Trump, disrupter in chief, found guilty
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ump, January 6, election lies, myths vs. facts, indictment, trials
Updated 10-28-24. Originally published Feb. 2024.
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• Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters
(Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey, Washington Post, 11-15-24)
A multipronged dark money effort by advisers to Elon Musk targeted liberals, Jews, Muslims and Black voters with ads that were not quite what they seemed.
'Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.
'Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.
'What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.'
• Keeping Track of the Trump Criminal Cases (New York Times, 10-28-24) For the first 234 years of the nation's history, no American president or former president had ever been indicted. That changed in 2023. Over a five-month span, former President Donald Trump was charged in four criminal cases. Together, the indictments accused him of wide-ranging criminal conduct before, during and after his presidency. One of those indictments has now led to the first criminal conviction of a former president; the other three remain pending. This is POLITICO's guide to the four Trump criminal cases.
---Trump's federal Jan. 6 Case Related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power after the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
---Trump Georgia Election Case Related to efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.
---Trump’s Classified Documents Inquiry Related to Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive government documents he took with him when he left office
---Trump N.Y. Hush Money Case Related to payments to cover up a sex scandal during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Two cases against Mr. Trump at the state level have been led by district attorneys in New York and Fulton County, Ga. His handling of sensitive federal government documents when he left office is at the center of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.
---Judge Declines to Toss Trump’s New York Hush-Money Conviction (Corinne Ramey, Wall Street Journal, 12-16-24) A New York judge ruled Monday that Donald Trump’s hush-money conviction this year remains valid, rejecting arguments from the president-elect that it should be dismissed on immunity grounds. Ruling concludes that Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity didn’t void prosecution.
---Trump Seeks to Delay His Sentencing Until After the Election Having routinely sought delays in his four criminal cases, he wants to use the extra time to fight his conviction on 34 felony counts in Manhattan.
---Trump is found guilty on 34 felony counts. Read the counts here (Ximena Bustillo and Hilary Fung, NPR, 5-30-24) Jurors in the New York criminal trial against former President Donald Trump have convicted him of 34 felony counts of falsified business records. This is the first time a former or sitting U.S. president has been convicted of criminal charges. The jurors said they unanimously agreed that Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
• Donald Trump Basically Admits to Interfering in 2020 Election, Makes Clear He Won’t Hesitate to Do It Again (Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, 9-3-24) Nothing to see here, just Trump claiming he had “every right” to interfere in a federal election. Meanwhile, this isn’t even the first time Trump has made clear he will very likely pull a 2020 again in 2024.
• "A third of Trump's campaign funding has come from billionaires, including several he's pledged to appoint to his cabinet. Fascism backed by Big Money is one of the most dangerous of all political alliances. We saw it in 1930s Germany, and we're seeing it again today."~Robert Reich
• Trump’s Final Days on the Campaign Trail (Antonia Hitchens, New Yorker, 11-3-24) 'As he wrapped up the speech, he quickly summarized his political beliefs: “Just very briefly, I am pro-life. I am against gun control. . . . I will fight to end Obamacare and replace it.” He ended on “Our country will be great again.”'
• The right place to make the best case against Trump (Washington Post Editorial Board,10-28-24)
"Donald Trump considers Jan. 6 a day of love. What might a day of hate look like?"
• Candidate threatens Liz Cheney with a firing squad (Lucian K. Truscott IV, 11-1-24) "In the closing days of this campaign, Trump is defaulting to threats of violence and arrest.... The New York Times reported this week that Trump’s threats against election officials appear to be having some effect. In an article entitled The Army of Election Officials Ready to Reject the Vote, the Times describes efforts in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania by election boards to reject certification of the vote if the election does not go Trump’s way. The people described in the article are partisan Republicans. When even they fear arrest and prosecution by their own candidate, something is seriously wrong in this country." The idea of “battleground states” has become a reality, where armed police officers may be necessary to secure the Constitutional right to vote. One political party and one presidential candidate are responsible for turning this election into a warzone."
• In Nov. 1 Milwaukee rally, Trump offers falsehoods on economy, climate change (Louis Jacobson, PolitiFact, 11-2-24) He said "today’s economic conditions are "like a depression," which is wrong. The unemployment rate is 4.1%, compared to about 25% during the Great Depression, and the economy is growing at 2.8% a year.
"Trump cast claims about climate change as alarmist. He said, "The ocean will rise in 500 years one-eighth of an inch. Who the hell cares?" This Pants on Fire claim drastically undercounts how fast the oceans are rising.
"Trump also said illegal immigrant gangs are taking over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado (local officials disagree), that countries such as the Congo and Venezuela are emptying their prisons and "insane asylums" to send people to the U.S. (claims that are unsupported), that he signed the largest tax cut in the history of the country (False), that Americans will become "rich as hell" from his plan to hike tariffs on imported goods by 10% to 20% (economists almost unanimously disagree), that "we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other nation in the world … including Saudi Arabia and Russia" (the U.S. ranks ninth, behind both of the countries he mentioned), and even that he was the first Republican to win all 77 Oklahoma counties (George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney beat him to it).
• Trump aides who don’t want him on the ballot (Mariana Alfaro, Washington Post 4-2-24)
---Former Trump officials are among the most vocal opponents of returning him to the White House (Michelle L. Price, Associated Press and PBS News, 4-5-24)
• Trump has made more than 100 threats to prosecute or punish perceived enemies (Tom Dreisbach, All Things Considered, NPR, 10-21-24) Two weeks before the presidential election, Donald Trump has used his most recent appearances on podcast and cable interviews to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents, fellow Americans he calls “the enemy from within.” Vice President Kamala Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted,” he says. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said last year. A review of Trump’s rally speeches, press conferences, interviews and social media posts shows that the former president has repeatedly indicated that he would use federal law enforcement as part of a campaign to exact “retribution.”
• How to Prevent the Worst From Happening (Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, 10-24) On just one issue (immigration): "Trump is cut from a very different cloth. He curtailed legal immigration during his presidency. Temporary visas for highly skilled noncitizen workers were reduced. Refugee admissions were slashed. Trump, who peddled outrageous lies against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, says he plans to strip them of their legal status. (At his rallies, Trump has whipped the crowds into a frenzy, getting them to chant, “Send them back! Send them back! Send them back!”)
Support for that paragraph:
---President Trump Reduced Legal Immigration. He Did Not Reduce Illegal Immigration (Cato Institute)
---Visa denial rates for highly skilled workers were already hurting Texas businesses before Trump administration ordered new limits (Texas Tribune)
---What Did America Lose from Trump’s Mass Exclusion of Refugees? It Includes Billions of Dollars per Year (Center for Global Development)
---Trump says he would revoke the temporary protective status of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. (Libbey Dean)
---Trump urges getting Haitian migrants out of Springfield, Ohio (X.com) One comment: "Meanwhile the residents of Springfield, OH are rallying around the Haitians."
• This Is Not the End of America (McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, 11-1-24) "Trump has, in his third campaign, been more explicit than ever about his illiberal designs. He has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists, and revoking broadcast licenses for TV networks whose news coverage he doesn’t like." But "The power of the people doesn’t disappear overnight just because the White House is occupied by an illiberal leader."
• Who REALLY Knows Trump? Maggie Haberman Does (YouTube video, Maggie Haberman with Anthony Anthony Scaramucci ("The Mooch"), 6-20-23, 59 minutes) An excellent overview of the man.
• Maggie Haberman, the Confidence Man’s Chronicler (Katy Waldman, New Yorker, 1-7-23) In her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Haberman 'presents Trump as a bullshit artist whose grand theme is his own greatness. Trump, Haberman writes, “was usually selling, saying whatever he had to in order to survive life in ten-minute increments.” He “was interested primarily in money, dominance, power, bullying, and himself.”
'Haberman sees herself as a demystifier. Her coverage is often grounded in statements about Trump's character—that he thrives on chaos but loves routine, or that he stirs up infighting among his cronies. When I asked her about these conceptual scoops, she corrected me: "They're contextual scoops."
'Context is key to Haberman's project. A characteristic article, which she co-wrote in July of 2017, emphasized that Donald Trump, Jr.,'s huddle with a Kremlin-linked lawyer proved "unusual for a political campaign" but "consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with." It was a quintessential Haberman balancing act, which underlined both the meeting's extraordinary nature (for Washington) and the mundane pattern that it fit (for the Trumps). A reader wondering whether to be surprised by such carelessness, such corruption, gets her answer: yes and no.'
• Maggie Haberman on What an Unleashed Trump Might Do (YouTube, The Ezra Klein Show, 10-25-24) This conversation was taped before Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly went on the record saying that Trump met the definition of a fascist and that the former president had told him, “You know, Hitler did some good things, too.”
"His relationship to the truth is what he can get away with, and what he can get away with saying. He does not look at truth the way most people do."
What if he loses [in 2024]? "He'll still be dealing with prosecutions, although they're in limbo. He will face a sentencing in New York, maybe... "He has said he won't run again. I am very skeptical...I suspect he will say that he will run again, because it freezes the field for two years, and the Republican party is the most successful endeavor he has ever had."
• White people without college degrees (men more than women) are Trump's most reliable demographic.
• Trump claims abortion is infanticide at election events (KFF Health Misinformation Monitor, 10-24-24) False claims about abortions later in pregnancy are often spread to distort perceptions of when and how often pregnant people have abortions. Some have exaggerated these claims even further, falsely stating that individuals seek abortions after birth. During the presidential debate on September 10, former President Trump falsely claimed that Democrats support "abortion after birth," equating it to execution.
• Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio’s Conservative Provocateur, Dies at 70 (Robert D. McFadden, NY Times, 2-17-21) A longtime favorite of the right, he was a furious critic of Barack Obama and a full-throated cheerleader for Donald J. Trump. For more than three decades he led attacks on liberals, Democrats, feminists, environmentalists and many others. Using often misogynistic and racist language and trafficking in conspiracy theories, he pushed conservative talk radio into extreme right-wing territory while building a regular audience of as many as 15 million Americans. In the Limbaugh lexicon, advocates for the homeless were “compassion fascists,” women who favored abortion were “feminazis,” environmentalists were “tree-hugging wackos.”
• Trump’s closing argument: full-throated fascism (Robert Reich, 10-24) Trump's fascism is now in the open. On Sunday, Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that the biggest problem on Election Day will “not be the people who have come in, who are destroying our country,” but, rather “the people from within — we have some very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
"Retired General Mark A. Milley, whom Trump picked to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that former president Donald Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” in new comments voicing his mounting alarm at the prospect of the Republican nominee’s election to another term (according to a forthcoming book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward)."
• Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 10-18-24) 'The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s
and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
'This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” '
"His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity."
• Trump gets profane at Catholic charity dinner (Peter Weber, The Week, 10-18-24) Trump "rushed through prepared remarks, stumbling at times as he read through pointed political jokes, bitter grievances and crude and at times profane personal attacks," The New York Times said. He "seemed most energized when he ditched his script, caught between being an insult comic or just being insulting."
• E.P.A., Just Rebounding From Trump Years, Faces an Uncertain Future (Lisa Friedman, NY Times, 10-29-24) Perhaps like few other federal agencies, the E.P.A. has been targeted by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies for a wholesale makeover.
If Mr. Trump returns to the White House, his allies have said they will do a more methodical job of reversing climate policies than they did in his first term, when they rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations they said were hampering the economy, only to watch from the sidelines as President Biden restored most of them. A rundown on what would be targeted.
• Inside a Trump Ad Saying Harris Will Raise Taxes and He Will Cut Them (Jonathan Swan, NY Times, 10-3-24)
Donald J. Trump’s campaign plans to spend millions on a deceptive anti-Harris ad, using a truncated quote (“Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes”), a deceptive truncation of the actual sentence in a NY Times article: “Harris is seeking to significantly raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.”
• Jailed reporters, silenced networks: What Trump says he'd do to the media if elected (David Folkenflik, Media, NPR, 10-22-24) In one recent interview, Trump said that if “radical left lunatics” disrupt the election, “it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
• Trump has made more than 100 threats to prosecute or punish perceived enemies (Tom Dreisbach, All Things Considered, NPR, 10-21-24) A review of Trump’s rally speeches, press conferences, interviews and social media posts shows that the former president has repeatedly indicated that he would use federal law enforcement as part of a campaign to exact “retribution.”
• The Supreme Court Just Made the Prospect of a Second Trump Term Even Scarier Than It Already Was (Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, 7-1-24) "Since the day he left office in 2021—just two weeks after he inspired a deadly attack on the US Capitol—the idea of a second term for Donald Trump has been a fully terrifying prospect. Not just because his response to losing the 2020 election was to sic a bloodthirsty mob on Congress, but also because of his vow to use the government to prosecute his enemies, his plans for mass deportations and detention camps, his chilling take on reproductive rights, his worrisome affection for Vladimir Putin, and his intent to fire thousands of civil servants who actually know what they’re doing and replace them with people whose main qualification is undying loyalty...
But with its ruling "agreeing on Trump’s claims of 'absolute immunity,' the Court’s six conservatives effectively destroyed the federal election-subversion case against Trump, which at best will now take place after November, and at worst will be consigned to the scrap heap of justice. Even more alarmingly, they basically gave Trump the green light to break whatever laws he wants in a second term by saying that presidents are immune from “criminal prosecution for actions” that fall under 'official' duties. If that strikes you as a terrible precedent to set, and one that could be easily exploited, you’re not alone."
• Trump Guilty on All Counts in Hush-Money Case (Jonah E. Bromwich and Ben Protess, NY Times, 5-30-24) Mr. Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records by a jury of 12 New Yorkers, who deliberated over two days to reach a decision in a case rife with descriptions of secret deals, tabloid scandal and an Oval Office pact with echoes of Watergate. The former president sat largely expressionless, a glum look on his face, after the jury issued its verdict. Alvin Bragg was vindicated. Trump will now experience life as a felon. The nation is now in uncharted waters.
• The problem with covering a monster masquerading as a buffoon (Lucian Truscott Newsletter, 10-8-24) “Donald Trump is the Wonderbra of American politics. He pushes everything Up and Out and In Your Face. But you know what’s left when the Wonderbra comes off, don’t you? Donald Trump sure as hell does.”
• Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, 9-2020) The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.
• Ex-president, felon, candidate: 5 takeaways from Trump’s conviction. (Jesse McKinley and Kate Christobek, NY Times, 5-30-24)A grueling trial ended suddenly. Trump and his supporters are furious. Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump's 2024 presidential campaign? Can a convicted felon even run for office?
• Trump Is Guilty, but Voters Will Be the Final Judge (David Remnick, New Yorker, 6-10-24) The jury has convicted the former President of thirty-four felony counts in his New York hush-money trial. Now the American people will decide to what extent they care.
• Trump sways his way into final two weeks of campaign as Kamala surges toward the finish line (Lucian K Truscott IV, 10-18-24) 'While he was president, Trump was famously disinterested in the mechanics of governing and managed to take more than 300 days off to play golf during his four years in office. He has seemed equally disinterested in presenting his plans if he is elected president to fans at his rallies, often veering off into disjointed orations about the fictional Hannibal Lecter, shark attacks on electric boats, and Kamala Harris’ “radical Marxist professor” father.'
• Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age (Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman,Videos by Chevaz Clarke and Aaron Byrd, NY Times, 10-6-24) With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years. And remember: A vote for Trump is also a vote for JD Vance and his patron Peter Thiel.
• When Trump Rants, This Is What I Hear (Carlos Lozada, Opinion, NY Times, 10-13-24)
'Six years before Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, began spreading rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Trump complained in an Oval Office meeting that he didn’t like admitting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador or African countries. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” the president asked, as he rejected a bipartisan immigration proposal. With little subtlety, he said he’d rather draw from Norway. “Why do we need more Haitians?” he reiterated. “Take them out.” '
“Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America,” Oscar Handlin wrote in “The Uprooted,” his 1952 work. “Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
• Slurring Trump's unhinged, endless RNC speech terrifies world (David Pakman show, 7-19-24, after assassination attempt) The best thing that has happened for Democrats in the last three weeks is Donald Trump's record duration 93-minute, rambling, slurring, soaking wet, dishonest and disorganized Republican convention speech. It was such a disaster, claiming it would be a new tone, getting away from the divisive rhetoric...It was essentially Trump's standard speech, delivered with a flatter sort of affect, to account for the serious and somber nature of the post assassination attempt environment, and riddled with the very same lies and grievances and distortions that we've become accustomed to...Trump confusing artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. As is often the case, Donald Trump taking the stage like he is some kind of cult leader."
• Tracking the Trump investigations and where they stand (Washington Post)
(Derek Hawkins, Nick Mourtoupalas and Natalie Vineberg)
A helpful calendar, with useful background information, presumably to be kept up-to-date.
• Keeping Track of the Trump Criminal Cases (The New York Times) "Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump?
The New York Times is here to help.
Key Cases and Inquiries: The former president faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.
Case Tracker: Trump is at the center of four criminal investigations.
Keep track of the developments in each here.
• As President, Trump Demanded Investigations of Foes. He Often Got Them. (Michael S. Schmidt, NY Times, 9-21-24) He has threatened to target his perceived enemies if elected again. A look at his time in the White House shows how readily he could do so.
Here Are Cases of Trump Rivals Who Were Subject to Investigation (Michael S. Schmidt and Matthew Cullen, NY Times, 9-21-24)
—James B. Comey declined to recommend prosecuting Hillary Clinton, opened an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, refused a loyalty pledge to Mr. Trump and bucked pressure to drop an investigation into Mr. Trump’s national security adviser.
—Andrew G. McCabe (Deputy F.B.I. director) was investigated by the Justice Department, fired and subjected to I.R.S. audit. Peter Strzok (lead F.B.I. agent on Clinton and Russia investigations) exchanged text messages with another F.B.I. official that were highly critical of Mr. Trump. Because of his dismissal, Mr. Strzok lost benefits and his pension. He racked up over a million dollars in legal fees...
—John F. Kerry, Obama's secretary of state, helped negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran while serving under President Barack Obama. After leaving office, he publicly criticized Mr. Trump for wanting to pull out of the deal, and he maintained some contacts with Iranian diplomats. At Trump's request he was investigated by the Justice Department. "The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to prosecute Mr. Kerry. But the Trump Justice Department did not give up on trying to bring charges. Attorney General William P. Barr took the case to the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland, where the top prosecutor there came to the same conclusion as the federal prosecutors in New York and declined to charge Mr. Kerry."
—"Mr. Trump sought to portray Hillary Clinton as corrupt throughout the 2016 campaign. Federal prosecutors and a special counsel examined nearly all the issues and conspiracy theories Mr. Trump raised about Mrs. Clinton, her campaign and the Clinton Foundation, including the Clinton campaign’s role in gathering information during the 2016 campaign about ties between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia and providing it to the F.B.I.... She was never charged with anything."
—The Justice Department subpoenaed phone and email records of journalists from CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times who covered the Trump presidency and the Russia investigation aggressively and used material that Mr. Trump felt had been leaked to hurt him. Mr. Trump publicly called the media the enemy of the people and repeatedly pushed aides to use the Justice Department to go after reporters who were writing damaging and embarrassing stories about him. Lawyers for the media companies were forced to secretly fight the Justice Department to stop them from obtaining the records. The Biden administration subsequently banned the use of subpoenas, warrants or court orders to seize reporters’ communications records or demand their notes or testimony in an effort to uncover confidential sources in leak investigations.
—Michael D. Cohen (Trump's former lawyer and fixer) pleaded guilty to federal charges in Trump's hush money case, served a prison sentence, and faced Trump's retaliatory effort to stop him from publishing anti-Trump book. While in prison, he was told by Bureau of Prisons officials that in order to remain out of prison he had to sign an agreement saying that he would not publish the book while still serving his sentence. Mr. Cohen refused to sign the agreement and was thrown back in prison. Days later, a federal judge freed him, ruling that the decision to put him back behind bars amounted to retaliation. The judge said that he had never seen the federal government try to reach such an agreement with a convict.
—John R. Bolton, Trump's national security adviser, wrote a highly unflattering book about Mr. Trump that was published during the 2020 election. "A federal judge refused to halt the publication. Mr. Bolton was never charged with mishandling classified information. The Biden Justice Department dropped the suit to recoup the book’s profits. The matter cost Mr. Bolton and his publisher hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees."
—Omarosa Manigault Newman (a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who then worked in the White House communications office in 2017, as Trump's White House aide. She faced civil suit by the Justice Department for breaking what Trump considered a confidentiality agreement and had to pay a 61,000 fine. 'After her book came out, Mr. Trump called her “that dog” and a “crazed, crying lowlife.” '
—Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, former adviser to Melania Trump, the first lady, faced a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to recoup her profits from a book critical of Trump and his wife...The Biden Justice Department later dropped the suit.
• In four years, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims (Fact Checker, Washington Post, updated 1-20-21) The Fact Checker’s database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump while in office.
• Vance Rewrites History About Trump and Obamacare[it].” (KFF Health News, 9-24-24, with PolitiFact) Vance contends that Donald Trump could have destroyed the Affordable Care Act, but “he chose to build upon [it].” Fact-checking sites: "We rate Vance’s statement False." And various articles supporting that judgment are linked to, including these:
---Six ways Trump has sabotaged the Affordable Care Act (Frank J. Thompson, Brookings Institute, 10-9-20) and
---Vance: Trump’s Health-Care Plan Is to Let Insurers Charge More for Preexisting Conditions (Jonathan Chait, Intelligencer, New York, 9-17-24)
• Pro-Trump Media Firm Abruptly Folds After Russia Scheme Exposed (John DeVore, New Republic, 9-6-24) "The conservative media network Tenet Media folded Thursday night, just one day after the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing it of being funded by Russian state-controlled media, according to Tenet Media field reporter Tayler Hansen. Tenet is just the latest flavor of Russian-backed misinformation campaign that has plagued American politics, but it is a sign of just how sizable the foreign country’s budget is in 2024 for influencing the November election."
• Trump’s Anti-Haitian Hate Has Deep American Roots (Jonathan M. Katz, New Republic, 9-16-24) The former president’s grotesque demagoguery is just the latest in a long line of vicious attacks on residents and immigrants from the island nation. In July 2024, J.D. Vance brought up Springfield in a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a far-right gathering obsessed, as the journalist Sarah Jones observed, with fertility, race, and the specter of a “post-white America.” Vance held up the Ohio town and its struggles to house and care for the new arrivals as evidence that immigration “has made our societies poor, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced.”
"This was a classic white supremacist argument. Vance’s focus on Springfield’s Haitian community catalyzed a reaction from the most extreme elements of the right. Trump named Vance his running mate shortly thereafter. A.I.-generated memes of cats, some being rescued by Donald Trump from savage-looking, shirtless Black men, proliferated. On September 9, Vance boosted the pet-eating conspiracy in a post on X.
"Baseless hatred of immigrants has been the driving force of Trump’s campaigns since he coasted down the golden escalator. They are the scapegoat for every problem that MAGA world encounters, be it real or phantasmic: housing prices, the labor market, health problems, bureaucratic dysfunction at state and federal agencies."
• Special Counsel Jack Smith refocuses Trump indictment (Lucian K. Truscott IV, 8-28-24) "The Supreme Court ruled that Trump was immune from prosecution for any acts he took as president with respect to his executive duties, specifically those involving the Department of Justice. So, just to sum up, the Supreme Court in effect gave a green light to Trump, if he is returned to the presidency, to meet with his new attorney general and order him to file indictments against his political enemies, because that would be an “official act” according to the Supreme Court.
"The superseding indictment maintains the charges against Trump for pressuring Vice President Pence to rule in his favor during the certification of electoral ballots on Jan. 6, and the indictment still includes Trump’s interactions with state representatives attempting to get them to hold fake hearings on fake election fraud. Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” eleven thousand-plus votes so Trump could be declared winner in Georgia, is still part of the superseding indictment as well.
• Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos (Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented, 8-10-24) "Because the Supreme Court found that official acts Trump took as president cannot be prosecuted because he is immune, the Special Counsel is letting everyone know from the get-go that the person they are indicting was the candidate for president in 2020, and the acts charged in the indictment were taken not by a president, but by a candidate for president.
Deep State Battle: Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could fight the so-called deep state on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
New Videos: Dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025 were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
Advice Given: “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
(Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented, ProPublica, 8-10-24)
The videos are part of an ongoing effort to recruit and train thousands of future conservative appointees. Despite Donald Trump’s efforts to disavow Project 2025, most of the speakers in the videos have previously worked for the former president.Click on the links on that website (not this one) to watch these videos:
Titles of Project 2024 Private Training Videos
The History of the Conservative
Movement Appointees and Policymaking
Conserving America
Appointees and Policymaking
Appointees and the Federal Workforce
Presidential Transitions and Appointee Hiring
Federal Background Checks and Security Clearances
What It’s Like to Serve as an Appointee
Time Management for Appointees
The Art of Professionalism
Staffing an Office
Left-Wing Code Words and Biased Language
How to Work With the Media
Government Oversight and Investigations
The Federal Budget Process
The Administrative State
What It’s Like to Serve as an Appointee
Federal Regulatory Process
Lessons Learned From Trump Administration About Passing New Regulations
Executive Orders
Advancing the President’s Agenda
Navigating Policymaking
Working With Congress
Coalition Building
Social Media Messaging
• Donald Trump's First Term Is a Warning (NY Times Interactive, 7-18-24, an amazing illustrated critical timeline) This week, Republicans have tried to rewrite the four years of Trump's presidency as a time of unparalleled peace, prosperity and tranquility: "the strongest economy in history," as Senator Katie Britt of Alabama put it. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia offered Mr. Trump's first term as an example of "common-sense conservative leadership." The record of what Mr. Trump actually did in office bears little resemblance to that description.
Under his leadership, the country lurched from one crisis to the next, from the migrant families separated at the border to the sudden spike in prices caused by his trade war with China to the reckless mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. And he showed, over and over, how little respect he has for the Constitution and those who take an oath to defend it. For Americans who may have forgotten that time, or pushed it from memory, we offer this timeline of his presidency. See highlights of Trump's first term (blog post on Writers and Editors, based on the extremely useful NY Times piece ).
• Trump Can't Get Over Biden, Project 2025 Videos Leak, and Trump Glitches with Elon (Jon Stewart and Dest Lydic, share the downside on Trump, on The Daily Show, 8-17-24, 35 minutes) Kamala Harris's campaign is crushing it, and Trump is spinning out. Jon Stewart and Desi Lydic cover Trump's week of flops, including his continued fixation on Joe Biden, denial that he has anything to do with Project 2025, (even though their leaked training videos feature every person he's ever met), a glitch-filled X interview with Elon Musk, and his off-the-rails "intellectual" economy speech about Tic Tacs. If you're hesitating about who to vote for, watch this.
• Mary Trump Interview with George Stephanopoulos (YouTube video, nearly 1-hour interview, ABC News, 7-16-20) A negative view of Trump and of his father.
• Donald Trump defeats niece Mary Trump in lawsuit over inheritance (Jonathan Stempel, Reuters, 11-15-22)
• Check this out: www.neverwalz.com/
• Why isn’t the media reporting on Trump’s growing dementia? (Robert Reich, 7-8-24) "In October, Trump warned his supporters that Biden will lead America into World War Two. True, Biden has occasional difficulty keeping his train of thought, as we witnessed during the debate. But Biden has gotten major bills passed. He’s been negotiating with world leaders. In terms of running the government, Biden has been functioning as well if not better than most presidents.
"Trump has said that under his administration, “If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”
"Trump has claimed that Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, is “very smart.” That whales are being killed by windmills. That he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. That the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed." Etc.
Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.
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• Keeping Track of the Trump Criminal Cases (New York Times, updated regularly)
• Donald Trump’s Trial of the Century (Eric Lach, NY Times, 4-14-24) Manhattan prosecutors have argued that the Stormy Daniels case—the first criminal trial of a former President in American history—is about much more than hush money. "The argument that the prosecutors have made in court filings is focussed on something closer to election interference. The case is about Trump lying his way into office...And legal experts believe that a conviction is likely. As a first-time offender, jail time isn’t a sure thing. And the Constitution does not prohibit a convicted felon from serving as President."
• How has Donald Trump fared on the Truth-O-Meter? (PolitiFact, 9-29-20) "Since 2011, we’ve checked 853 statements by Trump. Of these, 618 ended up as either Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire, meaning that 72% of Trump’s statements ended up in the bottom half of our rating system." For more recent scores see Trumpometer More than half of his promises were broken.
• What Sentencing Could Look Like if Trump Is Found Guilty "The case focuses on alleged interference in the 2016 election, which consisted of a hush-money payment Michael Cohen, the former president’s fixer at the time, made in 2016 to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg is arguing that the cover-up cheated voters of the chance to fully assess Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
"To date, Mr. Trump has been unrepentant about the events alleged in this case. There is every reason to believe that will not change even if he is convicted, and lack of remorse is a negative at sentencing. Justice Merchan’s evaluation of Mr. Trump’s history and character may also be informed by the other judgments against him, including Justice Arthur Engoron’s ruling that Mr. Trump engaged in repeated and persistent business fraud, a jury finding that he sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll and a related defamation verdict by a second jury.
"Justice Merchan may also weigh the fact that Mr. Trump has been repeatedly held in contempt, warned, fined and gagged by state and federal judges. That includes for statements he made that exposed witnesses, individuals in the judicial system and their families to danger."
And from other sources:
• Catch Up on Where the Trump Investigations Stand (Ben Protess, Alan Feuer and Danny Hakim, NY Times, 2-12-24) Donald J. Trump has been sued in New York and indicted in Georgia, Florida, Manhattan and Washington, as federal and state prosecutors elsewhere have opened a number of investigations.
• Lawfare’s coverage of the Trump trials Coverage of the criminal indictments against former President Donald Trump in the Southern District of Florida, Washington, D.C., and Fulton County, Georgia. Much good information here, well-organized.
• Tracking the Trump criminal cases (Politico Status, charges, and strengths and weaknesses of each case, key players, prosecution, Trump's team, Who could pardon him.
• Tracking Trump's trials (NPR)
• Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance ( Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire, The President's Taxes, NY Times, 9-27-20) The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
'The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
'Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.'
• “The Apprentice,” Reviewed: The Immoral Makings of Donald Trump (Richard Brody, New Yorker, 10-10-24) In the film’s telling, Donald’s rise to success and fall into moral turpitude are linked by the bare-knuckle tactics with which Roy Cohn helps him make his fame and fortune. Donald, a worthy apprentice, ultimately runs his personal life in similarly ruthless fashion.
Back to Trump in general:
I provide these links (to both facts and opinion and, above, a guide to information on various Trump cases and investigations) because I have found myself occasionally arguing about the man. I admit bias, but where there is a solid argument for Trump's innocence, let me know. ~ P.M.
• Liz Cheney: "There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump. My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden's policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution." ~ quoted from The Choice Republicans Face (Charles Sykes, The Atlantic, 4-26-24) More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.
• Covering Trump: An oral history of an unforgettable campaign (Shelley Hepworth, Vanessa Gezari, Kyle Pope, Cory Schouten, Carlett Spike, David Uberti and Pete Vernon, Columbia Journalism Review, 11-22-16. Series reported in partnership with Guardian US). Did Trump's tactics wound the media?
"You hear him talk for five minutes and understand that he does not believe in free and independent media. We know how threatening that is, not just to journalists, but to the idea of having accountability and the idea of democratic governance. That's part of what we all react to viscerally."
• On guns, abortion and voting rights, Trump leaves lasting mark on U.S. judiciary (Lawrence Hurley, Reuters, 1-15-21) Earlier in his presidency, Trump often touted judicial appointments as one of his greatest achievements in office. But after losing the Nov. 3 presidential election, he turned on judges, including Supreme Court justices, who repeatedly rejected his efforts to overturn the result as he pushed false claims of widespread voting fraud and irregularities.
"He misses the fundamentals, much less the subtleties, of the independent judiciary," Wheeler said. "Those concepts are just foreign to him."
• Drawing The Final Hours at the Trump Trial (Liza Donnelly, The People Rest, 5-21-24) The people rest.
• Trump is out of his mind and desperate (Robert Reich, 3-17-24)
''At a rally today outside the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, Trump warned that “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath … for the country.”
'He also warned that if he didn’t win, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”
'In the rest of the speech he repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been utterly discredited.
'He praised the people serving sentences in connection with the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol — calling them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commending their spirit, and promising to help them if elected in November.
'He cast migrants as threats to American citizens — claiming without evidence that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”
'Trump is clearly desperate. He knows that his future freedom and his fortune both depend on winning in November. He has no qualms about turning Americans against Americans to achieve this goal. Apparently he is even willing to fuel violence, a second civil war. Yesterday, Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, showed enough integrity to refuse to endorse Trump.'
• Letters from an American from Heather Cox Richardson's post 5-24-24:
"Trump himself is a problem for the party. His base is absolutely loyal, but he is a deeply problematic candidate for anyone else. As Susan Glasser outlined in the New Yorker yesterday, in the past week he chickened out of testifying in his ongoing criminal trial for paying hush money to an adult film actress to keep damaging information from voters in 2016 after insisting for weeks that he would. He talked about staying in office for a third term, ran a video promising that the United States will become a “unified Reich” when he wins reelection, and accused President Joe Biden of trying to have him assassinated. He will be 78 in a few weeks and is having trouble speaking.
"MAGA Republicans know their agenda is unpopular, and they are working to seize power through voter suppression, violence, gerrymandering, and packing the legal system. But there are signs a bipartisan defense of democracy may be gathering strength."
• Trump Is Not America’s Le Pen. He's Worse. (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 6-11-24) "Donald Trump is not like these politicians. The former president is not tacking to the center, and he is not trying to appear less confrontational. Nor does he seek to embrace existing alliances. On the contrary, almost every day he sounds more extreme, more unhinged, and more dangerous."
"Even Orbán, who has gone the furthest in destroying his country’s institutions and who has rewritten Hungary’s constitution to benefit himself, doesn’t brag openly about wanting to be an autocrat. Trump does. People around him speak openly about wanting to destroy American democracy too. None of this seems to hurt him with voters, who appear to welcome this destructive, radical extremism, or at least not to mind it."
• For the Women Who Accused the Trump Campaign of Harassment, It’s Been More Harassment (Marilyn W. Thompson, ProPublica, 5-23-24) Nearly eight years ago, convinced that she’d been treated unfairly, Jessica Denson sued Donald Trump’s campaign for workplace harassment. Then she discovered the lengths Trump’s attorneys would go to hit back — and their unwillingness to stop.
• The magnitude of Pence refusing to endorse Trump (Aaron Blake, Washington Post, 3-16-24) “It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” Mike Pence told Fox News on Friday. "Pence’s lack of an endorsement also highlights the chasm between GOP elected officials and those who actually served alongside Trump in his Cabinet. NBC News last summer reached out to 44 former Cabinet officials and found that only four of them would commit to backing Trump in what was then the early stages of the primary contest. Many have turned into strong Trump critics, like former chief of staff John F. Kelly and former defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper."
• Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 3-5-24) Super Tuesday. Just as voters don’t appear to know much about what the [Biden] administration has done to make their lives better, a recent study from a Democratic pollster suggests that voters don’t seem to know much about Trump’s statements attacking democracy. When informed of them, their opinion of Trump falls.
"Trump has called for mass deportations of immigrants and foreign-born U.S. citizens; on February 29, he said he would use local police as well as federal troops to round people up and move them to camps for deportation. Asked yesterday by a Newsmax host if he would “order mass deportations if you win the White House,” Trump answered: “Oh, day one. We have no choice. And we’ll start with the bad ones. And you know who knows who they are? Local police. Local police have to be given back their authority, and they have to be given back their respect and immunity.”
"On the one hand [Biden], caps to credit card late fees and an attempt to address price gouging; on the other hand [Trump], local police with immunity rounding up millions of people and putting them in camps, for deportation. And, in between the two, an election. People had better start paying attention."
• Trump-O-Meter (PolitiFact) Tracking 100 promises President Trump made during his 2016 campaign. "tracking 100 promises President Trump made during his 2016 campaign.For each campaign promise, our reporters research the issue and then rate it based on whether the promise was achieved: Promise Kept, Promise Broken, Compromise, Stalled, In the Works or Not Yet Rated. Go thru the promises and the ratings he got for each of them.
• How Far Trump Would Go (Eric Cortellessa, Time Magazine, 4-30-24)
"What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen."
'Trump would enter a second term backed by a slew of policy shops staffed by loyalists who have drawn up detailed plans in service of his agenda, which would concentrate the powers of the state in the hands of a man whose appetite for power appears all but insatiable. “I don’t think it’s a big mystery what his agenda would be,” says his close adviser Kellyanne Conway.'“But I think people will be surprised at the alacrity with which he will take action.”
"Every election is billed as a national turning point. This time that rings true. To supporters, the prospect of Trump 2.0, unconstrained and backed by a disciplined movement of true believers, offers revolutionary promise. To much of the rest of the nation and the world, it represents an alarming risk."
• How the Biden-Trump Border Visits Revealed a Deeper Divide (Shane Goldmacher, NY Times, 2-29-24) Their approaches to immigration represent a test of voters’ appetite for the messiness of democracy, pitting the president’s belief in legislating against his rival’s pledge to be a “Day 1” dictator. “The difference is between a president who is trying to address a complex policy issue through our political system and one who is promising quasi-authoritarian solutions.”
• I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 3-14-24)
The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024.
"Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”; “I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind, “weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”
"Indeed, Trump’s efforts this year to blame Biden for literally everything have taken on a baroque quality even by the modern-day standards of the party that introduced Willie Horton and Swift-boating into the political lexicon."
• US could have averted 40% of Covid deaths, says panel examining Trump's policies (Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian, 2-10-21) The country began the pandemic with a degraded public health infrastructure, leading to more deaths than other high-income countries. The US could have averted 40% of the deaths from Covid-19, had the country’s death rates corresponded with the rates in other high-income G7 countries. In seeking to respond to the pandemic, Trump has been widely condemned for not taking the pandemic seriously enough soon enough, spreading conspiracy theories, not encouraging mask wearing and undermining scientists and others seeking to combat the virus’s spread.
• Trump's brain getting worse QUICKLY, says psychologist Harry Segal, clinical psychologist and Senior Lecturer in the Psychology Department at Cornell University and the Department of Psychiatry at Cornell Weill Medical School, joins David Pakman to compare and contrast what is being labeled "cognitive decline" with regard to both Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.
Trump's decision not to participate in debates was smart. He's undeniably a successful self-promoter. But you are unlikely to see him in a debate with Biden. Remember his 2016 speech, saying I'm smarter than the generals (he believes it; he's a narcissistic person, with delusions about himself). He's a pathological liar. He believes his lies about himself. He never admits he's wrong. He is already a very erratic, mentally challenged person who shouldn't be anywhere near the White House. The tanning dye is to cue Americans to think he's younger but it's not well-applied (watch the hairline). He gets historical details wrong, mistaking one person for another. "I like making deals. That's how I get my kicks." But the kicks never lasted long. No amount of money, success, or attention was ever enough.
Joe Biden sometimes seems to trail off or mutter and sometimes seems confused about what he's trying to say. But his 2024 State of the Union speech (read it here) was at night, it was long, and he was incredible and quick. His badgering the Republicans and catching Marjorie Taylor Greene was impressive. "You really can't do that if you're suffering from major cognitive impairments." Biden is a more honest person who projects who he really is.
• Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This *(Charles Homans, NY Times,4-27-24) No major American presidential candidate has talked like he now does at his rallies — not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Donald Trump himself. "We're going to win this election because we have no choice. If we lose this election, we're not going to have a country left."
• ‘I am your retribution’: Trump rules supreme at CPAC as he relaunches bid for White House (David Smith, The Guardian, 3-5-23) Quoting Trump, the great divider: “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the war mongers... We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country … We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media. We will expose and appropriately deal with the Rinos [Republicans in name only]. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House. And we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all.”
• Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and The Unitary Executive (Stephen Skowronek, Oxford University Press) "As the nation’s chief executive, Donald Trump pitted himself repeatedly against the institutions and personnel of the executive branch. In the process, two once-obscure concepts came center stage in an eerie faceoff.
On one side was the specter of a “Deep State” conspiracy-administrators threatening to thwart the will of the people and undercut the constitutional authority of the president they elected to lead them. On the other side was a raw personalization of presidential power, one that a theory of “the unitary executive” gussied up and allowed to run roughshod over reason and the rule of law. The Deep State and the unitary executive framed every major contest of the Trump presidency. Like phantom twins, they drew each other out and wrestled to light basic issues of governance long suppressed.
"Though this conflict reached a fever pitch during the Trump presidency, it is not new. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and The Unitary Executive is about the breakdown of settlements and the abiding vulnerabilities of a Constitution that gave scant attention to administrative power. Rather than simply dump on Trump, the authors provide a richly historical perspective on the conflicts that rocked his presidency, and they explain why, if left untamed, the phantom twins will continue to pull the American government apart.
• A Financial Reckoning for Donald Trump (John Cassidy, New Yorker, 3-19-24) The former President’s inability to secure a $464-million bond in his New York civil fraud case is a reminder of the deep legal and financial peril he’s in. In their court filing, "Trump’s lawyers said that the Trump Organization had worked with four insurance brokers and approached thirty companies that provide bonds, but none of them had agreed to supply one for the James case....this latest development is testament to the formidable powers to go after fraudulent businesses that the New York attorney general possesses under state law. For decades, Trump managed to maneuver around this threat, despite allegations that he routinely stiffed contractors and engaged in other unscrupulous behavior."
• Even FOX can't save Trump! Anchors struggle to stop Trump disaster(The Bulwark, July 2024) While Donald Trump brags about his own intelligence, he doesn't have the intelligence to answer questions Fox News anchors directly coach to him. Will Saletan explains. "He's just a mean, petty, juvenile SOB."
• What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term (Carlos Lozada, Opinion, NY Times, 2-29-24) it is easy to imagine “Mandate for Leadership” wielding influence in a second Trump term. It is an off-the-shelf governing plan for a leader who took office last time with no clear plan and no real ability to govern. This book attempts to supply him with both--for a conservative agenda.
"There is plenty here that one would expect from a contemporary conservative agenda: calls for lower corporate taxes and against abortion rights; criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and the "climate fanaticism" of the Biden administration; and plans to militarize the southern border and target the "administrative state," which is depicted here as a powerful and unmanageable federal bureaucracy bent on left-wing social engineering. Yet what is most striking about the book is not the specific policy agenda it outlines but how far the authors are willing to go in pursuit of that agenda and how reckless their assumptions are about law, power and public service."
• The Untold Story of the Network That Took Down Roe v. Wade (Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, NY Times, 5-8-24) A conservative Christian coalition’s plan to end the federal right to abortion began just days after Trump’s 2016 election. From the book The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America "Great reporting by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer on how conservatives overturned Roe while everyone else slept." – Jane Mayer, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Money
• Harris Backs Slashing Medical Debt. Trump’s ‘Concepts’ Worry Advocates. (Noam N. Levey, KFF Health News, 10-13-24)
Patient advocates "fear that if former President Donald Trump wins a second term, he will weaken insurance protections by allowing states to cut their Medicaid programs or by scaling back federal aid to help Americans buy health insurance. That would put millions of people at greater risk of sinking into debt if they get sick.
"In his first term, Trump and congressional Republicans in 2017 tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a move that independent analysts concluded would have stripped health coverage from millions of Americans and driven up costs for people with preexisting medical conditions, such as diabetes and cancer.
"Trump and his GOP allies continue to attack the ACA, and the former president has said he wants to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act, which also includes aid to help low- and middle-income Americans buy health insurance.
• 9 Things Musk and Trump Said About Climate Change, Annotated Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong, NY Timers, 8-13-24) In a conversation on X, Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk spoke for a bit about climate change. Here’s what they got wrong and what they got right.
• Trump’s Energy Guy Talked a Green Game but Now Sells Big Oil Priorities (Lisa Friedman, NY Times, 6-9-24) Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota, has stepped into the spotlight as a cheerleader for oil and former President Donald J. Trump.
"In April, Governor Burgum helped to bring oil and gas executives to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump's private resort in Florida, for a now-infamous dinner during which Mr. Trump suggested that they raise $1 billion for his campaign. Mr. Trump told the executives they would save far more than that in tax breaks and legal fees after he repealed Mr. Biden's climate agenda, according to several people who were present and who requested anonymity to discuss a private event."
• Tony Schwartz: The Truth About Trump (YouTube video, speech at Oxford Union, Nov. 2016) The ghostwriter of "The Art of the Deal," the book Trump calls 'his proudest achievement.' "I'm here tonight because shortly before Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president back in July I made a decision to publicly renounce the book I had written and the man whose image and persona I had helped to shape and define. He is persevering, he is aggressive in pursuit of his goals. If he would lie about things that are so easy to disprove, he would lie about anything. Trump came out of the dark side of capitalism. If Trump loses the election, he will never acknowledge that he has lost the election.
• Trump's threat of mass deportation is a fearmongering hollow lie, and here is why (Lucian K. Truscott IV, 10-23-24) "Logistics is the reason Donald Trump will never, ever, even if he wins election and invokes the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, be able to deport the 15 million, or 20 million, or 25 million – whatever the number he throws out seemingly according to his mood or state of mental deterioration."
• Trump Fraud Trial Penalty Will Exceed $450 Million (Jonah E. Bromwich and Ben Protess, NY Times, 2-16-24) The ruling in Donald J. Trump’s civil fraud case could cost him all his available cash. The judge said that the former president’s “complete lack of contrition” bordered on pathological.
• Judge Engoron’s Ruling Is a Detailed Road Map to Trump’s Thievery (David Cay Johnston, Simply a Crook, TNR, 2-19-24) The $355 million judgment is bad enough. But if you want the full flavor of the Trump Organization’s chicanery, read what the judge had to say. "In justifying his findings of fact, New York Judge Arthur Engoron’s analysis of testimony in Trump’s seven-week civil fraud trial in Manhattan showed how everything Trump does is based on consistent and shameless cheating, deceiving, falsifying documents, and lying.
"The 92-page ruling establishes that Trump isn’t a business genius, a modern Midas who turns everything he touches to gold. Instead, the former TV entertainer and real estate mogul is simply a crook, a white-collar thief who uses flattery, threats, lies, and an ink pen to rip off everyone he can, particularly banks and insurance companies. Engoron’s opinion provides a road map to understanding Trump’s outrageous behavior and thus what we should expect from a second Trump administration.
"Trump, to use his words, does “whatever the hell” he wants. Trump is just being true to himself, whether cheating his niece Mary out of most of her inheritance; sexually assaulting women like E. Jean Carroll; making up lies about Carroll in hopes of discrediting her; or tricking banks, insurance companies, and our government into valuing his properties in ways that stuff greenbacks into his pockets."
"...The judge's opinion is a sequel to Trump's 1987 autobiography, The Art of The Deal, in which he brags about cheating at golf, deceiving business partners, and thumbing his nose at the law. That book is a guide not just to Trump's megalomaniacal ego but to how he serially ripped off unsuspecting people and then moved on to the next victim."
• Trump Media Is the New Bed Bath & Beyond (James Surowiecki, The Atlantic, 3-28-24) Donald Trump gets into the meme-stock business. Like GameStop and AMC before it, Trump Media trades not on fundamentals, but on emotion. Even if Trump Media can rely on Trump supporters to keep its stock up, at least for the moment, plenty of volatility is still in store, because speculators will look to cash in on the meme-stock mania by either riding the stock up or selling it short
• Pump and trump (Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with Andrea Bernstein and Meg Cramer, WNYC, and Peter Elkind, ProPublica, 10-17-18) Donald Trump claims he only licensed his name for real estate projects developed by others. But an investigation of a dozen Trump deals shows deep family involvement in projects that often involved deceptive practices. Trump’s licensing strategy originated with his early-2000s comeback, as “The Apprentice” propelled him to international TV stardom and restored luster to a reputation tarnished by multiple bankruptcies.
The New York Times published a 13,000-word examination of how Donald’s father, the late Fred Trump, and his estate, funneled millions of dollars to his children, in possible violation of tax rules and criminal laws. With copious documentation showing that Fred directed $413 million in today’s dollars to Donald — not the single loan for $1 million, with interest, that Donald has always claimed — it exploded Trump’s long-propagated claim that he is a self-made man.
This article examines another Trump claim: that his post-millennium comeback and global expansion rested on the brilliant purity of a licensing strategy that paid him millions simply for the use of his name. That, it turns out, is no truer than the notion that Donald Trump is self-made.
• Here Are the Trump Projects Where Ivanka and Her Dad Misled Buyers (Katherine Sullivan and Heather Vogell, ProPublica, 10-17-18) Read the Trumps’ false statements — and what the actual facts were. Part of a series exploring Trump business practices.
• For Donald Trump, the Recriminations Will Be Televised (James Poniewozik, NY Times, 2-17-24) The former president’s trials aren’t being aired. That isn’t stopping him from turning them into a political reality show. "The civil-fraud case against Donald J. Trump’s businesses in New York, in which he was ordered to pay a penalty of $355 million, was not televised. Neither was his civil trial for the defamation of E. Jean Carroll. Nor — barring an unlikely change in federal court policy — will be his looming federal election-interference trial.
But outside the courtroom, the show goes on.
"In each case, Mr. Trump has sought out the cameras, or brought in his own, to offer a stream-of-consciousness heave of legal complaints and re-election arguments. In the process, the former reality-TV host and current presidential candidate has turned his many legal cases into one-sided TV productions and campaign ads.
"To TV producers, because Mr. Trump is a former president, a candidate and high-profile defendant, his on-camera tirades are news. But there is also a kind of transaction at work. TV news craves conflict and active visuals. There are only so many times you can show a motorcade, or reporters cooling their heels in the street. Mr. Trump’s appearances give them sound, fury and B-roll.
""At the same time, Mr. Trump gets the kind of unfiltered access to the airwaves that networks were, once upon a brief time, wary of giving a candidate notorious for fabrications and conspiracy theories."
'A number of civil rights groups blame former President Donald J. Trump for creating an atmosphere of intolerance in America's schools. His promotion of what he called "patriotic education" — which sought to minimize the country's history of slavery — spurred conservative policymakers to support a series of efforts, including banning books, revising curriculums and challenging diversity programs...."We cannot underestimate the normalizing of intolerant behaviors..."' ~Strife in the Schools: Education Dept. Logs Record Number of Discrimination Complaints
• Trump, House Republicans plot to kill border deal (Stef W. Kight, Politics & Policy, Axios, 1-29-24 and ongoing) The migrant crisis at the border and in major U.S. cities is one of the most jeopardizing issues for Biden and Democrats this November. It's also Trump's marquee political issue. He has every incentive to keep it front and center as he heads toward a likely rematch against Biden. Biden has doubled down on a tougher border image in recent months, and has signaled his willingness to "shut down the border" if he's given new authority under the Senate agreement. But Republicans seem ready to walk away from the border deal."
• Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) on Trump reportedly discouraging a GOP border resolution before the election: “"The fact that [Trump] would communicate to Republican senators…that he doesn't want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling." (And not surprising.)
• Trump's extraordinary history lesson about airports and the Revolutionary War (Barbara Morrill, Daily Kos):
Do you want as president again someone whose history adlibs are so bad?
"In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified Army out of the Revolutionary Forces encamped around Boston and New York, and named after the great George Washington, commander in chief. The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown.
"Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant."
• The Good Republicans’ Last Stand (David Frum, The Atlantic, 2-12-24) Will enough of Trump’s party finally be willing to stick up for Ukraine rather than follow his lead and bow to Russia?
• An Outburst by Trump on NATO May Push Europe to Go It Alone (David E. Sanger, NY Times, 2-11-24) [A shared link that should allow non-subscribers to read this piece.]
“Many were alarmed by comments that he would “encourage” Russia to attack U.S. allies that didn’t pay into NATO, but European leaders were already pondering the prospect of an alliance without the United States. “Long before Donald J. Trump threatened over the weekend that he was willing to let Russia 'do whatever the hell they want' against NATO allies that do not contribute sufficiently to collective defense, European leaders were quietly discussing how they might prepare for a world in which America removes itself as the centerpiece of the 75-year-old alliance.
“Even allowing for the usual bombast of one of his campaign rallies, where he made his declaration on Saturday, Mr. Trump may now force Europe’s debate into a far more public phase.
“So far the discussion in the European media has focused on whether the former president, if returned to office, would pull the United States out of NATO.
“But the larger implication of his statement is that he might invite President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to pick off a NATO nation, as a warning and a lesson to the 30 or so others about heeding Mr. Trump’s demands.”
• Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ (Jeffrey Goldberg,The Atlantic, 9-3-20) The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic. President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, saying “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
• I chatted with a courtroom sketch artist who draws Trump (Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, 1-25-24, illustrated with court drawings) Christine Cornell has been at this for nearly 50 years—and she's seen it all. "I've been getting a lot of emails from all over the country, especially since Trump became my most current news...." Asked What’s it like capturing someone [like Trump] who is such an emotional trigger for people:
CORNELL: "You know, his face is—everybody knows it. And he has about three expressions: One is just implacable. You don't know what the heck is going on. The other is angry, and the other is a smug smile."
• Trump Is the Greatest Evil! (YouTube video, Liz Cheney The Bulwark Podcast with Charlie Sykes, 12-6-23) Listen and follow the transcript.
• Republican Push for More Capital Punishment Echoes Crime Panic of the 1980s (Duncan Hosie, History News Network, 5-23-23 ) "And former president Donald Trump — who oversaw an unprecedented spate of executions in the final days of his presidency — has vowed to swiftly execute drug dealers if reelected. In private, Trump has reportedly proposed that the federal government bring back group executions and the guillotine, and televise executions, potentially even the grisly footage of inmates’ death throes."
---Michael Cohen and Rosie O’Donnell: A Love Story (Jacob Bernstein, NY Times, 5-15-24) For years, Donald J. Trump hurled insults her way. Now, she is BFF with his former enforcer.
---Donald Trump has been wrong on trade for 30 years (Andrew C. McKevitt, HNN, 7-30-18) "Although Trump never got his trade war in the 1980s, Japan’s rise to the status of an economic superpower, and its subsequent fall, offers lessons for the conflicts the president has provoked today. “Japan-bashers” such as Trump missed how the influx of Japanese commerce and culture was transforming social and economic life in the United States for the better, bringing jobs and goods that connected Americans to a rapidly globalizing world. Trump may have welcomed a trade war, but it would have threatened tens of thousands of American workers at new Japanese-owned manufacturing plants."
• How Joe Biden Could Address the Age Issue (Dhruv Khullar, New Yorker, 2-26-24) It "would be a mistake to cast concerns about Biden’s age as simply a distillation of biases against the elderly. Trump, if reëlected, would also finish his term as an octogenarian, but voters harbor considerably fewer misgivings about his age. (It’s possible that the question of age is overshadowed by Trump’s more general incoherence; earlier this month, he claimed that Democrats were trying to change the name of Pennsylvania, and encouraged Russia to attack U.S. allies.)...Some longevity researchers, having pored over publicly available medical information about Biden and Trump, have deemed both men “super-agers.”
• Jeff Greenfield On Trump and History (On The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan, 1-19-24) Excellent summary, but listen, also.
• How the Biden-Trump Border Visits Revealed a Deeper Divide (Shane Goldmacher, Politics, NY Times, 2-29-24) 'Their approaches to immigration represent a test of voters’ appetite for the messiness of democracy, pitting the president’s belief in legislating against his rival’s pledge to be a “Day 1” dictator. “What’s being proposed is more than a difference on immigration policy,” said Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth, who helped found a group that monitors American democracy. “The difference is between a president who is trying to address a complex policy issue through our political system and one who is promising quasi-authoritarian solutions.”
'For his part, Mr. Biden made the case on Thursday that his hands had been tied by the failure of a bipartisan border package that had been negotiated on Capitol Hill. The legislation would have increased border spending, made asylum claims harder, and stiffened fentanyl screening. It unraveled when Mr. Trump demanded its defeat.'
...'The thing about Mr. Trump’s lightning-rod pledge to be a “Day 1” dictator was that it was not just a blanket promise of authoritarian rule. It was grounded in a specific policy. He said he wanted to close the border — the limits of governmental red tape be damned.'
• Is $83.3 Million Enough to Make Trump Stop Lying? (David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 1-26-24) To avoid today’s eye-popping verdict, he just needed to stop talking about E. Jean Carroll. Is there any sanction so dire that it can keep Trump from lying?
12-22-24: Four of Trump's co-defendants have pleaded guilty to illegally conspiring to overturn his defeat. They include three lawyers associated with Trump — Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell — as well as Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall. All could testify against the other defendants if those cases go to trial.
• The Constitutional Case for Barring Trump from the Presidency (Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 8-23-23) Does the Fourteenth Amendment empower state election officials to remove him from the ballot? The argument rests on Baude and Paulsen’s interpretation of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that officeholders, such as the President, who have taken an oath to “support” the Constitution and “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” will no longer hold such an office....
Laurence Tribe, a liberal law professor, and J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, wrote an article for The Atlantic, in which they essentially endorsed the view advanced by Baude and Paulsen: “The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again.”
See: The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again (J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe, The Atlantic, 8-19-23) "As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president."
"This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies."
• Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 1-20-24) "Last night at a rally in New Hampshire, former president Trump repeatedly confused former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is running against him for the Republican presidential nomination, with Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former speaker of the House....
"Observers have been saying for a while now that once Trump had to start appearing in public, his apparent cognitive decline would surprise those who haven’t been paying attention....
"The Trump Organization’s auditor said during a fraud trial in 2022 that the past 10 years of the company’s financial statements could not be relied on, and Trump was forced to turn to smaller banks, likely on much worse terms. Now the legal case currently underway in Manhattan will likely make that financial problem larger. The judge has already decided that the Trump Organization, Trump, his two older sons, and two employees committed fraud, for which the judge is currently deciding appropriate penalties....
"Since 2023, right-wing organizations, backed by Republican state attorneys general, have argued that banks are discriminating against them on religious and political grounds....
"The attempt to create distrust of large financial institutions is part of a larger attempt to destabilize the institutions of democracy. Trump is the figurehead for that attempt, but it is larger than him, and it will outlast him....
"Once elected, Trump and MAGA Republicans started to undermine faith in the rule of law that underpins our democracy. Less than four months after he took office, Trump fired the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, for investigating the connections between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, and his attacks on the FBI and the Department of Justice under which the FBI operates have been relentless ever since.
"Trump and his supporters have also challenged the U.S. military, insisting that it is weak because it is “woke.” He has called its leaders “some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my life.”
"Over all, of course, is the Big Lie that undermines the nation’s electoral system by insisting that the 2020 presidential vote was “rigged” against Trump. Although there has never been any evidence of such a thing, 30% of Americans think Biden won the presidency only through “voter fraud.”
• What Trump's lawyer was really advocating (Robert Reich, 1-11-24) America is not the Weimar Republic in its final days and Trump is not Hitler, but … the parallels between a potential Trump presidency and the Weimar Republic on the eve of 1933.
• Trump swaps bluster for silence, and possibly sleep, in his hush money trial (Jill Colvin, APNews, 5-26-24)
• Trump’s social media account shares a campaign video with a headline about a ‘unified Reich’
(Michelle L. Price, AP News, 5-21-24) While seeking to portray President Joe Biden as soft on antisemitism, has himself repeatedly faced criticism for using language and rhetoric associated with Nazi Germany. “You know, Hitler did some good things, too.”
• Jonathan Karl: Donald Trump and the End of the GOP (YouTube video, In Conversation with Jonathan Swan, 12-9-23, intelligent Q&A at Commonwealth Club, well worth listening to).
Karl is author of Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. In this special online-only program Karl details the former president’s quest for retribution, talks about how Trump talked about leaving the Republican party (during the post-election-defeat time when he was a pariah in the party) and provides a glimpse at what the GOP would be signing up for if it once again chooses him as its standard bearer.
Interesting stories, about Trump threatening to leave the party, the role of the massive database of Trump supporters (which Trump made a lot of money from, renting it out to the Republican party), about the threat of being ineligible ever to run for president again. Most shocking to Karl was Trump's belief that he could resume the presidency without being re-elected. He's drawn working class voters (Hispanic and African American men) and he really brings out the voters (from both parties). This has never been about policy. It's about orienting the party towards the whims of one man.
• Trump on Trial newsletter (NY Times) The latest news and analysis on the trials of Donald Trump in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.
• Trump Will Be a Dictator on Day One and Every Day Thereafter (Matt Ford, TNR, 12-6-23) His interview with Hannity told us everything we need to know about his second-term plans. His supporters have argued that Trump’s opponents actually struck first by charging him with a series of crimes after he left office. It’s a neat rhetorical trick from Trump and his allies: simultaneously arguing that the cases against them are illegitimate and that any targeting of his opponents would be legitimate.
"But that reasoning is detached from reality. First, the reason that Trump has been indicted multiple times is that he appears to have committed a wide variety of genuine crimes. He manipulated property values in New York to secure favorable loans from banks and lower taxes rates before taking office. He pressured local officials to “find” enough votes to let him win Georgia in the 2020 presidential election. He summoned a mob to attack the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power. And he stole classified documents from the federal government after leaving office."
• In a New York Times piece about Joe Biden's verbal slips: "Mr. Trump, at age 77, has not exactly been a smooth operator himself. He has long strayed off message, and has his own growing record of verbal slips. He has confused Mr. Biden with Mr. Obama, suggested America is on the verge of entering World War II, praised Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, and told supporters not to worry about voting."
• Trump Leads, and His Party Follows, on Vaccine Skepticism (Darius Tahir, KFF Health News, 10-6-24) A number of Republican voters now identify as vaccine skeptics
• The Rise of the Anti-Vaccine Movement
---What can Trump do about vaccines? More than you might think. (Megan Messerly, Politico,6-8-24) His new anti-vaccine persona could have far-reaching consequences if he’s elected to a second stint as president with far-reaching administrative powers. The former Covid-19 vaccine booster is now the nation’s most high-profile critic of immunization mandates.
---Trump says he won't give 'one penny' to schools with vaccine mandate (video, Politico, 5-19-24)
---Anti-vaxxers are now a modern political force (Jessica Piper, Politico, 9-24-23) “Covid vaccines have been the foot in the door for the more general anti-vaccine movement. The once-fringe movement is now seeing an influx in cash after the Covid pandemic. Depressed vaccination rates have led to more deaths from Covid-19, and have the potential to enable the return of potentially fatal childhood diseases such as measles. “Increasingly there’s less and less difference between old school and new school anti-vaxxers,” Gorski said. “New anti-vaxxers are lapping up the same old conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.”
---Ron DeSantis has a problem: Covid vaccine skepticism isn’t moving GOP voters The Florida governor rode the vaccine skepticism wave to remarkable heights, but voters are moving on from the pandemic.
---Our new poll shows just how much GOP voters have diverged from everyone else on vaccines (Steven Shepard, Politico, 9-23-23) Vaccine skepticism has found a home in the post-pandemic GOP. And it’s not just related to the Covid shot. A significant number of Republicans question the safety of vaccines and say Americans shouldn’t be encouraged to get them. Before 2020, polls showed little overall difference along partisan lines on issues related to vaccination, such as whether students should be inoculated against measles to attend public schools. But since Covid, Republican voters have diverged from everyone else.
• Trump doubles down, saying ‘Obamacare Sucks’ and must be replaced (NBC News, 11-29-23) Despite the GOP 2024 front-runner's call, congressional Republicans are divided on whether to pick that battle again after they tried and failed to eliminate the law in 2017.
• A Court Ruling That Targets Trump’s Persona (Lora Kelley, The Atlantic, 9-27-23) 'A New York judge’s decision undermines the former president’s image as a “deals guy.” He rode his image as real-estate mogul and a maestro of transactions first to pop-culture stardom, then to the White House. Now a judge has ruled that much of that dealmaking was fraudulent: New York Judge Arthur Engoron found yesterday that Trump and his associates, including his sons Eric and Donald Jr., committed persistent fraud by toggling estimates of property values in order to get insurance and favorable terms on loans. The judge ordered that some of the Trump Organization’s “certificates,” or corporate charters, be canceled, and that a receiver be appointed by the court to dissolve some of its New York companies. This latest blow for Trump puts on record that his mythos of business acumen was largely built on lies.
• ‘Blood bath’ remarks give Trump a new firestorm to rally around (Brett Samuels, The Hill, 3-8-24) 'Former President Trump and his allies are aggressively pushing back after Democrats and critics seized on his comments that there would be a “blood bath” if he loses November’s election.
'Trump had encouraged his supporters to come to Washington, D.C., for a “wild” rally and that morning urged them to march to the Capitol. He praised rioters as “patriots” and has since referred to those imprisoned for their actions that day as “hostages.”
'Biden has repeatedly cited Trump’s comments that there were “very fine people” on both sides after white nationalists clashed with counterprotesters in a deadly 2017 incident in Charlottesville, Va.
'During a 2020 debate, Trump told the Proud Boys, a far-right group, to "stand back and stand by," remarks he had to later clarify.
'And Trump has in recent weeks ratcheted up his attacks on migrants, saying they’re “poisoning the blood” of the country. On Saturday, he said he considers some migrants “animals” who are in some cases “not people.” '
• Why have so many Americans succumbed to Trumpism? (Robert Reich, Alternet) An opinion piece well worth reading. Trump has responded to America's lopsided economy "by portraying himself as a strongman who would fight for the “forgotten Americans.” He has responded to their suspicions by giving them a set of villains who, he claims, have conspired to keep them down — the so-called “Deep State,” the cultural elites supporting it, and the political establishment guarding it.
"In his 2024 campaign, Trump is using the criminal proceedings against him as a means of fusing his own identity with that of millions of Americans who have felt mistreated and bullied by the system. He is them. This fusion is a hallmark of authoritarian fascism. "As we have seen, many of the key political and economic institutions of our society have abandoned their commitments to the common good — and along the way, abandoned the bottom half of the adult population, especially those without college degrees. The consequence has been a catastrophe, especially for the bottom half.
"Trump’s attempted coup could not have gotten as far as it did — and it continues to this day — without the deepening anger, despair, and suspicions that have subsumed a substantial portion of the American population. This is especially true of Americans without college degrees, without good jobs, whose pay has stagnated, who have little or no job security, and whose adult children are no longer doing better than they did — in places that have been hollowed out and economically abandoned."
• Trump’s Chaos Agenda (Robert Reich, 10-9-23) Reagan’s negative view of government has morphed into a malevolent anti-democracy fervor. Ronald Reagan told Americans that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
"Reagan is still revered, especially by Republicans, but his negative view of government has morphed into an authoritarian fervor within the Republican Party. And that fervor has become the basis of a strategy — led by Trump — for seeking to persuade the rest of America that the nation is ungovernable as a democracy and therefore in need of an authoritarian strongman."
"The more chaos Trump and his allies create, the more pessimistic Americans feel about the capacities of our democratic institutions to govern the nation — which advances their authoritarian agenda."
• Trump’s Long Fascination With Genes and Bloodlines Gets New Scrutiny The former president’s remark about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country is one of several comments he’s made over the years regarding “good genes.” Mr. Trump dismissed criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology.
• Maggie-Koerth Baker Untangles the Story behind Trump’s False Claims of Immigrant Voter Fraud (Jeanne Erdmann, Open Notebook, 9-12-17) Trump proclaimed he had peer-reviewed research to support his claim: a 2014 study that said enough noncitizen immigrants were registered to vote to swing an election. What Trump didn’t tell his base is that other scientists had debunked the study, identifying a major flaw in the data analysis.
• Keeping Track of the Trump Investigations (The New York Times) State and federal prosecutors are pursuing multiple investigations into Donald J. Trump’s business and political activities, with the cases expected to play out over the coming months. Here is a guide to the major criminal cases involving the former president.
• Trump Thinks Running for President Again Is His Get Out of Jail Free Card (Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, 7-18-22) Justice Department policy says a sitting president cannot be prosecuted—and Trump knows it. He doesn’t care that rational people believe that inciting an insurrection (or being an abject racist, or trying to use the government to punish his enemies, or pardoning war criminals, or setting the wheels in motion to overturn Roe v. Wade) should disqualify him for holding office again, and he has apparently decided that another run for the White House is happening.
• The Patriot: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic,11/23) Until General Mark Milley, no chairman of the Joint Chiefs had confronted the possibility that the president might provoke a coup, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes in our cover story. Milley may have done more than any other American to protect the Constitution from Donald Trump.
"In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said....
"In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”
• My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump (Tim Alberta, The Atlantic, Jan 2024) 'Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.” '
• Fox Will Pay $787.5 Million to Settle Defamation Suit (Jeremy W. Peters and Katie Robertson, NY Times, 4-18-23) The settlement with Dominion Voting Systems was the latest extraordinary twist in a case that exposed the inner workings of the most powerful voice in conservative news....
"Producers referred to pro-Trump guests like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani as “gold” for ratings and acknowledged that the audience didn’t want to hear about subjects like the possibility of a peaceful transition from a Trump administration to a Biden administration.
"Those communications have shown how employees at Fox expressed serious doubts about and, at times, were scornful of Mr. Trump and his allies as they spread lies about voter fraud, questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s election. Some at Fox mocked Mr. Trump and his lawyers as “crazy” and under the influence of drugs like L.S.D. and magic mushrooms.
• The Mar-a-Lago Documents Indictment (Doug Muder, The Weekly Sift, 6-12-23) As clear and complete an explanation as you're likely to find in this short a space.
• Fact-Checking the Breadth of Trump’s Election Lies (Linda Qiu, Fact Check, 8-17-23) The former president faces multiple charges related to his lies about the 2020 election. Here’s a look at some of his most repeated falsehoods.
• Newspaper editorial boards reflect on Trump indictment across the U.S. (Politico, 8-2-23) On Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The United States “had never seen an indictment of this magnitude,” The New York Times Editorial Board wrote.
• Fact check: 14 of Trump’s false claims on ‘Meet the Press’ (Daniel Dale and Jack Forrest, CNN, 9-17-23) He's keeping fact checkers busy, for sure.
• George Will: Republican Party Living in Fear of Voters (MSNBC, MTP Daily,8-20-20) Columnist George Will says the GOP has enabled President Trump, and “fear” is the main reason they aren’t pushing back, “The Republican Party today lives in terror of its voters, and that’s, again, a very dangerous political condition.”
• Trump's debate response: The fascist who doesn't want America to think (Robert Reich, 8-25-23) The presidential mugshot. He deals in images designed to invoke defiance in supporters and outrage in opponents. Or complains about unflattering shots, of which this is surely the prize (scroll to bottom).
---Trump’s closing argument: full-throated fascism (Robert Reich, 10-17-24) America’s mainstream media is by now comfortable talking and writing about Trump’s authoritarianism. But in describing what Trump is seeking to impose on America, the media should be using the term “fascism.”
'On Sunday, Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that the biggest problem on Election Day will “not be the people who have come in, who are destroying our country,” but, rather “the people from within — we have some very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
• True patriotism is the opposite of Trump’s White Christian Nationalism (Robert Reich, 7-3-23) For July 4th, Trump advances his version of patriotism based on White Christian Nationalism. For example (and I quote):
---He commended the Supreme Court for rejecting affirmative action “so someone who has not worked as hard will not take your place.”
---He saluted the court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade so “radical left Democrats will not kill babies.”
---He condemned foreign governments that "send" over the border "people in jails and insane asylums" and promised to deny entry to "all communists and Marxists." And so on.
• Trump’s Legal Woes Mount as Trial Dates and Campaign Calendar Collide (Charlie Savage, NY Times, 7-19-23) The Republican front-runner is facing a growing tangle of criminal and civil trials that will overlap with next year’s presidential primaries. A rundown on all his trials.
• Years later, Jan. 6 fallout continues for journalists (Kirstin McCudden, Press Freedom Tracker blog, 7-28-23)
• Newspaper editorial boards reflect on Trump indictment across the U.S. (Kierra Frazier, Politico, 8-2-23) The United States “had never seen an indictment of this magnitude,” The New York Times Editorial Board wrote.
• Global media reacts to Trump’s third indictment (Jenna Moon, Semafor, 8-2-23) American democracy itself will hinge on this trial, said Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. This indictment will be the most important, he wrote, because the center of the argument is that Trump is a threat to political freedom.
• Jared and Ivanka made up to $640 million in the White House (Jordan Libowitz and Caitlin Moniz, Citizens for Ethics, 2-8-21) One major factor in their outside profits came from Ivanka Trump's ownership stake in the Trump Hotel in DC, just blocks from the White House and the locus of influence peddling in the Trump administration...
"Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump should never have been allowed to work in the White House. The Department of Justice reversed decades of precedent to grant President Trump's wish to have his children work in the White House. While taking on enormous responsibilities that they were unqualified to carry out, and debasing their positions with constant ethics scandals, they likely made hundreds of millions of dollars from questionable sources. All that was waived off by the same nepotism that got them their jobs."
• Trump, Macho Macho Victim (Maureen Dowd, NY Times, 11-19-22) 'It wasn’t really an announcement [of his candidacy for president] so much as another Trump scam to fend off prosecutions and to keep raising money from his supporters. Trump is no victim....Trump is the first former president subjected to a special counsel investigation into whether he masterminded a coup attempt. That’s mind-blowing, especially since he’s running for president again....Trump told Fox News that he "won't partake" in the investigation, as if it were a breakfast buffet at Mar-a-Lago that he's skipping.'
• To Jail or Not to Jail (Maureen Dowd, Opinion, NY Times, June 17, 2023) 'During his presidency, The Times reported, “his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the ‘beautiful mind’ material. It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.”
"The aides used the phrase — which turned up in the indictment — as shorthand for Trump’s organized chaos, how he somehow kept track of what was in the boxes, which he held close as a security blanket. During the 2016 campaign, some reporters said, he traveled with cardboard boxes full of real estate contracts, newspaper clippings and schedules, as though he were carrying his world around with him. "The guy likes paper."
'Trump has said one of his favorite movies is “Citizen Kane.” Perhaps the boxes at Xanadu he’s obsessed with, the papers that could make him the locked-up loser he dreads being, have been revealed as his Rosebud.
• What the January 6th Report Is Missing (Jill Lepore, New Yorker, 1-9-23) The investigative committee singles out Trump for his role in the Capitol attack. And that, in brief, is the report, which concludes that “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump.” And that, in brief, is "the problem: chasing Trump, never quite untethering itself from him, fluttering in the biting wind of his violent derangement, like a ribbon pinned to the tail of a kite during a tornado, and failing, entirely, to see the tornado."
"As prosecution, the report is thorough. But as historical explanation it’s a mess."
• Trump Real Estate Deal in Oman Underscores Ethics Concerns (Eric Lipton, NY Times, 6-20-23) Details of the former president’s agreement to work with a Saudi firm to develop a hotel and golf complex overlooking the Gulf of Oman highlight the ways his business and political roles intersect.Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, has already brought in at least $5 million from the Oman deal. The project could also draw scrutiny in the West for its treatment of its migrant workers, who during the first phase of construction are living in compounds of cramped trailers in a desertlike setting and are being paid as little as $340 a month, according to one of the engineers supervising the work.
• Indictment Presents Evidence Trump’s Actions Were More Blatant Than Known (Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman, News Analysis, Trump Documents Inquiry, NY Times, 6-8-23) The accounts in the 49-page indictment provide compelling evidence of a shocking indifference toward some of the country’s most sensitive secrets. The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump that was unsealed on Friday provided compelling evidence that Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents was more cavalier, and his efforts to obstruct the government’s attempts to retrieve them more blatant, than previously known. A classic example of what is known as a “speaking indictment,” the charging document did far more than merely lay out seven crimes, among them obstruction of justice and the willful retention of national defense records.
"Prosecutors say that Trump knowingly removed classified information from the White House; that the information was sensitive, including some relating to the country’s military vulnerabilities; that Trump left the documents in public places where others might have seen them; and that when asked to return the documents, he lied to federal investigators and tried to obstruct an investigation. Trump says he is innocent and the case is a witch hunt intended to prevent him from returning to the presidency."
• Indictment turbocharges Trump’s fundraising (Alex Isenstadt, Political, 4-15-23) The former president’s two political entities brought in $18.8 million during the first quarter of this year, through his joint fundraising committee and his campaign. But the campaign also says it brought in nearly the same amount in the two weeks after the charges were filed against the former president — $15.4 million — underscoring just how much the charges against Trump have animated his backers... nearly a quarter of those who contributed to Trump during that period had never given to him before. While the former president’s indictment — along with potential future charges in several ongoing investigations — puts him in serious legal jeopardy, it has helped to solidify his standing with his supporters and grow his campaign war chest."
• Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 8-6-23) From Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield's powerful speech in 1880 about how "four years after unreconstructed southern Democrats had taken control of all the former Confederate states and cemented the process of taking the vote away from Black men" this essay shifts to "Trump is charged with conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding—violating a law passed to stop Ku Klux Klan terrorists from breaking up official meetings in the late 1860s—and obstructing that proceeding: the counting of electoral votes."
"In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Republican-dominated states immediately found ways to keep minority voters from the polls and their votes from being counted, and in 2020, then-president Trump tried to throw out the votes of people in majority Black districts in order to overturn the results of that year’s presidential election."
• Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 6-11-23) "Trump supporters have flooded media channels with accusations that President Joe Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice to use as a political cudgel against former president Trump...While committed Republican partisans seem to believe Trump is a victim, according to the CBS News poll, 38% of likely Republican primary voters do, in fact, believe Trump endangered our security—and national security, after all, is the primary job of the president...The question is how much damage the fight for control will do to the Republican Party, especially in light of the fact that Smith’s other investigation, the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has not yet been concluded. There is reason to suspect those congress members involved in that effort might have been spooked by just how thorough the investigation of the documents case turned out to be."
• Trump’s Indictment Reveals a National-Security Nightmare (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic Daily, 6-9-23) Republicans are trying to gaslight America about the former president’s astounding recklessness. Trump and his enablers are already trying to brush the charges away as the result of a witch hunt over a minor issue, but this indictment shows why Trump was, and remains, a threat to national security. (Check out the photos of how and where he stored classified documents and read about who he shared their contents with.)
• America’s First Indicted Ex-President Is Very Sorry—for Himself (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 4-5-23) "Indicted and Arraigned Trump, in other words, turned out to be just like his most recent previous incarnation, Impeached and Defeated Trump: a rambling, unrepentant grievance machine...he’s already raised more than seven million dollars as a result of Bragg’s indictment, began sending out fund-raising e-mails using his “NOT GUILTY” plea even before he had entered it....you could get a T-shirt emblazoned with a fake mug shot of the former President for a contribution of a mere forty-seven dollars to the campaign."
• For Now, Trump and Allies Focus on Political Upside of a Criminal Case (Maggie Haberman, Michael C. Bender and Jonathan Swan, NY Times, 4-5-23) The indictment of the former president has unlocked a rush of fund-raising and has frozen the 2024 Republican primary, but he faces deeper legal peril in multiple inquiries.
To convict Trump of a felony, prosecutors must show that Trump’s “intent to defraud” included an intent to commit or conceal a second crime. That turns on the untested question of whether a state prosecutor can invoke a federal crime even though he lacks jurisdiction to charge that crime himself.
• The Cases Against Trump: A Guide (David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 3-23-23) The timelines, the issues at stake, and the threat they pose to the former president--arranged by Graham's assessment of the seriousness of the allegations to democracy and the rule of law, from the least significant to the most.
• How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole (Jim Rutenberg, NY Times, 4-6-23) Rupert Murdoch built an empire by giving viewers exactly what they wanted. But what they wanted — election lies and insurrection — put that empire (and the country) in peril. Win or lose, Fox News will still face a choice in the coming election and beyond. Do they continue catering, perhaps with more careful lawyering, to paranoid fantasies like those that led to Jan. 6, or do they pull back from the brink?
• How could a convicted felon who attempted a coup on America be the leading candidate for president? (Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse,Coffee Klatch, 7-20-24)
• Manhattan Prosecutors Will Begin Presenting Trump Case to Grand Jury (William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess and Jonah E. Bromwich, NY Times, 1-30-23) The Manhattan district attorney’s office will begin presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months. A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.
• Judge Imposes Sanction on Fox for Withholding Evidence in Defamation Case (Katie Robertson and Jeremy W. Peters, NY Times, 4-12-23) Judge Eric Davis also said an investigation was likely into Fox’s handling of documents and whether it had withheld details about Rupert Murdoch’s corporate role.
• Trump’s ‘Secret Weapon’? College Accreditation (Katherine Knott, Inside Higher Ed, 5-4-23) The issue of accreditation has become the subject of much debate between the two leading Republicans eyeing the presidency in 2024. Trump said in a campaign video that his plan would reclaim colleges and universities from the “radical Left.” If Trump returns to the White House, he plans to replace college accreditors and impose new standards on the nation’s colleges and universities that include removing diversity, equity and inclusion staff members; protecting free speech; and “defending the American tradition and Western civilization.”
Trump’s plan also would fine college and university endowments if they are found to have engaged in “unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity.”
• Inside the Hush-Money Payments That May Decide Trump’s Legal Fate (Ronan Farrow, New Yorker, 4-6-23) Years of interviews with potential witnesses provide insights into the Manhattan D.A.’s case. 'Trump had met with Michael Cohen, his personal attorney at the time, and David Pecker, then the chief executive of A.M.I. The three men formalized a scheme in which Pecker and A.M.I. agreed to buy the rights to incriminating stories on behalf of Trump’s campaign and never publish them. The practice of purchasing a story in order to suppress it is known in tabloid circles as “catch and kill.”'
• The Same Ole Line Dudes Are Waiting for You (Eric Lach, New Yorker, 4-7-23) Donald Trump’s arraignment may have been a circus for the media, but it was just another day at the office for New York’s professional line sitters.
• House Jan. 6 Committee to Issue Criminal Referrals, Chairman Says (Luke Broadwater, NY Times, 12-6-22) Representative Bennie Thompson, the panel’s chairman, said no decision had been made on who would be the subject of the referrals or what the charges would be. Scroll down for the Times coverage of the Jan. 6 Investigations (status of various hearings, trials, and investigations).
• Trump’s New Recruits (Tom Nichols,The Atlantic, 9-19-22) His embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theorists represents a new expansion not only of Trump’s cult of personality, but of his threats to sow violence.
• Elections and Trump's claims of election fraud
• Fact check: Trump lies about voter fraud while states, CDC encourage voting-by-mail as pandemic-friendly option (Facts First, Fact Check, CNN) CNN holds elected officials and candidates accountable by pointing out what’s true and what’s not.
• Trump repeats false election fraud claims during speech in Washington (Jill Colvin, AP/PBS, 7-26-22) In his first return to Washington since Joe Biden ousted him from the White House, former President Donald Trump vigorously repeated the false election-fraud claims that sparked the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. In a dueling speech not far away, his former vice president, Mike Pence, implored the Republican Party to move on from Trump’s defeat.
• Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump (Nicholas Confessore and Jim Rutenberg, NY Times, 3-8-23) Fox hosts and executives privately mocked the former president’s election fraud claims, even as the network amplified them in a frantic effort to appease viewers.
"It was a week after the 2020 elections, and Tucker Carlson — along with Fox News executives and other hosts — had watched with panic as Fox viewers, furious and disbelieving at President Donald J. Trump’s defeat, began to turn against the top-rated network.
"Fox News has been the most trusted and watched source of information for conservative America for decades, and its frequent symbiosis with the Republican Party is well established. But the internal documents released in recent days have provided an unprecedented glimpse into network decision-making as its dual imperatives — to keep its base audience of conservatives satisfied and meet its promise to maintain journalistic standards of fairness and factuality — came into conflict as never before.
"Mr. Carlson texted with staff members in early January 2021, adding, “I hate him passionately.”...But in the months after the Jan. 6 attacks, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” doubled down on a pro-Trump narrative that both Mr. Carlson and his bosses knew was rooted in a lie. According to a New York Times analysis, in 2021 nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — featured segments downplaying the Capitol riot, casting the insurrectionists as innocent citizens seeking legitimate redress for election fraud, and suggesting the riot itself was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by federal law enforcement to entrap Trump supporters....Senator Mitch McConnell pushed back against Mr. Carlson’s characterization of the Capitol attack.
"Top Fox personnel agonized over the difficulty of escaping Mr. Trump’s influence over their own audience. “This day of reckoning was going to come at some point — where the embrace of Trump became an albatross we can’t shake right away if ever,” Dana Perino, a prominent Fox host, wrote to a friend in November 2020.
"Yet the shoals they were trying to navigate had been in no small part laid by Mr. Carlson, one of Fox’s most-watched hosts. Though the newly released messages show Mr. Carlson expressing skepticism in his private emails about the extent of “voter fraud,” he had been an early and energetic promoter of the doubt Mr. Trump was trying to sow."
• The Enduring Power of Trumpism (Jelani Cobb, New Yorker, 9-15-22) No matter what becomes of Donald Trump, the forces of intolerance, racism, and belligerence he harnessed in American politics will persist. "The G.O.P. has abided all manner of corrupt, dishonest, anti-democratic, and potentially illegal behavior from Trump, including his incitement of an armed insurrection against the United States Congress, but the lacklustre midterm performance of Republicans seems to suggest that, like McCarthy sixty-eight years ago, the former President has reached a point where his demagogy has become a liability for his own party."
• It’s Just Fraud All the Way Down (David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 9-21-22) The complaint filed today by New York Attorney General Letitia James is remarkable not for the shrewdness of the misconduct it alleges, but for its audacity. "At times in his prepresidential life, Donald Trump represented himself as a real-estate mogul, a television star, a business visionary, and a salesman par excellence. But according to a complaint filed today by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Trump Organization was actually just a massive fraud with incidental sidelines in property development, merchandising, and entertainment."
• How they did it: Reporters uncovered Trump hush payments to two women (Denise-Marie Ordway, 3-11-19) A Wall Street Journal reporter discusses the newspaper's investigation into secret payoffs Donald Trump and his associates arranged to suppress sexual allegations from two women during the 2016 presidential campaign.
• Melania’s Trials (Maureen Dowd, NY Times, 4-20-24) "What could be more absurd and hypocritical than the putative Republican nominee selling Bibles and promoting an America with draconian abortion laws during his trial over a $130,000 payment to keep a porn star from telling voters about their dalliance?"
• Ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal tells her story about Donald Trump (YouTube video, 59 minutes, 3-22-18)
• How they did it: ProPublica investigates Trump's ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy (Chloe Reichel, 3-4-19) “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I haven't ever been part of a story that has had such powerful impact so swiftly,” Ginger Thompson, senior reporter at ProPublica, said.
• Key Takeaways From Trump’s Tax Returns (Jim Tankersley, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, NY Times, 12-30-22) Thousands of pages of tax documents contain details that have not previously been revealed. Among insights: Trump made no charitable contributions in 2020. In a bad year for business, Trump didn’t take a full refund. His own tax law may have cost him. Fred Trump is a silent actor in the returns. (Charlie Smart, NYTimes, 12-21-22)
• Appeals Court Restores Justice Dept.’s Access to Sensitive Files Seized From Trump(Charlie Savage, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, NY Times, 9-21-22) A federal judge had temporarily barred the department from using the records marked as classified in its inquiry into whether the former president illegally retained national defense documents. The decision by the appeals court was a striking repudiation of Mr. Trump’s attempts to claim in public, but not in court, that he had declassified the sensitive records at issue. The ruling was the latest turn in what began as a legal sideshow to the investigation into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of government documents, including some marked as highly classified.
Mr. Trump “suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was president,” the appeals court wrote. “But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified.” The court went on to say, “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal.
• Heather Cox Richardson (2-21-23) "Right-wing media has been trying to spin Biden’s trip to Kyiv and speech in Poland as proof that he doesn’t care about the derailment of the train carrying hazardous chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. In fact, Republican governor Mike DeWine initially rejected federal help when Biden offered it, saying he didn’t see the need for it.
"The right wing has also gone after Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for the accident, although it was the Trump administration that weakened safety regulations put in place under Barack Obama that could have mitigated the crisis, and railroad personnel cuts that left the train understaffed. Before the accident, train workers had worried that the 151-car train, 9,300 feet long and weighing 18,000 tons, was too long and too heavy to travel safely."
• Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 11-15-22) "The [Republican] party’s losses in the midterms appear to have opened the door for Trump's opponents to toss him under the bus. According to Jonathan Swan at Axios, at this morning’s annual meeting of the Republican governors, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie got “huge applause” from the room full of hundreds of politicians, consultants, and wealthy donors when he blamed Trump for three cycles of losses for the Republican Party. Christie said voters “rejected crazy.”
"Meanwhile, Trump has told the special master that the president has the authority simply to declare which records are personal records, and that he declared all the seized documents to be personal records while in office. He suggests his careless handling of the classified documents proves he considered them personal records. The Department of Justice has responded with incredulity (that’s the gist of it, anyway).
• 'Times' Journalists Puncture Myth Of Trump As Self-Made Billionaire (Terry Gross interviews investigative reporters Susanne Craig and David Barstow, who say the president received today's equivalent of $413 million from his father's real estate empire, through what appears to be tax fraud. See also Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father (Susanne Craig and David Barstowand Russ Buettner, NY Times, 10-2-18) Much of the $413 million Trump received (in today’s dollars) from his father’s real estate empire came through schemes to avoid paying taxes on multimillion dollar gifts in the family. Trump has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.
• Kari Lake was unflinchingly loyal to Trump. Then her campaign unraveled. Isaac Stanley-Becker and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, WaPo, 12-12-22) "Advisers wanted her to focus less on Trump’s false claims of voter fraud and more on homelessness, water independence and border security, according to people familiar with their counsel. Business leaders recommended that she tone down her MAGA message to create a friendlier climate for capital. Republican strategists asked her to stop denigrating early ballots, a method of voting once critical to Republican victories in the state....After pushback from some members of Lake’s team, the candidate herself spoke up. She said that True The Vote, the Texas-based group pushing unfounded claims of voter fraud, had told her to instruct supporters to mail in their ballots — not put them in drop boxes — as a way to “confuse the Democrats....Lake burst onto the national political stage this year as perhaps the purest embodiment of Trump’s grievance-fueled brand of politics....As advisers urged her to consolidate GOP support after the primary, Lake remained fixated on a grudge match against people loyal to the legacy of the late Sen. John McCain." See also True the Vote leaders sent to jail after contempt ruling by federal judge (Azi Paybarah, WaPo, 10-31-22) The organization, which has pushed false claims about the 2020 election, had been sued by a software company that has alleged defamation
• Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t? (Michael Gerson, Opinion, Washington Post, 9-1-22) A long, thoughtful essay about the Christian embrace of populist politics in America. "Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics. This has included deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions." The essay links to other op-ed pieces about specific issues, among them:
---The GOP celebration of covid ignorance is an invitation to death
---Of all the conservative bans on teaching about racism, the one in Texas is the worst
---Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 assault on American democracy (neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event). "In both public perception and evident reality, many White, conservative Christians find themselves on the wrong side of the most cutting indictments delivered by Jesus of Nazareth."
• A Timeline of Trump’s False and Misleading Statements on the Mar-a-Lago Search (Stuart A. Thompson, NY Times, 8-16-22) The former president has pushed frenetic and sometimes contradictory claims about the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida home. He and his allies have given often conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents without addressing why he had kept them. In the wake of the search, Mr. Trump has accused the nation’s justice system of being exactly what he tried to turn it into: a political weapon for a president. Republicans have struggled to coalesce around a unified strategy to respond to the F.B.I.’s search of Donald J. Trump’s headquarters in Palm Beach, Fla.
• The Part of the Espionage Act That Matters (Jan Lodal, a longtime defense and intelligence official, in a guest post on James Fallows blog, Breaking the News) "Trump’s violation of this Subparagraph (d) of the Espionage Act could not be clearer. Unlike all other crimes being considered for prosecution, Subsection (d) requires no probing of intent or consequence. It defines as criminal a clear process violation -- “failing to return” classified documents when properly asked to do so."
• Trump’s Shifting Explanations Follow a Familiar Playbook (News Analysis, NY Times, 8-14-22)
• The Complete Guide to All the Ways Donald Trump Is Legally Screwed (Vanity Fair, 8-22)
• A Sober Look at the ‘Cartoonishly Chaotic’ Trump White House (David Greenberg, NY Times, 9-14-22) In “The Divider,” political journalists keep their cool as they chronicle the outrageous conduct and ugly infighting that marked a presidency like no other. It’s all here: the culture wars and the corruption, the demagogy and the autocrat-love, the palace intrigue and the public tweets, the pandemic and the impeachments (plural).
• How Trump Supporters Came to Hate the Police (Luke Mogelson, New Yorker, 9-10-22) At the Capitol riot and elsewhere, MAGA Republicans have leaped from “backing the blue” to attacking law-enforcement officials.
• As President, Trump Demanded Investigations of Foes. He Often Got Them. (Michael S. Schmidt, NY Times, 9-21-24) He has threatened to target his perceived enemies if elected again. A look at his time in the White House shows how readily he could do so.
• v=5yBHNpKTIEE&t=491s"target="_blank">Truth and Trump: An Evening with Bob Woodward (TVO Today, 2-1-23, 1 hr 23 minutes) There's a minute-by-minute table of contents, so you can listen just to the parts that interest you.
• Most Americans see Trump's MAGA as threat to democracy (Jason Lange, Reuters, 9-8-22) A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Wednesday found a majority of Americans believe Trump's movement is undermining democracy.
• “We need to take away children.” (An investigation by Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic, 8-7-22) The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy. "It is easy to pin culpability for family separations on the anti-immigration officials for which the Trump administration is known. But these separations were also endorsed and enabled by dozens of members of the government’s middle and upper management: Cabinet secretaries, commissioners, chiefs, and deputies who, for various reasons, didn’t voice concern even when they should have seen catastrophe looming; who trusted “the system” to stop the worst from happening; who reasoned that it would not be strategic to speak up in an administration where being labeled a RINO or a “squish”—nicknames for those deemed insufficiently conservative—could end their career; who assumed that someone else, in some other department, must be on top of the problem; who were so many layers of abstraction away from the reality of screaming children being pulled out of their parent’s arms that they could hide from the human consequences of what they were doing....
“Congress, too, deserves blame, because it failed for decades to fill a legislative vacuum that anti-immigration officials moved to exploit. For too long, an overworked and underequipped border-police force has been left to determine crucial social, economic, and humanitarian policy....What happened in the months that led up to the implementation of Zero Tolerance—the Trump administration’s initiative that separated thousands of families—should be studied by future generations of organizational psychologists and moral philosophers.”
• Among the Insurrectionists (Luke Mogelson, Reporter at Large, New Yorker, 1-15-21) The Capitol was breached by Trump supporters who had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep the President in power.
January 6: A chronicle of an attack foretold.
• Plot to Overturn the Election (video, Frontline, 3-29-22) Many Republican voters believe his election was illegitimate, and the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump is now a defining issue of the Republican Party. In a new investigative collaboration, FRONTLINE and ProPublica trace the hidden sources of misinformation about the 2020 election, demonstrating how a handful of people have had an outsized impact on the current U.S. crisis of democratic legitimacy.
• How ‘Stop the Steal’ Captured the American Right (Charles Homans, NY Times Magazine, 7-19-22) "The movement to reinstate President Trump has gone far beyond him — and now threatens the future of American elections. It could properly be said to constitute a movement, but one that no longer gathers under the banner of “Stop the Steal,” preferring the good-government language of “election integrity” — though the movement has next to nothing in common with earlier efforts to shore up genuine vulnerabilities in the American election system....The insistence on America as a “republic” but not a “democracy” is a tendentious reading of James Madison popularized by the John Birch Society, the conspiratorial anti-communist organization — a justification for governing the country according to conservative values and policy prerogatives, even when the numerical majority of its people did not vote for them."
• The January 6 Hearings Are Changing Republicans’ Minds (Sarah Longwell, The Atlantic, 7-28-22) GOP voters want political power. And they’re no longer sure Donald Trump is the best way to get it.
• Will Be Wild (Wondery) An 8-part podcast series about the forces that led to the January 6th insurrection and what comes next. "Through in-depth stories from a wide range of characters – from people who tried to stop the attack to those who took part – hosts Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz explore the ongoing effort to bring autocracy to America, the lasting damage that effort is doing to our democracy, and the fate of our attempts to combat those anti-democratic forces. Because January 6th wasn't the end of the story, January 6th was just a practice run."
• Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump (Greg Olear, Prevail, 3-31-20) What happens when a Confidential Informant becomes President? This old post has come up in several recent Substack comments in response to the question, "Why hasn't Tя☭mp been arrested all these years?"
• Trump Claims He’s Not Ignoring N.Y. Attorney General Subpoena, He Just Lost His Phone (Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, 5-10-22) According to the ex-president, he is simply “not currently in possession” of the electronic devices prosecutors say contain crucial documents concerning his Trump Organization work.
• In Sworn Deposition, Trump Says He Has Real Concerns About Being Killed By a Piece of Fruit (4-27-22) Pineapples, tomatoes, and bananas are “dangerous stuff” that could take a person’s life, the ex-president testified.
• Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the Creation of Trump’s Stolen Election Myth (Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica, 4-26-22) Internal emails and interviews with key participants reveal for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the rigged election theory touted evidence they knew to be disproven, disputed or dismissed as dubious.
• A Fact-Checked List of Trump Accomplishments (Farah Stockman, Opinion, NY Times, 9-11-2020) A checklist, in case you can't remember them all.
• How Biden Should Investigate Trump (James Fallows, The Atlantic, 12-9-2020) The misdeeds and destructive acts are legion. The new president should focus on these three: "corrupt and possibly criminal” offenses, "corrosion of government rather than corruption of government," and three outright catastrophes, of which one, the mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic is "the greatest failure of governance in U.S. history."
• Yoni Appelbaum's pieces in The Atlantic up to 2021.
• Litigation Tracker (Just Security) Pending Criminal and Civil Cases Against Donald Trump.
• She Took the White House Photos. Trump Moved to Take the Profit. (Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman, NY Times, 3-31-22) The former chief White House photographer made plans to publish a book of Trump photos. The former president had other plans. Official photographers from every White House since President Ronald Reagan’s have published their own books. Barack Obama and George W. Bush were so supportive that they wrote forewords for them. But like so much else involving Mr. Trump, the plan by his chief photographer, Shealah Craighead, did not follow this bipartisan norm. Mr. Trump jumped the gun and did his own book of photographs.
"Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has sought multiple ways to monetize his presidency, from charging supporters to attend an event and take photos with him to selling MAGA merchandise. He also has a long history of disputes from before his political career with business partners and over the years faced regular accusations that he did not properly compensate contractors."
• How Donald Trump Captured the Republican Party (Romesh Ratnesar, NY Times, 2-22-22) A review of INSURGENCY: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted by Jeremy W. Peters.“Insurgency” chronicles the astonishingly swift transformation of the Republican Party, from the genteel preserve of pro-business elites to a snarling personality cult that views the Jan. 6 insurrection as an exercise in legitimate political discourse. The outlines of the Republicans’ hard-right turn are by now largely familiar. Watching the reality-television star deliver remarks from the Trump Tower food court to a crowd that allegedly included actors who had been paid $50 to hold signs and cheer, [Steve] Bannon couldn’t contain himself. “That’s Hitler!” Bannon said. And, as Jeremy W. Peters writes in this spirited new history, “he meant it as a compliment.” What distinguishes “Insurgency” is its blend of political acuity and behind-the-scenes intrigue.
• How did Trump’s name end up on coronavirus relief checks in 2020? ABC News successfully sued to find out. (Chris Young, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 3-2-22)
• Trump had positive COVID test before event with Gold Star families: book (Leo Shane III, Military Times, 12-1-21) When Trump came down with a life-threatening case of Covid, he suggested that he might have caught it from Gold Star families he had met with after his positive test. He not only concealed the result but also proceeded to put hundreds of people at risk by continuing his normal activities while refusing to wear a mask or practice social distancing. H/T Paul Krugman.
• The Ecological Destruction from the Border Wall, in “American Scar” (New Yorker documentary, Film by Daniel Lombroso, Text by Murat Oztaskin, 4-30-22) Congress didn't go along with Trump's call for a border wall, so in early 2019, the President found a different way: he declared a national emergency at the southern border, a move that allowed him to reallocate funds for the wall’s construction from the Department of Defense. All told, the Trump Administration built more than four hundred and fifty miles of the barrier, about a quarter of the length of the U.S.’s border with Mexico. Construction continued until the moment of Joe Biden’s Inauguration. Funding the project from the D.O.D.’s budget and classifying it as a matter of national security offered the Trump Administration a way around protections: it made the wall’s construction exempt from the stipulations of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and more than eighty other laws and statutes. “There’s a certain kind of lawlessness that applies to the southern border that does not apply anywhere else,” said Stephania Taladrid, a New Yorker writer who’s covered the effects of the border wall, and who reported and produced “American Scar.”
• Why has Trump remained so popular with Republicans? (Mark Mellman, The Hill, 1-17-24) "After the 2016 elections, I wrote a book chapter exploring his initial electoral appeal, which I argued arose from uniting three strands of conservatism—aversion to government, aversion to change and aversion to difference—along with the billionaire bounce, the view that a successful businessperson (which he was less of than he claimed) could fix the economy."
"Since then, lots has happened and most of it should have hurt the former president, even among Republicans. But it hasn’t. Why not? In my view, three factors taken together account for much of his continuing appeal—partisanship, the persistence of preexisting beliefs and (faux) authenticity."
• Insult Politics: Donald Trump, Right-Wing Populism, and Incendiary Language (Oscar Winberg, European Journal of American Studies, Open Edition Journals, Summer 2017) "This article positions the Trump campaign in historical traditions of right-wing populism, incendiary political language, and insulting rhetoric. Trump’s mocking and insulting rhetoric in the campaign was widely described as both norm-breaking and, surprisingly, not politically harmful. This article challenges both assumptions, illustrating how Trump fits into a long tradition of insult politics, and how it remains controversial and politically dangerous. The insult politics Trump utilized throughout his campaign served a political purpose. However, there are strong indications that Trump won the White House in spite of his mocking rhetoric, not because of it. Rather, the particular political position of Trump, and his media image, explains how he could utilize insult politics to his advantage."
• The Trump Presidency and the Mainstreaming of Far-Right Politics (Aurelien Mondon and Antonia Vaughan, Gale, 2021) By proceeding through the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, this article has underlined how the evolving role of the alt, far and extreme right reflects the broader normalisation of far-right discourse. No longer the outrageous cheerleaders of 2016, 2020 saw the far-right discourse lose its shock factor, in the process migrating the Republicans further to the right. This migration is perhaps best highlighted by Trump’s own words to the insurrectionists: ‘We love you’, in defiance of the outrage.
• Trumpism (Wikipedia, where you can see footnotes to this extract) "Trumpism is an authoritarian movement that consists of the political ideologies and political movement associated with Donald Trump and his political base. Scholars and historians have identified Trumpism as consisting of a wide range of right-wing ideologies such as right-wing populism, national conservatism, neo-nationalism, and neo-fascism. Trumpist rhetoric heavily features anti-immigrant, xenophobic, nativist,and racist attacks against minority groups. Other identified aspects include conspiracist, isolationist, Christian nationalist, protectionist, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBT beliefs.
"Trump's rhetoric has its roots in a populist political method that suggests nationalistic answers to political, economic, and social problems. These inclinations are refracted into such policy preferences as immigration restrictionism, trade protectionism, isolationism, and opposition to entitlement reform....Referring to the populism of Trump, sociologist Michael Kimmel states that it "is not a theory [or] an ideology, it's an emotion. And the emotion is righteous indignation that the government is screwing 'us'".
As media scholar Daniel Kreiss summarizes Hochschild, "Trump, along with Fox News, gave these strangers in their own land the hope that they would be restored to their rightful place at the center of the nation, and provided a very real emotional release from the fetters of political correctness that dictated they respect people of color, lesbians and gays, and those of other faiths ... that the network's personalities share the same 'deep story' of political and social life, and therefore they learn from them 'what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about.'"
• Trumpism, an ideology for the extreme far-right globally (Mariano Aguirre, openDemocracy, 12-14-20) Trumpism is the extreme far-right ideology that attacks democracy and normalizes violence against progressive agendas and liberal cultures, while promoting full market deregulation.
• Governing the ungovernable (Jess Bidgood, On Politics, NY Times newsletter, 4-12-24) "Amid the tumult, Johnson appeared at Mar-a-Lago on Friday in an apparent effort to shore up his support from the former president. The hope, it seemed, was that the two could see past their differences if they united around something that fires up the Republican base: stoking unfounded distrust in the election.
"During the joint appearance, Johnson said he would introduce a bill that would “require proof of citizenship to vote” and baselessly claimed that undocumented voters could tip American elections, even though voting by people who are not citizens is exceedingly rare. And he got what he had most likely come for: a full-throated endorsement from the former president."
• Biden May Win, but Trump Remains the President of Red America (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 11-4-20) His attacks on “the rigged election” are a worst-case scenario for the country. “Trump’s incessant questioning of the basic institutions of our government and electoral system has now produced his desired result, even if he may not be back for another four years: a superpower torn apart from within, no longer trusting of its own democracy.”
• A Political Obituary for Donald Trump (George Packer, The Atlantic, 12-9-2020) "The United States’ score on the human-rights organization Freedom House’s annual index dropped from 90 out of 100 under President Barack Obama to 86 under Trump, below that of Greece and Mauritius. Trump withdrew the U.S. from 13 international organizations, agreements, and treaties. The number of refugees admitted into the country annually fell from 85,000 to 12,000. About 400 miles of barrier were built along the southern border. The whereabouts of the parents of 666 children seized at the border by U.S. officials remain unknown."
• Documentary “Plot to Overturn the Election" Reveals Origins of the Stolen Election Myth (ProPublica and Frontline, 3-29-22) A group of people working from a plantation in South Carolina spread misinformation about the November 2020 election. These falsehoods have since become articles of faith for many Republicans. Watch "The Plot to Overturn the Election" (54 min.)
• Trump lost the election, but he won the online disinformation war (Peter Geoghegan, openDemocracy, 11-9-2020) "Social media platforms have allowed US conservatives to delegitimise the election and sow mistrust of democracy. Posts by far-right news site Breitbart had been shared three times as often as posts from the official pages of every Democratic member of the US senate combined in the previous 30 days....As Tuesday night moved into Wednesday morning, Trump held the Sunshine State comfortably, mainly thanks to Latino voters in the state's most populous county, Miami-Dade, shifting in huge numbers from Clinton in 2016 to Trump this time around. Why? One reason is the months of YouTube videos and Facebook posts that led many in Miami to believe that Biden was a stalking horse for socialism, anathema to the city's large Cuban ex-pat population. These conspiracy theories were shared widely and then repeated incessantly on Spanish-language radio."
• What if a U.S, presidential candidate refuses to concede after an election? (Van Jones, TED Talk about how to stop a coup, October 2020) You can read transcript as you listen. "The president’s litigation strategy is unlikely to succeed, but it’s doing great harm in the meantime." Explaining why the customary concession speech is one of the most important safeguards for democracy, Jones exposes shocking legal loopholes that could enable a candidate to grab power even if they lose both the popular vote and the electoral college.
Did you know "that under our constitution a presidential candidate could actually lose the popular vote, fail to get a majority in the electoral college, refuse to concede, manipulate hidden mechanisms in our government and still get sworn in as the president of the United States of America? Everyone essentially ignores the elite electoral process...".A concession speech is "the one speech no presidential candidate ever wants to give, and yet, it is that public address that is most important for the health and the well-being of our nation....The best way to stop a coup is to update and strengthen our democratic system as soon as this election is over. Maybe we need to rethink, reimagine or just get rid of this whole electoral college, extra inning thing in the first place.
"Get informed. A number of progressive organizations are already working hard to warn Americans about this growing threat to our democracy. Some organizations you could look into and research for yourself: choosedemocracy.us, electiontaskforce.org, protectdemocracy.org, mobilize.us, allamericans.org, civicalliance.com and the Fight Back table at demos.org. All these groups are working on this. Now, on the right, if that's your cup of tea, you could also check out The Heritage Foundation or the Government Accountability Institute."
• The Making of Donald Trump David Cay Johnston. An easy read: a once-over lightly survey of why this man should never have been allowed to hold office -- covering Trump's taxes and shockingly crooked tax dodging (easily done as a real estate tycoon), his casinos, Trump University, the fake names he's used in phone calls with the press, links with mafia members and Roy Cohn, his use of lawyers to bully, how he caused the destruction of the nascent United States Football League, his amorphous net worth, fake awards he has given himself, his golf courses, and the huckster's perpetual myth maintenance. (H/T Franklin the Mouse)
• Less Coverage and Higher Costs: The Trump’s Administration’s Health Care Legacy (American Progress, 9-25-20) The president has failed to deliver on his promises to “take care of everybody.”
• He Bought Health Insurance for Emergencies. Then He Fell Into a $33,601 Trap. (Jenny Deam, ProPublica, 5-8-21) Since the Trump administration deregulated the health insurance industry, there’s been an explosion of short-term plans that leave patients with surprise bills and providers with huge revenue.
• ‘It’s like every red flag’: Trump-ordered HHS ad blitz raises alarms (Dan Diamond, Politico, 9-25-2020) "The health department is moving quickly on a highly unusual advertising campaign to "defeat despair" about the coronavirus, a $300 million-plus effort that was shaped by a political appointee close to President Donald Trump and executed in part by close allies of the official, using taxpayer funds....[Michael] Caputo, who has no medical or scientific background, claimed in a Facebook video on Sept. 13 that the campaign was "demanded of me by the president of the United States. Personally."
...But 10 current and former health officials told POLITICO that they have concerns about the campaign's scope, goals and even how it has been funded — by pulling money out of health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control that are in the midst of fighting the pandemic, rather than working with lawmakers to set up a brand-new advertising effort with congressional oversight, or drawing on substantial internal resources and expertise in running health-related public service campaigns
....But 10 current and former health officials told POLITICO that they have concerns about the campaign's scope, goals and even how it has been funded — by pulling money out of health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control that are in the midst of fighting the pandemic, rather than working with lawmakers to set up a brand-new advertising effort with congressional oversight, or drawing on substantial internal resources and expertise in running health-related public service campaigns."
• How a Future President Can Hold the Trump Administration Accountable (Sam Berger, Center for American Progress, 8-5-2020)
• President Trump’s 3,400 conflicts of interest (Corruption, Crew, 9-24-2020) The conflicts include visits to Trump properties by foreign government officials, taxpayer spending at Trump businesses, and Trump’s own blatant promotions of the businesses. CREW has tracked around two conflicts of interest per day, but that is likely only the tip of the iceberg. According to data from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Trump made at least 500 visits to his own hotels, golf courses, restaurants, and other facilities during his four years in office. Special-interest groups held 130 events at Trump properties.
• Trump Organization convicted in executive tax dodge scheme (Michael R. Sisak, AP News, 12-6-22) Donald Trump’s company was convicted of tax fraud Tuesday for helping executives dodge taxes on extravagant perks such as Manhattan apartments and luxury cars, a repudiation of financial practices at the former president’s business as he mounts another run for the White House. A jury found two corporate entities at the Trump Organization guilty on all 17 counts, including charges of conspiracy and falsifying business records. Trump himself was not on trial. The probe, which began as an inquiry into hush-money payments made on Trump’s behalf, later morphed into an examination of the company’s asset valuation and pay practices.
• Trump’s penthouse value estimate boosted by millions due to his fame, execs testify in fraud trial (MICHAEL R. SISAK and JENNIFER PELTZ, AP News, 10-5-23) In pretrial testimony, the former president said that people who did business with him were given ample warning not to trust the statements, and that he never thought that the documents “would be taken very seriously.”
• Former Trump executive Allen Weisselberg sentenced to 5 months in jail for lying(Associated Press, 4-10-24) Allen Weisselberg, a retired executive in Donald Trump’s real estate empire, was sentenced Wednesday to five months in jail for lying under oath during his testimony in the civil fraud lawsuit brought against the former president by New York’s attorney general. The civil fraud trial ended with Judge Arthur Engoron ruling that Trump and some of his executives had schemed to deceive banks, insurers and others by lying about his wealth on financial statements used to make deals and secure loans. The judge penalized Trump $455 million and ordered Weisselberg to pay $1 million. They are both appealing.
• Trump wanted to launch missiles into Mexico to rid of drug labs: Esper memoir (Kelly McClure, Salon, 5-5-22) In a memoir written by Trump's former defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, it's revealed that the former president would often suggest shocking weapons-based forms of problem solving such as blowing up Mexican drug labs with missiles and shooting anti-police brutality demonstrators.
Heather Cox Richardson (5-6-22) "In other news today, a new book coming out by Mark Esper, former secretary of defense under Trump, reveals that the former president wanted the military to recall to active duty retired General Stan McChrystal and Admiral William H. McRaven in order to court-martial them for disloyalty to him. It also says that Trump wanted to have the U.S. military launch missiles at Mexican drug labs, quoting him as telling Esper that “[w]e could just shoot some Patriot missiles” into our neighbor and ally, Mexico, and no one would know it was the U.S. because Trump could just deny it.
"Esper pointed out that such an attack on a sovereign nation would be an act of war."
• Trump’s company has received at least $970,000 from U.S. taxpayers for room rentals (David A. Fahrenthold and Joshua Partlow, WaPo, 5-14-2020)
• Judge slaps down Trump appointee who has sought to reshape Voice of America and related agencies (Paul Farhi, Wash Post, 11-21-2020) 'Lee R. Crain, one of the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs, said Howell’s ruling ensures that journalists at the agencies can ‘rest assured that the First Amendment protects them from government efforts to control” their reporting. “They are free to do exactly what Congress intended: export independent, First Amendment-style journalism to the world.”... Michael "Pack had asserted the right to direct how journalists at VOA and sister networks such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia covered the news, a violation of the traditional “firewall” that ensures the networks aren’t government mouthpieces.'
See also Court Injunction Bars USAGM From Editorial Interference (Jessica Jerreat, VOA News,11-21-2020) and see U.S. Government-Funded Broadcasters Must Remain Free from Political Interference PEN America (11-22-2020) decries "vandalism" being committed by USAGM CEO Michael Pack, files court brief in lawsuit against the U.S. Agency for Global Media. "Since its inception, public broadcast journalism's challenge has been to win the trust of its audience—to bury any impression that Radio Free Europe, for example, is an American Pravda."
• An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry (David A. Graham, Adrienne Green, Cullen Murphy, and Parker Richards, The Atlantic, June 2019) His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage. "One of the things Trump learned when he injected himself into the Central Park Five case was that he could get attention for himself because he was a spokesman for a certain type of Archie Bunker New Yorker. I think that’s one of the bonds that he shares with [Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor] Rudy Giuliani: They’re both profoundly guys from that moment in New York when a lot of racial boundaries got drawn."
• Making Sense (Sam Harris's podcast, 10-30-2020). This link takes you to Harris's fascinating discussion with Andrew Sullivan about why Trump has been so successful despite being a horrible person.
• How Trump Became the Pro-Infection Candidate (Dhruv Khullar, New Yorker, 10-23-2020)
• The Coup Stage of Donald Trump’s Presidency (Masha Gessen, New Yorker, 11-20-2020) Is it a coup or a con? Trump’s bad con continues to show how easy it would be to stage a good one. Then we would call it a coup.
• Trump's Clown Coup (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 11-20-2020) We’ve been getting used to painful truths for so long that the awful enormity of the current situation doesn’t hit us in the way it should. The G.O.P. leadership, which has tolerated so many abuses by Trump, is now openly complicit in his worst one yet.
• How Trump and His Enablers Are Laying the Groundwork For a Coup d'état (A Pointed View, 11-10-2020) There's an interesting discussion of this on Facebook (launched by Anita Bartholomew's post).
• In 1,316 days, President Trump has made 22,247 false or misleading claims (Washington Post Fact Checker) The Fact Checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump since assuming office. A timeline of untruths, along with the facts. See also Trump is averaging more than 50 false or misleading claims a day (Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, The Fact Checker, 10-22-2020)
• Disappearing Data (HuffPost Report, 10-28-2020) Data is the lifeblood of a functioning government. Over the past four years, the Trump administration has destroyed, disappeared or distorted vast swathes of the information the state needs to protect the vulnerable, safeguard our health, and alert us to emerging crises. This is an accounting of the damage in several areas where data is crucial: The Pandemic, Climate Change, The Vulnerable, Pollution, Science, Food, Conservation, and the Census.
• The President's Taxes: Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance (Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire, NY Times, 9-27-2020--part of a series) The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due. "Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made." The returns "reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base....Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name."
• The Swamp That Trump Built (Nicholas Confessore, Karen Yourish, Steve Eder, Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman, Grace Ashford, Michael LaForgia, Kenneth P. Vogel, Michael Rothfeld and Larry Buchanan, NY Times, 10-10-2020) A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration.
• 18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records (NY Times, 9-27-2020) Times reporters have obtained decades of tax information the president has hidden from public view. Among the key findings of The Times’s investigation: "Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750. He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service. Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes."Read on.
• Trump Engineered a Sudden Windfall in 2016 as Campaign Funds Dwindled (Susanne Craig, Mike McIntire and Russ Buettner, NY Times, 10-9-2020) Tax records expose more than $21 million in highly unusual payments from the Las Vegas hotel Donald Trump owns with Phil Ruffin, routed through other Trump companies and paid out in cash. His tax records show that "his 'self-funded' presidential campaign was short on funds, and he was struggling to win over leery Republican donors. His golf courses and the hotel he would soon open in the Old Post Office in Washington were eating away at what cash he had left on hand....And in early 2016, Deutsche Bank, the last big lender still doing business with him, unexpectedly turned down his request for a loan. The funds, Mr. Trump had told his bankers, would help shore up his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. Some bankers feared the money would instead be diverted to his campaign."
• Misinformation about Biden’s health spreads after debate (Elizabeth Dwoskin, Washington Post, 9-30-2020) TikTok videos and Trump ads with false information got more than 700,000 views and clicks. See also Right-wing voices are dominating Facebook after the first presidential debate (WaPo, 9-30-2020) Many Americans who primarily get news from Facebook are living in a media ecosystem where the winner of the debate is clear: President Trump crushed Joe Biden. But Facebook and Twitter take unusual steps to limit spread of New York Post story (Dwoskin, WaPo, 10-15-2020) "Four years after Russian operatives exploited tech giants’ services during a presidential contest, the companies’ swift and aggressive steps in responding to the unverified story, and their divergent responses, are a real-time case study in their ability to protect the integrity of an election that has been marred by domestic disinformation and misleading accounts. That activity has included misinformation about Biden’s health, the dying wish of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the validity of mail-in ballots — much of it spread by Trump and his supporters."
• Trump got a $21 million tax break for saving the forest outside his N.Y. mansion. Now the deal is under investigation. (Joshua Partlow, Jonathan O'Connell and David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post, 10-9-2020) Five years ago, Donald Trump promised to preserve more than 150 acres of rolling woodlands in an exclusive swath of New York suburbia prized for its luxury homes and rural tranquility. He wrote off the cost as a business expense and the family calls it "a retreat for the Trump family."
• Trump says he's leaving hospital for White House, feels good (Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin, and Aamer Madhani, AP, 10-5-2020) "For more than eight months, Trump's efforts to play down the threat of the virus in hopes of propping up the economy ahead of the election have drawn bipartisan criticism....According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those with mild to moderate symptoms can be contagious for as many — and should isolate for at least — 10 day. On Sunday afternoon, Trump briefly ventured out of the hospital while contagious to salute cheering supporters by motorcade — an outing that disregarded precautions meant to contain the virus....Less than one month before Election Day, Trump was eager to project strength despite his illness. The still-infectious president surprised supporters who had gathered outside the hospital, riding by Sunday in a black SUV with the windows rolled up. Secret Service agents inside the vehicle could be seen in masks and other protective gear....[Sunday] was the second straight day of obfuscation from a White House already suffering from a credibility crisis. And it raised more doubts about whether the doctors treating the president were sharing accurate, timely information with the American public about the severity of his condition."
• The Coronavirus and the Threat Within the White House ( David Remnick, New Yorker, 10-3-2020) "The best security system and the most solicitous medical officers in the world could not protect Donald Trump from a danger that he insisted on belittling and ignoring....The Centers for Disease Control and other public-health institutions have long said that wearing masks is essential to minimizing the spread of the coronavirus. Trump has been of another opinion, a delusional one."
• The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19 (Michael Grabell, ProPublica, 5-13-22) Newly released documents reveal that the meatpacking industry’s callousness toward the health of its workers and its influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known. Congressional investigators have reported on a high-pressure lobbying campaign by the meat industry leading to one of the most consequential moments in the nation’s COVID-19 response: Trump's presidential order that effectively thwarted efforts by local health officials to shut plants down and slow the spread of COVID-19.
• The Battle Over “The Room Where It Happened” Continues (Authors Guild, 9-24-2020) "On September 15, the Trump Administration continued its campaign against John Bolton and his book The Room Where It Happened by opening a criminal inquiry into whether Bolton had unlawfully disclosed classified information in his bestselling memoir. Ellen Knight, formerly of the National Security Council, expressed concern 'about the politicization -- or even the perceived politicization -- of the prepublication review process. Once authors start perceiving that manuscripts are being reviewed for political considerations, they will lose confidence in the integrity of the process and find ways to publish or release their works without submitting them for review. This could result in unchecked disclosures of sensitive information and the potential for serious damage to our national security.' Ms. Knight’s letter states that the Bolton prepublication review process “entailed an unprecedented amount of interaction between the political appointees in the NSC Legal staff and the career prepublication review staff.”
• Twitter’s Trump Fact Check Won’t Solve Much, but at Least It’s Something (Dahlia Lithwick, Future Tense, Slate, 5-27-2020) Twitter took the unprecedented step of attaching warning labels accompanied by links to fact checks to two of the president’s false tweets. The president then went on to threaten that Twitter was “completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” although anyone with a brain quickly pointed out that private companies are not state actors and Trump has no First Amendment claims here.
• The First Amendment: what it really means for free speech and why Donald Trump is trampling on it (Eliza Bechtold, The Conversation, 8-5-19) "...there is no First Amendment right to use Twitter or have a Facebook page. As private entities, social media companies are free to adopt policies relating to user content and to remove users who violate such policies without implicating the First Amendment. Moreover, the First Amendment protects the expression of corporations and other associations, as well as individuals. This means that Facebook, Twitter, and others have free speech rights."
• Judges toss lawsuit alleging anti-conservative bias on social media (Marc DeAngelis, Engadget, 5-28-2020) In 2018, the nonprofit organization Freedom Watch and a conservative YouTuber named Laura Loomer tried to sue social media companies. They alleged that Twitter, Facebook and Google -- which owns YouTube -- broke antitrust laws and violated their First Amendment rights by conspiring to suppress conservative viewpoints. Their case was dropped last year, but they appealed the decision. According to Bloomberg, a federal appeals court today affirmed the decision to drop the suit, leaving the tech companies in the clear.The plaintiffs say that tech companies conspired to suppress conservative views. See also Freedom Watch and Laura Loomer Lose Lawsuit Against Social Media Platforms (Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy, 5-27-2020) No, said the Court. The plaintiffs' First Amendment claim failed because "the First Amendment 'prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech," because there was no evidence of an anticompetitive behavior by platforms, and because D.C.'s public accommodation statute doesn't apply to online service providers.
• The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President (McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, 2-10-2020) How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election. After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world's demagogues and strongmen in power.
• Literary Group Goes to Court to Stop Donald Trump From Violating the First Amendment (Eriq Gardner, Hollywood Reporter, 10-16-18) The Pen America Center says Trump is using his power to unconstitutionally punish and intimidate The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, the White House press corps and others who cover his administration.
• Why Bill Barr Turned on Trump (Donald Ayer, The Atlantic, 9-19-22) No one should think he’s having second thoughts about the awful things he did in office. Remember that Barr sought out the opportunity to serve as Trump’s attorney general by submitting a memorandum in June 2018, expanding upon his long-held, breathtaking vision that the Founders created an all-powerful president immune from virtually any limitation on his powers.
• Almost 2,000 former Justice officials condemn department for dropping Flynn case (Rebecca Klar, The Hill, 5-11-2020) 'Nearly 2,000 former Department of Justice (DOJ) officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations condemned the DOJ and Attorney General William Barr on Monday for moving to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The former officials said Barr “once again assaulted the rule of law” and accused the attorney general of using the department “as a tool to further President Trump’s personal and political interests.” '
See also ‘A constant battle of you against the leadership of your country’: Justice Dept. rattled as Flynn fallout reaches FBI (Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, and Josh Dawsey, Washington Post, 5-8-2020) 'While the president continued to criticize the FBI’s conduct, multiple federal law enforcement officials interviewed Friday expressed varying degrees of anger, resignation and alarm over the decision by Attorney General William P. Barr to abandon the prosecution of Flynn for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States before Trump took office. “The attorney general is supposed to be above reproach and apolitical in terms of how the department operates and how he or she as an individual operates, and he’s just completely lost that,” said one veteran Justice Department lawyer who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “He’s Trump’s attorney. He’s not the country’s attorney.” '
• How Trump Supporters Came to Hate the Police (Luke Mogelson, New Yorker, 9-10-22) At the Capitol riot and elsewhere, MAGA Republicans have leaped from “backing the blue” to attacking law-enforcement officials."One way to think about January 6th is as the consummation, in real time, of a tumultuous shift between two distinct eras of conservatism. Before 2020, most conservatives celebrated law enforcement as the protectors of a system that was, on balance, reliably favorable to their interests. By the end of 2020, after the lockdowns and the election, many conservatives had come to see that system the same way that right-wing extremists did—as corrupt and tyrannical, perhaps even satanic. At the same time, so long as Trump was still in power and weaponizing law enforcement against leftists, neither conservatives nor the police were forced to confront what this meant for their alliance. That reckoning could no longer be avoided on January 6th, and it is understandable that people on both sides of the line persisted in respecting the terms of a compact that was now obsolete."
• Kelly and Pompeo: How A Journalist Masterfully Combated Gaslighting (Stephanie Sarkis, Forbes, 1-25-2020) A brief demo on how to address gaslighters talking over you, spouting misinformation, acting as if they're being bullied, lying to make you look unreasonable, etc.
• Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 7-18-16) “The Art of the Deal” made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that myth—and regrets it. Over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is likely to lie about anything.”
“He has no attention span.” “. . .it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein.”
• Defending Rights & Dissent Opposes Trump Executive Order Equating Support for Palestinian Rights with Anti-Semitic Discrimination (Defending Rights & Dissent, 12-11-19) Anti-Semitism is a real threat, but it is a distortion of civil rights to use federal civil rights law to suppress speech in support of Palestinian rights.
• Judgment days (Stephanie McCrummen, Washington Post, 7-21-18) In a small Alabama town, an evangelical congregation reckons with God, President Trump and the meaning of morality. How can people who purport to disapprove of sinfulness of all kinds vote for a twice-divorced alleged adulterer who has boasted of sexual assault? What was important was not the character of the president but his positions, they said, and one mattered more than all the others. “Abortion,” said Linda, whose eyes teared up when she talked about it. Read that and then read this: Avoiding false judgments in journalism about Trump’s evangelical supporters (Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Nieman Storyboard, 4-11-19) A religion scholar assesses how the Washington Post's Stephanie McCrummen avoids predictable pitfalls in "Judgment Days."
• ‘A Terrible Mistake’: Trump Criticizes DeSantis on Abortion Ban (Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, NY Times, 9-17-23) The former president, while denouncing his chief rival for the Republican nomination, also largely evaded questions on the issue. "Mr. Trump's advisers are mindful that abortion was a political loser for Republicans in the 2022 midterm cycle."
"Since announcing his candidacy — just a week after Republicans underperformed expectations in midterm elections shaped by a backlash against the overturning of the abortion ruling — there has been no policy issue on which Mr. Trump has appeared more uncomfortable than on abortion. "In interview after interview since the repeal of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Trump has ducked questions about whether he would support a federal ban on most abortions at 15 weeks — the baseline position of many Republicans, including the leading anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America....
"In reality, Mr. Trump — who years ago said he supported abortion rights before switching his position in 2011 as he considered a presidential campaign that year — appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, providing a majority to reverse the Roe ruling. Democrats have made clear they plan to make Mr. Trump’s role in Roe’s end a key focus in the 2024 general election if he is the nominee."
• ICE Has Kept Tabs on ‘Anti-Trump’ Protesters in New York City (Jimmy Tobias, The Nation, 3-6-19) Documents reveal that the immigration enforcement agency has been keenly attuned to left-leaning protests in the city. “If [the Department of Homeland Security] is specifically focusing on those who are against the current president, it gets into the realm of what fascist regimes do,” says Jody Kuh, a volunteer organizer with Rise and Resist. “If they are watching us because we are against the current president’s policies, it is more than a little disturbing.”
• Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Trump Is a Fascist (Andrew Marantz, New Yorker, 3-27-24) Columbia historian Robert O. Paxton wrote, in 2017, in Harper’s Magazine. “Are we therefore looking at a fascist? Not really.” But history keeps happening, and historians’ minds can change. Here’s Paxton again, a few days after January 6, 2021, contra himself. The headline, in Newsweek, was “I’ve Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now.” “Trump’s incitement of the invasion of the Capitol,” Paxton wrote, “crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
"Trump’s bluster is famously unreliable, but, since 2021, he has called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”; he has referred to his political opponents as “vermin”; and he seems prepared to wield the levers of state more ruthlessly in a second term (including, among many other proposals, potentially using the Insurrection Act and other emergency powers to militarize the border)."
• A Brief History of Fascist Lies by Federico Finchelstein (University of California Press, 2020) Excerpt: "The same lies that motivated the El Paso killer are at the center of Trumpism and the so-called effort to Make America Great Again. Lying about things that are part of the permanent record has become part of the American president’s daily routine. Trump continuously has used specific propaganda techniques, lying with-out consequence, replacing rational debate with paranoia and resentment, and casting reality itself into doubt. Trump’s attacks on the mainstream media and the extensive documented instances where he claims he didn’t say something that is in fact in the public record are related to the history of fascist lies analyzed in this book."
• Inside the Steele Dossier & The Fusion GPS Investigation Of Trump (listen to Terry Gross, Fresh Air, 11-26-19) During the 2016 campaign, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch hired former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to investigate Donald Trump's involvement with Russia. Their book about this topic is Crime in Progress (the inside story of the high-stakes, four-year-long investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia ties—culminating in the Steele dossier, and sparking the Mueller report—from the founders of political opposition research company Fusion GPS) This Washington Post review of the book may help you decide whether to read further.
• The Summer of Chaos and God (Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, 9-5-19) 'A preference for chaos on the far right is connected to God in ways Democrats can barely talk about, much less comprehend, whether it’s the fundamental disconnect around evangelical support for unfettered gun rights or the right’s rejection of environmental protection or immigrants’ rights. But the more morally discordant Trump’s policies and politics are, the more he is seen as fighting for religious rights. This is not a claim that all or even most religious belief is nihilist—it is just a recognition that there is a deeply nihilist strain in some religious quarters, one that dovetails perfectly with the impulse to “blow it all up.”'
• Trump Can’t Block Critics From His Twitter Account, Appeals Court Rules (Charlie Savage, NY Times, 7-9-19) "Because Mr. Trump uses Twitter to conduct government business, he cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he does not like their views, a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled unanimously." "The decision may have broader implications for how the First Amendment applies to officials’ accounts in the social-media era."
• The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine (Jane Mayer, New Yorker, 10-4-19) How a conservative dark-money group that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2016 spread the discredited story that may lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment. See also the book Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green, as well as the article “Stupid Watergate” Is Worse Than the Original (David Remnick, New Yorker, 10-4-19) "...his corruption is totally as we see it, out front. He doesn’t try to hide it. He doesn’t try to hide the conflicts of interest or the lying. He is not a secretive conspirator. Donald Trump’s behavior echoes Nixon’s in one sense: he and his confederates appear to have been engaged in an effort to undermine the integrity of a Presidential election."
• The Difference Between Leaking and Whistle-Blowing in the Trump White House (Masha Gessen, New Yorker, 10-4-19) 'A whistle-blower often speaks out with the aim of halting some wrongdoing, but a leaker’s motives are generally self-serving....We have normalized Trumpism to such an extent that journalists and politicians didn’t know how to think about the Ukraine story until the whistle-blower framed it as an egregious abuse of power....Yet it took two and a half years for someone with significant access to the Administration to go through the process of systematically collecting information and transmitting it through the institutional channels created specifically for the purpose of saying, “This is not normal.”'
• What is Trumpcare? (Larry Levitt, news@JAMA, 9-25-19)
• Who Are Donald Trump's Supporters? Trump Nation (USA Today Interactives) They’re not clichés. The USA TODAY NETWORK interviewed voters in every state to find out. Read their comments.
• Trump the Truth: A Timeline of Assaults on Free Expression (Pen America) The Trump the Truth timeline, maintained and updated by PEN America during the first year of the Trump Administration, was used to track important developments during the Trump Administration that posed a threat to undermine free expression and press freedoms (or, from another viewpoint, express his opinion). See also PEN America's Trump the Truth report and timeline (PDF in standard prose format).
• PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter report on Trump. See especially All statements by Trump, rated as true or false or somewhere in between. (36 pages as of 7-25-19)
•“My father never got so much as a speeding ticket in his life,” says Eric Trump, whose father paid $25 million to people he defrauded through Trump University.
• Under Trump, LGBTQ Progress Is Being Reversed in Plain Sight (Kirsten Berg and Moiz Syed, ProPublica, 11-22-19) Donald Trump promised he would fight for LGBTQ people. Instead, his administration has systematically undone recent gains in their rights and protections. Since taking office, Trump’s administration has acted to dismantle federal protections and resources for LGBTQ Americans, particularly those gained under President Barack Obama. Here are 31 examples.
• 'Times' Journalists Puncture Myth Of Trump As Self-Made Billionaire (Terry Gross interviews investigative reporters Susanne Craig and David Barstow, who say the president received today's equivalent of $413 million from his father's real estate empire, through what appears to be tax fraud. See also Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father (Susanne Craig and David Barstow and Russ Buettner, NY Times, 10-2-18) The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through schemes to avoid paying taxes on multimillion dollar gifts in the family. "Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more."
• Mueller report suggests the ‘fake news’ came from Trump, not the news media (Paul Farhi, WaPo, 4-18-19) Mueller's report cites multiple instances in which Trump and White House aides misled or lied to journalists or in public statements as the investigation was unfolding....In fact, according to Mueller’s report, Trump’s first reaction [to news of Mueller's appointment] was anything but calm. According to notes taken by an aide, Trump responded by saying, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m f-cked. . . . This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
• Donald Trump Fact Check (Toronto Star)
• When Donald met Scott: a reporter's view of Trump and his White House wonderland (Katharine Murphy, The Guardian, 9-27-19) Australian PM Scott Morrison received a full-blown welcome from the US president. " If he doesn’t understand, the president will say: “Say it.” This means ask the question again, she says."
• Why PEN America Is Suing Donald Trump (Jennifer Egan, LitHub, 10-18-18) "Trump's vitriol against reporters has made political journalism a more dangerous practice....President Trump’s frank admiration for authoritarian rulers makes his efforts to hobble a free press here in America all the more alarming. His actions conform to what some call an 'authoritarian playbook' for modern tyrants, in which the curtailing of free speech occurs subtly and gradually through a system of governmental rewards and punishments that encourage cooperation and gradually chill opposing voices."
• Hundreds of Newspapers Denounce Trump's Attacks on Media in Coordinated Editorials(James Doubek, NPR, 8-16-18) Over 300 newspapers published editorials against Trump’s attack on the press. The President responded by calling the media “the opposition party,” and many believe this will only bolster his current platform. Will a united media be enough to reaffirm the First Amendment? NPR does not have an editorial board, and did not take part in Thursday's coordinated effort. The project was spearheaded by staff members of the editorial page at the Globe. See
---A Free Press Needs You (Editorial, NY Times, 8-15-18)
--- "Americans may not like the news they see or hear but they should not hold that against those who report it. In short, don’t shoot the messenger." --TriCorner News, LakeVille Journal, 8-15-18)
---Journalists are not the enemy (Boston Globe editorial board, 8-15-18)
---"Self-governance demands that our citizens need to be well-informed and that's what we're here to do. ... Some think we're rude to question and challenge. We know it's our obligation."--The Times of North Little Rock
---"Journalists are used to being insulted. It comes with the job ... But being called an enemy — and not of a politician or cause, but of the whole people of a nation — that's something else entirely."-- Topeka Capital-Journal
• EPA Lets AP Reporter Back Into Summit After She Was Shoved Out Of Building (DAvid Bauder, Talking Points Memo, 5-22-18) AP journalist Ellen Knickmeyer and reporters from CNN and E&E News were told they could not attend an invitation-only event, a summit on a class of chemicals present in dangerous amounts in many water systems around the country. Knickmeyer "was earlier barred and shoved out of the building by a security guard." “We understand the importance of an open and free press and we hope the EPA does, too,” CNN said. Scott Pruitt apparently does not.
• Trump admin tightens media access for federal scientists: report (Ali Breland, The Hill, 6-21-18) The Trump administration is directing federal scientists in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to get approval from the Department of the Interior, its parent agency, before speaking to reporters, according to the Los Angeles Times. "The employees said that they believe the new policies were established to control the voices of Interior employees. They believe the move is a part of larger efforts to quell discourse about climate change, which the agency has produced research on."
• "It's the law, stupid," and seven other lessons from the EPA's botched media blackout. (Indira Lakshmanan, Poynter, 5-24-18) The Federal Advisory Committee Act requires that any advisory group making recommendations to the federal government “shall be open to the public.” Journalists protect their interests if they’re versed in open records and open meetings laws.
• Board objects to EPA press office action (National Association of Science Writers, 3-26-18) Inpart: "With the March 20 “press release,” EPA effectively limited its discussion of a major science policy story to a handpicked, partisan outlet. It also encouraged journalists to learn details about this story from a published article, which can never be a basis of responsible news reporting.
"When reporters contact the EPA Press Office asking for information regarding the activities of a taxpayer-funded organization, those queries should be answered swiftly by knowledgeable staff. The same holds when journalists request public documents from an agency."
• Judge: Trump Can’t Block Twitter Users(Mark Joseph Stern, Slate, 5-13-18).S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that President Donald Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking Twitter users who criticized him and his policies. Her ruling is an extraordinary victory for free speech on the internet and a harsh rebuke to Trump’s effort to prevent his critics from engaging with him online.
• The White House's attack on scientists could manipulate public opinion (Lauren Kurtz and Romany Webb, Opinion, The Hill, 2-28-18) "The Trump administration’s FY2019 budget, unveiled last Monday, proposes cuts in essential funding for scientific research and education. Unfortunately, this attack on science is not an isolated incident. Barely a year into President Trump’s term, there have already been 111 attempts by the federal government to censor, misrepresent, or stifle science. Many appear intended to gain support for the administration’s efforts to prop up the fossil fuel industry... At the Department of the Interior (DOI), a website discussing the environmental and other risks of fossil fuel development was changed to emphasize economic benefits [and to argue against human causes of climate change]. A few months later, large swaths of land previously protected from coal mining and oil and gas drilling were opened to development. Shortly after this, DOI’s Bureau of Land Management changed the image on its homepage from a scenic park vista to a pile of coal, presumably to reinforce the message that public lands are for mining."
• Words banned at multiple HHS agencies include ‘diversity’ and ‘vulnerable’ (Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin, WashPost, 12-10-17) "The Trump administration has informed multiple divisions within the Department of Health and Human Services that they should avoid using certain words or phrases in official documents being drafted for next year’s budget. The words to avoid: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.” Participants at HHS were also told to use “Obamacare” instead of ACA, or the Affordable Care Act, and to use “exchanges” instead of “marketplaces” to describe the venues where people can purchase health insurance. At the CDC, budget analysts were told they could use an alternative phrase instead of “evidence-based” or “science-based” in budget documents. That phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”
The CDC analyst said it was clear to participants that they were to avoid those seven words but only in drafting budget documents.
• Homeland Security Used a Private Intelligence Firm to Monitor Family Separation Protests (Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept, 4-19-19) In the last two years, law enforcement agencies executing the Trump administration’s immigration agenda have cracked down on critics of the president’s policies. Among the targeted: humanitarian volunteers providing food, water, and medical aid to migrants trekking through the desert, and immigration attorneys, journalists, and activists working with, and around, migrant caravans.“This is a chilling revelation, but follows an even scarier trend of constant government surveillance and policing of immigrant communities, and targeting of activists and journalists,” Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center.
• The police threw the book at Trump Protesters in DC but sat and watched White Supremacists terrorize Charlottesville (Sandra Fulton, HuffPost, 8-29-17) "Last week, the Department of Justice altered a sweeping warrant, which sought to collect personal information on every visitor to an anti-Trump website that organized protests on Inauguration Day....The demand seems to be in line with a broader trend within the Trump Administration—a harsh crackdown against any group that disagrees with President Trump. For his part, Trump has categorized these protesters as the “Alt-Left,” a term that doesn’t seem to apply to any easily-defined entity beyond the paranoid imaginings of Trump and his allies." "The administration and law enforcement are using a range of tactics — from electronic surveillance to a growing number of anti-protest laws — to criminalize anyone that organizes in the streets to protest the president and his policies. But how are law enforcement and the administration responding to the very real threats coming from white supremacists like those who marched earlier this month on Charlottesville?'
• Leaked FBI Documents Reveal Bureau’s Priorities Under Trump (Ken Klippenstein, The Young Turks, 8-8-19) Under President Trump, the FBI’s official counterterrorism priorities have included “Black Identity Extremists,” “anti-authority” extremists, and “animal rights/environmental extremists,” according to leaked Bureau documents.... When an August 2017 internal FBI report referencing the counterterrorism threat posed by “Black Identity Extremists” was published by Foreign Policy, the FBI became the subject of intense criticism for adopting what critics alleged was a racially loaded term....While the documents depict concerns about violent black extremist attacks, they do not cite a single specific attack — unlike white supremacist attacks, of which several prominent examples are provided....So grave did the Bureau consider the threat of black extremists that from 2019 to 2020, using new designations, it listed the threat at the very top of its counterterrorism priorities — above even terror groups like Al Qaeda."
• Justice demands 1.3M IP addresses related to Trump resistance site (Morgan Chalfant, The Hill, 8-14-17) "DreamHost claimed that the complying with the request from the Justice Department would amount to handing over roughly 1.3 million visitor IP addresses to the government, in addition to contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors to the website, which was involved in organizing protests against Trump on Inauguration Day. “That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” DreamHost wrote in the blog post on Monday. “That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”
• Trump Administration Starts Returning Copies of C.I.A. Torture Report to Congress (Mark Mazzetti and Mathew Rosenberg, NY Times, 6-2-17) "The Trump administration has begun returning copies of a voluminous 2014 Senate report about the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program to Congress, complying with the demand of a top Republican senator who has criticized the report for being shoddy and excessively critical of the C.I.A....The committee, which was then run by Democrats, also sent copies of the entire classified report to at least eight federal agencies, asking that they incorporate the report into their records — a move that would have made it subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. That law, which allows citizens, the media and other groups to request access to information held by the federal government, does not apply to congressional records...The full report is not expected to offer evidence of previously undisclosed interrogation techniques, but the interrogation sessions are said to be described in great detail. The report explains the origins of the program and identifies the officials involved, and also offers details on the role of each agency in the secret prison program."
• How Can Journalists Protect Themselves During a Trump Administration? (Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic, 11-10-16) The president-elect’s attacks on the press hint at an unfriendly atmosphere for reporters.
• Trump Hates the Press? Take a Number. (Jack Shafer, Politico, 2-17-17) "No matter how grievous the sins of the press may be—and as a press critic, let me tell you, they are grievous—a president can’t forever blame everything on “dishonest reporters,” the “mess” the previous president left behind or the dug-in elites. Reckonings tend to take a while to form, as Nixon and Agnew learned. Trump’s will come."
• Trump, who received hundreds of millions of dollars from his father's real estate empire, calls John Fetterman spoiled: 'He lived off his parents' money' (Isabella Zavarise, Yahoo, 9-4-22)
• Journalists around the country are joining a Slack channel devoted to FOIA and Trump (Krysten Hare, Poynter, 1-25-17) A few days before President Trump's inauguration, MuckRock opened up a Slack channel to help journalists better cover him and his administration. Sign up here: www.muckrock.com.
• How far will President Trump’s media blackout spread? The Sunlight Foundation is trying to find out (Kelly Hinchcliffe, Poynter, 1-25-17)
• Trump tried to ban top aides from penning tell-all books (Nancy Cook and Andrew Restuccia, Politico, 8-13-18) After the controversy surrounding the Omarosa Manigault Newman tell-all, the President’s use of non-disclosure/disparagement agreements is facing public criticism. The idea that top government officials could be censored from speaking out against abuse of power is frightening. What happens in a world where important political stories cannot be told?
• The Memory Hole 2, run by Russ Kick, and The Internet Archive (The Wayback Machine) save pages that disappear from the Web. Kick's site has been good about saving items deleted by the Trump Administration (including Trump's error-filled Tweets).
• Trump shares Twitter accounts linked to conspiracy theory QAnon (Tony Romm and Colby Itkowitz, WaPo, 7-30-19) How QAnon, the bizarre pro-Trump conspiracy theory, took hold in right-wing circles online. (And how Trump tweets its latest claim.
• Unsolicited Advice for the White House Press Corps (Jack Shafer, Fourth Estate, Politico, 2-6-17) And keep up to date on Shafer's Twitter feed.
• Poll: Trump More Trusted Than the Media (by Republicans) (Curt Mills, US News, 2-9-17) Views on the press and the administration break down along clear party lines. ""The partisan split on this topic is clear – 89 percent of Republicans find the Trump administration truthful, versus 77 percent of Democrats who find the administration untruthful. Conversely, 69 percent of Democrats find the news media truthful, while a whopping 91 percent of Republicans consider them untruthful. Independents consider both untruthful," according to a poll conducted by Emerson College." Mind you, this was in 2017.'
• The Private Trump Angst of a Republican Icon (Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, New Yorker, 9-27-2020) James Baker thinks Trump is “nuts,” but he voted for him once—and may soon do so again?
• The Invention of Thanksgiving (Philip Deloria, The New Yorker, 11-18-19) Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday--in which white Americans have from the start tended to play a villainous role. 'Today, Wampanoag people debate whether Thanksgiving should be a day of mourning or a chance to contemplate reconciliation. It’s mighty generous of them....“American Indian” is a political identity, not a racial one, constituted by formal, still living treaties with the United States government and a long series of legal decisions. Today, the Trump Administration would like to deny this history, wrongly categorize Indians as a racial group, and disavow ongoing treaty relationships.'
• Trump organizations agree to pay $750,000 to settle lawsuit with D.C. (Keith L. Alexander, WaPo, 5-3-22) The city alleged the groups misused nonprofit funds donated for inauguration to benefit Trump and his family. Lawyers for the District also accused Trump’s organization of improperly using nonprofit funds to throw a private party on Jan. 20, 2017, for Trump’s children — Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric — which cost $300,000. The city also alleged that the Trump Organization, the inaugural committee and the Trump International Hotel misused $1.1 million.
• With New Trump Policy, Is the Moon for the Taking? (Ramin Skibba, Undark, 5-30-19) The Trump administration has been vague about what it hopes to accomplish on the moon, but mining may be on the agenda. "Worse yet, the 2024 target date suggests a selfish motive — an attempt by Trump to conjure a dramatic legacy before he leaves office, assuming he is reelected next year. Indeed, recent comments by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine suggest the deadline was chosen with little, if any, consideration of the scientific and engineering challenges."