The only redeeming aspect to Trump’s presidency is he brings us back to basics. And what could be more basic than the difference between democracy and dictatorship? Democracy is about means, not ends. If we all agreed on the ends (such as whether to build a wall along the Mexican border) there’d be no need for democracy. But of course we don’t agree, which is why the means by which we resolve our differences are so important. Those means include a Constitution, a system of government based on the rule of law, and an independent judiciary. A dictatorship, by contrast, is only about ends. Those ends are the goals of the dictator — preserving and accumulating personal power. To achieve those ends, a dictator will use any means necessary.
Which brings us back to Trump. The conventional criticism of Trump is that he’s unfit to be president because he continuously breaks the norms of how a president should behave. Trump’s norm-breaking is unsettling, to be sure, but Trump’s more fundamental offense is he continuously sacrifices means in order to preserve and accumulate personal power. He thereby violates a president’s core responsibility to protect American democracy. A president who shuts down government in order to get his way on a controversial issue, such as building a wall along the border with Mexico, and offering to reopen it as a concession when his opponents give in, is not protecting democracy. He is treating the government of the United States as a bargaining chip. He is asserting power by any means possible. This is the method of a dictator.
A president who claims he has an absolute right to declare a national emergency and spend government funds that Congress has explicitly refused to appropriate for the ends he seeks, is also assuming the role of a dictator. A president who spouts lies during a prime-time national television address over what he terms an “undeniable crisis” at the southern U.S. border, which is in fact no crisis at all, is using whatever means available to him to preserve and build his base of power. The real international threat to America is not coming from Latin America. It is coming from a foreign government intent on undermining our democracy by propagating lies, turning Americans against each other, and electing a puppet president.
We do not know yet whether Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. What we do know so far is that Trump’s aides and campaign manager worked with Putin’s emissaries during the 2016 election, and that Putin sought to swing the election in favor of Trump. We also know that since he was elected, Trump has done little or nothing to stop Putin from continuing to try to undermine our democracy. To the contrary, Trump has obstructed inquiries into Russian meddling, and gone out of his way to keep his communications with Putin secret, even from his own White House. The overall pattern is clear to anyone who cares to see it. Trump’s entire presidency to date has sacrificed the means of democracy to the end of his personal power.
He has lied about the results of votes, and established a commission to investigate bogus claims of fraudulent voting. He has attacked judges who have ruled against him, with the goal of stirring up the public against them. He has encouraged followers to believe that his opponent in the 2016 election should be imprisoned; and condemned as “enemies of the people” journalists who report unfavorably about him, in an effort to fuel public resentment — perhaps even violence — against them. To argue, as some Trump apologists do, that whatever Trump does is justified because voters put Trump in power, is to claim that voters can decide to elect a dictator. They cannot. Even if a majority of Americans were to attempt such thing (and, remember, Trump received three million fewer votes than his opponent in 2016), the Constitution prohibits it.
The choice could not be clearer. Democracy is about means, while dictatorship is about ends. Trump uses any means available to achieve his own ends. We can preserve our democracy and force Trump out of office. Or we can continue to struggle against someone who strives to thwart democracy for his own benefit. In the months ahead, that choice will be made, one way or the other.
Threats Internal & External
From Brexit to the Trump carnival inside the White House, the West is in chaos as the underpinnings to democracy are starting to slip. The dangerous instability has produced internal threats as we’re losing the ability or authority to govern, & from external sources as our adversaries have been given an opening to manipulate these unique circumstances to their full advantage. See excerpts pulled from opinion/brexit-western-
Today the U.S. and Great Britain scarcely govern themselves, never mind shape world order. Theresa May, who as prime minister resembles Thatcher in no respect other than gender and party, just suffered the worst parliamentary defeat in nearly a century over her Brexit deal. Donald Trump, who as president resembles Bush in no respect other than gender and party, presides over a shuttered government, a revolving-door administration, a furiously divided nation, and a mistrusted and mocked superpower. The West is now rudderless. To be rudderless puts you at the mercy of elements. The elemental forces of politics today are tribalism, populism, authoritarianism and the sewage pipes of social media. Each contradicts the West’s foundational commitments to universalism, representation, unalienable rights, and an epistemology built on fact and reason, not clicks and feelings. We are drifting, in the absence of mind and will, toward a moment of civilizational self-negation. Complacency breeds heedlessness. Liberals were heedless when they wrote off moral character as an essential trait of a good presidency. Conservatives (like me) were heedless when we became more concerned about the state of democracy in Iraq than in Iowa. Liberals were heedless when they embraced identity politics without ever thinking it could also be used against them. Conservatives (again, like me) were heedless when we downplayed the significance of the populism and scaremongering infecting the movement via talk radio and Fox News.
What about the United States? Among many conservatives I know, the view of Trump is that chaotic management, clownish behavior and ideological apostasies are irritants, not calamities, and prices worth paying for deregulation, tax cuts, and conservative courts. Really? These same conservatives spent the past 30 years preaching the importance of judgment, good character, and respect for institutions in the person of the president. They were right. What will they say when they find these attributes missing in the person of a president whose policy preferences and political affiliation they don’t share? The West is not adrift in placid waters. With limited resources but ruthless methods, Vladimir Putin has gone about undermining democracy from Kiev to Kansas. With equally ruthless means and far greater resources, Xi Jinping has raised the banner of efficient authoritarianism as the preferred model of 21st century governance. What does the West have to say in its own defense? Who does it have to say it? And who will fix the rigging and reset the rudder in time for the next squall?
Yes, Acid Dripping on Our Heads is an Emergency
This next article describes the Trump presidency as a steady drip of acid on our nation. Posted is the opening to opinion/trump-roberts-
For me, the most disturbing thing about the Trump presidency is the way each week, like a steady drip of acid, Donald Trump tries to erode the thing that truly makes us great as a country and the envy of so many around the world — the independence and nonpartisan character of our courts, our military, our F.B.I., our Border Patrol and our whole federal bureaucracy. No modern president has been more willing to use U.S. service members or border police as props for his politics, to blithely declare without evidence that most of the 800,000 federal workers going unpaid during the government shutdown are Democrats, to refer to the Pentagon leadership as “my generals” and “my military,” and to denounce different federal judges who have ruled against him as a “so-called judge,” an “Obama judge” and a “Mexican” judge (even though he was born in Indiana).
Why is this so important? Because America’s core governing institutions were not built to be “conservative” or “liberal.” They were built to take our deepest values and our highest ideals and animate them, promote them and protect them — to bring them to life and to scale them. They are the continuity that binds one generation of Americans to the next and the beacon for how we work together to build an ever more perfect union. At their best, these institutions have created the regulatory foundations and legal and security frameworks that have made America great — that have enabled innovation to be sparked, commerce to flourish and ideas to freely blossom. Rather than serving any party or person’s whims, these institutions have promoted and protected enduring American values, laws, norms and ideals. The independent, nonpartisan quality of our institutions is one of the biggest reasons so many people want to immigrate to America and why some people are even ready to build rafts out of milk cartons to get here. So when an American leader denigrates those institutions, tries to erode their independence or turns them into political props, he damages the very core of what makes our country unique.
And that’s why today I would like to give a shout-out to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts for having the integrity and courage to call Trump out for this behavior, to draw a red line around the judicial branch and to signal to Trump — politely but firmly — to keep his hands off its independence and nonpartisan charter. Roberts did so in November, after a federal district judge in San Francisco put Trump’s asylum policy on hold and the president denounced him as an “Obama judge.” Responding to a query made by The Associated Press, Chief Justice Roberts said: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” Roberts added, on that day before Thanksgiving, that an “independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
That threat is from a president without any shame or respect for the impartiality of our core institutions, who is backed by a party without any spine and by a network, Fox, without any integrity. This is not a test. This is a real, live emergency for our democracy.
Let’s Work to Divide Trump from His Echo & the Echo from His Base
Check this out: DELUSIONAL-Trump-and-FOX-
As reports came out this week the Trump-Cohen team engineered phony online polling elevating Trump’s status prior to the GOP presidential primaries, the Drudge Report was a key place where those polling numbers appeared. So there are encouraging signs cracks may be forming between Drudge & his support for Trump, seen in posts below from a-massive-hemorrhage-of-
The polls included a 2014 CNBC poll on business leaders and a 2015 Drudge Report pollof possible GOP presidential candidates. According to political journalist Jared Yates Sexton (author of the forthcoming book “The Man They Wanted Me to Be”), the fact that the Drudge Report has posted that banner and linked to an article unfavorable to Trump suggests that Matt Drudge’s support for the president could be waning. On Twitter, Sexton posted, “A quietly important development: if Drudge turns on Trump because he rigged a Drudge Report poll, it could mean a massive hemorrhage of Trump’s base. And I wouldn’t put that past Drudge for a second.” In a separate tweet, Yates explained why Trump dare not offend far-right media personalities like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. Yates posted, “It might seem small, but the Right Wing bubble is very fragile. That’s why Trump is so concerned about Coulter and Hannity. A momentary blip or break can result in giant echo chamber disruptions.”
Michael Cohen in the News
Here’s an article stating this was Trump’s worst week so far which came out prior to the BuzzFeed story, since Mueller repudiating that bombshell story did take much of the edge off these other revelations: dan-abrams-this-
More Cohen news comes from the anticipation over his February 7th scheduled appearance before Congress. In recent days, Cohen has expressed real fears over dangers to his family from that coming testimony, knowing firsthand the evil a vengeful Trump is capable of unleashing. So it’s still up in the air whether he’ll appear in Congress or not. If we had not become so accustomed to Trump’s mania, he should otherwise be charged with witness tampering & intimidation, especially the way the prez issued veiled threats this week aimed at Cohen’s father-in-law. If Cohen follows through with his recollections of Trump in a couple weeks played to a huge TV audience, his family should really be offered a witness protection program to ensure their safety. It’s rather unfortunate the prez apparently has some rabid thugs among his Trumpeter supporters, plus Kremlin thugs connected to his Russian dictator buddy who could take revenge.
I’ve often wondered if that’s the real reason Manafort never capitulated to Mueller, since he fears what the Russian connections might do to his family more than he fears dying in prison. If Cohen does testify to Congress, it should be explosive. But not as big as it could have been since it will be limited in scope, with Cohen being instructed to not interfere in an ongoing investigation, so he will not be answering questions related to the Russian probe. There are Cohen articles here about that coming appearance which reportedly will describe his years working for a “madman,” also reports Cohen being assigned to rig the online polls prior to the presidential campaign, & Cohen’s social media campaign intended to make him look sexy. Really! In limiting the number of outbound links, some of these you can click on & others you can look up:
These links report on the Feb. 7th Cohen testimony to explain what it’s like working for a “madman” (a song about this at bottom of part 3).
These lying scumbags in the House Freedom Caucus will stoop to any level of depravity in smearing the reputations of innocent civil servants or journalists, all to protect their corrupt leader by helping cover up his evidence of crimes. Then the evil-echo picks up the story & runs with it, while that gullible-beyond-belief audience swallows it whole. It’s one thing to be fooled by one errant BuzzFeed article, but it’s another to always fall for the echo nonsense even though it’s regularly proven false. We’ve seen this same pattern many times before, where Trump henchmen in Congress & the echo invent fallacious tales as a diversion or distortion to the Russian probe, which in practically every case are soon proven false.
Most of the article from a-new-right-wing-smear-
What happens when the politics of personal destruction intersect with a Trumpian conspiracy theory? Unfortunately, I’ve seen it, thanks to House Republicans who, with the help of conservative media, have waged an unfounded crusade against a former FBI official named James Baker. This campaign has been underway for over a year, as part of the larger GOP effort to distract attention from the core components of the Trump-Russia scandal, namely Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election to help Donald Trump and interactions between Trump’s circle and Russia. As I wrote nearly a year ago, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), one of the chief distractors, had penned a column for the right-wing Newsmax suggesting that Baker, who had been the general counsel for the FBI, had clandestinely passed me what we now call the Steele dossier: the series of private memos written by a former British intelligence officer that contained allegations that Moscow had a covert project to cultivate and co-opt Trump and that the Trump camp had secretly communicated with the Kremlin. (Yes, the documents also referenced the alleged pee tape.) I had published an article on October 31, 2016, that first revealed the existence of the Steele memos and the FBI’s interest in his reports. And this was Jordan’s point: Baker, on behalf of the bureau, had slipped me these documents as part of a secret FBI operation to thwart the election of Trump. Here was the Deep State at work! And I was a cog in its dirty-tricks machine.
Well, no. When House Republicans first tried to float this conspiracy theory in December 2017, I noted that Baker, a veteran Justice Department official whom I have known for years, had not been a source for me on this article. Reporters tend not to discuss their sources, but in this instance I believed it was important to counter the dissemination of inaccurate information, especially information that was being used to demonize Baker, an innocent and dedicated civil servant. I did send a copy of the Steele memos to Baker a week after I had posted the article on them. (My story had reported that Steele, whom I had not identified by name, had already provided copies to the bureau.) I asked if anyone in the bureau could talk to me about the documents. That’s what reporters do. No one at the FBI would. End of story. But not for the tinfoil-hat-wearing Republicans and their accomplices in the right-wing media. In October, Jordan and his partners-in-diversion, including Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), called Baker to the House for two private grilling sessions. And now conservatives are using a portion of the unreleased transcripts from those interviews to shift attention from the Trump-Russia scandal to one of their favorite tangents: how the FBI handled the Steele memos. Their latest stab at pushing the Baker-Corn-Steele conspiracy theory is based on a portion of the Baker interviews when he was questioned by Jordan. The congressman was pressing Baker on whether he had given me any information, and Baker’s attorney, Daniel Levin, interrupted to say Baker couldn’t discuss his interactions with reporters.
Jordan and Meadows have gone to town with this, writing Durham this week and demanding information on the investigation of Baker. And right-wing media outlets have pounced on this as yet another sign of a deceitful get-Trump cabal within the FBI. Following the lead of Jordan and Meadows, Byron York, in the conservative Washington Examiner, asserted that the leak under investigation by Durham “appeared to be dossier-related.” York claimed that the Baker testimony “revealing the criminal investigation is a new and important part of the story of the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation.” (The headline of his piece: “FBI interview makes big news—so why is it still secret?”) Another Examiner article
insinuated that the leak was connected to Baker’s relationship with me. The Washington Free Beacon reported that this was the “first confirmation Baker was the subject of a criminal leak probe.” Fox News has especially gone batty over this. In a “Hannity Watch” on the “Deep State,” Fox News’ Sean Hannity breathlessly declared the Baker news “a major development” and exclaimed, “Baker has long faced scrutiny over his ties to Mother Jones reporter David Corn. Remember, Corn was the first journalist to report the existence of Christopher Steele’s dirty dossier in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.” Laura Ingraham huffed, “James Baker himself is under investigation for media leaks against President Trump. It turns out he was in regular contact with Mother Jones leftist writer David Corn. Are they still publishing? Well, it’s just a coincidence, I’m sure. Remember, Jones was the first to report on that phony Steele dossier—you know, the thing that was a predicate used to start the entire Trump-Russia probe.” And on Fox News, Jordan stated that it “looks like” Baker had leaked information “relative” to the Russia investigation. He contended that the “real news” is FBI misconduct, not Moscow’s attack or Trump connections to Russia. But none of this hyperbolic yammering was justified, for the leak investigation cited by Levin was not related to the Russia investigation, the Steele memos, or me. And there was even a question whether the Durham probe was still active in regards to Baker. In December 2017, the Washington Post reported, “Baker had been caught up in a strange interagency dispute that led to a leak probe and attracted the attention of senior lawmakers, but people familiar with the matter said the probe had recently ended with a decision not to charge anyone.” (The Post also described Baker as “one of the most trusted, longest-serving national security officials in the government.”) Persons familiar with the Durham investigation have confirmed to me that this leak inquiry was not connected to the Steele dossier or Baker’s interactions with me. (Once again, Baker was never a source for me on the Steele memos or the FBI’s Russia investigation.) These sources also say they believe the portion of the investigation concerning Baker is indeed done. And, for the record, I have not been contacted by Durham or anyone working on his probe. The Baker testimony is not a bombshell that supports Team Trump’s unfounded claim that the real story is that Trump has been the target of a FBI-led government conspiracy. And Baker does not deserve to be turned into red meat for the right by the Dear Leader brigade at Fox News and other conservative outlets.
His testimony, though, has made real news. The recent blockbuster New York Times article revealing that the FBI in May 2017 opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trump included a statement Baker made during his closed-door House interviews. He had explained why Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey was considered within the FBI a blow to national security: “Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security.” CNN obtained other portions of the Baker interviews in which he stated that in 2017, FBI officials were contemplating whether Trump, in regard to Russia, was “acting at the behest of and somehow following directions, somehow executing their will.” Baker added, “I’m speaking theoretically. If the president of the United States fired Jim Comey at the behest of the Russian government, that would be unlawful and unconstitutional.” Jordan, Meadows, York, and the inhabitants of Planet Fox refuse to recognize that the scandal at hand is about Trump and Russia. Instead, they conjure up alternative realities, desperately prop up competing controversies, and cavalierly toss about false claims to protect Trump and his crew and to prevent a full accounting of an unprecedented attack on American democracy. In this episode, Baker has been a victim of their fact-free hit-and-run skullduggery. But more important, the American public is also a victim, as this crowd casts about conspiratorial diversions to hide the truth that they—and Trump—cannot handle.
Tit-for-Tat
washingtonpost/lucy-football-
https://www.motherjones.com/
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