Why Trump Is So Obsessed With Antifa

As a classic demagogue, Donald Trump always seeks to divide and conquer Americans.  Moreover, he correctly understands that his gullible and bigoted base of support needs a bogeyman to fear so that they willingly give into his autocratic and fascists agenda.  He needs an "us versus them" meme be it whites versus Hispanics or whites versus blacks.  He always divides and never unites. If there is no actual threat, then he will manufacture one to (i) keep dividing the population and, (ii) more importantly, distract from his own incompetence and malfeasance.  He is fanning racial unrest for the purpose of distracting from his failed handling of the covid-19 pandemic and the cratering economy.  His base, like mindless sheep, are eating it up, although his threats of military force against civilians seems to be finally waking some of the edges of his base to the fact that he is a threat to constitutional government. As part of his effort to divide and deflect, Trump has latched onto Antifa - a shorthand for antifascist - for a much needed bogeyman to frighten his mindless base - which seemingly knows little accuracte history - even though the FBI has found no basis for the claim.  But then when has the truth ever mattered to Trump.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump's newest obsession.  Here are highlights (the piece notes that past dictators have used tactics like Trump's):

This nation has been roiled with anguish and anger this past week over the police and extrajudicial killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and yet the White House is engaging in the same old rhetorical tactics of divisive scapegoating.

Only now that rhetoric comes in the service of ominous ends: President Donald Trump relies on the shadowy specter of “antifa”—a label for a diffuse militant movement unified by a drive to counter fascism through direct action—to evoke fear in the American people. Since his inaugural speech and its dark focus on “American carnage,” Trump has used the Nixonian vocabulary of “law and order” to paint himself as a bulwark against a descent into anarchy. Now he is manufacturing bogeymen.

As usual, the tweets came first. . . . he declared on Twitter, “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization”—despite the fact that, as many observers have pointed out, [Trump] the president has no legal authority to designate domestic terrorist groups. And antifa, short for “antifascist,” isn’t even a distinct organization with central leadership, but rather a loose confederation of like-minded activists, often acting anonymously.

When Trump invokes antifa, he infuses the word with a vaguely foreign-sounding otherness, heightened by the fact that he never expands it to its full form, antifascist—a strategic omission. That would complicate the simplistic dichotomy that Trump and his allies have been constructing, between right-leaning patriots and the far-left extremists who must be to blame for any violent eruption. By latching on to a nebulous and under-defined term such as antifa, Trump can ascribe all manner of ills to a scapegoat that shifts to satisfy his needs at the moment.

Trump doubled down in his remarks in the Rose Garden on Monday by enumerating a panoply of malefactors: “Our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa, and others.”

Though some activists who identify with the antifa movement may very well have taken part in recent demonstrations, The Nation reports that the FBI’s Washington field office “has no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement/presence” in the D.C.-area protests on May 31, according to internal documents. While inveighing against “Antifa,” Trump elided the violence that set off the protests in the first place: the police brutality that took the life of Floyd, just as it has imperiled the lives of other black Americans.

This kind of attempt to shift the political discourse away from issues of systemic racism has long been a hallmark of Trumpian rhetoric. The president’s response to the Unite the Right rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, which descended into violence nearly three years ago, notoriously included the false equivalence that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Antifa first entered his personal lexicon at a campaign rally in Phoenix on August 22, 2017, a week and a half after Charlottesville, . . . . Since then Trump has returned to the term often in speeches, reciting “an-tee-fah,” as he pronounces it, with an air of alien menace.

Both “antifa” and “antifascist” are, in fact, designations with extremely complex and commonly misunderstood histories, as explored in Mark Bray’s 2017 book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Bray gives the pronunciation as an-tee-fa, reflecting the word’s origins in a number of European languages, including German, where it abbreviated the noun Antifaschismus or the adjective antifaschistisch. As Bray explains, antifa was first used in Germany in the 1930s for a militant movement opposing the Nazi regime, and “Antifa committees” emerged toward the end of World War II with a revolutionary socialist bent. The modern antifa movement grew out of the punk scene in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when young leftists clashed with neo-Nazi skinheads.

The current scapegoating of antifa has historical echoes in other countries as well. I checked in with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at NYU and the author of the forthcoming book Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, who recently tweeted a quote from Mussolini referring to antifascists and other “degenerates” in 1927: “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person.” “During Italian fascism,” Ben-Ghiat told me via email, “when they needed to wipe out the political opposition, antifascists were first treated as terrorists and a special tribunal was created, as well as a special political police, to deal with them.

Other right-wing regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, declared “wartime” as “a continuing state of exception,” in which “the left were treated as terrorists and counter-insurgency methods were used against them,” Ben-Ghiat said. This was accompanied by a “moral discourse of healing the nation,” in which “the terrorist” is treated as a moral and political sickness. Ben-Ghiat sees similar rhetoric extending from Mussolini to Franco to Pinochet up to present-day regimes such as that of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Trump’s Rose Garden speech bore all of these authoritarian hallmarks. It used protests over grave injustices merely as a pretext for an aggressive militaristic stance against the country’s own citizens—any of whom might now be branded as “domestic terrorists” by the state. Being alert to how language can be weaponized in this way is a necessary step in deconstructing Trump’s would-be strongman act.

Trump and His Congressional Enablers Must be Removed

Reportedly Donald Trump wants to use a 213 year old law to use military troops against American citizens protesting the continue problem of police officers murdering black males. Please understand, that I in no way condone rioters and looters who in my view undermine the cause that protesters seek to have addressed, But using the American military against citizens is like something out of Putin's Russia or Castro's Cuba.  Alarm bells should be sounding loudly and citizens who support civil liberties and the U.S. Constitution should be screaming for Trump's removal from office by any means necessary.  Trump - faced with growing public disapproval and a horrendously failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic is desperate and this threat could well be the sign that he is out to overthrow the government viewing himself as a dictator.  Whether or not the military leadership and rank and file troops would fire on civilians is one to which we can only hope the answer is "No."  A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican looks at Trump's willingness to use military force against civilians:  Here are column highlights:

President Trump somehow imagined it was a good idea to unleash law enforcement on peaceful demonstrators before the 7 p.m. curfew Monday night as he stepped into the Rose Garden to give a knockoff version of Richard M. Nixon’s “law and order” message.

[Trump] The president who called NFL protesters peacefully taking a knee “sons of bitches,” lied when he declared that he is a friend of peaceful demonstrators. The police firing rubber bullets and launching tear gas at protesters in Lafayette Square in front of the White House said otherwise. Then, as if the scene was not evidence enough of his desire to raise the level of violence, he pledged to deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil, against U.S. civilians, if governors did not heed his incendiary advice to fill the streets with National Guard troops

It was later revealed that Trump instigated the assault on protesters specifically to make a gesture of walking to St. John’s church.

Nothing could be more representative of the dangerous narcissism of a president in over his head, resorting to threats of violence against a country he ostensibly is supposed to lead. The deliberate instigation of violence for his own photo op tells Americans how deeply twisted and deformed his character is.

Moreover, any attempt to use the military against civilians in this fashion would almost certainly be illegal and unconstitutional. Even under the Insurrection Act, federal troops would have to be invited into the states to suppress an actual rebellion. For Trump, the threat of force, however unrealistic, is his go-to move when his manliness is called into question — as it was when he fled to the bunker at the White House over the weekend.

If anyone in America had any doubt as to his intentions — to foment violence, to increase racial animosity, to glorify himself at the expense of the national good — Monday’s events should silence them. Democrats and any Republicans with a modicum of decency should denounce the stunt, call for a full review of the incident and conduct congressional oversight. We hope a strong bipartisan assembly of elected officials joins the protesters at the White House, and that one or more civil rights groups will file suit for use of excessive force and deprivation of the peaceful protesters’ rights of assembly and free speech. You are either for Trump or for democracy at this point.

It does not take much imagination to conclude Trump is attempting to escalate violence around the country so he can deploy the military. This is the conduct of a tin-pot dictator — someone resorting to violent suppression of our most closely cherished rights.

More than ever, we should all recognize that, as former vice president Joe Biden put it, this is an election about the soul of our country and the survival of peaceful self-governance.

Trump's malfeasance and threat to constitutional government as noted in the previous column has a conservative stalwart like George Will calling for his removal in another column in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts:

This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph — a photograph — showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous. Since then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.

Presidents, exploiting modern communications technologies and abetted today by journalists preening as the “resistance” — like members of the French Resistance 1940-1944, minus the bravery — can set the tone of American society, which is regrettably soft wax on which presidents leave their marks. [Trump's] The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be punished. He must be removed.

Social causation is difficult to demonstrate, particularly between one person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.

The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.

In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what?

In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, , , , ,
 Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.

An

Trump's Attacks on Twitter May Backfire

As Adolph Hitler rose to power, one of his first targets other than Jews were media outlets that reported the truth and refused to be propaganda arms of Hitler's Nazi Party.  Under Hitler confidant and sycophant Paul JosephGoebbels, the  Reich Minister of Propaganda gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Germany.  Newspapers and radio stations that failed to comply with Nazi Party dictates were vandalized, publishers arrested and put out of business.  Fast forward to 2020 and it is obvious that Donald Trump wants the same control over the media and seeks to silence any platform that exposes his endless lies and untruths. Trump's executive order signed yesterday - which is likely illegal - is a step in trying to silence social media platforms that have felt compelled to notate the untruthfulness of Trump's Twitter outbursts.  The irony is that by stripping them of limitations on liability for content, Trump may unwittingly be forcing them to be more vigorous in removing false content - something that would result in the opposite situation from what Trump wants: an unfettered platform to lie,  A piece in the New York Times looks at how Trump may have shot himself by his rash and tyrant like behavior.  Here are highlights:

President Trump, who built his political career on the power of a flame-throwing Twitter account, has now gone to war with Twitter, angered that it would presume to fact-check his messages. But the punishment he is threatening could force social media companies to crack down even more on customers just like Mr. Trump.

The executive order that Mr. Trump signed on Thursday seeks to strip liability protection in certain cases for companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook for the content on their sites, meaning they could face legal jeopardy if they allowed false and defamatory posts. Without a liability shield, they presumably would have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries — like [Trump's] the president’s.

That, of course, is not the outcome Mr. Trump wants. What he wants is to have the freedom to post anything he likes . . . . . Furious at what he called “censorship” — even though his messages were not in fact deleted — Mr. Trump is wielding the proposed executive order like a club to compel the company to back down.

It may not work even as intended. Plenty of lawyers quickly said on Thursday that he was claiming power to do something he does not have the power to do by essentially revising the interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the main law passed by Congress in 1996 to lay out the rules of the road for online media. Legal experts predicted such a move would be challenged and most likely struck down by the courts.

Mr. Trump’s order is intriguing because it attacks the very legal provision that has allowed him such latitude to publish with impunity a whole host of inflammatory, harassing and factually distorted messages that a media provider might feel compelled to take down if it were forced into the role of a publisher that faced the risk of legal liability rather than a distributor that does not.

“Ironically, Donald Trump is a big beneficiary of Section 230,” said Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which instantly objected to the proposed order. “If platforms were not immune under the law, then they would not risk the legal liability that could come with hosting Donald Trump’s lies, defamation and threats.”

Mr. Trump has long posted false and disparaging messages to his 80 million followers on Twitter, disregarding complaints about their accuracy or fairness.

[S]ome government officials said his plan was unenforceable. “This does not work,” Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the F.C.C. first appointed under President Barack Obama, said in a statement. “Social media can be frustrating. But an executive order that would turn the Federal Communications Commission into the president’s speech police is not the answer. It’s time for those in Washington to speak up for the First Amendment. History won’t be kind to silence.”

Even some conservatives objected, warning that the president was handing control of the internet to the “administrative state” and creating a bonanza for liberal trial lawyers to go after unpopular speakers traditionally filtered out by the mainstream media — including those like Mr. Trump himself.

The Communications Decency Act was passed during the dawn of the modern information age, intended at first to make it easier for online sites run by early pioneer companies like Prodigy and AOL to block pornography even when it is constitutional without running afoul of legal challenges.

By terming such sites as distributors rather than publishers, Section 230 gave them important immunity from lawsuits. Over time, the law became the guarantor of a rollicking, almost no-holds-barred internet by letting sites set rules for what is and is not allowed without being liable for everything posted by visitors, as opposed to a newspaper, which is responsible for whatever it publishes.

Mr. Trump may face an uphill road with his order. Daphne Keller, who teaches at Stanford Law School and has written extensively on internet law and regulation, said the order appeared to be “95 percent political rhetoric and theater that doesn’t have legal effect and is inconsistent with what the courts have said.”

However, Ms. Keller, who worked as an associate general counsel at Google for 10 years, said that even if the order did not carry legal weight, it may still be challenged because it was potentially an abuse of power that could violate the First Amendment rights of the companies.

Der Trumpenführer to Sign Executive Order on Social Media Companies,

The day after Twitter felt compelled to attach a warning to some of Donald Trump's tweets containing gross falsehoods (to thereby prompt readers to fact-check Trump's claims), much like a (i) petulant self-absorbed child or (ii) banana  republic dictator, Donald Trump claims he will sign an executive order likely punishing social media companies that resist giving a platform for his lies and deliberately false propaganda.  Spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany (who is severely challenged herself when it comes to truth and veracity) confirmed Trump's intentions to reporters aboard Air Force One, traveling with Trump to Washington from Florida. Trump's threatened action confirms that he sees himself as a monarch accountable to no one.  In reality, questions remain as to what Trump can realistically do to get revenge on those who will not disseminate his lies.   CNN Business looks at the controversy:

Donald Trump threatened to "regulate" or even "close" down social media platforms in a series of tweets over the last day after Twitter added a fact-check label to some of his posts. But Trump's options for cracking down on Twitter and other platforms over how they moderate their platforms are somewhat limited, legal experts say.

The options at Trump's disposal could range from pushing for new legislation to pressuring US regulators to sue the companies, none of which are guaranteed to accomplish what the president is threatening to do. The most "obvious" course of action would be for Trump to seek changes to the Communications Decency Act, which shields tech platforms from legal liability for a wide range of online content, according to Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.
 There has been an ongoing push, led by the Justice Department and Republicans in Congress, to do just that. But changing the law would require building broad consensus in a deadlocked Congress. The Trump administration could not go it alone. And a new law that specifies how tech companies must police their platforms could raise questions about the law's constitutionality. 

Trump could pressure agencies such as the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission to take action against social media companies. But the agencies have previously resisted efforts by the White House to transform them into arbiters of political speech, with officials privately voicing opposition to a draft executive order that experts at the time said tested the limits of agency jurisdiction. The FCC regulates phone and broadband infrastructure, said Schwartzman, and lacks much jurisdiction over Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) in the first place. Schwartzman said one way Trump could seek to "harass" social media companies would be to pressure the FCC to deny those companies licenses for unrelated experiments involving satellite internet or wireless spectrum. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has considered establishing a White House commission to study allegations of conservative bias. But that only underscores the limits of Trump's direct influence on the matter.
 Despite the limitations, growing tensions with the White House could still be perceived as a threat to the companies. Twitter and Facebook saw their shares dip on Wednesday on a day when the overall market was up.

Others argue that Trump should be allowed to lie and show his true self, but that argument forgets that a wide swath of the public lacks the knowledge - dare I say, intelligence - recognize the level of the untruthfulness.  A column in the Washington Post makes the case of allowing Trump to hang himself.  Here are excerpts:

Timothy Klausutis is right: His late wife deserves better than a president who has cynically seized on the tragic circumstances of her death at 28 and “perverted it for perceived political gain.”

Basic human decency, a quality manifestly lacking in Trump, argues in favor of granting Klausutis’s request. Yet, while my heart aches for him and his family, I think that, on balance, deleting the tweets would be a mistake.

Twitter is both a private company and a powerful public platform. Once it assumes the role of deciding what speech by public officials is to be allowed and what is to be taken down, it has ventured onto the slipperiest of slopes. I’m not sure I want Dorsey or his team deciding what the public should and shouldn’t see from the elected president of the United States. Even this one.

[U]nder Twitter’s ordinary terms of service, the platform would not only remove the tweets but also perhaps even Trump himself; some people have advocated for just that. But the president, like any world leader — except more so, with his 80 million followers — is no ordinary tweeter. The argument over what to do about Trump on Twitter is a subset of the larger debate about how to treat his outbursts and falsehoods, in particular whether the media becomes complicit simply by presenting them to a wider public. Thus, stretching back to the 2016 campaign, there has been vigorous debate over whether and how to cover Trump’s misinformation- and venom-filled campaign rallies. [B]ut I would argue that shining sunlight on Trump’s idiocy is the best disinfectant. Let the public witness him in his full glory and make its own judgment about whether he deserves a second term. Combine that with real-time chyrons and commentary calling out his falsehoods.

That is what Twitter usefully and appropriately did Tuesday when it appended a fact check to another set of Trump tweets about the supposed dangers of voting by mail. Twitter should do the same with Trump’s tweets about Scarborough

The fundamental problem isn’t Twitter — it’s Trump. He shouldn’t be de-platformed, but he must be defeated.

Chief Justice Roberts Rebukes Trump

Chief Justice John Roberts.

Since entering the White House - thanks to Electoral College electors failing to protect the nation as envisioned by the Founders - Donald Trump has proceeded to undermine and destroy public confidence in America's core institutions, including but not limited to the federal court system.  No doubt Vladimir Putin is smiling broadly as he watches from afar and sees Trump trying to replicate Putin's dictatorial rule in Russia.  Typically, the Supreme Court remains aloof from political disputes - although this may change given Trump's placement of rank partisans Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Court - but this week Chief Justice John Roberts found he could no longer bite his tongue and issued a rebuke to Der Trumpenführer's attacks on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that sounded like it came from Hitler or Putin's playbook of how to emasculate the judiciary and turn it into a tool of autocracy.  A piece in NPR looks st this rare but much needed rebuke of the foul individual at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Here are highlights:

In a rare moment of direct criticism, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked President Trump on Wednesday for [Trump's] the president's description of a federal judge who ruled against his asylum policy as "an Obama judge." Within hours, the president fired back on Twitter, launching an unusual conflict between the executive and judicial branches.

"We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges," Roberts said in a statement. "What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them."

"That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for," Roberts said. Roberts has never responded to any president so directly and publicly before.

Trump's initial response was to a ruling by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar, who issued a temporary restraining order against Trump's asylum policy Monday, saying it violated a provision of the asylum law. Trump called the decision a "disgrace," adding, "this was an Obama judge and I'll tell you what, it's not going to happen like this anymore."

Trump went on to excoriate the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which he wrongly blamed for the ruling, saying, "Every case that gets filed in the Ninth Circuit, we get beaten. And then we end up having to go to the Supreme Court, like the travel ban, and we won," Trump said.

However, Tigar is a district court judge who sits in San Francisco, and the Ninth Circuit, which encompasses much of the western United States, has not yet been asked to rule on his decision. Tigar's decision is also temporary, lasting only until Dec. 19 when the judge is scheduled to hear arguments about whether the order should remain permanent.

This is not the first time Trump has criticized a judge. During the presidential campaign, he called one judge with a Spanish surname who ruled against him a Mexican, alleging he couldn't rule fairly because of Trump's proposal to build a wall along with border with Mexico and called another who ruled against his travel ban "a so-called judge."

The American Bar Association joined in the criticism of Trump's comments.

"Disagreeing with a court's decision is everyone's right, but when government officials question a court's motives, mock its legitimacy or threaten retaliation due to an unfavorable ruling, they intend to erode the court's standing and hinder the courts from performing their constitutional duties," said ABA president Bob Carlson.  

The Post also noted the rare rebuke to the man seeking to destroy the independent judiciary: 

[I]t appeared Roberts, when asked to comment by the Associated Press, was eager to counter Trump’s criticism Tuesday of District Judge Jon S. Tigar. The Roberts statement did not mention the president by name.

The chief justice is an aggressive defender of the judiciary and has frequently expressed concern about attacks on its impartiality, whether they come from the left or the right. In 2010, he called the timing of President Barack Obama’s criticism of the court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC during the president’s State of the Union speech “very troubling.”

Roberts made it clear last month that he is particularly sensitive about the image of the courts because of the recent partisan battle over the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

At an event at the University of Minnesota just after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Roberts said the court served “one nation” and not “one party or one interest.”

“Our role is very clear: We are to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States, and to ensure that the political branches act within them,” he said. “That job obviously requires independence from the political branches. The story of the Supreme Court would be very different without that sort of independence.”

Trump Signals that Murder of Political Opponents is Now Acceptable

Trump with murderer MSB.

We learned two things yesterday: (i) like a 1930's dictator, Donald Trump wanted to use the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute his political nemesis, Hillary Clinton and James Comey out of what is little more than the vindictiveness of a narcissist whose ego was wounded, and (ii) false American "allies" like Saudi Arabia have a green light to murder political dissidents as long as they pretend to kiss Trump's very large ass and perform roles that American voters (and American and international law) would never allow the U.S. military to engage in such as the slaughter and starvation of children in Yemen.  The only reason the first desire of Der Trumpenführer wasn't pursued is because the former White House counsel told Trump that such a move would prove to be an expedited route to impeachment.  As for the tacit blessing of murder as a political tool, part of me thinks Trump is jealous: he'd love to order the murder of his political foes if he thought he could get away with it. Decent people - which excludes Trump supporters - should be appalled and one can only hope a majority of the U.S. Senate will force consequences on the Saudis.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump's tacit blessing of murder as a political tool:  

Today the president of the United States released a statement reaffirming his support for Saudi Arabia and its regent, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, known as MbS. The process of separating the substance of the document from its mortifying semiliteracy took me approximately 15 minutes, but I think I managed it without permanent damage to the Broca region of my brain. . . . . Here’s what close study reveals.

We knew—we always knew—that Donald Trump would never ditch an ally who would always support him as long as he reciprocated with loyalty of his own. MbS is such an ally. Recall that Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia, a curious choice for a president widely believed to hate and distrust Muslims. . . . . The affirmation of this relationship should be read not as the product of deliberation but as an exercise in apologetics: an explanation of a decision that was never in doubt, even if the explanation proved inadequate. All of Trump’s romances are like this. That is why his supporters love him; he loves them back unconditionally—whether they are racist or murderers or cretins.

But let’s examine the issues with Saudi Arabia that required this apologia. They are broadly divisible into three parts: (1) military, (2) economic, and (3) the assassination of the Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Trump begins with a foreboding message. “The world is a dangerous place!” he writes, at his most Churchillian. He characterizes the war in Yemen as a “proxy” war in which the American enemy Iran and the American ally Saudi Arabia have met on a field of battle. . . . . The destruction and immiseration of Yemen, including the starvation of children and other civilians, is a price Trump regards as a good deal for the inhibition of Iranian interests.

American economic entanglements with Saudi Arabia go back for many decades, and in this sphere too what Trump says is not entirely wrong, although he exaggerates well past the point of dishonesty. The Saudis, he writes, “agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States.” In other words: our friendship is too sweet to spit out, no matter how poisonous it may be. Trump has a propensity to lie about the magnitude of these deals, and in any case he tends to speak of these deals as if they were grants, rather than mutually beneficial arrangements that should increase American sway over Saudi Arabia, rather than force the United States into permanent Saudi enfeoffment and automatic concession to the Kingdom’s demands. If the Saudis have invested $450-billion, does not the United States have more sway over them, rather than less? (The Saudi role in global energy markets, of course, remains formidable, even if it is now proportionally smaller than that of the United States and Russia.)

And then, finally, comes the matter of Khashoggi. On October 2, a team of Saudis murdered Khashoggi, almost certainly in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. . . . The Turks caught the Saudis in an evil and inexcusable plot, one that (perhaps even worse) was executed with all the grace and competence of a team of howler monkeys on methamphetamines.

The CIA recently leaked its own assessment, which stated that MbS ordered the Khashoggi operation. This leak was calculated to ensure that Trump’s semiliterate valentine to MbS would be maximally awkward, a love-letter to a killer. , , , , He adds that “our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” This sentence is the ultimate transformation of the American government into a form of reality television. The CIA reports—you decide! Trump neglected only to tell readers how to register their votes.

But, again, the decision was rigged from the beginning. Trump’s alliance with Saudi Arabia long predated his awareness of who Khashoggi was, and the death of a single dissident was never going to freeze into hibernation a romance that was forever spring. Although the murder was indefensible, the relationship (Trump argues) is not. To have an alliance with Saudi Arabia against all forms of Islamism, he suggests, is worth the life of a dissident or two.

And here is the brutal truth behind this amoral love affair: MbS has done what America has asked. Fourteen years have passed since Michael Moore’s risible film Fahrenheit 9/11—long enough to erase America’s collective memory . . . . Saudi Arabia contributed 17 of the 19 hijackers on September 11; it encouraged jihadism while professing to be an American ally; it distorted American politics by wielding influence over the Bush family and the various corporate slaves to its oil industry.

MbS has acknowledged that hydrocarbon feudalism is not a viable form of government for Saudi Arabia in perpetuity. He has laid off criticism of Israel. Crucially, he has undertaken massive economic and political change, precisely along the lines that were the basis of a liberal critique of Saudi Arabia a decade ago. That the implementation of this critique has occasionally taken a homicidal form may have seemed to MbS incidental.

MbS has seemed wounded by the speed with which Western powers have dropped him—even after he has incarnated their fondest hopes for the modernization (and de-Islamization) of the Kingdom. He has alluded to a willingness to seek the friendship of China or Russia, if accession to every demand of the United States is not enough to maintain their relationship. But with Trump’s Tuesday statement he knows that the relationship is a safe one. “If you want a friend in Washington,” goes the adage, “get a dog.” With Trump’s statement we see that the genus Homo can be a more constant and loyal friend than found in any kennel.

America has much ugliness in its past.  Trump's actions have underscored the fact that at least in the White House, people have learned nothing from the horrors of the past and have willingly thrown away what little moral standing America may have had in the world. 

Homeland Security Will Collecting Data on Journalists

In follow up to the previous post and the growing dangers of a revival of fascism, Bloomberg has a piece reporting on a new operation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  In a move that could have legitimate benign purposes yet is also reminiscent of what the Bolsheviks did following the October Russian Revolution and what Hitler did during his rise to power, the Homeland Security will start collecting data on hundreds of thousands of journalists, media outlets and even bloggers.  While useful in identifying anti-American foreign efforts and Russian derived "fake news," the action is fraught with potential abuse.  Yes, the effort could be useful to even identify terrorist operatives, it could also be used to harass, censor or silence those simply reporting the truth and/or those critical of Der Trumpenführer regme which describes any critical pieces as "fake news" regardless of their accuracy and truthfulness.  A fress press is the number one threat to would be dictators.  Here are article highlights: 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”

It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3.

The data to be collected includes a publication’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread, top posters, languages, momentum, and circulation. No value for the contract was disclosed.

“Services shall provide media comparison tools, design and rebranding tools, communication tools, and the ability to identify top media influencers,” according to the statement. DHS agencies have “a critical need to incorporate these functions into their programs in order to better reach federal, state, local, tribal, and private partners,” it said.

The DHS wants to track more than 290,000 global news sources, including online, print, broadcast, cable, and radio, as well as trade and industry publications, local, national and international outlets, and social media, according to the documents. It also wants the ability to track media coverage in more than 100 languages including Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, with instant translation of articles into English.

The request comes amid heightened concern about accuracy in media and the potential for foreigners to influence U.S. elections and policy through “fake news.”

The DHS request says the selected vendor will set up an online “media influence database” giving users the ability to browse based on location, beat, and type of influence. For each influencer found, “present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer.”

A department spokesman didn’t immediately return a phone call and email seeking comment.

I have no faith in the current Trump/Pence regime not to put such information to nefarious uses.

Trump's Desire to Weaponize the Supreme Court

One of the main bulwarks of democracy and the rule of law is an independent judiciary that, at least in theory, equally applies the law to all citizens.  In practice, of course, one's ability to hire top legal counsel can result in some receiving very different outcomes than others.  Still, the concept of the equal rule of law is key to a democracy and, in America, the court of last resort on federal and constitutional issues is the Supreme Court of the United States.  This fact makes that court a target of Trump's megalomania and desire to weaponize the court against those who oppose him and those he dislikes: non-whites, gays, non-Christians, - the list is a long one.  With several of the Court's justices in their 80's, Americans who care about democracy should be terrified of the prospect of a retirement which would allow Trump to appoint another bigoted ideology like Neil Gorsuch.   Pray that no justice retires before the end of January, 2019, and that the Democrats retake control of the U.S. Senate in the 2018 midterm elections.   A column in the Washington Post looks at Trump's sinister agenda.  Here are excerpts:

Think about that last sentence, which received way less attention, and condemnation, than it deserved: “We . . . must ALWAYS hold the Supreme Court,” as if it were the presidency or a house of Congress, a prize awarded to the electoral victors.

As always, Trump manages to combine ignorance and cunning. He is ignorant of — ignorant, really, to the point of allergic to — the importance of the judiciary as an independent institution and the operation of the rule of law. Yet he is also maliciously canny; this is a man who knows that nothing motivates his base more than the prospect of courts packed with conservative judges.

“When I got in, we had over 100 federal judges that weren’t appointed,” Trump observed the day after the Stevens tweet, somewhere in the middle of a speech on infrastructure. “It was like a big beautiful present to all of us. Why the hell did [President Barack Obama] leave that?” Um, because Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), did their best to stall and block nominations?

For Trump, judges are just another set of crude political actors, on Team Trump or off it. When they rule against his political or financial interests, they are to be demeaned (“Mexican” judge, “so-called judge”) and bullied (“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” Trump tweeted after a ruling halting his travel ban. “If something happens blame him and court system.”)

But the Supreme Court, his tweet notwithstanding, is not “held” by Republicans — it is occupied by judges, who are nominated by Republican or Democratic presidents and confirmed by a Senate that has a Republican or Democratic majority. Unlikely that Trump was aware of this, but Stevens — who turned out to be a stalwart liberal — was nominated by a Republican president, Gerald Ford.

That is why Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s famous umpire analogy, depicting judges as neutral arbiters dispassionately using their Very Big Brains to reason through legal problems, was so frustrating, unsatisfying and, ultimately, misleading. “I believe that there are right answers,” Roberts said, “and judges, if they work hard enough, are likely to come up with them.”

But judging doesn’t work that way, certainly not at the Supreme Court level. The justices are not computers, they are humans, very smart ones, with very well-thought-through views about the Constitution and the law.

Trump is in good company with his cynical instrumentalism: McConnell’s brute-force refusal to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia stems from the same anything-goes conviction. 

And the future of the high court, and the judiciary generally, is not solely a Republican concern. My colleague Ronald Klainhas predicted a “battle of the ages” if Justice Anthony M. Kennedy retires this summer — one that Klain thinks will motivate Democrats even more than Republicans.

[T]he court functions best — it produces better results and stands a better chance of broad societal acceptance — when justices’ views are tested and contested, when they have to defend their interpretations and temper their positions to accommodate alternate ideologies.

A court composed entirely or overwhelmingly of justices appointed by presidents of a single party, whether Republican or Democratic, would not be a better court. It would be a far more flawed — and therefore more dangerous — branch.

Adding to my concern are two facts: (i) today's GOP put's party over country, and (ii) the American Bar Association - the country's largest association of attorneys - have rated many of Trump's federal court nominees as "unqualified."  Some have been so bad that their nominations were withdrawn.  Be very afraid if a justice retires before February 1, 2019.

Trump Wants to Change to Libel Laws to Block Unwanted News

The fragility of Der Trumpenführer's ego seemingly knows few limits - not surprising since he is a malignant narcissist - and now the White House has floated the notion of changing the libel laws so that Trump, in true dictator form, can sue any news out let which reports stories he doesn't like. Namely, stories that (i) tell the truth about him and his endless series of lies and untruths, (ii) they dysfunction that reigns in his regime, (iii) his unpopularity outside of the "basket of deplorables" who make up the bulk of his base, and (iv) his likely - in my view - collusion with Russia.  In the mentally ill word of Trump, anything that doesn't support his detached from reality view of himself is "fake news" while in truth, if anything is fake, it is what spills out of his mouth or onto his twitter feed.  The Guardian looks at this disturbing issue.  Here are highlights:

 A day after Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward issued a stirring call for the press to hold Donald Trump to account, the president’s chief of staff said the White House is actively considering a change to libel laws affecting news reporting. 

“I think it’s something that we’ve looked at,” said Reince Priebus, appearing on ABC’s This Week. “How that gets executed and whether that goes anywhere is a different story.”

On the campaign trail last year, Trump responded to reporting on his policies and background by floating the possibility of a change to libel laws. Such a move would in reality require a change to the US constitution, which enshrines freedom of the press in the first amendment, the supreme court having ruled on the issue.

Undaunted, the president returned to the theme on Thursday, writing on Twitter: “The failing [New York Times] has disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?”

On ABC, Priebus cited “articles out there that have no basis of fact and we’re sitting here and 24/7 cable companies writing stories about constant contacts with Russia and all these other matters”.

Links between Trump aides and Russia affecting the election campaign are the subject of House, Senate and FBI investigations as well as anonymously sourced reporting by major news outlets. Trump has been strongly critical of such reporting, on Russia and other subjects.

Woodward and Bernstein, who won Pulitzer prizes for their exposure of the cover-up of criminal activity by the Nixon White House, spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington on Saturday night.

Priebus was also asked about Trump’s suggestion that people who burn the American flag should be jailed or have their citizenship revoked. The supreme court has said burning the flag is a form of free speech.

“People need to stand up for our flag,” Priebus said, adding: “It’s something that, again, is probably going to get looked at.”

Are We Headed to a Constitutional Crisis?

As a post yesterday noted, once Donald Trump assumes the presidency - unless the Electoral College does its job and voids his election - America will be governed by the most corrupt regime in the nation's history.  For those who doubt this, one need only look at Trump's behavior over the last 19 days and all the actions taken to further his business interest at the potential expense of the nation's interest.  Like Putin and other tyrants and dictators, Trump seemingly sees his own financial interests and further accumulation of wealth as synonymous with the national interest even when the two sharply diverge.  His behavior would seem set on a collision course the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution that forbids elected officials from receiving benefits, a/k/a bribes from foreign powers.  The one question is whether or not Congress will act to stop Trump's excesses.  If the issue is left to Congressional Republicans, don't count on it.  Republicans in the Senate refused to do their constitutional duty and vote on Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee.  Why think they will care about unrestrained corruption and payoffs, especially if they receive some of the loot.   A piece The Guardian looks at the coming confrontation and constitutional crisis.  Here are excerpts:

Constitutional lawyers and White House ethics counsellors from Democratic and Republican administrations have warned Donald Trump his presidency might be blocked by the electoral college if he does not give up ownership of at least some of his business empire.

“The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before,” Donald Trump told the New York Times on Wednesday, and his election victory buzz does indeed seem to have been good for business.

Since the surprise outcome of the 8 November vote, foreign diplomats have been flocking to the newest Trump hotel in Washington to hear sales pitches about the business and vie to book their delegations into its rooms overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue for the inauguration on 20 January.

Trump, meanwhile, used a meeting with a delegation of Brexit activists including his closest British ally, Nigel Farage, to urge them to oppose wind farms which he felt would spoil the view from one of his Scottish golf courses. He also took time out from selecting cabinet officials to meet his Indian business partners and pose for pictures with them, while the Philippines government announced it was appointing his business partner in Manila as its next ambassador to Washington.

A day after a phone conversation between President-elect Trump and Argentinian president Mauricio Macri, Trump’s Argentinian associate – who was reported to have organised the call – confidently predicted that construction would start next year on the planned Trump Tower Buenos Aires, to be completed by 2020.

The associate, Felipe Yaryura, seemed supremely confident that the zoning restrictions that had stalled the project for years would soon be swept away.

[M]uch of what he has said and done since winning the election suggests that Trump comes to the presidency in the spirit of a tycoon making a new acquisition, overseeing the merger of Trump Inc and America Inc – a merger in which it is far from clear which would be the senior partner.

“It clearly degrades the presidency,” said Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of the Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm.

“It is going to undermine the legitimacy of the US around the world. Soft power has been about being able to project values. That already took a hit. It really comes to an end with this election.”

Although the president-elect claims to have handed the day-to-day running of the Trump Organization to some of his children, he has so far retained his ownership stake and those same children are sitting in on his meetings with foreign leaders. 

When the constitution was written, the founding fathers wrote the rules so that people like themselves, whom they expected to fill the presidency, could do so without having to sell off plantations or slaves.

The president is exempt from conflict-of-interest laws that constrain other office holders. The discovery of this loophole seems to have surprised and delighted Trump.

It was an interpretation of executive power that did not work out well for the US, nor for the president in question, Richard Nixon.

Constitutional lawyers are now warning that Trump’s presidency is in danger of going the same way as Nixon’s before it even gets started. Some say that unless Trump takes urgent steps to fully divest himself from his business interests, he might not even enter the Oval Office as president.

Trump seems to have received only a partial legal briefing on his exposure. Although the conflict-of-interest clauses do have a loophole for presidents, there is no such loophole for the “emoluments clause”, Article I, Section 9 of the constitution, which prohibits public officials from taking payments “of any kind whatever from any king, prince or foreign state”.

“Trump was totally wrong when he said the conflict of interest doesn’t apply to me,” said Norman Eisen, a former ethics counsellor to the Obama administration. “It shows he doesn’t know the constitution.

“The most fundamental conflict clause in the US constitution is the prohibition on emoluments on payments, presents or other things of value being given to American political officials including the president.”

Before Trump can even take that oath, he will have to be elected by the electoral college, another legacy of the founding fathers. . . . . The electors are under more pressure than usual because although Trump won the majority of seats in the electoral college, he lost the nationwide popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2m ballots. Some legal experts argue that the electoral college cannot approve a candidate like Trump, who does not fulfill the basic legal requirements to be president.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said in an email that the “electors who are to cast their votes for president on 19 December not as automatons but in light of constitutional constraints and principles cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump as president of the United States unless he fully divests himself of economic interests dependent on the fortunes, for good or ill, of the private Trump empire”.

That view is not restricted to academics and Democrats. Richard Painter, George W Bush’s chief ethics counsel, agrees that without a major reconfiguration of the Trump Organization, the president-elect is heading for a constitutional collision with the electoral college.

Eisen and Painter called on the Trump transition team to take urgent steps to address the problem, before it triggers a constitutional crisis. They recommended he sell all his business holdings and put the proceeds in a blind trust, the composition of which would remain unknown to him, as his predecessors have done for the past four decades. Painter offered his advice to the Trump circle as a fellow Republican, but has not received any response.

The optimist part of me hopes that the Electoral College voids Trump's election.  The pessimist expects it to rubber stamp the madness of a minority of voters - some 2 million fewer than those who voted for Clinton - and thereby cast the nation on the road to disaster and a constitutional crisis.