Category: Trump effect

December 28, 2018

     The forced inactivity of a federal government shutdown has lent an eerie cast to the customarily quiet period between Christmas and New Year’s.  That news lull was punctured in the most distressing way with the news, on Christmas Day. We learned that yet another migrant child, 8 year old Felipe Gomez Alonso, had died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, after being shuttled among four different facilities during his six days of detention, (Source:  “‘A Breaking Point’: Second Child’s Death Prompts New Procedures for Border Agency,” by Miriam Jordan, The New York Times, 12/26/18).

    The overcrowded and chaotic conditions at the border are a direct result of the Trump administration’s policy of deliberately slowing down the processing of immigrants at the border, in a process known as ‘metering,’ which creates a bottleneck.  In addition, this administration’s insistence on imprisoning those who present themselves at the border, rather than releasing them with a later court date, results in people being held for days on end in facilities that were not intended to hold families, or any person, for an extended period of time (Source:  ibid).  These policies are literally killing children! Continue reading “This is not a game.”

December 23, 2018

    Despite unified Republican control of the federal government, we head into Christmas in the midst of our third government shutdown this year, all because Trump refuses to sign a continuing resolution to fund the government unless Congress includes a $5 billion appropriation for his racist, unnecessary, border wall.  Trump is heedless to the impact that being furloughed three days before Christmas will have on 800,000 federal workers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, (Source: “The Impact,” by Steve Mufson and Lisa Rein, The Washington Post, 12/21/18).

    Like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, Congressional Republicans have watched in horror as the monster they created has spiraled out of control.  Not content to wreak havoc in the lives of people of color and LGBTQ people, Trump is busily doing the bidding of his Moscow overlords, much to the chagrin of his warmongering base. Continue reading “How we got here, Part 3”

December 20, 2018

 

As it becomes increasingly likely that Trump’s presidency will collapse under the weight of multiple criminal prosecutions, we can expect him to become even more reckless and destructive.  Exhibit A was yesterday’s declaration of troop withdrawal by tweet in Syria.  Contravening the Pentagon and his own purported military strategy, Trump bizarrely announced, “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” (@realdonaldtrump, Twitter,12/19/18. 9:29 a.m).  Trump’s move was consistent with his modus operandi — an impulsive, ill-considered betrayal of our allies that benefits Russia and plunges the region into further chaos, (Source:  “Trump Withdraws U.S. Forces from Syria, Declaring ‘We Have Won Against ISIS,’” by Mark Landler, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, The New York Times, 12/19/18).

Senator Bob Corker, who passes for an eminence grise in the Republican conference of doddering, myopic racists, was reduced to tweeting his disapproval when Trump stood him up for a scheduled White House meeting.  As several commentators pointed out, when you have spent the last two years completely abdicating your Constitutional responsibility to serve as a check on presidential abuses of power, you can’t cry foul when Trump gets around to screwing up something you profess to care about. Continue reading “Open your eyes”

December 18, 2018

 

Yesterday we learned that Russian interference with our political process was longer in duration and wider in scope than we previously realized.  According to reports prepared for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, the Russians used every available social media platform, during the 2016 election season, with a particular focus on riling up conservatives and suppressing the African American vote, (Source:  “A New Report on Russian Disinformation Shows The Operation’s Scale and Sweep,” by Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, The Washington Post, 12/17/18).

Russian “efforts to manipulate Americans grew sharply in 2014 and every year thereafter,”(ibid).  They deftly deployed Facebook, in particular, to dupe African Americans and conservatives.  Any doubt that the Russian efforts during the 2016 campaign were designed to help Trump were dispelled by the further revelation that, beginning in 2017, Russian trolls trained their sights on attacking Robert Mueller, who they clearly viewed as the gravest threat to Trump’s continued tenure in The White House, (Source:  “Russian disinformation teams targeted Mueller,” by Craig Timberg, Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post, 12/17/18). Continue reading “From Russia With Love?”

December 15, 2018

     It is tough to feel the holiday spirit while drowning in a maelstrom of news of this administration’s unrelenting cruelty.  Republicans in Washington and across the country have responded to electoral losses and escalating legal jeopardy by attacking the very principle of representative democracy and doubling down on viciously racist policies, impervious to criticism and heedless of the human cost.

      Late Thursday we learned that seven year old Guatemalan refugee, Jakelin Caal died of acute dehydration on December 6th, in the United States after 8 hours in the custody of Customs and Border Patrol.  Jakelin and her father were part of a group of 161 Guatemalan refugees who presented themselves at the border in New Mexico, seeking asylum, as is their legal right. Continue reading “This is not a game”

December 11, 2018

 

Another shoe dropped yesterday when accused Russian spy, Maria Butina agreed to a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. At the same time,her boyfriend, Republican operative, Paul Erickson, received a target letter from federal prosecutors, based on their belief that Erickson was a Russian agent (Source:  “Accused Russian spy Maria Butina cooperating with federal prosecutors as part of a plea deal,” by Sara Murray and Katelyn Polantz, CNN.com, 12/11/18).

By now, we know that Butina’s efforts to infiltrate conservative political circles centered around the NRA.  To boost their bona fides with American conservatives, Butina and her handler, director of the Russian Central Bank, Aleksandr Torshin, founded the group, “Right to Bear Arms,” which is particularly ironic, given Russia’s fairly strict regulation of gun ownership, (Source:  “How Maria Butina, accused Russian spy, worked her way into top US circles,” by Jon Swaine and Lois Beckett, TheGuardian.com, 7/17/18). The Russian plan was to manipulate Americans’ gun fetish in order to influence American politics at the highest level. Continue reading “The man in the mirror”

December 9, 2018

     Friday’s trio of filings from federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and Special Counsel’s Office leave no shred of doubt that, at the very least, the Department of Justice believes that Trump is guilty of two felonies directly related to increasing his chances of being elected.  At worst, the overwhelming amount of information revealed in the last week, with its dizzying array of redacted filings and a telephone book’s worth of Russian names, leads to the inescapable conclusion that Trump, his family and his company are at the center of a vast criminal enterprise with decades’ long ties to the Russian mob, (Source: “Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back three decades,” by Sean Illing, Vox.com, 12/8/18).   Recent events make it crystal clear that the Trumps, and those in their orbit, have zero compunction about lying, grifting or turning a blind eye to murder ( R.I.P. Jamal Khashoggi), in order to line their pockets.

    Trump, every single person who serves in his administration, and every Republican who empowers him, is both immoral and amoral.  His criminality is so wide in scope and so breathtakingly brazen, that it is hard to come to grips with it. As a result, some mainstream journalists desperately cling to an evaporating “status quo,” attempting to shoehorn a string of traitorous felonies into a shopworn pre-existing narrative.  They lazily repeat his lies in clickbait headlines, rather than debunking them in real time, chasing the ad pennies, oblivious to the danger. Continue reading “The price of our birthright”

December 7, 2018

All this week, the news media has been consumed with the pomp and ceremony of the state funeral for George H.W. Bush, justly mocking Trump for standing silent and stone-faced, while every other living President stood and recited the Apostle’s Creed; or mawkishly celebrating W’s candy hand-off to Michelle Obama, as if his adorable crush could erase eight years of his disastrous presidency.  Meanwhile, in a series of “below the fold” stories, Republicans around the country have been taking shocking, unprecedented steps to override the will of the voters and arrogate power for themselves.  North Carolina Republicans, who pioneered the tactics currently on display in Wisconsin and Michigan, have taken the coup one step further with the apparent outright theft of the 9th Congressional District through brazen election fraud.

Each instance is truly astonishing in its own right.  Wisconsin has been a laboratory in how to hijack a progressive state through a toxic, anti-democratic cocktail of voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering.  The partisan gerrymandering was so extreme that it was invalidated by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, who ordered the state to redraw the districts.  The Supreme Court vacated the decision on procedural grounds earlier this year, leaving the gerrymandered districts in place for the 2018 midterms (Source:  Gill v. Whitford, 585 U.S. ____ (2018).  As a result, Wisconsin Republicans won 64% of the legislative seats, despite winning only 45% of the vote (Source:  “Republicans’ power grab in Wisconsin is more evidence the party doesn’t care about the will of the voters,” by Emily Mills, Think, nbcnews.com, 12/4/18). Continue reading “Coup d’etat”

December 4, 2018

 

In the days since George H.W. Bush’s death on Saturday at the age of 94, a food fight has erupted on social media between those valorizing him and those excoriating him.  Should the 41st President be lauded for his World War II heroism as a 17 year old fighter pilot, his lifetime of public service, personal graciousness and devotion to his family?  Has he earned our opprobrium because of the naked cynicism he he repeatedly displayed in his quest to win elections?  He used racism to win –  criticizing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and unleashing the viciously racist Willie Horton ads to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988.  He abandoned his criticism of supply side theory as “voodoo economics” and flip flopped on abortion to secure his berth as ultra conservative Ronald Reagan’s Vice Presidential pick, (Source:  “Is History Being Too Kind to George H.W. Bush?” by David Greenberg, Politico.com, 12/1/18). Continue reading “No hagiography”

December 1, 2018

    Although every week of Trump’s presidency has brought new revelations in the Russia investigation, whether it was the indictment of 19 Russian operators of a troll farm who seeded our social media with divisive disinformation, or a 2016 meeting between a Putin backed Russian lawyer and Don, Jr., this week has been qualitatively different.  For the first time, Trump himself is squarely in the crosshairs as “Individual 1,” as evidence mounts that allows us to connect the dots between his decades’ long pursuit of a major real estate development in Moscow and the concerted efforts of Russia, acting through WikiLeaks and the Internet Research Agency to interfere in our elections and win Trump the presidency.

    This has been a week of unrelenting bad news for the mobbed up autocrat squatting in The White House.  Every day has marked a seismic development in the hydra-headed Special Counsel investigation, revealing anew the nest of vipers that populate Trump’s world.  Earlier this week, Mueller accused Paul Manafort of breaching his plea agreement by “lying repeatedly to prosecutors,” (Source: “Individual 1* is now a Central Subject of Mueller Probe *a.k.a Trump” by Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post, 11/29/18).

     We learned that Manafort had never withdrawn from his joint defense agreement with Trump, as is customary once a defendant has entered a plea agreement.  That revelation led to feverish speculation that Manafort and his lawyer were playing the Special Counsel by serving as moles ferrying information to Trump and his attorneys about Mueller’s lines of inquiry.

     At the same time that we were learning of Manafort’s ongoing duplicity, right wing gadfly and conspiracy theorist, Jerome Corsi, was elbowing his way into the spotlight with his claim that he had rejected a plea deal with the Special Counsel’s office.  Corsi provided the charging documents to several news outlets, which outlined how Corsi and Roger Stone concocted outlandish lies to conceal their communications with WikiLeaks, (Source: “A leaked Mueller draft document provides a glimpse into the investigation’s future,” by Andrew Prokop, Vox.com, 11/27/18). The charging document traces a clear path from the GRU (Russian intelligence) to WikiLeaks to Roger Stone to Trump (pere et fils).

     This backdrop made Thursday’s news of the  Michael Cohen plea deal that much more momentous.  Cohen’s admission that he lied to Congress and that his efforts to secure a deal for Trump World Tower extended far past January 2016, up to the eve of the Republican convention in July, raises the possibility that Trump’s business interests in Moscow included the illegal use of financing from sanctioned Russian banks and that Trump had direct knowledge of his campaign operatives’ collusion with Russian interference in our elections.

    As BuzzfeedNews.com  exhaustively detailed, Cohen’s confederate in trying to bring Trump World Moscow to fruition was Russian born Felix Sater, a shady character with ties to the Russian Mob who frequently served as an undercover source for U.S. intelligence agencies.  Together they worked Russian officials, oligarchs and bankers (Source: “The Crazy True Story of Trump Moscow,” by Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold, BuzzfeedNews.com, 5/17/18).  The plan apparently included a promise to give the $50 million dollar penthouse to Vladimir Putin.

     Trump knows he’s in real jeopardy.  It is obvious from his rage tweeting and his sulking at the G-20, staring enviously at Mohammad bin Salman yukking it up with Vladimir Putin.  

     Yet while we were distracted by schadenfreude, Republicans in Washington were industriously continuing their quest to destroy our democracy.  Only the combination of Jeff Flake’s determination to protect Mueller and a last minute attack of conscience from Tim Scott prevented the confirmation of voter suppression mastermind Thomas Farr to a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in North Carolina.  The Trump administration announced plans to allow energy companies to “conduct seismic tests in the Atlantic Ocean…that could harm…marine life,” (Source: “Trump’s move towards Atlantic drilling could hurt marine mammals,” by Ben Geman and Andrew Freedman, Axios.com, 11/30/18).  Lastly, thanks to an investigation by ProPublica we have learned that the Department of Education has dramatically scaled back the investigation of “systemic civil rights violations by schools and colleges”, dismissing complaints without investigating them.

       The point is that we should contain our glee at the prospect of Trump’s impending fall. He is merely fruit of the poisonous tree in a government filled with malevolent people motivated solely by racism and greed. We would do well to remember the words of Winston Churchill:  “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”