Category: Trump Administration

MyPillow Products Will No Longer Be Sold by These Companies

Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow, has said that several companies have stopped selling his products following his continued pushing of baseless allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Lindell, an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump, has repeatedly and falsely claimed that Trump did not lose the election and will stay in office for a second term.

His continued push of these false narratives, even after the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, prompted calls on social media for retailers to stop carrying MyPillow products. Continue reading.

Poll: Republican support for convicting Trump in Senate growing

About 20 percent of Republicans said they “strongly” or “somewhat” approved of a Senate conviction in the latest poll, conducted between Jan. 15-17.

Republican support for convicting President Donald Trump in his Senate impeachment trial has grown in his final days in office, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Tuesday. 

About 20 percent of Republicans said they “strongly” or “somewhat” approved of convicting in the latest poll, conducted Jan. 15-17. That’s an increase from the previous poll, conducted Jan. 8-11, in which 14 percent of Republicans said the same.

Approval of a conviction remained heavily partisan, with about 86 percent of Democrats saying they “strongly” or “somewhat” approved of a Senate conviction, a slight decrease from the previous poll. About 50 percent of independent respondents “strongly” or “somewhat” approved of a Senate conviction, up slightly from 47 percent in the Jan. 8-11 poll. Continue reading.

Lawmakers who objected to election results have been cut off from 20 of their 30 biggest corporate PAC donors

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U.S. executives continue to grapple with political bloodshed and its ripple effects on the corporate landscape

The 147 Republican lawmakers who opposed certification of the presidential election earlier this month have lost the support of many of their largest corporate backers — but not all of them.

The Washington Post contacted the 30 companies that gave the most money to election-objecting lawmakers’ campaigns through political action committees. Two-thirds, or 20 of the firms, said they have pledged to suspend some or all payments to their PACs.

Meanwhile, 10 companies said only that they would review their political giving or did not commit to take any action as a result of this month’s events. Continue reading.

Dominion Voting Systems threatens to sue Mike Lindell, MyPillow CEO, over false claims

Officials with Dominion Voting Systems have sent Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, a legal letter warning of pending litigation over his baseless claims of widespread fraud involving their machines.

“You have positioned yourself as a prominent leader of the ongoing misinformation campaign,” the letter said, referring to his continued false claims that their systems were rigged by someone to effect the outcome.

“Litigation regarding these issues is imminent,” the letter said. Lindell is only the latest to get a warning letter from Dominion officials about potential litigation, after he and Sidney Powell, the right-wing lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani and others have continued to spread false claims about the integrity of the results the machines showed. Continue reading.

‘They’ve been lied to’: Former cult member lays out the method for ‘deprogramming’ Trump diehards

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President Donald Trump’s critics have often described his army of devotees as a “cult,” and the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 makes it painfully obvious that many of those devotees have been radicalized by the president’s rhetoric. CNN’s Alisyn Camerota discussed the cult-like nature of Trump’s followers with a former cult member on January 19 — Trump’s last full day in office as president — and got his insights on what it will take to “deprogram” them.

Steven Hassan, author of the book “The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control,” is an ex-member of the infamous Mooney cult. On CNN’s “New Day,” Camerota asked Hassan if he considers the extremists who invaded Washington, D.C. on January 6 cult members — and he replied, “I do. I think they were deceptively recruited by an authoritarian political cult.”

Camerota listed some of the characteristics of a cult leader, ranging from “paranoid” and “lies a lot” to “stokes fear,” “narcissistic” and “grandiose self-image” — and asked Hassan, “Why do people follow leaders with such odious characteristics? How does that happen?” Continue reading.

Donald Trump’s “National Garden of American Heroes” sounds like a chaotic mess

With less than 48 hours to go until he reverts back to a private citizen, soon-to-be-ex-President Donald Trump is busy busy busy with the important work of a nation still reeling from the attempted coup he helped inspire. And to Trump, that work evidently includes launching a massive effort to create a “National Garden of American Heroes” that seems as chaotic and random as it does unnecessary and bloated.

In a lengthy executive order published Monday afternoon, Trump cites “dangerous anti-American extremism that seeks to dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity” as his impetus for creating his as-of-yet geographically ambiguous garden, which will feature dozens of statues of “historically significant” Americans.

That’s where things get weird. Continue reading.

Linguists break down how Trump’s language shifted in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot

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On Jan. 6, the world witnessed how language can incite violence. 

One after another, a series of speakers at the “Save America” rally at the Ellipse in Washington redoubled the messages of anger and outrage.

This rhetoric culminated with a directive by the president to go to the Capitol building to embolden Republicans in Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“Fight like hell,” President Donald Trump implored his supporters. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Continue reading.

Most Americans say the coronavirus pandemic is not controlled, Post-ABC poll finds

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As President Trump is leaving office, just over 1 in 10 Americans say the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is mostly under control, despite the departing president’s assertions that record case levels are exaggerations, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The nationwide survey shows that large majorities of people of all political affiliations say they think the deadly virus, which arrived in the country a year ago, is only somewhat under control or not at all controlled.

About 1 in 5 Republicans say they think the pandemic is at least mostly under control, with fewer than 1 in 20 regarding it as completely controlled, the survey finds. Democrats are more than twice as likely as those identifying with the GOP to say they perceive the virus as not at all under control. Continue reading.

Pompeo, Who Led Trump’s Mission at State Dept., Leaves With a Dubious Legacy

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As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo looks to his political future, his turbulent tenure is characterized by investigations into his leadership and ethics.

WASHINGTON — Spurned by many foreign allies, ridiculed by adversaries, disliked by a significant number of his own diplomatsand trying to preserve his political future, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week offered an insight into his legacy as a commander of the Trump administration’s scorched-earth foreign policy by citing a seminal moment in his personal history.

In 1983, when Mr. Pompeo was a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, an Iranian-linked militia bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 American troops. By his own telling — “My life wouldn’t be the same after that,” Mr. Pompeo said on Tuesday, in his last public speech in office — it was a powerful indoctrination for a young soldier in training to protect the United States from deadly enemies.

Thirty-five years later, after becoming the 70th secretary of state in 2018, Mr. Pompeo embraced the same military mentality to confront the world. Foreign policies were described as “mission sets,” and his wife, Susan, was a “force multiplier” in disarming dignitaries and families of State Department employees. Continue reading.

This is white supremacist domestic terrorism. We’ve been here before.

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When domestic terrorists fueled by outlandish conspiracy theories spun by a white supremacist president of the United States stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to overthrow the government, I was shocked. But not surprised. Our history is filled with eruptions of violence when our nation’s entrenched system of white supremacy feels that its place at the center of American life is threatened.

David Blight, Ron Chernow and Nikole Hannah-Jones, three chroniclers of our fraught racial history, were the perfect people to put the Capitol insurrection into greater perspective.

“We have plenty of precedents for what happened on January 6, not at the federal level, but in white-on-black violence in the South during Reconstruction,” Chernow told me in a primer he emailed to me before appearing on my Sunday show on MSNBC. “During this dreadful period, we had numerous cases of rampaging whites invading legislatures.” Chernow is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of President Ulysses S. Grant. Continue reading.