While the political setting on the South Lawn of the White House shattered all the norms and traditions of American political history, it was a surprisingly flat speech from the President that echoed many of the same promises and attacks as four years ago -- promises to repair the economy, protect the country from Democrats and socialism, ripping into the Washington establishment, bemoaning protests of police violence in the nation's cities and criticizing his opponent's long record -- with Biden taking the place of 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton.

While Trump ran through a litany of accomplishments from his first term, the address recycled many lines and themes from other speeches and political events this summer and lacked the energy and soaring pageantry of the speakers over the previous three nights of the Republican National Convention.

While many of the speakers before the President had tried to humanize him and portray him as a caring and compassionate figure, he glossed over the pain and grief that many Americans have felt during the pandemic and economic collapse. At one point during his speech, he went so far as to mock Biden's empathy, which had been a big focus of the Democratic National Convention last week, during a critique of opponent's record on trade.

He argued that a Biden administration would lead to "mob rule" in Democrat-run cities and said that "if Joe Biden doesn't have the strength to stand up to wild-eyed Marxists like Bernie Sanders," the Vermont senator, "and his fellow radicals, then how is he ever going to stand up for you?"

Formally accepting the Republican renomination, he said he was "proud of the extraordinary progress we have made together over the last four incredible years and brimming with confidence for the bright future we will build for America over the next four years."

As expected, Trump papered over his flawed handling of the pandemic, attempting to focus voters' attention on brighter times ahead and vowing to produce a vaccine for Covid-19 before the end of the year.

"We are meeting this challenge. We are delivering lifesaving therapies, and will produce a vaccine before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner," he said. "We will defeat the virus, end the pandemic and emerge stronger than ever before."

Trump once again blamed China for the spread of the coronavirus, noting that "many Americans, including me, have sadly lost friends and cherished loved ones to this horrible disease." He employed selective statistics to disguise that his administration has presided over one of the world's worst responses to the pandemic and now has more cases than any other country around the globe.

"As one nation, we mourn, we grieve and we hold in our hearts forever the memories of all of those lives that have been so tragically taken. So unnecessary," Trump said. "In their honor, we will unite. In their memory, we will overcome."

The President, who has consistently ignored and undercut the advice of scientists and public health officials, accused Biden of wanting to "surrender" to the virus.

"Instead of following the science, Joe Biden wants to inflict a painful shutdown on the entire country," Trump said, arguing, as always, that states should open their economies more swiftly so that Americans can return to work and their children can go back to in-person classroom instruction.

Multiple speakers, such as Vice President Mike Pence and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, referred to the pandemic in the past tense during the convention and Trump too seemed to suggest that the virus was waning, a view that contradicts the facts. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 3,600 Americans had died over the first three days of the convention -- more than the number who died during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Pandemic ignored at the White House

Given those statistics, the scene on the South Lawn of the White House Thursday night was stunning. Many of the more than 1,500 guests mingled close before and after the speeches, snapping selfies and chatting in close clusters as though the threat of the pandemic had evaporated. Many of the roughly 1,500 chairs set out on the lawn were arranged as close as 6 inches apart on the lawn, falling well short of the administration's own guidelines for social distancing. Most attendees were milling about without wearing masks.

Chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that "a number of people will be tested" for coronavirus before the event, but he did not specify who those individuals would be. Health experts on the White House coronavirus task force have been advising Americans to avoid large crowds during the pandemic.

CNN's Jim Acosta reported Thursday night that a senior White House official brushed off concerns about the lack of social distancing at Trump's speech.

"Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually," the official told Acosta.

The blatant use of presidential power to help the President's electoral chances was unprecedented. Huge video screens displaying the Trump-Pence campaign logo were on the lawn underneath the White House's iconic Truman Balcony. The convention stage was set up on the grounds of a building known as the "People's House," which has housed American presidents for more than 200 years.

It was just the latest example of how the campaign has trashed normal protocol and decorum designed to protect the institution of the presidency from over-politicization throughout this week.

Among the other blatant uses of official government property and pageantry for political purposes during the convention this week was the naturalization ceremony in the White House, a pardon for a political supporter, the use of federal property for political speeches and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressing the convention while on an international trip.

Police violence and racial unrest on the agenda

Speaking in an uncharacteristically flat voice, Trump delivered an indictment of Biden, claiming that the November election would decide whether "we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny."

Portraying Biden as beholden to Sanders and the progressives who supported the Vermont senator during the Demcoratic primary, he said the election would determine whether the country gives "free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens."

Trump also warned in stark rhetoric that Democrats see a "wicked nation that must be punished for its sins."

"Joe Biden is not the savior of America's soul -- he is the destroyer of America's jobs, and if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of American greatness," Trump said. "For 47 years, Joe Biden took the donations of blue-collar workers, gave them hugs and even kisses, and told them he felt their pain -- and then he flew back to Washington and voted to ship their jobs to China and many other distant lands."

At the Democratic National Convention last week, Trump said Biden and Democrats "repeatedly assailed America as a land of racial, economic, and social injustice."

"How can the Democratic Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?" he asked. But he did not make any efforts himself to heal the racial strife that has swept the nation since the death of George Floyd, who was killed in May by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for more than seven minutes.

Trump mentioned Kenosha in passing and instead of attempting to empathize with the tragedy that has brought demonstrators to the streets, he listed the city along with a string of others where he argued that protests have devolved into violence that endangers American families.

"When there is police misconduct, the justice system must hold wrongdoers fully and completely accountable, and it will. But what we can never have in America -- and must never allow -- is mob rule," Trump said. "In the strongest possible terms, the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and New York."

Earlier in the night Ben Carson, Trump's secretary of housing and urban development, offered condolences to the Blake family, stating at the beginning of his speech that "our hearts go out to the Blake family" and others affected by the violence in Kenosha.

"As Jacob's mother has urged the country, let's use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other," Carson said.

"In order to succeed in change, we must first come together in love of our fellow citizens," the Housing Secretary added. "History reminds us that necessary change comes through hope and love, not senseless and destructive violence."

Carson also chided Democrats who have called Trump a racist. "They could not be more wrong," he said, arguing that the President had brought African American unemployment to all-time lows and had supported measures in private life and government to promote minority businesses.

Trump has for years dealt in inflammatory rhetoric, from his intervention in the Central Park Five case in New York, to his racist Birther campaign against President Barack Obama to his claims that there were "very fine people" on both sides during clashes between white supremacists and protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Before Carson, the convention had largely stayed away from mentioning events in Wisconsin, aside from Pence who on Wednesday night tossed a mention of the city into a line about how "the violence must stop."

Throughout the summer, Trump has described anti-police protesters as "THUGS," and his administration cleared peaceful protesters with tear gas from a location in front of the White House before the President participated in a photo op in front of a nearby church with a Bible in hand. The administration says the clearing was done so fencing could be put up, not because of Trump's photo.

"If you think about it, Donald Trump saying you're not going to be safe in Joe Biden's America -- all the video being played is being played in Donald Trump's America," Biden told Cooper with a laugh on CNN's "Newsroom."

"The country will be substantially safer when he is no longer in office," Biden added.

This story has been updated with additional developments from the final night of the convention.

CNN's Jim Acosta contributed to this report.

Read this article:

Donald Trump recycles much of his 2016 message as he accepts renomination - CNN

The two men had for years had a difficult relationship. Trumps ex-wife Ivana recounts in her 2017 book, Raising Trump, that when she suggested naming their newly born first child Donald Jr., Trump protested: You cant do that! What if hes a loser? After his parents divorced, a 12-year-old Trump Jr. refused to speak to his father for a year. Later, he seemed intent on escaping the celebrity businessmans shadow and reputation. At the Fiji fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump Jr.s nickname was Ron Rump, and his fraternity brothers called him Ron. He loved it, perhaps because it gave him an extra level of anonymity, one of them recalls. Rather than working for the Trump Organization immediately after college, Trump Jr. spent a year and half in Aspen, Colo., skiing, hunting, fishing and tending bar at night.

In 2001, he moved back to New York City and took his place at the company. But his greatest contribution to the family business came on the set of The Apprentice, which he joined as an occasional boardroom judge in the shows 2006 season. He was valued by the producers as a stabilizing presence, running interference between the cast and crew and the volatile star, his father. When Trump would berate crew members for a mistake, one Apprentice producer recalls, Trump Jr., speaking from a well of personal experience, would console them: Its not your fault; its your turn.

People who worked on the show remember him often trying to lighten the mood. He provided the comic relief, because his dad doesnt have a sense of humor and Ivanka wasnt someone who made jokes, says Clay Aiken, the American Idol winner who appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2012. He was perfectly fine to take the piss out of himself, but sometimes hed make a joke about his dad and then you could tell he was really nervous his dad wouldnt like it. His self-esteem was in the gutter.

Much of the popular image of Trump Jr., especially among liberals, seems to stem from those years: uselessly trying to impress a man who can only be impressed by himself (GQ); a recurring liability and a chronic headache (The Daily Beast); the Fredo of the Trump family (Twitter). In the first days of Trumps presidency, he seemed poised for more of the same. After the election, while Ivanka and Kushner headed to Washington, Trump Jr. stayed behind in New York, ostensibly to run the Trump Organization with Eric. But he had little to do. He was in charge of the companys international portfolio, and while he could continue working on overseas projects that predated his fathers election, he couldnt embark on new ones.

For a time, he tried to play a role in shaping the administrations public-lands policy and other issues related to his outdoor activities, which had earned him the Secret Service code name Mountaineer. Senator Steve Daines, a Republican from Montana, used an elk-hunting trip with Trump Jr. in November 2016 to lobby the incoming administration to pick an interior secretary from the Mountain West. I wanted a Westerner, Daines says, and Westerner doesnt mean West Virginia. It doesnt mean Oklahoma. Trump Jr. recommended Ryan Zinke, then a Montana congressman and a friend of Dainess, for the Department of Interior job. Zinke got the nod but resigned in December 2018 after a scandal-plagued tenure.

Trump Jr.s relatively low public profile ended on July 8, 2017, when The New York Times revealed his role in arranging the Trump Tower meeting the previous summer between Trump campaign officials and the Russian lawyer and her associates. Though little seems to have come out of the meeting, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released this month found that the Russians had significant connections to the Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.

A few days after the Times article ran, Trump Jr. went on Sean Hannitys Fox News show to defend himself in a softball interview. There was nothing to tell, he said of the meeting. I wouldnt have even remembered it until you started scouring through this stuff. His stock among conservatives rose as he proceeded to wage a sustained campaign against the news media, Mueller and congressional investigators pursuing their own Russia inquiry. (It was reported this month that in 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committees Republican and Democratic leaders made a criminal referral of Trump Jr. and several other Trump associates to the Justice Department for lying or providing contradictory testimony to the panel.) He became a frequent guest on Fox News and an enthusiastic participant in the political fights of the moment. Dons favorite part of politics is getting punched in the face with a jab and responding with a haymaker, one person close to him says.

Read more here:

Donald Trump Jr. Is Ready. But for What, Exactly? - The New York Times

And yet this weeks effort represents a championship game, of sorts, not only an intensification of his efforts since March to recast the narrative of the pandemic but the apex of his lifelong gambit. It is the stiffest test because Trump is not just trying to rewrite the past, or even the very, very recent past, but the actual presentthe ongoing presentof this public health crisis and the attendant economic calamity. The convention itself is happening where its happening and how its happeningmostly D.C., of course, instead of Charlotte or Jacksonville, with videos, virtual fare and next to no crowdsliterally because nearly 180,000 people have died of Covid-19 and another 50,000 or more are predicted to die before November. His reelection hangs on whom voters hold responsible for those numbers.

He must rewrite history because the true past is something thats bad for him, said former GOP consultant Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

He takes his own failures, and he just rewrites what you see in front of your eyes, Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political scientist, told me. This is what hes always done.

It goes way, way back. In 1964, for instance, at the New York Military Academy, he asked a classmate to recount a play in a baseball game.

The bases were loaded, the classmate said. We were losing by three. You hit the ball just over the third basemans head. Neither the third baseman nor the left fielder could get to the ball in time. All four of our runs came in; we won the game.

No, Trump said. Thats not the way it happened. I want you to remember this: I hit the ball out of the ballpark! Remember that. I hit it out of the ballpark!

The Art of the Deal in 1987 crafted an indelible portrait of a brash master deal-doera nonfiction work of fiction, in the words of Trump biographer Tim OBrien, that the person who actually wrote it would come to greatly regret. I drastically misused my skills as a writer and storyteller to make Trump sound like the best version of himself, Tony Schwartz told me Wednesday evening.

It was, however, a truer account than the next two Trump books. Surviving at the Top came out in 1990, when he was barely surviving and nowhere near the top, and The Art of the Comeback came out in 1997, when he was no longer mired in the dire financial and reputational straits he was in the first half of that decade but nonetheless diminished and straining to reclaim a certain stratum of celebrity. The comeback wasnt complete until the debut of The Apprentice, in 2004, which pitched him as an omnipotent titan of business, which a not small share of Americans believed, which opened evidently a path to the presidency. In his telling of his life, over and over, again and again, failures arent failures and losses are wins.

Mr. Trump, Chris Wallace of Fox News said in the first Republican debate in the summer of 2015. You talk a lot about how you are the person on this stage to grow the economy. He cited his litany of corporate bankruptcies. Question, sir: With that record, why should we trust you to run the nations business?

I have never gone bankrupt, Trump said. I have never.

Not personally bankrupt.

But your companies have gone bankrupt, Wallace said. Is that the way youd run our country?

Youre living in a world of the make believe, Chris, you want to know the truth. And I had the good sense to leave Atlantic City, Trump said. Ive gotten a lot of credit in the financial pagesseveral years ago I left Atlantic City before it totally cratered, and I made a lot of money in Atlantic City. And Im very proud of it. I want to tell you that. Very, very proud of it.

The crowd that night laughed, clapped and cheered.

And Chris Wallace throws his arms up in the air and moves on to the next thing, former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me Wednesday.

We all do, he said. We all do.

While scrutiny, obviously, is higher now than it was ever before, Trumps platform, the implicit legitimacy, the importance and the audience and the attentionall thats higher, of course, than its ever been, too. Hes no longer an avaricious up-and-comer. Hes no longer a reality-TV, catchphrase superstar. Hes the president of the United States. Everything he says, every post that he makes, is magnified a million times more than it ever was, Zelizer said. And its a collective act now, said OBrien, the biographer. The Donald Trump con is now an operating principle for his White House, his family, and everybody around him in the GOP apparatus. Theyve all seen him do it and do it in a way in which any failures can just be denied and recast.

On Monday, then, Patty McCloskey of the gun-waving St. Louis couple of right-wing cancel-culture quasi-fame said Joe Biden wanted to abolish the suburbs, an absurd assertion. Former football player Herschel Walker praised Trump as a team owner when his tenure was a disaster that ended with the destruction of the United States Football League. A doctor from Louisiana commended Trump for his rapid and efficient response to the coronavirus pandemic, and a nurse from West Virginia stated that he recognized the threat this virus presented for all Americans early on, when he dismissed it from the start and often still does.

On Tuesday, Trump staged in the White House a naturalization ceremony for a handful of nonwhite new American citizens, jarring considering his record of anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric about shithole countries. Eric Trump said that Biden wants to defund the police, which isnt true, and that his father had delivered the largest tax cuts in American history, which isnt true, and that promises were made, and promises, for the first time, were kept, which obviously isnt true. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi echoed many others over the past few nights and blamed the devastation of the coronavirus on China and China alone. Then came Kudlow. It was awful, he said. Health and economic impacts were tragic, he said. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere, he said.

Its not Hubert Humphrey in 1968 saying, Well, were getting closer to the end of the Vietnam War, were almost there, which you could argue is spin, or Lyndon Johnson saying that, Princetons Zelizer told me. This is saying: The war is over. Its not happening.

It made a basic statement from Melania Trump at the end of the night sound almost shocking: I want to acknowledge the fact, she said, that since March, our lives have changed

If there is a ledger, Galen told me Wednesday, the 978 lies that everybody else told do not balance out the one truth she managed to sneak in.

And Wednesday? More of the same. Lots more.

Bidens campaign issued a statement characterizing the Republicans convention as malarkey in overdrive, adding: In Trumps version of reality, up is down, and down with the facts.

Donald Trump is an excellent storyteller. Its like were all amazed by his ability to cast himself in the best light possible. And thats kind of what campaigning is, Amanda Carpenter, a former speechwriter for Ted Cruz and the author of Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us, told me. He just does it with staggering audacity.

The question at hand now is whether it can work still. Ive theorized for a while now that his strength in creating the reality that he wants could be punctured by actual reality, Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush aide and the political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, told me. Most of his scandals and mismanagement of the first three years just didnt really impact the daily life of a lot of folks. That changed with the virus. His management of the virus has in a very real and tangible way negatively impacted peoples lives, and so his skill at creating this fake realitycan it overwhelm the pain that theyve experienced? We dont know the answer to that. I think maybe not.

Polls say hell lose. So do his approval ratings. Miller told me about a recent focus group RVAT did with 10 people in Florida who voted for Trump in 2016 but gave him unfavorable marks of late. They all said something to the effect of: I thought he was this businessman, that he was going to knock heads in Washington, that he was going to shake things upand like, now this virus is happening, and hes not doing anything. Hes not fixing it, Miller said. It wasnt like he had lost all these folks, but they had some real doubts about this bill of goods theyd been sold four years ago, about the problem-solving businessman. The takeaway for Miller? They bought it in 2016. But now?

I don't think it works this time, former John Boehner aide Michael Steel told me, because Covid isnt a distant or abstract issue. Its a daily reality of masks and cold fear and hot Purell and people, especially older Americans, getting sick and dying alone.

Trump doesnt get to do this stuff in a vacuum anymore, said Galen, because Covid has wrecked so much of traditional American life, from family life to schools to college football to pro football to the NBA.

The reality is too dramatic now, Zelizer said, to rewrite it.

I dont think you can write away a pandemic and 16 million unemployed people who are struggling to survive, and if you can, this country is in long-term trouble that extends well beyond Donald Trump, OBrien told me. If he gets away with not being held accountable for these things, then our institutions arent functioning well, and our voters arent getting the information and the education they need to hold their leaders accountable. And thats what the election will be a referendum on.

Not so much on Trump. Or even his coronavirus response.

This election is a referendum on us.

Because weve always had carnies, used car salesmen, con men, divide-and-conquer artists. Trumps rolled them all up into his persona, presidential historian Doug Brinkley told me Wednesday night. And if he gets reelected with us knowing all of this, he said, then he is a reflection of what modern America has become.

Read more from the original source:

How Trump Mastered the Art of Telling History His Way - POLITICO

The GOP stands for Grand Old Party, but there is no past on display at the 2020 Republican National Convention: No previous Republican presidents, or previous Republican presidential nominees, are speaking. History, for this Republican Party, began on June 15, 2015, when Donald J. Trump descended a golden escalator. That suits both sides just fine. The Bush family, and the Republicans who admire them, view Trump and his followers with horror. In turn, Trump and his allies look upon the Bush wing of the party with contempt.

Trumps rise has driven a rehabilitation of the George W. Bush brand. Bushs personal decency, his impulse toward tolerance and inclusivity, glows against the backdrop of Trumps casual cruelty and personal decadence. But the catastrophic misgovernance in which Bush ended his presidency, and Trump ends his first term, reveals the continuity between the two administrations.

When Bush left the White House in 2009, the Iraq War was a recognized debacle, with thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, casualties of its chaos. The global economy was in collapse, driven by a calamitous void of regulatory oversight of Wall Street, and the disastrous decision to let Lehman Brothers fall. Less than 10 years later, the next Republican president is ending his first term with nearly 200,000 Americans dead of the coronavirus the worst pandemic performance, by far, of any rich nation and an economy in shambles.

Bush and Trump are so personally different, and their administrations so temperamentally opposite, that it feels awkward to compare them, like trying to find the symmetries between a car crash and a spontaneous combustion. But in his new book, To Start a War, Robert Draper chronicles the internal deliberations and dynamics that led the Bush administration into Iraq. In doing so, Draper reminds us of the throughline between the two administrations: a toxic contempt for the government itself.

Drapers narrative starts in the hours after 9/11 when Deputy Secretary for Defense Paul Wolfowitz demands an assessment of Iraqi involvement in terrorism since the Gulf War. The missive, time-stamped 1:26 am on 9/12, was carried to Gary Greco, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency officer, by a deputy, who asked, What the hell does it mean? Greco knew exactly what it meant. It means were going to war in Iraq, he replied.

Draper conducted interviews with more than 300 people involved in the runup to the Iraq War, and the stories they tell, assembled one after the other, find a grim, repetitive tempo. Over and over, intelligence analysts and regional experts tried to talk Bush administration leadership out of their belief that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11, that it sought an alliance with al-Qaeda, that it posed a threat to the United States, that it would be easy to invade and rebuild, that there was firm evidence of weapons of mass destruction. And over and over again, Bush administration leaders dismissed them as hidebound bureaucrats whose obsession with process blinded them to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Take the links, or lack thereof, between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The intelligence community kept shooting down the theories and the frequently fabricated pieces of evidence connecting the two entities. Senior Bush officials asked again and again, and the answer kept coming back the same. To Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, it was proof that no one at the CIA had an open mind.

His colleague Wolfowitz reached out to the UKs Ministry of Defense. Surely your intelligence people have got stuff on this, he begged. They turned him down. So Wolfowitz and Feith formed their own small team to make the argument that the intelligence agencies wouldnt. Their team put together a briefing to show Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who loved it in part because one slide accused the CIA of neglecting a favorite adage of his, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and asked that it be shown to the CIA.

The meeting between the actual intelligence analysts and the ad hoc team assembled to come to the conclusions they wouldnt is darkly comic. This is your intelligence, Feith tells the assembled CIA analysts the implication being that the CIA gathered the data, but they were either too dim or too cautious to understand what it said. They were connecting dots that werent even there things wed dismissed and which, in hindsight, never took place, recalled one analyst in attendance. Bureaucrats, right?

Drapers book is full of stories like this, where the catalytic ingredient is contempt for the government employees who actually had the expertise the State Department officials who knew what it would mean to leave a power vacuum in Iraq, the United Nations weapons inspectors who had scoured suspected WMD sites in the country, the generals who understood that keeping the peace would be harder than routing Saddams forces, the foreign intelligence agencies who had discredited the sources the administration was relying on, the regional experts who warned against disbanding Iraqs army and civil service. Tragically, the Bush teams contempt for the weapons inspectors was such that when they didnt find weapons, it became, inside the administration, part of the case for war: It just showed how canny and deceptive Saddam really was, and how little you could trust the UN to contain him.

In some cases particularly speeches given by Dick Cheney the Bush team was simply lying about what was known, or not known. On this, Drapers reporting is clear: Key members of the Bush administration were obsessed with invading Iraq long before 9/11. There was no intelligence, no argument, that would have shaken their conviction. But often, the truth really was unclear, the intelligence really was uncertain, the decision-maker at least somewhat open to persuasion. In those cases, trust became the crucial question, and the Bushies always found it easy to mistrust anyone they could dismiss as a bureaucrat.

This was particularly true in the Defense Department, where Rumsfeld saw any dissent as evidence of the militarys fear of his modernization agenda. The second a question is raised about any current policy or any current process, the response is immediate and violent, he wrote in a memo. You must not change anything. There was likely truth to this assessment when it came to abandoning old weapons programs, but it proved disastrous in planning for a postwar Iraq.

In February 2002, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that occupying Iraq would require several hundred thousand soldiers. Furious, Rumsfeld deployed Wolfowitz to the Hill to rebut Shinseki. Wolfowitz said the four-star generals estimate was wildly off the mark (it wasnt) because the Iraqis will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down. He added the war would be near costless, because Iraqs oil exports would pay for the bulk of reconstruction. Shinseki was shortly thereafter forced into retirement.

Wolfowitzs rebuttal reflected Bushs views. The president thought the bureaucrats misunderstood human nature. They were obsessed with how to rebuild bureaucracy, share power, deliver services. Bush believed all people yearn for freedom, and warnings of a bloody aftermath were an insult to the Iraqi spirit. Planning for postwar governance wasnt needed because America wouldnt need to engage in much postwar governance.

Liberals often wonder how conservatives can think the government too inefficient to offer health insurance but capable of invading and rebuilding foreign countries. The answer to the riddle is simple: Bush, at least, didnt think the American government would have to do the hard work of governance in a foreign land. All it had to do was destroy the existing government.

The Bush teams contempt for government took a different form than the Trump teams contempt for government. The Bushies saw themselves as reformers who knew better than the government they led. They were capable, experienced, steeped in the values of the private sector. They wanted to remake the government in their own image. But their administration was a disaster in part because they didnt know better than the intelligence officials they dismissed, the financial regulators they later ignored, the FEMA staffers they left under incompetent leadership. They didnt respect the institution they ran enough to listen to what it knew.

The Trump team is more outrightly hostile to the government they lead. They fear the deep state too much to try and reform it. They dont want to remake federal agencies so much as corrupt them for their own gain. Where the Bush team was, at times, too interested in the minutia of the agencies they led, second-guessing even the smallest decisions from civil servants, the Trump team is detached from the agencies they run, unaware, annoyed, or threatened by the workings and responsibilities of the executive branch.

But the coronavirus disaster highlights the way different manifestations of contempt for the government can end in the same place. Like the Bush administration before it, the Trump administration is led by a president who thought he knew better than the experts, and didnt. Like the Bush administration before it, the Trump administration sidelined internal critics, silencing those who said the administration was doing insufficient planning and committing insufficient resources. Like the Bush administration before it, the Trump administration has been dismissive of the concerns and models offered by foreign governments and contemptuous of international organizations. And like the Bush administration before it, the Trump administrations misjudgments have led to a shocking casualty count and an economic crisis.

There are many differences between Bush and Trump as individuals, and many differences between their administrations. But both of them represent a Republican Party soaked in contempt for, and mistrust of, the federal government. When you dont respect, or even like, the institution you lead, you lead it poorly. When that institution is incredibly, globally important as the US government is leading it poorly can invite global catastrophe. And sure enough, under the last two Republican administrations, it has. There is continuity here, of the most consequential sort: a continuity of terrible outcomes.

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Night three of the Republican National Convention is all about heroes, particularlyin the words of Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburnthe kind Democrats dont recognizethe heroes of our law enforcement and armed services.

Leftists try to turn them into villains, Blackburn complained. They want to cancel them.

Its outrageous, if not particularly surprising, that Blackburn would caricature the nationwide movement against police brutality as nothing more than cancel culture run amok. Its more outrageous still that she would do so just days after the gruesome police shooting of Jacob Blake.

More surprising is Blackburns assertion that Democrats want to cancel members of the countrys armed forces while President Donald Trump has stood by the troops.

Trump, after all, is a man who kicked off his first presidential campaign by declaring that John McCain, who spent years as a POW in Vietnam, wasnt really a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured, Trump said. I like people who werent captured.

Trump is a man who viciously slandered the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim Army captain and bronze star recipient who was killed in the Iraq war.

And Trump is a man who smeared Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, a purple heart recipient who dared to tell the truth about Trumps Ukraine scandal. Just days after the end of his impeachment trial, Trump retaliated against Vindman and his twin brother, firing both of them from their positions on the National Security Council. Canceling them, if you will.

Originally posted here:

No, Donald Trump Has Not Stood By the Troops Mother Jones - Mother Jones

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York state attorney general is investigating whether Donald Trump and the Trump Organization improperly manipulated the value of the U.S. presidents assets to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits, and said Trumps son Eric has been uncooperative in the civil probe.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump attends a news conference about the latest coronavirus disease (COVID-19) developments, in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, U.S. August 23, 2020. REUTERS/Erin Scott

The disclosure was made in a filing on Monday with a New York state court in Manhattan, where Attorney General Letitia James is demanding that the Trump Organization, Eric Trump and others comply with subpoenas from her office.

Lawyers for the attorney general said the subpoenas were issued as part of her ongoing confidential civil investigation into potential fraud or illegality, adding there has been no determination that any laws were broken.

Alan Garten, chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, where Eric Trump is an executive vice president, said the company has tried to cooperate with James, a Democrat, as the Republican Trump seeks a second term in office.

The Trump Organization has done nothing wrong, Garten said. The NYAGs continued harassment of the company as we approach the election (and filing of this motion on the first day of the Republican National Convention) once again confirms that this investigation is all about politics.

James said she began her probe after Donald Trumps former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said in Congressional testimony that the presidents financial statements inflated some asset values to save money on loans and insurance, and deflated other asset values to reduce real estate taxes.

She also said Eric Trump was intimately involved in one or more transactions being reviewed, and had no plausible basis to refuse to testify pursuant to a subpoena.

Four properties are being probed, with a particular focus on a 212-acre (85.8 hectare) property in northern Westchester County, north of New York City, called the Seven Springs Estate.

James is examining an apparent $21.1 million tax deduction for Seven Springs for 2015 from the donation of a conservation easement, following Donald Trumps two-decade failure to build a golf course or residential housing on the property.

Other properties being probed include 40 Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles, and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.

The attorney general said the latter property, which towers a quarter-mile over the Chicago River, has been omitted from Donald Trumps Statement of Financial Condition since 2009.

James said significant amounts of subpoenaed materials have been produced but there is an impasse over other materials.

For months, the Trump Organization has made baseless claims in an effort to shield evidence from a lawful investigation into its financial dealings, James said. They have stalled, withheld documents, and instructed witnesses, including Eric Trump, to refuse to answer questions under oath.

In separate litigation, Donald Trump for a year has been fighting to block Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance from enforcing a subpoena seeking eight years of his tax returns, in connection with a criminal probe.

A federal appeals court will hear Trumps arguments on Sept. 1, after a judge refused to void Vances subpoena. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that Trump does not deserve immunity from Vances probe.

Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Jonathan Oatis and Bill Berkrot

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New York probing whether Donald Trump and the Trump Organization manipulated asset values - Reuters

11:18 AM PDT 8/26/2020byFrank Scheck

The diagnosis is in, at least according to the estimable gallery of mental health professionals, and members of The Duty to Warn Coalition, who are seen in Dan Partland's documentary: President Donald Trump suffers from a condition known as malignant narcissism, the components of which are narcissism, paranoia, anti-social personality disorder and sadism.

To which the rest of us can only say, "Well, duh!"

#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump, being released even as we're still suffering the effects of watching the Republican National Convention, delivers a devastating indictment of the mental state of our current chief executive. To anyone who follows the news religiously (and who doesn't, during these anxiety-ridden days?), not much presented here will prove revelatory. The film is even a little out of date, since one of its primary talking heads, Lincoln Project co-founder (and husband of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway) George Conway, has now abandoned his mission of criticizing Trump. But thankfully not before delivering such acidic comments as "Donald Trump is like a practical joke that got out of hand."

The shrinks participating in the documentary are technically violating what's known as "The Goldwater Rule," which states that it is "unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement." The ethical standard springs from a 1964 magazine poll in which 1,189 psychiatrists said that then-candidate Barry Goldwater was unfit to be president. Fortunately for the sake of the country, there's also something known as "The Tarasoff Rule," inspired by a California Supreme Court ruling that decreed that mental health professionals have a "duty to warn" if their patients might put someone else's life in danger.

And while Trump isn't their patient, the talking heads in #Unfit certainly make a convincing case for the danger that he poses to the nation. The film wouldn't really have to do more than trot out some of his greatest hits, which it does with clips of such episodes as Trump's remark that he wouldn't lose any voters even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, Sean Spicer's forced lying about the inauguration crowd size, and his machinations with Sharpies. Thankfully, the documentary doesnt include too many of these, since it would lead to a running time dwarfing Gone With the Wind.

"Trump is a sociopath, a sadist, a con artist, a racist, a misogynist and a sexist," declares one of the therapists in the film. He adds, "And I think that is a problem," which might well be the understatement of the year.

#Unfit loses some of its impact by occasionally concentrating on the trivial. There's a lengthy segment, for instance, devoted to chronicling Trump's habit of cheating at golf. Yes, it's indicative of his overall behavior that includes lying nearly every time he opens his mouth. But it pales in comparison to his ability to, say, launch a nuclear war, a topic that is discussed in frightening terms, or his many similarities to such historical figures as Mussolini and Hitler.

Ironically, it's not the mental health professionals on display who make the strongest impact, but rather Anthony Scaramucci, who seems to have settled on a second career as a media figure critical of the man for whom he once, albeit briefly, worked. Say what you will about the Mooch (and please, discuss among yourselves), he's got a way with words, as illustrated by this sly assessment of his former boss. "He is not a racist," Scaramucci affirms. "He treats everybody like shit. He's an asshole. That's different from being a racist."

It says something about our troubled times that the description almost seems comforting. Scaramucci also makes this astute point about the stakes for our democracy: "You can't disrupt a 243-year experiment for one dude's personality."

Naturally, the film can be accused of preaching to the choir (personally, I've lost my voice from so much singing). Despite its powerfully cogent and well-informed arguments, #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump is sadly unlikely to change the minds of the roughly 35-40% of the population who look at the president's behavior and apparently see nothing to be concerned about. But that's a subject for another documentary.

Production companies: Bronson Park Films, docshop ProductionsDistributor: Dark Star PicturesDirector: Dan PartlandProducers: Art Horan, Dan PartlandExecutive producer: Jason DreyerEditor: Scott EvansComposer: Tree Adams

83 min.

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'#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump': Film Review - Hollywood Reporter

The president is not slated to be on the airwaves anywhere during the final week of the month, as Republicans hold their convention.

Its a jarring turn of events for a reelection effort that has long promoted itself as a financial powerhouse and until recently had a heavy TV presence. And its exceedingly rare to see a sitting president go dark so close to an election. But the Trump campaign has seen its long-standing cash advantage over Biden dwindle to just about $20 million, according to the most recent financial disclosures, even as Biden pours money into commercials.

Trump aides say they have decided to focus their spending on the post-Labor Day final stretch of the campaign and say they see little reason to advertise during the national conventions, which are receiving widespread coverage. Bidens campaign spent $16 million on TV during his convention week, and is on track to spend more than $14 million during this weeks Republican confab.

It "makes little sense to blow donor money on ads during convention weeks, when all of the national media is focused on the candidates anyway," said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, who argued that Biden's advertising barrage was to designed to compensate for his relatively light public schedule.

Yet it has worried senior Republicans, who argue the reelection effort erred by allowing Bidens message to go unchallenged. Among Trump allies, there is a growing desire to see a super PAC fill the void. Many in the presidents sphere have long expressed dissatisfaction with America First Action, the principal pro-Trump outside group which has been outspent by its Biden-aligned rival.

Corey Lewandowski. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

With 70 days to go in a campaign, all of the people who have raised money on behalf of Donald Trumps name should be spending it to support his campaign right now, said former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who informally advises the president.

David Bossie, a former Trump deputy campaign manager who remains close to the White House, said, After years of planning, strategizing and fundraising, now is the time for the super PACs and those organizations that support President Trump and Vice President Mike Pences reelection to engage with their all-important dollars to have a positive impact now and not wait any longer.

An America First Action spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. The organization has spent roughly $13 million over the past month and has booked $24 million from September through the election. It has announced plans for a post-Labor Day, anti-Biden assault.

The Trump forces have also been hamstrung by the downfall of the National Rifle Association. The prominent outside group aggressively bolstered Trump in 2016 but has been essentially a nonfactor in 2020 as it confronts an investigation into alleged financial improprieties.

Trump advisers note they have placed a premium on digital advertising, especially during the conventions. From July 21 to Aug. 15, the presidents campaign spent $31 million on Facebook and Google, while the Biden team invested $25 million, according to Advertising Analytics. It represents an advantage for Trump, but not of the same magnitude Biden has been enjoying on TV.

Trump aides strenuously push back on the idea they are facing financial problems, though campaign manager Bill Stepien has been examining the campaigns operations, including budgeting. He has charged deputy campaign manager Justin Clark to review spending going forward.

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien. | Amy Newman/The Record via AP

After taking over the Trump campaign last month, Stepien briefly paused TV spending to reassess the strategy. Rather than airing commercials across the country, the campaign decided to target early voting states.

Pressed on the scale-back during a Sunday appearance on NBCs Meet the Press, Trump senior adviser Jason Miller said the campaign is conserving money right now and focusing a little bit more smartly and a little more effectively on the states that are voting early.

Yet even in most of those early voting states, Biden has dominated Trump. The former vice president spent more than three times as much as the president in North Carolina where absentee voting begins next week as well as in Florida and Arizona.

The one state where Trump outpaced Biden was Georgia, where the presidents team made a small investment. Losing Georgia would likely signal a catastrophic election for Trump, who carried the state by 5 percentage points in 2016.

The Trump campaign was also absent in Ohio and Nevada.

To some Republicans, the scenario feels eerily similar to 2012 when Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney during the convention weeks, fueling an early fall bounce.

Over the dog days of summer, the Biden campaign and his outside allies have owned the airwaves in the states that matter most, said Nick Everhart, a Republican ad-maker.

Everhart, however, cautioned that the average voter has been more consumed with the pandemics impact on their life, and said that deciding who to vote for is still a fall not a summer activity.

Whether the Biden advertising advantage persists into autumn remains an open question. While the Biden campaign has announced plans to spend $220 million starting in September, it has so far reserved only about half that, according to media buying figures obtained by POLITICO. The Trump campaign has booked nearly $148 million so far.

The Biden team has greeted Trumps summertime absence from the airwaves with jubilation and say it's evidence of a campaign on the decline.

The Trump campaign promised us the Death Star, but instead what we got was something closer to the Titanic, said Biden spokesman Michael Gwin.

Not everyone is convinced the drop-off will matter, though. Even without TV ads, Trump has an ability to draw attention in a way few politicians can. And many Republicans point out that the president found himself in a similar position four years ago.

Trump was significantly outspent in 2016, said veteran GOP ad-maker Scott Howell, and that didnt seem to matter.

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Trump goes dark on TV as early voting looms - POLITICO

An overview of the Department of the Interior's most crooked political appointees and its most egregious anti-environmental actions.

This presentation explores the various ways that industry lobbyists and right-wing operatives have infiltrated the Interior Department and are now using the powerful agency to rollback essential environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former mega-lobbyist for the oil and gas industry and Big Ag, has stocked DOI with conservative ideologues and corporate influence peddlers and together they are doing everything in their power to worsen the biodiversity crisis unfolding across this planet.

Journalist Jimmy Tobias(@JamesCTobias) discusses some of the investigative reporting he's done looking into Trump's Interior Department, with a focus on the agency's most crooked political appointees and its most egregious anti-environmental actions.

Oregon Wild's Doug Heiken reviews the Trump administration's newly announced rollbacks of critical habitat for the northern spotted owl and what the move means for Oregon's beloved remaining old growth forests, followed by a Q&A.

Jimmy Tobias is a contributing writer at The Guardian and a contributor at The Nation. An investigative reporter, he covers conservation, civil society and cities. He was formerly a trail worker with the U.S. Forest Service. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Intercept, Pacific Standard, HuffPost, Mother Jones, Outside, High Country News, and numerous other outlets.

Excerpt from:

Webcast: Age of Extinction - Corruption in Donald Trump's Dept of Interior - Oregon WildBlog

The Republican convention that nominates Donald Trump for a second term will be the greatest event in the political history of cancel culture. What Trump is cancelling is nothing less than the Republican party as it has existed before him. He ran in 2016 in the primaries on cancelling the GOP and in 2020 he ratifies his triumph. After the election, political scientists and historians will study his obliteration of the Republican party as his greatest and most enduring political achievement.

The Republican party has been on a long journey away from being the party of Abraham Lincoln, accelerating since Barry Goldwater and rightwing cadres captured it in 1964 in reaction to the civil rights movement. After Richard Nixon embraced the southern strategy and won the nomination in 1968 with the help of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the Dixiecrat segregationist presidential candidate in 1948, the party increasingly radicalized in every election cycle and became gradually unmoored. In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, the place where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. Surrounded by Confederate flags, he hailed states rights. As brazen an appeal as it was, Reagan felt he had to resort to the old code words.

Central to Trumps unique selling proposition is that he dispenses with the dog whistles. His vulgarity gives a vicarious thrill to those who revel in his taunting of perceived enemies or scapegoats. He made them feel dominant at no social price, until his catastrophic mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis. Flouting a mask is the magical act of defiance to signal that nothing has really changed and that in any case, Trump bears no responsibility.

But there has also been a political cost to Trumps louche comic lounge act that still transfixes a diehard audience lingering like late-night gamblers for the last show. Trump is the only president since the advent of modern polling never to reach 50% approval. Despite decisively losing the popular vote in 2016, he said he won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. This time, fearing an even more overwhelming popular rejection, he says the outcome will be rigged and he has pre-emptively tried to cancel the US Postal Service, to undermine voting by mail.

From Reagan onward, even as the fringe moved to the center and took it over, the party did not anticipate that it was slouching toward Trump. Conservatives have consistently failed to grasp the unintended consequences of conservatism. Even when Reagan fostered the evangelical right, George HW Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the supreme court, George W Bush invaded Iraq and neglected oversight of financial markets that collapsed, and John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, Republicans believed they were expanding the attraction of the conservative project. When Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh methodically degraded language, it seemed a propaganda technique to herd supporters. When the dark money of the Koch family and the wealthy reactionaries of the cloaked Donors Trust bankrolled the lumpen dress-up Tea Party to do their bidding on deregulation of finance and industry, the munificently funded conservative candidates did their bidding as retainers of privilege.

In the wasteland, only cockroaches and Mitch McConnell may survive

At the presidential level there still remained residual elements contrary to what metastasized into Trumpism. Reagan represented free trade and western firmness against Russia. George HW Bush was a paragon of public service. George W Bush was an advocate for immigrants. John McCain was the embodiment of patriotic sacrifice.

After Trump, all that has been cancelled. Since he first rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, to declare his candidacy against Mexican rapists, there has always been a new escalator downward. After overcoming his initial hesitation, the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, welcomed the election of a QAnon conspiracy-spouting candidate from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then McCarthy condemned QAnon and stated that Greene wasnt part of a movement she continued to defend.

Trump hailed her as a future Republican star. For months, he has been tweeting messages to encourage the racist, antisemitic cult. Theres a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it, Greene proclaimed. Ive heard these are people that love our country, Trump said. In the wasteland, only cockroaches and Mitch McConnell may survive.

Stuart Stevens, a prominent Republican political consultant, eyes startled wide open, has entitled his expos of the party It Was All A Lie. He describes the conservative Trump apologists, the adults in the room, as latter-day versions of Franz von Papen, the German chancellor who enabled the rise of Hitler in the complacent belief that he could be controlled and the conservatives would maintain power.

On 4 July, at the mammoth stage set of Mount Rushmore, Trump mugged for his photo op by posing his face next in line to the carving of Abraham Lincoln. He had earlier told the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, Did you know its my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore? And I started laughing, she recounted. And he wasnt laughing, so he was totally serious. (Trump tweeted that it was fake news that he had ordered an aide to inquire about immortalizing his face on the mountain.)

Ostensibly, Trump came to deliver his ideological message. He denounced cancel culture, which he said was the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America. He attributed it to a new far-left fascism. And he spelled out its punitive nature: If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished. Thus, he offered a concise description of his own cancel cultures methods.

Trumps cancel culture deals in aggressions, not micro-aggressions. The only safe space is where Trump is worshipped. Before, during and after the death of McCain, Trump unleashed tirades of insult. He finally complained that the McCain family never thanked him for approving the senators funeral arrangements, even though it was Congress that gave approval. For years, Trump has disparaged the Bush family. At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, when George W Bush called for setting aside partisanship and embracing national unity, Trump tweeted, but where was he during Impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside.

Trumps cancel culture deals in aggressions, not micro-aggressions. The only safe space is where Trump is worshipped

Trump has invoked Reagan only as a stepping stone of his own monumental pedestal. At a rally in 2019, Trump mused: I was watching the other night the great Lou Dobbs [of Fox News], and he said, When Trump took over, President Trump, he used to say, Trump is a great president. Then he said, Trump is the greatest president since Ronald Reagan. Then he said, No, no, Trump is an even better president than Ronald Reagan. And now hes got me down as the greatest president in the history of our country, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Thank you. We love you too.

When Trump sought to profit for his 2020 campaign by selling a gold-colored Trump-Reagan commemorative coin set, the Reagan Foundation sent him a curt letter, telling him to cease and desist. Trump has constantly retailed a false story about Reagan supposedly remarking after meeting him, For the life of me, and Ill never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president. The chief administrative officer of the Reagan Foundation felt compelled to note that Reagan did not ever say that about Donald Trump.

Trumps petty, vindictive and exploitative abuse of the Bush presidents, McCain and Reagan pales in comparison to his raging obsessions about Lincoln. He has boasted his poll numbers are better than Lincolns ever were (true), claimed he is more a victim than the assassinated martyr (untrue), and declared he has done more for Black Americans than Lincoln (untrue).

Trump, the would-be Great Emancipator and upholder of Confederate monuments, has lately ruminated about giving an address at Gettysburg. There are many such monuments there to the thousands of poor white southerners who gave their lives for the Slave Power and to overthrow the democracy of the United States. Perhaps, contemplating his last campaign, Trump could trudge across the rutted field of Picketts Charge. He might ask what his bikers and self-styled militia would be willing to do for him. What Lincoln consecrated, Trump would desecrate. But he would undoubtedly speak longer.

Trumps compulsive need to elevate himself as greater than the greatest president does not stand alone among strange statements about Lincoln from members of his inner circle. Some fancy that they too resemble Lincoln, alongside Trump. Some insist they are bravely fighting the civil war, on behalf of Trump. Some depict Trump as the reincarnation of Lincoln, to justify his dishonesty. Some summon Lincoln to claim God is on their side. The disconnect of these incoherent and eccentric gestures from any reality past or present is a telltale sign of terminal party identity. Each weird distortion marks the progress of Trumps cancel culture, the eclipse of history bred by one-man misrule that is a half-cocked aspiration to an authoritarian system that might be codified by the likes of William Barr.

Stephen Bannon, Trumps now-indicted former campaign manager and senior adviser, appeared in a 2019 documentary about his post-White House crusade to organize an international neo-fascist alliance. The film opens with Bannon cradling a volume of Carl Sandburgs biography of Lincoln. Bannon says portentously that its 1862. Then he reads Lincolns words: They wish to get rid of me and I am sometimes half-disposed to gratify them. We are now on the brink of destruction. It appears to me the Almighty is against us and I can hardly see a ray of hope. Lincolns fiery trial to preserve the union is reduced to Bannons dark apocalyptic mutterings against the forces conspiring against him and Trump: the Deep State, rootless cosmopolitans, globalists and liberal elites. Were a long way from, as Lincoln said, the last best hope of earth.

Betsy DeVos's definition of freedom as 'what we ought', that is, what she determines, is more Orwellian than Lincolnian

Ivanka Trump has turned to Lincoln for the occasional non-sequitur defense of her father. Her vacant voice and immobile expression augment the surprise effect of her inapt citations. After Attorney General Barr issued a deceptive characterization of the Mueller Report to mislead the public about its actual content, Ivanka rushed to support Barrs falsehood. She tweeted a quote: Truth is generally the best vindication against slander Abraham Lincoln. The difference between Barr and Lincoln was that Barr covered up the truth.

During the impeachment inquiry into Trumps withholding of nearly $400m in military aid to Ukraine, to coerce its government to launch an investigation that would smear Joe Biden with fabricated accusations of corruption, Ivanka leaped to protect her father. She claimed the incontrovertible facts were nothing but a partisan attack contrived to malign him, originating from a whistleblower within the intelligence community who was not particularly relevant.

Basically since the election, she said, this has been the experience that our administration and our family has been having. Rather than wait, under a year, until the people can decide for themselves based on his record and based on his accomplishments, this new effort has commenced. Once again, she reached for Lincoln as her fathers model. This has been the experience of most, she observed with the sagacious tone of a student of history. Abraham Lincoln was famously, even within his own cabinet, surrounded by people who were former political adversaries. Ivankas smug confusion was complete. She had mistaken the whistleblower whose memo triggered the impeachment process with Lincolns team of rivals.

On 23 January, Betsy DeVos, Trumps secretary of education, a billionaire heiress and funder of rightwing causes, spoke at the Museum of the Bible in Washington to a group from the Colorado Christian University, to claim Lincoln as the imaginary leader for the anti-abortion movement.

He too contended with the pro-choice arguments of his day, she said. They suggested that a states choice to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it. According to DeVos, women asserting their reproductive rights are engaged in a vast moral evil, equivalent to slavery.

Lincoln was right about slavery choice then, and he would be right about the life choice today, she said. Freedom is not about doing what we want. Freedom is about having the right to do what we ought.

DeVoss mangling of Lincoln, who was an early advocate of womens rights and suffrage but never said a word about abortion, is intended to legitimate the anti-abortion agenda of granting personhood rights to fetuses, which she and other zealots equate to enslaved African Americans. Her definition of freedom as what we ought, that is, what she determines, is more Orwellian than Lincolnian. Historically, claiming that law should be rooted in theological dogma is in the tradition of the southern theologians Lincoln condemned, who justified slavery by biblical references and divine sanction.

Mike Pence, Trumps vice-president, a former rightwing radio host, travelled in January to Ripon, Wisconsin, site of the founding of the Republican party in 1854, garrulously to praise Trump as the true heir to Lincoln in the advancement of our highest ideals. Once again, Pence explained, we are at a crossroads of freedom. Trump, the Lincoln manqu, is all that stands between America and the threat of Joe Biden and socialism and decline. Months before the murder of George Floyd and the wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations that swept across the country, Pence charged, Joe Biden believes America is, in his words, systemically racist. And despite historically low crime rates prior to this pandemic, Joe Biden believes that law enforcement in America has a, quote, implicit bias against minorities. In conclusion, the evangelical Pence declared, The Bible says, Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, and with President Donald Trump in the White House for four more years, well make America great again, again.

In the long-ago days when there was only one again, during the 2016 campaign, Pence defended Trumps shout-out to Vladimir Putin to hack and release Clinton campaign emails: Russia if youre listening

You know, Pence explained, Abraham Lincoln said, give the people the facts, and the republic will be saved. I mean, I think thats the point that [Trump is] making. Hes not encouraging some foreign power to compromise the security of this country. Bowdlerizing a dubiously sourced Lincoln quote, Pence portrayed Trump as the simple protector of facts and denied he was encouraging Russian intervention. Pences statement was a cover-up in real time. We now know from the Senate intelligence committee report that Roger Stone, Trumps longtime political operative and dirty trickster, was directly in touch with Trump on the theft of the Clinton emails by Russian intelligence and their release by WikiLeaks. To quote Marx Groucho Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? If Trump has a faithful servant, it is Mike Pence.

Mike Pompeo, Trumps secretary of state and yet another evangelical crusader, has raised Lincoln to justify his own brand of dogma. In a speech entitled Being a Christian Leader, to the American Association of Christian Counselors at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel at Nashville on 11 October, he explained how God directs him to be humble, forgiving and thrifty.

I know some people in the media will break out the pitchforks when they hear that I ask God for direction in my work, he said. But you should know, as much as Id like to claim originality, it is not a new idea. I love this quote from President Lincoln. He said quote, I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.

Unfortunately, in their Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, the historians Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher rate the words Pompeo spoke with a grade D: in other words, bogus. Lincoln is in fact recorded to have referred to knees only three times, all involving jokes. The Fehrenbachers also give a D to another well-used Lincoln quotation: You can fool all the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all the time; but you cant fool all the people all the time.

Stephen Miller, Trumps senior adviser, originator of the Muslim ban and separating migrant children from their families, author of the cancel culture speech at Mount Rushmore, is impatient for the apocalypse. Observing the protests at Portland before the federal courthouse that were met with a show of armed force, Miller went on Tucker Carlson Tonight to explain why this was Fort Sumter.

The Democratic party for a long time historically has been the party of secession, he said. What youre seeing today is the Democratic party returning to its roots.

In his compact and inverted analogy, the protest against police violence was a battle in a new civil war and the ragtag shifting bands of protesters including the Wall of Moms were the restoration of the pro-secession Southern Democratic party, which would of course transform Trump into Lincoln. The identity of the enemy may change Muslims, Mexicans or Moms but Miller is prepared to draw the sword for whatever clash of civilization may come. Hes just not prepared for a virus.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump plagiarized not only Reagans slogan, Make America Great Again, but also Nixons appeal to the silent majority. He also boasted: I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldnt lose any voters. Trumps attorney, asked about the Fifth Avenue example by the judge presiding in the case of the Manhattan district attorney seeking Trumps tax returns, argued that Trump would have legal immunity if he killed somebody.

Since March, more than 170,000 Americans the New York Times estimates more than 200,000 have died of coronavirus. On 20 June, Trump kicked off his campaign with a rally at Tulsa. Campaign workers tore stickers off the seats that encouraged social distancing. In the sparse but closely packed crowd sat Herman Cain, proudly grinning, not wearing a mask. For a brief moment in 2012 the former CEO of Godfathers Pizza and fast-talking Tea Party advocate had been the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Disillusioned after he quit the race when accused of sexual harassment, he called for a third party. Then came Trump.

For 2020, the man who said his Secret Service code name as president would be Cornbread became chairman of Black Voices For Trump. A month later, he was dead of coronavirus. Cain would miss his speaking slot at the Republican convention. He had joined what the ancient Greeks called the silent majority. Yet 20 days after Cains death, on 19 August, his Twitter account posted Trumps latest ad: Boy, it sure looks like Joe Biden is losing his mental faculties. In death, nobody, not even Mike Pence, could claim greater devotion to the party of Trump.

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How Donald Trump canceled the Republican party - The Guardian

But the target of Cooper's ridicule hadn't been asked what he thinks of the videos ... until Sunday.

"I have not, no," Trump said, blank-faced. "I'd like to see them. Are they good or bad?"

Hilton told Trump he thought the president would find them very entertaining.

"OK, good! I'd like to see them," Trump said. "If you're saying they're positive, I'd like to look. If they're not positive...."

Hilton acknowledged that Cooper "doesn't mean it to be positive."

"I see," Trump said. "Well, I'll have to check it out."

Cooper has garnered a huge social media following since going viral in April 2020 for her satirical Trump impressions. She has been retweeted and praised by a multitude of entertainers, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Stiller, Halle Berry, Chrissy Teigen and Cher.

Prior to her online success, Cooper was a writer and correspondent on the CBS All Access pilot "Old News," produced by Stephen Colbert. She is also the author of the best-selling books "100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings" and "How to be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings."

-- CNN's Lisa France contributed to this report

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Donald Trump was finally asked about Sarah Cooper's viral impersonations of him - CNN

HOAXDonald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of TruthBy Brian Stelter

Just about everyone understands that Fox News is the cheerleader in chief for a TV-obsessed president. We know the channel traffics in misinformation. Weve seen hosts lob softball questions during their regular interviews with President Trump. Was anyone really surprised to see Sean Hannity warming up the crowd at a Trump rally?

Even so, it is easy to forget the full extent of the power that Fox News wields over the Trump administration. The channel has spawned some of the defining myths of this presidency and spurred Trump to adopt positions so hard-line as to be unpalatable even to congressional Republicans.

A small sampling of Foxs fictions: The caravan of terrorists and criminals supposedly marching north to invade America. The debunked conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee staffer was murdered for leaking campaign emails. The false claim that Ukraine, not Russia, was interfering in the 2016 election. Most recently, the deadly notion that the coronavirus was no worse than the seasonal flu.

One moment those falsehoods were being served up by Fox personalities. The next, the president was parroting them, embellishing them, amplifying them to his tens of millions of social media followers sometimes even plagiarizing Foxs parodical chyrons.

This is the value of Hoax, the new book by the CNN journalist Brian Stelter. It provides a thorough and damning exploration of the incestuous relationship between Trump and his favorite channel and of Foxs democracy-decaying role as a White House propaganda organ masquerading as conservative journalism.

Hoax is not likely to change many readers minds. Its basic thesis that Fox is powerful and toxic is already conventional wisdom, thanks in part to last years authoritative New York Times expos of Rupert Murdoch, whose company owns Fox. (Also, lets be honest, not many Fox fans are likely to read this book.) Even so, Stelters cataloging of the power and toxicity of Fox is an important addition to the growing library of books documenting this strange period in American history.

Foxs clout extends far beyond warping peoples understanding of the world. Stelter shows, for example, how spurious attacks by Fox hosts led Trump to fire cabinet secretaries and shut down the federal government. It is the type of old-school media muscle-flexing that would be impossible under a stronger president.

Stelter is at his best when he is explaining the underlying forces that led Fox to embrace propaganda. (Once upon a time, he writes, Fox had a journalistic culture.) Part of the reason is money. Fox News makes nearly $2 billion a year. Its intensely loyal audience allows the channel to charge more for advertising and in fees assessed by cable companies. Inciting viewers is crucial for keeping ratings high.

But there is another force at play. Many Fox employees view their job as catering to the president. Nothing gets people buzzing like a @realDonaldTrump tweet. Everyone at Fox could see that the way to get attention, to get promoted, to get ahead was to hitch a ride with Trump and never look back, Stelter writes. Some Fox journalists yes, they still exist! find this troubling. Very few have the guts to say so publicly.

Stelter traces the Trump-Fox synergies to 2011, when Roger Ailes, the channels longtime boss, gave Trump a weekly phone-in slot on the Fox & Friends morning show. The platform provided him a direct line into the brains of millions of Republican primary voters. For its part, Fox got someone whose penchant for bombast and demagogy proved a ratings winner.

That symbiosis inspired other Fox hosts, none more so than Hannity.

Pre-Trump, Hannity was in trouble. He was churning out bland, predictable screeds against President Obama. Some producers were considering pairing him with a female co-host to spice things up. In Trump, Hannity sensed a chance to turn things around. He glommed onto the ascendant candidate, stoking fears of rigged elections, violent immigrants and murderous Democrats, and pitching Trump as the panacea.

By the time Trump was sworn in, Hannitys entwinement with the new president went far beyond sycophantic interviews and concocted conspiracies. On a near-daily basis, Hannity served as a presidential sounding board, and Stelter amusingly describes the TV star as exhausted by the round-the-clock counseling.

Stelter is far from an impartial observer. He is the host of a CNN show about the media, and his regular criticisms of Fox have made him a popular punching bag for Hannity and others.

Early on in Hoax, Stelter acknowledges that he is shocked and angry by what is going on at Fox, and his emotions sometimes seem to get the better of him. He resorts to name-calling and spreads gratuitous gossip about Fox personalities, at one point quoting an unnamed sources assertion that a female anchor knew how to use sex to get ahead. Coming from a victim of Foxs smears, it feels a little retributive.

Stelter also glosses over the fact that CNN is guilty of its own, Fox-lite version of partisan pandering. Certain hosts tend to ask leading, left-leaning questions. Everyone is incentivized to say things that go viral; hyperbole trumps nuance. This is not new. Tucker Carlson who has emerged as Foxs leading promoter of racist lies rose to notoriety as a flamethrower on the CNN show Crossfire.

To be clear, there is no equivalence between the occasionally inaccurate and misleading liberal media, which generally owns up to its mistakes, and the highly productive factory of falsehoods at Fox. But in a polarized America, cable news networks reflect and to varying degrees contribute to that polarization.

My biggest disappointment with Hoax is that Stelter doesnt unpack the greatest mystery of Foxs success: Why is the channels unbridled demagogy so enticing? Do viewers realize theyre getting played? Do they care?

The book cites research that shows Fox viewers are especially likely to hold inaccurate views of important issues, but what is actually going on in their heads when they sit down in front of the TV? The closest Stelter comes to answering this question is when he asserts that for some, Fox is an identity. Almost a way of life.

That may be true, but I would be curious to hear from and better understand those viewers. There is no sign that Stelter spoke to any. Readers are left to look down on Foxs millions of loyalists as gullible members of an extremist cult. It is just the sort of easy-to-digest but unnuanced conclusion that would play well on cable news.

The rest is here:

The Incestuous Relationship Between Donald Trump and Fox News - The New York Times

Donald Trump Jr. tapes his Republican National Convention speech in Washington, D.C. (Susan Walsh / AP Photo)

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Cocaine and Donald Trump Jr. started trending at the same time on Twitter on Monday night. This was a direct result of liberals freely and without facts theorizing about the presidents eldest son. These speculations are not just baseless but also unfair. There are far more human reasons for Trump Jr.s odd performance during the speech he gave at the RNC.Ad Policy

If you simply examine the text, the speech itself is perfunctory. Its a hard-right statement of the case for Donald Trumps reelection, in keeping with Trump Jr.s role as the family member who works hardest to enthuse the conservative base. His sister Ivanka, by contrast, is much more an emissary to the larger world and tries to put a moderate spin on Trumpism.

Heres a not uncharacteristic specimen from Juniors speech:

If Democrats really wanted to help minorities and underserved communities, instead of bowing to big money union bosses, theyd let parents choose what school is best for their kids. Theyd limit immigration to protect American workers. Theyd support the police who protect our neighborhoods. Theyd learn how to negotiate trade deals that prioritize Americas interest for a change. Theyd end the endless wars and quit sending our young people to solve problems in foreign lands. Theyd cut taxes for families and workers. Theyd create opportunity zones that drive investment into inner cities. In other words, if Democrats cared for the forgotten men and women of our country, theyd do exactly what President Trump is doing. America is the greatest country on earth, but my fathers entire worldview revolves around the idea that we can always do even better. Imagine the life you want to have, one with a great job, a beautiful home, a perfect family. MORE FROM Jeet Heer

Its only in the last sentence that Trump Jr. sounds a bit off, as if he were a radio station that suddenly shifted from Rush Limbaugh to Talking Heads. (And you may find yourself in a beautiful house / With a beautiful wife / And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here?)

Whats odd about the speech is Trump Jr.s mannerisms, the wild, distant glaze in his eyes, his strange puppet-like hand gestures, the too-fast racing through the words.

The most likely explanation is existential dread. Trump Jr. has never been comfortable in public life; hes always tried to mimic his father (a more successful public speaker). Trump Jr. has always seemed more like a lost puppy than a grown man, someone who is never at ease with the world but anxiously trying to spy out the situation. Added to this natural discomfort are his likely worries about his fate if his father loses.

More than any of the other Trump progeny, Trump Jr. was implicated in Russiagate. As The New York Times reports:

Dons the only person who thinks theyre going to lose, says a prominent conservative activist who is in regular contact with him and other key members of Trumps political operation. Hes like, Were losing, dude, and were going to get really hurt when we lose. An electoral defeat in November, Trump Jr. fears, could result in federal prosecutions of Trump, his family and his political allies. He has told the conservative activist that he expects that a Biden administration will not participate in a peaceful transition and instead will shoot the prisoners.

We dont need cocaine to explain Trump Jr.s speech patterns. There are reasons more firmly rooted in his life.

Read the rest here:

The Desperation of Donald Trump Jr. - The Nation

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., arrives for a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned President Donald Trump at a White House dinner last October that Chinese tech firms posed a direct threat to the U.S. business, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter.

Zuckerberg is said to have argued that clamping down on these firms should be more of a priority than reining in Facebook.

Around the time of the dinner, Zuckerberg warned U.S. officials and lawmakers that Chinese tech firms pose a risk to American values and the nation's technological dominance.The tech mogul is also said to have pointed out that TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, doesn't share Facebook's commitment to freedom of expression.

Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who met Zuckerberg in September called for an inquiry into TikTok in October.A national security review was launched soon after, and Trump signed an executive order to ban the app this month citing national security concerns. TikTok confirmed over the weekend that it has launched a legal appeal against the ban.

TikTok presents major competition to Facebook's business. The social video-sharing app, which has boomed in popularity in recent months, competes directly with Instagram. Given the size of TikTok's audience, it's possible companies would rather pay for advertising space on TikTok than on Instagram or Facebook.

White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Monday that Zuckerberg has "zero influence" when it comes to TikTok and that the report has "zero credibility."

A Facebook spokesperson told CNBC on Monday: "Mark has never advocated for a ban on TikTok. He has repeatedly said publicly that the biggest competitors to U.S. tech companies are Chinese companies, with values that don't align with democratic ideals like free speech.It's ludicrous to suggest that long-standing national security concerns raised by policymakers on both sides of the aisle have been shaped by Mark's statements alone."

Read The Wall Street Journal's full report here.

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Mark Zuckerberg reportedly warned President Trump about the rise of Chinese tech firms - CNBC