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This is topical to the last handful of posts in this thread.
I wonder if, for the the Heather Cox Richardson thread, we might be taking a little too much glee in Falwell’s current embarrassment.
I mean, unless we can get a direct link to ⊥rump’s own kompromat, in which case, by all means, let us proceed!
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Meh. Falwell is so tied to Trump that schadenfreude about the former includes hand-rubbing glee about pain also felt by the latter.
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Gessen’s law demands to take this seriously.
Someone send me a link to the trump campaign video and commented “Neues aus dem Sportpalast”.
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That link is Michael Cohen.
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Wollt Ihr den totalen Trump?
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August 25, 2020 (Tuesday)
The Republican National Convention is designed to fire up the base to make sure its members vote, and to reassure wavering Republicans that they can vote for Trump without being racists but rather staunch Americans. And on both fronts, the first two days of this convention have delivered.
Yesterday, Don Jr. and his girlfriend Kim Guilfoyle offered up red meat to the base, warning that Democrats stand for “rioting, looting and vandalism,” while Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley promised that race relations aren’t really that bad in America after all.
Tonight, First Lady Melania Trump spoke soothingly of parenting and offered sympathy to coronavirus victims while offering a sanitized version of her own American dream. Trump offered American symbolism, using the might of the presidency. He was flanked by servicemen in the White House, naturalized five immigrants, pardoned Jon Ponder, a Black man who started a program that provides services for former convicts after he was convicted of robbing a bank.
The Trump team is not using half-measures; they are meeting head-on the criticisms of Trump and exacerbating them. They are campaigning by audacity. That is, after all, one of the characteristics Trump’s base likes most about him.
Tonight that audacity dovetailed with what appears to be the Trump family’s growing authoritarianism to make them broadcast that they are above the law. Tonight’s proceedings smashed all U.S. laws and traditions against using public property for partisan purposes. The power of the presidency, the physical space of the White House—the people’s house-- and the nation’s international standing are all enlisted to get this president, this one man, reelected.
Trump used the power of his office to pardon as a campaign stunt. He used a naturalization ceremony—the fundamentally non-partisan act of becoming an American citizen—to sell the idea he is not anti-immigrant. Melania Trump spoke from the White House Rose Garden, behind a podium that bore the presidential seal, to campaign for her husband. And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke virtually from an official trip to the Middle East.
There is a law—the Hatch Act—which prohibits all employees of the Executive Branch except the president and the vice president from engaging in partisan political activity. It also prohibits the president and the vice president from commanding any employee to work on behalf of any candidate. The act is designed to make sure that officials cannot leverage the power of their office to enhance their own power. Since the law’s passage in 1939, presidents of both parties have scrupulously adhered to it. Members of the Trump administration have violated that act repeatedly, but tonight’s performance celebrated and extended those violations.
Pompeo’s speech made it clear the violations were no accident. One of the State Department’s own legal memos says in bold letters: "Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees may not even attend a political party convention.” But Pompeo not only spoke at the convention, he did it on an official overseas trip paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Former Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who spent 35 years in the foreign service, told NBC News: “People are extraordinarily upset about it. This is really a bridge too far…. Pompeo is clearly ensuring the State Department is politicized by using his position to carry out what is basically a partisan mission.”
Pompeo’s appearance with some of the religious sites of Jerusalem showing behind him was intended to highlight Trump’s outreach to evangelical voters like Pompeo himself. Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the other day said: “We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.”
The State Department said Pompeo addressed the convention in his “personal capacity,” but even this is out of bounds. In February, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun wrote an email to department employees saying he would not talk politics even when responding “to emails from friends.”
The State Department says that the RNC will pay for “everything” associated with the talk, but four current and former high-ranking diplomats noted that the logistics of overseas travel make that unlikely: the planes, motorcades, security, and so on required for a Secretary of State’s travels is all paid for with taxpayer money.
A State Department official told NBC News, “It is outrageously un-American for a sitting secretary of state to participate in a political convention.” At least the State Department indicated a little nervousness about using taxpayer money for partisan purposes. The White House has shown no such concern.
The first two nights of the convention have ranged far from the truth, keeping weary fact-checkers working overtime. But the gaslighting is not an accident, either; it is the point. Trump is selling the classic alternative reality of authoritarians who have little actual good news to report: he claims the country is in chaos, caused by lawless “others,” and he alone can solve the problem. He will return his supporters to the positions of authority they feel they have lost, ushering back in the good old days when the country was great.
Far from objecting to Trump’s lies or his violation of the law to use of the government to win reelection, Trump’s true believers will likely applaud both. The lies are a comforting story, made better by how much they upset non-believers—those “others”—and in their minds, the power of the government actually should be used to put down Trump’s unAmerican opposition.
Trump’s plan for a second term, though, will not necessarily benefit his supporters. He appears to intend to continue to act as he has done for the past three and a half years, slashing regulations and taxes, destroying the social safety net, and privatizing infrastructure, all in the service of freeing up capital to boost the economy.
That plan was in the news today as, in response to an inquiry from leading Democrats, the Chief Actuary for Social Security crunched the numbers behind Trump’s plan to end the payroll tax. Chief Actuary Stephen C. Goss said that the plan would end Disability Insurance in mid-2021 and Social Security by mid-2023.
Payroll taxes are just that: taxes that come out of your paycheck. In this case, the tax in question is the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) payroll taxes and the Self-Employment Contributions Act (SECA) taxes. These taxes provide the money that funds Social Security and Disability Insurance. Trump has talked about eliminating the taxes, arguing that getting rid of them would put more money in people’s pockets. It would, in the short term but, as Goss explains, it would almost immediately destroy Social Security and Disability Insurance.
A disregard for social welfare laws is not limited to Trump. In the New York Times yesterday, former chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen and Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Priorities, note that the Senate is on vacation while thirty million American households did not have enough food last week. “The economics of this moment are not complicated,” they write. The economy can’t recover and sustain itself until the coronavirus is under control. Until then, it is imperative for Congress to fund a relief bill to put money back into people’s pockets, both for moral reasons, and to keep the economy from grinding to a halt.
The House passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill in May, but the Senate refused to take it up. The Senate turned to writing a bill in late July, just as the federal boost of $600 a week to unemployment benefits was due to expire, along with the moratorium on evictions. Quickly, though, it became clear the Republican caucus could not agree on a bill, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell turned the problem of negotiating a new bill over to White House leaders and congressional Democrats.
With Republicans on the sidelines, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows refused to budge from their $1 trillion starting point even after the Democrats offered to meet them halfway. Trump declared the negotiations over and dramatically claimed to be handling the most crucial problems with executive actions. His use of the nation’s disaster relief fund to pay for a $300 weekly bonus in unemployment benefits to people in 30 states (so far) will not last more than five weeks, even as it drains our capacity to respond to the California and Colorado wildfires, the Iowa derecho, and the two tropical storms bearing down on Louisiana.
Reality looks a lot less triumphant than tonight’s tawdry performance in the house that has sheltered Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and which belongs not to the Trumps, but to the American people.
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I’m always dubious is something allegedly “belongs to the people”. But it definitely doesn’t belong to the Trumps.
According to the poll I started a while ago, Trump would need to get people shot by snipers on rooftops during demonstrations before “the people” (i.e., a larger group of citizens) actually march on the White House.
For something that belongs to “the people”, “the people” are quite complacent about misusing the place, e.g. for personal benefits and partisan performances.
Sidenote: Germany has an inscription on the Reichstagsgebäude which says “Dem deutschen Volke”. There is a smallish artwork at the Reichstagsgebäude today which says “Der deutschen Bevölkerung”.
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August 26, 2020 (Wednesday)
There is a profound disconnect between the reality of what is happening in America right now and what we are hearing from the White House.
Tonight, Hurricane Laura is barreling toward the coasts of Louisiana and Texas. The storm is on the verge of becoming a Category 5 hurricane, one of the strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the continental U.S. Its winds have reached 150 miles per hour and the National Hurricane Center has warned of an “unsurvivable” storm surge of up to 20 feet, as well as anywhere from 5-10 inches of rain. Forecasters warn that half of Lake Charles, Louisiana, home to almost 80,000 people, might be submerged. More than half a million people have been ordered to evacuate the region, but this will be a tall order for the 23.3% of the population there that lives in poverty.
Iowa is trying to rebuild from the August 10 derecho which brought winds of up to 140 miles an hour, left more than 400,000 Iowans without power, and damaged homes, businesses, and more than ten million acres of crops. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds asked for about $4 billion to cover the cost of the damage; Trump approved the portion that covered federal buildings and utilities but not assistance to homeowners and farmers.
Western wildfires have burned more than 1.8 million acres in August—an area almost double the size of Rhode Island. Fourteen states, including California, Arizona, Oregon, and Colorado, have suffered from the extreme events. While firefighters are gaining control over many of the fires, red flag warnings are still in effect in Northern California, Nevada, Oregon, and Montana.
A disaster of a different sort is burning in America as coronavirus continues to spread. New CDC guidelines quietly put out on Monday no longer recommend testing for asymptomatic people even if they’ve been in contact with someone who has the coronavirus. This new rule appears to reflect Trump’s frequent complaints that widespread testing is responsible for our climbing numbers of coronavirus cases. (He is incorrect.) He has repeatedly said we should slow the testing down. A White House spokesperson said the decision was science-based and not political; American Medical Association President Dr. Susan Bailey asked the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Department of Health and Human Services to “release the scientific justification” for the changes.
The spokesperson told reporters that the White House Coronavirus Task Force had signed off on the new guidelines, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of the task force told CNN that he was not part of any such discussion. “I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is,” he said. Other members of the task force also expressed alarm about the new rules.
And there is yet another kind of fire burning. On Sunday afternoon, August 23, a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rusten Sheskey, fired seven shots into Jacob Blake’s back as he opened his car door, leaving the 29-year-old father of five gravely wounded, likely paralyzed from the waist down.
Protests erupted in the wake of the shooting of yet another Black man, with the same pattern we saw in Portland: peaceful protests by day, riots by night. Armed militia members and counter protesters rushed to Kenosha and clashed with protesters, and after rioters looted and burned businesses, civilians armed with AR-15-style rifles took to the streets claiming they would back the police and restore order. Video shows police officers thanking the armed men for their help, despite the fact they are on the streets after the city’s curfew, and handing them water bottles.
Rather than restoring order, on Tuesday, a 17-year-old white man, Kyle Rittenhouse, from Antioch, Illinois, about 20 miles southwest of Kenosha, shot and killed two people and wounded a third. Rittenhouse’s social media is full of support for “Blue Lives Matter,” and shows him posing with weapons. Video from January 30, shows him in the front row of a Trump rally in Des Moines, Iowa; video from Tuesday shows him trying to get the attention of law enforcement officers before the shooting.
This afternoon, the Milwaukee Bucks professional basketball team refused to play game five of their first-round playoff series against the Orlando Magic. This is what’s known as a “wildcat strike” because it does not have the approval of union leadership—the NBA collective bargaining agreement bans strikes. The Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder joined in, and by 5:00 the NBA postponed all the evening’s games. All the WNBA games were also called off, and several Major League Baseball teams have struck in solidarity.
In a statement, the Bucks said, “Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action, so our focus today cannot be on basketball.” They asked the Wisconsin legislature to reconvene and pass “meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.” They also asked people to vote. Basketball superstar LeBron James was more straightforward: “F**K THIS MAN!!!” he tweeted. “WE DEMAND CHANGE. SICK OF IT[.]”
In Washington, tonight, at the third night of the Republican National Convention, speakers painted an image of the nation that did not square with this reality. There was scarce mention of the natural disasters that, in any other administration, would be headline news. The sentence “May God bless and protect the Gulf states in the path of the hurricane," offered by Eric Trump’s wife Lara, was about the extent of it.
There was scarce attention paid to the coronavirus, either, which has, to date, killed more than 180,000 Americans. Twenty-five percent of the world’s deaths from Covid-19 come from the U.S., which has 4% of the world’s people. From Fort McHenry, Maryland, Vice President Mike Pence congratulated Trump for suspending travel from China and saving “untold American lives.” White House officials continue to talk of the virus in the past tense, as if it is over. Images from the RNC of attendees sitting together, unmasked, send a signal that things are back to normal, when they are decidedly not.
There was no mention of Jacob Blake or the Kenosha shootings of Tuesday tonight, although Trump appeared to take the part of the Kenosha police and the civilian militias when he tweeted today that he was sending federal troops to Kenosha to restore “LAW and ORDER!”. (Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, instead deployed 500 members of the National Guard to Kenosha.)
From Fort McHenry, Maryland, Vice President Mike Pence talked of the “heroes” who have died in unrest around the country without mentioning the events that have sparked the unrest: the shooting of Black men and women at the hands of police officers, people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake. He lamented the death of federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood, “shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” implying he was killed by protesters. In fact, Officer Underwood died in a drive-by shooting by a Boogaloo supporter on a nearly empty street. And Pence claimed that Democratic nominee Joe Biden has said he would cut funding to law enforcement; this is a lie from a super PAC ad that spliced together video footage to change its meaning.
A million years ago, during the George W. Bush administration, a White House official dismissively told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” meaning that they believed solutions to the nation’s problems came from studying reality and finding answers. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the official told Suskind. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Creating their own reality might have worked for Bush’s people in 2004, but sixteen years later, with the country in conflagrations both natural and manmade, it seems that approach is no longer viable.
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No. It does belong to the people. The white house is our house. Full stop.
Not everyone. People have been out on the street since he was inaugurated.
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Major League Soccer, too. Why do people forget about soccer?
There have even been self-immolations in front of the White House protesting Turmp since his inauguration.
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I know, right?!
I mean Inter Miami FC just got its first win the other night! Beckham must be so proud!
But the NBA wildcat strike is a powerful move and I support any and all teams in all sports to shut it all down until meaningful changes are made to the way pigs treat people, especially Black Americans who have been systematically repressed since before… forever!
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and one more: children are still being separated from their parents and guardians at the border, only now they are being kept “off the book” - essentially kidnapped by private security contractors - and getting sent to mexico without due process even if they aren’t from mexico.
basically, they’re being trafficked by the trump administration, the exact thing qanon says the trump was sent to this earth to protect children from.
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i don’t sport, so i don’t know. are there fans there? i think the strike is awesome. it has the potential to raise awareness for people who don’t news. that said, i also wonder if they could have gotten away with it in normal non-covid times
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Silly, brown children don’t count… /s
I do wonder how many of these kids will end up in white, evangelical homes, where they’re forcefully indoctrinated into their hateful, violent world view.
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No audiences at any of these games (NBA, WNBA, and MLS are all on strike now).
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Could have gotten away with it? I don’t know what you mean. That they’d all get fired? No way that would happen.
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well, last time bending a knee was considered potentially career killing. so it seems to me the stakes are a lot less high without an audience in the stands to riot when the team refuses to play.
the dynamics of walking out are just different right now.
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All true, except when entire teams in multiple sports walk off the job. With or without a pandemic, owners aren’t going to fire all players on dozens of teams.
Just as there is power in a union, there is power in mass strikes! 
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The Commissioner of the NBA Adam Silver is very sensitive to the players needs. I would say that of all the sports leagues, he is more independent and less likely to bow down to the owners. There’s more of a partnership with the players.
Where the NBA goes, the other sports seem to follow…with the exception of the NFL and college football. The coaches, the fans and a lot of players seem to lean far right. This is why Colin Kaepernick had such a difficult time getting any sort of traction. Just a few weeks ago I saw college football players parroting their coaches during news interviews. (“Blah, blah, blah like Coach ______ has said, there is always going to be risk. But we’ve worked hard and we’ll all stay safe.”)
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