Tag: Trumpworld

Opinion: The man who will never go away

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Donald Trump is back, possibly at his party’s peril

There is a time-honored spy story plot: A retired CIA agent, tired of the clandestine life, has retreated to an island in Mediterranean. One day up the dirt road to his hideaway comes his former CIA station chief luring him back for one last mission. 

Saturday night, Donald Trump lured everyone back to his alternative universe of crazed conspiracies about a “rigged” election. His 91-minute speech in Wellington, Ohio, was the start of his vengeance tour against Republicans like nearby Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who voted to impeach Trump for fomenting the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. 

Equally predictable, but far more devastating, is the beginning of the onslaught of books featuring dramatic scenes from inside the Trump Oval Office. We have, of course, had articles and books like this before, but this time around the sources are finally talking on-the-record instead of lurking in the shadows.  Continue reading.

Has Trump Reached the Lying-to-Himself-and-Believing-It Stage of the Coronavirus Pandemic?

The reality—in both public-health and crass political terms—doesn’t look good for the President.

On Tuesday afternoon, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, came on the line with a breaking-news bulletin. Just before our interview, Whitmer had heard that President Trump was talking about dismantling the coronavirus task force he had assembled to oversee the national response to the pandemic. Whitmer seemed stunned by this information—U.S. infections from covid-19 were well over a million, the daily national death toll was often more than two thousand, and, in Whitmer’s hard-hit state, the crisis had already claimed more than four thousand of her constituents’ lives. “It’s just shocking,” she said, as we both tried to absorb the news. “Something new happens every day.”

By the next morning, Trump had, once again, changed his mind. He told reporters that he had no idea how “popular” the coronavirus task force was, and that it would remain in operation while shifting its emphasis toward reopening the economy and away from a public-health catastrophe that has already caused more U.S. deaths than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. These are crazy times in American politics. What’s a governor, or anyone trying to make sense of Trump’s on-again, off-again war on the virus, supposed to say?

Whitmer, a first-term Democrat in a swing state that helped Trump win the Presidency in 2016, has become such a lightning rod for Trump and his supporters that the President has given Whitmer her own derogatory Twitter nickname. After long-gun-toting protesters opposing her stay-at-home order entered the Michigan capitol last week—some of them wearing Trump campaign regalia, and some carrying Confederate flags, nooses, and swastikas—the President praised them as “very good people.” As Democrats nationally celebrate Whitmer’s unyielding response, and as Joe Biden considers her as his running mate, both the Republican-controlled state legislature and a Republican member of Congress have now sued her for using her emergency powers to keep the state closed during the crisis. Meanwhile, in heavily Democratic, heavily African-American Detroit, health-care workers are struggling to contain one of the worst outbreaks in the country. Continue reading.

Abuses of power from Trumpworld to Davos: Robert Reich

AlterNet logoAs the Senate debates Donald Trump’s future, chief executives, financiers and politicians have assembled in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual self-congratulatory defense of global capitalism.

The events are not unrelated. Trump is charged with abusing his power. Capitalism’s global elite is under assault for abusing its power as well: fueling inequality, fostering corruption and doing squat about climate change.

Chief executives of the largest global corporations are raking in more money and at a larger multiple of their workers’ pay than at any time in history. The world’s leading financiers are pocketing even more. The 26 richest people on Earth now own as much as the 3.8 billion who form the poorer half of the planet’s population. Continue reading.