Tag: Trump attack on the U.S. Constitution

Trump is leaving press freedom in tatters. Biden can take these bold steps to repair the damage.

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When Donald Trump first started accusing the mainstream media of dealing in “fake news,” it was impossible to know the long-term effects of this rhetoric. It seemed like just another of his trademark insults.

But the term — and the bad will behind it — quickly morphed into a political weapon, with ruinous effects both here and overseas.

Officials with an autocratic bent around the globe snatched up the idea to mock the press or to deny ugly truths. By late 2017, for instance, a state official in Myanmar was using the term to deny not only the shameful persecution of a Muslim minority group, but that population’s very existence: “There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news.” Continue reading.

Tracing Trump’s Postal Service obsession — from ‘loser’ to ‘scam’ to ‘rigged election’

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Soon after taking office in 2017, President Trump seized on the U.S. Postal Service as an emblem of the bloated bureaucracy. “A loser,” he repeatedly labeled one of America’s most beloved public institutions, according to aides who discussed the matter with him.

Allies coddled Trump by telling him the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 was widespread mail-in balloting fraud — a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence — and the president’s postal outrage coarsened further.

Then Trump complained to senior White House advisers that Jeff Bezos — a presidential foe in part because he owns The Washington Post, whose news coverage the president thought was unfair and too tough on him — was “getting rich” because Amazon had been “ripping off” the Postal Service with a “sweetheart deal” to ship millions of its packages, one of them recalled. They explained that this was not true and that the Postal Service actually benefited from Amazon’s business, the adviser added, but the president railed for months about what he described as a “scam.” Continue reading.

Pompeo Pushes Free Press For Kazakhstan After Barring NPR Reporter From Trip

“As a journalist, I’m sure you know the good work the State Department does to train journalists in press freedoms,” the secretary of state told a Kazakh reporter.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo championed a free press for Kazakhstan Sunday, days after cutting a National Public Radio journalist from the trip following his rant over questions about Ukraine.

Pompeo told Kazakh journalist Aigerim Toleukhan in an interview that freedom of the press helps “build out civil societies” — and that the United States was willing to show the media there how to do it. “As a journalist, I’m sure you know the good work the State Department does to train journalists in press freedoms,” he said.

Toleukhan pressed him to reconcile his praise for a free press with his treatment of NPR and his “confrontational” interview over Ukraine. “What kind of message does it send to countries … whose governments routinely suppress press freedom?” she asked. Continue reading.

Jewish group fears Trump’s new push threatens the separation of church and state

AlterNet logoThe head of a Jewish Democratic group condemned President Trump’s recently announced policies on religion as “a concerted attempt to chip away at the critically important separation of church and state.”

“The ‘religious freedom’ regulations announced by the White House regarding prayer in school and at nine federal agencies represent a concerted attempt to chip away at the critically important separation of church and state,” Jewish Democratic Council of America executive director Halie Soifer told Salon by email. “It’s also a transparent attempt by the President to pander to his Evangelical base. President Trump is using the pretext of ‘religious freedom’ to fulfill his broader political agenda as opposed to prioritizing the actual freedom of Americans, as protected by the First Amendment.”

On Thursday the Trump administration announced a number of measures that further the agenda of Christian conservatives. Nine federal agencies — including the Department of Justice, the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services — will remove restrictions on religious social service providers that use federal tax money requiring them to inform beneficiaries of secular organizations that could provide the same services. The Education Department will compel states to inform the federal government if there are complaints regarding students’ rights to pray, even though this requirement does not apply to other discrimination accusations. The department will also submit a guidance letter to the states requiring local districts to certify that they have no rules or regulations conflicting with students’ right to pray. In addition, according to BuzzFeed, the Department of Education will issue a draft regulation requiring all public colleges and universities that receive federal funding to provide the same rights, privileges and money to religious students groups that secular student groups have. Continue reading.

Trump spokeswoman: ‘I don’t think the president has lied’

The Hill logoNOTE:  This is another spokeswoman from the previous post, this time from his re-election campaign, stating the President hasn’t lied. This, when there’s a massive archive showing his lies.

CNN host Chris Cuomo and Kayleigh McEnany, a spokeswoman for President Trump‘s reelection campaign, got into a heated exchange late Wednesday over whether Trump lies, with McEnany repeatedly insisting that he doesn’t. 

The contentious back-and-forth came as Cuomo accused the president of consistently lying and demonizing people for being different.

“He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t lie,” McEnany retorted. “The press lies.”

View the complete August 29 article by Justin Wise on The Hill website here.

Leaked draft of Trump executive order to ‘censor the internet’ denounced as unconstitutional edict

AlterNet logoCivil liberties groups are warning of a major threat to online freedoms and First Amendment rights if a leaked draft of a Trump administration edict—dubbed by critics as a “Censor the Internet” executive order that would give powerful federal agencies far-reaching powers to pick and choose which kind of Internet material is and is not acceptable—is allowed to go into effect.

According to CNN, which obtained a copy of the draft, the new rule “calls for the FCC to develop new regulations clarifying how and when the law protects social media websites when they decide to remove or suppress content on their platforms. Although still in its early stages and subject to change, the Trump administration’s draft order also calls for the Federal Trade Commission to take those new policies into account when it investigates or files lawsuits against misbehaving companies.”

While Politico was the first to report how the draft was being circulated by the White House, CNN notes that if put into effect, “the order would reflect a significant escalation by President Trump in his frequent attacks against social media companies over an alleged but unproven systemic bias against conservatives by technology platforms. And it could lead to a significant reinterpretation of a law that, its authors have insisted, was meant to give tech companies broad freedom to handle content as they see fit.”

View the complete August 11 article by Jon Queally from Common Dreams on the AlterNet website here.

Trump lashes out at Washington Post over reporting: ‘Presidential Harassment!’

The Hill logoPresident Donald Trump on Sunday lashed out The Washington Post over its reporting on his attacks against a group of minority congresswomen, calling it an example of “Presidential Harassment.”

“The Washington Post Story, about my speech in North Carolina and tweet, with its phony sources who do not exist, is Fake News,” Trump tweeted, referring to a rally in North Carolina his campaign held last week. “The only thing people were talking about is the record setting crowd and the tremendous enthusiasm, far greater than the Democrats. You’ll see in 2020!”

“Presidential Harassment!” Trump added in a separate tweet, before tweeting “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” in a subsequent one.

View the complete July 21 article by Justin Wise on The Hill website here.

Trump complains of ‘crazed’ media coverage over ‘send her back’ chants

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Friday bemoaned the amount of media coverage devoted to supporters at his Wednesday night rally chanting “send her back” about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) as he dug in on his attacks against the first-term congresswomen and three of her colleagues.

Trump fired off a trio of tweets in which he shifted blame for the uproar over the chants onto the media one day after he sought to distance himself from the refrain. He again accused Omar of hating the country and blasted “vile and disgusting statements” made by progressive lawmakers he has attacked for six consecutive days.

View the complete July 19 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

‘This is nuts’: Former federal prosecutor argues Trump’s justification for blocking McGahn’s testimony will cripple the US Constitution

Former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig this week admitted he was stunned by President Donald Trump’s justification for blocking the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn — and he called the legal rationale behind it “nuts.”

Writing on CNN, Honig said he was aghast at the lengths the Trump White House is going to prevent Congress from conducting any oversight.

“The White House previously invoked executive privilege in an effort to prevent McGahn from producing documents to Congress,” he writes. “Now the White House — perhaps recognizing that its executive privilege invocation would likely fail on the legal merits — has changed tack and instead made an even broader claim that Congress cannot ever compel testimony from a senior adviser to the President. This is nuts.”

View the complete May 21 article by Brad Reed from Real Story on the AlterNet website here.