Greg Olear noticed Jared Kushner’s new role as a financier and his success at staying far, far away from his father-in-law’s trial in New York City. He also noticed that Jared had replaced Michael Cohen as Trump’s liaison with David Pecker and the National Enquirer. Naturally, he wonders why Jared is not being called to testify.
Archives for category: Trump
Rick Wilson, a Never-Trump Republican and a founder of The Lincoln Project, warns about the danger of normalizing Trump:
I’m seeing a lot of traditional, DC “bothsides” reporting lately, arguing that this is at some level a “normal” election between a center-left Democratic party and a center-right Republican party.
This morning, Axios published a piece by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei titled “Behind the Curtain: America’s reality distortion machine,” which caused a stir in political media circles.
It leads out with a question: “Here’s a wild thought experiment: What if we’ve been deceived into thinking we’re more divided, more dysfunctional, and more defeated than we actually are?” and proceeds to make some pretty good arguments about why we’re not a dystopian hellscape. I think they missed the big point, and this piece will stand out as a Washington Normalcy Bias exemplar for a long time.
My friend Molly Jong-Fast lit them up on Morning Joe,
She had precisely the right response: “But you understand that the conventional framing elevates the autocrat.”
No, not every American — in fact, not even a majority — is locked in the day to day of political struggle. Yes, there are silos. Yes, the algorithmic hypnosis of social media is real.
I cede all those points. America is a nation filled with hundreds of millions of people who aren’t partisan jihadis, left or right. There really is a desire for basic decency, decoupled from political rage, induced or not.
They’re not wrong to make these points, and the America they describe is one we should crave—not being involved in politics every moment of the day is a luxury only present in stable democracies.
But they ignore the existential issue underpinning this all.
We aren’t in a nation where the sensible center will survive if Donald Trump wins.
Only one side of the political argument wants their president to govern like a dictator. Only one side believes that the President is above the law — if his name is Donald Trump. Only one side of the political equation mounted an armed attack on the United States Capitol.
Only one side has welcomed the “no enemies to our right” philosophy, which means their party winks and nods at the alt-reich, the white nationalists, and the rest of the Daily Stormer crowd. Only one side is banning books, diving deeply into the seas of culture war cruelty and persecution.
Only one side backs America’s enemies abroad and promises to hand Europe over to Vladimir Putin on a plate. I could recite the Bill of Condemnation all day, but you understand the point.
The political movement that embraces the aforementioned horrors is MAGA, and its sole leader is Donald Trump.
Once again, the world is playing chess, and Donald Trump is eating the pieces and crapping on the board, and instead of horror, the reaction is a shrug.
This isn’t a regular election with typical outcomes.
Ordinary people living ordinary lives who think politics doesn’t matter and that the world will go on as it has can’t grapple with what happens in a post-American Presidency. It seems a lot of Washington reporters can’t either.
Normalcy bias is the best friend of authoritarians. If you think the algo-driven bubble on social media is robust, nothing tops normalcy bias. This cognitive bias can play into the hands of authoritarian regimes or leaders in a few ways:
It plays to the natural tendency for people to underestimate the possibility of a disaster, dictator, or disruptive event coming to the fore. It lets people assume that things will continue as normal because they’ve always been that way. (Berlin, 1936, anyone?)
It lulls people into complacency: they assume things will continue as they always have, and like frogs boiling in a slow pot, they may fail to recognize creeping authoritarianism and the erosion of democratic norms and civil liberties until it’s too late.
It makes people—even people reporting on it professionally—miss clear signals that a movement or regime is becoming more authoritarian, even when its leaders lay out their plans in broad daylight.
Once you say, “It can’t happen here,” there’s a high likelihood it’s already happening.
The normalcy bias makes people slow to react and resist authoritarian encroachments because they don’t perceive the seriousness of the threat until it’s too late.
Normalcy bias also rears its ugly head after the damage is done. Authoritarian actions are emergencies, you see. “The Caravan! Antifa! Transing the kids!” demand temporary measures lulling citizens into acceptance of the worst…and the temporary measures seem to last forever.
People convinced that the current system is immutable are less likely to make contingency plans or organize resistance against potential authoritarianism taking root. Trust me, the Never Trump folks screaming into the void for the last decade can tell you all about this one.
It’s tempting to hope that societal inertia in the center will overcome the energy and danger on the MAGA flank.
It hasn’t, and it won’t.
Will Bunch is the national political columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He attended a Trump rally recently, where he was more interested in the crowd than in the speaker. Who are the true believers who swear fealty to a man who tried to o return the 2020 election? To the man facing multiple indictments? To a billionaire who sells them sneakers and Bibles?
SCHNECKSVILLE — Even 30-mile-an-hour wind gusts whipping down from the nearby Poconos couldn’t move the bubble of Donald Trump-scented awe and alternative reality that descended on this hilltop village for about eight hours on Saturday.
And the thousands who waited hours on a single-file line that snaked around the fire department and a nearby technical college, like the endless headlights in the climax of Field of Dreams, did not want that bubble pierced by any stray jabs to remind them that Trump, who finally addressed the frigid crowd after sunset, is a criminal defendant or that Joe Biden isn’t actually America’s worst-ever president driving the nation into crime and deprivation.
Ask the one man who dared try.
He was an older gentleman from New Jersey, bespectacled, wearing an “ARMY” sweatshirt and a red Make America Great Again hat to show the multitudes of passersby that he’d once been one of them. He wouldn’t give his name, and his cause — Trump was somehow to blame for the prison time served by the Jan. 6 insurrectionist Jacob Chansley, “the QAnon Shaman” — was inscrutable. But any questioning of Trump was too much for one man in a backward baseball cap brandishing a can of Michelob Ultra, who abruptly hopped out of the line.
“I don’t like that. Get that sign out of here!” he threatened, as several on the line echoed their support. “You need to leave the immediate area.” The New Jersey man eventually slid down the line.
This Schnecksville extravaganza was the fourth Trump rally in the Mid-Atlantic that I’d attended since 2016. I go largely because I think the media still fails to understand America’s most important story of the last 10 years. U.S. democracy is staring out into the abyss not so much because of the narcissistic bluster of one alleged billionaire ex-president, but because of the people with fleece hoodies over their MAGA hats who spent hours in an April windstorm to see him.
These rallygoers are the vanguard of the 74 million who voted for Trump in 2020 and who still have him in a dead heat with Biden, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released hours before the event — despite or maybe because of the two impeachments, the 88 felony charges, or the Project 2025 blueprint for a “Red Caesar” dictatorship. If the American Experiment grinds to a halt after Jan. 20, 2025, it will ultimately be not the fault of Trump but the everyday citizens I met Saturday who are so eager to put him back in the White House.
Things have changed a lot since I talked to folks outside of Trump’s 2016 rally in Chester County, when they were intrigued by Trump’s not-a-politician bluster and his “get-’em-out-of-here” rage at liberal protesters. Eight years later, a Trump rally has become an Orwellian celebration of an upside-down world where the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years is actually the worst U.S. economy ever, the nation’s cities are cesspools of violence despite a plunging crime rate, and the only person wronged on Jan. 6 was not the scores of injured cops but Ashli Babbitt, shot by “a Black police officer.”
Thom Hartmann reports on the growing numbers of nations that have rejected democracy and accepted authoritarian rule. The Republican Party, he notes, has pledged its loyalty to an authoritarian leader, accepted his lies about the 2020 elections, and is abandoning Ukraine to please him. Shockingly, very few elected Republicans have stood up to Trump; the few that did are no longer in office.
He writes:
Democracy is in trouble, and the Russian/Ukrainian conflict highlights how imperiled it is becoming in the 21st century. The real issue in Ukraine isn’t just land, any more than the real issue in the US is abortion: that’s all the activity on the surface.
What’s grinding away below the surface, however, is the erosion or outright destruction of democracy itself, whether by invasion from without or corruption from within.
Ukraine and Taiwan represent possible tipping points for democracy internationally, while Republicans passing laws that allow politicians to ignore the results of elections — and Republicans in the US House have refused to stand up for a fellow democracy for 16 months now — could be a tipping point here.
Around the world, and in America today, there are nations and politicians who do believe that democracy — governance via the will of the majority, carried out by elected representatives — is the best form of government for a republic.
At the same time, however, there are many who give lip service to democracy to accomplish their political ends but, in reality, believe that authoritarianism and oligarchy are better ways to rule a nation and keep peace around the world.
And that movement toward authoritarianism and away from democracy is growing.
Freedom House reported in 2021 that:
“[T]he share of countries designated Not Free has reached its highest level since the deterioration of democracy began in 2006, and countries with declines in political rights and civil liberties outnumbered those with gains by the largest margin recorded during the 15-year period. The report downgraded the freedom scores of 73 countries, representing 75 percent of the global population.”
One of those countries they identified as a place where democracy itself is under assault is the USA, where virtually the entire Republican Party has rejected supporting democracy at home and supporting democratic governments abroad.
While this may seem like it’s just a conflict between Russia and the US/Europe, what’s really at stake here is a much, much larger issue.
The real question at the core of the Ukraine conflict, as well as the geopolitical and domestic political positions taken by Fox “News” and many in the GOP, is simple and straightforward:
“What’s the best way for humans to govern themselves?”
The real issue in the Russia-Ukraine and the China-Taiwan (among others) conflicts is that core question of what form of government is best.
Both Ukraine and Taiwan are asserting that democracy is the best way for humans to govern themselves; Russia and China (and about half the other countries of the world) believe they know better — and that history is on their side.
Who’s right?
Is democracy viable and natural, the “best” form of human governance, or is it a weak attempt to accomplish do-gooder goals that simply aren’t realistic or, even worse, are violations of natural law and/or human nature?
Strongman authoritarian regimes, theocracies, and dynastic empires run by ruling families or landowning cliques have been the “norm” for most of the last 7000 years of “modern” human history.
Is that proof, as many on the hard right argue, that the “experiment” of democracy is unnatural and therefore doomed to failure? Should we let Trump overthrow democracy and establish authoritarian rule here in the US? Has the “American experiment” run its course?…
Virtually the entire Republican Party is now committed to authoritarianism instead of democracy. Not even one single Republican senator was willing to vote to guarantee free and fair elections when the We, the People legislation was before Congress, and the party is using Trump’s “stolen election” lie to undermine and ultimately end democracy at the state level.
Right now they are embracing Vladimir Putin instead of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of our Democratic ally. The Putin Caucus in the House is willing to overturn Mike Johnson‘s speakership in service of Putin.
The few former Republican holdouts, like Kinzinger and Cheney, are the exceptions that prove this rule: the GOP is no longer a political party that holds what most of the world has always thought to be “American values.”
They’ve joined the side of Russia and China in this debate, openly asserting that political power should flow from the top down; in our country’s case, they’ve embraced a ruling class of morbidly rich American oligarchs.
A “hot” war across greater Europe may be on the way if Ukraine falls, perhaps followed by China seizing Taiwan once the precedent of “reclaiming former territories” has been set.
This debate about how humans should govern themselves is the real battle of our time, both metaphorically and literally, both internationally and right here at home.
It’s being fought across social media, battled in the billions spent on elections, and even in state and local governments across the US as authoritarian politicians work to keep minorities, young people, women, and LGBTQ+ people “in their place” and away from the voting booth.
No matter how the crisis in Ukraine works out, the underlying dispute will remain: should humans govern themselves democratically from the ground up, or with oligarchy from the top down?
The future of democracy is hanging in the balance, not just in Ukraine and Taiwan but here in the US, as well.
Please open the link to read this article in full.
Please watch this episode of “The Daily Show,” which aired on April 15.
Jon Stewart is in rare form!
Trump’s description of the Battle of Gettysburg is a classic. Don’t miss it.
Jay Kuo interviewed John D. Gartner, psychologist and psychotherapist, who leads a group called Duty to Warn. The group consists of mental health professionals who are concerned about Trump’s cognitive decline. Gartner told Kuo: there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia.
I’m offering excerpts from this fascinating interview.
Kuo asks, Gartner answers:
We hear a lot about Biden’s age and gaffes, to the point where most Americans cite Biden’s age but not Trump’s as a big issue for the election, even though they are only three years apart. Based on what you and other experts have observed, why are you sounding the alarm about Trump, but not about Biden?
I call it the “double lie.” Pathologizing Biden’s normal aging is the first lie. Normalizing Trump’s dementia is the second. The sorts of small lapses we’ve seen in Biden are part and parcel of normal aging. Forgetting names and dates doesn’t make us seniors less competent. What we lack in memory we more than make up for in judgment, experience, and wisdom. Other cultures revere their elders, but America in 2024 mocks and devalues theirs. The problem isn’t old people in government—the dreaded “gerontocracy.” It’s age-ism.
Joe Biden’s calling the current president of France by the old president of France’s name is like me calling my youngest daughter by my oldest daughter’s name, which I do all the time. When I get together with my fellow senior citizens, the topic of forgetting often comes up. Sure, I forget names and even appointments sometimes. But I’m a better psychologist now than I’ve ever been. I actually pity the patients who had the young Dr. Gartner. He didn’t know anything, and, honestly, I can’t even imagine why anyone paid him. I would argue that Biden, too, has objectively performed well at his job, despite, or maybe even because, of his age. Don’t judge us senior citizens by how fast we walk, or if we stumble over a name or two. Judge us by our performance.
And hello. Forgetting the name of the president of France isn’t the same as thinking Obama is president or that Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi are one person. Can we introduce a sense of proportion and some common sense here?…
Here are some of Gartner’s examples of Trump’s strange language in public:
Trump shows formal signs of disordered speech we typically see only in organically impaired dementia patients:
A) “phonemic aphasia”
Trump uses non-words in place of real words, that usually include a fragment of the actual word. For example saying “mishuz” instead of missile, or “Chrishus” instead of Christmas. You can look at supercut reels assembled by Ron Filipkowski on Twitter, The Daily Show, and now by the Democratic House Judiciary Committee, as well. Both Chairman Nadler and Rep. Swalwellshowed their own supercuts of Trump’s cognitive decline at the Hur hearings, to counteract Hur’s partisan slur about Biden’s “poor memory.”
To demonstrate how pervasive these errors are, I present this long but far from exhaustive list of Trump’s phonemic aphasias:
“President U-licious S Grant” (For Ulysses S. Grant)
“space-capsicle” (for space capsule)
“combat infantroopen”(for combat infantry)
“sahhven country”(for sovereign country)
“renoversh” (For renovations)
“Anonmmiss” (for anonymous).
“transpants” (for transplants)
“lawmarkers” (for lawmakers)
“supply churn” (for supply chain)
“Rusher” (for Russia)
“raydoh” (for radio)
“Liberal-ation (for liberation”)
“benefishers” (for benificiaries)
“con-ducking” (for conducting)
“stat-tics, suh-tic-six” (for statistics)
“crimakle” (for criminal)
“armed forsiva” (for armed forces)
“internate” (for Internet)
“transjija” (for transition)
“stanktuary” (for sanctuary)
That last example took place during Trump’s State of the Union Address, just to contrast that with the SOTU we just witnessed. In recent rallies in GA, NC, and VA over the course of just a few days Trump evidenced more examples:
“We have becrumb a nation”
“All comp-ply-ments” to Joe Biden.
“I know Poten.”
“He can’t cam-pay. He can’t campaign.”
“We will expel the wald-mongers.”
But of course, this is exactly what we should expect. As he deteriorates, these deficits will make themselves apparent more and more often. Now he can’t get through a rally without an example. Cornell psychologist Harry Segal speculated Trump may be “sundowning” and hence most vulnerable to going off the rails at night-time rallies.
Some have argued that Trump’s impaired speech could be an articulation problem, rather than a brain problem. Some have argued he could be slurring from a variety of causes, from loose dentures to drug toxicity (indeed many have speculated that Trump might be abusing or even snorting Adderall or some other stimulant.)
But all those competing explanations are disproven by one fact. Trump commits these aphasic errors in his written posts, as well, proving the problem is in his brain, not his articulation.
For example, he recently posted:
“Joe Buden DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES”
B) “Semantic aphasia”
Semantic aphasia is using a real word, but in a way that doesn’t correspond to its meaning. For example, when Trump referred to the “oranges of the investigation.” Another example would be “midtown and midturn elections.” Recently, when apparently trying to say “three years later,” Trump said:
“Three years, lady, lady, lady.”
More recently Trump said at a rally:
“We’re going to protect pro-God…”
In mid-sentence he goes blank and looks at the ceiling. When he reboots, the words he uses to complete the sentence don’t make sense:
“…context and content.”
C) Complete loss of all verbal language
Like an infant sometimes, Trump just makes sounds:
“Gang boong. This is me. I hear bing.”
Until finally, he is reduced to silence.
“Saudi Arabia and Russia will re-ve-du. Ohhh…”
Trump’s face went blank, followed by a sigh, and a silent pause while he looked at the ceiling.
D) Tangential Thinking
Trump evidences “tangential thinking” where he drifts from one unrelated thought fragment to another, and sometimes tries to “confabulate” them into a story. But the narrative is literally incoherent. When the press describes Trump’s speeches as “rambling,” they are gaslighting us with a euphemistic word that normalizes the grossly abnormal. Trump regularly degenerates into
incomprehensible strings of words.
Just recently outside a New York courtroom, Trump declared:
“We can’t have an election in the middle of a political season. We just had Super Tuesday. And we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already.”
Other examples would be:
“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”
“I could tell you about aircraft carriers, where they use electric catapults. They couldn’t go to the steam, which works better for about 1/100th the price, you know? The electric catapult, you know that story? I could tell you about the elevators on a tremendous carrier, the Gerald Ford, and they decided not to use hydraulic like the John Deere tractor, they decided to use magnets, ‘we’re gonna use magnets!’ to lift up the elevators with seven planes.”
In a recent string of rallies in GA, SC, and VA he said:
“They say I’m cognitively impaired. I’m not cognitively.”
“They don’t want illegal immigrants knocking on their front door and saying I’m going to use your kitchen. And I’m going to use your bedroom and there’s not a damn thing. And that’s the nice ones, okay?”
“They raided my house in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, they raided. With no raid, they had no reason to do so.”
Some of his utterances are incomprehensible for a different reason. They suggest Trump is so disoriented he’s occupying a different reality than everyone else.
For example:
“They’re weaponizing law enforcement for high-level interference against Joe Biden’s top and only political appointment. A guy named me. A guy named me.”
At a recent rally, he said:
“Biden beat Barack Hussein Obama. Ever heard of him?”
Biden never beat Obama. So we have to conclude that Trump is confused about basic reality, and living in a different reality that changes unpredictably. When a confused patient is evaluated in an emergency room, a standard psychiatric question to determine if a patient is disoriented is:
“Who is President of the United States?”
If you get that wrong the most probable explanations are dementia, psychosis or drug toxicity, and most probably you’d be admitted for observation in any case.
From Diane: since writing this post, I saw this clip of Trump speaking about the border. Please watch it.
It’s a tweet from Republicans Against Trump.
Donald Trump on the border crisis:
“People are pouring over. It’s sort of known as Steak Mountain. Steak Hill. Snake. Snakes…a lot of snakes…rattlesnakes…”
Drew Harrell of The Washington Post published a sad article about the Trump devotees who have put their life savings into his DJT stock offering and have no concerns about its value or its future. They are so certain that he is a financial genius that they expect the stock to soar, once the “liberals” stop depressing its market price.
Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said.
That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price dropped from $66 after its public debut last month to $32 on Friday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more.
“I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”
For shareholders like McLain, investing in Truth Social is less a business calculation than a statement of faith in the former president and the business traded under his initials, DJT.
Even the company’s plunging stock price — and the chance their investments could get mostly wiped out — doesn’t seem to have shaken that faith. The company has lost $3.5 billion in value since its public debut last month.
As a business, Trump Media has largely underwhelmed: The company lost $58 million last year on $4 million in revenue, less than the average Chick-fil-A franchise, even as it paid out millions in executive salaries, bonuses and stock.
And in two years, Truth Social has attracted a tiny fraction of the traffic other platforms see, according to estimates from the analytics firm Similarweb — one of the only ways to measure its performance, given that the company says it “does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries.”
But for some Trump investors, the stock is a badge of honor — a way to show their devotion beyond buying Trump merchandise, visiting Trump golf courses or donating to Trump’s presidential campaign….
Trump Media has boasted that it has benefited from a flood of “retail investors” — small-time and amateur shareholders betting their personal cash. Its merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, said its shares were bought by nearly 400,000 retail investors, and Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that the company had added over 200,000 new ones in the past couple of weeks.
“There’s not another company out there that has retail investors like this,” said Nunes, who this year will receive a $1 million salary, a $600,000 retention bonus and a stock package currently worth $3.7 million…
One investor said “the recent drops in share price have been the result of “stock manipulation” from an “organized effort” to make the company look bad. There’s no proof of such a campaign, but Schlanger is convinced. “It’s got to be political,” he said, from all the “liberals that are trying to knock it down…”
After the billionaire media mogul Barry Diller called Trump Media a “scam” stock bought by “dopes,” one account, @Handbag72, claimed to have bought more shares, arguing Diller didn’t “get it” or was “at risk of [losing] $$$$.” The next day, the account shared a 2021 blog post from the investing forum Seeking Alpha saying Truth Social could be worth $1 trillion in the next 10 years.
Soon after it was launched March 26 on NASDAQ, the stock reached $79. By last Monday, it had fallen to $26.61, after news broke that DJT intends to issue millions of additional shares, which would dilute the value of the original shares.
Bibles, sneakers, perfume, wine, steaks, now stocks. Trump will keep selling, and his cult will keep buying.
Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington pursues the facts about corruption in federal government. Lately, CREW has zeroed in on the potential for corruption in the launch of Trump’s new media company. So far, not a good investment. Trump owns more than half the stock, which he got for free. The stock opened at $78 and plummeted. On Friday it stood at $32.59.
CREW recently distributed this notice:
Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), a so-called blank-check company also known as a SPAC, last Friday officially merged with Donald Trump’s Truth Social, providing a massive cash infusion for the company. It also provided a lifeline for Trump himself, at a time when he desperately needs cash because he needs to post bonds for huge penalties in civil lawsuits.
Immediately, we wanted to figure out who had invested in Trump’s newly public company.
CREW got to work and uncovered the biggest institutional investor in DWAC: Susquehanna International Group LLP, which was co-founded by GOP megadonor Jeffrey Yass.
Yass is a major investor in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, and he recently faced scrutiny for meeting with Trump shortly before Trump changed his mind about banning TikTok. For Trump, this was a huge reversal that is quite beneficial for Yass.
Then we dug a little deeper and learned that Yass is worth $28 billion, is the single biggest political donor in the U.S. this cycle—and is also reportedly in the running to become Trump’s Treasury Secretary if he wins a second term.
This deal just gave Donald Trump a massive financial lifeline. And it opened up an even easier way to potentially influence Donald Trump.
The Yass connection raises enough alarm bells on his own, but the issue is even bigger. Trump taking his company public creates the opportunity for anyone who wants influence with Trump to buy stock in DJT. (Literally, that’s what they’re calling it.)
The value of the stock is widely understood to be massively inflated, with the true draw being the chance to invest in Trump himself. What if a foreign sovereign wealth fund invests? What if a person who wants a pardon invests? There’s nothing preventing either scenario.
As Trump runs for the presidency again, he’s cashing in from a publicly traded company. That is an ethics nightmare.
My comment:
Do you remember Jeff Yass? He went to New York City public schools. After college, he joined the financial industry, where he has been a great success. He is the richest person in Pennsylvania. He supports Trump. He opposes abortion. He supports charter schools and vouchers. “The Center for Education Reform” awards cash prizes annually called the Yass Prize. Most of the winners are charter schools. The top prize is $1 million. In 2022, the Capitol Prep Charter Schools was a finalist. The school in Harlem was launched by Dr. Steve Perry and Sean “Diddy” Coombs. In addition, Yass gave Texas Governor Greg Abbott $6 million to get the Legislature to enact a voucher plan. Abbott used the money to run radical right wingers to run against moderate Republicans who opposed vouchers.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
PO Box 14596
Washington, DC 20044
United States
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was interviewed by Christiane Amsnpour, who asked him what he thought about Trump’s views on abortion.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University, who specializes in Italian history and the history of authoritarianism. She frequently appears on network television and writes a blog called Lucid. This article was written in 2021 but remains timely. Both Trump and the Republican Party project their intentions on the other side.
She wrote:
“Biden is an authoritarian,” warned Fox News on Sept. 11, responding to President Joe Biden’s announcement that vaccinations or weekly Covid-19 testing would be required for employees of large businesses.
No matter that Fox News has had a similar policy in place for months. Propaganda isn’t about logic, but about evoking emotions. And in 2021 America, the Republican charge that Democrats are out to take away our liberty is just too effective at triggering anger and fear.
That’s why Republicans and their allies are investing massive time and energy in circulating this political fiction. The alleged threat posed by “left-wing authoritarianism,” and by Biden as a dictator in the making, are now central talking points for the GOP and its media, religious, and political allies.
It may be tempting to dismiss such rhetoric. Biden is hardly a man of the left, and he has made the defense of democracy against autocracy a theme of his foreign policy speeches. Yet we need to take this phony argument seriously. It is designed to take polarization to the next level, by peddling the idea that Commies/Radical Lefties are out to destroy free will, spiritual life, and civilization as we know it. It is designed to depict Biden as an existential threat and foster survivalist thinking. And what do you do to survive? Anything necessary.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans have a formidable media machine that dispenses disinformation such as this to hundreds of millions every day. They know that propaganda works through repetition, but for maximum impact different sectors of society should deliver the same message, with small variations that cater to the tastes of their constituencies. That’s what’s happening right now with the “Biden as authoritarian” line.
Fox News hammers home the threat of socialism almost daily, providing a frame for its audience to interpret every Biden action. The president’s public welfare measures, like subsidies to mitigate the pandemic’s economic effects, become socialist handouts. And mask and vaccine mandates, which follow best public health practices, are evidence for millions that Biden is the Adolf Hitler of our times.
Fox also trots out survivors of state socialism in Eastern Europe, like Rebekah Koffler, to warn that political correctness, intolerance of religious feeling, and education in schools about “sex-related garbage” (presumably sexual diversity and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals) portend the development of socialism in America.
Meanwhile, right-wing ideologues like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin provide intellectual cover with books like The Authoritarian Moment and American Marxism, the latter of which debuted at the No.1 slot for non-fiction hardcover on the New York Times bestseller list, selling 400,000 in its first week of release.
Faith leaders who support Donald Trump’s sham “stolen election” claims give their twist on the Biden-as-Duce talking point. Evangelical and nondenominational Christians preach the necessity of a spiritual crusade against a Marxist materialist who has seized power. And GOP politicians like Rep. Madison Cawthorn use a term associated with dictatorship to refer to individuals who were arrested for participating in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol: “political prisoners.”
The message that Biden is an authoritarian could lead to more armed actions à la Jan. 6. This is the solution alluded to in a May open letter by 124 retired military and national security officials. It urged Americans to act to “save the nation” from the danger represented by “a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyranny” –that being their characterization of Biden’s administration. Shutting down democracy to supposedly save democracy is in the best tradition of authoritarian takeovers and coups.
This talking point will escalate in 2021-2022. The more authoritarian the GOP becomes —criminalizing protest, suppressing voting, LBGTQ+ and reproductive rights, discarding the rule of law, and embracing violence— the more it will have to label Democrats as the freedom-wreckers.
Democrats must address this head-on, exposing the idea that Biden is an authoritarian as a phony talking point in their public declarations. Unified messaging on this point is key. Because the specter of an imminent left-wing takeover will be haunting American politics, threatening our democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 