Trump’s Threats to Deploy Troops Move America Closer to Anarchy

As a history major and having studied the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in the 1930's a nagging question has always been how and why did decent, moral Germans allow it to happen.  Now, in America, we are seeing a similar trend lead by a foul, narcissistic man who is aided and abetted by Republican elected officials who care only about power and by roughly 40% of the population.  Some of his supporters I understand: they are racists and misogynists.  But others who seem like decent people simple refuse to admit that they are being played for fools and refuse to see that Trump is the antithesis of what they claim to believe in.  They are exactly like the 1930's Germans who allowed Hitler to rise and ultimately destroy Germany.  With his attacks on the free press and now threats to use military troops against American civilians Trump is driving America towards anarchy which he will no doubt use as an excuse to declare martial law and the suspension of civil liberties.  It CAN happen in America and people are allowing it to happen.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at the danger.  Here are excerpts:

ATTORNEY GENERAL William P. Barr on Monday ordered federal police and National Guard forces to disperse protesters who were peacefully gathered in front of the White House. As flash munitions exploded and tear gas swirled, President Trump delivered a Rose Garden rant denouncing “acts of domestic terror” he said had taken place in Washington and other U.S. cities, and threatened to “deploy the United States military” to those that fail to “dominate the streets.”

[Trump] The president then walked across Lafayette Square to pose with a Bible in front of a church. The clearing of the square — carried out without the involvement of D.C. police, who were not told about it until moments before it occurred — enabled this cheap political theater, and we suspect the same term can be applied to Mr. Trump’s vow to deploy active-duty Army units. But military and congressional leaders ought to be telling him that any such action would be unacceptable.

As it is, Mr. Trump appears to be mobilizing federal forces to Washington, where he has the authority to take over the National Guard and deploy other troops without consulting local authorities.

One military official told the Times Mr. Trump was creating his own “palace guard.” Mr. Trump said he was “dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” to the District “to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and wanton destruction of property.”

There has been vandalism and some looting in the District — often carried out, as The Post reported, by mostly white extremists and criminals who have nothing to do with the thousands who have peacefully and justifiably demonstrated for racial justice. But calling the smashing of shop windows “domestic terror” is cynical hyperbole designed to cast Mr. Trump as a “president of law and order,” as he put it. D.C. police are capable of containing the disturbances without interference by “heavily armed soldiers.”

The deployment of regular military forces to Washington or any other city would be still more counterproductive. . . . To do so now, especially over the objections of local elected officials, would be, as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) put it, “unsustainable militarily” and “unsustainable socially because it’s the antithesis of how we live.”

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, surely know this. Yet they allowed themselves to be used as props in Mr. Trump’s march across Lafayette Square and participated in a phone call Monday in which the president demanded that governors use the National Guard to suppress protests.

Mr. Esper even spoke of U.S. cities as “the battlespace.” In enabling his incitement, Mr. Trump’s aides are helping him to push the country closer not to order but to anarchy.

The Religious Right Wants to Destroy Democracy

The so-called Christian Right - which in my view is neither right on issues nor Christian - has always had its element who wanted to over throw America's democracy to establish a theocracy with, of course, themselves in charge and dictating what others are allowed to think and how they are allowed to live their lives. Not that many years ago, huckster and scam artist Mike Huckabee - the father of the loathsome and  perpetually lying Sarah Huckabee Sanders - stated on Morning Joe that he wanted the Bible, not the U.S. Constitution, to be the governing factor in America's government.  Now, more and more of the ranks of the evangelicals - the Christofascist, if you will - are ready to overthrow democracy if they cannot inflict their will on the country through any other means. They look longingly at how Vladimir Putin has re-empowered the Russian Orthodox Church (which has a horrible record on its support of dictators) as a means to shore up his power.  Meanwhile, the Trump/Pence has promised the moon to evangelicals who have thrown principle and morality out the window in exchange for power. A lengthy piece in The Atlantic looks at this frightening trend of illiberalism and a longing for authoritarian rule.  Here are highlights:

By the tail end of the Obama administration, the culture war seemed lost. The religious right sued for détente, having been swept up in one of the most rapid cultural shifts in generations. Gone were the decades of being able to count on attacking its traditional targets for political advantage. In 2013, Chuck Cooper, the attorney defending California’s ban on same-sex marriage, begged the justices to allow same-sex-marriage opponents to lose at the ballot box rather than in court. Conservatives such as George Will and Rod Dreher griped that LGBTQ activists were “sore winners,” intent on imposing their beliefs on prostrate Christians, who, after all, had already been defeated.The rapidity of that cultural shift, though, should not obscure the contours of the society that the religious right still aspires to preserve: a world where women have no control over whether to carry a pregnancy to term, same-sex marriage is illegal, and gays and lesbians can be arrested and incarcerated for having sex in their own homes and be barred from raising children.

The religious right showed no mercy and no charity toward these groups when it had the power to impose its will, but when it lost that power, it turned to invoking the importance of religious tolerance and pluralism in a democratic society. That was then. The tide of illiberalism sweeping over Western countries and the election of Donald Trump have since renewed hope among some on the religious right that it might revive its cultural control through the power of the state. Inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia, a faction of the religious right now looks to sectarian ethno-nationalism to restore its beliefs to their rightful primacy, and to rescue a degraded and degenerate culture. All that stands in their way is democracy, and the fact that most Americans reject what they have to offer.The past few weeks have witnessed a nasty internecine fight among religious conservatives about whether liberal democracy’s time has passed. Sohrab Ahmari, writing at First Things, attacked National Review’s David French for adhering to a traditional commitment to liberal democracy while “the overall balance of forces has tilted inexorably away from us.”Many religious conservatives see antidiscrimination laws that compel owners of public accommodations to serve all customers, laws that might compel priests to break the seal of confession if they are told of child abuse, and the growing acceptance of trans people as a kind of impending apocalypse. It is no surprise that among their co-partisans, Ahmari seems to have the upper hand here; in such circles, “Crush your enemies” almost always plays better than “The other side has rights too.”

The concerns Ahmari airs are not wholly without merit: Religious conservatives are not paranoid to imagine themselves pariahs someday in the future because of their views; it was not so long ago that liberal champions such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton held public positions that today would be described by the left as bigotry.

In spite of their disagreements, Ahmari and French are in accord about a great deal when it comes to abortion, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights. French’s adherence to liberal democracy is a commitment to a set of rules under which these goals can be pursued in a pluralistic society: through public discourse, the courts, and the ballot box. For Ahmari and his ilk, this is insufficient. He seems to believe not only that the state should always settle such disputes in his favor, but that it should prevent cultural and political expressions he finds distasteful.This isn’t an exaggeration. In a since-deleted tweet, Ahmari praised Alabama Public Television for refusing to air an episode of the cartoon Arthur in which the titular character’s male teacher marries another man; his attack on French was preceded by another since-deleted eruption, over Drag Queen Story Hour at a public library, in which he cried, “To hell with liberal order”; and he has since suggested the humanities should be defunded because “they may be lost to us for good.”

If this is where Ahmari and his cohort are while the GOP still controls the courts, the Senate, and the presidency, imagine what they’ll be willing to countenance should they lose them. Ahmari’s demands here outline the United States that illiberals would like to see: one that resembles Orbán’s Hungary, where rigged electoral systems ensure that political competition is minimal, the press is tightly controlled by an alliance between corporations and the state on behalf of the ruling party, national identity is defined in religious and ethnic terms, and cultural expressions are closely policed by the state to ensure compliance with that identity. It is no surprise that the vast majority of black and Latino Christians see a secular but pluralist left as more trustworthy allies than conservatives who rail against “poisonous and censorious multiculturalism,” and darkly warn of a plot to “displace American citizens.”

The illiberals see the wealthy and upper-middle classes getting married, forming families, and raising children much as they did in the 1950s, and conclude that the problem with working-class Americans is not the diminished political power relative to their bosses, but the absence of a sharp enough lash, whether from the state or from a culture that has escaped the religious right’s grasp. Gillette should be making commercials about women staying at home and fathers going off to work, not dads teaching their trans sons to shave for the first time.

This understanding also helps illuminate the right’s eruption over YouTube’s decision to demonetize (but not remove) the channel of Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber who called the Vox reporter Carlos Maza a “lispy queer,” among other slurs. A world in which one can refer to gay people as “lispy queers” without repercussion is one in which the illiberal right is winning the culture war, so it matters little that YouTube is no less a private business than Masterpiece Cakeshop, and has a right to define the rules for using its platform. The same sort of protests that the right decries as illiberal when deployed against right-wing speakers on college campuses are suddenly a legitimate tactic when used against Drag Queen Story Hour.

The objective here, in Ahmari’s words, is to defeat “the enemy,” not adhere to principle, and that requires de-stigmatizing anew the kind of bigotry that was once powerful enough to sway elections.

[T]he illiberal faction in this debate retains Trump as its champion precisely because the president is willing to use the power of the state for sectarian ends, despite being an exemplar of the libertinism to which it is supposedly implacably opposed, a man whose major legislative accomplishment is slashing taxes on the wealthy, and whose most significant contribution to the institution of the family is destroying thousands of them on purpose. It is power that is the motivator here, and the best that could be said for these American Orbánists is that they believe that asserting an iron grip on American politics and culture would offer the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Every authoritarian movement has felt the same way.

The question of whether the Republican Party would abandon liberal democracy for sectarian ethno-nationalism was decided in the 2016 primary, and all French and Ahmari are doing is arguing about it after the fact. The commercial and social incentives for conservative writers to succumb to Trumpism are vast. . . . And the support Ahmari has drawn suggests that the conservative intelligentsia will offer less resistance to authoritarianism than it did in 2015 and 2016.

Trump is the symptom of the Republican Party’s turn toward illiberalism, not its cause; even before Trump ran for president, some Republican elites were plotting to diminish the political power of minorities and enhance those of white voters. Whatever their disagreements, the leaders of both the populist and establishment wings of the Republican Party have concluded that they cannot be allowed to lose power simply because a majority of American voters do not wish them to wield it. The president speaks of imprisoning his political rivals, and his voters cheer. He valorizes political violence, and his followers take note.Trump’s supporters exult in the head of state attacking private citizens who demand equal rights, then wave the banner of free speech exclusively in defense of expressions of bigotry. In the end, Trump will dictate the course of his party on these matters, and his base will do whatever he gives it license to do.

Writers such as French and Ahmari cannot shape this course; they can only argue about it after the fact.[T]his faction did not abandon its faith in liberalism’s capacity to solve problems during the decades of Jim Crow. It did not cry, “To hell with the liberal order!” over mass incarceration. It did not erupt in fury over the shattering of Latino families at the border, or the Trump-made aftermath of the catastrophe in Puerto Rico. It did not question whether liberalism had failed after the first, third, fourth or 15th mass shooting at a school, or because it is typical for Americans to beg strangers on the internet for money to cover their health-care costs or after an untimely death.

The state of emergency occurred when, and only when, liberal democracy ceased to guarantee victory in the culture war. The indignity of fighting for one’s rights within a democratic framework is fine for others, but it is beneath them.

[W]hat they describe as a crisis of liberal democracy is really just them not getting exactly what they want when they want it.

The Republican Strategy? Fear and Lies

"Lugen Presse" means lying press.

The frightening parallels between Trump/GOP lies and the rise of the Nazis in Germany more than three quarters of a century ago continue.  Outright lies about political opponents are the norm and at Trump's Rallies, the dog whistle calls to violence continue.  Indeed, today pipe bombs were delivered to the Obamas, the Clintons, CNN and other prominent Democrats.  While no links to right wing extremists have been established as yet, it is disturbing that Trump has continuously called the main stream media - sometimes CNN specifically - the "enemy of the people" and demonized Democrats.  Coincidence?  I suspect not.   With the 2018 midterms election less than two weeks away, the Trump and GOP lies are increasingly over the top.  A column in the New York Times looks at the fear mongering and lies.  Here are column highlights:

To prevent a blue wave on Nov. 6, [Trump] the president and his puppets are traveling audaciously far from the truth and shockingly deep into the gutter. I’ve seen bad before, but not this. The midterms aren’t just a referendum on which direction the country will go. They’re also a test of where the limits of decency and shamelessness are drawn.

Republicans especially . . .  have outdone themselves. I’ll get to Trump shortly, but the saddest and scariest part is that I really needn’t get to him at all.

In the Arizona battle for an open Senate seat, Representative Martha McSally, the Republican nominee, used a 15-year-old quip about the Taliban by Representative Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic nominee, to say that Sinema is guilty of treason.

In Ohio, Representative Jim Renacci, the Republican who is trying to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown, told the editorial board of The Cincinnati Enquirer that “multiple women” had contacted him to say that they had been assaulted by Brown between 1987 and 2004. Renacci offered no names, no details, no way for anyone to look into the matter. He just dropped the bomb and moved on.

In at least four House districts around the country, Republicans twisted aspects of Democrats’ pasts for inflammatory television commercials that alleged a tolerance for terrorism or an indulgence of it.

And in one House district in Arkansas, a renegade Republican super PAC even produced a radio ad that suggested that white Democrats would be "lynching black folk again" if their party won.

Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, blithely lofted the unfounded speculation that the liberal philanthropist George Soros had funded the caravan. On Monday, an undetonated explosive device was found outside Soros’s home in the New York City suburbs.

And Corey Stewart, the Republican challenging Senator Tim Kaine in Virginia, went out of his way to opine that Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post contributor murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, “was not a good guy himself.” I’d dismiss that as the ranting of one practiced provocateur, but as Robert Costa and Karoun Demirjian wrote recently in The Post, it belonged to a “whispering campaign” by some Republicans to “protect President Trump from criticism of his handling” of the Saudis. Anything, no matter how grotesque, for leader and party.

Maybe it’s desperation. The Republicans’ one huge legislative accomplishment over the past two years — the tax overhaul — is much less popular with voters than they had hoped it would be.

Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which also analyzes races, said that in some politicians’ eyes, Trump “has paid no penalty for his whoppers over the years.”

“You focus on your own campaign,” he added, “and maybe you think, ‘I can say whatever I want, too.’ In that sense, he’s a role model.”

The role model’s whoppers are quadruple-patty in these final, furious weeks. He has again conjured the hallucinatory specter of rampant voter fraud, the kind he once cited to explain away Hillary Clinton’s winning of the popular vote by nearly three million ballots. He has claimed nonexistent riots in California by people upset about living in sanctuary cities.

He has insisted without proof that there are “unknown Middle Easterners” (his proxy for “terrorists”) in the caravan of migrants. He has insinuated that deep-pocketed Democrats paid the migrants — which makes zero sense, because images of them are more likely to help anti-immigration Republicans than their Democratic adversaries.

But it’s not all darkness from Republicans. Sometimes it’s phony light. At several recent rallies, Trump boasted that he and Republican leaders were sprinting to devise and potentially enact an additional “10 percent tax cut for middle-income families” before Nov. 6. That would require more than just budgetary magic. It would call for some epic scheduling sorcery. Congress is in recess until after then.

Meanwhile, many Republican candidates who fought proudly and persistently to junk Obamacare without any suitable alternative are brazenly denying that past and fashioning themselves as the planet’s greatest champions of guaranteed health insurance for Americans with pre-existing conditions. That’s less an artful flip-flop than an extravagant fiction, and it’s of a piece with Republicans’ sudden complacency about deficits now that they’re ballooning under the party’s governance.

Besmirch first, worry about the fact checkers later. Or don’t worry about them at all. That’s Trump’s ethos, and nothing would make him happier than the devolution of American politics from a contest of ideas to a contest of inventions.

Trump is a clear and present danger to the nation and is displaying the same type of most frightening lies of history's tyrants and mass murderers of the past.  My "friends" who continue to support Trump and the liars in the GOP have forfeited any pretense that they are decent, moral people. 

The Death of "Morning in America"

Republicans love to bloviate about Ronald Reagan yet the irony is that I doubt Reagan could win a nomination in today's GOP.  Despite his many drawbacks, Reagan simply was not sufficiently extreme and racist to be acceptable to the toxic base of the GOP.  A base that cannot see the common humanity of others, a base that seemingly wants a dictatorship, a base that revels in cruelty toward those deemed "other", and a base that daily discards revered American principals.  With another anniversary of Reagan's death close at hand, his daughter ponders what her father would think of what has become of America under today's GOP and Donald Trump.  She rightly believes that he would be repulsed. Indeed, any true patriot should be repulsed.  Here are column excerpts:

My father used to talk about a recurring dream he had in which he was walking into a beautiful white building with grand columns, knowing that it was his new home. When he was elected president, he said the image finally made sense to him. Once in the White House, he never had the dream again.

My strident protests against some of my father’s policies definitely got his attention, which was what I intended — but they also wounded him, which was not my intention. In his last years of life, when Alzheimer’s disease had stolen many things but not love, I was able to sit with him and tell him my regrets. I miss my father in deeply personal ways. I also miss the dignity that he brought to the task of leading this country, the deep respect he had for our democracy, and now, after so much time has passed, I miss how much he loved America.

People often ask me what he would say if he were here now. . . . I simply say he’d be pretty horrified at where we’ve come to. But as the June 5 anniversary of his death has drawn near, I’ve let myself imagine what he would say to the country he loved so much. 

I think he would remind us that America began as a dream in the minds of men who dared to envision a land that was free of tyranny, with a government designed and structured so that no one branch of government could dominate the others. It was a bold and brave dream. But, he would caution, no government is infallible. Our democracy, because it is founded on the authority of “We the people,” puts the burden of vigilance on all American citizens.

Countries can be splintered from within, he would say. It’s a sinister form of destruction that can happen gradually if people don’t realize that our Constitution will protect us only if the principles of that document are adhered to and defended. He would be appalled and heartbroken at a Congress that refuses to stand up to a president who not only seems ignorant of the Constitution but who also attempts at every turn to dismantle and mock our system of checks and balances. He would plead with Americans to recognize that the caustic, destructive language emanating from our current president is sullying the dream that America once was. And in a time of increased tensions in the world, playing verbal Russian roulette is not leadership, it’s madness. He would point to one of the pillars of our freedom — a free press — which sets us apart from dictatorships and countries ruled by despots. He didn’t always like the press — no president does — but the idea of relentlessly attacking the media as the enemy would never have occurred to him. And if someone else had done so, he wouldn’t have tolerated it.

He would ask us to think about the Statue of Liberty and the light she holds for immigrants coming to America for a better life. Immigrants like his ancestors, who persevered despite prejudice and signs that read “No Irish or dogs allowed.” There is a difference between immigration laws and cruelty. He believed in laws; he hated cruelty. [H]e would ask the people of this country to reflect on his own words from his famous speech, “A Time for Choosing,”delivered in 1964: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

Today's GOP and the Trump/Pence regime are sentencing the nation and in no small part, the world to darkness.  They must be stopped. 

The Constitutional Crisis Has Begun

Many scoffed when I and others suggested that Donald Trump wanted to be an autocrat in the style of Vladimir Putin, Mussolini and/or Hitler.  Yet, now, based on a memo that has leaked, Trump and his lawyers - a questionable lot in some cases - are asserting that Trump is above the law.  Indeed, the law is whatever he says it is and he can end or launch investigations by the FBI or Justice Department on a whim or in the midst of a temper tantrum.   Thus, there can be no obstruction of justice if Trump is the one engaging in obstruction.  Moreover, Trump can pardon himself.  In short, Trump is akin to a Roman emperor or an absolute monarch in the Europe of old.  If Trump persists in these demands and delusions, we have arrived at a full blown constitutional crisis.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the disturbing situation.  Here are highlights:

For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, the specter of a coming constitutional crisis has loomed over the Russia investigation. The newly leaked memo by Trump’s lawyers, obtained by the New York Times, suggests that such a crisis is not merely a likelihood, but that it has already begun.

The memo proposes several tendentious interpretations of the publicly available facts of Trump’s behavior, along with some legally questionable and amateurish citations of precedent. But the most important passage is its sweeping assertion of presidential authority.

“The President not only has unfettered statutory and Constitutional authority to terminate the FBI Director, he also has Constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department to open or close an investigation, and, of course, the power to pardon any person before, during, or after an investigation and/or conviction,” they write, “Put simply, the Constitution leaves no question that the President has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials responsible for conducting those investigations.”

The implications of this authority are breathtaking. Trump, in their view, has unlimited control to open or close any federal investigation.

Trump has been angrily tweeting demands that the investigation into him and his allies be halted, and that the Department of Justice instead open investigations into his political enemies. These tweets have been treated as the ravings of a blowhard who just happens to occupy the most powerful position in the world, yet is somehow merely blowing off steam.

Should Trump’s legal case prevail in the courts — and the legality of such broad claims remains largely untested — it would confer upon any president, but immediately Trump, the ability to open charges against anybody the president wants to charge, and prevent investigations of anybody the president wants to protect, beginning with himself. This is l’état, c’est moi rendered as a formal legal case.

Trump cannot obstruct justice, according to his official legal stance, because justice is whatever Trump says it is. Before this is over, either Trump’s sweeping claim will survive, or the rule of law will, but not both.

A column in the Washington Post also commented on these dangerous and unprecedented - and untrue - assertions.  Here are Excerpts:

The lawyers made a variety of jaw-dropping claims and admissions. For starters, the lawyers admit that Trump dictated on Air Force One an explanation for a June 2016 meeting held with a Russian lawyer. This directly contradicts prior assertions from Sekulow that Trump had nothing to do with the statement, which set out a false explanation for the meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and assorted Russian figures. 

We should pause right there to consider the confession, for that is what it is, that the president put out a statement falsely portraying a meeting that was related to an ongoing investigation into Russian meddling with the 2016 presidential election. Even defenders of broad presidential power to hire and fire executive branch employees lack an argument that drafting a fake explanation to throw off an ongoing investigation is somehow within Trump’s Article II powers. A pack of constitutional experts savaged the argument that Trump could never be prosecuted for obstruction. Daniel Hemel writes:

The Declaration of Independence charged King George III with “obstruct[ing] the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to the laws for establishing judiciary powers.” That alone is evidence that the founding generation did not believe that heads of state were immune from obstruction charges. And while Article II instructs the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” that does not give him carte blanche to wield his law enforcement powers any way he chooses.

Laurence Tribe likewise tweeted: “Trump’s lawyers’ sweepingly Nixonian claim of unbounded presidential power is inconsistent with the core American principle that no-one is above the law. It would mean that even pardoning someone in return for a bribe is just fine. That’s simply wrong.” Trump’s lawyers, in making such a ludicrous claim of power, make both a constitutional and political error. The political error is nearly as great as the constitutional flaw is (i.e. we are not an absolute monarchy). Democrats have been struggling with how to address the “I” word (impeachment) in the campaign. Now they have the most powerful argument imaginable in the first referendum on the president since his election: Republicans support Trump’s claim to absolute power; Democrats do not. Which party should we have control Congress?
 Where does this leave us? Trump and his attorneys are prepared to argue that his power is near absolute to shut down investigations into his own conduct and that in any event he could pardon himself. That is not the system we have, but we are heading toward that constitutional face-off — especially if voters return GOP majorities ready to defend Trump’s claims to unfettered power.

How Democracy Dies: The Constitutional Crisis Is Here

Day after day we see Donald Trump behaving little better than a loud mouthed school yard bully - or more appropriately, like a banana republic or African dictator from years ago.  Lies, boasting, and seeing the government apparatus as merely existing to protect and appease him alone.  No one else has rights and concerns for constitutional government and the rule of law are of no consequence.  Indeed, Trump views himself as above the law - a trait demonstrated throughout much of his real estate career - as he tries to torpedo an investigation into his own wrongdoing sparked in no small measure by the sleazy and possibly treasonous minions that he used to staff his 2016 campaign.  Manafort, Page and Gates were ALL on the FBI radar long before they joined the Trump campaign.  In the case of Page, years before Trump ever announced his candidacy.  If anyone is to blame for the investigation, it is Trump himself through his poor choices and, as we have learned, his sycophants' efforts to collude with foreign powers.  Now, Trump, to protect himself, is moving to destroy the rule of law and ultimately democracy in America.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this dangerous crisis.  Here are excerpts:

Stop waiting for the constitutional crisis that President Trump is sure to provoke. It’s here.

On Sunday, via Twitter, Trump demanded that the Justice Department concoct a transparently political investigation, with the aim of smearing veteran professionals at Justice and the FBI and also throwing mud at the previous administration. Trump’s only rational goal is casting doubt on the probe by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which appears to be closing in.

Trump’s power play is a gross misuse of his presidential authority and a dangerous departure from long-standing norms. Strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin use their justice systems to punish enemies and deflect attention from their own crimes. Presidents of the United States do not — or did not, until Sunday’s tweet:

“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

Rather than push back and defend the rule of law, Justice tried to mollify [Trump] the president by at least appearing to give him what he wants. The Republican leadership in Congress has been silent as a mouse. This is how uncrossable lines are crossed.

The pretext Trump seized on is the revelation that FBI source Stefan A. Halper made contact with three Trump campaign associates before the election as part of the FBI’s initial investigation into Russian meddling.

The informant was not embedded or implanted or otherwise inserted into the campaign. He was asked to contact several campaign figures whose names had already surfaced in the FBI’s counterintelligence probe. It would have been an appalling dereliction of duty not to take a look at Trump advisers with Russia ties, such as Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, when the outlines of a Russian campaign to influence the election were emerging.

This conspiracy theory has so many holes in it that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s start with the glaringly obvious: If the aim was to make Trump lose, why wasn’t all the known information about the Trump campaign’s Russia connections leaked before the election, when it might have had some impact?

The truth appears to be precisely the opposite of what Trump says, which is not uncommon. The record suggests that Justice and the FBI were so uncomfortable investigating a presidential campaign in the weeks and months before an election that they tiptoed around promising lines of inquiry rather than appear to be taking a side. . . . . we had no idea that such a mature investigation of the Trump campaign was underway.

Now that the Mueller probe has bored into Trump’s inner circle — and federal authorities have raided the homes and office of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen — [Trump] the president appears to be in a panic. The question is whether he sees this “spy” nonsense as a way to discredit Mueller’s eventual findings, or as a pretext for trying to end the investigation with a bloody purge akin to Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.”

The Justice Department answered Trump’s tweeted demand by announcing that an existing investigation by its inspector general will now “include determining whether there was any impropriety or political motivation” by the FBI. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein may hope that is enough to avoid a showdown. I fear he is wrong.

None of this is normal or acceptable. One of the bedrock principles of our system of government is that no one is above the law, not even the president. But a gutless Congress has refused, so far, to protect this sacred inheritance.

Trump is determined to use the Justice Department and the FBI to punish those he sees as political enemies. This is a crisis, and it will get worse.

Historian: Almost Inevitable that Trump Will Attempt a Coup

Perhaps many of us are growing accustomed to the normalization of the reprehensible and destruction of political norms after 100 days of misrule by Der Trumpenführer, Reichsmarschall Pence, and his propaganda ministers.  As I speculated over the weekend, perhaps Trump lacks the self-discipline and consistent ideology to be another Adolph Hitler.  But one historian sees Trump as a continuing danger to American Democracy.  Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, is the award-winning author of numerous books including the recent “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” and a new book, "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.”  Snyder, in fact believes that Trump will attempt a coup as he finds himself unable to increase his popularity and unable to pass any meaningful legislation be it good, bad or indifferent.  A piece in Salon looks at why Snyder sees a continuing threat.   It also tells us that we must resist and not dive into the flow or become complacent.  Here are excerpts:

American democracy is in crisis. The election of Donald Trump feels like a state of emergency made normal.

Trump has threatened violence against his political enemies. He has made clear he does not believe in the norms and traditions of American democracy — unless they serve his interests. Trump and his advisers consider a free press to be enemies of his regime. Trump repeatedly lies and has a profoundly estranged relationship with empirical reality. He uses obvious and naked racism, nativism and bigotry to mobilize his voters and to disparage entire groups of people such as Latinos and Muslims.

Trump is threatening to eliminate an independent judiciary and wants to punish judges who dare to stand against his illegal and unconstitutional mandates. In what appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, Trump is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself, his family and his inner circle by peddling influence and access to corporations, foreign countries and wealthy individuals.

How long does American democracy have before the poison that Donald Trump and the Republican Party injected into the country’s body politic becomes lethal?

Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University . . . . explores how the American people can fight back against Donald Trump’s incipient authoritarian regime.

The Greeks understood that democracy is likely to produce oligarchy because if you don’t have some mechanism to get inequality under control then people with the most money will likely take full control.

With Trump, one sees the new variant of this where a candidate can run by saying, “Look, we all know — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — that this isn’t really a democracy anymore.” He doesn’t use the words but basically says, “We all know this is really an oligarchy, so let me be your oligarch.” Although it’s nonsense and of course he’s a con man and will betray everyone, it makes sense only in this climate of inequality.

As I see it, there are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is fascism. . . . . Another thing that’s clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just like the 1920s and the 1930s.

In your book you discuss the idea that Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler’s Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government by declaring a state of emergency. How do you think that would play out?

Let me make just two points. The first is that I think it’s pretty much inevitable that they will try. The reason I think that is that the conventional ways of being popular are not working out for them. The conventional way to be popular or to be legitimate in this country is to have some policies, to grow your popularity ratings and to win some elections. I don’t think 2018 is looking very good for the Republicans along those conventional lines — not just because the president is historically unpopular. It’s also because neither the White House nor Congress have any policies which the majority of the public like.

Whether it works or not depends upon whether when something terrible happens to this country, we are aware that the main significance of it is whether or not we are going to be more or less free citizens in the future.

My gut feeling is that Trump and his administration will try and that it won’t work. Not so much because we are so great but because we have a little bit of time to prepare. I also think that there are enough people and enough agencies of the government who have also thought about this and would not necessarily go along.

The thing that matters the most is to realize that in moments like this your actions really do matter. It is ironic but in an authoritarian regime-change situation, the individual matters more than [in] a democracy. In an authoritarian regime change, at the beginning the individual has a special kind of power because the authoritarian regime depends on a certain kind of consent. Which means that if you are conscious of the moment that you are in, you can find the ways not to express your consent and you can also find the little ways to be a barrier. If enough people do that, it really can make a difference — but again only at the beginning.

You have to accept there is a time frame. Nobody can be sure how long this particular regime change with Trump will take, but there is a clock, and the clock really is ticking. It’s three years on the outside, but in more likelihood something like a year. In January 2018 we will probably have a pretty good idea which way this thing is going. It’s going to depend more on us than on them in the meantime. Once you get past a certain threshold, it starts to depend more on them than on us, and then things are much, much worse. It makes me sad to think how Americans would behave at that point.

Every day you don’t do something, it makes it less likely that you will ever do something. So you’ve got to get started right away. “On Tyranny” is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. There are plenty of other great ideas from people coming from other traditions, but the basic thing is you have to change your protocol of daily behavior now.

Don’t obey in advance because you have to start by orienting yourself against the general drift of things. If you can manage that, then the other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016. You have to set your own habits now.

I hope he's wrong, but I can all to easily see Trump using a national emergency real or manufactured - to seize power, mussel the media and curtail civil rights. 

The Right Is Giving Up on Democracy

I write often about the ugly elements of the political and religious right here in America who seek to overthrow constitutional government in favor of either a strong man dictatorship or a Christian theocracy.  Sadly, they have historical precedents from the past in other countries.  One that springs immediately to mind is Germany.  Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's when far too many Germans put a restoration of perceived past national glory and bygone era ahead of democracy and true morality. The consequences for Germany and the world were horrific.   Yet, as The New Republic reports, more and more Republicans and others on the right are seemingly longing to throw away democracy and/or strip others of voting rights.  Some even hold up Vladimir Putin as an exemplary leader.  It is frightening phenomenon and underscores the growing desperation and radicalism of today's American right wing.  Here are highlights:

The single most ominous thing that Donald Trump said in all three presidential debates was a misguided attempt at a quip: “I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?” Moderator Chris Wallace, of course, had posed what would normally be the ultimate softball question for any presidential candidate: Would he accept the results of the election? And even after all his rhetoric about the “rigged” election, even with his increasingly urgent warnings about voter fraud, Trump’s answer came as a jolt. Because it happened in a debate, not during one of his rabble-rousing rallies, it felt like an official declaration that the GOP presidential nominee was prepared to incite a legitimacy crisis rather than accept that he’s lost to a woman.

As always with Trump, the temptation is to interpret this apostasy through the lens of individual psychology. . . . Yet such a personalized account of Trump’s behavior has the effect of letting his political party and his supporters off the hook. Not just for supporting him, but for sharing his grim view of American democracy.

Public-opinion polling shows that Trump’s low opinion of American elections has practically become Republican Party orthodoxy. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday, Republicans have an “unprecedented” level of “concern and mistrust in the system.” Roughly 70 percent of Republican voters believe that if Hillary Clinton wins the election, it’ll be due to fraud.

This suspicious Republican electorate is joined by growing ranks of conservative politicians, pundits, and intellectuals. They’re all increasingly willing to say that the existing American political system is hopelessly flawed and needs to be rolled back to the days before blacks and women could vote. On the most obvious level, this can be seen in moves by Republican governors all over America to make voting more difficult, through stringent voting ID laws, new hurdles to registration, and the curtailment of early-voting options. Equally significant has been the gutting of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act by conservative Supreme Court justices in the 2013 Shelby Country v. Holder ruling.

But these overt forms of voting suppression are merely the most visible manifestations of a larger questioning of democracy on the political right. Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric—and the eagerness of so many good, white patriotic Americans to cheer it and believe it—is a symptom of the larger trend on the political right toward doubting the legitimacy of the American system.

Suspicion of the democratic system is so pervasive on the right because it’s driven by the fear that white Christian America is facing demographic doom. The evidence is right there in the election results: Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and if current polling trends hold, the GOP will be batting one for seven when the results come in on November 8. Thanks to gerrymandering, Republicans may hold on to a U.S. House majority for a while, and they’ll remain competitive in state capitols in the near future. But a whites-only party can’t win national elections. And over time, the GOP’s congressional and state fortresses will crumble if the party doesn’t change dramatically. Or if the democratic system doesn’t change dramatically.

[S]ome leading religious conservatives have a different worry: the loss of Christian cultural hegemony. Back in 1999, First Things, a journal of the religious right, hosted a symposium called “The End of Democracy?” that was a precursor of things to come. Prominent Christians and Jews thrashed out the argument that American courts were so relentlessly secular that the entire political system might have to be overthrown. This was radical stuff. As editor Richard John Neuhaus wrote, “The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.”

Over the last few years, it’s become evident that the First Things symposium was no outlier, but rather an early symptom of the religious right starting to think outside the American political system for solutions. More recently, a virtual Vladimir Putin cult has arisen among religious conservatives longing for a return to cultural purity. Putin’s macho bearing, his hostility to LGBT rights, and his fusion of nationalism with support for the Russian Orthodoxy all make him an attractive figure to right-wing Christians disenchanted with Obama’s socially liberal America.

Franklin Graham, heir to the most influential American evangelist, says Putin should be celebrated for taking “a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda,” even as “America’s own morality has fallen so far on this issue.” Rush Limbaugh cheers Putin for opposing “a full-frontal assault on what has always been considered normalcy.” Religious Right stalward Bryan Fischer, host of the radio program Focal Point, has hailed Putin as a “lion of Christianity.” Sam Rohrer, president of the America Pastors Network, calls the Russian president “the moral leader of the world.”

Beyond this election, beyond even the fate of the Republican Party, there is a significant minority of Americans who are giving up on democracy because it doesn’t serve their purpose of upholding a white Christian patriarchy. Trump is merely a symptom of this problem, and even if he fades as a political force after the election, the underlying disease will remain, and indeed will likely spread. The threat to the American system is not an armed revolt after November 8, but the growing number of Americans who are convinced that only “regime change” can save capitalism, Christianity, and America itself.

On a somewhat related note, the Boston Globe has a good piece on the Christofascists' backing of Trump and the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy that has been exposed.  The piece is here and deserves a full read.