Tag: Trump weakening American democracy

Trump attacks ‘Fauci and all these idiots,’ says public is tired of pandemic, public health restrictions as infection rates rise

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President Trump dismissed precautions to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirusand attacked the nation’s top infectious-disease expert as a “disaster” Monday, arguing that people are getting tired of all the focus on a pandemic that has killed more than 219,000 Americans and continues to infect thousands of people in communities across the country.

The president claimed that voters do not want to hear more from the country’s scientific leaders about the pandemic, responding angrily to a critical interview Sunday night with CBS’s “60 Minutes” by Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said in a call with his campaign staff Monday that was intended to instill confidence in his reelection bid two weeks before Election Day. He baselessly suggested that Fauci’s advice on how best to respond to the outbreak was so bad it would have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more people. Continue reading.

Historian warns America is already in its own ‘slow-motion Reichstag Fire’

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Donald Trump continues to make it clear that he does not intend to leave office peacefully if he is defeated by Joe Biden and the Democrats on Election Day. Moreover, Donald Trump considers any election in which he is not the “winner” to be null and void. Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court is an obvious quid pro quo to secure his “reelection” if his attorneys and other agents can sufficiently sabotage the vote on Election Day and beyond.

On Thursday, Trump again followed the authoritarian’s playbook when he bragged to his supporters at a rally in North Carolina that U.S. Marshalls essentially executed Michael Reinoehl, an anti-fascist activist accused of killing a right wing paramilitary member during protests in Oregon last August.

Celebrating the extra-judicial killings of one’s political “enemies” is a common feature of fascist authoritarian regimes and the types of leaders admired and imitated by Donald Trump. Continue reading.

U.S. Agency for Global Media unrecognizable under Trump ally

Michael Pack, the new head of the agency that is home to Voice of America, has dismayed members of Congress from both parties

It was, in essence, an oversight hearing of a relatively small government agency, but what it amounted to was yet another indictment of a bureau taken over by a Trump ally and made unrecognizable to the members of Congress — from both parties — who fund and monitor it.

Democrats and Republicans joined in expressing anger and dismay at what has happened to the U.S. Agency for Global Media since a supporter of President Donald Trump was confirmed as its director in early June.

The agency, with an annual budget just under $1 billion and a staff of 4,000 employees and 1,500 stringer reporters, is home to the U.S. government’s international broadcasting operations, including the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, which have long been respected as trustworthy sources of information for people in authoritarian countries whose news is censored, restricted and blocked. Continue reading.

Trump makes it clear: He revels in the killing of his political opponents

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For all the demands that former Vice President Joe Biden condemn rioting and looting, no serious observer actually thinks he supports violence in the streets. The most plausible criticism of Biden is that he’s a creature of the existing political system — a product of and adherent to the established institutional order. He doesn’t want violence and chaos to shake the foundations of society.

President Donald Trump, on the other hand, really does relish chaos, and he cares little for any institutions that he doesn’t see as directly benefiting him. And in a new Fox News interview this weekend, he made clear that he’s not just a fan of violence — a view he has expressed repeatedly, even if he occasionally reads from scripts that say the opposite — but he is actively pleased by the deaths of his political enemies.

While discussing with host Jeanine Pirro the fact that U.S. Marshals — a part of the Justice Department, a part of Trump’s administration — killed the avowed antifa activist Michael Forest Reinoehl, the president expressed no regret at his death. In fact, he was triumphant about the killing.

Here’s the section of the transcript, per Factba.se: Continue reading.

Nora Dannehy, Connecticut prosecutor who was top aide to John Durham’s Trump-Russia investigation, resigns amid concern about pressure from Attorney General William Barr

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned — at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor who has worked with or for Durham for decades, informed colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Haven of her resignation from the Department of Justice by email Thursday evening. The short email was a brief farewell message and said nothing about political pressure, her work for Durham or what the Durham team has produced, according to people who received it.

Durham, who has never even acknowledged that Dannehy was in Washington working for him, had no immediate comment on the resignation. Continue reading.

Renowned psychiatrist explains how Trump has imposed a ‘malignant normality’ — just like the Nazis did

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Whereas we could not have predicted a pandemic three years ago, the authors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President anticipated how the president would respond, should there be a crisis.  We tried to warn the public of the very consequences we are witnessing today: the loss of many lives and livelihoods of Americans.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton has been one of the earliest voices to warn against these consequences.  He is distinguished professor emeritus of the City University of New York, a leading psychohistorian renowned for his studies of Nazi doctors and of Hiroshima bombing survivors, and author of Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry.

Lee: What is your analysis of Donald Trump’s response to Covid-19, in which you have said that his own effort at solipsistic reality breaks down?

Lifton: Covid-19 has presented a problem for Trump and his reality struggles.  I have written and spoken repeatedly about what I call his solipsistic reality.  That means it is entirely self-contained and having little to do with what others consider reality and little to do with classical standards of evidence.  With the Covid-19 virus, we have had a dreadful pandemic, which has given us constant, physical, organic evidence of sickness and death, evidence that is before us, that is concrete.  And in that sense, the effort of Trump to call forth his solipsistic reality is less and less effective. Continue reading.

Swept up in the federal response to Portland protests: ‘I didn’t know if I was going to be seen again’

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PORTLAND, Ore. — The protest outside Portland’s federal courthouse had died down by 3:40 a.m. on July 29, when a green laser shined down from a seventh-floor balcony used as a lookout by federal agents.

The laser landed on John Hacker, an activist and citizen-journalist standing in a park about 170 feet away. It skittered across Hacker’s feet, head and torso for more than 45 seconds. Suddenly, an unmarked van pulled in front of him. Doors slid open. Heavily armed men in camouflage tactical gear surrounded Hacker and took him into custody.

Hacker, 36, is among nearly two dozen people arrested but not charged during the Trump administration’s five-week response, from July through early August, to the demonstrations against police brutality in Portland. Before letting Hacker go, federal agents collected a DNA swab, photographed him and confiscated a phone that has not been returned, he said. Continue reading.

The signs that democracy is under attack are growing increasingly dire

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Earlier this week, New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo warned that American democracy is ending. He pointed to political violence on the streets, the pandemic, unemployment, racial polarization, and natural disasters, all of which are destabilizing the country, and noted that Republicans appear to have abandoned democracy in favor of a cult-like support for Donald Trump. They are wedded to a narrative based in lies, as the president dismantles our non-partisan civil service and replaces it with a gang of cronies loyal only to him.

He is right to be worried.

Just the past few days have demonstrated that key aspects of democracy are under attack. Continue reading.

White House threatens journalist with a ‘dossier’ over report exposing Trump’s self-dealing

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During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised that he would “completely isolate” himself from the Trump Organization if elected president. But the Washington Post and other media outlets have done a great deal of reporting on the many ways in which Trump’s properties — from Mar-a-Lago in South Florida to his hotels and golf resorts around the world — have profited from his presidency. Some of that reporting can be found in an article that was written by reporters David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey and Joshua Partlow and published by the Post on Thursday morning, and one of the article’s revelations is that a White House spokesman resented the Post’s investigation so much that he was willing to threaten Fahrenthold with a “dossier.”

In a written statement to the Post, the journalists report, Deere said: “The Washington Post is blatantly interfering with the business relationships of the Trump Organization, and it must stop. Please be advised that we are building up a very large ‘dossier’ on the many false David Fahrenthold and others stories as they are a disgrace to journalism and the American people.”

In that statement, Deere insisted that Trump has “turned over the day-to-day responsibilities of running the company, though he was not required to, (and) has sacrificed billions of dollars.” But Fahrenthold, Dawsey and Partlow, in their article, make it abundantly clear how much Trump’s businesses have profited from Trump’s presidency. Continue reading.

‘He’s going to be unleashed’: Republican DOJ appointees urge against Trump second term

The officials said they’re backing Joe Biden in the hope of restoring “basic honesty and integrity.”

A group of onetime Republican presidential appointees who served as senior ethics or Justice Department aides are endorsing Joe Biden for president, warning that Donald Trump has “weaponized” the executive branch and is putting in peril the legitimacy of the Justice Department.

“I think a lot of us are extremely alarmed, frankly, at the threat of autocracy,” Donald B. Ayer, former deputy attorney general during the George H.W. Bush administration, said in an interview with POLITICO. “He’s going to be unleashed if he gets a second term. I don’t know what’s going to stop him.”

The former officials endorsing Tuesday served under the Reagan, H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. Continue reading.