No, you don’t understand. He’s threatened because he thinks she’s competition.
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This video seems topical.
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June 30, 2020 (Tuesday)
Today’s big story was the increasing spread of the coronavirus across America. Yesterday, Anne Schuchat, director of the Centers for Disease Control (the CDC) said in an interview that the virus is spreading too fast and too far for the United States to bring it under control.
Today, when Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to a Senate committee on the coronavirus and the reopening of schools, he said he was “very concerned.” “We’re going in the wrong direction if you look at the curves of the new cases,” he said, “so we really have got to do something about that and we need to do it quickly.”
The country is now seeing more than 40,000 new infections a day while the European Union, which has more people, is seeing fewer than 6,000. About half the new cases are coming from California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona. Florida’s cases increased by 277 percent in the past two weeks; Texas’s by 184 percent, and Arizona’s by 145 percent. As our national confirmed deaths are approaching 130,000 people, Arizona recently released a new triage scoring system to help healthcare providers decide how to allocate resources if they must make choices about which patients to treat.
Nonetheless, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) did not want to hear Fauci’s evaluation of the crisis. “It’s important to realize that if society meekly submits to an expert and that expert is wrong, a great deal of harm may occur,” he lectured Fauci, who turned away Paul’s jabs with good humor. Paul told Dr. Fauci, “We need more optimism.”
I expected serious pushback today from the White House about the Russia bounty scandal, but their reaction was weirdly subdued. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany first suggested that the president hadn’t been “briefed” on the story, apparently using the word “briefed” to suggest it only means an oral report, rather than a written one. Multiple sources have confirmed that the information was indeed, in the President’s Daily Brief-- the PDB-- the written document of security issues he receives every morning.
Sources today also confirmed that it was a large money transfer from a bank controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to an account associated with the Taliban that alerted intelligence agencies that something was up, and that Trump was briefed on the information. This afternoon, in a press briefing, McEnany changed course, saying that “The president does read and he also consumes intelligence verbally. This president, I’ll tell you, is the most informed person on Planet Earth when it comes to the threats that we face.”
The White House tonight assured us that Trump has now been briefed on the bounty scandal, but while this story has consumed headlines since Friday—four full days ago—he has done and said nothing to condemn Russia’s actions. In a New York Times op-ed today, President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice points out that instead, Trump has dismissed the evidence as “possibly another fabricated Russia hoax, maybe by the Fake News” that is “wanting to make Republicans look bad!!!” Rice notes that if, indeed, Trump’s senior advisors thought there was no reason to inform Trump of the Russia bounty story, they “are not worthy of service.”
As a former National Security Adviser, she outlined what she would have done in their place after immediately giving the president the information. “If later the president decided, as Mr. Trump did, that he wanted to talk with President Vladimir Putin of Russia at least six times over the next several weeks and invite him to join the Group of 7 summit over the objections of our allies, I would have thrown a red flag: ‘Mr. President, I want to remind you that we believe the Russians are killing American soldiers. This is not the time to hand Putin an olive branch. It’s the time to punish him.’”
Rice called out the elephant in the room: Trump’s “perilous pattern” of deference to Russia.
He urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016, then praised Wikileaks for publishing them. He denied Russian interference in the 2016 election, undercut Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of that interference, and accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s word over that of our intelligence community when Putin denied Russian interference at a conference in Helsinki.
Trump “recklessly” pulled U.S. troops out of northeastern Syria, allowing Russian forces to take over our bases in the region. He has recently invited Putin to rejoin the international organization called the G7—from which Russia was excluded after it invaded Ukraine in 2014—and has suddenly announced that the U.S. will withdraw nearly a third of its troops from Germany, harming NATO and benefitting Russia. And now we know that Trump looked the other way as Russia paid for the slaughter of U.S. troops.
What does all this mean?
Rice doesn’t pull any punches: “At best, our commander in chief is utterly derelict in his duties, presiding over a dangerously dysfunctional national security process that is putting our country and those who wear its uniform at great risk. At worst, the White House is being run by liars and wimps catering to a tyrannical president who is actively advancing our arch adversary’s nefarious interests.”
The president’s weakness toward Russia was on the table today in another way, too, as Republicans stripped from a forthcoming defense bill a requirement that campaigns must notify federal authorities if they receive any offer of help from foreign countries. Accepting foreign money or help in any way is already illegal, as Federal Elections Commissioner Ellen Weintraub continually points out. The provision in this bill was a rebuke to the president, who told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos a year ago he would be willing to take such help, and then set out to get it from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. It also put on notice Attorney General William Barr, who in his confirmation hearing hedged his answer to whether he believes a campaign should alert authorities to foreign interference, finally saying he only considers help from foreign governments to be problematic.
For his part, the president continued to try to divert attention from coronavirus and the Russia bounty scandal by stoking a culture war, tweeting threats toward protesters and vandals who have defaced or pulled down statues. “This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country,” he tweeted today. A senior campaign official told Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post, “It’s a great political issue for the president.”
In a Sunday night interview in the Oval Office with Brian Kilmeade of the Fox News Channel, Trump inadvertently revealed just how fully his focus on our “history” is a political gambit. He pushed the issue of statues and history, talking of how vital statues are to understanding American history. Then, when Kilmeade pointed to a famous Frederic Remington statue that sits in the Oval Office and asked if it was of Teddy Roosevelt, Trump said “yes.” It is not. The sculpture is called “The Bronco Buster” and is an unidentified cowboy who looks nothing like Theodore—he hated the nickname “Teddy”-- Roosevelt.
Trump later told Kilmeade, “We have a heritage, we have a history. We should learn from the history. And if you don’t understand your history, you’ll go back to it again. You will go right back to it. You have to learn. Think of it—take away that whole era, and you’ll go back to it sometime—people won’t know about it.”
On that, the president and I agree.
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July 1, 2020 (Wednesday)
Coronavirus, the Russia bounty scandal, and the upcoming election continue to dominate America’s news.
Today, there were 52,788 new reported infections in the country, topping 50,000 for the first time. Right now, the seven-day average of new confirmed cases is the highest it’s ever been, and 45 states have seven-day averages of new infections higher than the previous week. June saw more than 800,000 new cases, bringing the total number of cases in the United States to more than 2.6 million.
But even with statistics like this, tonight on the Fox News Channel, Trump once again said that the economy was recovering strongly, and suggested that the coronavirus would go away on its own. He said: “I think we’re gonna be very good with the coronavirus. I think that at some point that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.” (The coronavirus will not just disappear.)
More news dropped today about the Russia bounty scandal, including the information that bounties on American and allied soldiers ranged up to $100,000. National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien blamed Trump’s CIA briefer for not bringing the information to the president’s attention, although sources confirm it was, in fact, written in the President’s Daily Brief in February. While O’Brien did not mention a specific name, he used the pronoun “her.” Trump’s usual briefer is Beth Sanner, a CIA analyst with more than 30 years of experience. Earlier, officials claimed that Trump missed the significance of the coronavirus at first because of her, as well, saying that she had downplayed the dangers of the virus when she briefed him about it on January 23. But Sanner has an excellent reputation as a briefer, and former intelligence officers familiar with Trump’s intelligence briefings say he cannot absorb anything that does not reinforce his worldview.
Trump continued to insist that the scandal isn’t real. He told an interviewer on the Fox News Channel that he had not been briefed on it because there was no consensus on the intelligence, and that he believed it was a hoax. On Twitter, he started the day by saying: “The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party. The secret source probably does not even exist, just like the story itself. If the discredited [New York Times] has a source, reveal it. Just another HOAX!” He followed up with: “Do people still not understand that this is all a made up Fake News Media Hoax started to slander me & the Republican Party. I was never briefed because any info that they may have had did not rise to that level….”
Congress, however, wants answers, and so far they have not been forthcoming. Tomorrow, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe will brief the Gang of Eight: the top Democrats and Republicans from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as the chairs and ranking minority members from both the House and the Senate Intelligence committees. The Gang of Eight is sworn to secrecy, and normally, it is only engaged under extraordinary circumstances when the president wants to limit access to information, as when a covert action is underway. Normally, the president is required to share information about intelligence with the congressional intelligence committees.
And then there is the upcoming election. Today Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is overseeing Trump’s campaign, moved long-serving campaign aide Michael Glassner from the position of chief operating officer to a different role in order to bring in Jeff DeWit, who had held the position in 2016. This move was in response to the Tulsa rally, and seems to assign Glassner the blame for that disaster. Such a shake-up at this point in an election year signals that the campaign team is nervous.
For his part, Trump is throwing his weight behind his base. On Tuesday night, he tweeted that he was considering scrapping a fair housing rule designed to combat racial segregation.
In 2015, President Barack Obama announced new rules to clarify the 1968 Fair Housing Act. That act required government not simply to stop outright discrimination, but also to dismantle existing segregation and foster integration instead, but this latter part of the law’s charge really never got off the ground. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule was designed to remedy that lack. It sets out a framework for local governments, States, and public housing agencies to look for racially biased housing patterns and to report the results. This will call out, for example, places where zoning laws bar affordable housing, a policy that appears to be race-blind, but which in practice excludes low-income families of color. The AFFH rule also requires towns to set goals which must be tracked over time.
Even while the rule was under discussion, opponents claimed it was an experiment in “social engineering” that would destroy white suburbs. “Let local communities do what’s best in their communities, and I would predict we’d end up with a freer and fairer society in 20 years than we have today,” Rick Manning, the president of Americans for Limited Government told Emily Badger of the Washington Post. “Far freer and fairer than anything that would be dictated from Washington.”
The Trump administration has already delayed enforcement of the AFFH rule, and had proposed to water it down. But last night Trump went after it altogether in a clear appeal to the white suburban voters he has been losing, and whose support he so badly needs in 2020. “At the request of many great Americans who live in the Suburbs, and others, I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas. Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!”
The Trump campaign today also reinforced its use of Nazi imagery. It offered for sale an “America First” t-shirt with a design reminiscent of the Nazi Iron Eagle widely understood to be a symbol of hate. Like the use of the triangle symbol that harked back to the Nazi tag for political prisoners, this image is close enough that it cannot be missed, but different enough that Trump supporters promptly insisted that people calling out its use are overreacting. On Twitter, conservative Tom Nichols, a professor of international affairs at the U.S. Naval War College said, “I’ve been pretty hard on people who make the Nazi comparisons around here, but Christ, even I saw this one right away. This is not some standard American eagle, this is a Trump graphics guy thinking he’s being clever and trolling the world by saying “mayyyybe it’s close.”
As Holocaust scholar Waitman Beorn notes, the Trump campaign’s appropriation of Nazi images speaks to Trump’s white supremacist base. But as media critic Parker Molloy noted about the previous controversy, issuing these images is also a cheap and easy way to command media attention without having to pay for it.
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Time to go back and learn from history?
Yeah, me too. Disclaimer: There are still things I will jump on every time, because the Shoa must not be ‘compared’ to anything.
Neo-fascists playing with the symbols of Nazis is nothing new around this part of the world. We have some experience with it. What we don’t have experience with is the heads of the state and gouvernment doing it.
Good luck of getting this shit sorted, US.
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And like clockwork, the GOP & Russian echo bots and tr0lls are spreading versions of these talking points far and wide. Objects which are closer than they appear…
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July 2, 2020 (Thursday)
Today Jeffrey Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested. Epstein was a super-shady socialite and convicted sex offender who had lots and lots of cash and hobnobbed with elites in the political and financial world. Maxwell was his socialite companion, and had been rumored to procure and groom young girls for Epstein and his friends. Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019 on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York, but died in his jail cell on August 10, leading a judge to dismiss all criminal charges against him. Maxwell was arrested today at a 156-acre farm in New Hampshire where she was hiding out. She is charged with six federal crimes, including sex trafficking and perjury.
It appears there may be a political angle to Maxwell’s arrest. Epstein entertained important people at his parties, including a number of men in Trump’s circle, as well as Trump himself. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine, “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” There is a video of Trump and Epstein partying together at Trump’s Florida property Mar-a-Lago in 1992, apparently discussing the women dancing around them, and after Maxwell’s arrest, a number of pictures of Trump and Maxwell together emerged on social media.
But while there have been allegations against Trump stemming from his association with Epstein, the only confirmed dealings with a member of the administration involve Trump’s first Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta. He had to resign when it turned out that as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 2007-2008, he had cut Epstein a secret deal to avoid the gravity of accusations against him. The FBI had identified at least 34 confirmed minors who alleged that Epstein had abused them, and there was evidence to corroborate those accounts, but Acosta permitted Epstein to plead guilty to a single state charge of solicitation and granted Epstein-- and any potential co-conspirators-- immunity from federal charges. Epstein served 13 months in the county jail, from which he was allowed out 12 hours a day on “work release.” Acosta later maintained that the deal was the only way prosecutors could be sure Epstein went to jail, and he expressed dismay at the work release arrangement, which Acosta called “complete BS.”
After Acosta became Labor Secretary, an investigation by the Miami Herald brought to light both the agreement and that Acosta had kept it secret, thus apparently violating the Crime Victims’ Rights Act of 2004 that says victims must be kept informed of the progress of federal criminal cases. (In April of this year, a federal appeals court said this law did not apply because Epstein was never charged.) In July 2019, Epstein was again arrested for sex trafficking. When agents searched his townhouse, they found hundreds of photos of naked girls and women, as well as CDs labeled with the names of young girls, the “+” sign, and the names of men. Acosta was in the news right then for trying to cut 80% from the budget of the International Labor Affairs Bureau, the agency that combats the sex trafficking of children. Acosta resigned from the administration on July 19.
So there is a connection between the Epstein case and the Trump administration through Acosta. But there may be something else out there. The charges today against Maxwell come from the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which also handled the 2019 Epstein case. Like his, Maxwell’s case is staffed by lawyers from the Public Corruption Unit. According to CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, this unit does not generally do sex trafficking cases “unless there is some potential angle against a public official.”
There is yet another thread dangling over this case. Less than two weeks ago, Attorney General William Barr tried to fire the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman, and replace him with someone outside the normal line of succession. Berman refused to leave, noting that until the Senate confirmed a replacement for him, “our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption. I cherish every day that I work with the men and women of this Office to pursue justice without fear or favor – and intend to ensure that this Office’s important cases continue unimpeded.” It sounded like he had a specific case in mind, and that both he and Barr knew what it was.
Barr had to back down, permitting the Deputy U.S. Attorney, Audrey Strauss, to take over for Berman, who stepped down once he had secured a normal succession for the position. It is Strauss’s name that is on the Maxwell indictment.
It was Barr’s father, Donald Barr, the headmaster of the prestigious Dalton School in New York City, who launched Epstein, hiring the 20-year-old math whiz and college dropout Epstein to teach high school calculus and physics. It was a student’s father who gave him a start in the more lucrative profession of options trading.
So perhaps we are looking at yet another scandal involving public officials; certainly there is plenty of such speculation on Twitter tonight. And yet, as damning as all this looks, I remain a skeptic about whether Barr’s attempt to take over the SDNY office is tied to the Maxwell case, and whether the case will ultimately involve members of Trump’s inner circle. To me this all looks a bit too neat, although there is no doubt that many important men are likely very nervous about what Maxwell could tell authorities.
It seems to me more likely that Barr’s attempts to take over the Justice Department with his own loyalists reflects a desire to control a number of cases that touch the president, not just this one. And Barr is definitely consolidating power in the DOJ. It largely flew under the radar, but in addition to his attempt to remove Berman from the Southern District of New York, over Memorial Day weekend Barr removed the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas. Joseph Brown was a Trump appointee who wanted to bring criminal charges against Walmart for its role in the opioid crisis. Barr replaced Brown with Stephen J. Cox, who had stalled the Walmart case.
And today, news broke that Richard Donoghue, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, New York, who is close to Barr, has stepped down to move to Washington, where he will take a powerful position in the Justice Department, overseeing investigations around the country. Barr is considering candidates to replace him, including Seth DuCharme, another loyalist.
We may learn more about Barr’s politicization of the Department of Justice when Berman testifies before a closed session of the House Judiciary Committee next week.
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Pimps and pushers
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July 3, 2020 (Friday)
And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of black and Indian slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their mind that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edge of a wilderness continent declared that no man was born better than any other.
America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.
What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indians, Chinese, and Irish were locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.” “Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include men of color, and eventually to include women.
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle, as a few wealthy men seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Words to live by in 2020.
Happy Independence Day, everyone.
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Re: trying to fire Berman
I still think it’s interesting to look at who was supposed to replace Berman: Jay Clayton.
Before Clayton became the head of the SEC he was a “Wall Street lawyer” (a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell). One of his clients was Deutsche Bank. The only bank that would lend Trump money. The bank that has legal trouble because it helped to launder Russian money.
As US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Clayton would know where not to look.
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July 4, 2020 (Saturday)
Today, on a day presidents traditionally use to avoid politics and reinforce Americans’ shared values, Trump gave a speech dividing Americans into two groups: his supporters and “the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing.” Trying to get people to look away from the devastating toll of coronavirus on this country—our official death toll is approaching 130,000— Trump is staking out a position as the leader of a culture war.
Today’s speech was an echo of the one he gave yesterday at Mt. Rushmore, where the faces of American presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln are carved into rocks sacred to the Lakota people. There, Trump set himself up as a defender of American history and culture against a “new far-left fascism” trying to destroy America. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” Trump said. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
Giving such a speech at Mt. Rushmore enabled Trump to illustrate his promise to dominate the enemies he insists threaten his version of America. He superimposed himself, with the commanding power of the U.S. government behind him, over the sacred lands of the Lakota, who have tried since the 1860s to protect those lands, and who now suffer the nation’s highest levels of poverty, as well as the devastating social ills that go with that poverty, including terrible susceptibility to coronavirus as well as horrific numbers of missing and murdered women. Trump’s performance at Mt. Rushmore was a carefully crafted image of the most powerful man in America dominating the most marginalized people.
Ironically, given his laments about the rewriting of history, his insistence that Mt. Rushmore is “an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom,” is a pretty huge rewriting of why there is a Mt. Rushmore in the first place.
Mt. Rushmore was conceived in 1923 in a desperate attempt to draw tourist dollars to a state that had been rushed into the Union to protect Republican political dominance and could not manage to achieve economic stability. The story is this:
In 1889, Republicans knew they were in political trouble. Americans had turned against their conviction that the government must protect big business at all costs, and that any kind of regulation or protection for workers amounted to socialism. In 1884, for the first time since the Civil War, voters had elected a Democrat to the White House. Grover Cleveland promised to use the government to protect ordinary Americans, and to stop congressmen from catering to wealthy industrialists.
To regain control of the government, in 1888, Republicans pulled out all the stops. They developed a new system of campaign financing, hitting up rich businessmen for contributions, and got employers to warn workers that if they didn’t vote for the Republican candidate they would be fired. Nonetheless, Republican Benjamin Harrison lost the election by about 100,000 votes.
But he won in the Electoral College.
Republicans immediately set out to make sure no Democrat could ever win the White House again. They rushed South Dakota into the Union in 1889, along with North Dakota, Montana, and Washington—all Republican regions-- to pack the Senate and the Electoral College. The next year, they rushed in Wyoming and Idaho, too, boasting that they would dominate government for the foreseeable future.
South Dakota, though, was a problem. Virtually all of the land in that new state belonged to the Lakota people.
The Lakotas were not originally from the region. They had been pushed west in the late 1600s from the area around the Great Lakes by warring tribes unsettled by the epidemics brought first by Europeans. But the Lakota believed the new land was their true spiritual home, and they considered the Black Hills there sacred. Once settled in the Great Plains, Lakotas adopted horses and became both wealthy and formidable warriors, so formidable they held their own against American incursions until after the Civil War.
In 1868, eager to stop Lakota attacks on the miners traipsing through their territory, the U.S. government agreed to leave the forts officers had built in Lakota territory. The Treaty of Fort Laramie established most of what would later become South Dakota as a reservation, along with the Black Hills. But the treaty did not stop miners, buffalo hunters, railroad men, or settlers from intruding on Lakota lands. In 1874, when a gold strike in the Black Hills sent miners pouring into the area, the government gave up trying to keep settlers out of the reservation, and instead set out to buy the Black Hills.
Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud refused. The Black Hills were priceless, he said, and to get them officials would have to make an equivalent offer. Hunkpapa Lakota Sitting Bull was less diplomatic. “We want no white men here. The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I will fight.” They demanded government officials honor the treaty.
Government officials interpreted Lakotas’ refusal to sell their lands as hostility. They stopped trying to keep miners out of Lakota lands and in December 1875, told Lakotas to report to authorities or expect war. Sitting Bull and his friend Crazy Horse were 250 miles away and probably never heard the order, but even if they had, such a journey was impossible to make in a South Dakota winter. The next summer, Sitting Bull pulled together from a number of different tribes the largest encampment of warriors in Lakota history, as many as 7,000 people, while the army set out to put them down.
In late June 1876, several of the twelve companies of the 7th Cavalry, commanded by General George Armstrong Custer, fell on the Lakota while they rested in midday by the Greasy Grass River, known to the army as the Little Bighorn. Custer died, alongside 267 other soldiers. The Lakota and their allies lost about 40. “I feel sorry that too many were killed on each side,” Sitting Bull said, “But when Indians must fight, they must.”
The Treaty of Fort Laramie required that three-quarters of Lakota men must ratify any further land cessions, but in the aftermath of the “Battle of the Little Bighorn,” the U.S. government simply seized the Black Hills. Then, in 1889, eager to open up land for eastern settlers in the new state of South Dakota, the government got Lakotas to sign significant land cessions, although exactly how they got those signatures is unclear, since the Lakotas had refused to sell the same land a year before.
Still, South Dakota was terribly low on both settlers and water, and it did not prosper. By the early 1920s, an early settler and the founder of the state’s historical society, Doane Robinson, decided to have a western hero carved into the Black Hills to attract tourists and boost the economy. He invited sculptor Gutzon Borglum to design it. Borglum rejected the idea of a western hero and instead designed a monument to represent American ideals: Washington, who had founded the nation; Jefferson, who had expanded the country west; Lincoln, who had saved the nation; and Roosevelt, who had protected democracy from industrialists.
Deep in the heart of the land the Lakota held sacred, Borglum carved a monument that, according to his son, was intended to illustrate that “Man has a right to be free and to be happy.”
It is hardly the fault of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt that a desperate western promoter used their images to fix a problem created by party politicians. Trump’s attempt to link that early twentieth-century effort-- and the violent history that preceded it-- to the better aspirations of our greatest leaders is a sleight of hand. If we permitted it, that dark and angry equivalence would wipe out our history, indeed.
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I didn’t know that history of Mt. Rushmore. Wow. Yeah, the Lakota should have to right to do whatever they want with it, including blowing up those faces.
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July 6, 2020 (Monday)
It is becoming clearer that there are currently two different versions of America. The White House and Trump supporters are trying to pretend that the world Trump continually tweets about is real, while the rest of the country is proving that reality doesn’t much care about the fictions Trump is peddling.
Today began with Trump frantic-tweeting, and those tweets were an impressionistic picture of how he hopes to win voters. He defended his performance in combatting what he called “new China Virus” cases, touted the strong stock market, and warned that “if you want your 401k’s and Stocks, which are getting close to an all time high…, to disintegrate and disappear, vote for the Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats and Corrupt Joe Biden. Massive Tax Hikes—They will make you very poor, FAST!”
He tweeted “China has caused great damage to the United States and the rest of the world,” then attacked Black race car driver Bubba Wallace for the discovery of a noose in his garage (it was not Wallace who discovered it) and NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate flag. He complained that “the Washington Redskins & Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they are going to be changing their names in order to be politically correct. Indians, like Elizabeth Warren, must be very angry right now.”
Then he defended his handling of the coronavirus, and once again insisted that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for Covid-19. He tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” and said that Democrats opposed reopening the schools “for political reasons, not for health reasons! They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it!” Finally, he boasted that his border wall “is moving fast in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. Great numbers at the Southern Border. Dems want people to just flow in. They want very dangerous open Borders!”
This frantic tweeting offered racism, attacks on Democrats, hopeful economic news, and Trump’s signature border wall (which has cost more than $3.6 billion already, for about 120 miles of wall, most of it replacing older fencing). It was a narrative tailor-made for Trump’s base.
Looming over Trump’s portrayal of his version of America, though, was the coronavirus. While other advanced countries have gotten the virus under control and are cautiously beginning to reopen, we are moving the opposite direction. As of today, we have almost 3 million confirmed cases and more than 130,000 deaths. In a number of states, especially in the South, cases are hitting new highs. Europe has banned American visitors, and Mexico and Canada have both closed their border with the U.S. Rather than trying to stop the crisis, the White House is launching a new messaging about the coronavirus: “Learn to live with it.”
Trump is doubling down on the idea that the United States must simply reopen, and take the resulting deaths as a cost of doing business. Three people who have been privy to administration thinking about the issue told reporters for the Washington Post that officials are hoping “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.” Advisors have urged Trump to try to avoid responsibility for the administration’s disastrous response to the pandemic by simply blaming China for it. Their goal is to try to repair the economy before the election, recognizing that economic recovery is the only way to make up the gap between Trump’s poll numbers and those of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, governors who reopened their states before cases had begun to decline significantly are now backpedaling. Texas governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order last Thursday requiring masks in more than half of the state’s hardest hit counties; Georgia Governor Brian Kemp asked Georgians to wear masks; Florida’s Miami-Dade County closed gyms, party venues, and ballrooms; and California closed beaches in Orange County over the holiday weekend. Washington state has stopped its reopening process for at least two weeks and is requiring face masks; Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have issued travel advisories requiring people coming from fifteen states experiencing Covid-19 spikes to self-quarantine for fourteen days.
But Trump is barreling ahead as if fears of the coronavirus are illegitimate. He is insisting that public schools must reopen for the fall on schedule, with no plan for doing so safely: “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” Today, Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran called for this plan exactly, issuing an executive order for all Florida K-12 schools to reopen in August. Florida set the national record for the most new coronavirus cases in a single day—11,458—two days ago.
Today, just as colleges and universities are trying to figure out how to manage their fall classes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that foreign students have to leave the country if their universities go to on-line instruction in the fall. The decision appears to be designed to pressure schools to resume face-to-face instruction or lose their foreign students, who pay the full tuition that most American students do not.
Urging Americans to plow headfirst into a deadly crisis that is racking up horrific numbers of dead is an unprecedented abdication of presidential leadership. It is hard to imagine what the endgame is, because it seems unlikely that Americans will, in fact, become numb to rising numbers of dead. Trump has suggested that there will be a vaccine sooner than we think, and perhaps he hopes such a miracle will win him goodwill to overcome our horror at the national death toll (there is even some speculation that he will announce one falsely as part of his “October surprise” before the election).
But the observations of his briefers that he cannot hear anything that does not conform to his worldview have stuck with me as I thought about this today. Perhaps he doesn’t have an endgame at all; he is simply making a gamble that the virus will magically go away, as he has suggested. It strikes me that, until now, he has always been able to get away with ignoring reality in favor of his worldview. The coronavirus, though, can’t be bullied or flattered, and it certainly cannot be ignored.
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I have to ask, because I am ignorant of US law: can they do that? Does this have a legal basis?
(For the foreign students, I begin to hope they can and will leave the country. Including those which are enrolled at universities which do have face-to-face courses and lectures.)
Not sure about this, sadly.
Roger that.
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Unfortunately, it’s ICE. It doesn’t matter if it has a legal basis. It’s the same group that was ordered by a judge not to separate children from their families in detention centers, and they ignored the order. It’s also one of the few government departments where the people who work there are more extreme than the president.
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We need to abolish ICE.
Fat chance though that Biden would do that.
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Can ICE can rewrite Visa policy? I thought that they can only execute policy, not create new policy?
She nails the Trump Administration’s motives perfectly.
If I were the the schools, I’d call their bluff and then send it to the courts to rule.
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from what i’ve read, homeland security manages a thing called “sevp”
sevp requires that students be enrolled in certified colleges and universities. ( remember the recent scandal of ice setting up fake universities and claiming those schooles were certified, only to prosecute students who unwittingly enrolled? )
part of the certification is, apparently, the number of in-person hours. [1]
Typically, foreign students are limited in how many online courses they can take and are required to do the majority of their learning in the classroom, according to immigration lawyer Fiona McEntee. Once the pandemic struck, students were given flexibility to take more online classes — but only for the spring and summer semesters.
even if there are other laws constraining their management of sevp, they can break the law, issue new guidance, and have it tied up in court with no individual person ever being liable. moreover, the threat alone will cause students to change their plans.
the brain drain and money drain from this will be painful.
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Ah, TIL. And we know that Congress will NOT act on this and create a waiver for the Fall or Winter sessions.
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