The Official Donald Trump Thread

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All The RepubliKlans Knew Donald Trump was a Scumbag Piece Of SHIT


Why must Black people too often be classified as 'Low Information Voters' ???.
Facts are Facts!!!!
In 2016 I heard fully grown Black men saying they were voting for Drumpf because they "liked his pimp game"

Trump pimps Melania

The chart below is the electrocardiogram of how to beat RepubliKlans at the ballot box
BLACK VOTER TURN-OUT. This is why suppressing Black voters is the #1 tactic of the RepubliKlans.
Again tell me why?
Why must Black people too often be classified as 'Low Information (Stupid) Voters', when their turnout is they key to who wins national elections

Trump is an elite con man.
Inheriting millions from his father and with his father's support and political connections (tax abatements) he rode the roller coaster of a highly leveraged (10% down borrow the rest) real estate business, using his unique brand of perpetual self-aggrandizement promotion. Surviving more than 5 business bankruptcys, he slogged forward, selling his "brand" to anyone who would pay his price, allowing them to slap his name on buildings and properties worldwide.
Glitz, glamour and bullshit was his brand. T.S.F. (Talk Shit Forever). The details were left to minions of lawyers and bankers, almost exclusively foreign banks since the 1980's bankruptcies.

Trump was always uniquely UNQUALIFIED to be the POTUS.

Unfortunately too many American citizens (80,000) in three States, were too stupid to realize this and gave him an electoral college victory, and the POTUS in 2016.

Look at his actual unedited answer to just one Question he was asked by the Times of London on Jan. 17th 2017.

The man is a babbling man-child sociopath.

The ABC interview tonight Jan. 25, 2017 was just as stupefyingly idiotic.

http://linkis.com/abcnews.go.com/Polit/jtQcuT1

Michael Gove and Kai Diekmann, of the Times of London right, interviewing Donald Trump in his eponymous tower in New York


Question:

Do you have any models — are there heroes that you steer by — people you look up to from the past?​

Answer:

Well, I don’t like heroes, I don’t like the concept of heroes, the concept of heroes is never great, but certainly you can respect certain people and certainly there are certain people — but I’ve learnt a lot from my father — my father was a builder in Brooklyn and Queens — he did houses and housing and I learnt a lot about negotiation from my father — although I also think negotiation is a natural trait, I don’t think you can, you either have it or you don’t, you get better at it but basically, the people that I know who are great negotiators or great salesmen or great politicians, it’s very natural, very natural . . . I got a letter from somebody, their congressman, they said what you’ve done is amazing because you were never a politician and you beat all the politicians. He said they added it up — when I was three months into the campaign, they added it up — I had three months of experience and the 17 guys I was running against, the Republicans, had 236 years – ya know when you add 20 years and 30 years — so I was three months they were 236 years — so it’s sort of a funny article but I believe it’s like hitting a baseball or being a good golfer — natural ability, to me, is much more important to me than experience and experience is a great thing — I think it’s a great thing — but I learnt a lot from my father in terms of leadership. ​

​

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/full-transcript-of-interview-with-donald-trump-5d39sr09d


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Profile of the SOCIOPATH

Common features of the behavior of a Sociopath


* Glibness and Superficial Charm

* Manipulative and Conning
They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.

* Grandiose Sense of Self
Feels entitled to certain things as "their right."

* Pathological Lying
Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities. Extremely convincing and even able to pass lie detector tests.

* Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.

* Shallow Emotions
When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.

* Incapacity for Love

* Need for Stimulation
Living on the edge. Verbal outbursts and physical punishments are normal. Promiscuity and gambling are common.

* Callousness/Lack of Empathy
Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others' feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.

* Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature
Rage and abuse, alternating with small expressions of love and approval produce an addictive cycle for abuser and abused, as well as creating hopelessness in the victim. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.

* Early Behavior Problems/Juvenile Delinquency
Usually has a history of behavioral and academic difficulties, yet "gets by" by conning others. Problems in making and keeping friends; aberrant behaviors such as cruelty to people or animals, stealing, etc.

* Irresponsibility/Unreliability
Not concerned about wrecking others' lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.

* Promiscuous Sexual Behavior/Infidelity
Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, rape and sexual acting out of all sorts.

* Lack of Realistic Life Plan/Parasitic Lifestyle
Tends to move around a lot or makes all encompassing promises for the future, poor work ethic but exploits others effectively.

* Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility
Changes their image as needed to avoid prosecution. Changes life story readily.

Other Related Qualities:

1. Contemptuous of those who seek to understand them
2. Does not perceive that anything is wrong with them
3. Authoritarian
4. Secretive
5. Paranoid
6. Only rarely in difficulty with the law, but seeks out situations where their tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired
7. Conventional appearance
8. Goal of enslavement of their victim(s)
9. Exercises despotic control over every aspect of the victim's life
10. Has an emotional need to justify their crimes and therefore needs their victim's affirmation (respect, gratitude and love)
11. Ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim
12. Incapable of real human attachment to another
13. Unable to feel remorse or guilt
14. Extreme narcissism and grandiose
15. May state readily that their goal is to rule the world


Click & Read Link Below
Profile of a Sociopath

Trump supporting Neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches.

 

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WOW: Republican DHS official releases brutal anti-Trump ad: "Trump stokes white supremacist terrorism and failed us SPECTACULARLY on COVID-19."
WOW. Elizabeth Neumann – the former Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention in Trump's DHS – says that even though SHE voted for Trump, she know knows we can't afford 4 more years of Donald Trump.

 

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MUST-SEE: CNN reporter issues EPIC fact-check of Trump after convention speech

BREAKING: A CNN reporter just issued an EPIC fact-check of Trump after his lie-riddled convention speech.

To hold Trump accountable for rampant illegal activity at the RNC, sign here

http://odaction.com/btchatchactrnc

 

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Sad, but true...

Thanks to www.densahcollection.com

 

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Trump LOSES IT On Female Reporter

 

[QueEx]

 

[QueEx]

All The RepubliKlans Knew Donald Trump was a Scumbag Piece Of SHIT

John Kelly should spill the beans

Illustrated | RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty Images, Oliver Contreras-Pool/Getty Images
December 10, 2018

Dear General John Kelly:

There can be no doubt that when you accepted a position in President Trump's Cabinet, you did so out of a sense of duty. Your views on border security and concerns about immigration and social cohesion seem genuinely felt. I believed you when you said that running the Department of Homeland Security, if only for six months, was "one of the great honors" of your life — a life that already had many great honors and achievements to its credit.


I wonder, though. When did you begin to feel a twinge of doubt?

Was it when, reportedly "stunned," you watched the president sign the "travel ban" executive order that you believed was still under discussion? ​

​

Or was it sooner than that? ​

​

Perhaps even during the transition period in Bedminster, New Jersey? ​

Whatever it was that drove you to the brink — the end-running around your authority by the two-headed monster known as "Javanka," or, needless to say, Trump's own mercurial fits and rages and stupidity — nearly every decent American could sympathize with you when you joked that your tenure as White House chief of staff was tantamount to a punishment from God.


How about this: Tell us the truth. The whole, ugly, unmitigated truth. Tell the American public what it was like working for a man like Donald Trump. Give us your version of the daily presidential potty-training that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently described during a fundraiser in Houston:

When the president would say, "Here's what I want to do, and here's how I want to do it," and I'd have to say to him, "Well, Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can't do it that way. It violates the law, it violates the treaty, you know." He got really frustrated … I think he grew tired of me being the guy every day who told him he can't do that and let's talk about what he can do. [Tillerson]

Hold that thought. Because I'm sure that Trump's crude response to Tillerson ("dumb as a rock," "lazy as hell") is crossing your mind. Maybe you're thinking, wouldn't it just be easier to leave on relatively decent terms? I'm still a decorated general officer. I tried my best to wade through the "cesspool of domestic politics." The president still refers to me as a "great guy." Why not leave it that?

The thing is, your reputation is already, alas, besmirched. You ultimately did not bring a chaotic White House under control. You did not bring an inexperienced, reckless president to heel. And, worst of all, you will forever be associated with an unconscionable migrant family separation policy that history will remember as cruel and pointless and ineffective on its own terms.

Maybe you'd prefer a long period of reflection. Maybe you're planning on writing a memoir, with your tumultuous tenure in the Trump administration merely a footnote to a distinguished career of military service and valor. But the public needs to know the truth now. The public deserves to know The "adults in the room," as men like you and Defense Secretary James Mattis are called in the Washington press corps, are always mentioned in the context of having prevented Trump from his worst impulses. The public deserves to know exactly where those impulses would have led us.


Sometime within the next year, it's going to become apparent to all but the most incorrigible #MAGA dead-enders that Trump is going to be remembered as one of the most despised figures in the history of American politics — a president of unfathomable corruptibility and plain incompetence.

General Kelly, you are now about to disembark from this particular journey. It's no longer in your job description to maintain the fiction that Trump is fit for high office. You don't need to protect the man anymore. And if you truly want to protect the country that you would have died for — that your son died for — it's incumbent on you to spill the beans.

Tell us the truth. And let us hold him accountable.

John Kelly should spill the beans

The outgoing White House chief of staff must tell the whole, ugly, unmitigated truth about working for President Trump

theweek.com

 

[MASTERBAKER]

This is not a joke, folks. Trump just announced that, if re-elected, he would likely appoint TED CRUZ to the Supreme Court... for LIFE

If that doesn't motivate you to vote for Joe Biden, nothing will! Follow
Ridin' With Biden
to defeat Trump and save the Supreme Court!

 

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Allegations of racism have marked Trump’s presidency and become key issue as election nears

by Greg Miller

September 23, 2020 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-race-record/2020/09/23/332b0b68-f10f-11ea-b796-2dd09962649c_story.html

IN unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”

When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”

In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.

Trump over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.

His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.

With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.

After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”

The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.

Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.

“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”

A second White House official who worked closely with Trump quibbled with the comparison, but only because later Oval Office occupants also had intolerant views.

“Woodrow Wilson was outwardly a white supremacist,” the former official said. “I don’t think Trump is as bad as Wilson. But he might be.”

White House officials vigorously dispute such characterizations.

“Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all,” said Sarah Matthews, a White House spokeswoman. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sow division.”

No senior U.S. official interviewed could recall Trump uttering a racial or ethnic slur while in office. Nor did any consider him an adherent of white supremacy or white nationalism, extreme ideologies that generally sanction violence to protect White interests or establish a racially pure ethno-state.

White House officials also pointed to achievements that have benefited minorities, including job growth and prison-sentence reform.

But even those points fade under scrutiny. Black unemployment has surged disproportionately during the coronavirus pandemic, and officials said Trump regretted reducing prison sentences when it didn’t produce a spike in Black voter support.

And there are indications that even Trump’s allies are worried about his record on race. The Republican Party devoted much of its convention in August to persuading voters that Trump is not a racist, with far more Black speakers at the four-day event than have held top White House positions over the past four years.

This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials, including some who have had daily interactions with the president, as well as experts on race and members of white supremacist groups. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a desire to provide candid accounts of events and conversations they witnessed without fear of retribution.

Coded racial terms

Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.

The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males.

Others have offered less charitable assessments.

Omarosa Manigault Newman, one of the few Black women to have worked at the White House, said in her 2018 memoir that she was enlisted by White House aides to track down a rumored recording from “The Apprentice” — the reality show on which she was a contestant — in which Trump allegedly used the n-word. A former official said that others involved in the effort included Trump adviser Hope Hicks and former White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

The tape, if it exists, was never recovered. But Manigault Newman, who was forced out after clashing with other White House staff, portrayed the effort to secure the tape as evidence that aides saw Trump capable of such conduct. In the book, she described Trump as “a racist, misogynist and bigot.”

Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece, has said that casual racism was prevalent in the Trump family. In interviews to promote her recently published book, she has said that she witnessed her uncle using both anti-Semitic slurs as well as the n-word, though she offered few details and no evidence.

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, has made similar allegations and calls Trump “a racist, a predator, a con man” in a newly published book. Cohen accuses Trump of routinely disparaging people of color, including former president Barack Obama. “Tell me one country run by a Black person that isn’t a s---hole,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

These authors did not provide direct evidence of Trump’s racist outbursts, but the animus they describe aligns with the prejudice Trump so frequently displays in public.

In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.

Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.

These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.

In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.

“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”

As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”

Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.

Biden has seized on the issue from the outset. In a video declaring his candidacy, he used images from the clashes in Charlottesville, and said he felt compelled to run because of Trump’s response. He has called Trump the nation’s first racist president and pledged to use his presidency to heal divisions that are a legacy of the country’s “original sin” of slavery.

Exploiting societal divisions

Trump has confronted allegations of racism in nearly every decade of his adult life. In the 1970s, the Trump family real estate empire was forced to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination against Black apartment applicants. In the 1980s, he took out full-page ads calling for the death penalty against Black teens wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park. In the 2000s, Trump parlayed his baseless “birther” claim about Obama into a fervent far-right following.

As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.

None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.

Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”

Studies of the 2016 election have shown that racial resentment was a far bigger factor in propelling Trump to victory than economic grievance. Political scientists at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, for example, examined the election results and found that voters who scored highly on indexes of racism voted overwhelmingly for Trump, a dynamic particularly strong among non-college-educated Whites.

Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.

Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.

“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”

Nearly all said that Trump places far greater value on others’ wealth, fame or loyalty to him than he does on race or ethnicity. In so doing, many raised a version of the “some of my best friends are Black” defense on behalf of the president.

When faced with allegations of racism in the 2016 campaign, Trump touted his friendship with boxing promoter Don King to argue otherwise. Administration officials similarly pointed to the president’s connection to Black people who have praised him, worked for him or benefited from his help.

They cited Trump’s admiration for Tiger Woods and other Black athletes, the political support he has received from Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and other Black lawmakers, the president’s fondness for Ja’Ron Smith, who as assistant to the president for domestic policy is the highest-ranking Black staffer at the White House, and his pardon of Black criminal-justice-reform advocate Alice Marie Johnson, expunging her 1996 conviction for cocaine trafficking.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Scott used his personal story of bootstrap success to emphasize the ways that Republican policies on taxes, school choice and other issues create opportunities for minorities.

Trump “has fought alongside me” on such issues, Scott said, urging voters “not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done.”

For all the prominence that Scott and other Black Trump supporters were given at the convention, there has been no corresponding representation within the Trump administration.

The official photo stream of Trump’s presidency is a slide show of a commander in chief surrounded by White faces, whether meeting with Cabinet members or posing with the latest intern crop.

From the outset, his leadership team has been overwhelmingly White. A Washington Post tally identified 59 people who have held Cabinet positions or served in top White House jobs including chief of staff, press secretary and national security adviser since Trump took office.

Only seven have been people of color, including Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who are of Lebanese heritage. Only one — Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — is Black.

Under Trump, the nation’s federal courts have also become increasingly White. Of the 248 judges confirmed or nominated since Trump took office, only eight were Black and eight were Hispanic, according to records compiled by NPR News.

Retreating from civil rights

Trump can point to policy initiatives that have benefited Black or other minority groups, including criminal justice reforms that reduced prison sentences for thousands of Black men convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes.

About 4,700 inmates have been released or had their sentences reduced under the First Step Act, an attempt to reverse the lopsided legacy of the drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which disproportionately targeted African Americans. But this policy was championed primarily by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and former officials said that Trump only agreed to support the measure when told it might boost his low poll numbers with Black voters.

Months later, when that failed to materialize, Trump “went s---house crazy,” one former official said, yelling at aides, “Why the hell did I do that?”

Manigault Newman was similarly excoriated when her efforts to boost funding for historically Black colleges failed to deliver better polling numbers for the president, officials said. “You’ve been at this for four months, Omarosa,” Trump said, according to one adviser, “but the numbers haven’t budged.” Manigault Newman did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials cited other initiatives aimed at helping people of color, including loan programs targeting minority businesses and the creation of “opportunity zones” in economically distressed communities.

Trump has pointed most emphatically to historically low Black unemployment rates during his first term, arguing that data show they have fared better under his administration than under Obama or any other president.

But unemployment statistics are largely driven by broader economic trends, and the early gains of Black workers have been wiped out by the pandemic. Blacks have lost jobs at higher rates than other groups since the economy began to shut down. The jobless rate for Blacks in August was 13 percent, compared with 7.3 percent for Whites — the highest racial disparity in nearly six years.

Neither prison reform nor minority jobs programs were priorities of Trump’s first term. His administration has devoted far more energy and political capital to erecting barriers to non-White immigrants, dismantling the health-care policies of Obama and pulling federal agencies back from civil rights battlegrounds.

Under Trump, the Justice Department has cut funding in its Civil Rights Division, scaled back prosecutions of hate crimes, all but abandoned efforts to combat systemic discrimination by police departments and backed state measures that deprived minorities of the right to vote.

Weeks after Trump took office, the department announced it was abandoning its six-year involvement in a legal battle with Texas over a 2011 voter ID law that a federal court had ruled unfairly targeted minorities.

Later, the department went from opposing, under Obama, an Ohio law that allowed the state to purge tens of thousands of voters from its rolls to defending the measure before the Supreme Court.

The law was upheld by the court’s conservative majority. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that voter rolls in African American neighborhoods shrank by 10 percent, compared with 4 percent in majority-White suburbs.

The Justice Department’s shift when faced with allegations of systemic racism by police departments has been even more stark.

After the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, Congress gave the department new power to investigate law enforcement agencies suspected of engaging in a “pattern or practice” of systemic — including racist — misconduct. The probes frequently led to settlements that required sweeping reforms.

The authority was put to repeated use by three consecutive presidents: 25 times under Bill Clinton, 21 under George W. Bush and 25 under Obama. Under Trump, there has been only one.

The collapse has coincided with a surge in police killings captured on video, the largest civil rights protests in decades and polling data that suggests a profound turn in public opinion in support of the Black Lives Matter cause — though that support has waned in recent weeks as protests became violent in some cities.

A Justice Department spokesman pointed to nearly a dozen cases over the past three years in which the department has prosecuted hate crimes or launched racial discrimination lawsuits. In perhaps the most notable case, James Fields Jr., who was convicted of murder for driving his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.

“The Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice is vigorously fighting race discrimination throughout the United States. Any assertion to the contrary is completely false,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “Since 2017, we have prosecuted criminal and civil race discrimination cases in all parts of the United States, and we will continue to do so.”

But the department has not launched a pattern or practice probe into any of the police departments involved in the killings that ignited this summer’s protests, including the May 25 death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, who asphyxiated after a White policeman kept him pinned to the ground for nearly eight minutes with a knee to his neck.

The department has opened a more narrow investigation of the officers directly involved in Floyd’s death. Attorney General William P. Barr called Floyd’s killing “shocking,” but in congressional testimony argued there was no reason to commit to a broader probe of Minneapolis or any other police force.

“I don’t believe there is systemic racism in police departments,” William P. Barr said.

Deport, deny and discourage

Days after the 2016 election, David Duke, a longtime leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted that Trump’s win was “great for our people.” Richard Spencer, another prominent white nationalist figure, was captured on video leading a “Hail Trump” salute at an alt-right conference in Washington.

People with far-right views or white nationalist sympathies gravitated to the administration.

Michael Anton, who published a 2016 essay comparing the country’s course under Obama to that of an aircraft controlled by Islamist terrorists and called for an end to “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners,” became deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.

Ian Smith served as an immigration policy analyst at the Department of Homeland Security until email records showed connections with Spencer and other white supremacists. Darren Beattie worked as a White House speechwriter before leaving abruptly when CNN reported his involvement in a conference frequented by white nationalists.

Stephen K. Bannon, who for years used Breitbart News to advance an alt-right, anti-immigrant agenda, was named White House chief strategist, only to be banished eight months later after clashing with other administration officials.

Stephen Miller, by contrast, has survived a series of White House purges and used his position as senior adviser to the president to push hard-line policies that aim to deport, deny and discourage non-European immigrants.

While working for the Trump campaign in 2016, Miller sent a steady stream of story ideas to Breitbart drawn from white nationalist websites, according to email records obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one exchange, Miller urged a Breitbart reporter to read “Camp of the Saints,” a French novel that depicts the destruction of Western civilization by rampant immigration. The book has become a touchpoint for white supremacist groups.

Miller was the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the so-called Muslim Ban issued in the early days of Trump’s presidency and the separation of migrant children from their parents along the border with Mexico. He has also worked behind the scenes to turn public opinion against immigrants and outmaneuver bureaucratic adversaries, officials said.

To blunt allegations of racism and xenophobia in the administration’s policies, Miller has sought to portray them as advantageous to people of color. In several instances, Miller directed subordinates to “look for Latinos or Blacks who have been victims of a crime by an immigrant,” then pressured officials at the Department of Homeland Security to tout these cases to the press, one official said. Families of some victims appeared as prominent guests of the president at the State of the Union address.

In 2018, as Miller sought to slash the number of refugees admitted to the United States, Pentagon officials argued that the existing policy was crucial to their ability to relocate interpreters and other foreign nationals who risked their lives to work with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What do you want? Iraqi communities across the United States?” Miller erupted during one meeting of National Security Council deputies, according to witnesses. The refugee limit has plunged since Trump took office, from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 this year.

In response to a request for comment from Miller, Matthews, the White House spokeswoman, said that “this attempt to vilify Stephen Miller with egregious and unfounded allegations from anonymous sources is shameful and completely unethical.”

As a descendant of Jewish immigrants, Miller is regarded warily by white supremacist organizations even as they applaud some of his actions.

“Our side doesn’t consider him one of us — for obvious reasons,” said Don Black, the founder of the Stormfront website, in an interview. “He’s kind of an odd choice to be the white nationalist in the White House.”

The moral character of his presidency

Trump’s presidency has corresponded with a surge in activity by white nationalist groups, as well as concern about the growing danger they pose.

Recent assessments by the Department of Homeland Security describe white supremacists as the country’s gravest domestic threat, exceeding that of the Islamic State and other terror groups, according to documents obtained by the Lawfare national security website and reported by Politico.

The FBI has expanded resources to tracking hate groups and crimes. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified Thursday that “racially motivated violent extremism” accounts for the bulk of the bureau’s domestic terrorism cases, and that most of those are driven by white supremacist ideology.

Major rallies staged by white nationalist organizations, which were already on the upswing just before the 2016 election, increased in size and frequency after Trump took office, according to Brian Levin, an expert on hate groups at California State University at San Bernardino.

The largest, and most ominous, was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

On Aug. 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-fascists and Confederate sympathizers descended on the city. Purportedly there to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, they carried torches and chanted slogans including “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us” laden with Klan and Nazi symbolism.

The event erupted in violence the next day, Saturday, when Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, tossing bodies into the air. Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Virginia native and peace activist, was killed.

Trump’s vacillating response in the ensuing days came to mark one of the defining sequences of his presidency.

Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”

In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.

Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”

Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.

“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”

Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”

Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.

The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.

“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”

For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. Kelly remained in his job through 2018. Cohn stayed until March 2018 after being asked to lead the administration’s tax-reform initiative and reassured that he could share his own views about Charlottesville in public without retaliation from the president.

Kelly and Cohn declined to comment.

The most senior former administration official to comment publicly on Trump’s conduct on issues of race is former defense secretary Jim Mattis. After Trump responded to Black Lives Matter protests in Washington this summer with paramilitary force, Mattis responded with a blistering statement.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis said. “Instead, he tries to divide us.”

In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.

“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.

“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.

Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.

“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.

“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.

But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.

“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”

 

[QueEx]

 

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[muckraker10021]

The illness he is

by Anand Giridharadas | Oct. 05, 2020

He is a weak man who has always longed to be a strong man, and he is a weak man’s idea of a strong man, and right before he got sick he made it clearer than ever that he intends to be a strongman. Some, knowing their history and knowing the pretensions of weak men and strongmen and weak men who become strongmen, have warned us about this potential from the beginning. But others, more cautious, more trusting in the power of institutions to save us, waited until recently to begin sounding the alarm. This is how democracy ends, they began to whisper. This is how it happens. He is attempting to do this right before our eyes.

Into the whispers landed a staggering story about his taxes. Here, again, the dyad of strength and weakness that defines Trump’s mind was at play. It seemed at first like a classic tale of plutocratic rigging. That’s how I read it and others read it, and there was much reason to read it that way. A man who manages to pay $750 in federal income taxes in a calendar year while, at that very hour, running for president on the basis of his special powers as a billionaire is the picture of a system that is conned, gamed, manipulated, overpowered. But a couple days after The New York Times story broke, two of its authors, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, went on the podcast The Daily and reframed their own story. This wasn’t a story about Trump’s cunning but about his brokeness, as Craig explained:

You know, rich people have great accountants. And they’re able to do all this wizardry to get a tax bill down. And we do see evidence that he’s employed accounting maneuvers that have helped him do that. But this is not a case of a rich guy hiding profits. This is a case of a man who runs businesses that year after year lose tens of millions of dollars.

There is, in other words, a kind of tax avoidance that represents strength at rigging things. But this was not that. This was a tax avoidance of weakness — a man just not that good at business. “There’s just basically nothing left to tax at the end of a year,” as Michael Barbaro, the host, summed it up.

Then, two days after the taxes story broke, in the longest week anyone can remember, came what swiftly became known as the Worst Debate Ever. At first, watching with my little boy, I was terrified. Trump’s performance of faux-strength was vulgar and crude, reckless and unpresidential, if that word still means anything. But it seemed to me it might work. Biden looked good and kind, but maybe he did look weak by the standards of the form of battle Trump had shown up to fight. And the moment I began to calm down was the moment when I realized how vast is the coalition of people who have been on the wrong end of that kind of fraudulent, hollow flexing of power. The women talked over in meetings, the men who as boys were thrown into lockers, the workers whose intelligence is overlooked, the people roughed up or worse by the cops just for being Black. I began to wonder if, by inflaming those memories and those sentiments, Trump doomed himself.

A few days after the debate, new polling came in. In the aftermath of the debate, Biden opened his largest lead yet — 14 percent. Maybe people don’t like the kind of boorish fake strength that scantily conceals weakness. And this number in particular leapt out at me: “Men 50 years and older moved to a 1-point advantage for Biden in the latest poll, compared to a 13-point advantage for Trump in the pre-debate NBC News/WSJ poll.” The Trump era is possible only because so many people have been so fooled by fake strength. But now here was a sign of some seeing the light.

And then a president who is a germaphobe, who has doubted the coronavirus from the start, who has galvanized much of the country to avoid the common-sense protections of masks and social distancing — then what he had enabled to go around all these months at last came around to him. His has been a policy of manslaughter at scale. Now it risked becoming a policy of suicide as well.

Whatever ended up happening to his body, it seemed clear that his illness represented the death of a certain widespread and catastrophic kind of masculinity. “We are the party of the emancipation proclamation, not the emasculation proclamation,” Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, said. His words summed up half a year’s worth of male insecurity on the political right that conflated prudence with weakness. Wearing masks was girly. Getting tested was girly. Social distancing was girly. Listening to scientists was girly. An iconic moment for this particular male terror of weakness came when Robert O’Neill, the former Navy Seal who claims to have been the one to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, tweeted a maskless photo of himself on a Delta flight, captioned “I’m not a pussy.” In the background of the photo was another, older man, wearing a fatigues-green United States Marine Corps hat — and a mask. When I saw his tweet I almost felt for him. What is it in our culture that has filled so many men with such an anxiety of impotence that even firing a bullet into the face of the most wanted terrorist alive and gaining the glory isn’t enough to reassure you that, yes, you are a man?

The president, of course, has what O’Neill has — the same withering doubt about being a man. (Has any other doubt wrought more destruction?) Which is why, without compunction, he hosted a potentially lethal event to honor his Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. Chosen to replace an actual feminist trailblazer and icon, the just-departed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barrett is the perfect Trumpian foil. She is a woman, so on the surface of things, where Trump dwells, there is that. But she would usher in a world in which women were weaker than they are now, unable to captain the fate of their own bodies, decisions over which majority-male legislatures would make. And a world defined by the every-man-for-himself economic fantasy that has animated the right during its last four decades of American hegemony — starting by, in all likelihood, providing the pivotal vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Here, once more, is a vision of strength that, in reality, fosters weakness wherever it spreads. It has broken the backs of workers, made it ever harder to rise above one’s station however hard one tries, and turned tens of millions of people’s daily survival into a source of unending concern. In the name of cultivating a nation of strength and vigor, America has been made tired and weak.

Over the weekend, I tried to tie the threads together: “He hosted a super-spreader event to honor a justice who would have the government control your body but refuse the duty to care for it, and when the virus he helped go around came around, he availed of the healthcare he would deny others, financed by the taxes he refuses to pay.”

What is dying now is so much bigger than him. It is this fantasy, this masquerade, of strength. This old, empty, puffed-up way of being a man. This economic philosophy that murders human potential in the name of birthing it. This insistence on doing one’s thing, listening to no authority ordering you to cover your orifices, and preferring death on a genocidal scale to your own yielding. This clinging to the kind of freedom that kills you.

Who knows in what state he will leave the hospital? What matters more is that everything he represents is dying. This toxic pursuit of strength that has brought America damn near down on its knees.

And what can be spied on the horizon, if you squint, is the prospect of other ways of being. They seem distant now, but they are rushing toward you. A whole kind of time feels like it’s ending. The real struggle now is to define what will replace it.

The.Ink | Anand Giridharadas | Substack

On politics and culture, money and power, from Anand Giridharadas. Click to read The.Ink, by Anand Giridharadas, a Substack publication.

the.ink

 

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To watch me & Mary Trump host the VP Debate pre-show, click this link and click "Set Reminder" -- https://bit.ly/30FLFir

 

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If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this presidency it’s that you have to get every rule in writing or Donald Trump will break it.

 

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My #PoliticsNation got’cha segment about Trump’s favorite catchphrase “law & order”.

 

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Bill Maher

Bill Maher · Dueling Grandpas


Dueling Grandpas
The competing Town Halls were last night. Trump was on NBC. Joe was on ABC and I was on THC. #JoevsTheVolcano

 

[QueEx]

Trump trashes Fauci in campaign call

Trump trashes Fauci and makes baseless coronavirus claims in campaign call

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/19/politics/donald-trump-anthony-fauci-coronavirus/index.html

Trump trashes Fauci and makes baseless coronavirus claims in campaign call

A frustrated and at times foul-mouthed President Donald Trump claimed on a campaign call that people are tired of hearing about the deadly pandemic which has killed more than 215,000 Americans and trashed Dr. Anthony Fauci as a "disaster" who has been around for "500 years."

www.cnn.com

CNN
By Kaitlan Collins
and Kevin Liptak
Mon October 19, 2020


CNN)A frustrated and at times foul-mouthed President Donald Trump claimed on a campaign call that people are tired of hearing about the deadly pandemic which has killed more than 215,000 Americans and trashed Dr. Anthony Fauci as a "disaster" who has been around for "500 years."

Referring to Fauci and other health officials as "idiots," Trump declared the country ready to move on from the health disaster, even as cases are again spiking and medical experts warn the worst may be yet to come.

Baselessly claiming that if Fauci was in charge more than half a million people would be dead in the United States, Trump portrayed the recommendations offered by his own administration to mitigate spread of the disease as a burdensome annoyance.

"People are tired of Covid. I have these huge rallies," Trump said, phoning into a call with campaign staff from his namesake hotel in Las Vegas, where he spent two nights amid a western campaign swing. "People are saying whatever. Just leave us alone. They're tired of it. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots."

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[muckraker10021]

OCT. 16, 2020
Donald Trump Has At Least $1,000,000,000 In Debt
More Than Twice The Amount He Suggested
The president’s liabilities are spelled out in dozens of documents, published here.
Trump is worth only an estimated $2.5 billion

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2020/10/16/donald-trump-has-at-least-1-billion-in-debt-more-than-twice-the-amount-he-suggested

 

[QueEx]

Martin Sutovec Copyright 2020 Cagle Cartoons


↓

 

[QueEx]

LIES, LIES, LIES . . .



Pat Bagley Copyright 2020 Cagle Cartoons

 

[QueEx]

 

[QueEx]

Steve Sack Copyright 2020 Cagle Cartoons

 

[muckraker10021]

Proud Boys' party is over
Trump fans throw tantrums because they've lost more than an election
Right-wing anger is exploding because they know they're losing — not just the election, but the larger culture war

Pro-Trump protesters and Proud Boys gathered during the "Million MAGA March" at Black Lives Plaza at the US Capitol in Washington, DC December 12, 2020

by AMANDA MARCOTTE

​

In vino veritas, or perhaps more appropriately, in Bud Light veritas: These were the words that came to mind while I watched Saturday's Proud Boys riot in Washington, D.C.

For years, the Proud Boys have angrily resisted critics who say the group is racist, claiming instead to be for "Western chauvinism." Before the heat got to him and he quit, Proud Boys founder (and onetime Vice co-founder) Gavin McInnes described the group as being "alt-right without the racism." The Boys' insistence that they are absolutely, definitely not a bunch of racists even led to ugly infighting when a splinter group broke off over the refusal of group leaders to commit to overtly white nationalist beliefs.

But on one Saturday night in Washington, fueled by alcohol and rage over Donald Trump's electoral defeat, the pretense that "Western chauvinism" is not a racist ideology collapsed. After hours of drinking and ginning themselves up, the Proud Boys stole Black Lives Matter flags and targeted counter-protesters who were gathered in Black Lives Matter Plaza. A group of Proud Boys dramatically lit a large Black Lives Matter flag on fire, while flashing the "OK" sign, which of late has been appropriated by racists as a "white power" symbol. Vandalism at two historically Black churches, Asbury United Methodist Church and Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, is being investigated as a hate crime. Four people were stabbed in altercations between the Proud Boys and counter-protesters.

Saturday's rally was ostensibly about protesting Trump's loss and claiming that he was the victim of a "rigged" election. But with inhibitions loosened by booze, anger and literal (as well as metaphorical) darkness, the truth was illuminated: The rage about Donald Trump's electoral fate is about racism. It's a part of the growing fury taking hold of conservatives as their control over American culture slips further and further out of their grasp. Trump is just the latest vehicle for this anger, but this story is about a lot more than him. It's bigger even than electoral politics. This is about a more fundamental issue: over Who gets to define America, and the widespread reactionary outrage over being outnumbered by more liberal, more diverse and more cosmopolitan Americans, and feeling unable to stop the tide of progress.

Trump was able to amass an extraordinary 74.2 million voters with a message of resentment at "political correctness" and "woke" culture, a story about how conservative white people are supposedly being victimized by a changing America. But as much as that campaign whipped up millions of Americans, at the heart of it all was a misdirection. What conservatives really want is control over the culture. That isn't something that can be won at the ballot box, and they know it.

If the actual goal of the angry right were control over governance and policy, they should be thrilled by the past year.

Despite Trump's defeat, the GOP has maintained control over the Senate (pending the results of Georgia's runoff elections next month) and gained at least 10 seats in the House, nibbling the Democratic majority down to a bare minimum. They have also packed the federal courts so thoroughly that meaningful Democratic legislation may be impossible to enact for at least a generation. Unless Democrats can pull upsets in both of the Georgia races to be decided on Jan. 5, incoming President Joe Biden will be hamstrung by all-too-familiar obstructionist Republicans.

But instead of being happy or at least begrudgingly accepting what was mostly a win for Republicans, the right has exploded in rage. That's because Donald Trump's defeat was a reminder that no matter how much Republicans maintain power through a drastically tilted electoral playing field, conservatives are still, culturally speaking, a minority — and one that's shrinking rapidly, at that.

This is why right-wingers always act like angry losers, no matter how many political wins they stack up. There's a limit to how much cultural change can be reversed at the ballot box or even in the courts. Of course, the policy fights over police reform, reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and immigration matter quite a bit to real people's lives. But even when the right wins on policy, the cultural changes — racial diversity, women's increased equality, the mainstreaming of LGBTQ people — march on. That's why Proud Boys targeted Black Lives Matter iconography instead of, say, the offices of Democratic Party leaders or progressive think tanks.

The same weekend that Proud Boys were throwing a public tantrum in Washington, Cleveland's baseball team finally gave in to longstanding pressure and announced it would drop its venerable but racist name, the "Indians." The move comes after the NFL team in D.C. dropped its former name, which was a far more vicious slur against Native Americans. Trump, unsurprisingly, whined about the Cleveland decision on Twitter, calling it "Cancel culture at work," even though the team's private owners made the decision and its players will take the field next season as usual. Even in using that term, Trump tacitly admitted that his power as president, and as massive cultural icon to the right, can do nothing to stop the anti-racist pressure campaign that caused the name change.

Trump's ultimately futile war over the military's move to ban Confederate iconography and rename bases currently named after Confederate figures is similar. That's a lost cause, and not just because Trump will soon leave office and the military will just proceed with its plans under Biden. Military leaders are making these decisions themselves, reflecting changes that have already occurring within military culture as the services have become more racially diverse and more open to women.

There are any number of other examples. Even as the right keeps on railing against these cultural changes, it can't help but reflect them. For instance, Saturday's right-wing rally featured an extremely lame hip-hop act, juxtaposing right-wing cultural appropriation with overt acts of racism. But this seeming contradiction is just SOP for Trumpers. Trump himself would dance badly to songs by the Village People at rallies where he'd promise to appoint more right-wing judges to strip LGBTQ people of their rights.

What else are conservatives supposed to do? Have crap music at their events? Even "Western chauvinists" understand that if they limit themselves to white, straight, conservative-oriented music, they're doomed to host a lame party. So they borrow very heavily from the same cultures they view as an existential threat to "America."

Again, that's why right-wingers eternally act like victims, no matter how many electoral wins they rack up. "MAGA" was a promise to restore a fantasy version of an American white-bread past. The entire Republican National Convention was a lengthy whine about "cancel culture" and "political correctness," which are right-wing scare terms to demonize shifting social mores that reject open bigotry. The implicit promise was that, by electing Trump for four more years, he would make it socially acceptable to be shitty again. That promise turned out more than 74 million people.

Make no mistake, Trump did a lot of damage in four years: He wrecked the economy, unleashed a pandemic, made the lives of immigrants miserable and rolled back environmental protections — the list goes on. But he wasn't able to do the one thing that his supporters most dearly wanted, which was to remake the culture in their image. He couldn't do that in four years, and he wasn't going to do it in eight. It's not impossible to use political power to do such a thing — the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany being the most obvious examples — but it generally requires heavy-handed state violence and censorship crackdowns that Trump flirted with but was never remotely able to implement on the scale necessary to fulfill those MAGA desires.

None of which is to say that everything will be just dandy now that Trump is leaving office. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other bigotries continue to be a major poison. Systematic racism still creates major inequalities in health, wealth and other social markers. To say that the culture is changing isn't to say that it has changed, and the right-wing assault on human rights is causing real people real pain every day. But none of these realities placate conservatives, who are still enraged that progressives continue to push for and often gain ground, especially in the cultural sphere.

And now a neofascist movement has been unleashed in the U.S. Trump's failed coup was, for him, about ego and power. For his supporters, however, it was a symbol of their long-term hopes of managing to wrest back control over the culture despite being both outnumbered and largely incapable of generating attractive cultural touchstones to lure other Americans to their side. The right is losing the culture war, and its anger over that will continue to grow, even as Trump himself is pushed out of the spotlight.

 

[QueEx]

Matt Wuerker Copyright 2021 Andrews McMeel Syndication

 

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[blackbull1970]

House GOP campaign wing reportedly withheld bad Trump polling from lawmakers at retreat

Tim O'Donnell
May 8, 2021, 10:54 am

House GOP campaign wing reportedly withheld bad Trump polling from lawmakers at retreat

The National Republican Congressional Committee did not share internal polling data that showed former President Donald Trump has weak numbers in key battleground districts at a retreat for House Republicans in April, two people familiar with the presentation told The Washington Post. The NRCC...

www.google.com

The National Republican Congressional Committee did not share internal polling data that showed former President Donald Trump has weak numbers in key battleground districts at a retreat for House Republicans in April, two people familiar with the presentation told The Washington Post. The NRCC staffers reportedly held back the information even when a member of Congress asked them directly about Trump's support.

The Post later obtained the full polling results, reporting that Trump's unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones, and nearly twice as many voters had a strongly unfavorable view of him than those who had a strongly favorable one. In those same districts, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were both more popular than Trump, the Post notes.

It reportedly wasn't the first time this has happened — Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told colleagues that Republican campaign officials had also glossed over poor Trump polling during a retreat for ranking committee chairs in March, per the Post.

Cheney, you may have heard in recent weeks, is determined to move the GOP away from Trump and she'd likely point to the polling as a reason why, but she's faced a lot of criticism from her colleagues, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who think the party's short-term electoral chances are doomed without the former president leading the charge, and there's no indication their minds will change anytime soon. Read more about Cheney's efforts at The Washington Post.

 

[blackbull1970]

Rep. Liz Cheney Vows To Continue Speaking Out Against Trump

 

[blackbull1970]

Trump supporter admits to voter fraud after casting dead mother's ballot in 2020

BY MORGAN GSTALTER
May 4, 2021

Trump supporter admits to voter fraud after casting dead mother's ballot in 2020

A Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to voter fraud charges after he illegally cast a ballot for former President Trump using his dead mother’s name during the 2020 presidential election.

www.google.com

A Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to voter fraud charges after he illegally cast a ballot for former President Trump using his dead mother's name during the 2020 presidential election.

Bruce Bartman, 70, pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of perjury and one count of unlawful voting and was sentenced to five years of probation, according to The Associated Press. In addition, he will not be allowed to vote in an election for four years and is no longer eligible to serve on a jury.

He apologized for his actions and blamed his decision on consuming false claims about the election.

"I was isolated last year in lockdown," Bartman told the judge. "I listened to too much propaganda and made a stupid mistake."

His attorney, Samuel Stretton, described his behavior as "a very misguided political mistake, and very stupid," according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Common Pleas Court Judge George Pagano described the case as one that "goes to the heart of our democracy" and commended Bartman for accepting responsibility for his action.

Bartman, of Marple Township, used the driver's license of his mother Elizabeth Bartman to register her to vote online, and then requested and filled out an absentee ballot in her name, prosecutors said.

Elizabeth Bartman died in 2008 and the state's voter system correctly flagged the fraudulent registration of a deceased person. However, Bartman signed a document and sent it back asserting that she was still alive.

He repeated the process for his deceased mother-in-law, Elizabeth Weihman, using her Social Security number but did not ultimately cast a ballot in her name.

Local investigators said they began investigating when rumors began circulating about a ballot being illegally cast on social media. A complaint was eventually filed to the Delaware County Board of Elections, the Inquirer reported, and a task force was able to find evidence of a possible crime.

Bartman was arrested in December and was one of three Pennsylvania men accused of committing fraud to vote for Trump. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the other two criminal cases are still pending.

Now-President Biden beat Trump in they Keystone State by more than 80,000 votes, helping him secure the necessary 270 electoral votes needed for the White House.

Trump and his campaign officials launched a lengthy and unsuccessful legal campaign attempting to overturn the results but statewide investigations have shown their claims about widespread voter fraud were false.

 

[blackbull1970]

Florida Officials Are “Actively” Preparing for the Possibility Trump Will Be Indicted at Mar-a-Lago

BESS LEVIN
MAY 13, 2021 3:12 PM

Florida Officials Are “Actively” Preparing for the Possibility Trump Will Be Indicted at Mar-a-Lago

His Bedminster golf club is reportedly also a possibility.

www.google.com

Six months after losing the 2020 election, Donald Trump is facing what can only be described as a rip-roaringly hilarious number of legal issues, an official designation law scholars tell us only applies to the history’s foremost accused crooks. He’s been sued 29 times and counting. He’s the subject of at least three criminal investigations. His personal attorney’s apartment and office were raided last month, and his ex-personal lawyer has predicted the guy will “absolutely” turn on Trump to avoid a lengthy sentence. Thanks to his last attorney general, the Biden Justice Department could charge him with obstructing the Mueller investigation.

But the most pressing issue is obviously the criminal investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who, among other things, has Trump’s tax returns in his hands; a trove of documents that could be used to get his longtime CFO to flip; the expertise of an outside forensic accounting firm; and Mark Pomerantz, a veteran prosecutor known for helping put white-collar criminals behind bars, including ones connected to the mob. Earlier this week, former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara told Slate that he sees a “decent likelihood” of Trump being charged and according to a new report, local Florida officials do too.

Per Politico:

Law enforcement officials in Palm Beach County, Fla., have actively prepared for the possibility that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance could indict former President Donald Trump while he’s at Mar-a-Lago, according to two high-ranking county officials involved in planning sessions. Among the topics discussed in those meetings: how to handle the thorny extradition issues that could arise if an indictment moves forward.

An obscure clause in Florida’s statute on interstate extradition gives Gov. Ron DeSantis the ability to intervene and even investigate whether an indicted “person ought to be surrendered” to law enforcement officials from another state—which means that as Mar-a-Lago prepares to close down for the season and Trump relocates to Bedminster, N.J., it isn’t just the Florida heat he’s leaving behind: He could lose a key piece of political protection.

“The statute leaves room for interpretation that the governor has the power to order a review and potentially not comply with the extradition notice,” Joe Abruzzo, Palm Beach County’s Circuit Court clerk, told Politico. (Abruzzo would be the person in charge of opening a potential “fugitive-at-large case” against Trump, should one be necessary.)

Trump is expected to spend the summer at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club where, according to Politico, the extradition statute also gives Governor Phil Murphy the power to investigate an out-of-state warrant. Unlike DeSantis, though, Murphy is not a Trump loyalist and would most likely not feel the need to intervene on the ex-president’s behalf. In other words, depending on when a potential indictment is issued, it would probably be in the 45th president’s best interest to be residing in the Sunshine State, where DeSantis would presumably go to great lengths to protect him. (An attorney for Trump declined Politico’s request for comment.)

In other Trump legal news, last week federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the DOJ must release a memo drafted by Bill Barr’s office that Barr claimed formed the legal basis for not charging Trump with obstruction in connection with the Mueller probe. According to Jackson, she believed Barr had already decided not to charge the 45th president with a crime well before he was given any written advice and the memo was created as justification not to do so. And according to Rachel Maddow, that would conceivably open the door for the Biden DOJ to indict Trump:

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Relatedly, on Wednesday former White House counsel Don McGahn struck an agreement with the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions related to the Mueller investigation. Probably a major point of discussion? The fact that, according to Robert Mueller, Trump instructed McGahn to lie to investigators, which is typically what one would describe as a major obstruction of justice.

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