear in command, Trump ordered his negotiators to halt talks over a new economic stimulus package, after House and Senate Republicans had struggled for months to reach a deal.
“I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets.
Donald Trump
Trump’s message stunned lawmakers. The decision is a major blow to Americans still struggling with the fallout from the pandemic and endangers an economic recovery that for months was driven by a $2.2 trillion stimulus passed by Congress in the spring. That money has been largely spent.
Among those stunned by Trump’s move: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
At the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics, Powell warned: “Too little support would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses.”
Powell said that government support—expanded unemployment insurance payments, direct payments to most households and support for small businesses—has prevented a recessionary “downward spiral” where job losses would reduce spending, forcing businesses to cut even more jobs.
Jerome Powell
A far smarter move by Trump would have been claiming that Republicans were vigorously pursuing a stimulus package—but were facing roadblocks thrown up by spendthrift Democrats.
That would have allowed Trump to play the part of the self-pitying underdog. And it would have put the blame squarely—if inaccurately—on the Democrats.
But Trump’s ego demands that he be the one seen to take decisive action. On December 11, 2018, it neatly tripped him up.
Nancy Pelosi—then House Minority Leader—and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, met with Trump in the Oval Office. And, true to his love of publicity, Trump made sure the meeting was televised live on TV.
Trump quickly demanded $5.6 billion to create a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
When Pelosi and Schumer refused to budge, Trump said: “And one way or the other, it’s going to get built. I’d like not to see a government closing, a shutdown. We will see what happens over the next short period of time.”
SCHUMER: “Twenty times you have called for, ‘I will shut down the government if I don’t get my wall.’ None of us have said—you’ve said it.”
TRUMP: “Okay, you want to put that on my—I’ll take it. You know what I’ll say: ‘Yes, if we don’t get what we want, one way or the other…I will shut down the government. Absolutely.’”
Trump did shut down the government. And because he had threatened to do so—on nationwide TV—he, not the Democrats, was blamed for it. Thirty-five days later, he caved to public pressure and reopened the government.
With the 2020 Presidential election less than a month away and himself behind former Vice President Joe Biden in the polls, it appears that Trump’s ego has once again neatly tripped himself up.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on October 6, 2020 at 12:19 am
The ancient Greeks defined hubris as overweening pride. For them, acting as if you were equal to or more powerful than the gods—or trying to defy them—was the most serious crime you could commit. And it came with a divine punishment.
Donald Trump has acted with hubris his entire life—but never more so than once he declared himself a Presidential candidate in 2015.
He savagely insulted his opponents. From June 15, 2015, when he launched his Presidential campaign, until October 24, 2016, he fired nearly 4,000 angry, insulting tweets at 281 people and institutions—including his fellow Republicans, journalists, news organizations, countries and even celebrities unconnected with politics.
Donald Trump
During debates, he belittled his Republican and Democratic opponents with insulting nicknames.
Political pundits expected that voters would reject Trump for violating long-held niceties of political discourse. But they never did.
He openly called for Russia to intervene in an American Presidential election.
On July 22, 2016, Trump said at a press conference in Doral, Florida: “Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are able to find the 33,000 emails that are missing [from Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s computer]. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Although this amounted to treason, he was never prosecuted.
He fired FBI Director James Comey.
On May 9, 2017, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for investigating Russia’s subversion of he 2016 Presidential race.
Although he clearly did this to subvert an FBI investigation, Republicans solidly backed him and he remained unimpeached.
He gave CIA secrets to Russia, which had intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win.
On May 10, 2017—the day after he fired Comey—Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office—and gave them highly classified Israeli Intelligence about an Islamic State plot to turn laptops into concealable bombs.
He hypocritically claimed “I am your President of law and order” after a lifetime of law-breaking.
He has been forced to shut down a fraudulent university and a fraudulent charity. He has bragged about buying politicians. He has been impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He ordered police and military forces to attack peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park so he could stage a photo op there.
* * * * *
Donald Trump’s rise to power has been fueled by bribery and intimidation. These methods served him well—until the advent of Coronavirus. The pandemic remains impervious to bribes or intimidation.
He has repeatedly lied about it:
- It’s a Democratic hoax.
- “One day, it will disappear.”
- There is no need for wearing masks or social distancing.
- There is a cure for COVID-19—the malaria drug hyroxychloroquine.
Yet the deaths continue to mount—210,000 by October 5. And he has offered only one “remedy” for it: “Reopen the country!” This has resulted in asssive infection rates across the nation.
Trump planned to win re-election as the President who had created a booming economy and high employment. But businesses across the country remain shuttered because of Coronavirus fears—or likely soon will be. Nearly half of all Americans are unemployed.
To force frightened Americans back to unsafe working conditions, Trump demanded they send their children back to COVID-19-threatened schools.
Meanwhile, Trump continued to violate the health guidelines of his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—holding massive indoor rallies, refusing to wear a mask, refusing to socially distance himself from others.
For a time he seemed impervious to the virus that had struck down so many others.
Then, on October 3, Trump himself became a casualty of the plague he had so long derided. Rushed to Walter Reed Hospital, he was given a cocktail of experimental anti-Coronavirus drugs that are beyond the price range of most Americans.
On October 5, a still-positive Trump demanded that he be released and returned to the White House. And he got his way.
At least 18 White House staffers have tested positive—including his wife, First Lady Melania; his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany; his personal adviser, Hope Hicks; and his longtime adviser Kelleyanne Conway.
Suddenly, Coronavirus—the issue he had sought to ignore or downplay since January—had emerged front and center. And, with it, his arrogant refusal to address it.
In his book, The World of Herodotus, Aubrey de Selincourt writes that the Greek historian filled his book, The Histories, with “stories of the perils of pride—pride of wealth, pride of power, pride of success, and, deadliest of all, the pride which leads a man to forget that he is nothing in the sight of the gods.”
And, in the pages of The Histories lies this warning: “Look to the end, no matter what it is you are considering. Often enough, God gives a man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him.”
Donald Trump has spent a lifetime committing crimes. Holding the Presidency is his only defense against prosecution—since a sitting President cannot be indicted. If he is turned out of office, prosecution awaits him at the state level in New York—and possibly at the federal level as well.
Trump’s lifelong glimpse of happiness may be about to end.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Politics, Social commentary on October 5, 2020 at 12:21 am
On September 27, The New York Times broke the unprecedented story of President Donald Trump’s tax returns, which he has long held secret.
Among the revelations: He paid no federal income taxes at all for 10 of 15 years. And he paid only $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017.
For most newspapers and TV networks, such investigative reporting is a rarity. Most media outlets are little more than “happy news” or propaganda organs.
On April 28, 2018, comedian Michelle Wolf hosted the annual White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C. There she skewered high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of the nation’s elite media.
Most of here jokes were focused on Trump administration officials—especially then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Michelle Wolf
But Wolf threw a series of sharp-edged zingers at some of the Nation’s most prominent media. And these comments have gone largely ignored.
They are, however, well worth examining—for the uncomfortable truths they reveal about much of the “news” being served up under the guise of fearless objectivity.
On CNN—where “news” now consists of a series of “talking heads” pontificating about stories that other journalists have dug up: We’ve got our friends at CNN here. You guys love breaking news, and you did it. You broke it. Good work. The most useful information on CNN is when Anthony Bourdain tells me where to eat noodles.
On Fox News’ sexual harassment scandals involving such prominent (and former) members as CEO Roger Ailes and commentator Bill O’Reilly: Fox News is here. So, you know what that means, ladies: Cover your drinks. Seriously.
On Fox News’ actual role as the propaganda organ of the Republican party: People want me to make fun of [Fox News commentator] Sean Hannity tonight, but I cannot do that; this dinner is for journalists.
On weak-rated MSNBC, which is the liberal version of Fox News: We’ve got MSNBC here. MSNBC’s news slogan is, “This is who we are.” Guys, it’s not a good slogan. “This is who we are” is what your mom thinks the sad show on NBC is called. “Did you watch ‘This Is Who We Are’ this week? Someone left on a Crockpot, and everyone died.”
On Megyn Kelly, who rose to fame and fortune as a Right-wing propaganda shill on Fox News: And, of course, Megyn Kelly. What would I do without Megyn Kelly? You know, probably be more proud of women.
And, by the way, Megyn, Santa’s black. The weird old guy going through your chimney was Bill O’Reilly. You might want to put a flue on it or something.
[This last jibe centered on Kelly’s infamous December 11, 2013 Fox broadcast where she claimed: “I kind of laughed and said this is so ridiculous. Yet another person claiming it’s racist to have a white Santa. For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white….Just because it makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. Jesus was a white man too.”]
On the continuing demise of newspapers—on which TV “news reporters” depend for their information: There’s a lot of print media here. There’s a ton of you guys, but I’m not going to go after print media tonight because it’s illegal to attack an endangered species. Buy newspapers.
On the media’s—especially the television media’s—morbid obsession with Donald Trump: There’s a ton of news right now; a lot is going on, and we have all these 24-hour news networks, and we could be covering everything. But, instead, we’re covering like three topics. Every hour, it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving.
On the media’s responsibility for the rise of a President they now detest: You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you.
He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. And if you’re gonna profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money because he doesn’t have any.
Donald Trump
[This last joke was probably the most painful the assembled media bigwigs had to endure. Because it’s undeniably true.
Trump’s campaign was saved from spending millions on TV advertising because the major TV news networks covered his every word. This was especially true when he was attacking women, blacks, Mexicans, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama—and even beauty pageant contestants.
For the media, Trump was “good for ratings”—in the same way that Mike Tyson was “good for boxing.” Both were seen as freaks—and thus guaranteed to lure viewers eager to find out: “What outrageous thing has he done now?”]
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on October 2, 2020 at 12:12 am
On September 28, the first of three scheduled Presidential debates occurred between former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.
Trump hurled insults and constantly interrupted Biden, causing many political commentators to label it the single worst Presidential debate in modern history.
For many, the lowest point came when moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would condemn white supremacy: “You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left-wing extremist groups.
“But are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland? Are you prepared to specifically do that?”
“Who would you like me to condemn?” Trump asked Wallace.
Biden twice said, “Proud Boys,” a violent Right-wing hate group.
“Proud Boys—stand back and stand by,” said Trump. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right wing problem.”
This was not the first time Trump had refused to condemn white supremacists.
On August 11-12, 2017, white supremacists from across the country gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally. Among the organizations represented:
- The Ku Klux Klan (KKK);
- The Alt-Knights;
- The “Militia Movement”;
- The American Nazi Party;
- The Confederate League of the South;
Like Nazis in 1930s Germany, they marched through the streets carrying flaming torches, screaming racial epithets and frightening the local citizenry.
On August 13, a Nazi sympathizer rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing a woman and injuring 19 other demonstrators.
President Donald Trump stated: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
Donald Trump
But he refused to specifically denounce the Fascistic demonstrators.
White supremacists were elated.
“He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us,” wrote Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer.
“No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”
Another Trump admirer: Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke.
“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa,” Duke tweeted after the news conference.
Fascistic groups make up a pivotal constituency for Trump. Without their support, he might not have become President. He can’t afford to alienate them.
But there was a time when a President and his Justice Department waged an all-out attack on the Klan during the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.
The reason: The murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi—Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney—-on June 21, 1964.
Poster for missing civil rights workers
Johnson ordered the FBI to find the missing activists. After their bodies were found buried near a dam, Johnson gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover a direct order: “I want you to have the same kind of intelligence [on the KKK] that you have on the communists.”
So the FBI launched a counterintelligence program—in Bureau-speak, a COINTELPRO—against the Ku Klux Klan.
Klansmen had shot, lynched and bombed their way across the Deep South, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. Many Southern sheriffs and police chiefs were Klan sympathizers, if not outright members and accomplices.
Ku Klux Klansmen in a meeting
The FBI’s covert action program aimed to “expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” KKK groups through a wide range of legal and extra-legal methods.
“My father fought the Klan in Massachusetts,” recalled William C. Sullivan, who headed the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division in the 1960s. “I always used to be frightened when I was a kid and I saw the fiery crosses burning in the hillside near our farm.
William C. Sullivan
“When the Klan reached 14,000 in the mid-sixties, I asked to take over the investigation of the Klan. When I left the Bureau in 1971, the Klan was down to a completely disorganized 4,300. It was broken.
“They were dirty, rough fellows. And we went after them with rough, tough methods.”
Among those methods:
- Planting electronic surveillance devices in Klan meeting places;
- Carrying out “black bag jobs”—burglaries—to steal Klan membership lists;
- Contacting the news media to publicize arrests and identify Klan leaders;
- Informing the employers of known Klansmen of their employees’ criminal activity, resulting in the firing of untold numbers of them;
- Developing informants within Klans and sewing a climate of distrust and fear among Klansmen;
- Breaking up the marriages of Klansmen by circulating rumors of their infidelity among their wives; and
- Beating and harassing Klansmen who threatened and harassed FBI agents.
The FBI’s counterintelligence war against the Klan ended in 1971.
Today, there are active Klan chapters in 41 states, with between 5,000 and 8,000 active members.
Only when America has a President who’s not beholden to the Fascistic Right can there be another COINTELPRO aimed at white hate groups.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on September 29, 2020 at 12:31 am
The father of modern political science, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) is widely thought of as the personification of Satan.
Actually, Machiavelli was a passionate republican, who spent most of his life in the service of his beloved city-state, Florence.
Florence, despite its wealth, lacked a strong army—and lay at the mercy of powerful enemies, such as Cesare Borgia. Machiavelli often had to use his wits to keep them at bay.
Niccolo Machiavelli
In his masterwork, The Discourses, he warned that life is complex and no course of action is guaranteed safe or successful.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a man of simplistic “solutions” for simplistic audiences.
By early April, he refused to issue a national “stay-at-home” order to contain the spread of the Coronavirus. When states began issuing shutdown orders of their own, he railed against those orders and demanded that “we need to reopen the country.”
Donald Trump
What lay behind this demand were two hidden agendas. He wanted to:
- Quickly revitalize—and take credit for—a once-booming economy—even though this was largely created by President Barack Obama.
- Return to his Nuremberg-style rallies, where he could slander anyone he wanted while basking in the worship of thousands of his fanatical followers.
Which is why he clearly missed this warning Machiavelli offered in The Discourses:
“…I shall speak here only of those dangers to which those expose themselves who counsel a republic or a prince to undertake some grave and important enterprise in such a manner as to take upon themselves all the responsibility of the same.
“For as men only judge of matters by the result, all the blame of failure is charged upon him who first advised it, while in case of success he receives commendations. But the reward never equals the punishment….
“I see no other course than to take things moderately, and not to undertake to advocate any enterprise with too much zeal, but to give one’s advice calmly and modestly.
“If either then the republic or the prince decides to follow it, they may do so, as it were, of their own will, and not as though they were drawn into it by your importunity.
“In adopting this course it is not reasonable to suppose that either the prince or republic will manifest any ill will towards you on account of a resolution not taken contrary to the wishes of the many.”
But, by May, more Americans were wary about “reopening the country” than about rushing to do so.
On the May 15 edition of The PBS Newshour, New York Times columnist David Brooks noted:
“If you look at actual behavior, people locked themselves down before any politician took a move. And even in those states where the politicians are opening up, people are still locking down….
“And so I think the key decisions right now are not being made in statehouses and certainly not the White House. They’re being made in living rooms, as people decide, is it safe? Can I go out?”
Coronavirus
By pushing his mantra—“America needs to reopen NOW!”—Trump was risking the lives of millions of Americans. But he was also risking the future of his Presidency.
If “reopening” the country proved disastrous, he had no back-up plan to offer.
Several states—such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—that re-opened saw swarms of people flooding into bars and restaurants. They didn’t wear masks or practice “social distancing.” Packed together like sardines, they offered themselves like a Right-wing sacrifice to Coronavirus.
The results were inevitable.
A new wave of COVID-19 erupted after America “reopened.” More employees were laid off—or refused to come to work for fear of Coronavirus.
The economy continued to tank.
As summer neared its end and millions of students faced returning to school, Trump offered his next “solution” to the Coronavirus pandemic: Send them back to school—-and not through virtual classes at home.
Trump wants children to return to possibly COVID-19-infected classrooms.
And he’s not asking parents to send their children back to school. He’s ordering them to.
On July 8, he tweeted that he might withhold federal funding from schools that do not resume in-person classes this fall.
Why is he so insistent on this?
Trump knows that before parents can return to work, their kids need to return to class, He hopes that will boost the economy—for which he can take credit.
And that will boost his chances for re-election in November.
Just as the ancient Canaanites sacrificed their children to the god Moloch, so does Trump expect his followers—and opponents—to risk their children’s lives for him.
And the sacrifices are already coming. On August 10, CBS News reported:
“Nearly 100,000 children tested positive for the Coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics finds. Just over 97,000 children tested positive for the Coronavirus from July 16 to July 30, according to the association.”
As a result, Trump is seen—as Machiavelli warned—as the primary instigator of that “reopening”—and the primary cause of 205,000 American deaths.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 28, 2020 at 8:39 am
From December, 2019, to July, 2020, President Donald Trump granted unprecedented access to legendary Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward.
That access has since spawned a bestselling book—Rage—and proven that Trump privately knew how deadly the Coronavirus was. Yet, in public, he played down the lethality of the virus and attacked those who sought to take it seriously.
On February 7, the following telephone interview occurred between Trump and Woodward:
Bob Woodward: And so, what was [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] saying yesterday?
Donald Trump: Oh, we were talking mostly about the virus, and I think he’s going to have it in good shape. But it’s a very tricky situation.
Woodward: Indeed, it is.
Trump: It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. The touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flues. People don’t realize, we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here. Who would ever think that, right?
Coronavirus
That damning confession has since appeared not only in Woodward’s book but on millions of TV and computer screens. Not only did Woodward tape record their conversations, but Trump knew he was taping them.
And those revelations have proven explosive for Trump—possibly enough to deny him a second term as President of the United States.
Yet a central question remains so far unanswered: Why did Trump give such access to a reporter—especially the reporter whose Watergate-related journalism proved instrumental in taking down President Richard M. Nixon?
Bob Woodward
There are at least three possible reasons why Trump dared to reveal to Woodward that he had blatantly lied to the American public.
Reason #1: Sheer hubris
The ancient Greeks defined “hubris” as excessive pride that led mere mortals “to think more than mortal thoughts.”
As President, Trump has:
- Fired FBI director James Comey for investigating Russia’s subversion of the 2016 Presidential election.
- Threatened to cut off federal funding to cities that displeased him.
- Shut down the Federal Government to (unsuccessfully) get full funding for his “border wall” with Mexico.
- Attacked “the top people in the Pentagon” for not defending him against charges that he referred to soldiers killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers.”
- Openly embraced Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
- Attacked members of the Federal judiciary.
- Fired Inspectors General investigating corruption within his administration.
And earlier this year he was acquitted of impeachable offenses by a majority-Republican Senate.
So if Trump believed himself invulnerable when he confessed his lying to Woodward, he had good reason to do so.
Donald Trump
Reason #2: Trump thought he could recruit Woodward as his cheerleader
Just as Germany’s Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, had a love/hate relationship with England, so, too, has Donald Trump had one with the American press—especially such major organs as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Trump has shamelessly used the media to promote his businesses, his TV show (“The Apprentice”) and, most of all, his Presidency. But he has bristled when the press reports scandals that have often been linked with his name.
So Trump may have thought he could win over Woodward—through the flattery of Presidential access. And with Woodward singing his praises, he would win a newfound respectability among the mainstream press which has so often savaged him.
In fact, he might have been encouraged to win over Woodward by no less than South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
Making that accusation is Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.
“It was Lindsey Graham who helped convince Donald Trump to talk to Bob Woodward,” Carlson said during his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight. “Lindsey Graham brokered that meeting. Lindsey Graham even sat in on the first interview between Bob Woodward and the President. How did that turn out?
“Bob Woodward dislikes Donald Trump, he’s been very clear about that. Woodward works for Jeff Bezos’ personal newspaper The Washington Post, which has made defeating Donald Trump its all-consuming mission.”
Reason #3: Trump wanted to take down Woodward
Donald Trump has long seen himself as a tough guy.
In 2011, at the National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia, he offered his audience this advice: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.”
During the second debate of the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump vowed that, if elected, he would prosecute and imprison his opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Days later, he threatened to imprison Clinton’s lawyers.
So it’s entirely possible that he saw his interviews with Woodward as the verbal equivalent of a prizefight, with himself—of course—emerging as the heavyweight champ.
Whatever his reason for agreeing to those interviews, he undoubtedly regrets it now: “It’s another political hit job,” he said of the bestselling book in a September 9 press conference.
Then he turned to his “handling” of the Coronavirus pandemic: He did the best he could, he did better than anyone else would have, and his actions saved millions of lives compared to doing nothing at all.
On September 22, Coronavirus deaths in the United States topped 200,000.
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CREATING A DICTATORSHIP: PART TWO (OF THREE)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on October 13, 2020 at 1:03 amThere were at least five instances when the Obama administration could have disqualified Donald Trump as a Presidential candidate—or secured his indictment. Yet it did neither.
Case #2: The Justice Department did not indict Trump for threats that he made—or inspired—against Republicans and Democrats throughout the 2016 campaign.
Even Fergus Cullen, former chairman of the New Hampshire GOP, expressed fear of what might happen if Trump lost the election:
Fergus Cullen
“That’s really scary,” Cullen said, recounting the violence at Trump rallies around the country leading up to the Republican National Convention. “In this country, we’ve always had recriminations after one side loses. But we haven’t had riots. We haven’t had mobs that act out with violence against supporters of the other side.
“There’s no telling what his supporters would be willing to do at the slightest encouragement from their candidate,” he said.
Trump even began encouraging his mostly white supporters to sign up online to be “election observers” to stop “Crooked Hillary from rigging this election.” He urged them to act as poll watchers in “other” [non-white] communities to ensure that things are “on the up and up.”
Many of his supporters promised to do so.
“Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure,” said Steve Webb, a 61-year-old carpenter from Fairfield, Ohio.
“I’ll look for…well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”
Knowing that large numbers of angry—and possibly armed—Right-wingers planned to descend on polling places could only have had a chilling effect on untold numbers of Democratic voters. And this would have been especially true in heavily conservative states.
Both the USA Patriot Act and the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act have statutes dealing with making terrorist threats against government institutions to influence their members.
President George W. Bush signing the USA Patriot Reauthorization Act of 2005
If Trump’s remarks did not violate one or both of those laws, certainly remarks made by his surrogates did.
Thus, the Justice Department could have cited the Patriot Act in indicting Trump and/or any number of his followers for “activities that…appear to be intended…to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion [and]…occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”
The Justice Department could have also demanded that the results of the election be invalidated on the basis that widespread voter and candidate intimidation played a massive role in it.
But of course this did not happen.
Case #3 Making threats against anyone under protection by the U.S. Secret Service is a felony. Yet Donald Trump was never held legally accountable by the Justice Department.
Case #4: The Justice Department did not invalidate the results of the 2016 election, despite overwhelming evidence that Russia intervened to elect Trump as Vladimir Putin’s chosen candidate.
In October, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) issued a joint statement: The Russian government had directed the effort to subvert the 2016 Presidential election.
On December 16, 2016, FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. agreed with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the White House.
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