Posts Tagged ‘THEODORE ROOSEVELT’
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on February 28, 2024 at 12:10 am
In January, 2018, the White House of President Donald Trump banned the use of personal cell phones in the West Wing.
The official reason: National security.
The real reason: To stop staffers from leaking to reporters.
According to an anonymous White House source: “The cellphone ban is for when people are inside the West Wing, so it really doesn’t do all that much to prevent leaks. If they banned all personal cellphones from the entire [White House] grounds, all that would do is make reporters stay up later because they couldn’t talk to their sources until after 6:30 pm.”
Other sources believed that leaks wouldn’t end unless Trump started firing staffers. But that risked firing the wrong people. To protect themselves, those who leaked might well accuse tight-lipped co-workers.
Within the Soviet Union (especially during the reign of Joseph Stalin) fear of secret police surveillance was widespread—and absolutely justified.
According to the 2016 book, One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State, by Mark Harrison, the methods used to keep conversations secret included:
- Turning on the TV or radio to full volume.
- Turning on a water faucet at full blast.
- Turning the dial of a rotary phone to the end—and sticking a pencil in one of the small holes for numbers.
- Standing six to nine feet away from the hung-up receiver.
- Going for “a walk in the woods.”
- Saying nothing sensitive on the phone.
The secret police (known as the Cheka, the NKVD, the MGB, the KGB, and now the FSB) operated on seven working principles:
- Your enemy is hiding.
- Start from the usual suspects.
- Study the young.
- Stop the laughing.
- Rebellion spreads like wildfire.
- Stamp out every spark.
- Order is created by appearance.
Trump has always ruled through bribery and fear. He’s bought off (or tried to) those who might cause him trouble—like porn actress Stormy Daniels.
He’s never been able to poke fun at himself—and he grows livid when anybody else does.
At Christmastime, 2018, “Saturday Night Live” aired a parody of the classic movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Its title: “It’s a Wonderful Trump.”
In it, Trump (portrayed by actor Alec Baldwin) discovers what the United States would be like if he had never become President: A great deal better-off.
As usual, Trump expressed his resentment through Twitter: The Justice Department should stop investigating his administration and go after the real enemy: “SNL.”
“A REAL scandal is the one sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live. It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame & belittle! Collusion?”
By saying that, Trump showed his contempt for the role of the First Amendment in American history.
Cartoonists portrayed President Andrew Jackson (1829 -1837) wearing a king’s robes and crown, and holding a scepter. This thoroughly enraged Jackson—who had repulsed a British invasion in 1815 at the Battle of New Orleans. To call a man a monarchist in 1800s America was the same as calling him a Communist in the 1950s.
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was lampooned as an ape and a blood-stained tyrant. And Theodore Roosevelt proved a cartoonist’s delight, with attention given to his bushy mustache and thick-lensed glasses.
Thus, the odds are slight that an American court would even hear a case brought by Trump against “SNL.”
Such a case made its way through the courts in the late 1980s when the Reverend Jerry Falwell sued pornographer Larry Flyint over a satirical interview in Hustler magazine. In this, “Falwell” admitted that his first sexual encounter had been with his own mother.
In 1988, the United States Supreme Court, voting 8-0, ruled in Flynt’s favor, saying that the media had a First Amendment right to parody a celebrity.
“Despite their sometimes caustic nature, from the early cartoon portraying George Washington as an ass down to the present day, graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist—an appointee of President Richard Nixon—wrote in his majority decision in the case.
Moreover, Trump would have been forced to take the stand in such a case. The attorneys for NBC and “SNL” would have insisted on it.
The results would have been:
- Unprecedented legal exposure for Trump—who would have been forced to answer virtually any questions asked or drop his lawsuit; and
- Unprecedented humiliation for a man who lives as much for his ego as his pocketbook. Tabloids and late-night comedians would have had a field-day with such a lawsuit.
And while Trump loves to sue those he hates, he does not relish taking the stand himself.
On October 12, 2016, The Palm Beach Post, The New York Times and People all published stories of women claiming to have been sexually assaulted by Trump.
He accused the Times of inventing accusations to hurt his Presidential candidacy. And he threatened to sue for libel if the Times reported the women’s stories. He also said he would sue the women making the accusations.
He never sued the Times, The Post, People—or the women.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on February 27, 2024 at 12:12 am
On May 10, 2018, The Hill reported that White House Special Assistant Kelly Sadler had joked derisively about dying Arizona United States Senator John McCain.
McCain, a Navy pilot during the Vietnam war, was shot down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967, and captured. He spent five and a half years as a POW in North Vietnam—and was often brutally tortured. He wasn’t released until March 14, 1973.
Recently, he had opposed the nomination of Gina Haspel as director of the CIA.
The reason: In 2002, Haspel had operated a “black” CIA site in Thailand where Islamic terrorists were often waterboarded to make them talk.
For John McCain, waterboarding was torture, even if it didn’t leave its victims permanently scarred and disabled.
Aware that the 81-year-old McCain was dying of brain cancer, Sadler joked to intimates about the Senator’s opposition to Haspel: “It doesn’t matter. He’s dying anyway.”
John McCain
Leaked to CNN by an anonymous White House official, Sadler’s remark sparked fierce criticism—and demands for her firing.
South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of McCain, said: “Ms. Sadler, may I remind you that John McCain has a lot of friends in the United States Senate on both sides of the aisle. Nobody is laughing in the Senate.”
“People have wondered when decency would hit rock bottom with this administration. It happened yesterday,” said then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
“John McCain makes America great. Father, grandfather, Navy pilot, POW hero bound by honor, an incomparable and irrepressible statesman. Those who mock such greatness only humiliate themselves and their silent accomplices,” tweeted former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Officially, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to confirm or deny Sadler’s joke: “I’m not going to get into a back and forth because people want to create issues of leaked staff meetings.”
Unofficially, Sanders was furious—not at the joke about a dying man, but that someone had leaked it. After assailing the White House communications team, she pouted: “I am sure this conversation is going to leak, too. And that’s just disgusting.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders
No apology was offered by any official at the White House—including President Donald Trump.
In fact, Senior White House communications adviser Mercedes Schlapp reportedly expressed her support for Sadler: “I stand with Kelly Sadler.”
On May 11—the day after Sadler’s comment was reported—reporters asked Sanders if the tone set by Trump had caused Sadler to feel comfortable in telling such a joke.
“Certainly not!” predictably replied Sanders, adding: “We have a respect for all Americans, and that is what we try to put forward in everything we do, but in word and in action, focusing on doing things that help every American in this country every single day.”
On May 14, 2018, Trump revealed his “respect” for “all Americans”—especially those working in the White House.
“The so-called leaks coming out of the White House are a massive over exaggeration put out by the Fake News Media in order to make us look as bad as possible,” Trump tweeted.
“With that being said, leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!”
This from the man who, during the 2016 Presidential campaign, shouted: “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks!”
Of course, that was when Russian Intelligence agents were exposing the secrets of Hillary Clinton, his Presidential opponent.
And, in a move that Joseph Stalin would have admired, Trump ordered an all-out investigation to find the person who leaked Sadler’s “joke.”
In January, 2018, the White House had banned the use of personal cell phones in the West Wing.
The official reason: National security.
The real reason: To stop staffers from leaking to reporters.
Officials now had two choices:
- Leave their cell phones in their cars, or,
- When they arrive for work, deposit them in lockers installed at West Wing entrances. They can reclaim their phones when they leave.
Several staffers huddled around the lockers throughout the day, checking messages they had missed. The lockers buzzed and chirped constantly from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday.
More ominously, well-suited men roamed the halls of the West Wing, carrying devices that pick up signals from phones that aren’t government-issued. “Did someone forget to put their phone away?” one of the men would ask if such a device was detected.
If no one said they have a phone, the detection team started searching the room.
Phone detector
The devices can tell which type of phone is in the room.
This is the sort of behavior Americans have traditionally—and correctly—associated with dictatorships
In his memo outlining the policy, former Chief of Staff John Kelly warned that anyone who violated the phone ban could be punished, including “being indefinitely prohibited from entering the White House complex.”
Yet even these draconian methods did not end White House leaks.
White House officials still spoke with reporters throughout the day and often aired their grievances, whether about annoying colleagues or competing policy priorities.
Aides with private offices sometimes called reporters on their desk phones. Others used their cell phones to call or text reporters during lunch breaks.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on February 26, 2024 at 12:10 am
“Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake news NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!”
So tweeted President Donald J. Trump on February 17, 2019.
Less than nine hours earlier, “SNL” had once again opened with actor Alec Baldwin mocking the 45th President. In this skit, Baldwin/Trump gave a rambling press conference declaring: “We need wall. We have a tremendous amount of drugs flowing into this country from the southern border—or The Brown Line, as many people have asked me not to call it.”
Right-wingers denounce their critics as “snowflakes”—that is, emotional, easily offended and unable to tolerate opposing views.
Yet here was Donald Trump, who prides himself on his toughness, whining like a child bully who has just been told that other people have rights, too.
The answer is simple: Trump is a tyrant—and a longtime admirer of tyrants.
Donald Trump
He has lavishly praised Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, such as during his appearance on the December 18, 2015 edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”:
“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country”—-a reference to then-President Barack Obama.
During a February, 2017 interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Trump defended Putin’s killing of political opponents.
O’Reilly: “But he’s a killer.”
Trump: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”
Asked by a Fox News reporter why he praised murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, he replied: “He’s a tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, tough people, and you take it over from your father…If you could do that at 27 years old, I mean, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that.”
In short: Kim must be doing something right because he’s in power. And it doesn’t matter how he came to power—or the price his country is paying for it.
Actually, for all their differences in appearance and nationality, Trump shares at least two similarities with Kim.
Kim Jong-Un
Blue House (Republic of Korea) [KOGL (http://www.kogl.or.kr/open/info/license_info/by.do)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
First, both of them got a big boost into wealth and power from their fathers.
- Trump’s father, Fred Trump, a real estate mogul, reportedly gave Donald $200 million to enter the real estate business. It was this sum that formed the basis for Trump’s eventual rise to wealth and fame—and the Presidency.
- Kim’s father was Kim Jong-Il, who ruled North Korea as dictator from 1994 to 2011. When his father died in 2011, Kim Jong-Un immediately succeeded him, having been groomed for years to do so.
Second, both Trump and Kim have brutally tried to stamp out any voices that contradict their own.
- Trump has constantly attacked freedom of the press, even labeling it “the enemy of the American people.” He has also slandered his critics on Twitter—which refused to enforce its “Terms of Service” and revoke his account until he incited the January 6 attack on Congress.
- Kim has attacked his critics with firing squads and prison camps. Amnesty International estimates that more than 200,000 North Koreans are now suffering in labor camps throughout the country.
Thus, Trump—-elected to lead the “free world”—believes, like all dictators:
- People are evil everywhere—so who am I to judge who’s better or worse? All that counts is gaining and holding onto power.
- And if you can do that, it doesn’t matter how you do so.
Actually, it’s not uncommon for dictators to admire one another—as the case of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler nicely illustrates.
Joseph Stalin
After Hitler launched a blood-purge of his own private Stormtroopers army on June 30, 1934, Stalin exclaimed: “Hitler, what a great man! That is the way to deal with your political opponents!”
And Hitler was equally admiring of Stalin’s notorious ruthlessness: “After the victory over Russia,” he told his intimates, “it would be a good idea to get Stalin to run the country, with German oversight, of course. He knows better than anyone how to handle the Russians.”
Adolf Hitler
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1990-048-29A / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D
One characteristic shared by all dictators is intolerance toward those whose opinions differ with their own. Especially those who dare to actually criticize or make fun of them.
All Presidents have thin skins. John F. Kennedy often phoned reporters and called them “sonofbitches” when he didn’t like stories they had written on him.
Richard Nixon went further, waging all-out war against the Washington Post for its stories about his criminality.
But Donald Trump took his hatred of dissidents to an entirely new—and dangerous—level.
On May 10, 2018, The Hill reported that White House Special Assistant Kelly Sadler had joked derisively about dying Arizona United States Senator John McCain.
Trump was outraged—not that one of his aides had joked about a man stricken with brain cancer, but that someone in the White House had leaked it.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on January 30, 2024 at 12:10 am
Nikki Haley has a problem.
It’s the same problem faced—and ignored—by every Republican candidate for President: The refusal to face the truth about slavery and the evils it spawned—including South’s role as its greatest defender.
On December 27, 2023, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was campaigning in Berlin, New Hampshire, for the 2024 Republican nomination for President.
“What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” a male attendee asked Haley.
“Well, don’t come with an easy question,” Haley replied. “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?”
Nikki Haley
The questioner replied that he wasn’t the one running for President.
“I think it always comes down to the role of government, and what the rights of the people are,” Haley said. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life.”
Of course, what she refused to say was that, in the pre-Civil War South, Southern governments had told millions of black slaves “how to live your life.”
The cause of the Civil War lay in the South’s trying to impose a slavocracy mentality and control over the rest of the nation.
From 1860 to 1865, the South—Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia—produced the greatest case of mass treason in America’s history.
Union (blue) and Confederate (red) states: 1860 – 1865
According to The Destructive War, by Charles Royster, it wasn’t the cause of “states’ rights” that led 13 Southern states to withdraw from the Union in 1860-61. It was their demand for “respect.”
“The respect Southerners demanded did not consist simply of the states’ sovereignty or of the equal rights of Northern and Southern citizens, including slaveholders’ right to take their chattels into Northern territory.
“It entailed, too, respect for their assertion of the moral superiority of slaveholding society over free society,” writes Royster.
It was not enough for Southerners to claim equal standing with Northerners; Northerners must acknowledge it. But this was something that the North refused to do.
Finally, its citizens dared to elect Abraham Lincoln President in 1860.
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln and his new Republican party damned slavery—and slaveholders—as morally evil, obsolete and ultimately doomed. And they were determined to prevent slavery from spreading any further throughout the country.
On April 12, 1861—just over a month since Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4—Southern batteries opened fire on Union Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, triggering the Civil War.
More than 750,000.Americans died—when the population of the United States stood at 31,443,321.
Four years later, on April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.
Now Southerners are trying to win through political manipulation what they couldn’t by open treason.
Red states are adopting Fascistic social policies on such issues as abortion, gay rights and classroom censorship. And they are trying to prevent the federal government or their own largest metro areas to resist those policies.
In the case of abortion, Red states are not only outlawing it within their own borders but trying to prevent states where abortion is legal from providing that service.
Thus Republicans, who began as the party of freedom, have mutated into the party now trying to end it.
According to Donald Kettl, the former dean of the public policy school at the University of Maryland:
“The only time I can recall in American history even remotely like this [divergence] was after the Civil War when the separate but equal doctrine began to emerge” across the South as a backlash against the attempts of the 13th, 14th and 15th Constitutional amendments to ensure equality for the freed slaves.
CNN Correspondent Ronald Brownstein warns of this development:
“As red states grow more aggressive about going their own way, while working to preempt challenges from above (the federal government) or below (blue local governments), they are testing how much divergence the nation’s fundamental cohesion can take before it begins to unravel.”
Twenty-five states voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Of these:
- Twenty of these states rank in the bottom 25 of those who hold at least a four-year college degree;
- Most fall into the top half when states are ranked by the share of their population that are White Christians or who own guns;
- Twenty-three rank in the top 26 states that emit the most carbon from their energy sector;
These states seek to reverse the “rights revolution of the last 60 years—on abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception and civil rights.
Today’s Republican party is no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It has become the party of John Wilkes Booth, Benito Mussolini and Donald Trump.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary, Uncategorized on December 8, 2023 at 12:07 am
In his ongoing war against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump may have the last word.
The former President has warned that if he can’t be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2024, “he’s willing to burn it all down.”
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has intimately covered Trump for years, has tweeted:
“Yes, Trump is more vulnerable than he’s been in a long time. But that has happened before and he’s survived.”
Maggie Haberman
Andrew Lih, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
“Trump has extremely few major donors who want to do anything for him right now and a number of them are having active conversations about the best way to stop him. But. Again….sound familiar?
“Trump has made clear he’s willing to burn it all down if he doesn’t get what he wants, which is maintaining his grip on the product line he’s been developing for six years: the Republican party. So a lot of electeds will have to make a choice they’ve not had to before.”
There is precedent for this. After serving two terms in the White House (1901-1909) Theodore Roosevelt became increasingly disillusioned with his handpicked successor: William Howard Taft.
Theodore Roosevelt
By 1912, he decided to run for a third term as a third-party candidate. His candidacy split the Republican vote—and enabled Democrats to elect Woodrow Wilson President.
No doubt many Democrats are now salivating at the possibility of the same occurring in 2024.
And even more of them are looking forward to seeing two would-be tyrants—Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis—trading lethal blows for most of the Presidential year.
Their reaction would be similar to that expressed by then-Senator Harry S. Truman when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”
* * * * *
As the Third Reich came to its fiery end, its dictator, Adolf Hitler, sought to punish the German people for being “unworthy” of his “genius” and losing the war he had started.
His attitude was: “If I can’t rule Germany, then there won’t be a Germany.”
In his infamous “Nero Order,” he decreed the destruction of everything still remaining–industries, ships, harbors, communications, roads, mines, bridges, stores, utility plants, food stuffs.
Fortunately for Germany, one man–Albert Speer–finally broke ranks with his Fuhrer.
Albert Speer
Risking death, he refused to carry out Hitler’s “scorched earth” order. Even more important, he mounted a successful effort to block such destruction and persuade influential military and civilian leaders to disobey the order as well.
As a result, those targets slated for destruction were spared.
Throughout his four years in office, President Donald Trump made it clear that America faced a stark choice: It could remain a constitutional democracy—or allow him to become an all-powerful “President-for-Life.”
Among his outrages:
- Repeatedly attacking the nation’s free press for daring to report his growing list of crimes and disasters, calling it “the enemy of the American people.”
- Siding with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency which unanimously agreed that Russia had subverted the 2016 Presidential election.
- Firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating that subversion.
- Giving Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak highly classified CIA Intelligence about an Islamic State plot to turn laptops into concealable bombs.
- Shutting down the Federal Government for 35 days in 2018-19 because Democrats refused to fund his ineffective “border wall” between the United States and Mexico.
- An estimated 380,000 government employees were furloughed and another 420,000 were ordered to work without pay. The shutdown ended due to public outrage—without Trump getting the funding amount he had demanded.
- Trying to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, who was likely to be his Democratic opponent in the 2020 Presidential election.
- Repeatedly lying about the dangers posed by the COVID-19 virus, and thus enabling it to ravage the country and ultimately kill 400,000 by the time Trump left office.
- Attacking medical experts and governors who urged Americans to wear masks and socially distance to protect themselves from COVID-19.
Trump’s ultimate act of criminality and treason came on January 6, 2021, when he incited his followers to violently attack the United States Capitol Building. Their goal: To prevent Republicans and Democrats from counting the Electoral Votes cast in the 2020 Presidential election.
Trump fully understood that an accurate count of those votes would reveal his loss to Joe Biden: 306 votes for Biden, compared with 232 for Trump.
Fortunately for American democracy, there were enough patriots determined to prevent Trump from becoming the absolute dictator he clearly intended to be.
Like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump’s attitude was: “If I can’t rule America, there won’t be an America.”
Deprived of his chance to destroy the country he claimed to love, Trump now threatens to destroy the political party that brought him to near-absolute power in 2016.
And Ron DeSantis stands ready to establish himself as an equally Trumpian dictator.
Their party is still waiting for a Republican Albert Speer to step forward and save America from the self-destructive brutalities of its own Right-wing fanatics.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on December 7, 2023 at 12:25 am
Having been defeated in 2020 for a second term by former Vice President Joe Biden, Donald Trump has convinced himself—and millions of his fanatical followers—that he was cheated by voter fraud.
He is convinced that the 2024 GOP Presidential nomination rightfully belongs to him. And that anyone who stands in his way must be mercilessly crushed.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, is equally convinced that it’s now the turn of a younger, more vigorous and equally ruthless man to hold the White House.
Not only does Trump believe DeSantis owes him absolute loyalty, but so do many of his supporters.
“Sadly, everything President Trump says is true. Ron DeSantis owes his governorship to Donald Trump and challenging him in 2024 would be a treacherous act of disloyalty,” said Roger Stone, a long-time Trump adviser.
Donald Trump
Moreover, Trump has never allowed a sense of loyalty to stand in the way of his ambitions—in business or politics.
In DeSantis, Trump faces an opponent every bit as ruthless as himself—and endowed with several built-in advantages. Even so, Trump remains the odds-on favorite to win the 2024 Republican nomination for President.
On November 11, 2022, the CNN website carried an opinion piece by Nichole Hemmer, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.
Entitled “Even the DeSantis bubble may burst,” it noted:
“On paper, DeSantis looks like Trump’s natural heir. Since winning the governorship by a whisper-thin margin in 2018, he has consciously molded himself after Trump, picking up everything from Trump’s hand gestures and speech cadence to his media-bashing and calculated viciousness….
“He has married that political style with a strongman persona. As governor, he has targeted protesters, universities, public health workers and corporations for opposing his policies.
“He has sent police to round up voters with felony convictions who, confused by the state’s efforts to strip their voting rights after voters reinstated them a few years ago, mistakenly voted in recent elections.
“He has bent the Florida legislature to his will, whipping up support for anti-gay laws, a new redistricting map and punitive legislation targeting Disney after the company criticized the state’s infamous ‘don’t say gay” bill.'”
Nichole Hemmer
Thus, in DeSantis, Trump faces an opponent every bit as ruthless as himself—and endowed with several built-in advantages.
First, DeSantis, at 45, is 32 years younger than the 77-year-old Trump.
Second, DeSantis, unlike Trump, has an existing power-base: The Governorship of a pivotal swing state: Florida.
Trump, an ex-President, lives at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Third, DeSantis doesn’t carry the baggage of scandals and notoriety that Trump has acquired as a businessman and President.
Fourth, DeSantis can reach far greater numbers of people through his Twitter account than Trump has been able to do through his failing website, Truth Social.
Trump’s Twitter account was closed—by Twitter—after he incited a mob of his followers to attack the United States Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
It has since been restored by Elon Musk since he acquired Twitter (now X) in 2022. But Trump prefers to use his subscriber-based website, Truth Social.
Ron DeSantis
Fifth, many Republicans are blaming Trump for their failure to sweep Democrats from state and Federal offices in a widely heralded “Red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections.
“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser,” read the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board’s headline. Fox News and right-wing podcasts and radio shows repeated the charge in the days after the elections.
Sixth, DeSantis has gained huge popularity within Florida by molding himself after Trump by tapping into the politics of resentment. Among the targets of his attacks:
Protesters: DeSantis enacted a 2021 “anti-riot” bill that:
- Grants civil legal immunity to people who drive through protesters blocking a road;
- Creates a broad category for misdemeanor arrest during protests;
- Anyone charged will be denied bail until their first court appearance;
- Creates a new felony crime of “aggravated rioting” that carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison and a new crime of “mob intimidation.”
Schools:
- Installed GOP allies in top university posts;
- Successfully pushed legislation that could change tenure and limit how university professors can teach lessons on race.
Blacks: Pushed through the legislature a new congressional map that will dilute the voting power of black Floridians.
COVID-19: Attacked wearing masks and getting vaccinated as threats to “American freedom”—to support a family, attend school, run a business.
Gays: Signed legislation prohibiting classroom discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity with younger students—a measure critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Walt Disney Corporation: Disney CEO Bob Chapek criticized DeSantis’ “don’t say gay” bill. DeSantis rammed through the legislature a bill eliminating the decades-long status Disney had held to operate as an independent government around its Orlando-area theme parks.
Asylum-seekers: Sent two planeloads of illegal aliens—at Florida’s expense—to the island of Martha’s Vineyard as a pre-election publicity stunt.
Nor has DeSantis neglected to make himself appear as a true “man of the people.”
A month before the election, he declared a gas tax holiday. He also suspended campaigning and focused on effective hurricane relief after Hurricane Ian.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on December 6, 2023 at 12:14 am
For Americans, the 2024 Presidential election may prove the equivalent of the deathmatch between German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin from 1941 to 1945.
At the very least, it promises to be the Right-wing heavyweight championship of the decade, if not the century: An all-out slugfest between former President Donald J. Trump and Florida Governor Ron D. DeSantis.
On November 10, 2022, Trump publicly attacked DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and took credit for DeSantis’ success after endorsing him in 2018.
This was only two days after DeSantis was soundly re-elected Governor—and the much-hyped “Red wave” failed to sweep Democrats out of state and federal offices in the 2022 midterm elections.
On his website, Truth Social, Trump posted that DeSantis had been a political lightweight who had come to him “in desperate shape” when running for his first term in office in 2017.
Donald Trump
“Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse [sic] him, he could win. also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart.”
For Trump, DeSantis’ worst sin was refusing to say whether he would run for President in 2024.
Having been defeated for a second term by Joe Biden in 2020, Trump believes he has an absolute right to regain that office in 2024.
“Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, ‘I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future.’ Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.”
By “loyalty” Trump meant: Loyalty to himself.
For Trump, there was only one “right” answer DeSantis could have given: “I will not be a candidate for President in 2024 and I will totally support President Trump for that office.”
And that was not the response that DeSantis gave.
Even worse for Trump: Several of his loudly-supported candidates across the country lost their electoral bids.
To add to his rage and sense of betrayal: Conservative media sided with DeSantis—such as Fox News and the New York Post, which ran a front page headline calling DeSantis “DeFuture” the day after the election.
New York Post, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Responded Trump: “NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post, is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious.”
A Trump advisor, speaking off-the-record, told Politico: “Obviously he is escalating. It is total shots fired. It is not what I would have done if it were totally up to me, but you can’t argue with Donald Trump’s tactics. They work. He is savage but effective. He was never going to stay restrained for long.”
“He is obviously threatened by a DeSantis presidential run,” said a longtime Florida Republican consultant speaking of Trump. “And by doing this, I think he will lose a lot of his base support.”
This, however, hasn’t happened—and Trump comfortably leads DeSantis in Republican polls.
Trump’s advisors tried to persuade him to soften his image. They feared that his angry and divisive rhetoric is turning off many voters who like his policies but desire some normalcy.
They also tried to persuade Trump to focus less on his 2020 election loss and offer solutions to voters’ problems.
At the DeSantis victory rally, chants resounded: “Two more years!”—meaning that his supporters want him to run for President in 2024.
For months, DeSantis refused to respond to the attacks Trump has made on him.
Two Florida Republicans close to DeSantis told Yahoo News that the governor would be wary of attacking Trump. He wanted to focus on policy issues and Florida’s recovery from Hurricane Ian.
By doing so, they said, DeSantis would highlight how his governing style differed from Trump’s more combative and less policy-focused approach.
It also would prevent him from getting sucked into an endless tit-for-tat war of insults with the insult-happy ex-President.
The Donald Trump-Ron DeSantis relationship wasn’t always so hostile.
Trump’s endorsement played a huge role in DeSantis’ winning the 2018 GOP primary against former Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who was an early favorite.
And DeSantis quickly showed his gratitude with a campaign video that was a naked Valentine to Trump’s ego—and the base that worshiped him.
Released on July 30, 2018, the ad was narrated by DeSantis’ wife, Casey.
CASEY DESANTIS: Everyone knows my husband, Ron DeSantis, is endorsed by President Trump. But he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids.
DESANTIS: “Build the wall” [as his son uses colored plastic bricks to build a wall. This was a line right out of Trump’s repeated demands for a wall separating the United States from Mexico.]
CASEY: He reads stories.
DESANTIS: “Then Mr. Trump said ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part'” [as he reads a book to his son].
CASEY: He’s teaching Madison to talk.
DESANTIS: “Make America great again” [as he holds up a “Trump” sign that says exactly that].
CASEY: People say Ron’s all Trump, but he’s so much more.
DESANTIS: “Bigly. So good” [as he’s looking at his son in a crib].
CASEY: I just thought you should know.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary, Uncategorized on March 24, 2023 at 12:10 am
In his coming war against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump may have the last word.
The former President has warned that if he can’t be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2024, “he’s willing to burn it all down.”
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has intimately covered Trump for years, has tweeted:
“Yes, Trump is more vulnerable than he’s been in a long time. But that has happened before and he’s survived.”
Maggie Haberman
Andrew Lih, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
“Trump has extremely few major donors who want to do anything for him right now and a number of them are having active conversations about the best way to stop him. But. Again….sound familiar?
“Trump has made clear he’s willing to burn it all down if he doesn’t get what he wants, which is maintaining his grip on the product line he’s been developing for six years: the Republican party. So a lot of electeds will have to make a choice they’ve not had to before.”
There is precedent for this. After serving two terms in the White House (1901-1909) Theodore Roosevelt became increasingly disillusioned with his handpicked successor: William Howard Taft.
Theodore Roosevelt
By 1912, he decided to run for a third term as a third-party candidate. His candidacy split the Republican vote—and enabled Democrats to elect Woodrow Wilson President.
No doubt many Democrats are now salivating at the possibility of the same occurring in 2024.
And even more of them are looking forward to seeing two would-be tyrants—Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis—trading lethal blows for most of the Presidential year.
Their reaction would be similar to that expressed by then-Senator Harry S. Truman when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”
* * * * *
As the Third Reich came to its fiery end, its dictator, Adolf Hitler, sought to punish the German people for being “unworthy” of his “genius” and losing the war he had started.
His attitude was: “If I can’t rule Germany, then there won’t be a Germany.”
In his infamous “Nero Order,” he decreed the destruction of everything still remaining–industries, ships, harbors, communications, roads, mines, bridges, stores, utility plants, food stuffs.
Fortunately for Germany, one man–Albert Speer–finally broke ranks with his Fuhrer.
Albert Speer
Risking death, he refused to carry out Hitler’s “scorched earth” order. Even more important, he mounted a successful effort to block such destruction and persuade influential military and civilian leaders to disobey the order as well.
As a result, those targets slated for destruction were spared.
Throughout his four years in office, President Donald Trump made it clear that America faced a stark choice: It could remain a constitutional democracy—or allow him to become an all-powerful “President-for-Life.”
Among his outrages:
- Repeatedly attacking the nation’s free press for daring to report his growing list of crimes and disasters, calling it “the enemy of the American people.”
- Siding with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency which unanimously agreed that Russia had subverted the 2016 Presidential election.
- Firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating that subversion.
- Giving Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak highly classified CIA Intelligence about an Islamic State plot to turn laptops into concealable bombs.
- Shutting down the Federal Government for 35 days in 2018-19 because Democrats refused to fund his ineffective “border wall” between the United States and Mexico.
- An estimated 380,000 government employees were furloughed and another 420,000 were ordered to work without pay. The shutdown ended due to public outrage—without Trump getting the funding amount he had demanded.
- Trying to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, who was likely to be his Democratic opponent in the 2020 Presidential election.
- Repeatedly lying about the dangers posed by the COVID-19 virus, and thus enabling it to ravage the country and ultimately kill 400,000 by the time Trump left office.
- Attacking medical experts and governors who urged Americans to wear masks and socially distance to protect themselves from COVID-19.
Trump’s ultimate act of criminality and treason came on January 6, 2021, when he incited his followers to violently attack the United States Capitol Building. Their goal: To prevent Republicans and Democrats from counting the Electoral Votes cast in the 2020 Presidential election.
Trump fully understood that an accurate count of those votes would reveal his loss to Joe Biden: 306 votes for Biden, compared with 232 for Trump.
Fortunately for American democracy, there were enough patriots determined to prevent Trump from becoming the absolute dictator he clearly intended to be.
Like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump’s attitude was: “If I can’t rule America, there won’t be an America.”
Deprived of his chance to destroy the country he claimed to love, Trump now threatens to destroy the political party that brought him to near-absolute power in 2016.
And Ron DeSantis stands ready to establish himself as an equally Trumpian dictator.
Their party is still waiting for a Republican Albert Speer to step forward and save America from the self-destructive brutalities of its own Right-wing fanatics.
1912 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ABC NEWS, ADOLF HITLER, ALBERT SPEER, ALTERNET, AMERICABLOG, AP, BABY BOOMER RESISTANCE, BBC, BLACKS, BLOOMBERG NEWS, BORDER WALL, BUZZFEED, CASEY DESANTIS, CBS NEWS, CIA, CNN, COVID-19, CROOKS AND LIARS, DAILY KOS, DEMOCRATS, DONALD TRUMP, ELECTORAL COLLEGE, FBI, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT, FOX NEWS, GAYS, GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, HARRY S. TRUMAN, HUFFINGTON POST, ILLEGAL ALIENS, JAMES COMEY, JANUARY 6 COUP ATTEMPT, JOE BIDEN, JOSEPH STALIN, MAGGIE HABERMAN, MASKS, MEDIA MATTERS, MOTHER JONES, MOVEON, MSNBC, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, NAZI GERMANY, NBC NEWS, NEW REPUBLIC, NEW YORK POST, NEWSDAY, NEWSWEEK, NICHOLE HEMMER, NPR, PBS NEWSHOUR, POLITICO, POLITICUSUSA, PROTESTERS, RACISM, RAW STORY, REPUBLICANS, REUTERS, ROGER STONE, RON DESANTIS, SALON, SCHOOLS, SEATTLE TIMES, SERGEY KISLYAK, SERGEY LAVROV, SEXUALITY, SLATE, SOVIET UNION, TALKING POINTS MEMO, THE ATLANTIC, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE DAILY BEAST, THE DAILY BLOG, THE GUARDIAN, THE HILL, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE INTERCEPT, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NATION, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, THE PRESS, THE VILLAGE VOICE, THE WASHINGTON POST, THEODORE ROOSEVELT, THINKPROGRESS, TIME, TRUTH SOCIAL, TRUTHDIG, TRUTHOUT, TWITTER, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, UKRAINE, UPI, USA TODAY, VACCINATIONS, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, VLADIMIR PUTIN, VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY, WALL STREET JOURNAL, WALT DISNEY CORPORATION, WILLIMAM HOWWARD TAFT, WOODROW WILSON
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on March 23, 2023 at 12:10 am
For Americans, it may turn out to be the equivalent of the deathmatch between German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.
At the very least, it promises to be the Right-wing heavyweight championship of the decade, if not the century: An all-out slugfest between former President Donald J. Trump and Florida Governor Ron D. DeSantis.
On November 10, Trump publicly attacked DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and took credit for DeSantis’ success after endorsing him in 2018.
This was only two days after DeSantis was soundly re-elected Governor—and the much-hyped “Red wave” failed to sweep Democrats out of state and federal offices in the 2022 midterm elections.
On his website, Truth Social, Trump posted that DeSantis had been a political lightweight who had come to him “in desperate shape” when running for his first term in office in 2017.
Donald Trump
“Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse [sic] him, he could win. also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart.”
For Trump, DeSantis’ worst sin was refusing to say whether he would run for President in 2024.
Having been defeated for a second term by Joe Biden in 2020, Trump believes he has an absolute right to regain that office in another two years.
“Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, ‘I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future.’ Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.”
By “loyalty” Trump meant: Loyalty to himself.
For Trump, there was only one “right” answer DeSantis could have given: “I will not be a candidate for President in 2024 and I will totally support President Trump for that office.”
And that was not the response that DeSantis gave.
Even worse for Trump: Several of his loudly-supported candidates across the country lost their electoral bids.
To add to his rage and sense of betrayal: Conservative media sided with DeSantis—such as Fox News and the New York Post, which ran a front page headline calling DeSantis “DeFuture” the day after the election.
New York Post, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Responded Trump: “NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post, is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious.”
A Trump advisor, speaking off-the-record, told Politico: “Obviously he is escalating. It is total shots fired. It is not what I would have done if it were totally up to me, but you can’t argue with Donald Trump’s tactics. They work. He is savage but effective. He was never going to stay restrained for long.”
“He is obviously threatened by a DeSantis presidential run,” said a longtime Florida Republican consultant speaking of Trump. “And by doing this, I think he will lose a lot of his base support.”
Trump’s advisors are trying to persuade him to soften his image. They fear that his angry and divisive rhetoric is turning off many voters who like his policies but desire some normalcy.
They are also trying to persuade Trump to focus less on his 2020 election loss and offer solutions to voters’ problems.
At the DeSantis victory rally, chants resounded: “Two more years!”—meaning that his supporters want him to run for President in 2024.
DeSantis has not responded to the attacks Trump has made on him.
Two Florida Republicans close to DeSantis told Yahoo News that the governor would be wary of attacking Trump. He wants to focus on policy issues and Florida’s recovery from Hurricane Ian.
By doing so, they said, DeSantis will highlight how his governing style differs from Trump’s more combative and less policy-focused approach.
It also prevents him from getting sucked into an endless tit-for-tat war of insults with the insult-happy ex-President.
The Donald Trump-Ron DeSantis relationship wasn’t always so hostile.
Trump’s endorsement played a huge role in DeSantis’ winning the 2018 GOP primary against former Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who was an early favorite.
And DeSantis quickly showed his gratitude with a campaign video that was a naked Valentine to Trump’s ego—and the base that worshiped him.
Released on July 30, 2018, the ad was narrated by DeSantis’ wife, Casey.
CASEY DESANTIS: Everyone knows my husband, Ron DeSantis, is endorsed by President Trump. But he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids.
DESANTIS: “Build the wall” [as his son uses colored plastic bricks to build a wall. This was a line right out of Trump’s repeated demands for a wall separating the United States from Mexico.]
CASEY: He reads stories.
DESANTIS: “Then Mr. Trump said ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part'” [as he reads a book to his son].
CASEY: He’s teaching Madison to talk.
DESANTIS: “Make America great again” [as he holds up a “Trump” sign that says exactly that].
CASEY: People say Ron’s all Trump, but he’s so much more.
DESANTIS: “Bigly. So good” [as he’s looking at his son in a crib].
CASEY: I just thought you should know.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary, Uncategorized on November 16, 2022 at 12:10 am
In his coming war against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump may have the last word.
The former President has warned that if he can’t be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2024, “he’s willing to burn it all down.”
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has intimately covered Trump for years, has tweeted:
“Yes, Trump is more vulnerable than he’s been in a long time. But that has happened before and he’s survived.”
Maggie Haberman
Andrew Lih, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
“Trump has extremely few major donors who want to do anything for him right now and a number of them are having active conversations about the best way to stop him. But. Again….sound familiar?
“Trump has made clear he’s willing to burn it all down if he doesn’t get what he wants, which is maintaining his grip on the product line he’s been developing for six years: the Republican party. So a lot of electeds will have to make a choice they’ve not had to before.”
There is precedent for this. After serving two terms in the White House (1901-1909) Theodore Roosevelt became increasingly disillusioned with his handpicked successor: William Howard Taft.
Theodore Roosevelt
By 1912, he decided to run for a third term as a third-party candidate. His candidacy split the Republican vote—and enabled Democrats to elect Woodrow Wilson President.
No doubt many Democrats are now salivating at the possibility of the same occurring in 2024.
And even more of them are looking forward to seeing two would-be tyrants—Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis—trading lethal blows for most of the Presidential year.
Their reaction would be similar to that expressed by then-Senator Harry S. Truman when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”
* * * * *
As the Third Reich came to its fiery end, its dictator, Adolf Hitler, sought to punish the German people for being “unworthy” of his “genius” and losing the war he had started.
His attitude was: “If I can’t rule Germany, then there won’t be a Germany.”
In his infamous “Nero Order,” he decreed the destruction of everything still remaining–industries, ships, harbors, communications, roads, mines, bridges, stores, utility plants, food stuffs.
Fortunately for Germany, one man–Albert Speer–finally broke ranks with his Fuhrer.
Albert Speer
Risking death, he refused to carry out Hitler’s “scorched earth” order. Even more important, he mounted a successful effort to block such destruction and persuade influential military and civilian leaders to disobey the order as well.
As a result, those targets slated for destruction were spared.
Throughout his four years in office, President Donald Trump made it clear that America faced a stark choice: It could remain a constitutional democracy—or allow him to become an all-powerful “President-for-Life.”
Among his outrages:
- Repeatedly attacking the nation’s free press for daring to report his growing list of crimes and disasters, calling it “the enemy of the American people.”
- Siding with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency which unanimously agreed that Russia had subverted the 2016 Presidential election.
- Firing FBI Director James Comey for investigating that subversion.
- Giving Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak highly classified CIA Intelligence about an Islamic State plot to turn laptops into concealable bombs.
- Shutting down the Federal Government for 35 days in 2018-19 because Democrats refused to fund his ineffective “border wall” between the United States and Mexico.
- An estimated 380,000 government employees were furloughed and another 420,000 were ordered to work without pay. The shutdown ended due to public outrage—without Trump getting the funding amount he had demanded.
- Trying to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, who was likely to be his Democratic opponent in the 2020 Presidential election.
- Repeatedly lying about the dangers posed by the COVID-19 virus, and thus enabling it to ravage the country and ultimately kill 400,000 by the time Trump left office.
- Attacking medical experts and governors who urged Americans to wear masks and socially distance to protect themselves from COVID-19.
Trump’s ultimate act of criminality and treason came on January 6, 2021, when he incited his followers to violently attack the United States Capitol Building. Their goal: To prevent Republicans and Democrats from counting the Electoral Votes cast in the 2020 Presidential election.
Trump fully understood that an accurate count of those votes would reveal his loss to Joe Biden: 306 votes for Biden, compared with 232 for Trump.
Fortunately for American democracy, there were enough patriots determined to prevent Trump from becoming the absolute dictator he clearly intended to be.
Like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump’s attitude was: “If I can’t rule America, there won’t be an America.”
Deprived of his chance to destroy the country he claimed to love, Trump now threatens to destroy the political party that brought him to near-absolute power in 2016.
And Ron DeSantis stands ready to establish himself as an equally Trumpian dictator.
Their party is still waiting for a Republican Albert Speer to step forward and save America from the self-destructive brutalities of its own Right-wing fanatics.
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TYRANTS UNITED–TRUMP AND HIS COMMUNIST HEROES: PART THREE (END)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on February 28, 2024 at 12:10 amIn January, 2018, the White House of President Donald Trump banned the use of personal cell phones in the West Wing.
The official reason: National security.
The real reason: To stop staffers from leaking to reporters.
According to an anonymous White House source: “The cellphone ban is for when people are inside the West Wing, so it really doesn’t do all that much to prevent leaks. If they banned all personal cellphones from the entire [White House] grounds, all that would do is make reporters stay up later because they couldn’t talk to their sources until after 6:30 pm.”
Other sources believed that leaks wouldn’t end unless Trump started firing staffers. But that risked firing the wrong people. To protect themselves, those who leaked might well accuse tight-lipped co-workers.
Within the Soviet Union (especially during the reign of Joseph Stalin) fear of secret police surveillance was widespread—and absolutely justified.
According to the 2016 book, One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State, by Mark Harrison, the methods used to keep conversations secret included:
The secret police (known as the Cheka, the NKVD, the MGB, the KGB, and now the FSB) operated on seven working principles:
Trump has always ruled through bribery and fear. He’s bought off (or tried to) those who might cause him trouble—like porn actress Stormy Daniels.
He’s never been able to poke fun at himself—and he grows livid when anybody else does.
At Christmastime, 2018, “Saturday Night Live” aired a parody of the classic movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Its title: “It’s a Wonderful Trump.”
In it, Trump (portrayed by actor Alec Baldwin) discovers what the United States would be like if he had never become President: A great deal better-off.
As usual, Trump expressed his resentment through Twitter: The Justice Department should stop investigating his administration and go after the real enemy: “SNL.”
“A REAL scandal is the one sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live. It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame & belittle! Collusion?”
By saying that, Trump showed his contempt for the role of the First Amendment in American history.
Cartoonists portrayed President Andrew Jackson (1829 -1837) wearing a king’s robes and crown, and holding a scepter. This thoroughly enraged Jackson—who had repulsed a British invasion in 1815 at the Battle of New Orleans. To call a man a monarchist in 1800s America was the same as calling him a Communist in the 1950s.
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was lampooned as an ape and a blood-stained tyrant. And Theodore Roosevelt proved a cartoonist’s delight, with attention given to his bushy mustache and thick-lensed glasses.
Thus, the odds are slight that an American court would even hear a case brought by Trump against “SNL.”
Such a case made its way through the courts in the late 1980s when the Reverend Jerry Falwell sued pornographer Larry Flyint over a satirical interview in Hustler magazine. In this, “Falwell” admitted that his first sexual encounter had been with his own mother.
In 1988, the United States Supreme Court, voting 8-0, ruled in Flynt’s favor, saying that the media had a First Amendment right to parody a celebrity.
“Despite their sometimes caustic nature, from the early cartoon portraying George Washington as an ass down to the present day, graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist—an appointee of President Richard Nixon—wrote in his majority decision in the case.
Moreover, Trump would have been forced to take the stand in such a case. The attorneys for NBC and “SNL” would have insisted on it.
The results would have been:
And while Trump loves to sue those he hates, he does not relish taking the stand himself.
On October 12, 2016, The Palm Beach Post, The New York Times and People all published stories of women claiming to have been sexually assaulted by Trump.
He accused the Times of inventing accusations to hurt his Presidential candidacy. And he threatened to sue for libel if the Times reported the women’s stories. He also said he would sue the women making the accusations.
He never sued the Times, The Post, People—or the women.
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