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Lithwick and Ornstein: A Last Chance for Democracy?

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2024 //
88

Dahlia Lithwick and Norman Ornstein are lawyers and close observers of national politics. In this article, they urge us to take Trump’s threats seriously. They are not just campaign rhetoric or empty promises. He means what he says. As Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Most of the mainstream media (MSNBC is an exception) attempts to normalize Trump, as though he’s just another in a long line of conservative politicians. He is not. He is an autocrat who longs to have total control and to use that control to get vengeance for his enemies (no “loyal opposition” for him).

The first term was a warning. Trump tried in some cases to pick good people, but they didn’t last long. He won’t make the same mistake. He will demand loyalty, total loyalty. Anyone he appoints will have to agree that the election of 2020 was rigged and stolen.

He says he will take bold steps to reverse the progressive gains of the past 90 years, which he will attribute to “communists, socialists, fascists vermin, and scum”

Lithwick and Ornstein write at Slate about The dangers posed by Trump:

Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal. But once elected, the autocratic elements take over, either immediately or gradually: The destruction of free elections, undermining the press, co-opting the judiciary, turning the military into instruments of the dictatorship, installing puppets in the bureaucracy, making sure the legislature reinforces rather than challenges lawless or unconstitutional actions, using violence and threats of violence to cow critics and adversaries, rewarding allies with government contracts, and ensuring that the dictator and family can secrete billions from government resources and bribes. This was the game plan for Putin, Sisi, Orbán, and many others. It’s hardly unfamiliar.

Donald Trump is rather different in one respect. He has not softened his spoken intentions to get elected. While Trump is a congenital liar—witness his recent claim that he, not Joe Biden, got $35 insulin for diabetics—when it comes to how he would act if elected again to the presidency, he has been brutally honest, as have his closest advisers and campaign allies. His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not. He has pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 violent insurrectionist rioters, who could constitute a personal vigilante army for President Donald Trump, presumably alongside the official one.

He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.

The battle plan of his allies in the Heritage Foundation, working closely with his campaign via Project 2025, includes many of the aims above, and more; it would also tighten the screws on abortion after Dobbs, move against contraception, reinstate criminal sanctions against gay sex while overturning the right to same-sex marriage, among other things. His top foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, has reiterated what Trump has said about his isolationist-in-the-extreme foreign policy—jettison NATO, abandon support for Ukraine and give Putin a green light to go after Poland and other NATO countries, and reorient American alliances to create one of strongmen dictators including Kim Jong-un. Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members—one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson—simply because Donald Trump demanded it. They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless….

We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do. We worry that every time we say “the system held” it implies that “holding” equals “winning” as opposed to barely scraping by. We worry that while Trump has armies of surrogates out there arguing that Trump is an all-powerful God proxy, the rule of law has no surrogates out there arguing for anything because nobody ever came to a rally for a Rule 11 motion. The Biden administration has largely taken the position that the felony conviction is irrelevant because it’s proof that the status quo isn’t in danger. But the reality is that Republicans are openly campaigning against judges, juries, and prosecutors. Overt declarations of blowing up our checks and balances and following the blueprints to autocracy set by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, meanwhile, are treated with shrugs by mainstream journalists and commentators. What’s more, Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness to kowtow to every Trump demand. The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.

“The system is holding” is not a plan for a knowable future. It never was.

Please open the link and read the article in full.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Why Are Murdoch Veterans Taking Over the Washington Post?

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2024 //
6

I’m worried about what’s happening at The Washington Post. The newspaper has long been an icon for its integrity and its high journalistic standards. The Graham family owned it from 1933, when Eugene Meyer, father of Katherine Graham, bought it at a bankruptcy auction, until 2013, when the newspaper was sold to Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.

In 2021, the Post’s executive editor Marty Baron retired and was replaced by veteran journalist Sally Buzbee, who had spent her career at the Associated Press.

Bezos won plaudits for not injecting himself into the newspaper’s editorial decisions. He wanted the newspaper to grow from a regional newspaper to a global one.

The newspaper won Pulitzer Prizes, but it suffered a loss of $77 million in revenues in 2023, as well as declining readership.

Bezos decided to shake things up by cutting the staff of the Post and bringing in fresh blood. In October 2023, the buyouts affected 240 members of the staff (10% of all Post employees), including most of the research team, whose work was vital for investigative reporting. For those who remained, this was a stunning blow. They assumed that Bezos, currently the richest man in the world with a net worth of $209 billion, would ignore the losses to keep the historic newspaper strong.

They were wrong.

In late 2023, Bezos selected William Lewis to become publisher of the Post. Lewis was a veteran journalist who had worked for British newspapers, including Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, editor of the politically conservative Daily Telegraph, publisher of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and CEO of Murdoch’s Dow Jones.

In early June of this year, Buzbee resigned after clashing with Will Lewis and was replaced as executive editor by Matt Murphy, former editor-in-chief of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

Lewis added fellow British journalist Robert Winnett as editor of the Post. Winnett spent 17 years at The Daily Telegraph.

With the new lineup, the trouble began.

In December 2023, David Folkenflip reported on NPR that Will Lewis helped Murdoch to navigate his way through the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News of the World and led to its demise. He wrote about Bezos’ choice of Will Lewis as the new publisher of The Washington Post:

The man picked to lead the Post — a paper with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — stands accused of helping to lead a massive cover-up of criminal activity when he was acting outside public view.

In lawsuits against News Corp.’s British newspapers, lawyers for Prince Harry and movie star Hugh Grant depict Lewis as a leader of a frenzied conspiracy to kneecap public officials hostile to a multibillion-dollar business deal and to delete millions of potentially damning emails. In addition, they allege, Lewis sought to shield the CEO of News Corp.’s British arm, News UK, from scrutiny and to conceal the extent of wrongdoing at News of the World’s more profitable sister tabloid, The Sun.

Folkenflik revealed in June that Will Lewis had offered him an interview if he would not write about his role in the phone hacking scandal. Lewis said that he had a conversation with a person at NPR before he assumed his duties at the Post.

And then all hell broke out.

The staff was demoralized and angry. They didn’t like the way Buzbee was sidelined, and they didn’t trust Lewis. Lewis told them about his plans for the future, and they were confused, not mollified.

Bezos took the unusual step of meeting with the newsroom staff. That was not enough to quell their anger about the layoffs and the new team at the top.

Media critic Dan Froomkin wrote about this meeting:

It was during a contentious, dismissive meeting he held with newsroom staffers a few hours after unceremoniously driving out executive editor Sally Buzbee and replacing her with two additional white male former Murdoch henchmen.

“If we keep doing the same things in the same ways,” the publisher said, according to one report, “we’re nuts,”

The big question, of course, is what he and his new Praetorian guard want to do differently. Thus far, he’s only shared the radical yet unformed idea of splitting the main newsroom in two and devoting the second one to the wildly enigmatic goals of “service and social media” to attract a new audience.  That’s the sort of plan you announce when you either have no plan or have one that you know won’t survive the scrutiny of your peers…. [Diane’s note: Other accounts of Lewis’ vision say that he plans for three newsrooms: one for opinions; one for the core daily news; and a third for social media and digital platforms geared toward younger audiences].

And given their previous affiliations with Murdoch and with the fiercely right-wing Telegraph newspaper – sometimes referred to as the Torygraph — there is a palpable fear in and out of the Post newsroom that the three men will drag the Post’s political coverage in a more pro-Trump direction.

Froomkin thought that the Post had a golden opportunity to be a forceful voice for the principles of democracy and truth, since the New York Times was committed to normalizing Trump and downplaying his threat to the nation.

He wrote:

So there is an extraordinary opportunity here for the Post to be the first elite newsroom to abandon the both-sides and pox-on-both-your-houses reporting style and instead actively warn readers that at this moment in our history, one party’s faults are wildly more dangerous than the other’s to both the free press and to a free country. That means relentless truth-telling along with remedial civics education and nonstop coverage of the stakes of the 2024 election

The Times’s egregiously restrained political coverage has left this lane wide open for the Post. And nothing could be more appropriate for the Post’s brand. The Post’s brand is bringing down a corrupt president; bold truth-telling that holds power to account. That’s an enormously powerful brand, both nationally and internationally, if the newsroom can deliver.

Was the ex-Murdoch team at the top likely to go in that direction?

The revelations about Will Lewis’s brand of Murdoch journalism kept coming, especially from NPR’s David Folkenflik. He wrote that Lewis and Winnett engaged in practices that might be okay in England but are considered unethical in the U.S. They paid people for stories (“checkbook journalism”), they used stolen records as the basis of scoops.

He wrote:

A vast chasm divides common practices in the fiercely competitive confines of British journalism, where Lewis and Winnett made their mark, and what passes muster in the American news media. In several instances, their alleged conduct would raise red flags at major U.S. outlets, including The Washington Post.

Among the episodes: a six-figure payment for a major scoop; planting a junior reporter in a government job to secure secret documents; and relying on a private investigator who used subterfuge to secure private documents from their computers and phones. The investigator was later arrested.

On Saturday evening, The New York Times disclosed a specific instance in which a former reporter implicated both Lewis and Winnett in reporting that he believed relied on documents that were fraudulently obtained by a private investigator…

Allegations in court that Lewis sought to cover up a wide-ranging phone hacking scandal more than a dozen years ago at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers are proving to be a flashpoint for the new Post publisher.

On at least four occasions since being named to lead the Post last fall, Lewis tried to head off unwelcome scrutiny from Post journalists — and from NPR.

In December, before he started the job, Lewis intensely pressured me not to report on the accusations, which arose in British suits against Murdoch’s newspapers in the U.K. He also repeatedly offered me an exclusive interview on his business plans for the Post if I dropped the story. I did not. The ensuing NPR piece offered the first detailed reports on new material underlying allegations from Prince Harry and others.

Immediately after that article ran, Lewis told then-Executive Editor Sally Buzbee it was not newsworthy and that her teams should not follow it, according to a person with contemporaneous knowledge. That intervention is being reported here for the first time. The Post did not run a story.

Eventually the Post did cover the scandalous behavior of its new leaders.

On June 20, CNN reported that two Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists blasted the leadership at their newspaper:

“I don’t know a single person at the Post who thinks the current situation with the publisher and supposed new editor can stand,” David Maraniss, an associate editor who has worked at The Post for nearly five decades and won two Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper, wrote in a candid Facebook post. “There might be a few, but very very few.”

Maraniss also zinged Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Post who installed Lewis, writing that he is “not of and for the Post or he would understand.”

Scott Higham, another Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Post, echoed Maraniss’ call for Lewis to exit the newspaper.

“Will Lewis needs to step down for the good of The Post and the public,” Higham replied in a comment on Maraniss’ post. “He has lost the newsroom and will never win it back.”

Spokespersons for Bezos and The Post did not immediately comment.

The backlash from The Post’s journalists comes after serious questions were raised about Lewis, who has been the subject of several explosive reports in recent days scrutinizing his journalistic integrity.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that, in his Fleet Street days, Lewis assigned an article that was based on stolen phone records. And The Post itself reported in a 3,000-word front page expose Sunday that a “thief” who used deceptive tactics to obtain private material had ties with Lewis’ hand-picked incoming top editor, Robert Winnett.

On June 21, Will Lewis announced that Robert Winnett had decided to stay in London and would not be joining the Post as editor.

It’s by no means clear that dropping Winnett will be enough to satisfy the newsroom.

Just yesterday, an article in the Post revealed that Will Lewis retains a financial interest in a small, digital-based firm that has contracts to work for The Post. The newspaper said the agreement does not violate its conflict-of-interest policy. But it smells funny.

Stay tuned. The fate of a great newspaper is at stake.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Media, Trump

Dana Milbank: Trump Plays the Fascist Card

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2024 //
14

Dana Milbank calls out Trump for repeatedly sending fascist signals to his base. When Congress holds hearings on anti-Semitism, they should call Trump to testify.

Dana Milbank writes about Trump in The Washington Post:

As you’ve probably heard, Donald Trump has once again raised a führer.

The former president’s Truth Social account posted a video posing the question “What happens after Donald Trump wins?” and providing a possible answer: In the background was the phrase “unified Reich.”

This follows Trump’s echoing Adolf Hitler in campaign speeches, saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and calling his opponents “vermin.”

And that, in turn, followed Trump’s dining at Mar-a-Lago with high-profile antisemite Ye (Kanye West) and white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes, who likened incinerating Jews to baking cookies.

Under the three-Reichs-and-you’re-out rule, Trump should be on the bench. Yet he keeps swinging — and this week provided a sobering measure of how numb we have become to his undeniably fascist rhetoric.

Almost exactly eight years ago, Trump attacked Gonzalo Curiel, then the district judge in the Trump University fraud case, saying that his “Mexican heritage” posed “an inherent conflict of interest.” In the uproar that followed, even Republican leaders were appalled, and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said Trump’s statement was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

This week, Trump did almost the same thing when he left court on Tuesday after his defense rested in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. “The judge hates Donald Trump,” he said. “Just take a look. Take a look at him. Take a look at where he comes from.” New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan emigrated from Colombia as a child. But this time there was little outcry from the inured populace, and if Republican leaders had any complaints about Trump’s textbook racism (or on his third Reich moment of this campaign) I must have missed them.

Vilifying migrants is a standard fascist trope. So is the constant claiming of victim status. Trump falsely alleged in a fundraising email this week that his opponent conspired to kill him. “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger” during the FBI’s 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago for missing classified documents, Trump wrote. He separately claimed that Biden’s Justice Department “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.” In reality, the FBI took extra precautions to avoid a confrontation by conducting the search when Trump was away and alerted the Secret Service. Agents were operating under the same standard rules of engagement they used when searching Biden’s home: Lethal force can be used only if in “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.”

Also this week, Trump, asked by Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV whether he favored restricting Americans’ access to birth control, responded: “We’re looking at that, and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly.” After the televised interview was broadcast, Trump said the notion that he would advocate restrictions on contraception was “a Democrat fabricated lie.”

That maneuver — floating an outrageous policy and then pretending he had done no such thing — is another tool that Trump routinely uses. After Trump’s Truth Social account shared the video with the slightly-blurred “unified Reich” message during a lunch break in Trump’s trial in New York, his spokeswoman claimed the video had been “created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the president was in court.” The campaign removed the post.

Sound familiar? During the 2016 campaign, Trump tweeted an image that had been used by white supremacists of a Star of David atop a pile of cash. The campaign removed the offending post and Trump said it had been posted by a staffer. He later told a crowd that his aides “shouldn’t have taken it down.”

During that same campaign, Trump also tweeted an image of an American flag containing an image of what appeared to be Nazi Waffen-SS soldiers. The campaign removed this post, too, and blamed an intern.

The disavowal is part of the game, says Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor who specializes in the rhetoric of fascism. “You do it and then you deny it and it’s just systematic, over and over and over again,” he told me in a phone call. “The people who want to hear it hear it, and it signals the direction you want to go in.” And for those uncomfortable with the extremism, the denial provides “a way of lying to themselves and telling themselves this is not what’s really going on.”

But it is. From Nazi Germany to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Stanley says, people invariably thought the rhetoric of the rising authoritarian was exaggerated and just for dramatic effect. “Historically, people always, always don’t take it seriously,” he said. Perhaps they don’t realize that Trump is deploying the exact same tropes — against migrants, judges, gender nonconforming people, universities, the media, “Marxists” — now being used by autocrats in Russia, India and Hungary. “If you look at what Trump is saying … everywhere in the world the authoritarians are saying that.”

And yet we drift, placidly, into autocracy. Okay, Trump is unifying the Reich. But Biden is so old!

Trump’s fascist rhetoric is supported by an array of authoritarian polices, which he and his campaign have helpfully divulged.

Trump has said that his (false) election fraud claims justify “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He said he wouldn’t be a dictator, “other than day one,” when he would use absolute power to seal the border and drill for oil. He has proposed that those shoplifting from stores should “fully expect to be shot.” He said he would round up as many as 20 million illegal immigrants and, perhaps, put them in mass deportation camps, taking money from the military if necessary.

He said he would appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden, his family and “all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders and our country itself.” He said he would order prosecutors to “go down and indict” his political opponents if they are “doing well and beating me” — and he would fire prosecutors who don’t follow such orders. He said he would use the National Guard, and perhaps the regular military, to crack down on protests against him.

He would strip civil service protections so he could replace federal workers with Trump loyalists, and he might take over independent agencies, including the Federal Reserve. He suggested he would change laws to attack what he perceives as “anti-White” bias.

Speaking at the National Rifle Association on Saturday, Trump asked the crowd whether he should “be considered three term or two term?” Several in the crowd shouted out: “Three!”

Earlier this spring, the American Conservative published an article titled “Trump 2028” that argued the 22nd Amendment, which limits a president to two terms, “is an arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve nonconsecutive terms.” The group is part of Project 2025, to which the Trump campaign has informally outsourced its policy planning.

Trump has hinted that he would pardon those sentenced for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He included in his courtroom entourage this week two convicted felons, Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner he pardoned, and Chuck Zito, a former Hells Angels leader. During testimony, defense witness Robert Costello showed the same sort of contempt for the judge as Trump did outside the courtroom. He rolled his eyes, talked under his breath, called the proceedings “ridiculous” and complained with a “jeez” when he disagreed with Merchan’s ruling.

Trump has promised “retribution” against his political opponents, and outside Trump’s trial this week, his allies amplified the threat. “They fear Donald Trump and they fear what’s going to happen if he becomes president again — and, I tell you, they should fear,” said Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.).

“Yes,” agreed Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.), at his side, wearing a necktie with Trump’s face printed on it.

Trump had one final thing to say before he left the courthouse this week. Just a day after his post about the “unified Reich,” he offered a message for “Jewish people that vote for Biden and the Democrats: They should have their head examined.”

Well, I have had my head examined, and it was found to contain the following memories of things Trump has said and done:

He told his White House chief of staff John Kelly that “Hitler did some good things” and complained that U.S. generals weren’t “totally loyal” to him the way Nazi generals were to Hitler. He spoke of the “very fine people” marching among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. He closed out his 2016 campaign with an ad that singled out three prominent Jews with suggestions that they manipulate a “global power structure.” He was reluctant to disavow David Duke or supporters of his who harassed and threatened Jewish journalists. He has shared innumerable messages on social media from white supremacists. He has repeatedly questioned the loyalty of American Jews.

Long ago, Vanity Fair reported that Trump’s ex-wife Ivana said he read from a book of Hitler’s speeches, which he kept in a cabinet by his bed. Trump confirmed that he had the book but denied that he read it. By coincidence or design, there has been a startling overlap in their language of late.

Trump speaks of immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and “coming in with disease.” Hitler said that great civilizations died “as a result of contamination of the blood,” and he called Jews “the worst kind of germ-carriers in poisoning human souls.”

Trump calls his political opponents “radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Hitler called Jews “an inferior race that multiplies like vermin.”

Trump says that “the enemies from within are more dangerous, to me, than the enemies of the outside. Russia and China, we can handle.” Hitler spoke of “the greater inner enemy” and said that when “the internal enemy was not recognized … all efforts to resist the external enemy were bound to be in vain.”

Trump complains that “fake news is all you get, and they are indeed the enemy of the people.” Hitler complained of “the lying Marxist press” and said “the function of the so-called liberal press was to dig the grave for the German people.”

Trump claims that “we’ve never done worse than we’ve done now. … We’re so disrespected. The whole world is laughing at us.” And he warns: “If we don’t win this election, I believe we will no longer have a country.” Hitler claimed that “the Reich had fallen from a height which can hardly be imagined in these days of misery and humiliation.” He warned that “one year of Bolshevism would destroy Germany” and transform it “into chaos and a heap of ruins.”

Trump, at the end of his speeches, likes to say: “We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.” Hitler spoke of a “world conspiracy” made up of “Jews and democrats, Bolshevists and reactionaries” and motivated by a “hatred” of Germans.

No, Trump isn’t Hitler, and the 21st century United States isn’t Weimar Germany. But Trump’s words, so obviously ripped from history’s darkest pages, lead no place good. The only thing poisoning the blood of our country is his copycat fascism.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

NYC Prosecutors Seek to Extend Trump Gag Order Because Of Death Threats

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2024 //
17

Anyone who stands up to Trump puts their life at risk. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has received hundreds of death threats since his prosecution began. Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies because of his rigging the election by paying off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep his sexual encounter with her out of the news before the vote in 2016. While he throws around claims that Democrats “would rig the election” in 2016 and claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen,” it was he who rigged the election by paying Daniels for her silence.

Trump claims that his inability to attack the jurors and prosecutors violates his First Amendment rights. He is vile.

The New York Times reported today:

Prosecutors in Manhattan said on Friday that a judge should keep in place major elements of a gag order that was imposed on Donald J. Trump, citing dozens of threats that have been made against officials connected to the case.

The order, issued before Mr. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial began in mid-April, bars him from attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff and relatives of the judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have sought to have the order lifted since Mr. Trump’s conviction in late May. But in a 19-page filing on Friday, prosecutors argued that while Justice Merchan no longer needed to enforce the portion of the gag order relating to trial witnesses, he should keep in place the provisions protecting jurors, prosecutors, court staff and their families.

The New York Police Department has logged 56 “actionable threats” since the beginning of April directed against Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who brought the case, and against his family and employees, according to an affidavit provided with the filing.

Such threats, evidently made by supporters of Mr. Trump, included a post disclosing the home address of an employee at the district attorney’s office, and bomb threats made on the first day of the trial directed at two people involved in the case.

The 56 threats that were logged, prosecutors said, did not include the hundreds of “threatening emails and phone calls” that were received by Mr. Bragg’s office in recent months, which the police are “not tracking as threat cases.”

Mr. Trump was convicted on May 30 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payoff made to the porn star Stormy Daniels. The money was meant to cover up a sexual tryst she says she had with Mr. Trump in 2006, a decade before he was elected president. (Mr. Trump, 78, has continued to deny ever having had sex with Ms. Daniels.)

If he didn’t have sex with Daniels, why did he pay her $130,000?

Categories Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Safety, Trump

“Democracy”: Where’s the “Conflict” in the Georgia Case Against Trump

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2024 //
39

I’m curious. Regarding the Georgia election case, where – exactly – is the Fanni Willis “conflict” that may have impaired, impinged or otherwise impacted the rights of those accused in that case?

The Associated Press reported this:

“A Fulton County grand jury in August indicted Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a sprawling scheme to illegally try to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Four defendants have pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors, but Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty…Trump and eight other defendants had tried to get Willis and her office removed from the case, arguing that a romantic relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest. McAfee in March found that no conflict of interest existed that should force Willis off the case, but he granted a request from Trump and the other defendants to seek an appeal of his ruling from the state Court of Appeals.”

So, again, what EXACTLY is the “conflict” that infringes on the rights of the accused in the Georgia, some of whom have already – in fact pleaded guilty.

CNN reported this:

“In March, after what amounted to a mini-trial where attorneys for Trump and his co-defendants sought to prove their case against Willis and Wade, McAfee found there was not enough evidence to firmly prove Willis financially benefited from the relationship.”

So, the prosecutors were put on trial and the judge found that there wasn’t evidence to say that Willis got some kind of financial favor from Wade. But even if she HAD, where is the “conflict” that harms the right of the accused?

The Washington Post put it like this:

“McAfee ruled that Trump and the others had ‘failed to meet their burden’ of proving Willis’s romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade and allegations that she was financially enriched by trips the two took together were enough of a ‘conflict of interest’ to disqualify her from the case..

To put it differently, the “conflict” in this case was that Willis and Wade slept together and sometimes took trips together– they were “bad” — and thus that should disqualify them from the case. But, What. About. The. Case? What about the facts of the case? What about the specific charges and the charges to which others have pled guilty?

Sydney Powell – yes, her – pled guilty to “conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties.” She also agreed to help prosecutors in other cases.

Guess who was involved in the conspiracy and the other cases?

Kenneth Chesebro, charged with seven felony counts, pled guilty to “one felony count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents. ” False documents to be used to overturn the election results. Guess on whose behalf Chesebro filed those false documents? Chesebro agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in other cases too.

Trump attorney Jenna Ellis pleased guilty in Georgia “to a charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, a felony. She has already written an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, and she agreed to cooperate fully with prosecutors as the case progresses.”

So, there’s a pattern here. 

But where – exactly – is the “conflict” in the other cases? The cases of the ringleader Trump, and dirty trickster Mike Roman? The cases of Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman? Of Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark and the rest?

Meanwhile, the findings of fact in the Colorado court decision by Sarah Wallace that declared Trump an insurrectionist, which relied heavily on the January 6 Committee Report and included testimony by officers attacked in the January 6 riot, have gone unchallenged by any credible evidence, including that put forth by Trump or his attorneys. As noted in the decision,

“while Trump spent much time contesting potential biases of the Committee members and their staff, he spent almost no time attacking the credibility of the Committee’s findings themselves. The Hearing provided Trump with an opportunity to subject these findings to the adversarial process, and he chose not to do so, despite frequent complaints that the Committee investigation was not subject to such a process. Because Trump was unable to provide the Court with any credible evidence which would discredit the factual findings of the January 6th Report, the Court has difficulty understanding the argument that it should not consider its findings which are admissible under C.R.E. 803(8).”

The Colorado Supreme Court found that because Trump was – in fact – an insurrectionist, he could not be on the Colorado ballot because the United States Constitution explicitly prohibited it under Article 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Seems pretty clear: “no person shall…hold any office, civil or military, under the Constitution who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same…”

The United States Supreme Court ignored the findings of fact in the Colorado trial court and overturned the Colorado Supreme Court decision to take Trump off the ballot. The Court said “We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.”

According former federal appellate judge Michael Lutting and constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe, this was “a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation…Our highest court dramatically and dangerously betrayed its obligation to enforce what once was the Constitution’s safety net for America’s democracy.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/supreme-court-trump-v-anderson-fourteenth-amendment/677755/

Three members of the Supreme Court were – in fact – appointed by a seditionist, an insurrectionist, who took lots of help from Russian intelligence agencies to win* the 2016 election, and tried to violently overturn the 2020 results. One other justice flies seditionist flags over his houses, and another has a wife who is an open seditionist.

It appears to me that the “conflicts” some people, mostly Republicans, are worried about are the absolutely entirely wrong conflicts.

Categories Accountability, Atlanta, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Georgia, Justice, Trump

Thom Hartmann: The 50-Year Trump MAGA Reich?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2024 //
26

Thom Hartmann says that Trump fans are dreaming of a 50-year MAGA reich:

Horrified critics blast Fox’s Ingraham for suggesting a 50-year MAGA reich is possible. If Trump wins, this will be referred to as the age of Trump,” Laura Ingraham told her Fox viewers, dreaming of a repeat of the kind of consequential presidency that stamps political eras. “He dominates the policy debate in ways that no one has done since Reagan. And if he picks a strong VP… this coalition could be in power for 50 years.” Ingraham — who I also once debated, at a Heritage Foundation event — could be right. If Trump becomes president this fall, he and his Project 2025 allies will transform America in ways that go far beyond FDR’s New Deal or Reagan’s war on working people. The Christian Taliban that has surrounded him will take over public school instruction and birth control policy, racist militias and skinheads will be running elections and immigration policy, the media will be finally and fully seized by rightwing oligarchs like in Russia and Hungary, unions and equality movements will be functionally outlawed, and Trump’s “enemies” (including reporters and commentators like yours truly) will end up in prison. Each of those things are already promised explicitly by Trump himself or part of the Project 2025 program for the next Republican presidency.

Categories Elections, Fascism, Trump

Jennifer Rubin: Which Candidate is “Fit” to be President?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2024 //
35

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin responded to a biased article in the Wall Street Journal that derided Biden’s fitness for the Presidency. Its primary sources: House Speaker Mike Johnson and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, both Trump lackeys.

Rubin wrote:

A president’s gait, verbal tics and minor recall errors have virtually nothing to do with the job of being president. The White House occupant is not a “Jeopardy!” contestant, a stand-up comic, a talk-show host or guest; the president is the head of the executive branch and commander in chief.

The job of being president is executive management, something with which political reporters (as opposed to business reporters) have virtually no expertise. We should be asking whether a candidate can absorb necessary details, make good personnel decisions, reach sound conclusions, evaluate risk and consider the consequences of actions. Can the president separate personal interests from the interests of the nation, of allies or even the planet? That is what the president does, day after day.

And we do not need to be armchair psychiatrists to evaluate that sort of presidential fitness. As I have written, Trump’s closest colleagues tell us that he is willfully ignorant, cannot grasp basic concepts, cannot absorb written material. As for his hiring decisions, by his own admission, he has hired a slew of dumb or incompetent people. He gloms on to ridiculous quack theories, and he channels the ideas and rhetoric of America’s enemies and of historical villains.

Trump cannot keep national secrets — or understand they are not “his.” He is incapable of grasping the values and ethos of military service. Because he is so susceptible to flattery and so thin-skinned, he cannot tell friend from foe. And as his former national security adviser John Bolton put it, “Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term.”

Part and parcel of good decision-making is impulse control. If one cannot refrain from lashing out in anger at allies, spilling secrets to U.S. enemies, or launching personal attacks and threats against fellow Americans (in defiance of court orders, no less), one cannot be entrusted with the immense responsibilities of the presidency. (There might also be something seriously wrong with you, but that is beside the point.)

Moreover, we know how Trump’s decision-making turned out. He downplayed the coronavirus, and hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily. He concocted the “big lie” about the 2020 election and, unable to admit losing, incited a riot at the U.S. Capitol. He didn’t want to reveal embarrassing sexual impropriety, so he broke the law in New York — 34 times.

You don’t need to make a specific medical diagnosis to see that the essential aspects of the presidency — judgment, reading comprehension, discretion, unselfish decision-making, appreciation for military sacrifice — are utterly beyond Trump.

At the most basic level, Biden, while three years older, can discern friend from foe, reveres the military, understands the value of alliances, generally hires capable advisers, puts together complex legislative deals and exhibits inexhaustible empathy for others’ suffering. He complies with the legal process (e.g., sitting down with special counsel Robert K. Hur), follows Supreme Court decisions (and then explores alternatives, as he did on student debt) and engages in successful international diplomacy. He talks in depth about policy.

It’s reasonable to conclude that, with age, Biden has gained immense experience, formed relationships and absorbed data that helps guide his current decision-making. Should we care that he walks more stiffly than he did 10 years ago? (FDR served 12 years in a wheelchair.)

In sum, the measure of a president — regardless of that officeholder’s level of spryness or eloquence — is the capacity to perform a singularly important job: making good decisions on behalf of others in keeping with our laws and national values. No reasonable person would conclude, based on all available evidence, that Trump can do so; no fair person would conclude that Biden’s age impedes him from doing so.

This article contains numerous links, none of which transferred to my blog. Please open the link to Rubin to see her extensive documentation.

Categories Bias, Biden, Character, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Trump

What Trump Promised to Do for Israel if He Is Elected

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2024 //
20

Haaretz, a prominent daily in Israel, has been very critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu and of his failure to make a deal for peace. More than once, the journal’s writers have suggested that Netanyahu hopes to continue the war until after the U.S. presidential election, hoping that Trump wins.

In 2016, Trump’s biggest donor was Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner. He and his wife Miriam gave $90 million to Trump. There was a deal. In return for the first $20 million, Trump promised to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. When Trump won, he did just that.

Adelson died in 2021. His widow has an even bigger ask: she wants Trump to let Israel annex the West Bank. The West Bank is supposed to be the heart of a new Palestinian state. If Israel annexes it, there will never be a Palestinian state. She has let it be known that she will give more money to Trump’s campaign than she and her husband gave last time.

If Trump is elected, it will be a tragedy for Israel, for the Palestinians, and for peace in the Middle East.

Categories Elections, Trump

Thom Hartmann: The Billionaires Supporting Trump Are Digging Their Own Graves

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2024 //
20

Thom Hartmann has a warning for the billionaires supporting Trump: You endanger yourself if he wins.

He writes:

America’s rightwing billionaires are freaked out about communism and, in their paranoia, they are funding and encouraging the rise of a form of fascism that will eventually turn on them, too. Will they wake up in time?

Louise and I just finished watching the extraordinary Showtime series, A Gentleman in Moscow, which takes place in the years and decades immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. A wealthy aristocrat (he was a count) is basically imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and has a front-row seat to observe how the well-intentioned revolt against the excesses of the Romanov dynasty turned into a brutal dictatorship, ultimately headed by a sociopathic Joseph Stalin. The banality of evil.

It flashed me back to the 1960s and a number of conversations I had as a young teenager with my father and heard on TV shows that we watched together like those moderated by William F. BuckleyJr. and Joe Pyne. The fear those days was that Soviet-style communists were plotting to take over America, confiscate all the wealth from the morbidly rich, and then line them up against a wall and shoot them as Lenin and his followers had done in Russia.

It was a fear that, at the time, seemed rational to many Americans.

Fred Koch, the founder of the Koch dynasty, had made his first big money “building refineries, training Communist engineers, and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure” for Stalin. He saw up close and personal how violent the USSR really was, and apparently never forgot it.

Koch Industries — and thus the Tea Party and the best of today’s Republican infrastructure — would never have happened were it not for the money Stalin gave Fred Koch for his services. Neither would the John Birch Society, which Koch heavily fundedin the wake of the “communist” Brown v BoardSupreme Court decision, have ever acquired the influence it did.

The Republican Party fully embraced anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s in a misplaced effort to regain political power after being shattered by the Republican Great Depression.  Republican rule (and Harding’s massive tax cuts) during the 1920-1932 era led directly to the Great Crash and everybody back then knew it; the GOP didn’t regain serious control of Congress until the 1990s, when most who could have remembered were dead.

Republican Senator Joe McCarthy led the charge in the 1950s, warning America that “communists” had infiltrated the Army and the State Department and were preparing to take over our country on behalf of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.

When I was 13, my father gave me a just-published book he’d gotten from a friend in the John Birch Society titled None Dare Call It Treason. A major national bestseller and political bible for Republicans and Birchers, it posited that the US State Department was riddled with communist sympathizers, largely based on circumstantial evidence and the “investigations” conducted a decade earlier by Senator Joe McCarthy.

There was no such conspiracy: the failures of communism were becoming evident, and Americans who publicly proclaimed the need for Soviet-style communism in the United States were few and far between. 

But that didn’t stop the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, from frequently and loudly suggesting to the press that there were millions of American communists just waiting to be activated by the right leader. It was one of his favorite ways to label, target, and disempower people like Martin Luther King Jr. and union leaders who were simply petitioning for civil or workers’ rights.

While today there may still be a few actual advocates of Soviet-style communism in the US, to quote Eisenhower about rich rightwingers, “their numbers are small and they are stupid.” But that reality hasn’t stopped as many as a hundred of America’s roughly 800 billionaires from claiming — and probably sincerely believing — that calls for social and economic justice really mean that one day liberals will rise up, come out about their secretly harbored communism, and do to the American rich what Lenin did to the wealthy in Russia in the second decade of the 20th century.

Their kneejerk reaction to progressive policies like high income taxes on the rich and strong social safety net policies for poor and working-class people has been to label those efforts as, essentially, early stage or camel’s-nose-under-the-tent communism. Out of that fear, they fund reactionary rightwing politicians like Trump and Johnson who promise to end the social safety net and keep their taxes below those of average working people.

This is an old model. Hitler rose to power promising to end the “threat of communism” in Germany: he went after communists before he went after Jews. As Pastor Niemöller famously wrote, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…”

Tragically, the result of the policies pushed by these reactionary, radical Republicans has been the opposite of what they say is their goal of stabilizing American society to ensure their own safety. Republican tax cuts have thrown the nation into over $34 trillion of debt, gutted the middle class, and produced a reactionary embrace of classical fascism as a solution to the crises of debt, offshoring jobs, and a lack of social and economic mobility.

Donald Trump is now promising to turn America into a “unified Reich.” 

As Les Leopold brilliantly points out, the main result of the 1980s Republican (and, to some extent, Democratic) embrace of neoliberal policies — driven in large part by the billionaire Davos set — has been to destabilize the American working class and drive them into the arms of the racist and neofascist movement that rose up and took over the GOP with the Trump presidency.

In that regard, the billionaires funding the Trump movement, Project 2025, etc., are now working against their own best interest. While Republican tax cuts and deregulation have produced an explosion of wealth at the top, they’ve also produced wealth inequality that’s led to an armed insurrectionist movement that threatens the kind of social and political instability that actually could lead to a civil war and a resulting Lenin-style backlash against the rich.

Robert Reich points out:

“813 US billionaires control a record $5.7 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans control $3.7 trillion in wealth. When ~800 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.”

In fact, the period from the end of WWII to the 1980s Reagan Revolution was one of the most stable — and successful — for American capitalism in our nation’s history. A top income tax bracket ranging from 91% to 74% that kicked in after a few million a year in today’s dollars, and clear laws against stock and wealth manipulation schemes like stock buybacks and private equity, caused a general and widely shared prosperity.

The working class grew in wealth at about the same rate as did the top one percent during that period before Reaganism gutted the union movement and thus the middle class; average workers with a good union job could buy a home and car, take an annual vacation, and put their kids through school with ease. When they reached old age, they had a good pension to supplement their Social Security, making retirement safe and comfortable.

That was, in fact, the story of my father, who spent his life working in a unionized tool and die shop in Lansing, Michigan. It was the story of every family I knew growing up in a working class neighborhood that was rapidly transitioning into a healthy middle class.

Nonetheless, Reagan and the billionaires financing him were convinced the union movement and calls to expand anti-poverty programs initiated by LBJ’s Great Society were the leading edge of a communist takeover that would ruin America and endanger the lives of the morbidly rich. The result of their paranoid policies is the social and economic wreckage of the middle class that drives today’s militia movements and is exploited by rightwing hate radio, Fox “News,” and similar outlets.

It’s not like we weren’t warned. Back in 1776, Adam Smith wrote in his remarkable tome on economics, The Wealth of Nations, exactly how rich people following their own greed inevitably destroy the very society from which they extract profits unless that society establishes strong guardrails to protect itself from them.

He argued that in “rich” countries — where the public good is well administered and there’s a more general prosperity — profits are ample to satisfy the business owners needs, but not excessive. When the rich seize control of most of the profits and wealth, however, and thus have the power to exploit society, he said, they always drive nations into poverty and ruin:

“But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.”

This year, America saw the highest level of corporate profit in the history of this country, and perhaps in the history of capitalism in developed countries worldwide. 

A few sentences later, Smith elaborates:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this [wealthy] order [of men], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.

“It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

The simple reality is that markets, like traffic, work best when they’re appropriately well-regulated. The idea of a “free market” is as absurd as the idea of “free traffic” where everybody is welcome to ignore red lights, traffic lanes, and stop signs. It’s a rhetorical device designed to make average Americans accept changes in the rules regulating capitalism that will benefit the profits of the top one percent and nobody else. 

And it’s killing us.

The European, Asian, and Canadian experience of the past 80 years or so has shown that strong union movements, a healthy social safety net (Medicare for All, free or inexpensive college, support for the deeply poor), and legislatures that answer to voters instead of donors (with strict regulation of money in politics) almost always produce general prosperity and social stability.

It’s why the “socialist” nations of Scandinavia — with the strongest union movements, highest income taxes on the rich, and most all-inclusive social safety nets — consistently rate among the happiest nations in the world. None are considering flipping into the Soviet model that fills the nightmares of so many of America’s rightwing billionaires.

While the rise of authoritarianism in post-revolutionary Russia is usually posited as a warning against communism’s forcible redistribution of wealth, in fact it’s a warning against any sort of authoritarianism. It proves that both the extreme left and the extreme right — communists and fascists — must embrace violence and terror to impose their will on a nation’s people.

In that regard, America’s billionaires — along with the rest of us — should be every bit as frightened of the avatars of fascism like Trump, Bannon, and Orbán as they are of the ghosts of the long-dead USSR.

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Trump

Mary Trump: Uncle Sam or the Crazy Convicted Felon Uncle?

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2024 //
30

Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, has repeatedly warned about the dangerous character of her uncle. She wrote the national bestseller Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

She wrote on her blog today:

In the wake of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, I’m reminded just how stark the choice before us is—on the one hand, a man who understands sacrifice and honors service, on the other one who, after strenuously avoiding his own service calls those who died fighting for democracy “suckers” and “losers” and then turns around, as he did last Saturday, and says, telling the truth for once, “unless you are a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?”

Well, Donald, according to your former Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, you would—and you did.

Last Saturday also marked 150 days until Election Day, which means we now have 145 days to save this country. Just as in 2020, we are on a knife’s edge in the choice between democracy and what we can now clearly say is fascism. (Back in the more innocent days of the fall of 2020, we were still calling it autocracy.) The difference now, of course, is that the edge of the knife is even thinner, the stakes higher, and the electorate by turns more misinformed, more checked out, and more demoralized than we were almost four years ago. And all of us continue to be traumatized to one degree or another, a fact that is barely acknowledged. 

So, what do we do? I think the first thing we must do, is to make clear to Americans exactly what they’re choosing between — Uncle Sam or the crazy uncle who wants to burn it all down.

Uncle Sam, representative of the best of what America aspires to, was well-represented last weekend in Normandy, France, where President Biden traveled to pay his, and our, respects to the original Antifa activists — the brave allied soldiers who stormed the beaches to liberate a continent and save the world from the dark forces of fascism which the other uncle is currently stoking. 

While in France, President Joe Biden visited the Aisne-Marne, the American cemetery in France where many of our heroes are buried. Five years ago, my convicted felon uncle refused to go to Aisne-Marne because it was raining. He didn’t want to mess up his hair. Seriously. But, much worse, he didn’t see the point in wasting his time going to see the aforementioned “suckers” and “losers”—those whose bravery helped turn the tide against the Third Reich.

Joe Biden reminded the world what American leadership and courage look like. He reminded the world of the power of alliances. He reminded the world what is best about America. Every day, my convicted felon uncle holds up a mirror to the worst of us, and it’s long past time people start looking—really looking—at what is reflected there.

While President Biden stood with our allies and argued that the United States should continue to lead the fight against fascism, my convicted felon uncle was being interviewed by “Dr.” Phil McGraw and Sean Hannity, altogether three of the greatest examples of white men failing up in American, and he made it clear that one of the driving forces behind his wanting to be president again is “revenge.” He wants to be free and clear to go after his political enemies. Although the two sycophants tried mightily to steer Donald away from the subject, he could not be dissuaded—and he couldn’t have been more clear:

“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” he told McGraw

“I would have every right to go after them,” he told Hannity.

We are reminded every day that convicted felon Donald Trump hates America — he hates its people, its ideals, its democracy, its judicial system, its leaders, its rule of law. He even hates his own followers. At Saturday’s rally, he came right out and admitted it: “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote.” That he openly courts and aligns himself with the same forces we defeated in Europe 80 years ago makes it all so much worse.

Joe Biden has pulled us out of the hole we were in thanks to the Trump administration’s horrific and willful mishandling of the pandemic and the economic collapse that ensued; he has restored our standing in the world; he honors the memories of those who sacrificed everything so that our democracy might endure. My uncle, the convicted felon, honors nothing and he will continue to rally the darkest forces—that he himself has lifted from their hiding places—to erase those memories and render those sacrifices meaningless. 

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a normal election. In 146 days, Americans are going to choose what kind of country we want to be going forward. Will it be the same country that fought on those beaches against the evil of tyranny and fascism? Or will we choose to align the most powerful country in history with the malicious designs of the enemies we risked so much to vanquish?

There is a palpable sense of fear among the good guys these days. In Europe, our allies wonder who we are. At home, we wonder the same. Are we the good guys or the bad guys? Are we aligned with Uncle Sam or the uncle who can’t seem to speak without lying or act without committing crimes against our country and our Constitution? In just a few months, we will know. 

I believe in the America Joe Biden and his party represents. I believe our best chance forward is to make sure the administration stays in Democratic hands, we increase the Democrat’s Senate majority, and make sure we take over the House. Overall, we are a good people, striving to do better. I believe we are better than my convicted felon uncle and the hatred he espouses and inspires.

America has won this fight before. In 146 days, we can win it again.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump
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