They note the way he encourages violence while later insisting that he did not encourage violence. He plays the victim. He plays the man of deep Christian faith.
The best way to understand his speeches is not through the lens of rationality, but by recognizing that he is a performer.
Currently, he is giving the performance of his life because he needs to get elected so he can dismiss the federal charges against him.
Our reader who calls him/herself “Democracy” left the following well-documented comment about Putin and Trump. Trump laughs at any suggestion that Putin helped him best Hillary Clinton, calling it a “witch hunt,” “a hoax,” or just “Russia, Russia, Russia!” He says he was cleared by the Mueller Report. Democracy says otherwise.
He or she writes:
The Supreme Court is “undemocratic” in that its members are not elected.
Yet, it is part of a larger democratic system crafted by the Founders in the Constitution. Its members (and all federal court judges) are appointed by the president – who is elected – and subject to confirmation by a majority of the Senate (also elected). It has the power of judicial review, which in simplified terms is “the power of an independent judiciary, or courts of law, to determine whether the acts of other components of the government are in accordance with the constitution.”
In the case of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to declare Trump an insurrectionist and remove him from the ballot per the direct wording of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the US Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility. It turned its collective back on the Constitution, led by the core conservatives on the Court.
What I find MOST undemocratic about THIS Court is that fully one-third of it — in my view — is illegitimate. These members — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett — were appointed by a president* who knowingly and willingly took LOTS of help from Russian intelligence agencies to win* the 2016 presidential election.
David Cole put it like this in describing the Mueller Report in the New York Review of Books:
“Robert Mueller’s report lays out in meticulous detail both a blatantly illegal effort by Russia to throw the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump and repeated efforts by Trump to end, limit, or impede Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference. Trump’s efforts included firing or attempting to fire those overseeing the investigation, directing subordinates to lie on his behalf, cajoling witnesses not to cooperate, and doctoring a public statement about a Trump Tower meeting between his son and closest advisers and a Russian lawyer offering compromising information on Hillary Clinton.”
“The Mueller report describes extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians, many of which Trump campaign officials lied about. And it finds substantial evidence both ‘that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.’… Russian intelligence agency hackers targeted Hillary Clinton’s home office within five hours of Trump’s public request in July 2016 that the Russians find her deleted e-mails. And WikiLeaks, which was in close touch with Trump advisers, began releasing its trove of e-mails stolen by the Russians from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta one hour after the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about assaulting women was made public in October 2016.”
“Trump has repeatedly dismissed the investigation as a ‘witch hunt.’ But Mueller found “sweeping and systematic” intrusions by Russia in the presidential campaign, all aimed at supporting Trump’s election. He and his team indicted twenty-five Russians and secured the convictions or guilty pleas of several Trump campaign officials for lying in connection with the investigation, including campaign chairman Paul Manafort, top deputy Rick Gates, campaign advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, and Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone faces multiple criminal charges arising out of his attempts to conceal his contacts with WikiLeaks. If this was a witch hunt, it found a lot of witches.”
“The report establishes beyond doubt that a foreign rival engaged in a systematic effort to subvert our democracy…the Russians referred to their actions as ‘information warfare.’ One would think that any American president, regardless of ideology, would support a full-scale investigation to understand the extent of such interference and to help ward off future threats to our national sovereignty and security. Instead, Mueller’s report shows that Trump’s concern was not for American democracy, but for saving his own skin.”
“The report rests its determinations of credibility on multiple named sources and thoroughly explains its reasoning. Its objective ‘just the facts’ approach only underscores its veracity…the results are devastating for Trump…Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire the special counsel…after this was reported by The New York Times, Trump instructed McGahn to lie about it. Trump lambasted Attorney General Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the investigation…Trump repeatedly pressured Sessions to ‘unrecuse’ himself.…He interceded to delete from a statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer any reference to the lawyer’s offer to provide compromising information on Hillary Clinton. He encouraged important witnesses, including Cohen and Manafort, not to cooperate with the investigation.”
“No reasonable reader can come away from the report with anything but the conclusion that [Trump]repeatedly sought to obstruct an investigation into one of the most significant breaches of our sovereignty in generations, in order to avoid disclosure of embarrassing and illegal conduct by himself and his associates.”
Jane Mayer described the 2016 election in the New Yorker like this:
“Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, since 1993, has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck…She is widely respected by political experts in both parties…her conclusion is that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is ‘likely that it did.’…Russian trolls created social-media posts clearly aimed at winning support for Trump from churchgoers and military families…according to exit polls, Trump outperformed Clinton by twenty-six points among veterans; he also did better among evangelicals than both of the previous Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain…During the weeks that the debates took place, the moderators and the media became consumed by an anti-Clinton narrative driven by Russian hackers.”
Volume V of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the 2016 election stated that,
“the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s highlevel access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat…”
“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”
The New York Times reported the Volume V release like this:
“The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pagesprovided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary…the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a ‘Russian intelligence officer.’…Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share information with Mr. Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services ‘represented a grave counterintelligence threat,’ the report said…The Senate investigation found that two other Russians who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s eldest son — had ‘significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.’…”
The BBC reported this in the summer of 2018 after Trump met with Putin in Helsinki:
“After face-to-face talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mr Trump contradicted US intelligence agencies and said there had been no reason for Russia to meddle in the vote. Trump was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president when it came to the allegations of meddling in the elections.
‘President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,’ he replied.
US intelligence agencies concluded in 2016 that Russia was behind an effort to tip the scale of the US election against Hillary Clinton, with a state-authorised campaign of cyber attacks and fake news stories planted on social media.”
Trump is not just an insurrectionist. He was – and is – a clear and present counterintelligence danger to the security of the United States.
The members of the Court have to know this. Rather than act on what they know to be true, they ducked their heads and pretended otherwise.
Federal Judge Royce Lamberth in D.C. has sentenced those convicted of committing crimes during the January 6 insurrection, most of them for violently assaulting police officers. He objects to those (like Trump) who insist on calling them “hostages” and “patriots.” Almost as shocking is the fact that Republican members of Congress who ran for their lives on January 6 sit silently as Trump praises their attackers. Trump has treated them as heroes and promised to pardon all of them.
D.C. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth delivered a tongue-lashing last week during the sentencing of a participant in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot convicted of multiple crimes. He railed against downplaying the insurrection and specifically condemned the effort to elevate convicted criminals to the status of “hostages.”
It was not the first time Lamberth tried switching off MAGA’s national gaslighting exercise. In a January sentencing memo for another Jan. 6 participant convicted of serious felonies, he declared:
“I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved “in an orderly fashion” like ordinary tourists, or martyrizing convicted January 6 defendants as “political prisoners” or even, incredibly, “hostages.” …
“Protestors” would have simply shared their views on the election — as did thousands that day who did not approach the Capitol. But those who breached and occupied the Capitol building and grounds halted the counting of the electoral college votes required by the Twelfth Amendment.
He continued, “This was not a protest that got out of hand. It was a riot; in many respects a coordinated riot, as is clear from cases before me. … Although the rioters failed in their ultimate goal, their actions nonetheless resulted in the deaths of multiple people, injury to over 140 members of law enforcement, and lasting trauma for our entire nation.” He concluded, “This was not patriotism; it was the antithesis of patriotism.”
Rubin points out that
Trump has not only reimagined Jan. 6 as a glorious event but promised to pardon those involved. Just Security compiled a list of the criminals who would be let out of jail if he spared convicts and those incarcerated awaiting trial. Tom Joscelyn, Fred Wertheimer and Norman L. Eisen calculated that, as of March 23 (the day after Trump reportedly vowed to set “these guys free”), there were 29 inmates in custody related to Jan. 6, “including defendants who are either awaiting trial or post-conviction.”
These include 27 “charged with assaulting law enforcement officers in the U.S. Capitol or on its grounds,” of which 20 have either been convicted or pleaded guilty. The violence involved should shock Americans:
One convicted felon helped lead the assault on police guarding the Capitol’s external security perimeter, an “attack [that] paved the way for thousands of rioters to storm the Capitol grounds.” Another inmate allegedly threw “an explosive device that detonated upon at least 25 officers,” causing some of the officers to temporarily lose their hearing. “For many other officers that were interviewed,” an FBI Special Agent’s statement of facts reads, “it was the most memorable event that day.”
Other January 6th inmates held in D.C.: “viciously ripped off” an Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer’s mask; assaulted officers “with an electro-shock device;” allegedly sprayed multiple police officers with a pepper spray; “struck an MPD officer with a long wooden pole multiple times;” and allegedly used a “crutch and a metal pole” as “bludgeoning weapons or projectiles against” a “line of law enforcement officers.”
At its most basic level, Trump’s support of Jan. 6 criminals should demolish the notion that Trump and MAGA followers “stand with the blue” or represent the “law and order” party. Trump called these people to the Capitol, fired them up and urged them on to the Capitol. Facing trial himself for the events of Jan. 6, he wants to let out of jail the foot soldiers he enlisted to attack democracy.
Trump admires criminals who attacked officers of the law. They are not hostages. They are criminals.
Forgive me for posting two reviews of my last book, which was published on January 20, 2020.
As I explained in the previous post, I did not see either of these reviews until long after they appeared in print. Slaying Goliath appeared just as COVID was beginning to make its mark, only a few weeks before it was recognized as a global pandemic. In writing the book, I wanted to celebrate the individuals and groups that demonstrated bravery in standing up to the powerful, richly endowed forces that were determined to privatize their public schools through charters or vouchers.
America’s public schools had educated generations of young people who created the most powerful, most culturally creative, most dynamic nation on earth. Yet there arose a cabal of billionaires and their functionaries who were determined to destroy public schools and turn them into privately-managed schools and to turn their funding over to private and religious schools.
Having worked for many years inside the conservative movement, I knew what was happening. I saw where the money was coming from, and I knew that politicians had been won over (bought) by campaign contributions.
Publishing a book at the same time as a global pandemic terrifies the world and endangers millions of people is bad timing, for sure.
But the most hurtful blow to me and the book was a mean-spirited review in The New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR is unquestionably the most important review that a book is likely to get. Its readership is huge. A bad review is a death knell. That’s the review I got. The reviewer, not an educator or education journalist, hated the book. Hated it. I found her review hard to read because she seemed to reviewing a different book.
I was completely unaware that Bob Shepherd reviewed the review. I didn’t see it until two or three years after it appeared. He wrote what I felt, but I, as the author, knew that it was very bad form to complain, and I did not.
Frank G. Splitt is a regular reader of the blog and a retired engineer of great distinction. He sent me his Amazon review of Liz Cheney’s best-selling book about the Congressional hearings conducted by the January 6 Select Committee. I have been meaning to review the book myself but put it off and am glad to print Frank’s review, as I agree with him.
I found the book to be absorbing, revealing what Congressional leaders said to one another on the day of the insurrection, as well as the inner workings of the January 6 Committee. Cheney doesn’t pull her punches. She was appalled by Trump’s disrespect for the Constitution and his egregious lying. She is contemptuous of Congressionals leaders like Kevin McCarthy who first condemned the violent attack, then turned on a dime to bend his knee to Trump.
Liz Cheney gave up her leadership role because of strong principles. Chief among these was her oath to the Constitution. She refused to betray it, and by doing so, she gave up the likelihood that she would one day be Speaker of the House. Very few Republicans were willing to follow her lead. I have immense respect for her.
Frank G. Splitt writes:
Liz Cheney wrote the book with purpose in mind: to assure that the January 6 Select Committee’s work that revealed the culpability of former president Donald Trump in the January 6.2021, attack on the U.S. Capital would not only be thoroughly documented for posterity, but would also illuminate in detail his criminal behavior backed by solid evidence via trustworthy testimony, mostly from members of his own administration.
The book is fact-based and well organized—providing the author’s first-hand beginning-to-end account of the January 6th, 2021, insurrection from outside and inside the halls of the Capital. She tells in consummate detail how, in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump ignored the rulings of dozens of courts, plotted to overturn a lawful election, and provoked a violently egregious attack on our Capitol. Cheney goes on to tell how Trump and his congressional enablers broke their oaths of office— betraying the American people and the Constitution in their attempt to prevent the counting of electoral votes and so keep Trump in office.
Liz Cheney helped organize and lead the Congressional Select Committee investigation into how it happened. In her book she tells the story of this perilous moment in our history—exposing those who helped Trump spread his stolen-election lie while forsaking her promising political career in the process.
In the end, I am disappointed not only with the gullibility of so many American citizens who buy into Trump‘s lies, but even more so with craven politicians who keep silent for fear of losing their positions in Congress. No doubt, Cheney would have been near the top of the list of courageous U. S, Senators in John Kennedy’s 1956 book Profiles in Courage.
I am also somewhat disappointed that Trump did not respond to the Select Committee’s subpoena to testify before the committee. By not appearing, Cheney was denied the opportunity to emulate Senate lawyer Joseph Welch’s admonition of lying Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy at the 1953 Army-McCarthy hearing by saying: Mr. Former President, you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
This should be a must-read book for every American voter as Cheney’s warning concerning the likely consequences of Trump’s return to office is indeed chilling.
Six conservative Supreme Court justices overruled Roe v. Wade, discrediting a decision that had been in force for half a century. Before the Dobbs decision, American women were able to get an abortion. Today one of every three American women lives in states where abortion has been banned.
Former President Donald Trump has falsely claimed, again, that he had to post a bond in order to appeal a $454 million civil fraud judgment against him – and falsely claimed, again, that Judge Arthur Engoron did something unusual in forcing him to post a bond during the appeal process.
On Tuesday, the morning after Trump posted the $175 million bond necessary to prevent New York’s attorney general from beginning to collect on Engoron’s judgment, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee wrote on social media: “I had to pay New York State in order to appeal a corrupt decision by a biased, crooked and highly overturned judge. It’s supposed to be the other way around – you appeal before you pay. Is a crooked New York Judge allowed to make you pay for the ‘privilege’ of appealing a wrongful & corrupt decision??? NOT IN AMERICA!!!”
Trump made similar claims in March, claiming, for example, that “Engoron wants me to put up the ridiculous fine (I DID NOTHING WRONG!) before I get a chance to Appeal his crazed ruling – A first!”
Facts First: Trump’s claims are comprehensively untrue. He was not required to post a bond in order to appeal Engoron’s ruling; he began the appeal process in February, more than a month before he posted the bond. And the requirement he actually faced – to post a bond to prevent collection during the appeal process – was not “a first” or some unusual requirement created by Engoron. In fact, the requirement is set out by New York state law, and it is regularly applied in civil cases in the state.
“This is literally the way that the NY rules of court are designed to work, and actually work every day,” Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor who is now a litigator in private practice in New York, told CNN in March. He said at the time that the rules being applied to Trump “are applied every day in New York courts, on verdicts of all sizes,” though the size of the judgment against Trump was notably large. Epner added: “Donald Trump is either horribly misinformed or lying.”
And there is no evidence for Trump’s repeated claims that Engoron is “crooked” or “corrupt.”
Under New York law for civil cases, it is standard to have to post a bond (or cash) in the full amount of a judgment in order to secure a stay that prevents collection during the appeal. In March, Trump falsely claimed this was an unprecedented Engoron requirement. Later in March, after Trump’s lawyers told a New York appeals court that it had proven impossible to secure a bond for more than $450 million, the appeals court decided that Trump could put up a lower amount, $175 million.
Epner told CNN at the time that “it’s highly unusual that it would be reduced at all,” and “highly unusual that it would be reduced by this amount,” though not unprecedented.
If Trump had not posted a bond and if New York Attorney General Letitia James had collected on the judgment, and then Trump had eventually won the case on appeal, James would have been required to return any collected money to Trump along with interest.
NBC showed the nation how NOT to hire a conservative commentator. They picked a MAGA firebrand who stood squarely behind Trump’s lies about the election. Their entire stable of in-air stars at MSNBC revolted, along with Chuck Todd of NBC, the network’s chief political honcho.
It was not Ronna McDaniel’s conservative views they rejected, but her lying. Lying is unethical.
Jill Lawrence, a journalist who writes at The Bulwark, a site for anti-Trump Republicans, offered the following advice:
YOU HAVE TO DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE, and where if not at the Big Lie?
If the Ronna McDaniel saga were a miniseries or magazine piece, it would be called “The Five-Day Tenure of a Great Get”: It starts last Friday when NBC News announces that it has hired the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee as a political commentator. A massive backlash ensues, led by the network’s on-air talent, over McDaniel’s role in trying to reverse the 2020 election results, her year of denying them, and her continued attempts to underminethem. Okay, maybe not that great a get. By Tuesday, she’s out.
We live in complicated media times, and mistakes are constantly made—even now. They’ve been made since 2015 and the struggle will continue as long as Donald Trump is a dominant presence in American life.
I’ve been through it on the inside, and the McDaniel debacle brought back a lot of memories. The hardest journalism job I’ve ever had was being commentary editor of USA Today during “the reign of Donald Trump and his loyalists’ deadly attack on the Capitol to try to keep him in power,” as I called it in a 2021 interview. “Handling op-eds during this period was the challenge of a lifetime. I’ve never been so familiar with the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the criminal code and the unique angst of fact-checking in the Trump era.”
As that era continues to drag on, so do the challenges. And let’s be blunt: This is an asymmetrical problem. With so many Republicans tethered to Trump, MAGA, and their self-serving fictions, how do you showcase conservative voices while maintaining professional standards of truth, reality, and facts that aren’t “alternative”?
At USA Today, our editing team of liberals and conservatives tried like hell to do both. We had conservative regulars, conservative guest columnists, and first-person essays by conservatives. One column I edited mentioned the “liberal mob” and I remember chuckling at the phrase—it was an opinion, and the author was certainly entitled to it. I also remember fact-checking a Joe Biden op-ed during his 2020 campaign, and it was not difficult—because there were facts in it, and they were confirmable.
Most if not all traditional news outlets want very much to publish viewpoints across the ideological spectrum. David Mastio, my center-right editor and immediate boss at USA Today, used to mock-sigh as he told me that “You do ‘wrong’ so well.” He did, too, from my center-left perspective.
A commitment to viewpoint diversity is part of a business model, of course, but it’s also part of a fairness model—and a way to sharpen readers’ thinking, as well as our own. Whatever the motivation for this commitment, it can be difficult to maintain in our fraught media moment: the ongoing clashes over evidence and reality make it easy for a journalist or manager or organization to get into trouble.
I saw it when a conservative friend lost a job over insisting on facts in a commentary about Trump—by a pro-Trump writer. We all saw it when CNN aired a live Trump town hall with a cheering audience and an outgunned moderator, reviewed by the network’s own media writer as “a spectacle of lies.” And don’t even get me started about the time the news section of USA Today fact-checked a high-level Trump official’s “opposing view” to a USA Today editorial. (Spoiler: It was Peter Navarro, who reported to prison last week to serve four months for contempt of Congress.)
The temptation to hire big names like McDaniel is understandable, especially if—like NBC News—you have $300,000 lying around to pay her. Trump himself had the occasional byline on our page, and he was fact-checked. Vice presidential nominee Mike Pence wrote the “opposing view” in 2016 when the editorial board, breaking with USA Today tradition, said Trump was “unfit for the presidency.” Pence also wrote it in 2020 after we went even further and endorsed Biden—the first time in the paper’s history that the board endorsed a presidential candidate.
That election was, or should be, a line of demarcation. Before the Big Lie, and after it. Before the January 6th Capitol attack, and after it.
My 2021 Christmas wish was zero tolerance for the Big Lie, Stop the Steal crowd in Congress. I laid it all out in a column that ran with the headline “Oust Trump coup planners, enablers and provocateurs from public office. They betrayed us.” But they’re still there, from House Speaker Mike Johnson on down.
There’s nothing news organizations can do about that, or about Trump’s current starring roles as presumptive GOP presidential nominee and defendant in his many criminal and civil trials, or about the endless dilemma of when and how and whether to cover him in year nine of his lies and outrages.
What they can do, at the very least, is stop rewarding Big Lie opportunists like McDaniel.
Top brass at NBC thought it was a brilliant idea to hire Ronna McDaniel, former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a paid contributor. They did not check with their on-air commentators, who had taken the brunt of McDaniels’ criticism of the “fake news” on behalf of Trump. They knew she had fiercely defended his lies about election fraud. She has now retracted her lies, but that didn’t erase her history as a liar.
When the on-air commentators lambasted the hiring of McDaniel during their shows on Sunday and Monday, NBC leadership withdrew their offer.
But they had signed a contract to pay McDaniel $300,000 a year for two years, and she’s expecting to be paid in full.
If NBC wanted to add a Republican commentator who did not participate in the effort to overthrow the election and subvert the Constitution, they could have hired Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, or Mitt Romney (Ronna McDaniel’s uncle). She used to call herself Ronna Romney McDaniel but Trump insisted that she drop her middle name and she did.
Diane Ravitch's blog 