This is exactly how Donald Trump operates as well. He has made lying and false representations of reality his trademark in politics, and his lies are easily checked. The Washington Post keeps a running tally of his lies and as of August 1 it computed that he made 4,229 “false statements” (lies) in 558 days in office. It may seem like madness but, as with Nigerian scammers, there is method to it. Blatant lies help him separate true believers from the skeptics and to bolster their loyalty. By lying, Trump is proposing a different reality — the one the Great Leader is creating. Reality for the Trump base is not what they see, hear and read about in “Fake News” outlets, but what Trump presents them with. No wonder conspiracy theories such as the notorious QAnon flourish among his supporters. Like all cults, the Trumpists are actually proud of possessing this “true” reality, which is open only to them and which no one else sees. They are the Chosen, while everyone else is rotting in the cesspool of Fake News. This too Trump has borrowed from Nigerian scammers. Once they hook their victims, they work to instill into them the sense of exclusivity, leading them to believe that they are the only one who sees that the scheme is going to work — and the only one who is right, so that all the doubters are mistaken. This culminates in the belief that one’s friends and relatives who were trying to dissuade the scam victim from getting involved will be put to shame when they see all the money one will supposedly make. When you decide to become a Trump supporter, reality is not the only casualty you will suffer. Shame is another one. Trump has worked long and hard to inure his base against their own conscience. Trump once said that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue in plain sight, and his followers will not defect him. After a year and a half in office, he has now identified around 40% of the American population who are susceptible to being cultists and has tempered them to the point when they will, to use his one-time fixer Michael Cohen’s phrase, take a bullet for him. Or drink poisoned Kool Aid which he’s offering them. Like victims of Nigerian scams, they certainly should be pitied, but it is their own fault, too.
Dangerous Times for Reporters just doing their Jobs
Journalists throughout the world are being endangered with the American President responsible for spreading that vitriolic rhetoric. As so many reporters bravely hold dangerous heads of state accountable & keep their citizens informed, many rogue leaders are using Trump’s example & rhetoric for ruthlessly silencing their critics. Our president will surely have blood on his hands as he continues on with his irresponsibly hateful lashing out at the press: un-official-trumps-
And how benign those actions now seem in retrospect. Abrams, still practicing constitutional law at age 82, says the current president easily trumps Nixon as the most dire threat the press has ever faced. Nixon never borrowed from Stalin to assail “enemies of the people.” Nixon never wrote the way Donald Trump tweets, that journalists “can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!” Nixon at his rallies didn’t goad his followers into hurling abuse at nearby journalists on the scene—and threatening worse. “No president in our history has been as unremittingly hostile,” he told me earlier this week. “We live in a violent country awash in weapons, and there is good reason to be concerned about the people he attacks so regularly. That is especially true since he has now moved from exclamations about ‘fake news’ to assertions that the lives of Americans are threatened by his journalistic critics.”
Far more insidious is Trump’s unprecedented war on objective reality, a classic tyrant’s tactic. In Abrams’s words, “if news is ‘fake’ not because it is untrue but because it is insufficiently supportive of him, the very relevance of truth-telling becomes at risk…Cynical or repeatedly false criticism (of the free press) ultimately leads to an ill-informed and ultimately ill-led people. And when the criticism is often, very often, rooted in a sort of ignorant rage, it too easily can lead to an ignorant public led by a repressive regime.” And, on Thursday, it was precisely those burgeoning concerns that prompted more than 300 newspapers and media outlets to stand in solidarity—an unprecedented moment, because notoriously independent journalists rarely collaborate on anything. The so-called “elite” papers wrote editorials defending their constitutionally-empowered mission to hold power accountable, but, most importantly, they were joined by smaller newsrooms in virtually every state, red as well as blue—from Boise, Idaho and Kenosha, Wisconsin to Topeka, Kansas and Kokomo, Indiana.
The press badly needs expressions of support, and, ironically, it could benefit from the broader backlash against Trump’s autocratic impulses. His decision this week to strip former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance—and to map similar actions against others who criticize him—has triggered bipartisan anger, most notably a stinging statement from the now-retired Navy admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. In a Thursday letter addressed to Trump, William H. McRaven wrote: “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation. If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken.” McRaven’s dissent should not be underestimated. Regardless of whether, or to what extent, the press collaborates to push back against the greatest domestic threat it has ever faced, it will likely find allies who are fighting parallel battles in defense of free expression.
Fox Viewers too naive to understand what they’re watching
Thanks in large part to the Fox News-Trump tag team, much of the GOP base has been dumbed down & are more than happy to stay securely inside their delusional bubble. Read all about them in midterms-trump-red-wave-
According to Lt. Col Ralph Peters, Trump maintains his hold on his core supporters by assuring them that “Nothing is your fault. I can save you.” Speaking on MSNBC with Ari Melber on Friday, August 17, Peters explained: He’s offering them absolution. Nothing is their fault. It’s the fault of the deep state. It’s the fault of minorities. It’s the fault of the left. It’s the fault of traditional Republicans. It’s the fault of immigrants. And his message to them is you’re not responsible. Whatever failures you’ve had in your life, whatever bad choices you’ve [made — it’s] somebody else’s fault. He gives them somebody to blame….
Col. Peters, formerly an analyst at FOX News, left that organization in March 2018, saying: Four decades ago, I took an oath as a newly commissioned officer. I swore to “support and defend the Constitution,” and that oath did not expire when I took off my uniform. Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.
Are they hopelessly bamboozled, or can all those loyal believers in the Fox News-Trump propaganda ever be informed enough to come back to their senses? I honestly don’t know. But we can at least try. Please circulate this info in helping those open-minded enough to find an escape from their echo-bubble. See excerpts from what-will-finally-turn-
President Trump suffered the kind of body blows this week that would have felled any other politician. Pow! Wham! Ka-pow! Any other president would have been knocked out. But for Trump, it was just another ordinary week. He has been so beaten down for so long that it’s hard to see any visible damage from these additional blows. No matter how bad it gets, his approval rating never seems to fall far below 40 percent. (He’s currently at 42 percent approval in the FiveThirtyEight poll of polls.) It is thus easy to say that none of this matters. Easy — and wrong. Previous presidents who were in office during times of robust economic expansion, with low unemployment and a roaring bull market, generally had average approval ratings well over 50 percent. Trump’s egregious misbehavior consistently costs him at least 10 points in the polls.
What might prevent Trump’s tried-and-true Don Rickles strategy from succeeding? It won’t be the criticism he gets from retired security officials, which only feeds his crackpot conspiracy theories about the Deep State. It certainly won’t be criticism from the press; in one recent poll, 43 percent of Republicans want Trump to have the power to shut down news outlets “engaged in bad behavior.” I fear that even if an n-word tape is discovered, it won’t do the trick. As Jonathan Last argues in the Weekly Standard, Republicans are more likely to normalize the n-word than they are to turn on Trump. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s standing is forever secure. Polls consistently show that only three-quarters of his supporters strongly approve of his execrable performance; a quarter are more lukewarm. What might make these less committed supporters turn on the president? If special counsel Robert S. Mueller III finds proof of collusion and obstruction of justice, that might do the trick — at least for some of them. Maybe.
Real Threat to Democracy
More terrifying signs of a president looking to turn dictator are found in The-Threat-To-Our-
The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase“enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giuliani blurted out on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.” This is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career-ending. We know what a military coup looks like. But as Levitsky and Ziblatt note, a slow-motion dismantling of rules, norms and expectations can be more insidious because we don’t even notice what’s happening to us.
Fox News-Trump take a trip through Crazy-Land
This fits the category of Trump corrupts everything he touches: juan-williams-trump-
Just look at the ridiculous attacks they’re directing at special counsel. Trump is calling the Mueller team disgraced & discredited, plus they’re a team of thugs & represent McCarthyism (Trump himself is the closest thing we’ve seen to McCarthyism). Check out these next links revealing a continuation of his ongoing unhinged attacks on the Mueller probe: trump-sides-with-nixon-
Words like Orwellian & prostitutes are used in excerpts from this next article ex-fox-news-analyst-
Fox News may be President Donald Trump‘s favorite channel, but one former employee bashed it as nothing short of a propaganda-waving attack on the U.S. Constitution. Ralph Peters, who resigned this year as the outlet’s military analyst, told CNN’s Brian Stelter during a Sunday Reliable Sources interview that his choice to leave was motivated partly by his disgust with the organization’s fixation on propping up the president. He said Fox News is “assaulting the Constitution” and “the rule of law.” “Fox isn’t immoral; it’s amoral,” he said. “It was opportunistic. Trump was just a gift to Fox, and Fox, in turn, is a gift to Trump.”
As a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel with experience working with Russian intelligence, Peters also expressed his deep belief that Trump is beholden to President Vladimir Putin. “There is no other way to explain his behavior,” Peters said. “And he perfectly fits the profile of the kind of people the Russians target. So when it comes to worries, Trump gives us something new to worry about virtually every day.” Peters also said the commander in chief’s behavior didn’t signal much love of country, let alone reverence for the free world, calling the times “Orwellian.” “This is a distinctly un-American president who really doesn’t seem to like America very much, certainly doesn’t respect it,” Peters told Stelter. “And he’s a president who appears to be enthralled to a foreign power, a hostile foreign power. This is unbelievable to me. I could never have foreseen this.”
Not only is the president at fault, but so was the administration backing him, Peters argued, describing Trump’s staffers as “his henchmen and henchwomen.” “The people supporting Trump are radicals, these couch potato anarchists,” he said, referring to voters. “They want vengeance. And Trump is brilliant at that. He’s done what autocrats and charlatans and false messiahs throughout history have done. He’s told his core supporters, you’re not to blame for the mistakes you made. You’re not to blame for your failures. It’s them, it’s the minorities, it’s the immigrants, it’s fake news, it’s the deep state.”
Toward the end of the interview, Stelter circled back on Fox News, and Peters took his criticism an even further step. “The polite word is ‘prostitutes,’ so we’ll just leave it at that. I don’t want to be the go-to guy for Fox-bashing forever, but what Fox is doing is causing real harm to our country right now,” he said.
And it’s no wonder so many of these conservative pundits on cable TV shows come across as knuckleheads with their ridiculous & demonstrably false arguments in favor of Trump. They actually signed NDAs requiring them to be idiots: fox-news-cnn-hired-ex-
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And these excerpts come from trump_attack_bruce_ohr_
Watch Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump explain that the reason Donald Trump is threatening the security clearance of midlevel Department of Justice employee Bruce Ohr, who may lose his job as a result, is because Trump is relying on Fox News conspiracy theories over facts or DOJ procedures. Guest hosting for Brian Williams last night, Steve Kornacki played a clip of Trump calling Ohr “a disgrace” and saying “I suspect I’ll be taking [his security clearance] away very quickly.” “Who is he and why does the president care so much about him?” Kornacki asked Bump about Ohr. Bump did not come right out and say that Trump prioritizes Fox über alles but it was implicit in the explanation:
BUMP: He has the president’s attention because Fox News and Sean Hannity have been talking about Bruce Ohr nonstop for the past week or so. That’s why he has the president’s attention. Why he is important in this drama is that his wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS which was the firm that was hired by this law firm working for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign which hired Christopher Steele who cobbled together this dossier of reports which alleged various interactions between Trump campaign and Russian nationals. And so Ohr had had repeated conversations with Steele over the course of 2016 – I forget the exact timeline but this has been something that because there have been repeated efforts to try and find potential weak spots within the Russia investigation – we saw this memo from Rep. Devin Nunes of California which tried to draw attention to the FISA application of Carter Page, we’ve seen other allegations of unmasking, so and so forth. They’re constantly looking for weak spots. This is the new weak spot on which people are focused. And that’s why – because Fox News has been so adamant about reports this week, I think that’s why President Trump has drawn so much attention to it.
The other guest, Mieke Eoyang, a former House Intelligence Committee staffer, noted that Trump is trying to punish Ohr because of his wife, not for anything Ohr did. Punishing people “for actions that are not even their own, that is really problematic,” she said. Yes, and what’s at least as problematic is Trump’s elevation of Hannity – a man without a college degree, much less any expertise in national security – and other television hosts over the Department of Justice. The New York Times has more information about Ohr’s situation, including the fact that Ohr could lose his job if he loses his security clearance, that Trump seems to have brushed aside, assuming he bothered to learn it in the first place: Mr. Ohr was in touch with Mr. Steele, a professional acquaintance whom he had known before Mr. Steele began working for Fusion GPS, through summer and fall 2016, including one conversation in which Mr. Steele said that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”
Mr. Ohr eventually told the F.B.I. about his wife’s work and about his conversations with Mr. Steele, passing along information given to him by Mr. Steele that the F.B.I. had already received directly from the former spy. Mr. Steele had worked with the bureau on past cases. And no evidence has emerged showing that Mr. Ohr or his wife played a role in starting the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation. Rather, it was contacts between a former Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, and Russian intermediaries that prompted the bureau to open the inquiry in late July 2016. Whatever the reason Ohr was demoted, it’s very clear the DOJ has not found he deserves to have his security clearance revoked. More importantly, it’s pretty darned clear Ohr has little to nothing to do with the Mueller investigation and probably never did. Yet because Trump’s BFFs at Fox News have found Ohr another scapegoat for Operation Collusion Cover-Up, Trump seems ready and willing to ruin the man’s career as collateral damage.
Overconfident President & Corrupt Congressman
Trump is displaying supreme confidence in his party’s chances for the midterms, either for rallying his base in getting them pumped up, or he’s just plain delusional: donald-trump-
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