Trump/Pence's Ultimate Betrayal of Its Base

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman hits a home run in a column in the New York Times that looks at the ways the Trump/Pence regime - and the Republican Party as a whole - has betrayed and continues to betray its white working class base.  A base that seems willing to believe any lie so long as its racial animosities are pandered to. The latest betrayal is the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.  While Kavanaugh may provide an anti-gay, pro-Christofascist vote on the Court to the delight of evangelical Christians, he will likely do nothing but harm them economically and help lock in the wage stagnation that has harmed so many working Americans even as corporate profits have soared and the wealthy have claimed a growing percentage of all wealth in America.  Here is Krugman's column:

By now, it’s almost a commonplace to say that Trump has systematically betrayed the white working class voters who put him over the top. He ran as a populist; he’s governed as an orthodox Republican, with the only difference being the way he replaced racial dog-whistles with raw, upfront racism.

Many people have made this point with respect to the Trump tax cut, which is so useless to ordinary workers that Republican candidates are trying to avoid talking about it. The same can be said about health care, where Democrats are making Trump’s assault on the Affordable Care Act a major issue while Republicans try to change the subject.

But I think we should be seeing more attention devoted to the way Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court fits into this picture. The Times had a good editorial on Kavanaugh’s anti-worker agenda, but by and large the news analyses I’ve seen focus on his apparently expansive views of presidential authority and privilege.

I agree that these are important in the face of a lawless president with authoritarian instincts. But the business and labor issues shouldn’t be neglected. Kavanaugh is, to put it bluntly, an anti-worker radical, opposed to every effort to protect working families from fraud and mistreatment.

The most spectacular example is his opinion that Sea World owed no liability for a killer whale attack that killed one of its workers, because she should have known the risks. He has declared the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps control the financial fraud against working families that played a major role in the 2008 crisis, unconstitutional. He’s taken an extremely expansive view of the rights of business to suppress union organizing.

This is all, by the way, the opposite of populism. The public strongly supports worker protections. The ongoing campaign to take them away is an act of conservative elites, people who have made their careers by carrying water for business interests, and is being implemented in effect by stealth under the noses of voters who thought Trump was on their side.

And this betrayal matters much more for workers than, say, Trump’s trade bluster. There’s growing evidence that wage stagnation in America – the very stagnation that angers Trump voters — isn’t being driven by impersonal forces like technological change; to an important extent it’s the result of political changes that have weakened workers’ bargaining power. If Trump manages to install Kavanaugh, he’ll help institutionalize these anti-worker policies for decades to come.

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Sessions Announces New Anti-Gay Task Force Under Guise of "Religious Liberty"

The euphemism in today's Republican Party for rolling back LGBT rights is "protecting "religious liberty."  Of course, only one set of religious belief is protected under the Trump/Republican Party Agenda: extreme right wing Christian beliefs.  The religious beliefs and civil rights of all others falls before the Christofascists push to make their beliefs supreme and their ability to discriminate against others whether based on sexual orientation or, I suspect before their quest is over, race and skin color.  Pushing this Christofascist agenda is Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, and his ever foul Attorney General, Jeff Sessions - a man I have had the acquaintance of since the late 1970's. As CNN reports, Sessions - acting no doubt on Trump's orders so as to maintain the loyalty of his utterly immoral evangelic base - has announced a new task force to implement the Trump Justice Departments effort to grant special rights to Christofascists and exempt them from public accommodation and non-discrimination laws.  Here are article highlights (in reading the piece, be mindful that "religious groups" only encompass far right Christian groups):

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday announced the Department of Justice's creation of a "religious liberty task force" to "help the department fully implement our religious guidance."

Sessions said the goal of the task force will be protecting religious groups from persecution.

"The task force will help the department fully implement our religious liberty guidance by ensuring that all Justice Department components are upholding that guidance in the cases they bring and defend, the arguments they make in court, the policies and regulations they adopt and how we conduct our operations," Sessions said. "That includes making sure that our employees know their duties to accommodate people of faith."
 Sessions cited "a dangerous movement" aimed toward stripping away the First Amendment right to freedom of religion as a basis for forming the new task force.  "A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom," Sessions said in his speech. "There can be no doubt. This is no little matter. It must be confronted and defeated."

Slate provides more context and notes that references to non-right wing Christian traditions appear to be merely disingenuous window dressing to deceive the gullible or to toss a talking point to militant Christofascists.  Here are excerpts:

Sessions mentioned the Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu religions and proclaimed that the DOJ would protect all adherents from discrimination. But in arguing that it was an “unease” over a “changing cultural climate” that motivated Trump voters and the administration’s religious-liberty policies, Sessions seemed to refer more to the complaints of the Christian right. “[Trump] said he respected people of faith and he promised to protect them in the free exercise of their faith,” Sessions said. “He declared we would say ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”

In October 2017, Sessions released a vague memo that instructed federal agencies to observe 20 “principles of religious liberty.” Activists for LGBTQ and women’s rights worried at the time that the proclamation gave broad permission for religious groups to ignore federal civil rights laws.

“Under this administration, the federal government is not just reacting—we are actively seeking, carefully, thoughtfully and lawfully, to accommodate people of faith,” he said. “Religious Americans are no longer an afterthought.”

Sadly, the rights of everyone other than Christofascists will now be an after thought and the concept of a secular civil society will be further undermined. Having followed the far Christian right for over two decades, the move is no surprise to me.  Literally no one in American society is more self-centered, selfish and uncaring to others than the "godly Christian" evangelicals.  They make a mockery of the Gospel message and, if America is lucky, will accelerate the exodus from religion by Millennials and others as Christianity as imposed by the Christofascists becomes something to be reviled and avoided. 

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“Dirty Rubles”: Trump is an Existential Threat to America

One of the problems with keeping up with the Trump/Pence Russiagate scandal is the plethora of different threads to the story line.  Other than political junkies, many lack the time or the patience to try to stay on top of what is happening and the accumulating evidence that things are very rotten in America in 2018. Trump, of course adds to the confusion via his endless tweet storms aimed at distraction, especially whenever damaging news is leaking. I have noted how it now seems that America is lying a real life spy novel.  Now, a new book, "Dirty Rubles" pieces the multiple story lines together and paints a very damning portrait not only of Trump - and his lie repeater, Mike Pence - but the larger GOP that he believes is complicit in the Russiagate scandal.  A piece in Salon looks at the book with an interview of its author.  Here are some highlights:

Americans would do themselves a gigantic favor by reading the new nonfiction book from acclaimed novelist Greg Olear, “Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia.”

Olear brings his sharp literary scalpel to what promises to emerge as one of America’s most enormous and consequential scandals, operating under the belief that it takes a novelist’s ability to understand and tell stories to truly capture the essence of the “stranger than fiction” Trump-Russia conspiracy. The result is a riveting, infuriating and, against all the odds, uplifting book. It's essential reading for all Americans, especially those in the apathetic majority who view Russian meddling in U.S. elections as insignificant.

I recently interviewed Olear about “Dirty Rubles.”

I think it’s hard for people to square the avuncular guy on TV who cracked jokes and fired people with the real Donald J. Trump. The truth is, the guy’s been mobbed up for decades, with ties to both La Cosa Nostra and Russian organized crime. Trump is a money launderer for the latter, and has been for quite some time. “Money laundering” sounds cute, like something Danny Ocean and his merry men do, but it’s a euphemism for something unspeakable. The Russian mob has become so vast and successful because it eagerly participates in the worst of the worst: human trafficking, child pornography, sex slavery, opioids, illegal arms deals, blood diamonds — all the grisly, awful stuff that Trump accuses MS-13 of doing. By taking those dirty rubles and making them legitimate, Trump is a party to all of that.

The media also likes to forget that Trump is a serial rapist and sexual predator. We can use the “allegedly” qualifier if you like, but he has bragged about this on many occasions. There are more than 20 accusers now, and I believe them.

The kompromat, by the way, does not involve tinkling Moscow prostitutes, but far more heinous activities. This is a person who sexually assaulted a reporter from People magazine at his house -- while his wife was home. You don’t think he’s capable of greater depravity halfway around the world, when he thinks no one is watching?

Treason is a vague term. Unlike rape or murder or even petty larceny, it’s not visceral. But it’s the worst crime there is, because Trump actively betrayed 330 million Americans. He conspired with the Russians to contaminate the election, he lied about it, he continues to lie about it, and we have yet to find out exactly what he has promised his Russian master. I’d like to think that Americans across the political spectrum would agree that the POTUS should not be a compromised asset of the Russian Federation.

Helsinki reaffirmed what I’ve known for two years, and what Hillary told us in the debate: Trump is Putin’s puppet. Has a powerful world leader ever presented as submissively, as weakly, as Trump did in Finland? He makes Neville Chamberlain look like Rambo.

Real estate is a good way to launder money, as Trump well knows. Another is campaign finance. So much dark money, so many ways to donate anonymously. It seems clear now, given the latest round of indictments, that Russian money was funneled into the Republican National Committe via the NRA and other avenues. Anyone who took that money is complicit. This is why the Paul Ryans and Dana Rohrabachers and Devin Nuneses of the world have gone to great lengths to throw water on the Mueller investigation, in my estimation. And why so many GOP members of Congress are retiring. They are not trying to save Trump; they are trying to save themselves.

Trump/Russia is a complicated story, with a bunch of different threads. It’s just like a novel — except that it more or less proves the old saw about truth being stranger than fiction.

My book doesn’t cover any new ground. It takes the stuff we already know and gives it narrative structure, to make it easier to absorb for readers lucky enough not to know the difference between Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Gorkov. That’s all I’m trying to do. I’m not David Corn, a seasoned Washington bureau chief with sources out the wazoo. I’m not James Comey, who has intimate first-hand knowledge of the events.

And I’m certainly not Michael Wolff, who basically crashed the Trump party and wrote about it in a lurid but lame way. I’m a long-form writer who has carefully followed Trump/Russia, who has written and tweeted about it for almost two years — who has done the research, as a historical novelist might say — and I’m telling the story the best way I know how to tell it. I’m perfectly, if not uniquely, qualified to do that.

As I wrote in the book, Donald Trump comprises the gravest existential threat to the republic since the Civil War. That is not hyperbole. But here’s the thing: if the American experiment is going to end, it won’t be because of that fucking guy. In that, I have the fullest confidence.

Trump's Putin Fixation Is an LGBT Problem

Anti-gay violence has doubled in Russia since 2013 - all with government approval.
American Christofascists want it to happen in America.

I find "friends" who whine that political differences should not divide friends.  They, of course, are white, Christian heterosexuals who are not facing threats to their civil rights and perhaps even physical safety as a result of the Trump/Pence regime that they supported.   Seemingly, they expect me and others in the LGBT community to simply ignore the fact that they support those who openly seek to harm us.  I'm sorry, but seeking to defend one's rights against insidious foes that "friends" support is not just a matter of "political differences."  Were the shoe on the other foot, I suspect they would be livid and anything but cordial with those supporting their enemies. Thus, I view the "political differences" meme to be the height of hypocrisy.  As a piece in The Advocate notes, Trump/Pence pose a true threat to LGBT Americans, especially with Trump mimicking Putin's alliance with the regressive Russian Orthodox Church by the manner in which is is boosting the Christofascist agenda.  Here are article highlights:

As Donald Trump moves the United States closer to authoritarianism, we must be concerned. Human rights, including LGBTQ rights, do not flourish under authoritarian regimes.

Any doubt as to Trump’s subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin was erased at this month's Helsinki summit and its subsequent press conference, where it was clear that Trump is in Putin’s pocket. Trump spent over two hours alone with the former KGB agent, with only translators in the room. With no record made of that meeting, we have no idea of what concessions Trump made — and no insight is forthcoming from the White House or the secretary of State. . . . . If Trump is taking direction from Putin, it's clear the American LGBTQ community is at risk of losing basic human rights.

It was Putin who allowed the leaders of Chechnya, an ultraconservative region of the Russian Federation, to kidnap, beat, imprison, and murder gay men. On June 11, 2013, the Russian federal law "for the Purpose of Protecting Children From Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values" was passed. It is also known as the “gay propaganda law,” and by placing a ban on promoting LGBTQ rights and culture in Russia, it has encouraged violence against the Russian LGBTQ community — which has doubled. The White House has moved in a similar direction — attempting to boot trans people from the military, dismantling the AIDS commission, advocating in court for antigay businesses, working to scrub us from the Census, and refusing to acknowledge Pride. 

While Putin claims he seeks to protect children, Trump cites religious freedom in order to endanger our human rights.

Trump’s self-serving sycophant of a vice president, Mike Pence, is an antigay religious zealot who resurrected a failing political career in Indiana by signing on with Trump; he gave his boss high praise after the shameful Helsinki summit, while John Brennan, the former CIA director, called Trump’s performance “nothing short of treasonous.” 

The indictment of Maria Butina as an unregistered Russian agent sheds light on Russia's infiltration of the Republican Party. She, along with her handler, Russian operative Alexander Torshin, allegedly used the National Rife Association and the religious right to gain access to top-level Republicans to advance Russian interests. Butina attended two National Prayer Breakfasts to hobnob with Republicans' friends. Guns, religion, and an attractive young female Russian helped Republicans and Russians find common ground. Religious right leadership also seems fond of Putin. Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, traveled to Moscow four times and testified in 2013 before the Duma in support of antigay laws. In December 2015, evangelist Franklin Graham had a private audience with Putin.

As Trump and the Republicans embrace Putin and authoritarianism, we can expect that lessons will be learned from Putin as to how to render the LGBTQ community invisible and suppress our human rights in the name of protecting something else — in Russia, it’s children, and in the U.S., it’s religious liberty.

Trump’s base is just fine treating us as scapegoats or punching bags. We live in dangerous times.

Why Pence Must Go Down with Trump

As unfit for office and as large a threat Donald Trump may be to the nation, should he be forced from office due to collusion with Russia, out right treason or some other cause, it is imperative that Mike Pence be caught up in the maelstrom and forced from office along with him.  Why? First, because I believe that Pence's "Sergeant Schultz routine" is a charade and that he was very much aware of the activities of the Trump/Pence campaign.  Secondly, because Pence represents as much of a clear and present danger to America as Trump poses. Pence is just as dishonest as Trump and, perhaps, more frighteningly, the man is deranged religious zealot who believes that he is on a mission from God to impose the equivalent of a Christofascist theocracy on the nation.   A column in the New York Times focuses on Pence and just how dangerous he is for constitutional government and secular society.  Indeed, the author of a biography on Pence says Trump is the lesser evil.  Here are excerpts:

There are problems with impeaching Donald Trump. A big one is the holy terror waiting in the wings.

That would be Mike Pence, who mirrors the boss more than you realize. He’s also self-infatuated. Also a bigot. Also a liar. Also cruel.

To that brimming potpourri he adds two ingredients that Trump doesn’t genuinely possess: the conviction that he’s on a mission from God and a determination to mold the entire nation in the shape of his own faith, a regressive, repressive version of Christianity. Trade Trump for Pence and you go from kleptocracy to theocracy.

That’s the takeaway from a forthcoming book by the journalists Michael D’Antonio, who previously wrote “The Truth About Trump,” and Peter Eisner. It’s titled “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence,” it will be published on Aug. 28 and it’s the most thorough examination of the vice president’s background to date.

The book persuasively illustrates what an ineffectual congressman he was, apart from cozying up to the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos and other rich Republican donors; the clumsiness and vanity of his one term as governor of Indiana, for which he did something that predecessors hadn’t and “ordered up a collection of custom-embroidered clothes — dress shirts, polo shirts, and vests and jackets — decorated with his name and the words Governor of Indiana”; the strong possibility that he wouldn’t have won re-election; his luck in being spared that humiliation by the summons from Trump, who needed an outwardly bland, intensely religious character witness to muffle his madness and launder his sins; and the alacrity with which he says whatever Trump needs him to regardless of the truth.

“People don’t understand what Pence is,” D’Antonio told me. Which is? “A religious zealot.”

And D’Antonio said that Pence could end up in the White House sooner than you think. In addition to the prospect of Trump’s impeachment, there’s the chance that Trump just decides that he has had enough.

So it’s time to look harder at Pence. “The Shadow President” does. It lays out his disregard for science, evident in his onetime insistence that smoking doesn’t cause cancer and a belief that alarms about climate change were “a secret effort to increase government control over people’s lives for some unstated diabolical purpose,” according to the book.

It suggests callousness at best toward African-Americans. As governor, Pence refused to pardon a black man who had spent almost a decade in prison for a crime that he clearly hadn’t committed. He also ignored a crisis — similar to the one in Flint, Mich. — in which people in a poor, largely black Indiana city were exposed to dangerously high levels of lead. D’Antonio told me: “I think he’s just as driven by prejudice as Trump is.”

At Trump’s urging and with taxpayer money, he and his wife, Karen, flew to a football game in Indianapolis just so he could make a big public gesture of leaving in protest when, predictably, some of the players took a knee during the national anthem.

And, following Trump’s lead, he rallied behind the unhinged former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. . . . The conservative columnist George Will seized on Pence’s speech to write that Pence had dethroned Trump as “America’s most repulsive public figure.”

“He is absolutely certain that his moral view should govern public policy,” D’Antonio told me.

D’Antonio then recounted two stories that he heard from college classmates of Pence’s after the book had gone to bed, so they’re not in there. . . . . Another involved a college friend of Pence’s who later sought his counsel about coming out as gay. D’Antonio said that Pence told the friend: “You have to stay closeted, you have to get help, you’re sick and you’re not my friend anymore.”

I asked D’Antonio the nagging, obvious question: Is America worse off with Trump or Pence?

“I have to say that I prefer Donald Trump, because I think that Trump is more obvious in his intent,” he said, while Pence tends to “disguise his agenda.” D’Antonio then pointed out that if Pence assumed the presidency in the second half of Trump’s first term, he’d be eligible to run in 2020 and 2024 and potentially occupy the White House for up to 10 years.  Heaven help us.

Pence must never occupy the White House.  Nothing would be more fitting than seeing his sanctimonious, cruel, bigoted ass go down in flames with Trump.  

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