Trump-Hannity Interview: A Trump Second Term?

Click here for an article at The Plum Line, a WaPo blog by Paul Waldman, entitled "Here’s what a second term of Trump would look like."

In an interview, Hannity tossed Trump this softball: "What are your top priority items for a second term?” To which our hero, the golden-tongued orator, responded as follows:

Well, one of the things that will be really great: You know, the word “experience” is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word “experience” is a very important word. It’s a very important meaning. I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times, all of a sudden I’m president of the United States, you know the story, I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say, “This is great.”

But I didn’t know very many people in Washington. it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now I know everybody. And I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes, like you know an idiot like Bolton, all he wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.

Okaaaay, thank you for that. Incidentally, I read elsewhere -- Mediate, I think -- that of a one-hour interview, 10 minutes were commercials. Of the remaining 50 minutes, Hannity and Trump spent 3 minutes discussing Covid-19; 47 minutes were spent covering other topics -- confederate monuments, looters and rioters, Sleepy Joe Biden, et cetera.

Lindsey Graham on Donald Trump and Joe Biden

Paste this in your browser address window:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1277238042546319360

Whatever became of this version of Lindsey Graham, and how did he become one of Trump's major lickspittles?

Steve Schmidt v. Matt Gaetz

Matt Gaetz, Republican congresscritter from Florida, directed an insulting tweet to Steve Schmidt, oldtime Republican strategist:

“Decline” could be the story of the various Republican campaigns you’ve led, Steve.

Our ships sail on.

Yours all rest at the bottom of the political ocean.

Big mistake.

In a multi-tweet message, Schmidt responded:

You invited a Holocaust Denier to the State of the Union. You are a conspiracy theorist and a lackey for the most inept, incompetent and illiberal President in American History. In an utterly rancid political moment you have established yourself as a buffoon without peer.

Your drunk driving incident, dozen speeding tickets and gas mask stunt at the beginning of the pandemic mark you as an entitled, reckless and spoiled punk. Your conduct disgraces the United States Congress. One thing is certainly true about democracy, the crazy and the stupid deserve representation also, and with you they have a perfect one.

Trump is falling apart in every way. He is physically decrepit and slovenly. He can barely walk. He is mentally and morally weak and failing at a profound level. He will be repudiated by the American people and by history’s harsh judgement, as will you.

When you are an old man looking back on it all you can be satisfied that you were the political version of Meatloaf or Gary Busey on the Apprentice, a figure of ridicule, a clown 🤡 in Trump’s circus.

The economy is shattered. America is divided and 120,000 are dead from a badly managed pandemic. Trump is going down. @ProjectLincoln @reedgalen @jwgop @TheRickWilson .

All you will have left is the stench. It won’t go away. Ever.

Forthcoming Bombshell: Book By Mary Trump (Niece)

Click here for an article at The Hive, a Vanity Fair blog, by Joe Pompeo, entitled "“She Feels Very Determined”: How Mary Trump’s Coming Bombshell Was Built."

The article is about a forthcoming book by Mary Trump, 55-year-old daughter of Trump's older brother, Fred, who died of ailments related to his alcoholism at the age of 42. She is a clinical psychologist, which gives some weight to her insights into the toxic DNA of the Trump family. The book will be titled "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man."

This quote from the article gives us some idea of what the book will be like:

On the night of her uncle’s election, responding to a tweet from progressive journalist Joan Walsh, Mary wrote, “This is one of the worst nights of my life. What is wrong with this country? I fear the American experiment has failed.”

Paste this into your browser's address window for Stephen Colbert's take on it, a "reading" from the book by Mary Trump herself:

https://twitter.com/colbertlateshow/status/1273057775493550081

Fake News

Here's a segment from Reliable Sources, a CNN blog by Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, entitled "Twisted incentives." They say that "if one's primary intention is not necessarily to accurately inform or make a good faith argument, but instead to prey on preexisting political narratives to score cheap clicks and engagement on social media, the rules of the game change."

Twisted incentives

Rushing to judgment before all the facts have emerged is never a good idea if one's intention is to provide accurate information to an audience. Too often, preliminary information turns out to be inaccurate or seen in a different light once the full picture is made available. It's usually better to wait until a reasonable amount of information surfaces before weighing in.

But if one's primary intention is not necessarily to accurately inform or make a good faith argument, but instead to prey on preexisting political narratives to score cheap clicks and engagement on social media, the rules of the game change. In the universe of hyper-partisan media, it's actually in one's interest to publish information — regardless of how thin the supporting evidence is — that fits neatly into the narrative.

If you're ahead of your competitors in publishing, you'll see a huge boost in engagement on social media. And if you end up being wrong, so what? Slap an update on the article and move on — the audience will either not notice or care the way they would if an established news org erred.

On Tuesday, we were offered two examples (see below) in which right-wing media pushed a preferred narrative that went viral on social platforms, only later to be undercut by the facts that emerged. (To be clear, this happens across partisan media, and is not unique to right-wing media, though the President consumes the latter camp's messaging which makes it at the moment far more consequential.)

No, Shake Shack didn't poison the NYPD

If you logged online Monday night, you may have seen disturbing reports that indicated a trio of NYPD officers had been poisoned while at a Shake Shack. Those reports, many of which went viral in right-wing media, were based off statements from police unions. But early Tuesday morning, NYPD Detective Chief Rodney Harrison said an investigation had "determined there was no criminality." CNN reported that investigators believe a cleaning agent in the milkshake machine hadn't fully cleared and ended up in the drinks served to the officers.

And yet, even the NYPD's own statement didn't stop some partisan media players from pushing the misinformation. Justin Baragona reported that "despite Harrison’s statement, which came at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, several Fox News stars ... continued to push the now-debunked claim that the officers were deliberately poisoned by the burger chain’s employees." This B.S. continued into Tuesday night on right-wing websites like The Daily Wire, which blasted out a nightly newsletter with the headline about Shake Shack. All in all, it's a good case study demonstrating that the incentives in hyper-partisan media reward stories that reinforce preexisting political views versus accurate reporting...

Man allegedly linked with "Boogaloo" movement charged

A couple weeks ago, right-wing media personalities and outlets suggested — or outright blamed — the death of federal officer David Patrick Underwood was the result of Antifa or left-wing demonstrators. As Kevin Roose tweeted, "This Oakland police killing was heavily promoted by right-wing publications a few weeks ago as evidence that left-wing protesters were turning violent."

"It was all over Facebook," Roose explained, "shared by right-wing pages with millions of followers. Among the top stories on the platform for days." And it wasn't just limited to online platforms — Underwood's death was used to suggest violence at the demonstrations on talk radio and Fox News too.

Fast forward to Tuesday. US Attorney David Anderson announced at a press conference that a man believed to belong to the anti-government extremist "Boogaloo" group has been charged for the murder. In other words, not a left-wing Black Lives Matter protester or Antifa member. Far from it. But will the outlets and personalties that pushed that narrative correct their previous posts? Will the same amount of attention be given to the new information? Don't hold your breath...

No real consequences

When mainstream news organizations mess up, they correct their errors. If it's a big mistake, disciplinary measures might be taken against the reporter or editor. In severe cases, people could lose their jobs and their careers might be forever tainted.

But, as I alluded to earlier, hyper-partisan media generally isn't governed by the same rules. If these organizations or personalities make a mistake, no matter how egregious it may be, there are no real repercussions. The pundit or outlet often barely corrects or updates the post, before moving on to the next story that will advance the predetermined narrative. In fact, it can be argued that these hyper-partisan entities still benefit from pushing inaccurate information. If their post went viral on social media, for instance, they likely gained followers and added to their reach. The incentives in our current media environment are not aligned with disseminating accurate information.

Chris Cuomo v. Larry Kudlow: Systemic Racism

Click here for a video clip (6:55) of Chris Cuomo replying to Larry Kudlow's repeated assertion that there is no systemic racism in the United States. Cuomo goes on and on and on and ON citing aspects of U.S. life where whites have a systemic advantage over blacks; it's quite a list.

He finishes by giving two possible reasons why Kudlow would express such a belief: one, in his world, he doesn't encounter it so he doesn't realize it's there; or two -- the reason Cuomo believes is the real reason -- he is knuckling under to Trump.

Cops' Participation In Vile Facebook Groups

This is pretty frightening. Click here for Part 1 of a three-part series entitled by Will Carless and Michael Corey, entitled "To protect and slur: Inside hate groups on Facebook, police officers trade racist memes, conspiracy theories and Islamophobia."

William Barr, Explained

Click here for an excellent (long) article in The New York Times Magazine by Mattathias Schwartz, entitled "William Barr's State of Emergency."

It does a good job of explaining Barr's development as a supporter of the theory of the "unitary executive," defined in Wikipedia:

Proponents of a strongly unitary theory argue that the president possesses all of the executive power and can therefore control subordinate officers and agencies of the executive branch. This implies that the power of Congress to remove executive agencies or officers from Presidential control is limited. Thus, under the strongly unitary executive theory, independent agencies and counsels are unconstitutional to the extent that they exercise discretionary executive power not controlled by the president.

The article says:

The presidency, in his [Barr's] view, handled “sovereign functions … which by their very nature cannot be directed by a pre-existing legal regime but rather demand speed, secrecy, unity of purpose and prudent judgment to meet contingent circumstances.” Part of the core function of the presidency was the ability to act swiftly and without constraint, but this capability had been diminished by the other branches since Watergate. Congress had burdened the president with oversight, while the courts were interfering with Trump’s travel ban on certain countries and his termination of President Barack Obama’s DACA program for young immigrants. Barr seemed to suggest that when it comes to foreign policy, the only legitimate check on presidential behavior is the next election. Months later, this argument would become the foundation of Trump’s impeachment defense.

Barr, who had previously been attorney general under Poppy Bush, was appointed Trump's attorney general largely on the strenght of an unsolicited "application" he sent to the White House:

outlining why he believed that Mueller had no legal right to investigate Trump for obstruction of justice. The president, Barr argued, has “complete authority to start or stop” investigations and can “give direction” on individual cases, including those that touch on his political or financial interests. “The Constitution itself places no limit on the president’s authority to act on matters which concern him or his own conduct,” Barr wrote. Law enforcement, he argued, was a power exclusively held by the president, because “he alone is the executive branch.”

Barr had hardly been in his post for a month when he received the Mueller report, when he published a hugely distorted "summary" of the report which seemed to exonerate Trump (which the report itself was far from doing). It's a mistake to consider Barr to be a tool of Donald Trump:

“Those who think he’s a tool of Donald Trump are missing the point,” says Stuart Gerson, who led the Justice Department’s civil division during Barr’s first tour and then succeeded him, serving as acting attorney general during the first three months of Bill Clinton’s presidency. “If anything, it’s the other way around. Barr is vastly more intelligent than Donald Trump. What Trump gives Bill Barr is a canvas upon which to paint. Bill has longstanding views about how society should be organized, which can now be manifested and acted upon to a degree that they never could have before.”

Many believe Barr to be acting not as "the people's lawyer," but as Donald Trump's personal lawyer:

Vanita Gupta, the former head of Obama’s civil rights division at the department, articulated a prevailing view of Barr among Democrats, telling me that the attorney general has “since Day 1 operated as the president’s defense lawyer.” Gupta says Barr’s interventions on behalf of Trump associates have far-reaching consequences. “Barr is overturning decisions made by career prosecutors to placate the president,” she says. “It’s insulting to federal prosecutors who have given their time to build cases with honor and integrity. It has a destructive impact on morale.”

I await with trepidation the forthcoming publishing of the Durham report, which looks as though it will be an effort to pillory the Mueller investigators:

Based on Barr’s public statements, we can see the rough contours of Durham’s findings beginning to take shape. The government’s conduct during the Obama-to-Trump transition, Barr has said, was “abhorrent.” Surveillance of Trump’s campaign amounted to “spying.” Then there was the all-important question of whether the F.B.I. was justified in opening the initial Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties.

The Durham investigation has been shrouded in mystery, but it doesn't look good:

Barr has spoken with intelligence officials from Italy, Australia and Britain to reportedly solicit information that could help Durham. In the case of Italy, where Barr and Durham met with political leaders and intelligence chiefs in person, his visit provoked concern among U.S. diplomats, who told The Times that Barr circumvented protocols in setting up the trip. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who is the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee and helped write its five-volume report, said there were “concerns” about Barr’s trips. “There is queasiness among our allies about the kind of activities Barr is engaged in,” he said.

Peggy Noonan v. Trump

Click here for an article by John Harwood at CNN entitled "Trump's evident character flaws leave him unable to meet the historic moment."

Harwood contrasts efforts to unite a divided country by presidents going all the way back to FDR with Trump's constant efforts to divide the country, please his supporters, and antagonize his political opponents. He quotes Peggy Noonan, who predictably praised Ronald Reagan before saying:

"A president doesn't have to be brilliant," Noonan wrote 25 years ago. "He doesn't have to be clever. You can hire clever. But you can't buy courage and decency, and you can't rent a strong moral sense. A president must bring those things with him."

It Can't Happen Here? Oh, Yeah?

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Salman Rushdie, entitled "I’ve seen dictators rise and fall. Beware, America."

Rushdie has lived through and under dictatorships in India and Pakistan, and has used their many misdeeds as the basis for some of his novels. He says he has lived in the U.S. for 20 years and has been a citizen for the last 4, and reminds us that the First Amendment says, in part: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

And yet, the man whose incompetence allowed the pandemic to tighten its deadly grip around our necks, and whose inflammatory language full of racist dog whistles has played a significant role in unleashing white-supremacist bigotry upon us all, stands in the Rose Garden of the White House and announces without an iota of shame that he wants to protect peaceful protesters. At that very time, just down the street, his security forces, some of them on horseback, are attacking a peaceful protest with tear gas and rubber bullets. A moment later, he characterizes the demonstrators as terrorists and characterizes their protests as crimes against God.

Rushdie says:

If he is allowed to use the actions of a tiny minority of criminals and white extremist infiltrators to invalidate the honorable protest of the vast majority against the murder of Floyd, the violence of the police toward the black community and the entrenched power of American racism, he will be on his way to despotism. He has threatened to use the Army against American citizens, a threat one might have expected from a leader of the former Soviet Union, but not of the United States.

In my most recent novel, “Quichotte,” I characterized the present moment as the “Age of Anything-Can-Happen.” Today I say, beware, America. Don’t believe that it can’t happen here.

"IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE": Shades of Sinclair Lewis.

Statement by General Mattis

Statement made by General James (Mad Dog) Mattis, a former Marine four-star who was Trump's first Secretary of Defense, acting from January 2017 to January 2019:

In Union There Is Strength

I have watched this week's unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words "Equal Justice Under Law" are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation.

 When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a "battlespace" that our uniformed military is called upon to "dominate." At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict— between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part.

Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.

James Madison wrote in Federalist 14 that "America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat." We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.

Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that "The Nazi slogan for destroying us...was 'Divide and Conquer.' Our American answer is 'In Union there is Strength.'" We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

We can come through this trying time stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals, grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln's "better angels," and listen to them, as we work to unite.

Only by adopting a new path—which means, in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.

James Mattis