Tag: Trump authoritarian tendencies

Trump soundly mocked for demanding speedy resolution to impeachment: ‘You don’t get to dictate terms’

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump broke with his Republican defenders, who say impeachment is moving too fast, and demanded a quick resolution to the constitutional process.

House Democrats moved the impeachment process from the Intelligence Committee to the Judiciary Committee after nearly two weeks of testimony, and Trump called for a speedy end to the matter.

“The Do Nothing Democrats had a historically bad day yesterday in the House,” Trump tweeted. “They have no Impeachment case and are demeaning our Country. But nothing matters to them, they have gone crazy.”

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Trump is surrounded by yes-men who are afraid to tell him ‘what he doesn’t want to hear’: Former economic adviser Gary Cohn

AlterNet logoThe United States’ last two presidents were criticized by some of their supporters for being overly deferential to advisors: there were liberals and progressives who believed that President Barack Obama became overly reliant on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on economic policy and some conservatives who believed that President George W. Bush was too quick to defer to the neocon war hawks in his administration on foreign policy. But President Donald Trump has had the opposite problem: a tendency to grow angry and defensive when challenged by advisers — and Gary Cohn, Trump’s former chief economic adviser, fears that being surrounded by yes-men could prove problematic for Trump.

Trump’s administration, according to the Brookings Institution, has had an 80% turnover rate. Appearing on former Obama adviser David Axelrod’s podcast, “The Axe Files,” Cohn (who resigned from the Trump Administration in March 2018) asserted that Trump, at this point, might be lacking the constructive criticism he needs in the White House.

“We had an interesting nucleus of people when I was in the White House — the initial team,” Cohn told Axelrod during the interview. “We were not bashful. It was a group that was willing to tell the president what he needed to know, whether he wanted to hear it or not.”

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CIA psychologist on Trump’s ‘damaged personality’: The president ‘may not even recognize the legitimacy of the election’

AlterNet logoIt is obvious even to the untrained eye that Donald Trump is mentally, emotionally and psychologically unwell. Trump has shown himself to be detached from empirical reality, vengeful, a compulsive liar and a probable sexual predator. He lacks empathy, care or concern for others, and possesses utter contempt for the rule of law, the Constitution and other restrictions on his behavior. In total — as leading mental health professionals have repeatedly warned — Trump’s behavior appears to be sociopathic.

For those and many other reasons, Trump merits impeachment and removal from office. But this state of emergency is also an opportunity for hostile foreign countries (especially Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer) — as well as America’s “friends” — to advance their own interests over those of the United States by manipulating a psychologically vulnerable president.

Dr. Jerrold Post is the founding director of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior. As the CIA’s head psychological profiler, he served under five American presidents of both political parties. Following his 21 years of service with the CIA, Post became a professor of psychiatry, political psychology and international affairs at George Washington University.

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Bill Barr is the most dangerous Trump official — and it could put him on a collision course with Chief Justice Roberts

AlterNet logoOver the last three years, Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies have often been frustrated by the law. Here is just one example that was recently reported in the New York Times.

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

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To Hide His Tax Returns, President Claims Monarchical Authority

Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to block a New York grand jury subpoena seeking his tax returns, which he once promised to publicly release, makes you wonder anew why he is so keen to prevent anyone from looking at those records, even in secret. But the case also raises the more momentous question of whether presidents have an unqualified right to quash such demands as long as they occupy the White House.

Trump’s view, as U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero summarized it last month, is that “the person who serves as President, while in office, enjoys absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind.” Marrero rejected that claim as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” And on Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit agreed.

The subpoena seeking Trump’s returns from his accounting firm is part of a probe by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who is investigating hush payments received by two women who say they had sexual relationships with the president before he was elected. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, is serving a prison sentence for federal crimes related to those payments, and Vance is reportedly curious about whether the scheme also violated a state law prohibiting falsification of business records.

View the complete November 10 article by Jacob Sullum on the National Memo website here.

Ex-Ethics Chief: Officials Who Defend Trump Are Waging ‘War on Democracy’

“We are in dangerous territory,” Walter Shaub cautioned in a lengthy Twitter thread.

The former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on Friday used a lengthy Twitter thread to warn about the people in positions of power who continue to defend President Donald Trump’s “indefensible” actions.

“Rather than risking a short-term political defeat, these anti-patriots wage war on democracy itself,” wrote Walter Shaub in the first of 11 tweets. “We are in dangerous territory.”

Shaub, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama and quit after serving during the first six months of the Trump administration, listed a slew of examples of Trump’s alleged ethics violations to back up his claim.

View the complete October 26 article by Lee Moran on the Huffington Post website here.

A revealing 24 hours for the GOP and the ‘rule of law’

Washington Post logoIt’s hardly breaking news that President Trump has an uneasy relationship with the rule of law. He campaigned on putting his unindicted opponent in jail. He has attacked judges individually and the judiciary as an institution. He allegedly asked his FBI director for loyalty and to lay off a top aide. He tried to get his first attorney general to launch politically expedient investigations. Robert S. Mueller III laid out five instancesin which there was significant evidence that he obstructed justice. He’s declining to cooperate with his own impeachment inquiry. And he even criticized his Justice Department for indicting two Republican congressman.

What hasn’t been chewed over quite as thoroughly is how much this attitude has infected those around him — many of them in the Republican Party, which prides itself as the party of the rule of law.

And the past 24 hours have been full of activity on that front.

View the complete October 23 article by Aaron Blake on The National Memo website here.

Political scientist explains how authoritarian regimes co-opt institutions to work for the leader: ‘That is happening even more rapidly under Trump’

AlterNet logoDonald Trump is a human maelstrom of chaos, disorder, lies and destruction — as has at least partly been exposed by Tuesday’s damaging Capitol Hill testimony from Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine.

Trump’s supporters are addicted to the chaos and lies. They too want to “burn it all down”. Trump and his supporters are the political beast with two backs, linked forever by insatiable lust.

The recent examples are too numerous to fully detail and list. Trump has encouraged and aided ethnic cleansing, and possible genocide, against the Kurds in Syria. He has engaged in multiple abuses of power, including obstruction of justice. He has tried to bribe and extort the Ukrainian president. He has violated the emoluments clause of the United States Constitution in any number of ways. He has ordered administration officials not to comply with subpoenas issued by Congress. He has spread racist or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He has threatened violence against leading Democrats, the news media and otherswho dare to criticize him.

View the complete October 23 article by Chauncey DeVega from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Trump is falling ‘under malign influence’ — and abetting the rise of European authoritarianism

AlterNet logoIn our June/July/August 2015 issue, we published an article by Eleni Kounalakis, our United States ambassador to Hungary during much of the Obama administration. The piece explored Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to the 2010 election of Viktor Orbán. It was a story about how Clinton and her diplomats rallied to keep authoritarianism at bay in eastern Europe. Their successes in Hungary were partial and quite fragile. As the Washington Post explains, they couldn’t survive the election of Donald Trump. The United States now sides with the authoritarians.

Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said…

…their disparaging depictions of Ukraine reinforced Trump’s perceptions of the country and fed a dysfunctional dynamic in which White House officials struggled to persuade Trump to support the fledgling government in Kyiv instead of exploiting it for political purposes, officials said.

The government, very much including Trump’s own national security staff, has been powerless to stop this reversal.

View the complete October 22 article by Martin Longman from the Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

Our Republic Is Under Attack From the President

New York Times logoIf President Trump doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office

Last week I attended two memorable events that reminded me why we care so very much about this nation and also why our future may be in peril.

The first was a change of command ceremony for a storied Army unit in which one general officer passed authority to another. The second event was an annual gala for the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) Society that recognizes past and present members of the intelligence and Special Operations community for their heroism and sacrifice to the nation. What struck me was the stark contrast between the words and deeds heralded at those events — and the words and deeds emanating from the White House.

On the parade field at Fort Bragg, N.C., where tens of thousands of soldiers have marched either preparing to go to war or returning from it, the two generals, highly decorated, impeccably dressed, cleareyed and strong of character, were humbled by the moment.

View the complete October 17 commentary by William H. McRaven, former commander of the United States Special Operations Command, on The New York Times website here.