Showing posts with label fascist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fascist. Show all posts
Monday, February 10, 2025
Monday, August 10, 2020
‘Friday Night Massacre’ at US Postal Service as Postmaster General — a Major Trump Donor — Ousts Top Officials
‘Friday Night Massacre’ at US Postal Service as Postmaster General — a Major Trump Donor — Ousts Top Officials
"America is in a dead sprint to authoritarianism. The man is pulling out all the stops to prevent the citizens of this country from holding a legitimate election in which he might face removal from office."
BY JON QUEALLY | AUGUST 8, 2020
Government watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and pro-democracy advocates declared it a “Friday Night Massacre” for the US Postal Service after news broke in a classic end-of-the-week dump that Louis DeJoy — a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump and the recently appointed Postmaster General — had issued a sweeping overhaul of the agency, including the ouster of top executives from key posts and the reshuffling of more than two dozen other officials and operational managers.
According to the Washington Post:
The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.
Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.
Already under fire for recent policy changes at the USPS that mail carriers from within and outside critics have denounced as a sabotage effort to undermine the Postal Service broadly as well as disrupt efforts to carry out mail-in voting for November’s election amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the moves unveiled late Friday were viewed as an overt assault on democracy and a calculated opportunity to boost Republicans’ long-held dream of undercutting or privatizing the government-run mail service while also boosting their election prospects in the process.
“Another Friday night massacre by this administration — and this time dealing another devastating blow to our postal service,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) “The American people deserve answers and we’re going to keep fighting for them.”
Scanlon was among more than 80 congressional lawmakers who sent a letter to DeJoy earlier in the day expressing “deep concerns” about operational changes he has made for mail carriers that have delayed deliveries and lowered standards.
“It is vital that the US Postal Service not reduce mail delivery times, which could harm rural communities, seniors, small businesses, and millions of Americans who rely on the mail for critical letters and packages,” the letter stated. “Eliminating overtime and directing postal workers to leave mail on the floor of postal facilities will erode confidence in the Postal Service and drive customers away, resulting in even worse financial conditions in the future.”
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, warned what occurred Friday is designed to weak the Postal Service, slow vote-by-mail, and disrupt the 2020 Census.
“We are sounding an alarm regarding personnel changes, policy shifts and service disruptions happening inside the US Postal Service on Louis DeJoy’s watch,” Clarke said in a statement. “The postal service lies at the heart of our democracy and is critical to the success of an unprecedented vote-by-mail system that is needed for a fair and effective 2020 election season. The postal service helps ensure that our nation’s most vulnerable communities are receiving medications and resources during the pandemic. It is also critical to the efforts to achieve a full and accurate 2020 Census.”
Clarke said the administration’s intentions are clear: “DeJoy, a Trump donor with no experience inside the postal service, has been installed to cause chaos and disruption at a time when the timely delivery of mail could not be more critical.”
As Common Dreams reported earlier Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was among those who signed the letter and also called for DeJoy’s efforts to be investigated by the Inspector General of the USPS. Since 2016 alone, DeJoy has donated more than $2.5 million to the Republican Party and candidates. In 2020, prior to his appointment as Postmaster General by the GOP-controlled board of governors, DeJoy had already given approximately $360,000 to a Super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection.
As the Post notes in its reporting, the reshuffling of top managers and executives — as well as a hiring freeze and push for early retirements— “worried postal analysts, who say the tone of DeJoy’s first eight weeks and his restructuring have recast the nation’s mail service as a for-profit arm of the government, rather than an essential service.”
In a video posted to Twitter, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oreg.) characterized DeJoy as a “political crony” of the president’s and also denounced the brazen efforts now on display as a “Friday Night Massacre” scenario:
Appearing Friday afternoon on Capitol Hill, DeJoy brushed off accusations that he is acting as a political bag man for Trump. “While I certainly have a good relationship with the president of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the president or anyone else in the administration is wholly off-base,” DeJoy said.
But outside critics like Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics and a fierce critic of Trump’s behavior as president, said the latest move should be seen as nothing less than a direct effort by DeJoy to exploit his authority at the Postal Service to further the president’s political interests and reelection prospects.
According to Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal commentator and podcast host, “Congressional Democrats need to do something about this” immediately.
“If we wait until October/November, it’ll be too late,” said Cohen. “Trump is actively sabotaging the election under our noses—this isn’t theoretical, it’s happening RIGHT NOW.” Cohen said this situation should be treated like a “f***ing five-alarm fire” and said action must be taken by both lawmakers and the US public without delay.
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee which has oversight for the USPS, said what DeJoy is trying to pass off as simple organizational restructuring is actually “a Trojan Horse” designed to destroy one of the nation’s most trusted and valued institutions from within.
Connolly on Friday night called it, “Deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election — an election that hinges on mail-in ballots.”
Link to original article at Bill Moyers On Democracy:
https://billmoyers.com/story/friday-night-massacre-at-us-postal-service-as-postmaster-general-a-major-trump-donor-ousts-top-officials/
"America is in a dead sprint to authoritarianism. The man is pulling out all the stops to prevent the citizens of this country from holding a legitimate election in which he might face removal from office."
BY JON QUEALLY | AUGUST 8, 2020
Government watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and pro-democracy advocates declared it a “Friday Night Massacre” for the US Postal Service after news broke in a classic end-of-the-week dump that Louis DeJoy — a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump and the recently appointed Postmaster General — had issued a sweeping overhaul of the agency, including the ouster of top executives from key posts and the reshuffling of more than two dozen other officials and operational managers.
According to the Washington Post:
The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.
Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.
Already under fire for recent policy changes at the USPS that mail carriers from within and outside critics have denounced as a sabotage effort to undermine the Postal Service broadly as well as disrupt efforts to carry out mail-in voting for November’s election amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the moves unveiled late Friday were viewed as an overt assault on democracy and a calculated opportunity to boost Republicans’ long-held dream of undercutting or privatizing the government-run mail service while also boosting their election prospects in the process.
“Another Friday night massacre by this administration — and this time dealing another devastating blow to our postal service,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) “The American people deserve answers and we’re going to keep fighting for them.”
Scanlon was among more than 80 congressional lawmakers who sent a letter to DeJoy earlier in the day expressing “deep concerns” about operational changes he has made for mail carriers that have delayed deliveries and lowered standards.
“It is vital that the US Postal Service not reduce mail delivery times, which could harm rural communities, seniors, small businesses, and millions of Americans who rely on the mail for critical letters and packages,” the letter stated. “Eliminating overtime and directing postal workers to leave mail on the floor of postal facilities will erode confidence in the Postal Service and drive customers away, resulting in even worse financial conditions in the future.”
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, warned what occurred Friday is designed to weak the Postal Service, slow vote-by-mail, and disrupt the 2020 Census.
“We are sounding an alarm regarding personnel changes, policy shifts and service disruptions happening inside the US Postal Service on Louis DeJoy’s watch,” Clarke said in a statement. “The postal service lies at the heart of our democracy and is critical to the success of an unprecedented vote-by-mail system that is needed for a fair and effective 2020 election season. The postal service helps ensure that our nation’s most vulnerable communities are receiving medications and resources during the pandemic. It is also critical to the efforts to achieve a full and accurate 2020 Census.”
Clarke said the administration’s intentions are clear: “DeJoy, a Trump donor with no experience inside the postal service, has been installed to cause chaos and disruption at a time when the timely delivery of mail could not be more critical.”
As Common Dreams reported earlier Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was among those who signed the letter and also called for DeJoy’s efforts to be investigated by the Inspector General of the USPS. Since 2016 alone, DeJoy has donated more than $2.5 million to the Republican Party and candidates. In 2020, prior to his appointment as Postmaster General by the GOP-controlled board of governors, DeJoy had already given approximately $360,000 to a Super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection.
As the Post notes in its reporting, the reshuffling of top managers and executives — as well as a hiring freeze and push for early retirements— “worried postal analysts, who say the tone of DeJoy’s first eight weeks and his restructuring have recast the nation’s mail service as a for-profit arm of the government, rather than an essential service.”
In a video posted to Twitter, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oreg.) characterized DeJoy as a “political crony” of the president’s and also denounced the brazen efforts now on display as a “Friday Night Massacre” scenario:
Appearing Friday afternoon on Capitol Hill, DeJoy brushed off accusations that he is acting as a political bag man for Trump. “While I certainly have a good relationship with the president of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the president or anyone else in the administration is wholly off-base,” DeJoy said.
But outside critics like Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics and a fierce critic of Trump’s behavior as president, said the latest move should be seen as nothing less than a direct effort by DeJoy to exploit his authority at the Postal Service to further the president’s political interests and reelection prospects.
According to Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal commentator and podcast host, “Congressional Democrats need to do something about this” immediately.
“If we wait until October/November, it’ll be too late,” said Cohen. “Trump is actively sabotaging the election under our noses—this isn’t theoretical, it’s happening RIGHT NOW.” Cohen said this situation should be treated like a “f***ing five-alarm fire” and said action must be taken by both lawmakers and the US public without delay.
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee which has oversight for the USPS, said what DeJoy is trying to pass off as simple organizational restructuring is actually “a Trojan Horse” designed to destroy one of the nation’s most trusted and valued institutions from within.
Connolly on Friday night called it, “Deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election — an election that hinges on mail-in ballots.”
Link to original article at Bill Moyers On Democracy:
https://billmoyers.com/story/friday-night-massacre-at-us-postal-service-as-postmaster-general-a-major-trump-donor-ousts-top-officials/
Friday, July 31, 2020
Sunday, July 5, 2020
The Cruelty Is The Point
Some people don't want their lives improved, they want the lives of those they hate made worse. We won't change their minds on that, but we can outnumber them. PLEASE VOTE for Biden.
Saturday, June 6, 2020
Friday, June 5, 2020
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Don't Be Bamboozled
There's not a lot of time left. November will be here soon enough. Don't be bamboozled. Our country is literally at stake.
RESIST.
RESIST.
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Robert E. Kelly on Trump and the GOP
This is an amazingly succinct account, written by Robert E. Kelly, Professor of Political Science, of the current state of Trump, the Republican party, and all their conservative supporters.
The last few weeks of the Trump Show have been more awful than usual but also inadvertently revelatory @ Trump's coalition. If you've paid attention, you've suspected this stuff for a long time, but bc T says the quiet parts out loud, a lot of GOP masks have definitively dropped:
1. Gun rights advocates now clearly think that routine massacres are an acceptable price to pay for access to long guns. The president's teleprompter speech was so forced & hackneyed, & his desperation to blame anything - video games, mental health, the culture, hate – except easy gun access, was so transparent, that no one serious will ever buy that stuff again. That doesn't mean gun control will happen - Fox and empty-state senators will see to that - but at least the 'debate' is over. The insincerity of these arguments is now undeniable. The NRA & co. now clearly prioritize gun ownership over public safety, and they will say anything to defend a capacious reading of the 2A.
2. A lot of Trump voters are racist. Again, this wasn't too hard to figure out before; the tea party pretty clearly wasn't motivated by limited government. But Trump has ripped the mask off, just as he did with his blatantly fatuous speech on the shootings. Journalists have danced around calling the president racist for 2 years and have hedged for decades on racism as a motivation despite stuff like Willy Horton and the Southern strategy. Those days are now over. 'Economic anxiety' is the standard talking point to deflect this. That is impossible to invoke after 'send her back' caused no drop in Trump's approval rating. It is apparent now that Trump wants the GOP to be like the Nat'l Front.
3. Evangelicals couldn't care less about personal virtue. Here's another Trump 'silver lining': Trump's personal behavior is so appalling - spiteful, mean-spirited, selfish, adulterous - that evangelical support for him auto-demolishes any ethical/virtue argument they make. We never need to take moralistic arguments from religious conservatives seriously again. They're just another interest group now, with no principled belief in elevating our debased politics. I find this sell-out the most disappointing. There is something noble in the notion that politicians should strive for personal virtue. But evangelicals sold their soul to Trump for judges & access.
4. It's all about the tax-cuts and judges. Trump is woefully unfit for the office. Lots of retired GOP officials, like Boehner and Ryan, pretty clearly see that. But they swallowed all the racism, misogyny, narcissism, norm-busting, & so on just for that juicy 2017 tax cut to their donors. Again, you probably suspected plutocracy before. W's 2001 & 2003 tax cuts were upwardly redistributive too. But Trump is so awful that the Congressional GOP's willingness to stand with him anyway has starkly revealed its donor class preferences.
5. Budgetary restraint is for Democratic presidents only. Trump's Keynesianism, exploding deficits, & bullying of the Fed for low interest rates to help him get re-elected are now so obvious as to be undeniable. Again, you kind of already knew this, but maybe the tea party was serious and Romney and Ryan really did think we were becoming Greece. Well that story is gone now too. Trump deficit spends with such abandon, that this GOP plank is revealed as insincere also. Kinda makes you wonder what's left? Trump is woefully unfit & a terrible president, but his inability to lie convincingly is weirdly useful, ideologically at least. Yes, Trump lies and flim-flams all the time, but he when he does, he almost always signals his insincerity via his body language. He says the right stuff for a moment - at Charlottesville or after the shootings - but in such a fake, reading-from-the-teleprompter manner that you can easily decipher his true beliefs. This inability to mouth appropriate platitudes, to lie convincingly, has inadvertently revealed a lot about the GOP coalition and destroyed a lot of its most useful pretenses, e.g., crime, not race, is the concern, or mental health is the culprit of gun violence. This myth-busting is a 'progress' of a sort, which the GOP will come to regret after Trump is gone and no one knows what it stands for besides racism and upper income tax cuts. Aligning with Trump is a Faustian bargain, and the bill will come due. But by demolishing useful, deflective GOP myths, Trump is accelerating that reckoning.
Link to original Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/Robert_E_Kelly/status/1159337764950642689
The last few weeks of the Trump Show have been more awful than usual but also inadvertently revelatory @ Trump's coalition. If you've paid attention, you've suspected this stuff for a long time, but bc T says the quiet parts out loud, a lot of GOP masks have definitively dropped:
1. Gun rights advocates now clearly think that routine massacres are an acceptable price to pay for access to long guns. The president's teleprompter speech was so forced & hackneyed, & his desperation to blame anything - video games, mental health, the culture, hate – except easy gun access, was so transparent, that no one serious will ever buy that stuff again. That doesn't mean gun control will happen - Fox and empty-state senators will see to that - but at least the 'debate' is over. The insincerity of these arguments is now undeniable. The NRA & co. now clearly prioritize gun ownership over public safety, and they will say anything to defend a capacious reading of the 2A.
2. A lot of Trump voters are racist. Again, this wasn't too hard to figure out before; the tea party pretty clearly wasn't motivated by limited government. But Trump has ripped the mask off, just as he did with his blatantly fatuous speech on the shootings. Journalists have danced around calling the president racist for 2 years and have hedged for decades on racism as a motivation despite stuff like Willy Horton and the Southern strategy. Those days are now over. 'Economic anxiety' is the standard talking point to deflect this. That is impossible to invoke after 'send her back' caused no drop in Trump's approval rating. It is apparent now that Trump wants the GOP to be like the Nat'l Front.
3. Evangelicals couldn't care less about personal virtue. Here's another Trump 'silver lining': Trump's personal behavior is so appalling - spiteful, mean-spirited, selfish, adulterous - that evangelical support for him auto-demolishes any ethical/virtue argument they make. We never need to take moralistic arguments from religious conservatives seriously again. They're just another interest group now, with no principled belief in elevating our debased politics. I find this sell-out the most disappointing. There is something noble in the notion that politicians should strive for personal virtue. But evangelicals sold their soul to Trump for judges & access.
4. It's all about the tax-cuts and judges. Trump is woefully unfit for the office. Lots of retired GOP officials, like Boehner and Ryan, pretty clearly see that. But they swallowed all the racism, misogyny, narcissism, norm-busting, & so on just for that juicy 2017 tax cut to their donors. Again, you probably suspected plutocracy before. W's 2001 & 2003 tax cuts were upwardly redistributive too. But Trump is so awful that the Congressional GOP's willingness to stand with him anyway has starkly revealed its donor class preferences.
5. Budgetary restraint is for Democratic presidents only. Trump's Keynesianism, exploding deficits, & bullying of the Fed for low interest rates to help him get re-elected are now so obvious as to be undeniable. Again, you kind of already knew this, but maybe the tea party was serious and Romney and Ryan really did think we were becoming Greece. Well that story is gone now too. Trump deficit spends with such abandon, that this GOP plank is revealed as insincere also. Kinda makes you wonder what's left? Trump is woefully unfit & a terrible president, but his inability to lie convincingly is weirdly useful, ideologically at least. Yes, Trump lies and flim-flams all the time, but he when he does, he almost always signals his insincerity via his body language. He says the right stuff for a moment - at Charlottesville or after the shootings - but in such a fake, reading-from-the-teleprompter manner that you can easily decipher his true beliefs. This inability to mouth appropriate platitudes, to lie convincingly, has inadvertently revealed a lot about the GOP coalition and destroyed a lot of its most useful pretenses, e.g., crime, not race, is the concern, or mental health is the culprit of gun violence. This myth-busting is a 'progress' of a sort, which the GOP will come to regret after Trump is gone and no one knows what it stands for besides racism and upper income tax cuts. Aligning with Trump is a Faustian bargain, and the bill will come due. But by demolishing useful, deflective GOP myths, Trump is accelerating that reckoning.
Link to original Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/Robert_E_Kelly/status/1159337764950642689
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Saturday, November 3, 2018
VOTE!
ON TUESDAY NOVEMBER 6TH
https://maddogpac.com/
"But when fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro-Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war. It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders, who are not yet visible, will know how to locate the great springs of public opinion and desire and the streams of thought that flow from them and will know how to attract to their banners leaders who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would-be Fuhrers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certainly deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion."
--from AS WE GO MARCHING by journalist John Thomas Flynn
 |
| The current administration, and the party and followers who support it exhibit EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE WARNING SIGNS. |
Republican and conservative leaders--and their supporters--don't care that climate change is going to literally destroy our civilization, and that we are going to be out of land, out of food, and out of luck. They don't care that people of color are being assassinated, they don't care that women are being raped, they don't care that children are shot en masse in their own schools (of course conservatives shriek about protecting fetuses, but once you are born, then they will destroy you), they don't care that a single health emergency could force someone into bankruptcy and ruin for the rest of their lives. We need decency, sanity, the ability to think ahead and determine consequences. As John F. Kennedy said, we need leaders who believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, and the human heart as the source of national compassion. And when you see conservative leaders and their supporters siding with Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, denying a safe haven for those ravaged by poverty and war, giving--yet again--huge tax cuts and more money to the wealthy and more and more hardships for everyone else, attempting to destroy the time-honored institution of public schools in favor of education for the wealthy only, deliberately telling lies to incite violence toward one of our most cherished manifestations of democracy which is a free press, blaming women for being victims of male violence, supporting child molesters and wife beaters and embezzlers and black-out drunk sex-assaulting judges for public office (they have admitted the only reason they do so is to annoy and incite the left, which is harming themselves as well), and trying to destroy any system of sane healthcare in favor of profit margins for insurance companies, it is clear that they are NOT the ones who will bring much needed dignity, purpose, action, liberty, or compassion to the United States.
If you or someone you know has ever thought or said, "I don't vote because my vote doesn't count" has to realize that 2/3 of the US population usually does not vote. If that missing 2/3 did vote, then their vote would matter tremendously (and we have seen proof so many times where a candidate won an office by only a handful of votes). Then they would wield power, and in order to wield power, you have to take it. You have to actually vote. If you or someone you know has ever thought or said, "Well, I'm not really into politics" has to realize that what is before us is not "politics." This is not partisan, this is about survival. We have a chance now. Maybe the last real, clear shot. I am still holding out hope that we are brave enough to create the world that the best part of ourselves strive toward.
Saturday, May 26, 2018
"Trump's sustained attacks on American rights" by Joan Biskupic
Trump's sustained attacks on American rights
Analysis by Joan Biskupic, CNN legal analyst & Supreme Court biographer
Updated 2:15 PM ET, Sat May 26, 2018
(CNN)Two years ago Sunday, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump derided US District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, hearing a lawsuit against Trump University, for his "Mexican" heritage and complained of being "railroaded" by the legal system.
It was shocking, Democrats and Republicans alike condemned Trump's racially intemperate criticism of the Indiana-born judge.
Turns out, it was nothing.
Over the past 24 months, Trump has scorned judges, derided the American court system, and trampled on all manner of constitutional principles. Trump has especially ridiculed due process of law, the bedrock against government's arbitrary denial of a person's life, liberty or property.
Critics warn that denunciations that once seemed so aberrational may be seeping into the American psyche and influencing how government operates.
This week, Trump suggested immigrants at the border could be summarily deported without any hearing to determine if they deserved asylum or were US citizens wrongly apprehended. In a Fox News interview that aired on Thursday, Trump flatly deemed the system of immigration judges "corrupt" and said, "Whoever heard of a system where you put people through trials? Where do these judges come from?"
The administrative system, in fact, is part of Trump's executive branch, run by the Justice Department; the attorney general appoints immigration judges.
In the same interview, Trump responded to the NFL policy prohibiting kneeling during the "Star-Spangled Banner," with a message for players who refuse to stand for the anthem: "Maybe you shouldn't be in the country."
Such an attitude inflames controversy over league rules for players protesting racial injustice to intimations of government rejection of its citizens - for speaking out.
Due Process. Citizenship. Racial Equality. Trump's targets seem to merit none of these. It is not lost on Trump's detractors that he routinely takes aim at immigrants and racial minorities.
At the same time, the President expresses outrage over what happens to the men of his world.
When his former staff secretary Rob Porter was accused by two ex-wives of domestic violence, Trump emphasized in February to the news media, "He says he's innocent." Then in a tweet, Trump wrote: "Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?"
In April, Trump referred to an FBI raid on the home and office of Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen, executing a court-approved subpoena, as "an attack on our country ... an attack on what we all stand for."
If Trump's norm-shattering derision of the courts and constitutional principles has only accelerated in the past two years, public responses appear more polarized. Opponents are overwhelmingly Democratic. Trump's approval rating among Republicans remains high.
There also may be fatigue. Trump is constant. His questioning Thursday of a legal process for people apprehended at the border drew scant public response.
Long before he was a candidate, Trump was known for complaints about the justice system and incendiary rhetoric. He railed against five black and Latino men accused (and wrongfully convicted) for a 1989 rape of a jogger in New York's Central Park. Trump bought full-page ads in New York newspapers proclaiming, "Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police." Even after the men were exonerated, he suggested they were guilty.
The difference now, of course, is that he is America's top leader. So last fall, when he tweeted that an Uzbekistan man who was charged with killing eight pedestrians and bikers in New York City "SHOULD GET THE DEATH PENALTY," some law professors and analysts wondered if the President's comments would hurt the government's legal case.
Trump sets a tone for the whole country - a reality that spurred Republican op-ed columnist Michael Gerson, a former aide to President George W. Bush, to pen a scathing assessment earlier this month.
"Whatever else Trumpism may be," Gerson wrote in The Washington Post, "it is the systematic organization of resentment against outgroups. His record is rich in dehumanization. ... This is more than a disturbing pattern; it is an organizing political principle. And it has resulted in a series of radiating consequences."
As one of many examples, Gerson pointed to West Virginia GOP Senate candidate Don Blankenship's statement that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was creating jobs for "China people." (His wife, Elaine Chao, was born in Taiwan.)
"The Trump era is a renaissance of half-witted intolerance," Gerson concluded, urging Republican leaders to challenge Trump. (The President endorsed one of Blankenship's opponents and Blankenship lost the primary.)
If such protests from the right are rare, the left has tried to remain energized.
The stream of Trump rhetoric against due process "is exhausting, yet requires us to remain vigilant," said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Gupta said an overriding concern is that dehumanizing language and attacks on minorities influence administration policy "The daily hits to due process are real and it is dangerous for any of us to accept this as normal," she said.
Irrespective of how responses have evolved over the past two years, Trump has not deviated from his personal script.
As he declared in May 2016, when many of his comments were rallying fans and roiling critics, "You think I'm going to change? I'm not changing."
Link to original article
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/26/politics/trump-rights-due-process-curiel/index.html
Analysis by Joan Biskupic, CNN legal analyst & Supreme Court biographer
Updated 2:15 PM ET, Sat May 26, 2018
(CNN)Two years ago Sunday, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump derided US District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, hearing a lawsuit against Trump University, for his "Mexican" heritage and complained of being "railroaded" by the legal system.
It was shocking, Democrats and Republicans alike condemned Trump's racially intemperate criticism of the Indiana-born judge.
Turns out, it was nothing.
Over the past 24 months, Trump has scorned judges, derided the American court system, and trampled on all manner of constitutional principles. Trump has especially ridiculed due process of law, the bedrock against government's arbitrary denial of a person's life, liberty or property.
Critics warn that denunciations that once seemed so aberrational may be seeping into the American psyche and influencing how government operates.
This week, Trump suggested immigrants at the border could be summarily deported without any hearing to determine if they deserved asylum or were US citizens wrongly apprehended. In a Fox News interview that aired on Thursday, Trump flatly deemed the system of immigration judges "corrupt" and said, "Whoever heard of a system where you put people through trials? Where do these judges come from?"
The administrative system, in fact, is part of Trump's executive branch, run by the Justice Department; the attorney general appoints immigration judges.
In the same interview, Trump responded to the NFL policy prohibiting kneeling during the "Star-Spangled Banner," with a message for players who refuse to stand for the anthem: "Maybe you shouldn't be in the country."
Such an attitude inflames controversy over league rules for players protesting racial injustice to intimations of government rejection of its citizens - for speaking out.
Due Process. Citizenship. Racial Equality. Trump's targets seem to merit none of these. It is not lost on Trump's detractors that he routinely takes aim at immigrants and racial minorities.
At the same time, the President expresses outrage over what happens to the men of his world.
When his former staff secretary Rob Porter was accused by two ex-wives of domestic violence, Trump emphasized in February to the news media, "He says he's innocent." Then in a tweet, Trump wrote: "Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?"
In April, Trump referred to an FBI raid on the home and office of Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen, executing a court-approved subpoena, as "an attack on our country ... an attack on what we all stand for."
If Trump's norm-shattering derision of the courts and constitutional principles has only accelerated in the past two years, public responses appear more polarized. Opponents are overwhelmingly Democratic. Trump's approval rating among Republicans remains high.
There also may be fatigue. Trump is constant. His questioning Thursday of a legal process for people apprehended at the border drew scant public response.
Long before he was a candidate, Trump was known for complaints about the justice system and incendiary rhetoric. He railed against five black and Latino men accused (and wrongfully convicted) for a 1989 rape of a jogger in New York's Central Park. Trump bought full-page ads in New York newspapers proclaiming, "Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police." Even after the men were exonerated, he suggested they were guilty.
The difference now, of course, is that he is America's top leader. So last fall, when he tweeted that an Uzbekistan man who was charged with killing eight pedestrians and bikers in New York City "SHOULD GET THE DEATH PENALTY," some law professors and analysts wondered if the President's comments would hurt the government's legal case.
Trump sets a tone for the whole country - a reality that spurred Republican op-ed columnist Michael Gerson, a former aide to President George W. Bush, to pen a scathing assessment earlier this month.
"Whatever else Trumpism may be," Gerson wrote in The Washington Post, "it is the systematic organization of resentment against outgroups. His record is rich in dehumanization. ... This is more than a disturbing pattern; it is an organizing political principle. And it has resulted in a series of radiating consequences."
As one of many examples, Gerson pointed to West Virginia GOP Senate candidate Don Blankenship's statement that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was creating jobs for "China people." (His wife, Elaine Chao, was born in Taiwan.)
"The Trump era is a renaissance of half-witted intolerance," Gerson concluded, urging Republican leaders to challenge Trump. (The President endorsed one of Blankenship's opponents and Blankenship lost the primary.)
If such protests from the right are rare, the left has tried to remain energized.
The stream of Trump rhetoric against due process "is exhausting, yet requires us to remain vigilant," said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Gupta said an overriding concern is that dehumanizing language and attacks on minorities influence administration policy "The daily hits to due process are real and it is dangerous for any of us to accept this as normal," she said.
Irrespective of how responses have evolved over the past two years, Trump has not deviated from his personal script.
As he declared in May 2016, when many of his comments were rallying fans and roiling critics, "You think I'm going to change? I'm not changing."
Link to original article
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/26/politics/trump-rights-due-process-curiel/index.html
Friday, December 1, 2017
Trump Stains Democratic Ideals by James Cook
Sorry to darken the holiday spirit, but we are living in dark times...
Embracing the far right, Trump stains a history of democratic ideals
By James Cook
North America correspondent/BBC News
One of my cherished possessions, which I cart with me around the world, is a tattered paperback copy of the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches.
On the front cover, John F Kennedy stands gripping a lectern, in full flow; on the back, Martin Luther King raises a hand before the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.
As you gaze at that second picture, you can hear his preacher's voice, resonant and rhythmic. You can hear the cadences rise and fall, a hint of vibrato, as he describes his dream.
On the pages in between, the speeches shine brightly with democratic ideals, many proclaimed by American presidents.
There is Woodrow Wilson, promoting the League of Nations in Pueblo, Colorado in September 1919: "There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace."
There is Herbert Hoover's great rallying cry for conservatism in New York in October 1928: "The march of progress" founded on "ordered liberty, freedom and equal opportunity to the individual."
The Wall Street crash of the following year brought that march to an abrupt halt, and by the spring of 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration speech crackled across the radio airwaves, the nation was in the desolation of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt's watershed inaugural is best remembered for its signature line - "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - but it contained much else besides, not least a warning of the "false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit".
A Democrat, Roosevelt might have abjured the "rugged individualism" of his Republican predecessor, but the two presidents shared a commitment to liberty, characterised by Roosevelt in his 1941 address to Congress as "four freedoms": namely the freedoms of speech and religion and freedoms from want and fear.
"Enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom," he declared.
Roosevelt had a year earlier started his country on the long, slow turn away from isolationism and toward engagement in the fight against fascism, with his "arsenal of democracy" speech, in which he urged reluctant citizens to lend their vast resources to the British war effort.
Thirteen presidents later, the debate about whether to turn inward or to engage with the world has been resurrected by Donald Trump. He insists that he is not an isolationist but he describes US foreign policy in unilateral, transactional terms and has championed "America First" — a phrase originally associated with opposition to Roosevelt's desire to fight Hitler.
The most prominent spokesman for the 1940s America First Committee, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, accused Jewish groups of "agitating for war" and was himself accused of being pro-Nazi.
Embracing the phrase "America First" does not in itself indicate fascism, but there is more to the picture than that.
For Lindbergh and Roosevelt, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. In 1944 American troops waded through the surf of Normandy's beaches and into the path of Nazi bullets.
Half a lifetime later, at Pointe du Hoc on the English Channel, Ronald Reagan commemorated their sacrifice with the words: "Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history." That's in my book of speeches too.
Of course, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals.
This week marks the 153rd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, when US troops murdered and mutilated women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado, just one atrocity among many as white Europeans vanquished the native peoples of the New World.
Then a country founded on genocide and slavery covered its ears for shameful ages before it heard Martin Luther King's insistence that it "make real the promises of democracy" for African Americans. Woodrow Wilson, for one, used fine words but he introduced racist policies too. Even now, that promise of democracy remains only partially fulfilled.
The US has been guilty of bombing civilians, of torture and imprisonment without trial and of subverting the very democracy it professes to hold sacred when it does not like what democracy delivers.
The 45th US president appears to recognise some of this. Shortly after taking office, Mr Trump told Fox News that he respected the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The interviewer objected: "He's a killer though. Putin's a killer."
"There are a lot of killers," Mr Trump replied. "We've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country's so innocent?"
He may have been correct, but for an American president to casually and publicly equate his country with a murderous kleptocracy was nonetheless a stunning and revealing moment.
For much of its history, America's leaders have, at the very least, paid lip service to upholding the virtues on which their nation was founded - often in the face of existential totalitarian threats, not least from Moscow.
"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," President Kennedy acknowledged in Berlin in 1963, "but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."
Mr Trump's rhetoric has been rather different.
Far from prioritising freedom of religion and racial reconciliation, he has repeatedly played to a gallery of the far right. He spread the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the US.
He has sought to undermine the free press, repeatedly dismissing inconvenient or critical journalism as "fake news".
He has cosied up to autocrats, from Turkey's Erdogan ("very high marks") to Duterte of the Philippines (a "great relationship") to Egypt's Sisi ("love your shoes").
His reaction to news of a terrorist attack in London was not to express solidarity with the mayor of the city, Sadiq Khan, but to attack him. Mr Khan is a Muslim.
And now, in perhaps the most shocking move of all, Mr Trump has used his Twitter account with more than 40 million followers to deliver a huge boost to Britain First, a racist group on the far-right fringes of UK politics, and followed up with an attack on the British prime minister Theresa May, in theory his closest international ally.
So much for the special relationship.
It is hard to imagine now that the president's delayed state visit to the UK, scheduled for early next year, can go ahead without howls of outrage from a large section of the British public. Downing Street, desperate for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, insists that the trip remains on.
It is a far cry from the time that the two nations fought side by side to defeat Nazism.
Sprinkled among the fine and idealistic speeches in my book, like granules of arsenic, are the words of fascists and racists. Nazis Adolf Hitler ("my patience is now at an end") and Reinhard Heydrich ("the final solution"), the British fascist Oswald Mosley ("England again dares to be great"), and, later, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell ("the River Tiber foaming with much blood").
Reading them now, a question comes to mind: did American soldiers fight and die on the beaches of Normandy so their president could promote fascism?
It is an astonishing question, absurd even. To many it may seem offensive even to ask.
But it falls to reporters to describe in plain language what we see, and promotion of fascism and racism is all too easy to observe in the United States of 2017.
Mr Trump amplified the fascism of Britain First, sending its message booming and bouncing around the world. It is a message which continues where Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, left off. His huge rally at London's Earl's Court in July 1939 was advertised using the slogan Britain First and he uttered it himself in his speech that night, a speech in which he also defended Hitler and attacked the "corrupt interest of Jewish finance".
According to Wikipedia, citing a now deleted web page, today's Britain First aims to protect "British and Christian morality", to preserve "our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage" and to maintain "the indigenous British people" as the nation's "demographic majority".
Mr Trump insists he wants to put America First for all Americans, regardless of race or religion, but the president's opponents have accused him of using so-called "dog-whistle" politics to appeal to like-minded voters.
The president opened his campaign for the White House by promising to wall off Mexico and create a "deportation force" to expel more than 10 million illegal immigrants from the country.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best…they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting," he said.
He tweeted (and later deleted) false statistics about the percentage of white people killed by black people.
His initial reaction to the murder of Heather Heyer as she protested about a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was to insist there was blame "on many sides" and to defend some "very fine people" who marched with the fascists. The comments, which appeared to place the Nazis and their opponents on the same moral plain, left members of his own party reeling in horror.
The former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spoke for many when he tweeted: "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."
On Islam too Mr Trump is sharply at odds with his party predecessors, who generally took great care not to link radical extremist ideology with the wider views of a religion followed by nearly a quarter of the world's population, an estimated 1.8bn people.
When, in March 2016, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Mr Trump whether he thought Islam was at war with the West, the presidential candidate's reply was remarkable.
"I think Islam hates us. There's something there. There's a tremendous hatred there… There is an unbelievable hatred of us," he said. Pressed on the subject, he declined to draw a distinction between mainstream Muslims and jihadists. "It's very hard to separate," he said.
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" and he has at least contemplated closing mosques and creating a database of Muslims in the US.
At the end of this century, how will such words sit alongside those from Hoover and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan? Will they look strange or normal? Will the United States again be promoting plurality, or will it be retreating into the supposed security of a white Christian society?
In the past two years I have met many, many Trump supporters who are decent, hard-working Americans with no axe to grind against minorities, but I have also met more than a handful of racists and white supremacists who cheer on the man in Pennsylvania Avenue.
And Mr Trump is championed by the influential new media of the far-right, led by none other than the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.
Mr Trump is far from the first president to diverge from the democratic ideals of the United States, but in doing so as brazenly, as often, and in such a racially and religiously charged manner, he fosters division at home and imperils his country's reputation abroad.
The flame of American idealism, which shone so brightly from my book of speeches, is guttering.
Link to original article
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42197006
Embracing the far right, Trump stains a history of democratic ideals
By James Cook
North America correspondent/BBC News
One of my cherished possessions, which I cart with me around the world, is a tattered paperback copy of the Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches.
On the front cover, John F Kennedy stands gripping a lectern, in full flow; on the back, Martin Luther King raises a hand before the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.
As you gaze at that second picture, you can hear his preacher's voice, resonant and rhythmic. You can hear the cadences rise and fall, a hint of vibrato, as he describes his dream.
On the pages in between, the speeches shine brightly with democratic ideals, many proclaimed by American presidents.
There is Woodrow Wilson, promoting the League of Nations in Pueblo, Colorado in September 1919: "There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace."
There is Herbert Hoover's great rallying cry for conservatism in New York in October 1928: "The march of progress" founded on "ordered liberty, freedom and equal opportunity to the individual."
The Wall Street crash of the following year brought that march to an abrupt halt, and by the spring of 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration speech crackled across the radio airwaves, the nation was in the desolation of the Great Depression.
Roosevelt's watershed inaugural is best remembered for its signature line - "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - but it contained much else besides, not least a warning of the "false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit".
A Democrat, Roosevelt might have abjured the "rugged individualism" of his Republican predecessor, but the two presidents shared a commitment to liberty, characterised by Roosevelt in his 1941 address to Congress as "four freedoms": namely the freedoms of speech and religion and freedoms from want and fear.
"Enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom," he declared.
Roosevelt had a year earlier started his country on the long, slow turn away from isolationism and toward engagement in the fight against fascism, with his "arsenal of democracy" speech, in which he urged reluctant citizens to lend their vast resources to the British war effort.
Thirteen presidents later, the debate about whether to turn inward or to engage with the world has been resurrected by Donald Trump. He insists that he is not an isolationist but he describes US foreign policy in unilateral, transactional terms and has championed "America First" — a phrase originally associated with opposition to Roosevelt's desire to fight Hitler.
The most prominent spokesman for the 1940s America First Committee, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh, accused Jewish groups of "agitating for war" and was himself accused of being pro-Nazi.
Embracing the phrase "America First" does not in itself indicate fascism, but there is more to the picture than that.
For Lindbergh and Roosevelt, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. In 1944 American troops waded through the surf of Normandy's beaches and into the path of Nazi bullets.
Half a lifetime later, at Pointe du Hoc on the English Channel, Ronald Reagan commemorated their sacrifice with the words: "Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history." That's in my book of speeches too.
Of course, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals.
This week marks the 153rd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, when US troops murdered and mutilated women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado, just one atrocity among many as white Europeans vanquished the native peoples of the New World.
Then a country founded on genocide and slavery covered its ears for shameful ages before it heard Martin Luther King's insistence that it "make real the promises of democracy" for African Americans. Woodrow Wilson, for one, used fine words but he introduced racist policies too. Even now, that promise of democracy remains only partially fulfilled.
The US has been guilty of bombing civilians, of torture and imprisonment without trial and of subverting the very democracy it professes to hold sacred when it does not like what democracy delivers.
The 45th US president appears to recognise some of this. Shortly after taking office, Mr Trump told Fox News that he respected the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The interviewer objected: "He's a killer though. Putin's a killer."
"There are a lot of killers," Mr Trump replied. "We've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country's so innocent?"
He may have been correct, but for an American president to casually and publicly equate his country with a murderous kleptocracy was nonetheless a stunning and revealing moment.
For much of its history, America's leaders have, at the very least, paid lip service to upholding the virtues on which their nation was founded - often in the face of existential totalitarian threats, not least from Moscow.
"Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," President Kennedy acknowledged in Berlin in 1963, "but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."
Mr Trump's rhetoric has been rather different.
Far from prioritising freedom of religion and racial reconciliation, he has repeatedly played to a gallery of the far right. He spread the racist lie that Barack Obama was not born in the US.
He has sought to undermine the free press, repeatedly dismissing inconvenient or critical journalism as "fake news".
He has cosied up to autocrats, from Turkey's Erdogan ("very high marks") to Duterte of the Philippines (a "great relationship") to Egypt's Sisi ("love your shoes").
His reaction to news of a terrorist attack in London was not to express solidarity with the mayor of the city, Sadiq Khan, but to attack him. Mr Khan is a Muslim.
And now, in perhaps the most shocking move of all, Mr Trump has used his Twitter account with more than 40 million followers to deliver a huge boost to Britain First, a racist group on the far-right fringes of UK politics, and followed up with an attack on the British prime minister Theresa May, in theory his closest international ally.
So much for the special relationship.
It is hard to imagine now that the president's delayed state visit to the UK, scheduled for early next year, can go ahead without howls of outrage from a large section of the British public. Downing Street, desperate for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, insists that the trip remains on.
It is a far cry from the time that the two nations fought side by side to defeat Nazism.
Sprinkled among the fine and idealistic speeches in my book, like granules of arsenic, are the words of fascists and racists. Nazis Adolf Hitler ("my patience is now at an end") and Reinhard Heydrich ("the final solution"), the British fascist Oswald Mosley ("England again dares to be great"), and, later, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell ("the River Tiber foaming with much blood").
Reading them now, a question comes to mind: did American soldiers fight and die on the beaches of Normandy so their president could promote fascism?
It is an astonishing question, absurd even. To many it may seem offensive even to ask.
But it falls to reporters to describe in plain language what we see, and promotion of fascism and racism is all too easy to observe in the United States of 2017.
Mr Trump amplified the fascism of Britain First, sending its message booming and bouncing around the world. It is a message which continues where Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, left off. His huge rally at London's Earl's Court in July 1939 was advertised using the slogan Britain First and he uttered it himself in his speech that night, a speech in which he also defended Hitler and attacked the "corrupt interest of Jewish finance".
According to Wikipedia, citing a now deleted web page, today's Britain First aims to protect "British and Christian morality", to preserve "our ancestral ethnic and cultural heritage" and to maintain "the indigenous British people" as the nation's "demographic majority".
Mr Trump insists he wants to put America First for all Americans, regardless of race or religion, but the president's opponents have accused him of using so-called "dog-whistle" politics to appeal to like-minded voters.
The president opened his campaign for the White House by promising to wall off Mexico and create a "deportation force" to expel more than 10 million illegal immigrants from the country.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best…they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting," he said.
He tweeted (and later deleted) false statistics about the percentage of white people killed by black people.
His initial reaction to the murder of Heather Heyer as she protested about a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was to insist there was blame "on many sides" and to defend some "very fine people" who marched with the fascists. The comments, which appeared to place the Nazis and their opponents on the same moral plain, left members of his own party reeling in horror.
The former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney spoke for many when he tweeted: "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes."
On Islam too Mr Trump is sharply at odds with his party predecessors, who generally took great care not to link radical extremist ideology with the wider views of a religion followed by nearly a quarter of the world's population, an estimated 1.8bn people.
When, in March 2016, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Mr Trump whether he thought Islam was at war with the West, the presidential candidate's reply was remarkable.
"I think Islam hates us. There's something there. There's a tremendous hatred there… There is an unbelievable hatred of us," he said. Pressed on the subject, he declined to draw a distinction between mainstream Muslims and jihadists. "It's very hard to separate," he said.
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" and he has at least contemplated closing mosques and creating a database of Muslims in the US.
At the end of this century, how will such words sit alongside those from Hoover and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan? Will they look strange or normal? Will the United States again be promoting plurality, or will it be retreating into the supposed security of a white Christian society?
In the past two years I have met many, many Trump supporters who are decent, hard-working Americans with no axe to grind against minorities, but I have also met more than a handful of racists and white supremacists who cheer on the man in Pennsylvania Avenue.
And Mr Trump is championed by the influential new media of the far-right, led by none other than the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.
Mr Trump is far from the first president to diverge from the democratic ideals of the United States, but in doing so as brazenly, as often, and in such a racially and religiously charged manner, he fosters division at home and imperils his country's reputation abroad.
The flame of American idealism, which shone so brightly from my book of speeches, is guttering.
Link to original article
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42197006
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Early Warning Signs Of Fascism
With the Monster-In-Chief and his horrid administration at the helm of the United States, we can check off each one of these items...
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