Category Archives: Donald Trump

A little over a week after a prosecutor in Georgia indicted former President Donald Trump for trying to overturn the results of the states 2020 presidential election, Republicans said they will use a new law to remove her from office.

In May, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the law that created a new commission of political appointees with the power to remove and discipline elected prosecutors over decisions or policies not to prosecute certain offenses. The law seeks to limit or restrict reform-minded prosecutors. In the case of Fulton County which includes Atlanta though, District Attorney Fani Willis is not even known as much of a reformer. Instead, Republican lawmakers set their sights on Willis for another reason: prosecuting the wrong person.

In a Facebook post Monday, state Sen. Clint Dixon, a Republican, said Willis was indicting Trump because of an unabashed goal to become some sort of leftist celebrity and should be investigated for using the justice system against her political opponents.

The Public Rights Project, a nonprofit that worked on a lawsuit by a bipartisan group of Georgia prosecutors against the bill earlier this month, filed a preliminary injunction against the commission on Thursday seeking to stop it from initiating any disciplinary or removal proceedings against a prosecutor while litigation over the law is pending.

The original reasoning for the commission was to go after DAs who supposedly werent prosecuting enough, said Jill Habig, executive director of the Public Rights Project. Its not only about not prosecuting enough, its also about prosecuting too much if the defendant is the wrong one from the perspective of the partisan officials who are creating and staffing this commission.

Habig, who said her group disagrees with that characterization of prosecutors targeted by the bill, said the injunction to block Williss ouster was necessary to preserve the will of voters who elected prosecutors across the state. (The commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The new Georgia law is one of close to 40 similar measures introduced in a third of states since 2017 that target prosecutors implementing popular criminal justice reforms. The recent efforts to subvert the authority of elected prosecutors have been largely driven by white Republican lawmakers in gerrymandered states against Black Democrats in the liberal islands of cities, Habig said.

Over a third of states have considered legislation to retaliate against local prosecutors for pursuing policies that they disagree with, Habig said. This is part of a national trend that were seeing of predominantly white, often gerrymandered state legislatures targeting prosecutors often Black prosecutors, and often prosecutors elected in cities and counties with larger Black and brown populations. So the partisan and racial nature of this retaliation I think is something thats really important to highlight.

The remarks by Dixon, the state senator, were the first shot across the bow, Habig said: The drumbeat is just starting.

Another Republican state lawmaker called last week for a special legislative session to investigate Willis, and others are drafting a statement to condemn her for indicting Trump, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. (Dixon and Kemp did not respond to a request for comment.)

Beyond the focus on Willis for indicting Trump, Habig said, the law is already having a pernicious effect on prosecutors across the state. There have already been changes in how DAs talk about their priorities and the kinds of cases that they think are most important, changes in the traction to build criminal justice reform efforts in the state, she said.

Georgia attorneys said they were afraid to discuss basic parts of their work for fear of being targeted for removal under the law. I have concern that some of my policies and approaches could be interpreted as a stated policy that could give rise to a complaint, investigation, and discipline, DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston wrote in an affidavit supporting the motion for a preliminary injunction. Boston said her commitment to reforms like higher evidentiary standards and pretrial diversion guidelines could all put a target on her back.

In anotheraffidavit, the director of public policy and communications at the Savannah nonprofit Deep Center said the organization had been working with a local prosecutor to implement reforms, but, after the passage of the law, the prosecutor balked.

Deep Centers Coco Guthrie-Papy said her organization had worked with Chatham County District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones to develop plans to address the backlog of people awaiting trial and sentencing in the county jail, start a pre-arrest diversion program, and alleviate certain court fines and fees. Joness office embraced those efforts at first but soon became more reluctant, Guthrie-Papy said.

Guthrie-Papy said her organization started to see changes as the bill started moving through the legislature. Its one of those things thats never spoken out loud, but you can see peoples behavior start to change because people get scared. And fear is an incredibly powerful emotion, she said. It was very clear to us that all of this work that we had sort of been trying to push through the DAs office was going to come to a halt.(Jones did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Before the push for the new law, some prosecutors in Georgia, in response to calls from local communities, began to narrow their focus to the most dire crimes, Guthrie-Papy said. She pointed to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 as a catalyst for the election of more reform-minded DAs, but the new law put those prosecutors in a bind.

At the end of the day, she said, what it has really done is disrupted the legacy of bipartisan reform that has happened in Georgia, which has been really, really hard to get to.

The rest is here:

Georgia GOP Gears Up to Remove Atlanta Prosecutor Who Indicted ... - The Intercept

One by one, some with a little hesitation, six hands went up on the debate stage Wednesday night when the eight Republican candidates answered whether they would support Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination if he was a convicted criminal. Hand raising is a juvenile and reductive exercise in any political debate, but its worth unpacking this moment, which provides clarity into the damage that Mr. Trump has inflicted on his own party.

Six people who themselves want to lead their country think it would be fine to have a felon as the nations chief executive. Six candidates apparently would not be bothered to see Mr. Trump stand on the Capitol steps in 2025 and swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, no matter if he had been convicted by a jury of violating that Constitution by (take your choice) conspiracy to obstruct justice, lying to the U.S. government, racketeering and conspiracy to commit forgery or conspiracy to defraud the United States. (The Fox News hosts, trying to race through the evenings brief Trump section so they could move on to more important questions about invading Mexico, didnt dwell on which charges qualified for a hand raise. So any of them would do.)

There was never any question that Vivek Ramaswamys hand would shoot up first. But even Nikki Haley, though she generally tried to position herself as a reasonable alternative to Mr. Ramaswamys earsplitting drivel, raised her hand. So did Ron DeSantis, after peeking around to see what the other kids were doing. And Mike Pences decision to join this group, while proudly boasting of his constitutional bona fides for simply doing his job on Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrated the cognitive dissonance at the heart of his candidacy.

Only Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson demonstrated some respect for the rule of law by opposing the election of a criminal. Mr. Hutchinson said Mr. Trump was morally disqualified from being president because of what happened on Jan. 6 and made the interesting argument that he may also be legally disqualified under the 14th Amendment for inciting an insurrection. Mr. Christie said the country had to stop normalizing Mr. Trumps conduct, which he said was beneath the office of president. Though he was accused by Mr. Ramaswamy of the base crime of trying to become an MSNBC contributor, Mr. Christie managed to say something that sounded somewhat forthright: I am not going to bow to anyone when we have a president of the United States who disrespects the Constitution. For this, Mr. Christie and Mr. Hutchinson were both roundly booed.

Its important to understand the implications of what those six candidates were saying, particularly after watching Mr. Trump turn himself in on Thursday at the Fulton County Jail to be booked on the racketeering charge and 12 other counts of breaking Georgia law. Only Mr. Ramaswamy was willing to utter the words, amid his talk about shutting down the F.B.I. and instantly pardoning Mr. Trump, saying Mr. Trump was charged with politicized indictments and calling the justice system corrupt.

We cannot set a precedent where the party in power uses police force to indict its political opponents, he said. It is wrong. We have to end the weaponization of justice in this country.

This is the argument that Mr. Trump has been making for months, of course, but when more than three-fourths of the main players in the Republican field support it, it essentially means that a major political party has given up on the nations criminal justice system. The party thinks indictments are weapons and prosecutors are purely political agents. The rule of law hardly has a perfect record in this country, and its inequities are many, but when a political party says that the criminal justice system has become politicized and that the indictments of three prosecutors in separate jurisdictions are meaningless, it begins to dissolve the countrys bedrock.

Mr. Pence said he wished that issues surrounding the 2020 election had not risen to criminal proceedings, but they did, because two prosecutors chose to do their jobs faithfully, just as the former vice president did on Jan. 6. He piously told the audience that his oath of office in 2017 was made not just to the American people but also to my heavenly father. But any religious moralizing about that oath was debased when he said he was willing to support as president a man whose mug shot was taken Thursday at a squalid jail in Atlanta, who was fingerprinted and had his body dimensions listed and released on bond like one of the shoplifters and car burglars who were also processed in the jail the same day.

Apparently Thursdays proceedings were a meaningless farce to Mr. Pence, Ms. Haley and the other four. But most Americans still have enough respect for the legal system that they dont consider being booked a particularly frivolous or rebellious act. The charges against Mr. Trump are not for civil disobedience or crimes of conscience; they accuse him of grave felonies committed entirely for the corrupt purpose of holding on to power.

Being booked and mug-shotted for these kinds of crimes represents degradation to most people, despite the presumption of innocence that still applies at the trial level. How does a parent explain to a child why a man in a mug shot might be the nations next leader? That should be a very difficult conversation, unless you happen to be a Republican candidate for president.

Source photographs by Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock and Fulton County Sheriffs Office, via Associated Press.

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Opinion | Raising a Hand for the Man in the Mug Shot - The New York Times

As much as anything, this week was the real start of the 2024 campaign, and the preview it offered suggested how much the next year will be dominated by variations on the tiresome theme of Trump, Trump, and Trump again. Even the former Presidents absence from the first Republican debate, on Wednesday, did little to distract from the story line of the poll-dominating elephant not in the room, as the Fox News anchor Bret Baier put it. But, if the subject is by now a familiar one, the plot has taken a notable twist, summed up in the extraordinary spectacle that unfolded in Atlanta late on Thursday evening.

In a highly public display manufactured for maximum prime-time impact by the worlds most famous criminal defendant, Trump flew into the city on his private jet ahead of a Friday deadline for his surrender, then motorcaded to the Fulton County Jail, where he was arrested, fingerprinted, and had his mug shot taken, before being released on a pre-negotiated two-hundred-thousand-dollar bail. There was no real news in this, of course, since he was indicted earlier this month. But that did not stop the breathless hours of coveragethe scenes of his plane slowly rolling down the tarmac, the extensive motorcade ride through Atlanta, his self-reported and highly suspect description of himself as six feet three and two hundred and fifteen pounds. The big reveal of the evening was his photo, in which he wore a navy suit and red tie. He glared straight into the camera for his big moment; the trademark Trump glowereyebrows raised, vaguely menacing, closer to a scowl than a smileis one he has cultivated for years. In the White House, his aides called it, simply, the Stare. He stands charged with illegally seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, in Georgia and nationally. If the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, has her way, he will go on trial as soon as October 23rd, alongside a rogues gallery of eighteen co-defendants in a scheme that Willis has likened to a criminal racketeering conspiracy.

The unprecedented photo of a former American President treated like a common criminal, which Willis seemed intent on orchestratingUnless somebody tells me differently, Fulton Countys sheriff had said earlier this week, we are following our normal practiceswill go down in history, and not, it is safe to say, in a good way. Look at the mug shots of the Watergate conspirators: there is a grainy satisfaction in contemplating those black-and-white figures today, knowing how their stories ended up. Yet, for now, Trump sees only political gainand, quite possibly, the spectre of a historic self-pardonin that snarly snapshot from the Fulton County Jail. And why, after all, shouldnt he? The four indictments this year have been good for his poll numbers with the Republican base, good for his fund-raising, and good for his favored political move of presenting himself as a perpetual victim who must seek vengeance against his persecutors.

Even the big event whose timing he did not orchestrate this week tended to reinforce his preferred narrative of inevitable victory over a largely quiescent field of Republican also-rans. Trumps absence at the debate, on Wednesday, afforded the eight G.O.P. candidates who made it to the stage a chance to argue over policy matterssuch as support for the war in Ukraine and deficit reductionwithout his oxygen-sucking presence. Only ten minutes of questions in two long hours were actually about Trump and the ongoing challenge to American democracy that he presents. But it did not matter. The takeaway from the first debate of 2024 was not all that different from the takeaway from the first debate of the 2016 election cycle: the Republican Party is the Party of Trump, whether hes onstage or not.

The essential moment came at the top of the second hour, when the Fox News anchors finally, belatedly, uttered the T-word, asking which Republican candidates would endorse the ex-President as their nominee even in the increasingly likely scenario that he becomes a convicted felon. The responses that followed unrolled as a sort of democracy car crash: first the young entrepreneur and aspiring Trump clone Vivek Ramaswamys hand shot up, high, followed quickly by Nikki Haleys, Tim Scotts, and Doug Burgums. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor once touted as a possible Trump-killer until his leaden personality and clumsy campaigning sent him sinking in the polls, did himself no favors by looking to see what the other candidates were doing, then raising his hand as well.

Next to go was Mike Pence, the former Vice-President whose candidacy has veered between sanctimonious reminders of how he stood up to Trump, on January 6, 2021, and almost inexplicable acts of sycophancy toward him. A few minutes later, Pence would demand, in that deep baritone of his, that the other candidates weigh in on his January 6th choice to rebuff Trump and certify his 2020 election defeat. I think the American people deserve to know whether everyone on this stage agrees that I kept my oath to the Constitution that day, he said. Did he think the audience would forget that he had just pledged to vote for Trump again, criminal convictions be damned? Pence has long since perfected the ability to abase himself in public without seeming the least bit ashamed.

In the end, six out of eight candidates confirmed what we already knew: they would back Trump as the nominee, essentially, no matter what. The two exceptions were Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie. Someone has to stop normalizing this conduct, Christie said, of Trump, prompting audible boos from the audience. Baier and his co-anchor, Martha MacCallum, didnt even bother to ask which felonyout of the ninety-one counts, in four separate criminal indictments that he is currently facingTrump might be convicted of. That was not the point of their hypothetical, which instead served to remind America that even Republicans ostensibly running against the ex-President are very likely to end up voting for him.

Watching these hopelessly outmatched candidates, I kept thinking back to one of the great lines from last summers January 6th hearings in the House of Representatives. Trumps former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, described how, after the 2020 election, he and others had been part of Team Normal, those who tried and failed to convince Trump that he had really lost the election, only to find themselves pushed aside in favor of Team Crazy, whose members, led by Rudy Giuliani, aided and abetted Trumps lies about the rigged election. The Republican debate stage in Milwaukee this week was filled with candidates who came from what passes for Team Normal in todays G.O.P., figures such as Trumps former Vice-President, Pence; Trumps former U.N. Ambassador Haley; and Trumps former friend and adviser Christie.

All three of them built their careers as governors in the pre-Trump Republican Party: Pence and Haley in the reliably red states of Indiana and South Carolina, respectively; Christie in Democratic New Jersey, a point he emphasizedto little availin his debate-stage pitch for Republicans to go for a candidate who knows how to win a competitive race in unfriendly territory. But, just like Stepien and the rest of Team Normal, they all eventually sold out to Trump. In this, they represent the very considerable part of the Republican Party that knew supporting Trump was a disaster back in 2016 and, yet, when it came time for the general election and divvying up the spoils of power that followed his unlikely victory, they did it anyway.

If this were a different time, a viewer of Wednesdays debate might have concluded that it was not a bad night for Team Normal. Haley and Christie delivered several of the more memorable zingers while making impassioned cases for decidedly normal causes, such as supporting Ukraine, a free country aligned with the U.S., over Vladimir Putins murderous dictatorship, as Haley put it, or choosing to protect the Constitution over terminating it, as Christie put it. Both took especial glee in going after Ramaswamy, a Trump for the millennial set so automatic in his Trumpier-than-thou responses to any question that Christie lampooned him as a sort of ChatGPT version of a Republican candidate. It was a good dig but also perhaps unintentionally revealing: ChatGPT might very well come up with a Trumpist candidate who sounds a lot like this one.

Besides, the polls these days about the Republican race for 2024 are clear: Team Normal is a sideshow, and a highly compromised one at that. There should be little doubt that most of those who now claim to have moved on from Trump, such as Haley and Pence, will nonetheless raise their hands and vote for him again if they have to. For Republicans, for now, there is, once again, only Team Trump.

Originally posted here:

The Harsh Glare of Justice for Donald Trump - The New Yorker

(Permanent

MILWAUKEE Much was made prior to Wednesday's debate of the fact that its organizers had banned various of the former president*'s surrogates from the post-debate spin room. Of course, this made all the sense in the world since El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago had declined to participate, opting instead for a touching bout of virtual make-up sex with Tucker Carlson. Because this move by the debate made such perfect sense, it naturally got all up the nose of people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who whined so loudly that NORAD probably issued an alert. From Newsweek:

Not to worry, Marge. We were blessed by a visit from Donald Trump, Jr. and his inamorata, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who carried the former president's water, and bullshit, by the bucketful.

Sluggo scoffed at the very idea that his father, now d/b/a Inmate no. P01135809 in Fulton County, Georgia, even needed to hobnob with this pack of Lilliputian losers.

If you're wondering how this blithe dismissal of the competition, and of the debate itself, squares with the raging tantrums the Trump surrogates threw about being denied access to the spin room, you clearly have been in the northernmost regions of Finland, communing with reindeer, for the past seven years. Don't try to catch up all at once.

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane has found a woman who likely would disagree with Vivek Ramaswamy's contention that the climate crisis is a hoax.

You can see it coming, right?

There was an old episode of The Twilight Zone in which a survivor of the Titanic is picked up by the Lusitania and then picked up by another doomed ocean liner the Andrea Doria, I think and it's all a riff based on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Mary Kaneko is living that nightmare, and anyone who denies the crisis for which she has become a tragic focal point belongs in a zoo.

Remember when Inmate No. P01135809 came to Wisconsin with his golden shovel and turned the first earth on what he said was going to be the eighth wonder of the world -- a huge facility run by Taiwanese giant Foxconn that was going to employ 3000 people. Yeah, not so much. From the Washington Post:

This, of course, is a big part of the legacy of former governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. Foxconn played Walker and, later, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago for the suckers they plainly were. They rolled Walker for some $3 billion in tax credits, and it stuck the state and local governments for another $500 million in site improvements. And this was all without any real promises that the project would ever happen.

All hail the art of the deal.

You want something that could really scramble the 2024 elections? How about a massive strike in the automotive industries? From CNN:

Shawn Fain, the new UAW president, has been unsparing in his critique of how, by his lights, management has gotten off easy in negotiations over the past several years. He wants pay raises and he wants benefits returned to 2009 levels. Fain's mandate derives from a series of scandals at the top of the UAW that sent two previous presidents to jail. He also has been quite vocal on the subject of how the president must put up or shut up about his devotion to organized labor. My guess is they'll reach some sort of settlement. Whether or not the rank and file will approve it, however, is genuinely up for grabs. And that's going to be quite inflammatory on the campaign.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Down On The Levee Blues" (Sidney Bechet): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1963, we see London cracking down on the diesel lorries that are, as the narrator says, "belching smoke and smell." I do like the hilarious detail that "some tobacco manufacturers believe" that diesel smoke causes lung cancer. Informed sources say! Anyway, hard luck for the guy driving that "proper stinker." History is so cool.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Smithsonian:

Lakefront property always has been expensive.

Bruce Springsteen dropped Born To Run on this day in 1975. (It's also the anniversary of Keith Moon's driving a Lincoln Continental into a Holiday Inn swimming pool, which has something to do with BTR, but I can't quite put my finger on it.) Is it strange that, after all these years, and given the other tracks on the album, my favorite Springsteen track is still "Meeting Across The River"? It's stripped of all the grease-stained mythology that's drives all the other cuts on the record. Eddie and his partner are small-time semi-hoods who have to scramble even to get a ride into the city for a meeting with a guy that you just know isn't going to go well. They even have to fake being strapped. It reminds me of Vincent Patrick's great The Pope of Greenwich Village or, closer to home, George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle. And Randy Brecker's glorious trumpet accents lodge the story squarely in the traditions of the great films noir. The stuff that dreams are made of.

Hey, New York Times, is it a good day for dinosaur news? Its always a good day for dinosaur news!

Congratulations to India for joining the Brotherhood of Diplodocoid Nations. We'll be in touch about the dues. After all, even your dinos lived then to make us happy now.

I'll be back on Monday to see what other nuggets Vivek Ramaswamy has mined from the depths of American history. ("Do we really know that Custer was killed by indigenous soldiers? How do we know it wasn't Vikings?") Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline. Wear the damn mask. Take the damn shots, especially the damn boosters, especially the newest boosters. And spare a moment for the people of Ukraine, and of the earthquake zone in Turkey and Iraq, and in the flood zones of Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Vermont. and in the fire zones in Canada, Hawaii, Washington state, Louisiana, and the Canary Islands, and for our fellow citzens of the LGBTQ+ communities, who deserve so much better than they're getting from their country.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.

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Donald Trump Jr. and His Dad's Band of Surrogates Don't Care ... - Esquire

Much of that evidence resurfaced Tuesday in special counsel Jack Smiths four-count indictment of Trump, which referenced call logs and White House records that were already familiar to Americans who tracked the Jan. 6 committee proceedings. Chutkan was randomly selected Tuesday to preside over Trumps latest criminal case, his third in the last four months.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President, Chutkan wrote in her 2-year-old ruling, a rebuke that is sure to echo as she prepares to preside over the newest criminal case against the current GOP frontrunner for the presidential nomination in 2024.

Chutkan, 61, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and came to the U.S. for college as a teenager, attending George Washington University and then law school at the University of Pennsylvania. She spent more than a decade as a public defender in Washington, D.C. She later worked for the law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner before being confirmed as a federal trial judge in Washington in 2014.

Chutkan has avoided some of the most pointed criticisms of Trump that some of her colleagues on the federal bench in D.C. have delivered as theyve sentenced defendants who participated in the Jan. 6 mob that attacked the Capitol as part of Trumps bid to remain in power. Judge Reggie Walton has called Trump a charlatan. Judge Amit Mehta has said Jan. 6 defendants were pawns of Trump and his allies. Judge Amy Berman Jackson has chastised Republicans for refusing to level with Trump about the 2020 election.

It is not patriotism, it is not standing up for America to stand up for one man who knows full well that he lost instead of the Constitution he was trying to subvert, Jackson said at a sentencing last year.

But Chutkan has delivered some of the harshest sentences to Jan. 6 defendants and made her disgust and horror over the attack clear, lamenting the prospect of renewed political violence in 2024 and noting that no one accused of orchestrating the effort to subvert the election had been held accountable.

You have made a very good point, she told Jan. 6 rioter Robert Palmer at his December 2021 sentencing, that the people who exhorted you and encouraged you and rallied you to go and take action and to fight have not been charged.

The issue of who has or has not been charged is not before me. I dont have any influence on that, she said. I have my opinions, but they are not relevant.

But Chutkan also said that reality wasnt a reason to go easy on those who bought into the election lies and acted upon that belief.

The people who planned this and funded it and encouraged it havent been charged, but thats not a reason for you to get a lower sentence, she said. I have to make it clear that the actions you engaged in cannot happen again. Every day were hearing about reports of antidemocratic factions of people plotting violence, the potential threat of violence, in 2024.

Chutkan has alluded more specifically to Trump in other Jan. 6 sentences, including her first to misdemeanor defendant Carl Mazzocco, who Chutkan said went to the Capitol in support of one man, not in support of our country.

During those early months of the Jan. 6 investigation, Chutkan also staked out territory that some of her colleagues were reluctant to tread: She pointedly rejected the equivalence some defendants were drawing between violence adjacent to Black Lives Matter protests and the riot at the Capitol.

Latest News on the Trump Indictment

One Trump-appointed judge, Trevor McFadden, had raised sharp questions about whether Jan. 6 defendants were being treated more harshly than people accused of similar conduct during the summertime violence of 2020.

I think the U.S. attorney would have more credibility if it was even-handed in its concern about riots and mobs in this city, McFadden said at the time.

Chutkan, while sentencing a defendant in a different case, appeared to allude to her colleagues remark, before saying she flatly disagreed.

People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters became violent, Chutkan said of the protests and rioting that followed George Floyds death. But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the January 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.

Continue reading here:

Trump's new judge is a tough Jan. 6 sentencer and has a history with him - POLITICO

In a normal society, a former presidentlets call him Donald Trumpwhos been indicted three times in under four months, on charges ranging from obstruction of justice to conspiracy to defraud the United States, would have absolutely no chance of ever being president again. It straight up would not be a scenario anyone would have to even contemplate; even if this individual were not in prison, the idea that they would be able to run for and win higher office once more would not compute.

But unfortunately, we dont live in a normal society; instead, we live in a place in which millions of people not only still support Donald Trump, but grow fonder of him with every new criminal charge. Which means that, despite the aforementioned indictments*, the twice-impeached, thrice-indicted ex-president is dominating every other candidate for the Republican nomination, and currently looks to be the most likely GOP nominee in the 2024 general election. That, of course, scares the shit out of a lot of peopleincluding, apparently, one Barack Obama. Whose fear, it has to be said, is extremely unsettling!

The Washington Post reports that during a private lunch with Joe Biden in late June, the 44th president voiced concern about Donald Trumps political strengthsincluding an intensely loyal following, a Trump-friendly conservative media ecosystem, and a polarized countryunderlining his worry that Trump could be a more formidable candidate than many Democrats realize. According to people familiar with the conversation, Obama made it clear his concerns were not about Bidens political abilities, but rather a recognition of Trumps iron grip on the Republican Party.

Obamas concerns are certainly warranted: In a New York Times/Siena poll released on Monday, Trump led his closest competition, Ron DeSantis, by a whopping 37 points. An even wilder data point that seems to validate Obamas fears was that Trump beat DeSantis even among Republicans who believe he committed serious federal crimes. To be clear, that means these people believe Trump is a criminal, and want him to be president anyway.

As FiveThirtyEight optimistically notes, should Trump be convicted before November 5, 2024, voters might be less inclined to cast a ballot for him, and presumably theyd be even less so if hes sentenced to time in prison. (In the case of the most recent indictment, two of the charges carry up to 20 years behind bars, and compared to her colleagues, the judge assigned to the case has imposed the toughest sentences for January 6 defendants.) Though, who knows!

As for a potential Trump-Biden rematch, another Times/Siena Poll poll published this week put the two in a tie, with each receiving 43% of the votewhich, for people who think democracy is worth preserving, is pretty pants-shittingly scary.

In somewhat happier news, Obama reportedly promised at the same June lunch to do all he could to help the president get reelected. And in a statement, a spokesman for Bidens campaign told the Post: President Biden is grateful for his unwavering support, and looks forward to once again campaigning side-by-side with President Obama to win in 2024 and finish the job for the American people.

*And everything else!

Mike Pence giveth and Mike Pence taketh away

Yes, he tweeted yesterday that anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President, but then he basically suggested today that Trump was just listening to his lawyers advice when he tried to overturn the electionwhich, coincidentally, is a defense Trump is reportedly planning to use.

Read the rest here:

Barack Obama Is Also Scared Shitless That Donald Trump Could Win Another Term: Report - Vanity Fair

Former President Donald J. Trump is dominating his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, leading his nearest challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by a landslide 37 percentage points nationally among the likely Republican primary electorate, according to the first New York Times/Siena College poll of the 2024 campaign.

Mr. Trump held decisive advantages across almost every demographic group and region and in every ideological wing of the party, the survey found, as Republican voters waved away concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy. He led by wide margins among men and women, younger and older voters, moderates and conservatives, those who went to college and those who didnt, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas.

The poll shows that some of Mr. DeSantiss central campaign arguments that he is more electable than Mr. Trump, and that he would govern more effectively have so far failed to break through. Even Republicans motivated by the type of issues that have fueled Mr. DeSantiss rise, such as fighting radical woke ideology, favored the former president.

Overall, Mr. Trump led Mr. DeSantis 54 percent to 17 percent. No other candidate topped 3 percent support in the poll.

Below those lopsided top-line figures were other ominous signs for Mr. DeSantis. He performed his weakest among some of the Republican Partys biggest and most influential constituencies. He earned only 9 percent support among voters at least 65 years old and 13 percent of those without a college degree. Republicans who described themselves as very conservative favored Mr. Trump by a 50-point margin, 65 percent to 15 percent.

Still, no other serious Trump challenger has emerged besides Mr. DeSantis. Former Vice President Mike Pence, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina each scored 3 percent support. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, each received support from just 2 percent of those polled.

Yet even if all those candidates disappeared and Mr. DeSantis got a hypothetical one-on-one race against Mr. Trump, he would still lose by a two-to-one margin, 62 percent to 31 percent, the poll found. That is a stark reminder that, for all the fretting among anti-Trump forces that the party would divide itself in a repeat of 2016, Mr. Trump is poised to trounce even a unified opposition.

The survey comes less than six months before the first 2024 primary contest and before a single debate. In an era of American politics defined by its volatility, Mr. Trumps legal troubles his trials threaten to overlap with primary season pose an especially unpredictable wild card.

For now, though, Mr. Trump appears to match both the surly mood of the Republican electorate, 89 percent of whom see the nation as headed in the wrong direction, and Republicans desire to take the fight to the Democrats.

He might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wifes underpants and you cant be a man anymore, David Green, 69, a retail manager in Somersworth, N.H., said of Mr. Trump. You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trumps my guy. Hes proved it on a national level.

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis maintain strong overall favorable ratings from Republicans, 76 percent and 66 percent. That Mr. DeSantis is still so well liked after a drumbeat of news coverage questioning his ability to connect with voters, and more than $20 million in attack ads from a Trump super PAC, demonstrates a certain resiliency. His political team has argued that his overall positive image with G.O.P. voters provides a solid foundation on which to build.

But the intensity of the former presidents support is a key difference as 43 percent of Republicans have a very favorable opinion of Mr. Trump a cohort that he carries by an overwhelming 92 percent to 7 percent margin in a one-on-one race with Mr. DeSantis.

By contrast, Mr. DeSantis is stuck in an effective tie with Mr. Trump, edging him 49 percent to 48 percent, among the smaller share of primary voters (25 percent) who view the Florida governor very favorably.

In interviews with poll respondents, a recurring theme emerged. They like Mr. DeSantis; they love Mr. Trump.

DeSantis, I have high hopes. But as long as Trumps there, Trumps the man, said Daniel Brown, 58, a retired technician at a nuclear plant from Bumpass, Va.

If he wasnt running against Trump, DeSantis would be my very next choice, said Stanton Strohmenger, 48, a maintenance technician in Washington Township, Ohio.

A number of respondents interviewed drew a distinction between Mr. DeSantiss accomplishments in Tallahassee and Mr. Trumps in the White House.

Trump has proven his clout, said Mallory Butler, 39, of Polk County, Fla. And DeSantis has, but in a much smaller arena.

The truly anti-Trump faction of the Republican electorate appears to hover near one in four G.O.P. voters, hardly enough to dethrone him. Only 19 percent of the electorate said Mr. Trumps behavior after his 2020 defeat threatened American democracy. And only 17 percent see the former president as having committed any serious federal crimes, despite his indictment by a federal grand jury on charges of mishandling classified documents and his receipt of a so-called target letter in the separate election interference case being brought by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith.

I think Donald Trump is going to carry a lot of baggage to the election with him, said Hilda Bulla, 68, of Davidson County, N.C., who supports Mr. DeSantis.

Yet Mr. Trumps grip on the Republican Party is so strong, the Times/Siena poll found, that in a head-to-head contest with Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Trump still received 22 percent among voters who believe he has committed serious federal crimes a greater share than the 17 percent that Mr. DeSantis earned from the entire G.O.P. electorate.

Mr. DeSantis has made taking on woke institutions a centerpiece of his political identity. But when given a choice between a hypothetical candidate who prioritized defeating radical woke ideology or one who was focused on law and order in our streets and at the border, only 24 percent said they would be more likely to support the candidate focused on fighting woke issues.

Equally problematic for Mr. DeSantis is that those woke-focused voters still preferred Mr. Trump, 61 percent to 36 percent.

The ability to defeat Mr. Biden and to enact a conservative agenda is at the core of Mr. DeSantiss appeal to Republicans. He has warned that Mr. Trump has saddled the party with a culture of losing in the Trump years and has held up his resounding 2022 re-election in the once purple state of Florida as a model for the G.O.P. As governor, he has pushed through a sweeping set of conservative priorities that have sharply reoriented the state and promised he would bring the same policymaking zeal to the White House.

Yet these arguments do not appear to be working. A strong majority of Republicans surveyed, 58 percent, said it was Mr. Trump, not Mr. DeSantis, who was best described by the phrase able to beat Joe Biden. And again, it was Mr. Trump, by a lopsided 67 percent to 22 percent margin, who was seen more as the one to get things done.

Mr. DeSantis narrowly edged Mr. Trump on being seen as likable and moral. Interestingly, the share of Republicans who said Mr. Trump was more fun than Mr. DeSantis (54 percent to 16 percent) almost perfectly mirrored the overall horse race.

He does not come across with humor, Sandra Reher, 75, a retired teacher in Farmingdale, N.J., said of Mr. DeSantis. He comes across as a a good Christian man, wonderful family man. But he doesnt have that fire, if you will, that Trump has.

Increasingly on the trail, Mr. DeSantis is calling attention to his blue-collar roots and his decision to serve in the military as reasons voters should support him as he runs against a self-professed billionaire. But the poll showed Mr. Trump lapping Mr. DeSantis among likely Republican primary voters earning less than $50,000, 65 percent to 9 percent.

As of now, Mr. DeSantiss few demographic refuges places where he is losing by smaller margins are more upscale pockets of the electorate. He trailed Mr. Trump by a less daunting 12 points among white voters with college degrees, 37 to 25 percent. Among those earning more than $100,000, Mr. DeSantis was behind by 23 points, half the deficit he faced among the lowest earners.

The fractured field appears to be preventing Mr. DeSantis from consolidating the support of such voters: In the hypothetical one-on-one race, Mr. DeSantis was statistically tied with Mr. Trump among white college-educated voters.

On a range of issues, the poll suggests it will be difficult for Mr. DeSantis to break through against Mr. Trump on policy arguments alone.

In the head-to-head matchup, Mr. Trump was far ahead of Mr. DeSantis among Republicans who accept transgender people as the gender they identify with, and among those who do not; among those who want to fight corporations that promote woke left ideology, and among those who prefer to stay out of what businesses do; among those who want to send more military and economic aid to Ukraine, and among those who do not; among those who want to keep Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are, and among those who want to take steps to reduce the budget deficit.

Mr. Trump leads Mr. DeSantis among Republicans who believe abortion should always be legal, and among those who believe it should always be illegal.

Mr. DeSantis signed a strict six-week abortion ban that Mr. Trump has criticized as too harsh. Yet Mr. Trump enjoyed the support of 70 percent of Republicans who said they strongly supported such a measure.

Marcel Paba, a 22-year-old server in Miami, said he liked what Mr. DeSantis had done for his state but didnt think the governor could overcome the enthusiasm for Mr. Trump.

There are just more die-hard fans of Trump than there are of Ron DeSantis. Even in Florida, Mr. Paba said. I dont see people wearing a Ron DeSantis hat anywhere, you know?

Camille Baker, Alyce McFadden and Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.

The New York Times/Siena College poll of 932 voters in the likely Republican primary electorate was conducted by telephone using live operators from July 23 to 27, 2023. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.96 percentage points. Cross-tabs and methodology are available here.

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Trump Crushing DeSantis and G.O.P. Rivals, Times/Siena Poll Finds - The New York Times

Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a political rally while campaigning for the GOP nomination in Erie, Pa., in July. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images hide caption

Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a political rally while campaigning for the GOP nomination in Erie, Pa., in July.

Former President Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday on charges he participated in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results an effort that reached a bloody crescendo as his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Following an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith, a grand jury voted to charge Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, witness tampering and conspiracy against the rights of citizens, and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.

Trump, who has been summoned to appear in court on Thursday, is still the leading candidate in the Republican primary race. If he pleads not guilty (as he has with the other indictments), we could be hearing about his trial as he makes his case for the White House.

Here are five key points to help get you up to speed.

The former president now faces legal peril in three criminal cases following March's indictment on 34 counts of falsifying business records and June's indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents. Trump has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

A prosecutor in Fulton County, Ga., is leading a separate investigation into Trump's alleged efforts to pressure state election officials there. And Trump is also fighting two civil lawsuits, including a federal jury finding that left him liable for battery and defamation.

But this latest indictment stands apart from Trump's other legal challenges.

The Department of Justice's investigation into Jan. 6, 2021, is among the most sprawling and complex in U.S. history it gets at the heart of the alleged effort to overturn legitimate election results and obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.

"The attack on our nation's Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy," said the special counsel in a short statement before reporters. "As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant, targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government."

The indictment charges Trump with four serious federal criminal offenses:

University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias described the overall case against Trump as "damning" and representing real "legal jeopardy."

Trump is the only person who is charged and he is the only defendant in this latest indictment. But the court document scatters some clues for the future in terms of who else might potentially face charges.

Six people are labeled as co-conspirators in the indictment. They are given individual numbers and potentially identifying traits but they are not identified by name in the court document.

Some are attorneys who helped promote bogus election fraud claims. Co-conspirator 3 is described as an attorney who privately acknowledged that the unfounded election fraud claims were "crazy." Another, co-conspirator 4, was a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and "attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures."

And their descriptions line up with those of people who could be of interest to investigators, such as former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Sidney Powell and former DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark.

Even before the indictment was unsealed, Trump and his allies were actively working to control the narrative, calling this a sham indictment and accusing the Biden administration of trying to interfere with the 2024 election.

On Truth Social, Trump said a "Fake Indictment" was evidence of "prosecutorial misconduct." His campaign issued a formal statement (and, later, a fundraising pitch) calling it "election interference." And his Republican allies in Congress plus even some of his GOP primary foes cast the indictment as political persecution at the hands of the Biden administration.

But as NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoez pointed out in an interview with All Things Considered, the attacks from Trump and his supporters are focusing on the process not so much the substance.

"They claim these are politically motivated charges. They attack the special counsel. But they don't necessarily refute specific allegations," Ordoez said. "They don't argue Trump never incited those followers who attacked the Capitol. They never say that Trump didn't seek a group of fake electors."

That's because after two impeachments, three indictments and quite a few scandals in between, Trump has conditioned his supporters to see each allegation against him as a reason to rally around him.

And it works. In March, several weeks before the first indictment, Trump had just 43% of the vote in Republican polling, according to a RealClearPolitics average. But a day after he was charged in a hush-money scheme to an adult film actress, his numbers had jumped to 50%.

Two months later, he was indicted for mishandling classified documents. His polling average jumped again.

As of Monday, ahead of the news of the latest indictment, Trump was still in the lead among Republican presidential candidates.

The federal indictment of Trump over efforts to overturn the 2020 election came soon after similar election interference charges were made public against a Trump ally in Michigan.

Matthew DePerno the most recent Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, who worked with Trump's team to try to contest his 2020 loss in the state was arraigned Tuesday on state charges for an alleged effort to unlawfully gain access to voting machines.

DePerno has been charged with undue possession of a voting machine, willfully damaging a voting machine and conspiracy, according to the special prosecutor investigating the case.

Investigations into election interference are ongoing elsewhere, as well. Arizona's Democratic attorney general is investigating the 2020 fake electors there, and a Georgia prosecutor is set to soon announce her long-awaited charging decisions in an investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election there.

And all of these investigations are happening separately from the Justice Department's sprawling and complex investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

On that day, Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, injuring scores of law enforcement officers, forcing a panicked evacuation of the nation's political leaders and threatening the peaceful transfer of power after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

To date, the DOJ has charged more than 1,000 people in what's become the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history.

That list now includes Trump.

NPR's Ben Swasey and Carrie Johnson contributed reporting.

This reporting originally appeared in our digital live coverage.

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Donald Trump indictment news: What to know about the 2020 ... - NPR

As the Post notes, Willishas strongly hintedfor months that she will seek multiple indictments in the case, using Georgias expansive anti-racketeering statutes that allow prosecutors not only to charge in-state wrongdoing butto use activities in other statesto prove criminal intent in Georgia. In court filings, Willis has described her probe as an investigation of multi-state, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere.

In addition to potential charges out of Georgia, Trump is likely to be indicted by special counsel Jack Smith in connection with the Justice Departments investigation into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and the attack on the Capitol that followed. Thats on top of the charges Trump was already indicted with in June related to his handling of classified documentswhich were expanded last week, as well as a criminal case brought in April by the Manhattan district attorneys office.

Meanwhile, if anyone was thinking an actual prison sentence would stop the former guy from running, think again. On Friday, in an interview with a conservative talk show host, Trump doubled down on his pledge to never drop out of the race, even if hes behind bars.

On the other hand

According to Ron DeSantis, the constant barrage of insults from Trump and others means hes still a contender. If youre up by so much, you would not be worried about anybody else, DeSantis told reporters on Sunday. So the fact that Im taking the incoming from all of these people, not just him, but a lot of the other candidates, a lot of mediathat shows people know that Im a threat.

Chris Christie not sure how many different ways he can say it

Continued here:

Donald Trump Has an Absurd Amount of Support From Republicans ... - Vanity Fair

My research analyzes real speeches made by politicians past and present, including those of Trump, Orban and Putin, using cognitive linguistics a branch of linguistics that examines the relationship between language and the mind. What I have found is that throughout history, speeches by dictators and autocrats have one thing in common: they use dehumanizing metaphors to instill and propagate hatred of others.

It is well-documented that for example words like reptiles and parasites were used by the Nazi regime to compare outsiders and minorities to animals. Strongmen throughout history have referred to targeted social groups as rats or pests or a plague. And its effective regardless of whether the people who hear this language are predisposed to jump to extreme conclusions. Once someone is tuned into these metaphors, their brain actually changes in ways that make them more likely to believe bigger lies, even conspiracy theories.

These metaphors are part of a cognitive process that entraps some people in this kind of thinking while others are unaffected. Heres how it works.

The first step to manipulating the minds of the public, or really the precondition, is that listeners need to be in the right emotional state.

In order to hack into the minds of the public, people need to feel fear or uncertainty. That could be caused by economic instability or pre-existing cultural prejudices, but the emotional basis is fear. The brain is designed to respond to fear in various ways, with its own in-built defense mechanisms which produce chemicals in the response pattern, such as cortisol and adrenaline. These chemical responses, which zip straight past our logical brains to our fight-or-flight reactions, are also activated by forms of language that instill fear, either directly (as in a vocal threat) or, more insidiously, by twisted facts which allay fears through lies and deceptive statements.

In this state, dehumanizing metaphors are very effective. My research shows that this language taps into and switches on existing circuits in the brain that link together important and salient images and ideas. In effect, metaphors bypass higher cognitive reasoning centers to make linkages that may not have a basis in reality. And when that happens, a person is less likely to notice the lie, because it feels right.

This pattern becomes more effective the more it is used. According to studies, the more these circuits are activated the more hardwired they become, until it becomes almost impossible to turn them off. What this means is these repetitive uses of dehumanizing metaphors are incredibly powerful to those brains already willing to hear them, because they direct their thoughts, making it easy to focus on certain things and ignore others.

The same is true of conspiracy theories. The neuroscientific research shows that people who believe them develop more rigid neural pathways, meaning they find it difficult to rethink situations once this pattern of thinking is established.

This also means that if someone is already more susceptible to believing lies in the form of dehumanizing metaphors and this same person comes across a big lie or a conspiracy theory that fits into that well-trodden neural pathway, they are more likely to believe it and be influenced by it.

This is how language that might seem like harmless hyperbole winds up literally changing the way people think. And once they think differently, they can act in ways that they might not have before.

With the rise of populist and far-right political movements in the 2010s, the use of dehumanizing metaphors to engender hatred of foreigners or of those who are different in some way has spread worldwide.

In 2016, during a state-orchestrated public campaign against refugees and migrants in Hungary, Orban characterized them as a poison. In August 2017, when groups of white supremacists arrived in the college town of Charlottesville, Va., to participate in a Unite the Right rally, the protesters used both animal and dirt metaphors when they claimed they were fighting against the parasitic class of anti-white vermin and the anti-white, anti-American filth.

Putins labeling of the Ukrainian leadership as Nazi falls into this category, a powerful slur against the Jewish leader Zelensky, whom Putin called a disgrace to the Jewish people. Significantly, he uses this alongside dehumanizing language to justify the invasion of Ukraine, claiming it as a mission in denazification, eliminating Ukraine of its Nazi filth by innuendo. The use of the dirt and filth metaphor, coupled with the historically loaded terminology, is a persuasive linguistic tool.

Former President Trump also supported his Big Lie with the same pattern of conspiracy theories and fake news reported in far-right social media that spurred supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

These dehumanizing metaphors have been used consistently to tap into the neural pathways of fearful or anxious people ready and waiting to believe. This helps explain why so many Trump supporters were influenced by the QAnon conspiracy hoax in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Trumps Big Lie refers to the false claim that the election was rigged and stolen from him through massive electoral fraud even though that assertion has been repeatedly debunked.

Significantly, Trump also supported his Big Lie with the same pattern of conspiracy theories and fake news reported in far-right social media, such as QAnon, that spurred Trump supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This sustained use of the central metaphor of a cabal of satanic, cannibalistic abusers of children conspiring against Trump will easily fit into the entrenched neural pathways of someone who is already willing to believe.

The tricky thing about all this is that some people are more susceptible to this type of rhetorical manipulation than others. This comes down to critical thinking and brain training. If one wants to or needs to believe then the language works manipulatively and the neural pathways are built up. If we arent fearful or primed to believe, our brain has mechanisms to alert us to the deceit. Simply put if we are constantly critical of lies, our brains are more trained to notice them.

Unfortunately, research into this brain wiring also shows that once people begin to believe lies, they are unlikely to change their minds even when confronted with evidence that contradicts their beliefs. It is a form of brainwashing. Once the brain has carved out a well-worn path of believing deceit, it is even harder to step out of that path which is how fanatics are born. Instead, these people will seek out information that confirms their beliefs, avoid anything that is in conflict with them, or even turn the contrasting information on its head, so as to make it fit their beliefs.

People with strong convictions will have a hard time changing their minds, given how embedded a lie becomes in the mind. In fact, there are scientists and scholars still studying the best tools and tricks to combat lies with some combination of brain training and linguistic awareness.

Not all hope is lost, however. History has shown that disruptive events such as the toppling of a regime or the loss of a war can force a new perspective and the brain is able to recalibrate. So it is at least possible to change this pattern. Once the critical mind is engaged, away from the frenzy of fear and manipulation, the lie can become clear. This is the uplifting moral tale that can be gleaned from history all the great liars, from dictators to autocrats, were eventually defeated by truth, which eventually will win out.

But the bad news is that you need that kind of disruption. Without these jarring events to bring a dose of reality, it is unlikely that people with strong convictions will ever change their minds something that benefits the autocrat and endangers their society.

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What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbn Understand ... - POLITICO