Why Does Trump Put Russia First?

Since before the 2016 election, Donald Trump has shown that time and time again he puts the interest of Vladimir Putin's Russia ahead of the interests of America and its NATO allies.  The constant question has been why.  Is it because Russian election interference put him in the White House?  Is it because laundered Russian money has kept his real estate ventures afloat given his in ability to secure loans from and U.S. banks?  Is it because he longs to rule America as a dictator as Putin rules Russia, supported by corrupt politicians and sycophants?  Now that it has become clear - despite Trump's lies and denials - that Russia paid bounties for the killing of American troops in Afghanistan and that Trump did nothing, the question becomes all the more relevant.  Former national Security Advisor Susan Rice has an op-ed in the New York Times that is an indictment of Trump and those in his regime who did nothing to punish Putin.  Indeed, Trump did Putin favors and helped Russia's objectives even after knowing Putin was paying for the murder of Americans.  As the 2020 election nears, Trump's betrayal of American military members is yet another reason he needs to be defeated - and thoroughly investigated once he is out of office.  Here are column excerpts (as disclaimer, I have a son-in-law who served in Afghanistan who was badly wounded in that fool's errand war):

Since at least February, and possibly as early as March 2019, the United States has had compelling intelligence that a committed adversary, Russia, paid bounties to Taliban-linked fighters to kill American troops in Afghanistan. American service members were reportedly killed as a result.

To this day, the president of the United States has done nothing about it.  Instead, President Trump dismissed the intelligence as not “credible” and “possibly another fabricated Russia hoax, maybe by the Fake News” that is “wanting to make Republicans look bad!!!”

Mr. Trump also claimed that neither he nor Vice President Mike Pence was ever told about this critical intelligence before it was first reported in The New York Times. Setting aside for a moment the credulity of that claim, whenever [Trump] the president learned of this deeply troubling intelligence, why did he not publicly condemn any Russian efforts to kill American soldiers and explore options for a swift and significant U.S. response?

None of this adds up.  As a former national security adviser, I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that no one told Mr. Trump about this intelligence.

It was reportedly contained in the president’s daily briefing, which is provided to all top-level national security officials. Even if Mr. Trump does not bother regularly to read the daily briefing, we must assume others do. If the president’s senior advisers — Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser; Richard Grenell, who stepped down in May as acting director of national intelligence; and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, among others — thought it was unnecessary to inform the commander in chief of this life-or- death matter, then they are not worthy of service.

[T[he administration reportedly informed the British government, and the National Security Council convened an interagency meeting in March to discuss the intelligence and its implications.

Here’s what should have happened. Had I, as national security adviser, received even “raw” reporting that Russia was paying to kill U.S. service members, I would have walked straight into the Oval Office to brief the president.

Contrary to the spin-masters in the White House today, I would not have waited until we had absolute certainty. I would have said, “Mr. President, I want to make sure you are aware that we have troubling reporting that Russia is paying the Taliban to kill our forces in Afghanistan. . . . I will convene the national security team to get you some options for how to respond to this apparent major escalation in Russia’s hostile actions.”

If later the president decided, as Mr. Trump did, that he wanted to talk with President Vladimir Putin of Russia at least six times over the next several weeks and invite him to join the Group of 7 summit over the objections of our allies, I would have thrown a red flag: “Mr. President, I want to remind you that we believe the Russians are killing American soldiers. This is not the time to hand Putin an olive branch. It’s the time to punish him.”

If Mr. Trump was told about Russian actions, why did he not respond? If he was not told, why not? Are his top advisers utterly incompetent? Are they too scared to deliver bad news to Mr. Trump, particularly about Russia? Is Mr. Trump running a rogue foreign policy utterly divorced from U.S. national interests? If so, why?

A perilous pattern persists that underscores Mr. Trump’s strange propensity to serve Russian interests above America’s. Recall that, during his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump publicly urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and praised WikiLeaks for publishing stolen documents.

He denied and dismissed Russian interference in the 2016 election, then took Mr. Putin at his word at a Helsinki meeting while undercutting the U.S. intelligence community, and obstructed the Mueller investigation and distorted its findings. Mr. Trump recklessly removed U.S. troops from northern Syria and allowed Russian forces to take over American bases.

Next, Mr. Trump unilaterally invited Mr. Putin to attend the Group of 7 meeting, a move that apparently upended the organization’s annual summit. Subsequently, without any consultation, Mr. Trump announced his decision to remove nearly a third of U.S. troops from Germany — a sudden and inexplicable withdrawal that weakens the U.S.-German relationship and harms NATO, while benefiting Russia.

Most recently, we have learned that even Russian efforts to slaughter American troops in cold blood do not faze this president. . . . . . Now Mr. Putin knows he can kill Americans with impunity.

At best, our commander in chief is utterly derelict in his duties, presiding over a dangerously dysfunctional national security process that is putting our country and those who wear its uniform at great risk. At worst, the White House is being run by liars and wimps catering to a tyrannical president who is actively advancing our arch adversary’s nefarious interests.

Vote a straight Democrat ticket in November at all levels of government.  Republicans must be severely punished for their betrayal of America through their pandering to Trump.

Are Senate Republicans Setting the Stage for Dictatorship?

Watching Senate Republicans in the impeachment proceeds makes it clear that one thing is nowhere in their thoughts, namely living up to their oaths of office and defending the constitutional order.  Indeed, they seem poised to say that a president is above the law and can do literally whatever he/she wants. Even if the nation survives the Trump regime, the precedent may well come back to haunt Republicans should the Democrats capture the White House with an equally narcissistic, megalomaniac.  Sadly, Republican senators have put their own re-election and avoidance of upsetting Trump's white supremacist, Christian extremist base above the interest of the nation and the constitutional order.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Senate Republicans' abandonment of the oaths and concern for the nation.  Here are highlights:

[Trump's] The president’s lawyers this week floated their catch-all impeachment defense, one tailor-made for President Trump. It is, in essence, that a narcissistic president can do no wrong.

Like most of [Trump's] the president’s arguments, it’s erroneous. But no argument could have presented the issue more starkly to Republican senators: Will they follow their oaths to defend the Constitution and to do impartial justice? Or will they once again show fealty to Trump personally, thereby accepting his conflation of his personal interests with those of the nation?

Leave it to Alan Dershowitz to drive the point home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.  If “a president does something which he believes will get himself elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz contended.

For a president psychologically incapable of distinguishing between his own personal interests and the nation’s, that amounts to the ultimate get-out-of-impeachment-free card. Trump already believes that “I have an Article II” — Article II of the Constitution — “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” This self-described very stable genius, he of “I alone can fix it,” is convinced that his reelection, achieved by whatever means necessary, serves the interests of the country. In short, anything goes.

But the argument is a lie. It’s another example of how Trump corrupts all around him. Following the lead of the political aides and allies who came before them, during the past two weeks it has been the lawyers who have debased themselves. Defying their own obligations of candor to the tribunals before which they appear, they’ve lied to and misled the court of impeachment about the House proceedings and underlying facts, peddled conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation, and of course about Ukraine and the Bidens. Their legal position is likewise false. It’s just not true that good motives, when mixed with bad ones, compel acquittal under the law. If a politician takes a bribe to do what he thinks would have been best for the public anyway, he still goes to jail. If he’s president, under a Constitution that refers to impeachment specifically for “bribery,” as well other “high crimes and misdemeanors,” he should still be removed.

It’s also not true that “abuse of power” is not impeachable, or that a statutory crime is necessary for impeachment. And it’s not true, as Dershowitz argued Wednesday, that the Framers’ rejection of “maladministration” as a basis for impeachment means that abuse of power isn’t impeachable. The Framers rejected the word “maladministration” because it covered mistakes and incompetence, not because it also could mean abuse of power. In fact, they swapped “high crimes and misdemeanors” into the final document precisely because it does cover such abuse.

[I]f a president conditions another official act — releasing security assistance to a foreign country — on a requirement that the foreign country smear the president’s political opponent. That’s not politics; that’s corruption. And corruption, for all the Trump lawyers’ attempt to muddy the waters with tortured interpretations of the Constitution, is what this impeachment is all about. Trump acted with corrupt intent to damage a political opponent. Testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton seems certain to underscore that point. 

Which is precisely why Republican senators seem so desperate not to hear it and so willing to entertain a false reading of the Constitution that would effectively render the impeachment clause a nullity. Should they do that, they will have sacrificed their own oaths to protect their own electoral prospects, and the country and the Constitution will have been saddled with a terrible precedent. The Senate will have told Trump that, indeed, he can do whatever he wants.

The Anonymous White House Official Is a Collaborator,

Perhaps it was the way I was raised, but when one sees and evil and danger, one has a moral duty to remove it, if possible, not merely collaborate with it and play mental gymnastics rationalizing that you are somehow restraining the evil.  The author of the anonymous op-ed run by the New York Times is, in my view, a collaborator with the evils of the Trump?pence regime and willing to engage in harming the country on a long term basis all so that the very rich can enjoy huge tax cuts which are ballooning the national debt and so that regulations constraining the worse inclinations of large corporations can be rolled back.  The lives and future of average Americans are nowhere within this toxic agenda.  Frank Rich has a spot on piece at New York Magazine that looks at the Vichy Republicans and the equally toxic and hypocrisy-filled Brett Kavanaugh.  Here are excerpts (for Fox News viewers, "Vichy Republicans" is a comparison with the French who collaborated with the Nazi's in France in WWII):

For once Trump is right: the “anonymous” Times op-ed is “gutless.” The anonymity allows its author to do what every other cowering administration figure and Republican leader has done since Inauguration Day — duck any responsibility for what is happening and retreat from any real pushback against Trump. If we are to believe Mr. (or Ms.) Anonymous, he and his fellow in-house Trump resisters are the “adults in the room” and “unsung heroes” who are “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” This is no doubt how Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and all the rest of the president’s Vichy Republicans see themselves too. But which of Trump’s “worst inclinations” have any of them frustrated? The ripping apart of immigrant families? The nonstop race-baiting and the condoning of white neo-Nazis at Charlottesville? The assaults on Americans’ health care, on LGBT rights, on the press? The nonstop ethical abuses and kleptomania of the Trump family and Cabinet members? The wholesale effort to sabotage the rule of law?
 The anonymous author, like every other Trump enabler, essentially says don’t worry, we have the country’s back, and any White House horror is worth it in exchange for “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” At least when those like Lindsey Graham espouse such a rationale they attach their names to it. Mr. Anonymous is a coward so lacking a moral compass that he doesn’t realize that the best way to “preserve our democratic institutions” (as he claims to be doing) is to identify himself, resign, and report any criminal activity he has witnessed by the president or his colleagues. [T]he piece could also be viewed as a P.R. strategy for its author. It reads like a defense document that’s being put on the record should that rainy day come when Mr. Anonymous, no longer anonymous, will have to defend his own actions in a Nuremberg-like legal reckoning once the king of Crazytown has been carted off. As any student of Vichy knows, there was no shortage of French collaborators who falsely claimed to have been secretly part of the underground Resistance to the Pétain regime once the war was over. Kavanaugh also stands ready to help Trump evade the law. He refused to say whether he believes the president can defy a subpoena or pardon himself, and he refused to recuse himself from any forthcoming cases which might involve Trump. He even refused to condemn Trump’s tweet attacking the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, Jeff Sessions, for permitting the indictments of two Republican congressmen accused of wholesale financial theft. [H]ere’s what I would ask Kavanaugh if I were a Democratic senator on the Judiciary Committee: “Explain your thinking when you wrote a legal memo to the independent counsel Kenneth Starr proposing that President Clinton be asked this question and nine others like it: ‘If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions in the Oval Office area, you used your fingers to stimulate her vagina and bring her to orgasm, would she be lying?’” And in further keeping with the ethos set by the “grab ’em by the pussy” president who nominated Kavanaugh, I would ask that question aloud before the nominee’s family. The answer might well illuminate the future justice’s view of women and their right to govern their own bodies with a specificity missing in his obfuscating filibusters about Roe. My favorite take on it all was from Tim Miller, a Never-Trump Republican political operator who’d worked for Jeb Bush in 2016. “Here’s my problem with saying a eulogy is an ‘implicit critique of the president,’” he wrote on Twitter. “It is impossible to praise someone’s commitment to American values or highlight admirable character traits without implicitly criticizing Trump bc he doesn’t believe in them and he has none.”

How Much Longer Will Congressional Republicans Betray America?

The national nightmare that is the Trump presidency could be over in short order if congressional Republicans would cease putting their party and their steal from the poor to give to the rich agenda.  Unfortunately, even as more and more Americans come to the realization that the Trump White House represents a real life version of the tale of the "Emperor  has No Clothes," all signs are that members of the GOP continue to put their party and toxic agenda ahead of the interests of the nation.  Indeed, some appear to be engaging in their own efforts to obstruct justice and undermine the rule of law.  A prime example is Senator Lindsey Graham against whom we can only assume that either Trump or the Russians have compromising information that is being used to turn him into a Trump sycophant.  The task for Democrats is to make sure between now and election day in November, 2018, that as many voters as possible are educated about the GOP's betrayal of both average Americans and constitutional government.  A column in the Washington Post looks at how Republicans are throwing the country and voters under the bus.  Here are excerpts:

The most astonishing aspect of the response to Michael Wolff’s book is that anyone is surprised. President Trump’s unfitness for office was obvious long before he was elected. Once he moved into the White House, the destructive chaos of his administration was there for all to see. Future historians will scratch their heads to figure out why it took this particular book to break the dam of denial.

None of this takes anything away from Wolff’s achievement in “Fire and Fury.” On the contrary, he deserves our thanks for creating Trump’s “emperor has no clothes” moment, even if this point should have been reached before, say, Nov. 8, 2016. Trump’s tweets on Saturday pronouncing himself “a very stable genius” only underscored the damage Wolff has done and Trump’s dumbfounding insecurity.

But Wolff alone cannot bring this presidency crashing down, given how many Republicans still seem determined to protect Trump. Even as the news was dominated by Wolff’s revelations, Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley and Lindsey O. Graham made a criminal referral to the Justice Department on Friday — and not against anyone who might have colluded with Russia.

[T]he episode was one of many signs that Republican leaders in Congress are sticking with Trump in the face of the damage the president’s increasingly obvious and glaring shortcomings are doing to our country. Over the weekend, Republican leaders trooped up to Camp David to meet with Trump and pledge their allegiance to a common agenda.

Trump will continue to try to rally what base he has left with tweets about kneeling NFL players, immigrants, law and order and “political correctness.” He will keep attacking Hillary Clinton, the surest sign of his weakness, since his own record has done little to draw Americans his way. He needs targets to make his enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend approach work.  But it’s not working as well as it used to. 

Trump’s [and the GOP's] policies have shown that his true commitments are to himself and to other very wealthy people and corporate interests. . . . . His other policies, reflected in his slew of executive actions, have weakened federal protections for the environment, for workplace safety and worker pay, for civil rights and for small investors.

In response to what is little more than a traditional right-wing agenda, there has been a marked erosion of loyalty to Trump among voters who thought they were casting ballots for a populist and are getting ideological and plutocratic policies instead. A Pew Research Center survey last month found Trump losing ground particularly among whites without college degrees and white evangelical Christians, groups whose devotion Trump counts on.

What might be called the Wolff Effect will thus be paradoxical. It could strengthen the bonds between Republican politicians and Trump at the very moment when everyone else is coming to terms with how dangerous it is to have a president who is so uninformed and unstable. In the meantime, more traditional journalists will carry on their painstaking work, piling up evidence that Trump did all he could to block a legal accounting for the methods that helped get him to the White House in the first place.  We should have gotten here sooner. But far better late than never.

How Has Supporting Trump Worked Out for Russia?

As a piece in New York Magazine states, "We now know with more certainty than we did a couple weeks ago that the Russian government tried to tip the scales in last year’s presidential election toward Donald Trump and that central figures in the Trump campaign were apparently only too happy to accept the assistance."  One goal was to obviously weaken America and discredit the electoral process and on that, Trump seems to be delivering for Putin.  On climate change, China may step into America's former role and come to dominate renewable energy over time as Trump tries to breath life into the almost dead coal industry.  In terms of respect for America, Putin hit a home run as positive views of America plummet to new lows.  There are, of course, other things Putin hoped to achieve which the piece reviews.  Here are some article highlights:

[W]hat did Russian president Vladimir Putin get for his efforts? Has he received a decent return on his investment, or is Trump backfiring on him?

Here’s a look at some of the policy areas in which Putin likely hoped a Trump victory would advance Russian interests and how well Trump has delivered (whether knowingly or unknowingly). Remember, it’s Putin giving the grades here, so high marks don’t necessarily mean a job well-done.

Sanctions

In backing Trump, perhaps no objective was a bigger motivator for Putin and his oligarchic comrades than the easing of U.S. sanctions on Russia. While the impact of the sanctions on Russia’s ruling class has not been as sharp as it’s been for the underclass, a lot of wealthy Russians (including people who are personally friendly with Putin and Trump) would like to be able to travel, spend money, and do business in the U.S. and Europe more freely again. Trump’s people were signaling to Russia that he was willing to give ground on sanctions before he took office — and possibly before he was elected.

So far, no such luck. The Senate imposed new sanctions on Russia in June to punish the Kremlin for its election interference and, being well aware of Trump’s excessive coziness with Putin, took steps to limit his ability to lift them.

Grade: B-

Cybersecurity

If Putin has his way, 2016 won’t be the last U.S. election marred by Russian intelligence interference. It would be a shame if the president he helped us elect turned around and made it harder for him to “participate” in the future. Fortunately, Trump can’t admit that our elections are vulnerable to foreign interference without admitting that it helped him win, which his ego won’t allow, so he’s doing nothing to prevent Russia or other hostile actors from taking further cracks at our political parties’ communications or our election infrastructure. Instead, he’s channeling his energy into hunting down the millions of fraudulent U.S. voters that exist only in the fevered minds of some on the right.

Grade: A+

NATO

Trump’s campaign-trail diatribes against our NATO allies for not paying their fair share of defense costs was music to Putin’s ears, as a NATO weakened by wavering American support would give him a freer hand to reassert Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and particularly in the Baltic countries. Trump alarmed allies, blindsided his own national-security team, and surely set Putin’s heart aflutter when he declined to commit to the Article 5 mutual-defense provision in a speech at NATO headquarters in May — only to backtrack and say he would indeed uphold it in a press conference in Romania early last month. Clearly, his military and national-security staff set him straight in the interim. Meanwhile, other NATO countries are boosting their defense spending this year, for which Trump is taking too much credit. This is looking more and more like one campaign pledge the president won’t be able to fulfill.

Grade: F

Europe

If Putin can’t have a weaker NATO, a fractured European Union might be the next best thing — hence Russia’s (unsuccessful) efforts to help the Euroskeptical rightist Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential election in the same way he helped Trump in ours. On the whole, Trump does not instill much confidence in European leaders: Alienating Europe appears to be among his policy goals, and he now has Germany worried that he will start a trade war. On the other hand, Trump’s hostility to transatlantic cooperation has Europe seeking other partners, such as Japan, and it may be unwittingly making Europe stronger by helping Europeans appreciate the value of their union and the need for self-reliance. He’s also not abandoning the U.S. commitment to European security vis-à-vis Russia, as evinced by his agreement to sell Patriot air-defense missiles to Poland earlier this month.

Grade: C

Syria

Russia’s objectives in Syria remain as they have always been: to keep Bashar Al-Assad in power, Islamists out of power, and the Russian naval facility in Tartus open. Trump’s frustration with the Syrian stalemate and hesitation to oust Assad suited Putin much better than Clinton’s plans for more direct engagement.

After their G20 meeting, Trump and Putin announced that the U.S., Russia, Israel, and Jordan had brokered a cease-fire in southwest Syria, which took effect last Sunday. While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson maintains that the U.S.’s long-term goal for Syria is for Assad to step down, the new Syria strategy that emerged from the meeting would leave him in power, at least for the time being. . . . Critics have called the cease-fire plan unenforceable, have said it ignores Iran’s role in the conflict, and have alleged the plan entails a capitulation to Russia’s agenda from which Iran will emerge the winner. In short, it looks like the shots in Syria are now being called from Moscow, not Washington.

Grade: A

Russia's Unprecedented Election Tamper to Aid Trump

Personally, I find it frightening that most Republicans seem to care nothing about the fact that a hostile foreign government aided and abetted their party's presidential candidate.  Not that many years ago, members of the GOP would have been screaming the word "treason" about anyone who worked with or benefited from Russian espionage.  Sadly, that day is gone and it appears that both Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, and GOP slime ball, Mitch McConnell will do all they can to block a meaningful investigation of Russia's election tampering and/or retaliation against Russia.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the disturbing situation and the failures on various fronts to have addressed the treat - and possible treason - before the election last month.  Here are article highlights:

Well before the White House or U.S. intelligence agencies publicly blamed the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, two members of Congress did. Back in September, Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, released a statement accusing Russian intelligence agencies of hacking Democratic Party institutions. “Americans will not stand for any foreign government trying to influence our election,” they declared. “We hope all Americans will stand together and reject the Russian effort.”

Ultimately, however, many Americans did just the opposite: They stood still and they stood apart. Over 40 percent of Americans now say they’re not especially bothered by reports of hackers working with the Russian government to influence the U.S. election; most Democrats say they’re bothered by the interference, while most Republicans say they aren’t. . . . . Not long after a foreign government’s attempt to alter American politics, America had seemingly moved on to other matters.

Schiff is refusing to move on. The future of liberal democracy in the United States and around the world is at stake, he told me, and the U.S. government is rapidly running out of time to respond to the threat (Schiff says he has no confidence that Trump will punish Russia over its role in the election). In Trump’s denial of Russian meddling, Schiff sees a “president-elect who cannot accept any facts that diminish any of his achievements, no matter how well-established the facts are.” But Schiff is also critical of Obama, whose “excess of caution” ended up “inviting too much Russian interference.” And he’s critical of his own party. “Democrats failed to persuade the American people why they should care” about Russia’s intervention, he said.

Adam Schiff: I do agree with the assessment that the combination of cyber hacking, dumping of information, dumping of potentially forged information in the future, the propagation of fake-news stories—all of these “active measures” by Russia to interfere in our elections, to interfere in European elections—is a game-changer. It is of phenomenal importance and it’s a grave danger to the country. It’s a grave danger to liberal democracy, period. We’ve seen a creeping authoritarianism around the world, and this has been enabled by the cyber revolution. What we saw the Russians do in our presidential election was just utterly unprecedented in its scope and in its impact.

What made this so unique was the Russian willingness to dump this information in a way to damage one of the candidates, Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton, and in so doing help another candidate, Donald Trump. What made it so powerful was that we had the unusual specter of a major party and its nominee giving the Russians deniability. In any other election in modern U.S. history, had Russia been interfering in the political process in a way that benefitted one candidate, you would have had both candidates repudiating it. . . . But here you had, in Donald Trump, someone who was willing, on the one hand, to egg on the Russians to hack more, but on the other to give them deniability—a feat of both mental and rhetorical gymnastics that few could pull off. But he did.

[The cyber campaign] clearly had an impact [on the election]. Whether it was decisive or not we’ll never know. In a close election, any fact can be decisive. But there’s no refuting the Russian involvement in our elections. And that ought to be alarming to every American regardless of its impact.

In the context of the Russian cyber hacking, what it meant was that people’s party identity was so firmly entrenched that Republicans didn’t care enough about Russian hacking as long as it was helping their candidate. Even now you’ve seen Republican attitudes toward Russia change because of the expediency of who their new party leader is. And that’s largely, I think, influenced by core GOP hostility to Democrats.

The two most disturbing things I’ve seen since the election by the president-elect were, first, his claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted; otherwise he would have won the popular vote. That’s pure fiction. For someone who is about to be our president to publish that falsity is alarming. What followed close on the heels of that was the unwillingness to accept that the Russians had meddled in a way that helped him. And so he has to deny the underlying facts.

Both of those things tell me this is a president-elect who cannot accept any facts that diminish any of his achievements, no matter how well-established the facts are. That worries me a great deal for when he becomes president. Does that mean that he is going to ignore intelligence that contradicts his personal views because [it’s] less beneficial to him? That is a very dangerous trait to have in a commander in chief.

He’s doing long-term damage both to the intelligence community that risks its neck to provide a lot of these insights and analysis, but also to his own success as president and the country’s success, because there’ll be a national-security crisis at some point.

[I]t doesn’t take a rocket scientist or secret sources of information to recognize that in Secretary Clinton, [the Russians] had a candidate who they thought would be standing up to Russia, hostile to Russia, someone who’d been critical of their flawed elections in 2011. And in Donald Trump they had someone who was admiring of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, dismissive of NATO, and willing to potentially repeal sanctions [against Russia over its military intervention in Ukraine]. The Russians had every reason to prefer Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

Trump Is the Result of White Rage, Not Economic Anxiety

One of the myths promoted by the much of the mainstream media throughout the just past election is that whites rallied to Donald Trump due to economic anxiety and frustration.  Any, apparently, was more palatable to "journalists" than admitting that a majority of whites who voted for Trump and Republican candidates were motivated by racial hatred and resentment.  Pretending that something isn't so and lacking the spine to call out ugliness in the populace is one of the great betrayals of the media and is yet another example of how the media has enabled bad things to happen to this country, the unchallenged lies that took the nation into the Iraq War being another example.  An article in Time looks at the real reason we are now facing four years of the least competent and most reactionary (to the delight of the Christofascists) administration in the nation's history.  Here are excerpts:

White rage got us here. While the economic anxiety of Trump supporters is often touted as the driving force behind the mogul’s electoral college victory, that rationale is just a ruse, a clever red herring. The median income of a Trump supporter is more than $70,000 per year, which is well above the national average, and a 2016 study noted that it would take African Americans 228 years to equal the wealth of whites in the U.S. Clearly, Trump’s pathway into the Oval Office is not really about white economic angst. Rather, Barack Obama’s election — and its powerful symbolism of black advancement — was the major trigger for the policy backlash that led to Donald Trump, and which has now put America’s national security at risk.

Republicans carved out this trench shortly after Obama’s 2008 victory. The GOP pushed through a number of laws at the state level to block as many of his voters, primarily African Americans, from the polls as possible. North Carolina targeted black voters with nearly “surgical precision.” Wisconsin Republicans were “giddy” about disfranchising African Americans, especially in Milwaukee. Florida’s GOP cut particular days of early voting to nullify the political participation of black churchgoers. Texas required certain types of government-issued photo IDs to vote and then ensured that nearly 1.6 million black and Latino citizens would have very limited access. Ohio skewed its early voting laws to diminish the turnout in the cities while also implementing a literacy test that officials applied only to those in urban counties.

The end result was that the Republicans had effectively shattered the black and Latino demographic firewall that could have prevented a Trump presidency. A Trump presidency, to be clear, that many in the Republican establishment rightfully feared because of the mogul’s demonstrated unfitness for office.

But they didn’t fear it enough. Because even in the wake of federal court orders striking down many of the most odious, discriminatory features of voter suppression, the GOP resisted, stalled and defied the judiciary until confusion and resignation reigned at the polls. It was too late.

In a horrific Faustian calculation, these Republican patriots put the nation at risk so that Trump could fulfill his dominant campaign promise. And, to be clear, it was not to make America great again, but to make access to America’s resources “whites only” again. The Klan recognized it, as did the white nationalists who gave Trump their full-throttled support. But, this wasn’t just a fantasy of the far right. The allure of a revived Jim Crow nation that proudly, willfully excludes and debases millions of nonwhites was so reaffirming and reassuring that everything else became secondary or tertiary. Everything else, including national security.

Patriots cheered on as Trump asked the Russian government to hack an American citizen who had led a national-security agency. Patriots acquiesced to a foreign policy that encouraged nuclear proliferation, oozed profound ignoranceabout the basic fundamentals of U.S. nuclear capability, and kept in play use of the ultimate weapon by a man who has difficulty even maintaining control on Twitter.

In other words, in January 2017, a man will be at the helm of the U.S. military, intelligence and foreign policy bureaucracies, who actually encouraged foreign intervention in an American election and advocated for dismantling the alliances that will aid Russian expansionism and weaken U.S. influence and power. Yet, the patriots bet that the trade-off will be well worth it.  Clearly, white rage has brought us here.

The take away?  The next time some "friend" or acquaintance begins to give some bull shit excuse for their vote for Trump, call them out and let them know that they are a racist, homophobe, anti-immigrant zealot or other form of bigot.  Tell them that there is no need for pretense on their part. Tell them that you see them for who and what they really are and that you will guide your future interactions with them accordingly.  They may want to avoid looking in the mirror, but we will hold it up to their faces nonetheless.