Benklers teamjust published its study, which examinesthepresidents disinformation campaign against mail-in votes and detailsthemethodsand peoplehes using to accomplish his goals.Thefindings found that some ofthebiggest names in American mass media andthepolitical elite are primarily responsible, and that social media plays only a secondary role.Thefindings run contrary tothepopular idea that its foreign troll factories doingtheworst disinformation dirty work.

Thestudy examined 55,000 media stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 Facebook posts.Theconclusion, echoingtheir research from 2015 to 2018, is that Donald Trump and Fox News arethekey players in this crucial disinformation campaign, not Russian trolls.Theresearchers mappedthe campaign out, showing a clear and recurring culprit: Trump, whether on TV or Twitter or by close proxy.

Theres been a lot of alarm over Russian interference and clickbait factories on social media, says Benkler, but in 2016 and today, what we see is that mass media is much more important.

TheAmerican press amplifies this dramatically because outlets cannot resist giving attention totheWhite House. Calling his actions a disinformation campaign would be profoundly difficult for some journalists who are desperate to project balance as if it is equal to fairness.

But this has real consequences. Mail-in voting expands access to an election inthemiddle of a national health crisis, and lies are being used as justification to undercut or eliminate this accessa tactic clearly at play in Texas and other states.

There is a way forward, however.Theresearch argues thattheprimary cure is for these media outlets to more aggressively policethepresidents disinformation.

While many Americans are set in their beliefs on election fraud, there is still a substantial group of persuadables, says Benkler. They are unsure of the truth about election fraud, they watch network news, and they read local papers that aggregate journalism from outlets liketheAssociated Press.

That means theonly meaningful players arethenews editors andthe journalists at those outlets most often used for political news bytheleast attentive, least politically engaged people in society, Benkler says.

That includes tacklingthequestion ofthepresidents misinformation clearly and directly, and avoiding false balance. EventheNew York Times, whose readers are well informed onthereality of voter fraud, sometimes publishes credulous and noncritical journalism on this. One recent story about Texas shutting down ballot drop-off sites, for example, was headlined Citing security, Texas governor limits counties to one spot each for in-person ballot drop-offs, giving credence totheidea.Not untiltheseventh paragraph does the story mention, as a brief aside, that there is absolutely no evidence that mail-in voting causes fraud.

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Mainstream media is the biggest amplifier of White House disinformation - MIT Technology Review

This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as miracles coming down from God. If thats true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tissue.

The emergency antibody that Trump received last week was developed with the use of a cell line originally derived from abortion tissue, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed the experimental drug.

The Trump administration has taken an increasingly firm line against medical research using fetal tissue from abortions. For example, when it moved in 2019 to curtail the ability of the National Institutes of Health to fund such research, supporters hailed a major pro-life victory and thanked Trump personally for taking decisive action against what they called the outrageous and disgusting practice of experimentation using baby body parts.

But when the president faced a deadly encounter with covid-19, his administration raised no objections over the fact that the new drugs also relied on fetal cells, and anti-abortion campaigners were silent too. Most likely, their hypocrisy was unwitting. Many types of medical and vaccine research employ supplies of cells originally acquired from abortion tissue. It would have taken an expert to realize that was the case with Trumps treatment.

Last Friday, as Trump developed worrisome symptoms of covid-19, the president received an emergency cocktail of anti-coronavirus antibodies made by Regeneron. These molecules are manufactured in cells from a hamsters ovary, so-called CHO cells, according to the companynot in human cells.

But cells originally derived from a fetus were used in another way. According to Regeneron, laboratory tests used to assess the potency of its antibodies employed a standardized supply of cells called HEK 293T, whose origin was kidney tissue from an abortion in the Netherlands in the 1970s.

Since then, the 293T cells have been immortalized, meaning they keep dividing in the lab, somewhat like a cancer, and have undergone other genetic changes and additions.

According to Regeneron, it and many other labs employ 293T cells to manufacture virus pseudoparticles, which are virus-like structures that contain the spike protein of the deadly coronavirus. It needs those to test how well different antibodies will neutralize the virus.

The two antibodies Regeneron eventually put forward as an experimental treatment, which may have saved Trumps life, would have been selected using exactly such tests. Because the 293T cells were acquired so long ago, and have lived so long in the laboratory, they are no longer thought of as involving abortion politics.

Its how you want to parse it, says Alexandra Bowie, a Regeneron spokesperson. But the 293T cell lines available today are not considered fetal tissue, and we did not otherwise use fetal tissue.

The Trump administration has sought to block or curtail research that requires tissue from recently performed abortions. In August, for example, a new board created by the Department of Health and Human Services, and stacked with figures opposed to abortion, voted to withhold funding from 13 of 14 proposals.

The rejections centered on research seeking fresh supplies of abortion tissue, rather than ongoing research involving older, well-established cell lines in use for many years, like the type Regeneron employed. However, one reason some scientists want to study abortion tissue is so they can create new and valuable cell lines.

Update: An earlier version of this story was headlined "Trumps antibody treatment was tested using cells from an abortion." The words "originally derived" were added to clarify that the cells are not from a recent abortion.

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Trumps antibody treatment was tested using cells originally derived from an abortion - MIT Technology Review

President Donald J. Trump revisited some of the themes of his America First foreign policy this morning in an otherwise short and disjointed speech to the first virtual UN General Assembly. By turns boastful and defensive, the president exaggerated his domestic and international achievements while offering scathing criticism of China for all manner of offenses, from inflicting a pandemic on the world to poisoning the global environment. It was a slapdash performance that included multiple tendentious claims and statements easily refuted by cursory fact-checking. It was also a missed opportunity for the president, who might otherwise have used the occasion to outline a sovereignty-minded approach to international cooperation, one that would have resonated not only with his domestic base but perhaps with some in his foreign audience. Instead, he delivered a shallow and unpersuasive address.

Seventy-five years after the UNs founding in World War II, the president began, the world was again engaged in a global struggle. This time, the enemy was the China virus. Remarkably, Trump sought to frame the U.S. response to the pandemic as a public health triumph rather than what it has been: an unmitigated disaster that has resulted in far higher morbidity and mortality rates than in any other advanced market democracy. The president promised that more success was imminent. The United States would produce a vaccine, defeat the virus, and usher in a new era of unprecedented prosperity, cooperation, and peace.

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This rosy scenario left a couple of things unclear. The first was why his administration, if it is so determined to save the world with a vaccine, has chosen not to have the United States join the more than 170 other countries that are members of COVAX, a pathbreaking consortium working not only to develop a vaccine but to ensure that when one emerges it is shared equitably by humanity rather than hoarded by individual countries for their own citizens. The second mystery is how the president plans to engineer the Kantian future he apparently envisions through a transactional foreign policy grounded in nationalism, nativism, protectionism, and unilateralism.

The Internationalist

About one thing, the president was sure: We must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world: China. Trump repeated his by-now-familiar origin story of the COVID-19 pandemic: how China allowed the virus to spread globally and how the World Health Organization (which is virtually controlled by China) had facilitated Chinese mendacity by lying about human-to-human as well as asymptomatic transmission.

It is legitimate for Trump to call out China for its lack of transparency, to blame WHO for its early missteps, and even to brag that his own travel ban may have saved lives in the short term. It is quite another thing for him to ignore the catastrophic effects of his subsequent inaction and misinformation in ensuing weeks, when (by his own admission) he took refuge in happy talk and failed to mobilize the federal government and prepare the nation for the aggressive social distancing and other public health measures that might have prevented or at least slowed community transmission of the novel coronavirus. Holding China accountable is important. The same could be said of his administration.

Perhaps the most bizarre section of Trumps speech, because it was such a non-sequitur, was his criticism of Chinas global environmental recordits dumping of plastic into the ocean, rampant overfishing, destruction of coral reefs, toxic mercury pollution, and massive greenhouse gas emissions. These are all genuine problems, but the real issue for the president seemed to be U.S. amour-propre, or perhaps his own wounded sensibilities. Those who attack Americas exceptional environmental record while ignoring Chinas rampant pollution are not interested in the environment, he declared. They only want to punish America and I will not stand for it. The outburst made one to wonder who they might be and why the U.S. environmental record is indeed a topic of scrutiny. The latter might have something to do with a U.S. leader who continues to dispute the reality of climate change and whose administration has gone into overdrive in its efforts to dismantle domestic environmental regulations. If Chinas environmental record is fair game, so too is his administrations.

The president then pivoted, all too briefly, to the United Nations and its purposes. If the United Nations is to be an effective organization, it must focus on the real problems of the world, he declared. This includes terrorism, the oppression of women, forced labor, drug trafficking, human and sex trafficking, religious persecution, and the ethnic cleansing of religious minorities. The United Nations, of course, is deeply involved on all of these fronts, in bodies ranging from the UN Counterterrorism Committee to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the International Organization for Migration, and the International Labor Organization. At the same time, the presidents list was curiously selective. There was no mention of many other priorities that top the UNs agenda and everyday work, from arresting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to conducting peace operations, advancing sustainable development, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and ameliorating the plight of refugees and the internally displaced.

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The president next offered a rapid-fire list of his administrations greatest hits, albeit with some poetic license in describing them. The Trump administration had built the greatest economy in history, revitalized the NATO Alliance, stood up to decades of Chinas trade abuses, withdrew from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal, and obliterated the ISIS caliphate. Trump took justifiable pride in brokering groundbreaking peace deals in the Middle East, notably between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. We intend to deliver more peace deals shortly, he promised.

The president was less persuasive when he declared, America will always be a leader in human rights, given his own well-established (and self-admitted) coziness with dictators and strongmen from Russian President Valdimir Putin to Chinese President Xi Jinping. We are standing with the people of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in their righteous struggle for freedom,Trump said, making one wonder why the United States could not do the same in, say, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Although selectivity has always been a hallmark of U.S. human rights policy, such hypocrisy has rarely been more obvious.

The president closed his scattershot speech by revisiting the main theme of his first address to the world body three years ago, namely, the centrality of sovereignty in international cooperation. For decades, the same tired voices proposed the same failed solutions, pursuing global ambitions at the expense of their own people, Trump asserted. But only when you take care of your own citizens, will you find a true basis for cooperation.

As Ive written elsewhere, the presidents thesis is a straw man, because the United Nations (as the word nations implies) is an intergovernmental body rather than a supranational one. It is premised on the political independence of its members, and their decision to cooperate is an embodiment and an expression of their respective sovereignties. The globalist threat to popular sovereignty, in other words, exists only in the fevered imaginations of Trumps base. It is a pity that the president is too wedded to this imagined collision between multilateralism and sovereignty, when the former is in fact premised on the latter. Indeed, many of the most diehard sovereigntists are to be found precisely where the president sees globalists running amok: the corridors of the United Nations.

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Donald Trump's Disjointed and Misleading UN Address - Council on Foreign Relations

Jared Kushner, the US presidents son-in-law, told journalist Bob Woodward that one of the best ways to understand Donald Trump is to study Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland. Kushner paraphrased the Cheshire Cats philosophy: If you dont know where youre going, any path will get you there.

Wednesday was one of those days when to have a seat in the White House briefing room felt like stepping through the looking-glass into Blunderland, where the mad hatter has an authoritarian streak a mile wide.

Trump careered from touting miracle vaccines to building supreme court suspense, from insulting a female member of the British royal family to abruptly departing for a mysterious emergency phone call. But first, there was the small matter of kneecapping American democracy.

Perhaps it was not chance that the president, ever eager to generate media outrage, gave the first question to Brian Karem, who describes himself on Twitter as a Loud Mouth senior White House reporter at Playboy. Will you commit to make sure theres a peaceful transferral of power after the election? Karem asked.

All of his 43 predecessors would have said yes, presumably. But Trump replied: Were going to have to see what happens, you know that. Ive been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.

Karem shot back: I understand that, but people are rioting. Do you commit to make sure that theres a peaceful transferral of power?

Still Trump refused to commit. Get rid of the ballots and youll have a very peaceful there wont be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.

Later, Karem remarked on Twitter: This is the most frightening answer I have ever received to any question I have ever asked. Ive interviewed convicted killers with more empathy. @realDonaldTrump is advocating Civil War.

And Julian Castro, who served in Barack Obamas cabinet, tweeted: In one day, Trump refused a peaceful transition of power and urged the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice to hand him an election if the results are contested. This is fascism, alive and well in the Republican Party.

Trump was also questioned about the failure of a grand jury to bring charges against Louisville police for the killing of Breonna Taylor during a drug raid gone wrong.

The president declined to offer his own perspective or comfort for millions aggrieved by another case of racial injustice. Instead he read a statement from Daniel Cameron, the attorney general of Kentucky, a loyal supporter who last month delivered a prime time address at the Republican national convention.

I think hes a star, said Trump, also noting that the governor has called in the National Guard and suggesting that, when in doubt, theres always the strategy of mindless optimism: Itll all work out.

Another reporter asked about Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, urging people to vote in remarks that some interpreted as supporting Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Trump said: Im not a fan of hers - and she has probably heard that but I wish a lot of luck to Harry because hes going to need it.

The attempt at humour hovered awkwardly in the air like a coronavirus particle.

Speaking of which, the president was ruminating on Covid-19 when he called his latest adviser, Scott Atlas, to weigh in from the podium. Trump then told reporters: I have to leave for an emergency phone call.

Karem and others demanded to know the nature of the emergency. Trump said only: I have a big call, a very big call. Could it be Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin? One wit on Twitter quipped that it was probably just Lou Dobbs of Fox Business.

Atlas has the kind of combative swagger that appeals to Trump. He denied media reports that he has clashed with coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx. He claimed Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, misstated something when he told the Senate that 90% of the population remains susceptible to Covid-19.

Jim Acosta of CNN queried: Americans hear one thing from the CDC Dir & another thing from you, who are we to believe?

Atlas responded: Youre supposed to believe the science and Im telling you the science.

Indeed, earlier Trump had claimed, Our approach is pro-science. Bidens approach is anti-science words to remember when he heads to Florida on Thursday for the latest of his packed, nearly mask-free campaign rallies in Wonderland.

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Donald in Blunderland: Trump won't commit to peaceful power transfer at surreal press briefing - The Guardian

We already knew that this falls campaign, with Donald Trump fighting for his political survival, would be crazy, overwhelming, and exhausting. But, no matter how much weve come to expect the worst, its still a shock when it happens. At least it should be. On Wednesday, Trump was asked what should have been a simple question: Do you commit to a peaceful transfer of power? There is only one answer to this question in America. The answer is yes. But not for Trump. Well, were gonna have to see what happens, he responded. You know that Ive been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster. Further pressed, he added, Well want to haveget rid of the ballots and youll have a verywell have a very peaceful... There wont be a transfer, frankly. Therell be a continuation.

No wonder, then, that Washington has been in a full uproar for weeks over the constitutional crisis that may ensue after the vote, if the results are too close to call or if there is a winner and Trump doesnt like who it is. In the wake of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgs death, a week ago, Trump said he wants to make sure that a ninth, presumably loyal, Justice is in place before the election, in case the Court is where the outcome of the election ends up. And he appears to have the Republican votes in the Senate to make it happen.

So, yes, the prospect of the upcoming election shouldand doesinspire dread. But so does the prospect of what tomorrow might bring from the Presidentand the next day, and the day after that. The election is still forty days from now. How will we get through the rest of this week? This month? Consider that the following are things that Trump has done in the course of this long, enervating, and not-yet-over September, every single one worthy of front-page scandal, of career-ending political damage for an American elected official:

He said its an amazing thing that the coronavirus affects virtually nobody, a few hours before the United States officially surpassed two hundred thousand deaths from the pandemic.

He said that Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the worlds premier infectious-disease agency, did not know what he was talking about regarding the timetable for a coronavirus vaccine. And that Redfield did not know what he was talking about in urging the public to wear masks, to prevent infection.

He said that some people dont think mask-wearing is necessary during the pandemic. When pressed about who thinks this, at an ABC News town call, he said, Waiters. A couple days later, he was asked the same question. He again said, Waiters.

He said that there would be a vaccine in October. Or November. Or very soon. And that it would be available for everyone immediately. All of which is at odds with what the governments top public-health officials have testified to under oath.

When told this week that the Food and Drug Administration would make standards as stringent as possible for approving the vaccine, in order to increase public confidence in it, he accused his own scientific agency of being political. He then said that the F.D.A.s standards could not be implemented unless the White House approved them, and that the White House has not done so.

He said that U.S. deaths from COVID-19 would be very low if you just didnt count those who had died in blue states. That is both inaccurate and very, very alarming coming from someone whose title is President of the United States. He also said that he would give himself an A-plus for his handling of the pandemic, and that he has saved millions of lives.

He said that the Nov 3rd election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, and that Democratic governors may somehow steal ballots rather than let them be counted.

He said that climate change was nonexistent and also that it would just start getting cooler, just you watch. When told that the science does not agree with him, he said that the science is wrong. I dont think science knows, actually, he added.

He touted a super-duper secret hydrosonic missile that the Pentagon is going to deploywhich may or may not be a new hypersonic missile.

He retweeted a gif calling his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, a pedophile. He retweeted a video that made it look as though Biden had played a song called Fuck tha Police at a campaign event, which, needless to say, he had not.

He told the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs of some kindI think theres probably, possibly, drugs involved, he saidand then he elaborated on his theory during a campaign rally full of unmasked supporters. Dont underestimate him, Trump told them. Look, hes been doing this for forty-seven years,andI got a debate coming up with this guy. No, its true. You never know, you never know. They gave him a big fatshotin theass, andhe comes outandfor two hours hes better than ever before.

He compared himself to Winston Churchill. He compared himself to Abraham Lincoln. He said that Democrats are planning to destroy suburbia and put Senator Cory Booker in charge of it. He even said that Ruth Bader Ginsburgs last wish, as relayed by her granddaughterthat her Supreme Court seat not be filled by Trumpwas a fabrication cooked up by his Democratic opponents.

This September seems to be the ultimate test of whether we really, truly, finally have run out of outrage. Reading back through this list, its hard to conclude anything else. When Ginsburg died, it took less than a day for Trump to announce that he would try to replace her before the election. I was not surprised in the least bit. When Trumpafter complaining for months about a rigged election, just because he is behind in the pollssaid on Wednesday that he would not agree in advance to a nonviolent transfer of power, his words were abhorrent but not at all revelatory.

At a press conference on Tuesday, the day the U.S. officially passed two hundred thousand deaths from the pandemic, Trump was asked why he had not said anything about the grim milestone. He listened to the reporters question, then turned away. Uh, anybody else? he asked. Because of all the horrors and lies that preceded it, and all that are sure to follow, the Presidents callous disregard was not a major story but just another viral video in a news cycle full of them. Trump has succeeded in conditioning us to believe that the weeks news, while awful, is less so because the awfulness is so consistent. Awful is the new Trumpian normal, which is pretty amazing when you consider that the old Trump-era normal was already pretty bad. He has rendered us collectively incapable of outrage, just when we need it most. If we cant be appalled at the Presidents indifference toward two hundred thousand dead Americans, then there is nothing left that can horrify us. After all, the COVID-19 death toll so far is the biggest mass-casualty event in American history aside from the Civil War, the Second World War, and the 1918 flu pandemic.

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Here Are Twenty Other Disturbing, Awful Things That Trump Has Said This Month, and Its Not Over Yet - The New Yorker

"We're rounding the corner," he told "Fox & Friends" of the coronavirus during an interview Monday morning. "With or without a vaccine. They hate when I say that but that's the way it is. ... We've done a phenomenal job. Not just a good job, a phenomenal job. Other than public relations, but that's because I have fake news. On public relations, I give myself a D. On the job itself, we take an A+."

How, you might ask yourself, could this President give himself top marks in handling the pandemic when he had admitted to downplaying the threat it posed to the public, driven skepticism about mask-wearing, pushed unproven (and even dangerous) remedies to deal with the virus and repeatedly underestimated the death toll?

Simple! Trump lives in a fantasy world of his own creation. He always has. In that world, he is the smartest, the savviest, the coolest, the best-looking and the winningest person in the world. Objective facts fall by the wayside in that world. And Trump has always -- whether in the business world or the political one -- surrounded himself with people who affirm that his world is the real one and the actual real one is some sort of conspiracy narrative driven by his "elite" enemies in the Democratic Party and the media.

All of which allows Trump to live in a sort-of bubble. Prior to being elected president, his wealth allowed him to exist in that bubble. Now the security of the White House does the same.

The problem for Trump is that in politics what grade you give yourself matters a whole lot less than the grade the people you need to vote for you give to your performance. And, on that front, Trump is failing.

The disconnect between how Trump sees his handling of the coronavirus and how the public sees it is vast. But again, objective facts play a role here.

Put plainly: There is simply no evidence the country is "rounding the corner" on the virus as Trump suggested Monday. And while Trump is free to give himself whatever grade he wants in how he has dealt with the virus, his constituents disagree. Profoundly.

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Donald Trump gives himself an 'A+' for his handling of the coronavirus. Uh, what? - CNN

But that also means Donald Trump will miss the last turn of his first term as US President at the hallowed green granite UN podium, from which generations of world leaders have lectured the world.

A ripple of amusement cascaded around the cavernous chamber. Other world leaders laughing, in part perhaps at what he said, part perhaps that he would say it.

Trump took the laughter in stride.

" -- so true..." he nodded. More laughter followed.

"Didn't expect that reaction, but that's OK," he said.

The Twittersphere lit up lampooning Trump, and at this stage of his presidency, most of the gathered dignitaries thought they had the measure of the man at the microphone.

Leaders talking past each other

More than ever, leaders seem to talk past each other. With or without a live audience, UNGA has come to mirror the high-speed, highly globalized and increasingly fractured world orbiting around it.

Trump's preaching of his tremendous achievements in 2018 was a point in case -- of course his principle audience is always his electorate, and they won't be far from his mind during his address this week.

Xi, who takes the virtual podium next, will also try to put the best light on his own pickle: stuck in a stuttering trade war with the US, watching Trump polarize business partners against Beijing, while it rachets up tension with Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

We will hear about Covid-19 and the importance of working together to fight the virus repeated several times. But we'll also hear a great deal of hot air: Trump will deny that he failed to contain the virus domestically and Xi will deny that China shirked its responsibility to warn the world sooner. Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin, ever the iceman in delivery and demeanor, will surely claim how much his nation is doing to help others with its vaccine development -- even though respected international medical experts criticize the speed with which Russia has rushed the jab out.

If ever there were a year for the world to have less talk, more listening and more cooperation, this would be it. But the lesson of Covid-19 in 2020 has unfortunately all too often been for leaders to talk a good game about the need to work together to fund, develop, and deliver an end to the pandemic -- but to act in national interest first when the chips were down.

Even the sophisticated interlocking of the European Union didn't stop member nations from closing borders between themselves. With a second wave of the coronavirus surging in Europe, we can expect more of the same.

Meanwhile, Johnson has been mostly absent on the world stage -- though recently shocking the world as he prepares to welch on an international treaty.

The three leaders' speech scripts will have been carefully vetted, but don't expect much coordination this week -- except perhaps on Iran, where both oppose Trump.

A changed world

In 2018, Trump had the last laugh at the UNGA. He did what he was going to do regardless of the chuckles and polite putdowns he received: China got a trade war and NATO continues to receive a hard time over funding despite the cunning of its seasoned Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Today the world is different, and it's unlikely that much laughter will be heard in the Assembly Hall. Now, when we most need to come together we cannot.

For diplomats tight on time and short of sleep, the traditional week in New York City once afforded some lighter moments, a good dinner, an important meeting -- or as Macron did last year, a stroll down the street sans jacket, joking with journalists.

As Ukraine's newly minted President Volodymyr Zelensky observed to me in an elevator last year, New York is a great place -- though it would've been better, he said, without the attention being heaped on him at that time. The former comedian still had his self-deprecating wit.

This year, it's hard to imagine any leader would be up for idle banter. Surging second waves of the coronavirus await many leaders now, as they turn off their virtual UNGA connections and tune in to troubles at home.

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At the United Nations this week, US President Donald Trump will be denied something he loves -- a live audience - CNN

In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorfs dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent moved on them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. Im automatically attracted to beautifulI just start kissing them, its like a magnet ... And when youre a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab em by the pussy.

Carrolls lawsuit took a dramatic turn two weeks ago, when the Justice Department intervened in an attempt to take over the presidents defense, asserting that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he claimed not to know Carroll. Meanwhile, a White House spokesperson denied all of the womens allegations, calling them false statements that had been thoroughly litigated and rejected by the American people. Read Parts 1, 2, and 3 here.

You are looking at slightly out-of-focus 2016 images taken from a 15-second video of the thenRepublican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, and a campaign staffer, Alva Johnson. Before people see the tape, Trump attorneys say that their client does not kiss Alva. After the tape is released, the lawyers say that what Trump is doing to Alva is an interaction, a word they will employ in pleadings before the judge presiding over the federal suit in which Alva claims that Trump kisses her without her consent.

Reader, we will now leave the video so we can learn who kisses whom, who sues whom, and why this kind of fight with a man is not new for Alva.

What does Trump smell like?

I dont know.

When he comes in at you.

II

Stop and think.

I dont

Alva lowers her eyes and tries to smell Trump in her minds nostril. Sweatmaybe? Alvas nose ring quivers like a damselfly. Makeup? Cosmetics? Its a cramped RV and its raining, and people are wet, and there are a bunch of guys whove been there since 6 oclock in the morning setting up chairs and tables and so Ireallyjustfreeze.

Alva looks like a choir girl but laughs with the sound of a marching band. Huuh-eh-huuh-huuh-huuh-huuh-huuh!

Ive been told by some readers of Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series that they are surprised that we Trump accusers talk to each other like this. I think it is not how Trump accusers talk; I think it is how women talk. Which is to say that I offer Alva various animals and vegetables that Trump might smell like.

No, no, no, Alva replies. I was holding my breath.

Are you the only Black woman Trumps ever kissed?

Alva Johnson, the former director of administrative operations for the Florida Trump campaign, regards me slyly through Zoom. She is a marvel, a Black woman from Alabama, a demure nonconformist, a former big-time college athlete, listed as 6 feet tall in the University of Alabama at Birminghams sports pages (Im really 5 foot 9, but of course, as a hitter in volleyball, they fudge our heights for intimidation), slim as a lettuce leaf, with a laugh amounting to genius.

No, Im not, Alva says. Trump dated a Black woman.

What?

You dont know that?

This summer, before I talk to Alva, I visit Jill Harth, the makeup artist. We are in Jills boudoir, and the two of us are going through her giant basket of Trump photos. While Jill is flinging out all over the bed smiling photos of our current president, the man she sued in 1997 for groping her intimate private parts (she later withdrew the suit), she tells me a strange story about her American Dream Calendar Girls, a witty beauty pageant she created in the mid-90s. I am examining a photo of Trump with his arms around a group of Jills Calendar Girls, each one whiter than a boiled egg, when Jill mentions something about Trump constantly wanting to help pick the girls.

He did not even want to look at photos of women of color, she says.

I am not certain I heard her correctly. What did Trump say exactly, Jill?

He said, No! No! No! I dont want to see any Black girls! (Trump has denied that he ever excluded Black women from such events.)

So, reader, when Alva Johnson says that Trump was head over heels for a Black woman, I need to prevent myself from sagging to my knees in astonishment. Yes, Alva assures me, He dated a Black woman. Long term. For a couple of years.

No! I cry.

Listen, E. Jean, Alva says, taking in breath, if you really want to loosen up the racists from Trumps basea tuba aria of chucklesif you want the white supremacists to understand that he is not their friend, I mean, he dog-whistles, but he dated a Black woman.

Even I, a chick so white that I look like Ive been hit with a banana-cream pie, manage to loosen up the supremacists when a photo of Trump and me in the company of our ex-spouses shoots around the globe. My ex-husband is Black. The supremacists write emails to enlighten me as to the character of their godlike leader, who would never touch a woman who has been with a Black man. You understand, reader, that when the supremacists say Trump would never touch a woman who has been with a Black man, the supremacists do not say touch, nor woman, nor been with, nor Black man. I cannot give you the precise languagebecause their emails are not fit for human eyesbut I can tell you that they write such fascinating descriptions of my vagina that you might think youre reading about a dead carp that has been left out in the sun and gone bad.

Actually, Alva tells me, Prince has a song about Trumps relationship with a Black woman. Yeah, its called Trump, or Trumps Girlfriend, or something.

The song is a hilarious tip of Princes hat to Trump titled Donald Trump (Black Version), though its not actually about Trumps relationship with a Black woman, but a guy named Morriss. Kara Young, the daughter of a Black mother and a white father, begins dating Trump around 1997, seven years after Prince writes the song; and thus it is that Alva, believing that Trump cant be racist, what with the hundred rap songs about him and because, well, he dated a Black woman, and assuming that Trump is never going to winthus it is, reader, that Ms. Alva Mahaffey, born into a large Birmingham family of Black professionals (her mother, Ammie Savage, is a teacher of French, Spanish, and English; her stepdad, Jacob Savage, is a microbiologist); thus it is that little Alva, who grows up listening to her grandmother and aunts talking about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed the four little girls, about the police siccing dogs on the protesters in Kelly Ingram Park, and about how they themselves brought food to Dr. King in the Birmingham jail; thus it is that Alva, a cheerleader, a member of the church choir, Alva, who eventually becomes a human-resources professional and founds her own event-planning company, Alva, who always votes Democrat, Alva, who hosts trainings for Obama-campaign volunteers in her home in 2008, Alva, who carries Hillary Clintons book Living History around with her; thus it is that Alva decides to join the campaign staff of Donald Trump.

Naturally, Trump looking her up and down like an Airedale eyeing a rump roast as she walks toward him at a 2015 campaign rally in Birmingham, and then exclaiming, Oh! Beautiful! Beautiful! Fantastic! nearly deters the ever-professional Alva from joining his campaign.

But when I start working for him, Alva says, there are 17 other candidates in the race! Theres no wayno one expects Trump to become the Republican nominee. I mean, you have Ted Cruz. You have Marco Rubio. You have

Jeb Bush, I say, raising my head from my desk, where I have been rolling it back and forth in amazement at Alvas awful miscalculation. Of course, she wasnt the only one.

I do it to get work experience on a political campaign. I do it to network. And I know I can throw a rally.

Boy, does Alva know how to throw a rally! Two days before Super Tuesday, 32,000 people show up at her event in Madison, Alabama. Jeff Sessions becomes the first sitting U.S. senator to endorse Trump, bestowing a blessing of legitimacy upon the popinjay from New York.

Alva, who thinks she is just going to grow her event-planning business in Alabama, receives a phone call after the rally. They ask me if I can pack my bags and go to Missouri, says Alva, who has the title of director of outreach and coalitions. It sounds like a good opportunity. There are still a lot of candidates in the race, and so I talk with my family, make sure my four kids are taken care of, and I go to Missouri. Then its just kind of traveling from state to state to state. Im in a bubble. Im out with the voters and supporters, or with people who are on the fence, or coming up with concepts, or rounding up people to go knock on doors. Its a bunch of lonely people out in this world, okay? Its a bunch of lonely people who want to feel heard, and they are vulnerable. Not the white supremacists. Not those people, but the vulnerable people who are put in that echo chamber, where bad information about Trump is fake news and cant be true.

Alva is eventually promoted to director of operations for Florida, and runs the states three mobile offices. Showing the extraordinary stamina that seems to be required of campaign women, especially Black womenin this case, Alva doesnt encounter a single other Black woman on the road trying to elect TrumpAlva commits herself to taking the three RVs to every county in Florida, which is how she arrives in Tampa with the Donalds mug decorating her vehicle and his pudgy self heading toward her.

What are you wearing, Alva? I ask.

A white T-shirt. With the word Trump in red and the blue logo: Make America Great Again. And Ive got a pair of cute jeans, and heels. I always wear heels. Everyone always laughs, because I wear heels everywhere. So I am wearing burgundy-colored Nine West closed-toe pumpsI love those pumpsand my jeans are kind of tapered, but they, you know, are not tight or anything

Alva interrupts herself, and looks into the Zoom screen, arching her eyebrows in the manner of every woman in the world.

Its funny I have to say that. Because as women, were kind of conditioned to say, Im not showing this, I wasnt showing that. So I am just wearing some blue jeans, my T-shirt, heels, and, as it is raining, a baseball cap.

Prince has another song.

U dont have 2 be rich

2 be my girl

U dont have 2 be cool

2 rule my world

Aint no particular sign Im more compatible with

I just want your extra time and your

Kiss

Trump walks into the RV, Alva says. It is August 24, 2016. And hes like, Wow! This is great! Ive made sure we have volunteers and supporters there making him feel welcome, and Im in the back making certain that people get to meet himOkay, did you get his autograph? Good! Come around this way! So Im directing traffic, and I can see him looking at me. Im at work. I am in front of people I manage and who have to listen to what I tell them to do. They must take me seriously as a woman. And its even more complicated because Im a Black woman. I dont want any blurred lines. I dont want any questions about my professionalism.

Trump is about to exit when he pauses in front of Alva.

He grabs me and holds my arms at my sides. People dont seem to register that this is what is happening to me. Im as stiff as a board. And he kisses me. He tries to kiss me on the lips, but I turn my head.

Im at work! Hes my boss! There are other women there. He doesnt do this to anyone but me. I dont show emotion. I just, you know, I just keep trekking through. The story Alva got a kiss from the boss travels so fast, it beats me to Sarasota. And I remember when I call my parents that night and tell them what happens, I start crying. I remember pulling over in a Trader Joes parking lot and crying. They say, Why are you crying? And I laugh and say, I dont know why Im crying. Then I feel stupid for crying. But it is something that triggers me when Im telling the story. And it is something I feel even to this day: I know that what happened is not right. Its without my permission.

Alva cries on the phone because long ago, when she was in fourth grade, after her little sister, Aundria Mahaffey, died of leukemia, Alvas motherwho is divorced from Alvas dad, grieving her child, and trying to make ends meet on a teachers salaryturns to a teenage friend of the family to babysit Alva. Alvas mom is always careful. She believes she is putting her daughter in the safest and most nurturing place. I am 9 years old, Alva says, and the guy is a jock who chases me around for hours while I hide, cry, and try to fight him off when he finds me. I squeeze under the bed, and he pulls me out by my legs. Even when he goes away to college, hell pick me up as a big brother and will literally park his car and rape me as I try to fight him off. I am 11 when he goes off to school. This continues until I am 13, and he is a junior in college and finally has a steady girlfriend. (He denies Alvas allegations.)

When we are both adults, he sends me a friend request on Facebook. But I am grown up now. Im a woman and Im no longer hiding. I sent him a private message on Facebook about what he did to me. You know what he replies? He replies with a sad-face emoji.

Take the weekend off! Rejuvenate! Get rested! And Monday, were all going to come back, and its going to be a brand-new day!

The Florida campaign director is delivering this pep talk to the states Trump-for-president staff during a dinner meeting at a seafood restaurant in Sarasota. Alva is thinking, Were four weeks away from the election, and you want us to rest? She elbows the guy next to herwhats going on?

And he is like, You know, the thing today.

And Alva is like, What thing today?

And he says, Well, theres, you know, the video.

And Alva is like, What video?

So she Googles it, and its this Access Hollywood tape, and she cant hear it, but she is looking at the words running underneath, I just start kissing them I dont even wait . . . When youre a star, they let you do it, and Alva pushes back her chair, stands up, drops her napkin on the table, and tells her partner, who is visiting from Alabama (and who is not a fan of Trumps), that they are leaving. Good, Im ready to leave anyway, he replies, and the two of them walk out, get in their rental car, and close the door. At which point Alva restarts the video and starts to scream: Thats what Trump did to me! I knew it! I knew it! I knew I wasnt overreacting!

She never goes back. She consults with a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, Adam Horowitz, quits the campaign on his advice; and, figuring why throw the baby out with the bathwater, later submits applications for several positions with the new administration. I earned this opportunity through my hard work on the campaign, Alva says. Why should I be punished for his actions? In 2017 she hires Hassan Zavareei, a respected Washington, D.C., litigator; and, viewing the case as a former HR professional who would persuade any company she worked for to get rid of a man like Trump because of his pattern of allegations, sues Trump in February 2019 for kissing her without her consent and for paying her less than her white male counterparts.

In June 2019, William F. Jung, a Trump-appointed federal judge, dismisses the case, on the grounds that it was improperly framed as a political statement, though he says Alva can refile in a streamlined suit alleging simple battery for the kiss and wage discrimination. About a month later, Trumps lawyer Charles Harder submits the video of the interaction. Alva remembers turning her head to avoid Trumps lips, and Trump holding her more forcibly than the video shows; Zavareei submits to the court an independent forensic report concluding that the video might have been doctored, and asks to reopen discovery to obtain the original. The judge denies the motion, and Alva drops the suit in September 2019.

Alvas rakish earrings swing back and forth.

Well? I say, sucking on the end of my Sharpie.

Well, Alva says, with her sideways smile. Its embarrassing being a Black woman who worked for Trump, I can tell you that much!

Thats the big one for me, she says. I disappointed a lot of people. Not just Black people, but Black and white. But specifically Black people. I expected people to give me the Heisman arm. She laughs and throws out her arm. Its like that stiff-arm from the Heisman Trophy.

The Trump campaign is suing Alva for violating the nondisclosure agreement that she signed as a condition for working for Donald J. Trump for President Inc. For good measure, the campaigns lawyers are also asking that Alva pay its legal fees (yet to be determined). Which is rich, considering that on the deadline for Trump to appeal the state courts ruling requiring him to participate in discovery in my own lawsuit, the White House arranges for Attorney General Bill Barr and the 113,000-member Department of Justice to defend him, thereby making Alva pay for his defense in my suit with her tax dollars (and yours too, reader).

But Trump cant do much to Alva. She doesnt have any money, she tells me. She is busy writing, networking, and waiting for the end of the nightmare that is this presidency, but alas, theres nothing for old Trump to sue for, beg for, or con her out of.

So, Alva, I say, after we both pour ourselves a cocktail. If you could go back in time, what do you wish had happened when Trump came waddling up to you in that RV?

My instinct? Alva says, sipping her dry ros on ice. Id like to punch him. I mean, Im pretty strong. Hes 6 foot 3 or something, but I probably would be more aggressive. I would probably push him off me. I would put my finger in his face and tell him, Dont you ever put your hands on me. I probably would tell him that hes a future eunuch if he makes one more move.

Youre Division I, woman! I cry, growing more buoyant by the second.

As a kid I had to fight a dude off of me, so I always know its easier for me to get on top than to be pinned down.

And what if Trump comes at you again?

I would probably knee him, Alva says.

Behind her on the pale butter-yellow wall is a deers head with a 14-point rack of antlers, a buck, mounted above the fireplace.

And what would Trump do next? I ask.

Alva rocks back, closes her eyes, and out comes the whole brass section of laughter.

Im afraid that Trump would like it.

Here is the original post:

'I Moved on Her Very Heavily': Part 4 - The Atlantic

Donald Trumps astonishing suggestion at a campaign rally last weekend that the US president will deploy government lawyers to try to hit the brakes on the counting of ballots on election night relies on the complicity of one federal official more than any other.

That official is the attorney general, William Barr, who, as the leader of the justice department, directs the army of government lawyers who would sue to halt the counting of votes.

Conveniently for Trumps stated plan, Barr appears not only ready to acquiesce, he seems eager to bring the lawsuits, having laid groundwork for challenging the election with weeks of misleading statements about the integrity of mail-in voting.

To some observers, the attorney general appears to have also laid the groundwork for a further alarming step, one that would answer the question of what action the Trump administration is prepared to take if a contested election in November gives rise to large new protests.

In order for Trump to steal the election and then quell mass demonstrations for that is the nature of the nightmare scenario now up for open discussion among current and former officials, academics, thinktankers and a lot of other people Trump must be able to manipulate both the levers of the law and its physical enforcement.

In Barr, Trump not only gets all of that, critics say, but he also enjoys the partnership of a man whose sense of biblical stakes around the election imbues him with a deep sense of mission about re-electing Trump.

In a break with the relative reticence of his first 18 month in office, Barr has laid out his own thinking with a series of recent speeches, interviews and internal discussions. Even routine critics of Barr have been struck by the Barr that has now revealed himself.

The erstwhile mild-mannered Washington lawyer has been spouting attacks on election integrity and hostility toward street protests while describing, in explicitly religious terms, an epochal showdown between the forces of moral discipline and virtue which he believes he represents and individual rapacity manifesting as social chaos, embodied by leftwing protesters among others.

His abuses have only escalated as we have gotten closer and closer to the election, and as the president has felt more and more politically vulnerable, said Donald K Sherman, the deputy director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington watchdog group, which has called for Barrs impeachment.

I cant put it more plainly than this: the attorney general is a threat to American citizens having free and fair access to the vote, and is a threat to American having their votes counted.

In recent weeks, Barr has reportedly asked prosecutors to weigh charging protesters under sedition laws, meant to punish conspiracies to overthrow the government, and to weigh criminal charges against the Seattle mayor for allowing residents to establish a small police-free protest zone. He has designated New York City, Portland and Seattle as anarchy zones that he says have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract criminal activities, threatening federal funding.

Such designations cleanly feed Trumps re-election narrative of public safety under threat. They also reflect a constitutionally questionable, and normally non-conservative, eagerness on Barrs part to reach the arm of federal government into local law enforcement.

Barr has demonstrated this tendency before. In June, he took the highly unusual step, as attorney general, of personally directing federal officers to use crowd suppression tactics to eject peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square near the White House.

Barr later denied giving any direct orders, but the White House stated flatly: It was AG Barr who made the decision.

Meanwhile Barr has competed with Trump to erode faith in the upcoming election, peddling baseless conspiracy theories about foreign nations printing counterfeit ballots, spreading tales about mass mail-in ballot fraud in a lie that was later retracted by the justice department and expressing frustration that the United States uses mail-in voting and multi-day voting, which are common measures to accommodate voters going back decades.

Were losing the whole idea of what an election is, Barr complained in an appearance earlier this month at Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Neil Kinkopf, a Georgia State law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under Bill Clinton, said that Barrs solicitousness for Trumps political wellbeing was historic.

I think this attorney general is demonstrably more committed to the political success of the president, and the presidents political agenda than any attorney general in history I can think of, Kinkopf said.

What drives Barr? For political observers familiar with Barrs long Washington career, which included an earlier stint as the attorney general under George HW Bush, the notion that he could help lead American democracy off a cliff might provoke some cognitive dissonance. Like other powerful Republicans and everyday voters who have enabled Trump, Barr does not appear to be motivated by personal loyalty to Trump per se, but by a sense of Trumps role in a greater plan.

Before his appointment by Trump, many insiders saw Barr as a committed institutionalist who would protect the independence of the justice department from Trumps most damaging tendencies, though Barr clearly was a strong believer in a muscular presidency.

But others saw Barr coming. They include Kinkopf, who testified against Barr before the Senate at Barrs January 2019 confirmation hearing. In his testimony, Kinkopf warned about Barrs subscription to so-called unitary executive theory, which lays out an alarming and dangerously mistaken view of an executive power of breathtaking scope, subject to negligible limits, Kinkopf said.

The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious

It appears that, if confirmed, William Barr will establish precedents that adopt an enduring vision of presidential power; one that in future administrations can be deployed to justify the exercise of power for very different ends, Kinkopf warned at the time.

But today even Kinkopf says he is deeply surprised by the extent to which Barr has surpassed that warning.

When I testified against him, I recognized how dangerous the unitary executive theory is, Kinkopf said. But what I didnt appreciate, and I dont think anybody appreciated, was just how fully he would deploy that theory in advance not of rule-of law values, but in order to advance both the presidents political agenda, and I think more deeply for Barr, his own social and religious commitments.

Those commitments, in turn, are a matter of public record, including in a speech Barr delivered at Notre Dame University about one year ago. In the speech, Barr described a political philosophy driven by the need to counter an individual rapacity in humans that quickly produces licentiousness and the destruction of healthy community life if not restrained. The only possible restraint, in Barrs view, are moral values [that] must rest on authority independent of mens will they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

In short, Barr argued, as he has elsewhere, that the inevitable result of secularism is moral decay and social chaos.

It appears that it is just such chaos that Barr sees in the current street protests driven by the ant-racism Black Lives Matter movement. He has denounced the protesters in his Michigan speech as these so-called Black Lives Matter people and claiming they were not interested in black lives. Theyre interested in [using] props a small number of blacks who are killed by police to achieve a much broader political agenda.

If Barr gives shockingly short shrift to the motivations of protesters haunted by the recurring specter of police killings of people of color, he holds his own motivations in high esteem.

Barr appears to see himself locked in a historic struggle against literal evil, and he appears to regard the upcoming election as the climactic battle. A Trump loss, Barr recently told a Chicago Tribune columnist, would mean the United States was irrevocably committed to the socialist path. He called the election a clear fork in the road.

The attorney general sees himself clearly as fighting culture wars that are to him moral and religious, Kinkopf said. And those are deeper I think commitments for him than the commitment to federalism. And so to the extent that the balance of federal and state power gets in the way of achieving what he wants to achieve in the culture wars, hes willing to cast that aside.

So if there werent a culture war angle on it, I think he would take the position that states and local governments should be left to police their own communities, and the federal government should keep its nose out. But because he sees something at stake in the current protests that jeopardizes what he feels as being the proper order of society, hes not troubled about using federal power to pursue what he views as being the right results.

Originally posted here:

'His abuses have escalated': Barr's kinship with Trump fuels election fears - The Guardian

Larry Neumeister, Associated Press Published 2:52 p.m. ET Sept. 24, 2020

President Trump's niece, Mary Trump, will release her tell-all-book on July 14. Here are some of the most notable excerpts. Wochit

NEW YORK Donald Trumps niece followed up her best-selling, tell-all book with a lawsuit Thursday alleging that the president and two of his siblings cheated her out of millions of dollars over several decades while squeezing her out of the family business.

Mary L. Trump sought unspecified damages in the lawsuit, filed in a state court in New York City.

Fraud was not just the family business it was a way of life, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleged the president, his brother Robert, and a sister, the former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, portrayed themselves as Mary Trump's protectors while secretly taking her share of minority interests in the family's extensive real estate holdings. Robert Trump died last month.

Messages seeking comment were sent to the Justice Department and lawyers for the president. Messages also were sent to a lawyer for Robert Trump and to email addresses listed for Maryanne Trump Barry.

New book by Mary Trump.(Photo: Simon & Schuster, left, and Peter Serling/Simon & Schuster via AP)

Mary Trump and her brother, Fred Trump III, inherited various real estate business interests when her father, Fred Trump Jr., died in 1981 at 42 after a struggle with alcoholism. Mary Trump was 16 at the time.

Mary Trump interview: Niece says shes heard President Trump use racist slurs, he retaliates on Twitter

According to the lawsuit, Donald Trump and his siblings devalued Mary Trump's interests, which included a share of hundreds of New York City apartments, by millions of dollars even before Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump Sr., died on June 25, 1999.

After the family patriarch's death, Mary Trump and her brother filed objections to the will and Donald Trump and his siblings ratcheted up the pressure to settle by cutting off health insurance to their niece and nephew, the lawsuit said.

It said the action amounted to unfathomable cruelty because Fred Trump III's third child, born hours after Fred Trump Sr.'s funeral, was having seizures and required extensive medical care including months in a neonatal intensive care unit.

As they pressured Mary Trump to accept a settlement and relinquish all interests in the Trump businesses, the uncles and aunt provided fraudulent accounting and financial statements that misrepresented the value of their father's estate at $30 million or less, the lawsuit said.

In reality, Marys Interests were worth tens of millions of dollars more than what Defendants represented to her and what she received, the lawsuit said.

In keeping with a confidentiality clause in a settlement of the dispute over Fred Trump Sr.'s will, lawyers for Mary Trump refused to say how much she received. But the numbers provided in Thursdays lawsuit make it unlikely that she would have received more than several million dollars.

Freed from gag order: Mary Trump has one word of advice for her uncle, President Trump: 'Resign'

In a lawsuit aimed at stopping the July publication of Mary Trump's book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Worlds Most Dangerous Man, Robert Trump said the payout was substantial.

Roberta Kaplan, one of Mary Trump's lawyers, said in an interview that today she lives "at a level that is certainly miles away from the luxury her aunts and uncles enjoy.

Since her book's publication, Mary Trump has promoted it extensively. She also has released portions of 15 hours of recordings she made in 2018 and 2019 with Maryanne Trump Barry in which her aunt is heard criticizing Donald Trump, saying he has no principles at one point and Donald is cruel at another.

The lawsuit said the fraud against Mary Trump was particularly egregious and morally culpable because Defendants deliberately targeted her because they disliked her. It noted that the president, in a tweet, has said she was rightfully shunned, scorned and mocked her entire life. It cited tweets in which he described her as a mess who her grandfather couldnt stand.

In her book, Mary Trump, a psychologist, analyzed the president extensively in unflattering ways and made an assertion which he denied that he paid someone to take the SATs for him when he sought to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania.

The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, would have to overcome laws that limit how long someone can wait to sue over fraudulent activity.

Mary Trump maintains that she learned of the fraud only after an in depth analysis of the Trump family financial history by The New York Times that discussed how Donald Trump and his siblings inherited and built fortunes.

In a statement, she said: "Recently, I learned that rather than protecting me, they instead betrayed me by working together in secret to steal from me, by telling lie after lie about the value of what I had inherited, and by conning me into giving everything away for a fraction of its true value. I am bringing this case to hold them accountable and to recover what is rightfully mine.

A bestseller: Mary Trump's book on uncle President Trump breaks 1 million in sales

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After tell-all book, Mary Trump sues President Trump and his siblings, claims they cheated her of millions - USA TODAY

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Today Barton Gellman tells me something that I didnt know: the consent decree is gone. Heres what that means:

The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any ballot security operations at the polls. In 2018, a federal judge allowed the consent decree to expire, ruling that the plaintiffs had no proof of recent violations by Republicans. The consent decree, by this logic, was not needed, because it worked.

The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district courts opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a National Ballot Security Task Force, some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged peoples eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police.

So what does this mean? Lets turn the mic over to President Trumps wastrel son:

Its 1981 all over again. Trump Jr. is recruiting an army to provide election security, and I think everyone with more than a room temperature IQ knows what that means. It means descending in force on polling places in Black neighborhoods and trying to scare people into staying away. This is what Republicans routinely did until a judge stopped them, and its what theyre going to do again now that a judge has removed the leash. Apparently 40 years wasnt enough.

Follow this link:

Donald Trump Jr. Is Recruiting an Election Day Army Mother Jones - Mother Jones

"I said let's turn on the evening news. Let's watch it. This is gonna be a big show tonight. Get ready. And NBC, which is one of the most crooked, one of the worst newscasts. [crowd boos]

"And I'm talking about normal NBC, not MSDNC, MSDNC is the worst, but so I turn on NBC with Lester Holt, another beauty, and they start with a hurricane, and then they went to something, and something else, and I'm saying, 'First Lady, this is getting a little embarrassing, with 20 minutes into a half hour show, they haven't mentioned the Nobel Peace Prize.'

"And then it went through the whole show and they never mentioned. And then I got nominated for a second one and they never mentioned. And when Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, got nominated, no when Barack Hussein Obama got nominated, he didn't know why he was nominated. It was like right at the very beginning. He didn't do anything. He did nothing! And he got nominated. It was the biggest story I've ever seen. But that's OK. In the meantime, we're president, and they're not, right? We, we."

See, being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize is a LOT different than actually winning it. Mostly because a whole lot of people can nominate you to be in the running.

"These nominations will be submitted by members of national assemblies, governments, and international courts of law; university chancellors, professors of social science, history, philosophy, law and theology; leaders of peace research institutes and institutes of foreign affairs; previous Nobel Peace Prize Laureates; board members of organizations that have received the Nobel Peace Prize; present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; and former advisers of the Norwegian Nobel Institute."

Which is a lot of different people!

Trump seems to not understand the distinction, or chooses not to understand because either a) in his mind he has already won or b) it simply fits his convenient -- though oft-disproven -- narrative that the media is biased against him.

This is not the first time Trump has expressed confusion about how the Peace Prize works or suspicion about how they decide who wins.

Which, well, OK.

CNN's Allison Gordon contributed to this report.

Continued here:

Donald Trump seems to think he has already won the Nobel Peace Prize - CNN

President Donald Trump will sign a series of executive orders aimed at protecting people with preexisting conditions and look for a way to prevent surprise medical bills, senior administration officials said Thursday.

Trump discussed the executive orders, which are part of his "America First" health-care plan, during his visit toCharlotte, North Carolina later in the day.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters on a conference call that one of the orders would declare it the policy of the United States to "provide protections to ensure that Americans with preexisting conditions are protected regardless of whether the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional and its protections for preexisting conditions invalidated."

"The president is also taking action to protect surprise billing, a source of financial insecurity for all Americans who do have insurance that has gone unaddressed for two years now," he said.

He said the order would direct HHS to work with Congress to get legislation passed by Congress that will protect patients against surprise medical bills. If such legislation is not passed by Jan. 1, then Trump will instruct HHS to investigate executive and regulatory actions that Trump can take that will ensure that patients are protected against surprise bills, Azar said.

"He's telling [Congress] get your act together, get something passed or we'll be coming at it and you'll get what you get from us," Azar added.

The move comes as the Trump administration attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare, which has a provision that prevents insurers from discriminating against Americans with preexisting medical conditions. The Supreme Court is set to hear the latest constitutional challenge to Obamacare, the case of California vs. Texas, following the presidential election in November.

It also comes as Trump tries to pitch his vision for health care to voters ahead of the election on Nov. 3.

The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg this month creates a new level of uncertainty over the health-care law. If a new justice were to be seated in time for that case to be heard, that could push the balance of the court in favor of repeal.

Trump has previously insisted that he would protect preexisting health conditions.

"I stand stronger than anyone in protecting your Healthcare with Pre-Existing Conditions. I am honored to have terminated the very unfair, costly and unpopular individual mandate for you!" Trump said in a tweet in early January.

In June, Trump tweeted that "Obamacare is a joke" but he would "always protect people with pre-existing conditions."

During a speech atCharlotte, Trump said the executive orders would help "restore America to full strength." He said Obamacare is "unacceptable" to him because it is "too expensive" and doesn't do "as good a job as it could have."

He also touted the elimination of Obamacare's individual mandate penality, which Congress reduced to $0 in 2017, and claimed he "protected" preexisting conditions.

"What we have now is a much better plan," he said, calling his administration the "health-care party." "A lot of that was through good management. We managed it properly. We have tremendous people working on it."

In a statement following the announcement, the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank, called Trump'sexecutive orders "a last-ditch effort to conceal his record on health-care arson."

"The president's announcement is straight out of the Twilight Zone," said Maura Calsyn, managing director of health policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. "For years, he has promised to end the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the law that guarantees that 135 million people with preexisting conditions cannot be denied coverage or charged more based on their health history."

"An executive order is no substitute for the ACA's protections, which are especially critical for people of color, women, and people with disabilities,"Calsyn added.

John Fleming, assistant to the president for planning and implementation at the White House, told reporters Obamacare has not helped Americans and has "been anything but affordable."

"President Trump wants for all Americans to have better choice, better care and lower cost, andthis is where we kick the football off today, with this announcement," he said. "But I want to reiterate to everyone that whatever happens from this point on, with future legislation, with rules and regulations that are passed, the president is absolutely committed to coverage for preexisting conditions."

It's unclear if the president has the authority to require insurers to cover preexisting conditions.On the call with reporters, the officialsmaintained that the executive orders were legally enforceable.

"We will work with Congress, more or otherwise, to ensure that they're protected. But [Trump's] making a clear defined statement of United States policy that people with preexisting conditions are protected," Azar said.

Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, said unless "Congress has adopted a law prohibiting discrimination against the sick, or President Trump is exercising authority that Congress has delegated to him, his executive orders don't have legal effect."

"They have no more legal weight than a campaign slogan and that's all this executive order is," he said.

CNBC's Bertha Coombs contributed to this report.

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Trump to sign executive orders protecting preexisting conditions and seeking a way to prevent surprise medical bills - CNBC

By Ben SmithIn December 2015, after the demagoguery of Donald Trumps presidential campaign became clear, I asked CNNs president, Jeff Zucker, if he regretted his role in Trumps rise.

First Zucker who put The Apprentice on NBC in 2004 and made Trump a household name laughed uproariously, if a bit nervously. Then he said, I have no regrets about the part that I played in his career.

I was thinking about that exchange when Tucker Carlson of Fox News recently gleefully aired recordings of conversations with Zucker that Trumps fixer, Michael Cohen, had deviously taped in March 2016.

Zucker is heard speaking in flattering and friendly terms about Trump, or, as he called him, the boss.

You guys have had great instincts, great guts and great understanding of everything, Zucker says to Cohen of Trumps campaign.

You may have missed the recordings CNN didnt cover them, nor did The New York Times but if you can filter out Carlsons spin and Foxs campaign against CNN, theyre still revealing.

Of course TV executives work for access behind the scenes; of course, under the stirring mood music that fills CNN hour after hour, an old bond thrived between cable televisions defining executive and the president of the United States.

But the story of Trump and Zucker is a kind of Frankenstein tale for the late television age, about a brilliant TV executive who lost control of his creation. And it illustrates the extent to which this American moment is still shaped not by the hard logic of politics or the fragmented reality of new media, but by the ineluctable power of TV.

Zucker made his bones as a wunderkind producer for the Today show. He took over NBCs entertainment group in 2000, as the Friends era was ending and reality TV was beginning. The network desperately needed a new kind of hit, and Zucker found it in The Apprentice a corporate boardroom version of Survivor, the blockbuster at rival CBS. That show transformed Trump from a local blowhard into a national figure, and laid the groundwork for his presidential campaign.

When Trump ran for president, Zucker briefly dismissed him as a sideshow in an early 2015 email to his political team, according to one of its recipients. But as soon as he saw the ratings his old star could still deliver, he spent 2015 and 2016 turning CNN into a platform for his ambitions. He went so far as to turn the camera to the empty podium before Trumps rallies, while other presidential candidates seethed and suspected accurately, it turns out that the two men maintained a cozy back channel.

When the folks over there at CNN get all high and mighty about their journalistic integrity thats just not real, said Terry Sullivan, who managed Sen. Marco Rubios campaign and said he laughed out loud when he heard the recording. Theyre running a reality TV show. Thats what Zuckers good at.

The story is not, of course, quite that simple. CNN retains much of its straight news DNA and its tough Washington interview machine, and is indispensable in moments of big breaking news like Ruth Bader Ginsburgs death. But the company had hired Zucker in 2013 to restore its relevance at a moment when the internet had replaced TV as a source of the newest information. Now its signature prime-time broadcasts, from Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, are nightly cris de coeur, featuring monologues about Trumps misdeeds, competing with MSNBC for the same enraged American audience. They feature the occasional true reality TV flourish notably, the duet between Cuomo and his brother, the New York governor, and the highly staged exit of the anchor from his basement, where he had isolated himself when he contracted the coronavirus.

In speaking to dozens of people who know Zucker over the past few weeks, I heard two distinct theories of what is going on now: One is the current version of CNN amped up outrage and righteousness is just Zuckers latest reflexive adaptation in search of ratings. The other is that Zucker, TVs Dr. Frankenstein, has been willing to dent his networks nonpartisan brand in order to kill his runaway monster, Trump.

Preston Beckman, who was NBCs executive vice president for program planning and scheduling just before Zuckers ascendancy there, said Zuckers thirst for ratings blinded him to the damage he was doing by offering saturation Trump coverage.

Hes a ratings whore and Im telling you that as a ratings whore, Beckman told me. But its one thing to be a ratings whore in prime time but its another thing to be a ratings whore when it comes to news.

Zuckers friends see a redemption story.

As a journalist, he has a conscience, a sincere commitment to the First Amendment and a deep sense of citizenship, said Ben Sherwood, another top morning show producer who went on to lead the Disney-ABC Television Group, and who has known Zucker since they worked on The Harvard Crimson together 35 years ago.

Zucker admits he isnt the most introspective person, Sherwood wrote in a book called The Survivors Club. The CNN chief is a survivor of two bouts of colon cancer in his 30s and heart surgery in 2018.

Hes constantly in motion, most at home in the control room, directing shots and popping into his hosts ears to suggest aggressive lines of questioning, suggesting stories to his digital team. People who wonder at his professional survival and resilience sometimes miss what an effective leader JZ, as hes known internally, has been at CNN, winning the deep loyalty of many of his staff with the blend of obsessiveness, decisiveness and loyalty that you need in a news leader.

Jeff is the most decisive and self-assured media executive Ive ever worked for or covered as a reporter, said NBCs Dylan Byers, a former CNN reporter, adding: But he has a North Star. The North Star is ratings.

Zuckers professional passion has never been hard news: Its been ratings, corporate success and winning at every game. His most legendary moments have dramatic tactical thrusts like his poaching of Meredith Vieira from The View on ABC for the Today show in 2006. And his relationship with Trump reflects a certain New York social world that has always blended friendship, talent management and philanthropy. Zuckers then-wife, Caryn, lunched with Melania Trump, a mutual friend said, and raised money for the private school both families children attended; Donald Trump wrote a check.

Zuckers falling-out with his old star came late. Even in the spring of 2017 after a presidency that kicked off with an attempt to ban Muslims from traveling to America he told my colleague Jonathan Mahler, I like Donald.

But the tensions were growing. Trump had chosen Fox over CNN as the main home of his rolling talk show, giving the conservative network constant access and interviews. His powerful son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was rising inside the administration, lacked Trumps affection for Zucker and pushed the president away from him.

When AT&T moved to buy CNNs parent company, Time Warner, in 2016, Trump began attacking his old friend. He did it in public, on Twitter. He also raised Zucker in a private meeting with AT&Ts then-CEO, Randall Stephenson, in early 2017, a comment that hasnt been previously reported.

The presidents campaign against Zucker was interpreted reasonably by Zucker as an attempt to get him fired as a condition of the merger, according to three people who spoke to AT&T and Time Warner executives at the time. But Time Warner stood by him, and Trumps Justice Department sued to stop the merger. When Stephenson finally took control of the company in 2018, he didnt fire the CNN president.

Mahlers piece noted that CNN had become more focused on American politics, an unending loop of dramatic moments, conflicts and confrontations in other words, it had become Trumpier. He also noted Zuckers strange symbiosis with Trump. But that summer, CNN fired Jeffrey Lord, a genial, silver-haired former aide to Ronald Reagan who had been Trumps most stalwart defender on the network.

And by the end of that year, the lure of ratings pulled the network in a new direction: resistance. Trumps own political theater featured regular televised confrontations with CNNs White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, a different kind of win-win. But if Trump and Zucker sometimes still seemed to be winking, their audiences arent in on the joke, and the deadly serious stakes became clear when a deranged Trump supporter mailed a bomb to CNNs New York headquarters in October 2018.

Zucker didnt respond through a spokeswoman when I asked again, five years later, whether he now regrets his role in Trumps career.

But this run, too, may be coming to an end. When I spoke to former NBC colleagues of Zucker about his tenure there, the show they brought up most often wasnt The Apprentice; it was Fear Factor, in which contestants were tossed in their underwear into a pit full of rats, among other grotesque stunts. USA Today described it as perhaps the most vile program ever to air on a major network.

Fear Factor didnt age well. The show lasted six seasons, and a revival was cut short by public backlash to a stunt in which competing sets of identical twins drank donkey semen. The public got tired of it (and that donkey stunt didnt air).

After a while it was like, Jesus Christ, the host, Joe Rogan, recalled in a 2019 interview. How many times can you throw them off buildings?

Consuming the news of the last four years has felt at times like watching Fear Factor and its cruel and violent strain of reality television. Thats the sensation of doomscrolling on Twitter late at night, the unending outrage cycle that has propelled cable news to its current strong and steady ratings.

When I spoke to people at CNN, they made the point that ultimately they cover and react to the news, they dont make it. Zucker may be in the control room, and when we look back at this disorienting era, media leaders will be important, secondary figures. But this isnt reality TV, its reality, and the shows executive producer is Donald Trump.

And the part of the American electorate that was enjoying the show may get tired of this too. If Donald Trump loses in November, that may also mark the end of this era of cable television, which he had fed and fed off, and which has left its audience divided and exhausted.

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Jeff Zucker helped create Donald Trump. That show may be ending - Economic Times

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.

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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.

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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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The continuity between George W. Bush and Donald Trump - Vox.com

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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

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