Moms will not be intimidated by thugs without name tags in unmarked cars or by tear gas.
Archives for category: Trump
Here is the Lincoln Project’s latest video: We will vote. We must vote to oust the worst president in American history.
Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin writes in The New Yorker that Trump’s pardon of convicted felon Roger Stone proves that Trump is worse than Nixon. Nixon worries about appearances. Trump never does. Trump is shameless. He flaunts his lack of ethics and his complete indifference to norms.
On March 21, 1973, President Richard Nixon and John Dean, the White House counsel, conferred in the Oval Office about ways to keep the Watergate scandal from consuming the Administration. The two men weighed the possibility of a pardon or commutation for E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars. “Hunt’s now demanding clemency or he’s going to blow,” Dean said. “And, politically, it’d be impossible for, you know, you to do it.” Nixon agreed: “That’s right.” Dean continued, “I’m not sure that you’ll ever be able to deliver on clemency. It may be just too hot.” Neither Nixon nor Dean had especially refined senses of morality or legal ethics, but even they seemed to understand that a President could not use his pardon power to erase charges against someone who might offer testimony implicating Nixon himself in a crime. To do so, they recognized, would be too unseemly, too transparent, too egregiously corrupt. And, in fact, Nixon never gave a pardon, or commuted a sentence, of anyone implicated in the Watergate scandal.
But, on Friday night, Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of Roger Stone, his associate and political mentor of more than three decades. Last year, Stone was convicted of obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, and witness tampering in a case brought by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. William Barr, the Attorney General, had already overridden the sentencing recommendation of the prosecutors who tried the case—a nearly unprecedented act—and Stone was ultimately sentenced to forty months in prison. But Barr’s unseemly interference in the case was somehow not enough for the President, so Trump made sure that Stone would serve no time at all. The only trace of shame in Trump’s announcement was that he delivered it on a Friday night—supposedly when the public is least attentive.
Ron Berler writes about education. This article originally appeared at Medium. He originally wrote the article at the beginning of Trump’s presidency but thinks it resonates today.
It was the Friday before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Kathryn Frey had decided to read Carmen Agra Deedy’s children’s book, “The Yellow Star: The Legend of King Christian X of Denmark,” to her fourth-grade, Greenwich, Conn., class. It tells a tale of how the king and his countrymen protected that nation’s Jews from Nazi persecution during World War II.
Frey teaches at New Lebanon School, one of the town’s three Title I elementary schools. Some know Greenwich as a tony New York suburb. But one corner of it is not. In her class of 18, there are 14 Latinos, two African Americans and two whites. Seventeen are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Frey was sick that day, so I was recruited to read to her students. The children, 9 and 10, gathered in front of me on the rug. They had barely heard of Nazi Germany or the war, and couldn’t say when the events in question took place. But they did have a firm sense of right and wrong. They blanched when I told them what the Nazis had done and how they had discriminated.
I opened the book and began to read, pausing after each page to show the children the illustrations that help illuminate the story. Deedy’s picture book is myth inspired by fact. In her telling, the king encouraged all his people to wear on their outer clothing the yellow star meant by the Nazis to identify and isolate Jews, so the invaders wouldn’t know who was Jewish and who was not. History teaches that the king protected Denmark’s Jews by other means. But the students got the point: Jews, non-Jews, all were Danes.
Since President Donald Trump issued his initial immigration executive order, temporarily barring U.S. entry to visa holders from seven predominantly Muslim nations, and banning refugees from all nations and those from Syria indefinitely, I’ve thought quite a bit about Deedy’s book, and why Frey chose it for her students. I sought her out in her classroom.
Frey has taught for 30 years, the last four at New Lebanon. She invited me to sit at a round, child-size worktable near the center of the room. We were alone; her students were in gym class. The wall in front of us was lined with baskets of books that made up the room’s library. Above them was a partial timeline of U.S. history, from the first British expedition to Roanoke Island, N.C., in 1584, to the civil-rights era, in 1960.
Frey said that the class had just begun a unit on historical fiction — a genre with which few of the students were familiar. She had selected “The Yellow Star” for its simple theme and its schoolchild accessibility. “This is the first time that most of them have been exposed to historical time periods,” she said. “At this age, they know famous people, but they don’t have a sense of what happened. They know Martin Luther King, and when I returned the day after his holiday, we talked about how a person’s actions and words can cause change. They made the connection between Dr. King and King Christian.”
Change and action and the power of words have taken on particular meaning for her students.
“The day after the [presidential] election, several children told me they were very worried about what might happen to them,” Frey said. “They talked about it that morning among themselves when they came into class. They were worried about their families. One boy came to me in tears and said he was leaving the country, that his family was going back to Portugal. He went around the room, saying goodbye to his friends. Later that day I called his dad. The boy was mistaken; the family was staying.”
But the damage was done.
It took 15 minutes to read “The Yellow Star” to the class. Upon finishing, I looked up at the students. From their expressions, I feared I had upset some of them all over again. When I asked their thoughts on those who had threatened Denmark’s Jews, their response was heartfelt, uncomplicated. “That’s wrong,” blurted one boy, to general agreement. “It’s not fair,” seconded another.
The students never mentioned President Trump or his executive order. But they decided they liked King Christian X very much.
Dana Milbank watched Bill Barr testify before the House Judiciary Committee and wrote this in the Washington Post:
Here comes the caravan!
In 2018, when things were looking grim for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, President Trump conjured a crisis. He declared “an invasion of our country” by Central American migrant caravans full of “stone cold criminals,” “unknown Middle Easterners” and “gang members” who were “putting our country in great danger.”
Trump mobilized 2,100 National Guard members and then, days before the election, 5,200 active-duty U.S. troops. He declared a national emergency and told voters to “blame the Democrats.” The voters didn’t fall for the phony crisis, and the caravan menace fizzled.
Now another electoral reckoning approaches, and Trump is following the same script. This time, he proclaims that “sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators” in Portland, Ore., and Seattle seek to “destroy our American cities, and worse.”
Instead of using the troops again as his political props, Trump is now mobilizing armed federal police from the Justice and Homeland Security departments — and claiming that “cities would burn” if Democrats won the election.
There are two differences this time, though. The military deployment in 2018, though wasteful, did little harm. But the current deployment of federal police to Portland has provoked a dramatic increase both in peaceful protests and in violence — tensions had been subsiding before Trump’s escalation — and rekindled unrest nationwide.
The other difference: In 2018, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis restricted troops to a supporting role on the border to avoid constitutional violations. But the man leading the current provocation, Attorney General Bill Barr, displays no scruples as he whips up violence in service of Trump’s reelection.
Barr defends federal response in Portland
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing, the attorney general described the federal response to the ongoing protests in Portland. (Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
“What unfolds nightly around the [Portland] courthouse cannot reasonably be called a protest; it is, by any objective measure, an assault on the government of the United States,” Barr testified to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Repeatedly blurring the distinction between the masses of peaceful, racial-justice demonstrators and the small band of violent vandals, Barr said peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Square hit with chemical agents, stun grenades and rubber bullets had been “unruly.” Pressed about the many times force has been used against nonviolent demonstrators, he declared that “protesters” — he made quotation marks with his fingers — “are not following police directions.” He justified the use of weapons against peaceful demonstrators by saying “it’s hard to separate” them from the criminals.
He dismissed the idea that there is systemic racism in policing, alleged that police use deadly force more often against white men than black men (black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police) and blamed racial-justice protests for a spike in violence: “When a community turns on and pillories its own police, officers naturally become more risk-averse and crime rates soar. Unfortunately, we are seeing that now in many of our major cities.”
He spoke of a “mob” using “slingshots, tasers, sledgehammers, saws, knives, rifles and explosive devices” to attack federal officers serving on a strictly “defensive mission” — omitting mention of federal officers throwing nonviolent demonstrators into unmarked vans for questioning without probable cause. And he repeatedly scolded Democrats for “not coming out and condemning mob violence,” even as Democrats on the panel did just that.
But then, Barr, like his boss, is not a stickler for facts. Last week, he said of the administration’s Operation Legend, which forces federal police into U.S. cities: “The FBI went in very strong into Kansas City, and within two weeks we’ve had 200 arrests.”
The actual number of arrests in that period? One.
Barr sounded as if he were channeling Trump’s Twitter account as he denounced “the bogus Russiagate scandal,” defended Trump’s pardon of Roger Stone after Stone refused to incriminate Trump, defended the attempted dismissal of Michael Flynn’s guilty plea, defended the imprisonment of Michael Cohen after he refused to disavow criticism of Trump, defended the dismissal of the prosecutor overseeing investigations of Rudolph W. Giuliani, defended the baseless allegation that voting by mail is fraudulent, and defended armed, right-wing protesters who invaded the Michigan Capitol and called for killing the governor. (They were against “crazy rules.”) He even defended Trump’s handling of the pandemic as “superb,” while blaming the Obama administration.
Barr made no attempt to hide his contempt for the Democratic majority, telling them “I think I speak English” and “I’m going to answer the damn question,” and frequently speaking over, and occasionally laughing at, the lawmakers. The disrespect was mutual: Chairman Jerry Nadler attempted to deny Barr a five-minute bathroom break.
“You’re a real class act,” the attorney general told the chairman.
Barr knows about class. He uses federal police powers to deny peaceful Americans their constitutional rights while fomenting violence among hoodlums — all to revive Trump’s reelection bid.
This time, there really is a caravan “putting our country in great danger” — and Barr leads it.
This piece was published today on the New York Review of Books blog. Readers of this blog will be familiar with its contents. Readers of the NYBR blog will learn about the debate about how and when to reopen schools and will learn about how Trump and Pence strong-armed the CDC and forced it to weaken its guidance to schools on reopening.
Trump cares more about his re-election than about the lives of America’s students and school staff. He proved it. Today he tweeted a suggestion that the November elections should be delayed, a decision that belongs to Congress, not to him. You can bet that if Congress agreed (the Democratic House would never agree), there would never be another election in his lifetime. His good friend Putin should won a referendum to keep him in power until 2026. Trump must be envious.
Jan Resseger takes Trump and DeVos to task for ignoring the needs of students and adults in their headlong rush to reopen schools to prop up the economy in time for the election.
In contrast to Obama, who reacted to the Newtown massacre with compassion, our current leaders are indifferent to the risks they seek to impose on other people’s children.
Resseger cites some of the best articles that describe the disparate impact of the pandemic.
Ellie Mystal wrote in The Nation:
“We have not gotten anything right when it comes to caring for our children. We were not getting things right before the coronavirus pandemic; we did not get things right at the outset of the crisis; and as we hurtle towards the fall, we are on the verge of getting things dangerously, irreparably wrong again… It didn’t have to be this way. If we had successfully done the work of stopping the spread of the virus, as has been done in other countries, we wouldn’t have to pick which poison to expose our kids to… Meanwhile, just last week, President Donald Trump worried that CDC guidelines for protecting our children were too ‘expensive.’… And so, we are here. I wouldn’t let my children eat candy handed out by this administration. There are snakes with better parental instincts than these people.”
What’s missing from the Trump-DeVos response is empathy and simple decency.
The Washington Post reported that the Ronald Reagan Foundation asked the Trump campaign to stop using the former president’s name for the Trump campaign.
Reagan Foundation to Trump, RNC: Quit Raising Money Off Ronald Reagan’s Legacy.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, which runs the 40th president’s library near Los Angeles, has demanded that President Trump and the Republican National Committee (RNC) quit raising campaign money by using Ronald Reagan’s name and likeness.
“It was simply handled with a phone call mid-last week to the RNC, and they agreed to stop,” Reagan Foundation chief marketing officer Melissa Giller said in an email Saturday.
What came to the foundation’s attention — and compelled officials there to complain — was a fundraising email that went out July 19 with “Donald J. Trump” identified as the sender and a subject line that read: “Ronald Reagan and Yours Truly.”
The solicitation offered, for a donation of $45 or more, a “limited edition” commemorative set featuring two gold-colored coins, one with an image of Reagan and one with an image of Trump. The coins were mounted with a 1987 photograph of Reagan and Trump shaking hands in a White House receiving line — the type of fleeting contact that presidents have with thousands of people a year…In the 1990s, both Reagan and his wife Nancy signed legal documents that granted the foundation sole rights to their names, likenesses and images. Of course, there are countless photos and videos of Reagan that are in the public domain. But the foundation claims power to block them from being used for commercial purposes and political endorsements.
The Washington Post says that Trump has latched on to school choice and a fast reopening as issues that will win back white suburban women, whose support for him has faded.
This may indicate how out of touch he is. Parents move to the suburbs because their property wealth creates good schools. There is no unmet demand in the suburbs for vouchers or charter schools.
Furthermore polls clearly show that parents want their children to return to safe schools. They do not want their children to go to full-time in-person instruction without safeguards in place.
Trump is unaware that vouchers are not popular, that they have lost every state referendum by large margins.
But Republicans won’t let school choice go, even though only a tiny percentage of parents choose to leave public schools, even when choice is easy and free.
The Post writes:
President Trump sees two school issues as key to reelection, and after paying almost no attention to education for most of his presidency, he’s pushing both in negotiations over the next pandemic relief bill.
The president’s first priority is getting schools to reopen this fall, which he sees as central to economic recovery and getting parents back to work. Trump regularly tells advisers that he believes it is “totally safe” for children to return to school, a senior White House official said.
He is also newly focused on school choice policies, which let families use tax dollars for private school tuition. Aides see both as political winners with suburban women and, in the case of school choice, black voters, too…
Now the White House is pushing Congress to tie tens of billions of dollars in new federal aid to whether schools restart in-person education, even as cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, climb. Trump also wants 10 percent of new K-12 spending set aside for private schools, including tax credits that would support private tuition scholarships, a form of vouchers.
Senate Republicans are proposing $70 billion for K-12 schools as part of the larger pandemic relief package, and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said half of that would be reserved for schools that are “going back to a traditional school setting” as opposed to only distance learning. He said that’s because operating in person creates new expenses.
For private schools, Republicans plan to set aside the 10 percent Trump wants, but they are not planning to include his tax credit plan. Rather, lawmakers are considering direct payments to private schools, or funneling dollars through scholarship funds, which help families pay private school tuition, a GOP Senate aide said. The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said these two options will be presented to Democrats, who could pick…
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has taken a more nuanced tack. Last week, he released a plan that urged caution, saying that each school district should make decisions based on local conditions and that schools in areas with high infection rates should not reopen too soon.
“Donald Trump’s disastrous mismanagement of the coronavirus response is the top roadblock stopping schools from reopening,” said Biden spokesman Andrew Bates.
White House spokesman Judd Deere said: “If Disney World can be open, so can our schools.”
Politically, Trump’s gamble is that voters are more eager for their children to return to classrooms than fearful of the virus. Mercedes Schlapp, a top campaign adviser to Trump, put it this way at an online event aimed at women: “The suburban mom will say, ‘I am going to stick with President Trump on this one because he wants to make sure my kid gets back to school.’ ”
But the polling suggests that is a tough sell.
A Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking poll released Thursday found 6 in 10 parents with children in schools said it is better to open schools later to minimize infection risks, even if students miss out on academics and social services and some parents will not be able to work. About half that — 34 percent — said the reverse. A recent Quinnipiac University survey found voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of school reopenings by a margin of more than 2 to 1. Voters also said, again by a 2-to-1 ratio, that it was unsafe to send students to elementary, middle and high schools in the fall.
Republican allies have showed polling like this to Trump, warning him that pushing for full reopening will not be popular. Nonetheless, the White House is pushing forward, as Trump argues that reopening schools will eventually be widely popular.
“The president sees it as a metric of success that we are getting back to normal,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.
Laurie Garrett is a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer. This article in Foreign Affairs explains why Trump and DeVos’s demand to reopen the schools for full-time, in-person schooling in a few weeks will fail. The schools don’t have the money to meet the necessary safety requirements. The less affluent the community, the less money is available to reduce class sizes and make the schools safe.
The article makes excellent points and contains a useful summary of research. I urge you to read it.
But be warned: it has the worst, most misleading headline I have ever seen in any article. I don’t hold writers responsible for headlines. I wonder whether the person who wrote it read the article.
The schools are neither a moral nor a medical catastrophe. It would have been more accurate to say that the federal government’s treatment of the schools is a moral and medical catastrophe. After all, we have a president who scoffs at science. Who can trust their children’s lives to his uninformed advice? It is obvious that his desire to open the schools is based on his political self-interest, not the lives of children and staff.
Where the pandemic is raging, it is not safe to open schools. Where it appears to have been controlled, the schools must reopen cautiously, with the resources needed to keep people as safe as possible, and with full awareness that there might be a resurgence of the virus.
