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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Much press ink and broadcast time have been devoted to decrying the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Wringing their hands over the substantively accurate view that Trump is a fascist and his candidacy is a major turn toward the Dark Side, the institutions and the individuals decrying the Trump phenomenon are hypocritical. Far from being an aberration, Trump’s candidacy is a direct outgrowth of powerful forces that have been at work for the better part of a century and that are the embodiment of fundamental elements of American and Western society.
The program begins with two op-ed columns from The New York Times. Timothy Egan highlights the awareness on the part of Trump supporters that race hatred, support for slavery and the neo-Confederate movement, xenophobia and reaction are the substance of what he is about and what they want. Egan notes, correctly, that “beast is us.” Richard Cohen sets forth the apprehension that Europeans feel about the Trump candidacy, underscoring their experience with the descent of a society into fascism.
Europeans are consummately hypocritical in their condemnation of Trump, although the insights that Cohen has noted are accurate. They are hardly in a position to look down on Trump–European politics are experiencing the same “Perfect Sturm.” Not only are fascist parties riding a crest of popularity in Europe over the “anti-immigrant” gambit, but fascism was never expunged from Europe, due to Cold War politics which will be highlighted below. We note that Slovakia is among the countries witnessing the ascent of fascist parties.
The “Troika” (read “Germany”) mandated the installation of the fascist LAOS Party as part of the provisional Greek government in the late fall of 2011. The Greek citizenry had NO say in this, whatsoever.
Perhaps even more hypocritical than Europe’s bemoaning of the “Trumpfverbande” is the so-called “progressive sector” in the U.S., whose misty-eyed embrace of Snowden, Greenwald, Assange et al constitutes an alignment with PRECISELY the same political forces that are embodied in the Trump candidacy. The so-called “progressives” have allied themselves with the milieu of WikiLeaks, Eddie the Friendly Spook and Glenn Greenwald, who are part and parcel to the politics of David Duke, the neo-Confederate movement and apologists for slavery. The political forces that Tim Egan correctly identifies as being “Trumpers” are precisely the forces that are behind the Snowdenistas and Assangeholes.
Much of the program consists of excerpts from an important new book: The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government by David Talbot. Although virtually none of the material will be new to veteran listeners–we’ve been covering the relevant subject material exhaustively and for decades–it is important and refreshing to have a current book of this magnitude and relatively high profile available.
Some of the points discussed in the book:
- The Dulles brothers, Sullivan and Cromwell and their roles in the capitalization of Germany and the rise of Hitler’s cartels: ” . . . Foster Dulles became so deeply enmeshed in the lucrative revitalization of Germany that he found it difficult to separate his firm’s interests from those of the rising economic and military power–even after Hitler consolidated control over the country in the 1930s. Foster continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben as they were integrated into the Nazis’ growing war machine, helping the industrial giants secure access to key war materials. . . . . Foster refused to shut down the Berlin office of Sullivan and Cromwell . . . .”
- The Dulles brothers active and treasonous role in blocking Safehaven, the Roosevelt administration’s effort at blocking the Nazi flight capital program that was to coalesce into the Bormann network: ” . . . . Dulles and [Thomas] McKittrick [of the Bank of International Settlemnts] continued to work closely together for the rest of the war. In the final months of the conflict, the two men collaborated against a Roosevelt operation called Project Safehaven that sought to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. . . . . Dulles and McKittrick were more inclined to protect their clients’ interests. Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to power, to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And during the Cold War, he would be more intent on using Nazi loot to finance covert anti-Soviet operations than on returning it to the families of Hitler’s victims. . . . While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother was doing the same in New York. By playing an intricate corporate shell game, Foster was able to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property. . . . By the end of the war, many of Foster’s clients were under investigation by the Justice Department’s antitrust division. And Foster himself was under scrutiny for collaboration with the enemy. . . . But Foster’s brother was guarding his back. From his frontline position in Europe, Allen was well-placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm. “Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” observed Nazi hunter John Loftus . . . .”
- Dulles collaborated closely with Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen, whose work for CIA (and later BND) constituted a continuation of the Third Reich’s war against the Soviet Union–a war in which he collaborated with Dulles: “. . . . The Gehlen Organization saw the Cold War as the final act of the Reich’s interrupted offensive against the Soviet Union. . . . The covert Cold War in the West was, to an unsettling extent, a joint operation between the Dulles regime and that of Reinhard Gehlen. The German spy chief’s pathological fear and hatred of Russia, which had its roots in Hitler’s Third Reich, meshed smoothly with the Dulles brothers’ anti-Soviet absolutism. In fact, the Dulles policy of massive nuclear retaliation bore a disturbing resemblance to the Nazis’ eterminationist philosophy. . . . We live “in an age in which war is a paramount activity of man,” Gehlen announced in his memoir [prefaced by Holocaust-denier David Irving–D.E.], “with the total annihilation of the enemy as its primary aim.” There could be no more succinct a statement of the fascist ethos. . . .”
- Dulles and Gehlen’s collaboration on the “Stay Behind/Gladio” project:. . . . He [Gehlen] was prepared to take drastic action to prevent such a political scenario from unfolding in Bonn–going so far as to overthrow democracy in West Germany if necessary. . . . It is unlikely that Dulles was shocked by Gehlen’s proposal to reinstitute fascism in Germany, since CIA officials had long ben discussing such authoritarian contingency plans with the Gehlen Organization other right-wing elements in Germany. In 1952, West German police discovered that the CIA was supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy. . . . These authoritarian plans were part of a sweeping covert strategy developed in the earliest days of the Cold War by U.S. intelligence officials, including Dulles, to counter a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe by creating a “stay-behind network” of armed resisters to fight the Red Army. Code-named Operation Gladio, these secret CIA-funded networks attracted fascist and criminal elements, some of which later played subversive roles in West Germany, France, and Italy, disrupting democratic rule in those countries by staging terrorist acts and plotting coups and assassinations. . . .”
- Dulles’s liaison with the Senate was Prescott Bush, Sr.: “. . . . Dulles’s CIA operated with virtually no congressional oversight. In the Senate, Dulles relied on Wall Street friends like Prescott Bush of Connecticut–the father and grandfather of two future presidents–to protect the CIA’s interests. According to CIA veteran Robert Crowley, who rose to become second-in-command of the CIA’s action arm, Bush ‘was the day-to-day contact man for the CIA.’ . . .”
The program concludes with review of the role of Allen Dulles in hammering together the Crusade For Freedom, a covert operation that had its culminationwith the Reagan administration:
- “. . . . Frustration over Truman’s 1948 election victory over Dewey (which they blamed on the “Jewish vote”) impelled Dulles and his protégé Richard Nixon to work toward the realization of the fascist freedom fighter presence in the Republican Party’s ethnic outreach organization. As a young congressman, Nixon had been Allen Dulles’s confidant. They both blamed Governor Dewey’s razor-thin loss to Truman in the 1948 presidential election on the Jewish vote. When he became Eisenhower’s vice president in 1952, Nixon was determined to build his own ethnic base. . . .
- . . . . Vice President Nixon’s secret political war of Nazis against Jews in American politics was never investigated at the time. The foreign language-speaking Croatians and other Fascist émigré groups had a ready-made network for contacting and mobilizing the Eastern European ethnic bloc. There is a very high correlation between CIA domestic subsidies to Fascist ‘freedom fighters’ during the 1950’s and the leadership of the Republican Party’s ethnic campaign groups. The motive for the under-the-table financing was clear: Nixon used Nazis to offset the Jewish vote for the Democrats. . . . In 1952, Nixon had formed an Ethnic Division within the Republican National Committee. Displaced fascists, hoping to be returned to power by an Eisenhower-Nixon ‘liberation’ policy signed on with the committee. In 1953, when Republicans were in office, the immigration laws were changed to admit Nazis, even members of the SS. They flooded into the country. Nixon himself oversaw the new immigration program. As Vice President, he even received Eastern European Fascists in the White House. . . . .
- . . . . As a young movie actor in the early 1950s, Reagan was employed as the public spokesperson for an OPC front named the ‘Crusade for Freedom.’ Reagan may not have known it, but 99 percent for the Crusade’s funds came from clandestine accounts, which were then laundered through the Crusade to various organizations such as Radio Liberty, which employed Dulles’s Fascists. Bill Casey, who later became CIA director under Ronald Reagan, also worked in Germany after World War II on Dulles’ Nazi ‘freedom fighters’ program. When he returned to New York, Casey headed up another OPC front, the International Rescue Committee, which sponsored the immigration of these Fascists to the United States. Casey’s committee replaced the International Red Cross as the sponsor for Dulles’s recruits. . . . .
- . . . It was [George H.W.] Bush who fulfilled Nixon’s promise to make the ‘ethnic emigres’ a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972, Nixon’s State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states. Bush’s tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor’s 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party’s official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush’s campaign allies were the émigré Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States. . . . ”
Program Highlights Include:
- Review of the Bush family’s links to the Thyssens.
- Review of the Thyssen participation in the Bormann flight capital network.
- Review of the Bormann group’s collaboration with the CIA.
- Collaboration of the New York Times with Dulles’s CIA, including the paper’s own incorporation of Nazis. Like the GOP, they are “shocked, shocked” at the Trump candidacy.
“The Beast Is Us” by Timothy Egan; The New York Times; 3/04/2016.
You heard the word “scary” used a lot this week, that and much more. Not from the usual scolds. Or Democrats. The loudest alarms came from desperate, panicked Republicans, warning of the man who is destroying the Party of Lincoln before our eyes.
“The man is evil,” said Stuart Stevens, a chief strategist for Mitt Romney in 2012. Romney himself called Donald Trump a fraud on Thursday.
But as much as these “too little, too late” wake-up calls are appreciated, it’s time to place the blame for the elevation of a tyrant as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee where it belongs — with the people. Yes, you. Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society. Educated and poorly educated alike, men and women — they know what they’re getting from him.
This idea that people are following Trump only for the celebrity joy ride, that if they just understood the kind of radical, anti-American ideas he advocates they would drop him, is garbage. If the pope couldn’t dent Trump, Romney surely will not.
For Trump’s voters were not surprised at his hesitancy to disavow the hearty approval of a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. They certainly weren’t shocked when neo-Nazis hailed Trump a savior months ago, so a little added backing from hooded haters was not going to throw them.
They aren’t upset that he’s attacked one of the foundations of an open society — free speech — with his recent call to “open up” the libel laws. Nor does it bother them in the least that he wants to apply a religious test for entry into a country whose founders were against any such thing. A majority of his Super Tuesday backers, in fact, support just that.
And recent kudos from a pro-slavery radio host will certainly not dampen his legions. That support came from James Edwards. “For blacks in America,” he has said, “slavery is the best thing that ever happened to them.”
Yes, Trump cannot choose his allies. But it’s certainly no coincidence that the race haters, immigrant bashers and religious hucksters who’ve been at the fringe for some time are all in for Donald Trump.
With media complicity, Trump has unleashed the beast that has long resided not far from the American hearth, from those who started a Civil War to preserve the right to enslave a fellow human to the Know-Nothing mobs who burned Irish-Catholic churches out of fear of immigrants.
When high school kids waved a picture of Trump while shouting “Build a wall” at students from a heavily Hispanic school during a basketball game in Indiana last week, they were exhaling Trump’s sulfurous vapors. They know exactly what he stands for.
Granted, a huge portion of the population is woefully ignorant; nearly a third of Americans didn’t know who Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was in a Gallup poll last year. But ignorance is not the problem with Trump’s people. They’re sick and tired of tolerance. In Super Tuesday exit polls, Trump dominated among those who want someone to “tell it like it is.” And that translates to an explicit “play to our worst fears,” as Meg Whitman, the prominent Republican business leader, said.
“He’s saying how the people really feel,” one Trump supporter from Massachusetts, Janet Aguilar, told The Times. “We’re all afraid to say it.”
They’re saying it now. So more than a third of Trump supporters in South Carolina wish the South had won the Civil War, and 70 percent think the Confederate flag should be flying over the state capital. And 32 percent believe internment of Japanese-American citizens was a good thing — something that the sainted Ronald Reagan apologized for.
Judge him by his followers, who’ve thrown away the dog whistle. “Voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage,” said David Duke, the former Klansman. And judge him by those who enabled his rise, out of cowardice or opportunism, two words that will follow Chris Christie to his grave.
“To support Trump is to support a bigot,” wrote Stevens, the former Romney strategist. “It’s really that simple.”
Now that the nomination is nearly his, Trump will start to tone it down and take it back. Just kidding, he’s going to imply. “I hate to say it, but I’m becoming mainstream,” he said.
But it’s not mainstream to toss aside longstanding American policy against war crimes, advocating torture “even if it doesn’t work.” It’s not mainstream to approvingly pass on quotes from the Fascist Benito Mussolini. It’s not mainstream to be “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten,” as Gov. Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, said.
The German magazine Der Spiegel called Trump “the world’s most dangerous man.” The Germans know a thing or two about the topic.
I would like to think our better angels always prevail. But there are also dark episodes, when the beast is loose, and what stares back at us from the mirror is something ugly and frightful. Now is one of those times.
2. The second Times op-ed piece discusses Europe’s fears of a Trump presidency as the coming of fascism to America.
“Trump’s Il Duce Routine” by Richard Cohen; The New York Times; 2/29/2016.
Europe, the soil on which Fascism took root, is watching the rise of Donald Trump with dismay. Contempt for the excesses of America is a European reflex, but when the United States seems tempted by a latter-day Mussolini, smugness in London, Paris and Berlin gives way to alarm. Europe knows that democracies can collapse.
It’s not just that Trump retweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” It’s not just that Trump refuses to condemn David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who has expressed support for him. It’s not just that violence is woven into Trump’s language as indelibly as the snarl woven into his features — the talk of shooting somebody or punching a protester in the face, the insulting of the disabled, the macho mockery of women, the anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. It’s not just that he could become Silvio Berlusconi with nukes.
It’s the echoes, now unmistakable, of times when the skies darkened. Europe knows how democracies collapse, after lost wars, in times of fear and anger and economic hardship, when the pouting demagogue appears with his pageantry and promises. America’s Weimar-lite democratic dysfunction is plain to see. A corrupted polity tends toward collapse.
Trump is telling people something is rotten in the state of America. The message resonates because the rot is there.
He has emerged from a political system corrupted by money, locked in an echo chamber of insults, reduced to the show business of an endless campaign, blocked by a kind of partisanship run amok that leads Republican members of Congress to declare they will not meet with President Obama’s eventual nominee for the Supreme Court, let alone listen to him or her. This is an outrage! The public interest has become less than an afterthought. Trump is telling people something is rotten in the state of America. The message resonates because the rot is there.
Enter the smart, savvy, scowling showman. He is self-financed and promises restored greatness. He has a bully’s instinct for the jugular and a sense of how sick an angry America is of politics as usual and political correctness. He hijacks a Republican Party that has paved the way for him with years of ranting, bigotry, bellicosity and what Robert Kagan, in The Washington Post, has rightly called “racially tinged derangement syndrome” with respect to President Obama. Trump is a man repeatedly underestimated by the very elites who made Trumpism possible. He’s smarter than most of his belittlers, and quicker on his feet, which makes him only more dangerous.
He’s the anti-Obama, all theater where the president is all prudence, the mouth-that-spews to the presidential teleprompter, rage against reason, the backslapper against the maestro of aloofness, the rabble-rouser to the cerebral law professor, the deal maker to the diligent observer. If Obama in another life could have been a successful European social democrat, Trump is only and absolutely of America.
Part of the Trump danger is that he’s captured an American irredentism, a desire to reclaim something — power, confidence, rising incomes — that many people feel is lost. Trump is a late harvest of 9/11 and the fears that took hold that day. He’s the focus of vague hopes and dim resentments that have turned him into a savior in waiting. As with Ronald Reagan, it’s not the specifics with Trump, it’s a feeling, a vibration — and no matter how much he dissembles, reveals himself as a thug, traffics in contradictions, the raptness persists. Europe is transfixed. The German newsweekly “Der Spiegel” has called Trump “the world’s most dangerous man” and even waxed nostalgic for President George W. Bush, which for a European publication is like suddenly discovering a soft spot for Dracula. The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has tweeted that Trump “fuels hatred.” In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has attacked Trump’s proposed ban on non-American Muslims entering the United States, and more than half a million people have signed a petition urging that he be kept out of Britain. This weekend Britain’s Sunday Times ran a page-size photo of Trump in Lord Kitchener pose with a blaring headline: “America Wants Me.”
So do a few Europeans, among them the French rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is a fan, as are some Russian oligarchs. Judge a man by the company he keeps.
This disoriented America just might want Trump — and that possibility should be taken very seriously, before it is too late, by every believer in American government of the people, by the people, for the people. The power of the Oval Office and the temperament of a bully make for an explosive combination, especially when he has shown contempt for the press, a taste for violence, a consistent inhumanity, a devouring ego and an above-the-law swagger.
As Europe knows, democracies do die. Often, they are the midwives of their own demise. Once lost, the cost of recovery is high.
3. Europeans are hardly in a position to look down on Trump–European politics are experiencing the same “Perfect Sturm.” Not only are fascist parties riding a crest of popularity in Europe over the “anti-immigrant” gambit, but fascism was never expunged from Europe, due to Cold War politics which will be highlighted below. We note that Slovakia is among the countries witnessing the ascent of fascist parties.
The “Troika” (read “Germany”) mandated the installation of the fascist LAOS Party as part of the provisional Greek government in the late fall of 2011. The Greek citizenry had NO say in this, whatsoever.
. . . . The extreme-right People’s Party took in 8 percent of the votes and 14 seats in parliament. Despite the electoral split, Fico said he would work to rebuild a coalition that could take control going forward, possibly with the Slovak National Party, which took in 8.6 percent of the votes cast.
“As the party that won the election we have the obligation to try build a meaningful and stable government,” Fico said, per The Guardian. “It will not be easy, I am saying that very clearly.”
In order to win back the majority government, Fico’s party could need to form an alliance with multiple groups, which the prime minister had hoped to avoid. Fico’s party entered the election with a platform that included strong anti-migrant and anti-Muslim sentiments, despite Slovakia’s absence from the main migrant routes through Europe and relative disconnect from the ongoing crisis related to that issue.
As other countries in the Balkan region and Central Europe are caught in the midst of a migration surge, Fico’s opposition to allowing refugee quotas backed by the EU and his resistance to the “fiction” of multiculturalism makes Slovakia one of the European nations not open to the migrant flow.
Despite that Smer-Social Democracy position, issues in Slovakia including teacher strikes, unemployment, and corruption in the healthcare system may have diverted votes from Fico’s migrant-heavy platform to the other parties’ greater focus on domestic issues, including the People’s Party, chaired by Marian Kotleba.
Mr. Kotleba, a former leader of a now-banned neo-Nazi party, gained notoriety in 2013 during a successful campaign for regional governor in which he praised the Slovak Nazi collaborationist government during World War II. The Economist describes him as “once fond of wearing uniforms in the 1930s and 40s fascist style.” . . . .
4. The so-called “progressive sector” is in no position to intelligently criticize Trump, because they have allied themselves with the milieu of WikiLeaks, Eddie the Friendly Spook and Glenn Greenwald, who are part and parcel to the politics of David Duke, the neo-Confederate movement and apologists for slavery. The political forces that Tim Egan correctly identifies as being “Trumpers” are precisely the forces that are behind the Snowdenistas and Assangeholes.
5.The Dulles brothers, as we have seen so often, were part and parcel to the establishment of the German corporate and cartel structure that spawned Hitler. For background on this, we recommend–among other sources–the old anti-fascist books available for download on this website. We have done numerous shows on the subject, beginning with Miscellaneous Archive Show M11.
. . . . Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers’ Wall Street law firm, was at the center of an intricate international network of banks, investment firms, and industrial conglomerates that rebuilt Germany after World War 1. Foster, the law firm’s top executive, grew skilled at structuring the complex merry-go-round of transactions that funneled massive U.S. investments into German industrial giants like the IG Farben chemical conglomerate and Krupp Steel. The profits generated by these investments then flowed to France and Britain in the form of war reparations, and then back to the United States to pay off war loans.
Foster Dulles became so deeply enmeshed in the lucrative revitalization of Germany that he found it difficult to separate his firm’s interests from those of the rising economic and military power–even after Hitler consolidated control over the country in the 1930s. Foster continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben as they were integrated into the Nazis’ growing war machine, helping the industrial giants secure access to key war materials. He donated money to America First, the campaign to keep the United States out of the gathering tempest in Europe, and helped sponsor a rally honoring Charles Lindbergh, the fair-haired aviation hero who had become enchanted by Hitler’s miraculous revival of Germany. Foster refused to shut down the Berlin office of Sullivan and Cromwell–whose attorneys were [allegedly] forced to sign their correspondence “Heil Hitler”–until his partners (including Allen), fearful of a public relations disaster, insisted he do so. When Foster finally gave in–at an extremely tense 1935 partners’ meeting in the firm’s lavish offices at 48 Wall Street–he broke down in tears. . . .
6. Both Dulles brothers conspired to shut down Operation Safehaven, safeguarding their corporate relationships with Third Reich industry and paving the way for the rise of the Bormann capital network. “. . . . Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to power, to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And during the Cold War, he would be more intent on using Nazi loot to finance covert anti-Soviet operations than on returning it to the families of Hitler’s victims. . . .”
. . . . Dulles and [Thomas] McKittrick [of the Bank of International Settlemnts] continued to work closely together for the rest of the war. In the final months of the conflict, the two men collaborated against a Roosevelt operation called Project Safehaven that sought to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. Administration officials feared that, by hiding their ill-gotten wealth, members of the German elite planned to bide their time after the war and would then try to regain power. Morgenthau’s Treasury Department team, which spearheaded Project Safehaven, reached out to the OSS and BIS for assistance. But Dulles and McKittrick were more inclined to protect their clients’ interests. Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to power, to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And during the Cold War, he would be more intent on using Nazi loot to finance covert anti-Soviet operations than on returning it to the families of Hitler’s victims.
Dulles realized that none of his arguments against Project Safehaven would be well received by Morgenthau. So he resorted to time-honored methods of bureaucratic stalling and sabotage to help sink the operation, explaining in a December 1944 memo to his OSS superiors that his Bern office lacked “adequate personnel to do [an] effective job in this field and meet other demands.” . . . .
. . . . While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother was doing the same in New York. By playing an intricate corporate shell game, Foster was able to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property. Some of Foster’s legal origami allowed the Nazi regime to create bottlenecks in the production of essential war materials–such as diesel-fuel injection motors that the U.S. military needed for trucks, submarines, and airplanes. By the end of the war, many of Foster’s clients were under investigation by the Justice Department’s antitrust division. And Foster himself was under scrutiny for collaboration with the enemy.
But Foster’s brother was guarding his back. From his frontline position in Europe, Allen was well-placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm. “Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” observed Nazi hunter John Loftus, who pored through numerous war documents related to the Dulles brothers when he served as a U.S. prosecutor in the Justice Department under President Jimmy Carter.
If their powerful enemy in the White House had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young man served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason. . . .
7a. In FTR #‘s 278, 370, 435 and 475, we discussed the Bush family, their links to Nazi industry and Mr. Emory’s belief that the Bush family is the point element of the Bormann network in the U.S. FTR #370, in particular, highlights the violent cover-up of the Bush family/Thyssen link. Note that Bormann saw Fritz Thyssen as a pipeline to Allen Dulles.
. . . . Also, Bormann felt [Fritz] Thyssen was his ace in the hole if he ever needed a pipeline to Allen W. Dulles. . . .
7b. Much of the discussion that follows concerns Dulles’s collaboration with Reinhard Gehlen. Note that Gehlen cleared his actions with Admiral Doenitz (Hitler’s successor) and General Franz Halder, indicating that the German chain of command was still in effect even after Gehlen began working with the U.S.
Gehlen met with Admiral Karl Doenitz, who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor during the last days of the Third Reich. Gehlen and the Admiral were now in a U.S. Army VIP prison camp in Wiesbaden; Gehlen sought and received approval from Doenitz too! . . .44
. . . . As Gehlen was about to leave for the United States, he left a message for Baun with another of his top aides, Gerhard Wessel: “I am to tell you from Gehlen that he has discussed with [Hitler’s successor Admiral Karl] Doenitz and [Gehlen’s superior and chief of staff General Franz] Halder the question of continuing his work with the Americans. Both were in agreement.”
In other words, the German chain of command was still in effect, and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans.
. . . . The file revealed that he had been banking under his own name from his office in Germany in Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires since 1941; that he held one joint account with the Argentinian dictator Juan Peron, and on August 4, 5 and 14, 1967, had written checks on demand accounts in first National City Bank (Overseas Division) of New York, The Chase Manhattan Bank, and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., all cleared through Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires. . . .
8. Prescott Bush, Sr. was the Senate’s liaison with Dulles’s CIA.
. . . . Dulles’s CIA operated with virtually no congressional oversight. In the Senate, Dulles relied on Wall Street friends like Prescott Bush of Connecticut–the father and grandfather of two future presidents–to protect the CIA’s interests. According to CIA veteran Robert Crowley, who rose to become second-in-command of the CIA’s action arm, Bush “was the day-to-day contact man for the CIA. It was very bipartisan and friendly. Dulles felt that he had the Senate just where he wanted them.” . . . .
9a. With the connivance of Dules’s CIA, Gehlen pursued the Cold War as an extension of the Third Reich’s war against the Soviet Union.
. . . . The Gehlen Organization saw the Cold War as the final act of the Reich’s interrupted offensive against the Soviet Union. . . .
The covert Cold War in the West was, to an unsettling extent, a joint operation between the Dulles regime and that of Reinhard Gehlen. The German spy chief’s pathological fear and hatred of Russia, which had its roots in Hitler’s Third Reich, meshed smoothly with the Dulles brothers’ anti-Soviet absolutism. In fact, the Dulles policy of massive nuclear retaliation bore a disturbing resemblance to the Nazis’ eterminationist philosophy. . . . We live “in an age in which war is a paramount activity of man,” Gehlen announced in his memoir [prefaced by Holocaust-denier David Irving–D.E.], “with the total annihilation of the enemy as its primary aim.” There could be no more succinct a statement of the fascist ethos. . . .
9b. Next, the program details the Gehlen/Dulles authorship of the “Stay Behind/Gladio” networks. “. . . . He [Gehlen] was prepared to take drastic action to prevent such a political scenario from unfolding in Bonn–going so far as to overthrow democracy in West Germany if necessary. . . . It is unlikely that Dulles was shocked by Gehlen’s proposal to reinstitute fascism in Germany, since CIA officials had long ben discussing such authoritarian contingency plans with the Gehlen Organization other right-wing elements in Germany. . . .”
. . . . He [Gehlen] was prepared to take drastic action to prevent such a political scenario from unfolding in Bonn–going so far as to overthrow democracy in West Germany if necessary. . . . It is unlikely that Dulles was shocked by Gehlen’s proposal to reinstitute fascism in Germany, since CIA officials had long ben discussing such authoritarian contingency plans with the Gehlen Organization other right-wing elements in Germany. In 1952, West German police discovered that the CIA was supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy. Police investigators revealed that the CIA-backed group had compiled a blacklist of people to be “liquidated” as “unreliable” in case of a conflict with the Soviet Union. Included on the list were not just West German Communists but leaders of the Social Democratic Party serving in the Bundestag, as well as other left-leaning government officials. There were cries of outrage in the German parliament over the revelations, but the State Department worked strenuously behind the scenes to suppress the story, and similar alarming measures continued to be quietly contemplated throughout the Cold War.
These authoritarian plans were part of a sweeping covert strategy developed in the earliest days of the Cold War by U.S. intelligence officials, including Dulles, to counter a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe by creating a “stay-behind network” of armed resisters to fight the Red Army. Code-named Operation Gladio, these secret CIA-funded networks attracted fascist and criminal elements, some of which later played subversive roles in West Germany, France, and Italy, disrupting democratic rule in those countries by staging terrorist acts and plotting coups and assassinations.
In the end, Gehlen didn’t feel the need to overthrow democracy in Bonn, but his organization did undertake a variety of secret activities over the years that seriously undermined democratic institutions in Germany. Backed by U.S. intelligence, Hitler’s former spymaster implemented wide-ranging surveillance of West German officials and citizens, including opening private mail and tapping phones. Gehlen defended the snooping as an internal security measure aimed at ferreting out Soviet and East German spies, but his net grew wider and wider until it was cast across an increasingly broad spectrum of population, including opposition party leaders, labor union officials, journalists and schoolteachers. Gehlen even used his spy apparatus to investigate survivors of the Valkyrie plot against Hitler . . . .
. . . . Gehlen was acting not just on behalf of his U.S. patrons, but his clients in Bonn. Even some CIA officials worried that Gehlen was being improperly used by Hans Globke to gather information on political opponents and fortify the Adenauer administration’s power. . . . On one occasion in the 1950s, the savvy Globke paid a visit to Gehlen’s Pullach headquarters, poring over the dossiers of various German political figures–and taking the opportunity to remove his own file. . . .
9c. As we have seen, Hans Globke was Adenauer’s eminence grise and the architect of the Nuremburg laws.
. . . . High among those [former Third Reich] officials was Chancellor Adenauer’s right-hand man Hans Globke, who had helped draft the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the racial identification system that served as the basis for the extermination of German Jews. . . .
10a. We review analysis of the Crusade For Freedom–the covert operation that brought Third Reich alumni into the country and also supported their guerilla warfare in Eastern Europe, conducted up until the early 1950’s. Conceived by Allen Dulles, overseen by Richard Nixon, publicly represented by Ronald Reagan and realized in considerable measure by William Casey, the CFF ultimately evolved into a Nazi wing of the GOP.
. . . . Frustration over Truman’s 1948 election victory over Dewey (which they blamed on the “Jewish vote”) impelled Dulles and his protégé Richard Nixon to work toward the realization of the fascist freedom fighter presence in the Republican Party’s ethnic outreach organization. As a young congressman, Nixon had been Allen Dulles’s confidant. They both blamed Governor Dewey’s razor-thin loss to Truman in the 1948 presidential election on the Jewish vote. When he became Eisenhower’s vice president in 1952, Nixon was determined to build his own ethnic base. . . .
. . . . Vice President Nixon’s secret political war of Nazis against Jews in American politics was never investigated at the time. The foreign language-speaking Croatians and other Fascist émigré groups had a ready-made network for contacting and mobilizing the Eastern European ethnic bloc. There is a very high correlation between CIA domestic subsidies to Fascist ‘freedom fighters’ during the 1950’s and the leadership of the Republican Party’s ethnic campaign groups. The motive for the under-the-table financing was clear: Nixon used Nazis to offset the Jewish vote for the Democrats. . . .
. . . . In 1952, Nixon had formed an Ethnic Division within the Republican National Committee. Displaced fascists, hoping to be returned to power by an Eisenhower-Nixon ‘liberation’ policy signed on with the committee. In 1953, when Republicans were in office, the immigration laws were changed to admit Nazis, even members of the SS. They flooded into the country. Nixon himself oversaw the new immigration program. As Vice President, he even received Eastern European Fascists in the White House. . .
10b. More about the composition of the cast of the CFF: Note that the ascension of the Reagan administration was essentially the ascension of the Nazified GOP, embodied in the CFF milieu. Reagan (spokesman for CFF) was President; George H.W. Bush (for whom CIA headquarters is named) was the Vice President; William Casey (who handled the State Department machinations to bring these people into the United States) was Reagan’s campaign manager and later his CIA director.
. . . . As a young movie actor in the early 1950s, Reagan was employed as the public spokesperson for an OPC front named the ‘Crusade for Freedom.’ Reagan may not have known it, but 99 percent for the Crusade’s funds came from clandestine accounts, which were then laundered through the Crusade to various organizations such as Radio Liberty, which employed Dulles’s Fascists. Bill Casey, who later became CIA director under Ronald Reagan, also worked in Germany after World War II on Dulles’ Nazi ‘freedom fighters’ program. When he returned to New York, Casey headed up another OPC front, the International Rescue Committee, which sponsored the immigration of these Fascists to the United States. Casey’s committee replaced the International Red Cross as the sponsor for Dulles’s recruits. Confidential interviews, former members, OPC; former members, British foreign and Commonwealth Office. . . .
. . . . .It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon’s promise to make the ‘ethnic emigres’ a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972, Nixon’s State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states. Bush’s tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor’s 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party’s official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush’s campaign allies were the émigré Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States. . . .
12. We conclude with a look at The New York Times’ use of a Third Reich alumnus named Paul Hofmann as a foreign correspondent, beginning with the Gray Lady’s coverage of the CIA’s participation in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba.
. . . . As the Congo crisis reached its climax, a new correspondent for The New York Times showed up in Leopoldville with a distinctly anti-Lumumba bias. Paul Hofmann was a diminutive, sophisticated Austrian with a colorful past. During the war, he served in Rome as a top aide to the notorious Nazi general Kurt Malzer, who was later convicted of the mass murder of Italian partisans. At some point, Hofmann became an informer for the Allies, and after the war he became closely associated with Jim Angleton. The Angleton family helped place Hofmann in the Rome bureau of The New York Times, where he continued to be of use to his friends in U.S. intelligence, translating reports from confidential sources inside the Vatican and passing them along to Angleton. Hofmann became one of the Times’s leading foreign correspondents, eventually taking over the newspaper’s Rome bureau and parachuting from time to time into international hot spots like the Congo. . . .
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters about a conversation he had with Donald Trump this morning. The topic of the conversation? “I took the opportunity to recommend to him that no matter who may be triggering these violent, uh, expressions or conflict that we’ve seen at some of these rallies, it might be a good idea to condemn that and discourage it, no matter what the source of it is.” So we’re at the point where the GOP’s leading Senator just had to warn the guy that’s on course to win his party’s presidential nomination not to incite violence at political rallies. And these words of caution were passed along to Trump on the same day that he appears to be poised to essentially secure that nomination.
It’s all part of why a certain very unpleasant question is becoming increasingly relevant. It a question that should never need to be asked, but here we are so we might as well ask it:
Given the state of US politics, is the ghost of Roy Cohn more pleased? Or more proud?
“The friendship they forged would provide the foundation for Trump’s eventual presidential campaign. And in hindsight, it serves as a tool for understanding Donald Trump the Candidate, whose bumper sticker-averse declarations—undocumented Mexican immigrants are “criminals” and “rapists”; Senator John McCain is “not a war hero”—have both led him to the top of the Republican primary polls and mistakenly convinced many that he is a puzzle unworthy of solving. It may appear that way, but Trump isn’t just spouting off insults like a malfunctioning sprinkler system—he’s mimicking what he learned some 40 years ago.”
As we can see, while Cohn never had kids, he was sort of a second father figure to one up and coming fellow:
Yes, it’s sort of a shame Cohn couldn’t live to see the day. Sort of. But at least the ghost of Roy Cohn is presumably smiling somewhere.
The ghost of Cohn’s old boss is probably pretty happy too.
Last night, PBS NewsHour had a special about first-time voters, including a profile of a Fayetteville, NC, family volunteering to make calls for the Trump campaign. And the mother working just happened to have big Celtic Cross tattoo on her right and an “88” on her left hand. It was kind of hard to miss.
Now, the fact that someone with overt white supremacist symbolism is volunteering for Donald Trump isn’t exactly news at this point. At least not breaking news. But it is kind of newsworthy that the racist tattoos weren’t even mentioned in the report. They were definitely visible, but not actually mentioned:
“PBS made no mention of the symbols in the story, Gawker said.”
Weird. It seems like big, visible white supremacists tattoos would be part of this story.
We’re probably going to see a lot more articles like this as America continues tiptoeing up to the Rubicon:
“There are no institutions that can prevent people from voting for a man who incites violence — only norms. And Trump is revealing just how weak those norms are.”
Yep, those norms are looking a little shaky. But they could always get shakier:
So let’s hope we don’t see informal Trump “protection” groups start popping up. Especially groups with names inspired by a Mussolini quote:
“While noting that the idea of a pro-Trump paramilitary organization is “not a bad idea,” the Lion Guard says such violence would feed into mainstream media’s anti-Trump narrative.”
That’s reassuring.
Donald Trump reiterated his calls for torturing terror suspects following an ISIS-affiliated attack in Brussels, explicitly calling for waterboarding but also strongly hinting at significantly more torturous techniques. When asked about the fact that the military doesn’t agree that torture is useful, Trump found two generals that would agree with him. Or, at least, two generals that Trump is pretty sure would agree with him if they hadn’t died decades ago:
“I think they believe in it 100 percent. You talk to General Patton from years ago. You talk to General Douglas MacArthur...I will guarantee, these were real generals, and I guarantee you, they would be laughing. Right now they’re crying and right now they’re spinning in their graves as they watch the stupidity go on.”
Well, Douglas MacArthur would indeed probably be spinning in his grave today. Not for the reasons Trump cited, but related reason:
“In war crimes trials overseen by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander in the Pacific and a great Republican hero, testimony about water torture led to numerous convictions — and sentences that ranged from years of imprisonment at hard labor to death by hanging. As head of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, MacArthur voted to uphold those convictions and sentences.”
So, unless Douglas MacArthur is spinning in his grave over regrets that he used water boarding as a reason to convict people of war crimes, it seems like Donald Trump is going to need to find another dead general to justify his torture policies.
Then again, when you consider polls like the December 2014 Pew poll showing Americans overwhelming approve of waterboarding, it’s not like Donald Trump really needs military approval to help sell his torture policies. A majority of the American public is apparently already sold on the idea. And given Trump’s near inevitability as the GOP, it would appear that the Republican party is already sold on “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. It’s a pretty disturbing state of affairs. Except, perhaps, for Dick Cheney. And, of course, ISIS.
The rise of Donald Trump is raising a number of disturbing questions for the US political establishment, with “how did we contribute to this?” being one of the key questions finally getting asked by many of those in mainstream media. And given the calamitous impact on the nation and world when one of the two major US parties goes insane, there’s no doubt plenty of blame to go around, so let’s hope such questions continue to get asked. Fortunately, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, two very mainstream political analysts, are about to publish a revised version of their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism”, that examines the political dysfunctional in Washington DC and comes to the startling conclusion: DC’s dysfunction is primarily due to the GOP’s extremism and isn’t simply a “both parties are at basically equally at fault” phenomena. *Gasp* What a shocking conclusion.
So with all the Trump-related hand wringing these days, we’ll see if the revised version of Ornstein’s and Mann’s makes more waves than it did in 2012. And hopefully the new addition includes much more on the role of the media plays in these dysfunctional dynamics. After all, following the 2012 rollout of their book, Ornstein and Mann were almost immediately shunned by a media establishment that had, until that point, been very friendly. No more TV appearance, no more Sunday morning talk shows. The dynamic duo of the beltway punditocracy suddenly became unpersons. All because they wrote a book pointing out that the GOP’s growing extremism is disproportionately to blame for the dysfunction in DC. That seems like the kind of mass media collusion of delusion should also share quite a bit of the blame:
“And what was the Beltway media’s response when Ornstein and Mann squarely blamed Republicans during an election year for purposefully making governing impossible? Media elites suddenly lost Mann and Ornstein’s number, as the duo’s television appearances and calls for quotes quickly dried up. So did much of the media’s interest in Mann and Ornstein’s prescient book.”
(CNN)Is Donald Trump a fascist?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/09/opinions/bergen-is-trump-fascist/
Note the following points not covered in the article about Donald Trump:
1. He is tacitly supporting violence against hecklers at his rallies.
2. He is being supported by White Supremacists and does not clearly disavow their support.
3. He, like Hitler has a huge ego and believed that he is the solution to the nation’s problems.
Here is the article:
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of the forthcoming book “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.”
(CNN)Is Donald Trump a fascist?
To answer that question it is helpful to examine three interrelated phenomena: the history of European fascism, the rise of far-right nationalist parties around the West today and what historian Richard Hofstadter famously termed “the paranoid style in American politics.”
Let’s start with the classic 2004 study “The Anatomy of Fascism” by American historian Robert Paxton, who examined the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe and found some commonalities among them. They played on:
• “A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions.” Trump’s ascendancy outside the structures of the traditional Republican Party and his clarion calls about America’s supposedly precipitously declining role in the world capture this trait well.
• “The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.” Trump’s careless regard for the truth — such as his claims that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks, or that Mexican immigrants are rapists and murders — and the trust he places in his own gut capture this well.
What else can besieged American Muslims do?
What else can besieged American Muslims do?
• The belief of one group that it is the victim, justifying any action. Many in Trump’s base of white, working-class voters feel threated by immigrants, so Trump’s solution to that, whether with Mexico (build a wall) or the Islamic world (keep them out), speaks to them.
• “The need for authority by natural leaders (always male) culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny.” This seems like quite a good description of Trump’s appeal.
In Paxton’s checklist of the foundational traits of fascism there is a big one that Trump does not share, which is “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will when they are devoted to the group’s success.”
From America to France, extreme politics reign
From America to France, extreme politics reign 11:18
There is no hint that Trump wishes to engage in or to foment violence against the enemies, such as immigrants, he has identified as undermining the
American way of life.
One is therefore left with the conclusion that Trump is a proto-fascist, rather than an actual fascist. In other words, he has many ideas that are fascistic in nature, but he is not proposing violence as a way of implementing those ideas.
Don’t collectively punish Muslims
Don’t punish all Muslims after San Bernardino (Opinion)
So how else might we frame the Trump phenomenon? It’s useful to view in the context of the wave of the far-right nationalist movements that have swept Europe in recent years and that are defined by hostility to immigrants and minorities.
On Sunday, Marine Le Pen’s National Front far-right party finished first in the initial round of regional elections in France, transforming her party, in the words The New York Times, from “a fringe movement into a credible party of government.”
The National Front obtained more than a quarter of the votes and is leading races in just under half of France’s 13 regions.
The National Front was doubtless given a boost last month by the Paris massacres that killed 130 and were carried out, in part, by second-generation French immigrants.
A similar phenomenon to Trump can be found in Hungary, where the popular Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, has ordered the construction of fences to prevent Middle Eastern refugees from reaching his country and has said it will only offer asylum to Christian refugees.
Trump’s pronounced anti-immigrant stance is reminiscent of both Le Pen in France and Orban in Hungary, although he is far from alone in taking such positions in much of today’s Republican Party.
Finally, it’s helpful to position Trump in the long tradition of what Hofstadter had termed in 1964 “the paranoid style in American politics,” his well-known analysis of an American far-right that believed vast conspiracies were undermining the United States.
Trump participates in the Republican debate in Cleveland
Trump has updated the paranoid right for the post‑9/11 era: Instead of a communist plot to take over America, the conspiracy theory favored in the 1950s, the threat is now immigrants, whether they are Mexicans or Muslims. (Earlier waves of American jingoistic paranoia in the 19th century were directed at Masons and then Catholics.)
Trump displays many of the traits of a proto-fascist, and he is also part of a wave of right-wing nationalist movements that is sweeping the West. He can also be positioned in the long, American right-wing tradition of fearing “the Other,” whether they are Catholics or Jews or, now, Muslims.
If the party of Lincoln wishes to become the party of intolerance, selecting Trump to be its presidential candidate is a good way forward.
Donald Trump is once again having to distance itself from pro-Trump robocalls by the openly white nationalist American Freedom Party, this time in Wisconsin. And while the the Trump campaign has disavowed its enthusiastic white nationalist supporters in the past, those disavowals haven’t exactly worked, as evidenced by the latest round of robocalls. And then there’s the fact that the David Duke has already publicly told Trump to “do whatever you need to do to get elected,” so it’s not like Trump can really make his white nationalist support diminish simply through disavowals. You’d need policies the white nationalists can’t stomach, and it’s very unclear what Trump could come up with that fits that category. Although his recent refusal to rule out nuking Europe might be a start:
“Matthews asked Trump to tell the Middle East and Europe that he would never use nuclear weapons, but Trump continued to evade. Asked again if he’d use nuclear weapons in Europe, Trump held firm. “I am not—I am not taking cards off the table,” Trump responded.”
Well, at least a few of Trump’s white nationalist supporters probably weren’t super thrilled to hear that.
With a GOP contested convention looking more and more likely lately, it’s worth keeping in mind that Donald Trump still has a not-so-secret weapon: the threat of imploding the party via giant riot if he doesn’t get the nomination. It’s a threat Trump has already dabbled with, having previously suggested that there would be riots at the GOP convention if he doesn’t get the nomination, and then, just yesterday, Trump tweeted a video featuring clips of anti-Trump protests, violence, and a bloodied police officer with the narration “We’re at war”. So the threat of violence, whether directed towards anti-Trump forces on the right or left, is already a part of the Trumpian zeitgeist.
But it’s also worth nothing that the threat of violence is a threat Trump doesn’t need to personally issue through vague statements or tweets. Roger Stone is already doing it for him:
“Stone said the campaign was not involved in organizing this, instead saying the protests will be “organized by Trump nation,” but said that “we did inform them.” He said he had “issued the call to action” on Infowars, the Alex Jones-run conspiracy show, on March 30, that they “will stage protests at hotels of state delegates of states supporting the BIG STEAL,” and that he and Jones would be speaking (Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul are both invited).”
Roger Stone and Alex Jones to the rescue!
So is Stone serious, or is this just talk? Well, if it is serious, there’s going to be a lot more talking from Roger Stone, since he’s promising to tell all of his protestors which hotels and room numbers house the GOP delegates:
“Join us in the Forest City. We’re going to have protests, demonstrations...We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal. If you’re from Pennsylvania, we’ll tell you who the culprits are. We urge you to visit their hotel and find them.”
Well, it’s probably for the best the petition for the open-carry of weapons at the convention was a joke and didn’t pass, because it’s very unclear that Stone is joking. Trump’s supporters sure aren’t. So, who knows, we might very well see Roger Stone and Alex Jones lead some sort of pro-Trump militia in Cleveland, dedicated to finding where the delegates sleep and giving them ‘a piece of their mind’.
Of course, if Stone is really serious about making this threat the kind of threat that the GOP might take seriously, why wait until the convention to ‘rage’? After all, the biggest super-duper delegate of them all, Charles Koch, appears to be leaning towards not just ‘stealing’ the nomination from Trump, but stealing it from all the other candidates who stuffed themselves into the clown car and giving the nomination to Paul Ryan. Granted, they’re denying the story. But it’s kind of hard to ignore the fact that the GOP “establishment” (which is basically the Koch brothers these days) appears to be seriously gearing up for at least the possibility of contested convention. So it’s not at all an improbably story, which raises the question: if Stone and Alex Jones are actually serious, why not send the Trump militia to start ‘raging’ at Charles’s house now?
“If GOP delegates start looking for an alternative to both Trump and Senator Cruz, why settle for Miss Ohio when you could marry Miss America?”
Could Paul Ryan, the GOP’s Miss America, become the GOP’s peace-maker? If that report is accurate, the Kochs appear to think so. But that doesn’t mean the Trumpian legions agree. So, in the spirit of being pro-active, shouldn’t the ‘Days of Rage’ Stone has planned for Cleveland start in Wichita?
One of the big questions that arose when Roger Stone announced his ‘Days of Rage’ plan to stalk GOP delegates at their hotel rooms in the event of a contested convention was how on earth the Trump campaign was going to keep the taint of Stone’s dirty tricks from becoming part of the narrative for why the party should choose someone else. After all, there are some pretty persuasive arguments the Trump campaign could use for why it should ultimately get the nomination even if he falls short of the majority of delegates he needs, but “if you don’t nominate me, Roger Stone’s mob will find you and make sure you nominate me” probably isn’t one of them.
So how exactly the Trump campaign was going to maintain a distance from Stone’s dirty tricks machine during a chaotic convention was always going to be one of the more interesting things to see play out once Stone made his ‘Days of Rage’ call to arms. And, because this is the Trump campaign we’re talking about, it just got more interesting:
“After news of Manafort’s increased role broke, Stone tweeted an old picture of himself with Manafort and wrote, “I have every confidence @realDonaldTrump will be nominated with the experienced leadership of Paul Manafort.””
It’s hard to see how tweets like that are going to fall down the memory hole if things get crazy in Cleveland. Oh well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer party.
It looks like Roger Stone’s “Days of Rage” scheme is getting started a few months early:
“What House is “going through” is 50 to 60 calls an hour, emails, text messages and online death threats from angry Donald Trump supporters since Sunday night when his contact information was released (it is not clear who originally sent out the information).”
Keep in mind that we’re living in the age of anonymous digital communication tools, so assuming these Trump supporters are up to date with their cypherpunk technologies of choice we could end up seeing a wave of digital threats with little recourse. It’s all rather ominous seeing a major party issue death threats against itself, although it would be even more ominous if it involved a party that wasn’t, itself, sort of a giant death threat against life on earth. Still, even uncivil parties like the GOP should be able to select their nominees in a civil manner. That’s how democracy is supposed to work, even for parties that are basically enemies of the democratic process.
So let’s hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, although it’s worth noting that it’s a sign of things already happening:
“There have been a few [messages] for myself and others that have referenced personal things, things you’ve said on social media, references to our families, references to our houses, things like that that feel a little bit more ominous,”
Yikes. It would appear that Roger Stone’s delegate intimidation plan isn’t going to be limited to stalking hotel rooms. And that means there isn’t really a stalking “off” switch for the plan either, unless the delegates change their names and move. So the Trumpian faction of the GOP is on the cusp of sending the GOP “establishment” into a witness protection program if Trump isn’t the nominee.
There’s no shortage of reasons for how the GOP got to this point, but poor role models definitely played a YUUUUGE role.
The Trump campaign issued a reassuring prediction for Trump supporters: The campaign forsees that it will easily reach 1,265 delegates by the time all the states have voted, well over the required 1,237. Of course, that’s also an optimistic assessment and there are plenty of scenarios where Trump doesn’t reach the magic 1,237 number and the contested convention nightmare scenario ensues. But it turns out there’s a new development that could shake things up, possibly to the Trump campaigns big advantage:
34 of Marco Rubio’s pledged delegates aren’t actually pledged anymore and up for grabs:
“Only 34 of the 172 delegates Rubio won in the primaries will be immediately up for grabs on the first ballot in Cleveland. That development is opening up a fierce competition to win these lapsed Rubio delegates, which are located in Oklahoma, Minnesota and Louisiana.”
Boy, 34 delegates sure would be useful for a campaign that’s on track to almost but not quite hit that magic 1,237 number, only to see everything slip through Trump’s well-proportioned hands in the subsequent rounds of convention voting. And yet it’s very obvious that Ted Cruz is the one with the campaign best position to woo those suddenly unbound delegates. And that’s part of why, while it’s certainly possible that Trump could get all the 1,237 he needs before the convention, it’s probably a lot more likely that he almost gets there, but not quite. And the longer this goes, the more it looks like a GOP convention that doesn’t resolve itself in the first found is going to turn into a total fiasco.
Boy oh boy, it sure would help if the Trump campaign had some means to win over a nice chunk of those 34 delegates because every delegate counts at this point. Oh, that’s right, it does have those means: Roger Stone can unleash the “Days of Rage” hounds and gang-stalk them into submission! Now, before they succumb to Cruz’s sweet siren’s song. Granted, it’s obscene that we even have to think about such possibilities, but it’s not like the gang-stalking and death threats haven’t already begun. Gang-stalking is already the reality of contemporary GOP primary politics.
Might the Trump campaign be considering such strategies? They’d never admit it, but they haven’t really done much of anything to stop Stone’s current gang-stalking promotion after the death-threats have already started by Trump supporters so it’s not like there’s a compelling reason to think the campaign isn’t at least considering it.
Beyond that, you almost have to wonder if the broader GOP would disapprove if Trump did it at this point? After all, there won’t be any need for a super-high profile gang-stalking disaster to hit the convention in Cleveland if Trump secures the delegates he needs before getting to the convention. In other words, should the GOP hierarchy, or at least a big chunk of it, conclude that opposing Trump is now more damaging than supporter him, there’s no reason not to sacrifice those 34 delegates to Stone’s Trumpian army to ensure they give Trump the delegates he needs. Sure, there are ethical reasons not to do so, but this is the GOP we’re talking about, so there’s basically reason not to do it except for the bad press associated with getting caught. But it’s not like the Trump campaign is weakened by bad press. If anything it’s the opposite. Bad Boy Trump sells. And don’t forget, the GOP establishment still really hates Cruz too.
So now that 34 delegates are suddenly free to be intimidated, upending any existing convention strategies on all side, who knows why kind of gang-stalking shenanigans might be under consideration. And not just by the Trump campaign.
Part of what make primary season in the US democracy so interesting is that the non-parliamentary winner-take-all nature the American electoral system doesn’t quite work, mechanistically, when there’s more than two parties running. And that basically means the two major parties are sort of umbrella parties for voters and ideologies that might otherwise be in separate parties under a parliamentary system. And that makes US primaries potentially the closest the US to a more-than-two party vote of major consequence. And when you have a ‘clown car’ primary season like the GOP has had this year, it’s also the closest thing to an election where you have a large number of different “parties” all competing against each other and each of those parties has a chance to gain a significant chunk of the vote. Contests like that almost never happen in the general election, but they aren’t at all unheard of for the primaries.
And that’s all why, while GOP primaries are generally an endless fount of bad ideas if zombie lies, there is one really great idea that the GOP primary is sort of indirectly promoting this year: Instant runoff voting, where voters don’t vote for a single candidate but instead create an ordered list of who they would prefer. If applied in the general election, instant runoff voting would allow for, say, a Green Party on the left and America First party on the right, garnering votes on election day without the risk of them acting as “spoilers” that inevitably arise in a winner-take-all majority rules system. Democracy could basically work better because people could have greater choices without effectively being punished for it. Wouldn’t that be fun.
So why is this year’s GOP primary a fabulous argument for instant runoff voting? Well, because just about all the candidates would have probably preferred it in a 17 person race, especially in a “winner to all” state primary. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio could have potentially garnered a much larger chunk of the “no Trump” vote that was getting divided up in the earlier primary races. And Donald Trump’s campaign has often made the argument that it would have probably cinched the nomination by now if he wasn’t running against a fully loaded Clown Car. And Donald Trump may be right. But as the article below points out, maybe not. And that’s part of the fun of instant runoff voting: we’d still get all the excitement that comes from watching a Clown Car go off the rails, but it would be a different kind of exciting:
“These divided results provide further evidence that Republicans are facing a complicated and challenging nomination process no matter the voting system. Nonetheless, RCV would encourage candidates to find common ground with other candidates’ supporters instead of waging scorched-earth, overly-negative campaigns that define politics today. As FairVote’s primary focus series pointed out last week, RCV would almost certainly result in campaigns that are more civil and substantive based on findings from Rutgers-Eagleton Poll surveying seven cities using RCV in 2013–2014.”
Just imagine: Trump would be losing and the whole primary process would be more civil. At least in theory! All the GOP needed to do was adopt instant runoff voting. But it’s too late for that this year. Better luck next time. Or perhaps, better luck in Cleveland.
We now return to our regularly scheduled GOP primary coverage.
When Donald Trump gave his victory speech following his overwhelming win in New York last night, perhaps what stood out most was how little the speech stood out from the standard speeches politicians give. The name calling like “Lyin’ Ted” or “Crooked Hillary” was gone, and Trump merely complained a bit about the primary system being rigged which, again, was a rather subdued for Trump. So subdued that Trump’s victory speech raised the question of whether or not we might be seeing a new ‘Presidential’ phase of the Trump campaign that he’s shaken up his campaign staff and looking more and more like the overwhelming nominee.
Who knows if anyone believed that was the case, but if the Republican National Committee found itself wishing it was true, you couldn’t really blame them. After all, it’s only been a few days since Trump professed how he really hoped no violence would take place at the GOP’s convention if he didn’t get the nomination due to the rigged system. If you’re at the RNC, and you’ve just received the “that’s a nice convention you have there. It sure would be a shame if something happened to it” treatment from someone with Donald Trump’s pedigree, it’s only natural to hope that your party’s extortionist just turned over a new leaf.
And perhaps he had actually had turned over a new leaf immediately following his big win. We’ll see *snicker*. But the winds of change are always blowing in that space between The Donald’s ears, and there’s nothing stopping that leaf from turning right back over again which is something that must be worrying even the optimists at the RNC. Especially since, just an hour before his ‘respectable’ victory speech, Donald Trump retweeted a White Supremacist again:
“If the message discipline required of Trump to keep accumulating delegates through the electoral process demands that he back away from his more racially incendiary rhetoric, a seemingly accidental retweet of a white supremacist’s blessing could help keep the haters in the Trump fold. After all, Cruz isn’t exactly a softy on Muslims, Mexicans, or members of other minority groups. His rhetoric is simply more finely coded, as in one of his favorite phrases, “radical Islamic extremists,” which is at times coupled with stoking fears that the implementation of Shariah law is imminent in the United States. It’s a phrase that leaves it to the listener to apply to all Muslims. Trump’s rhetorical weapons are more blunt; he’s called for barring the entrance of Muslims into the U.S., which makes establishment types squirm in their seats.”
Ted Cruz’s dog-whistles are too quiet so if Trump is going to risk being “respectable” he needs to “accidentally” retweet a “neo-Boer” (and then leave it on his twitter feed even after it’s reported) so he doesn’t lose the pro-#RWDS (right-wing death squad) vote. Aren’t GOP primaries fun?
And you have to hand it to Trump, catering the right-wing death squad vote does have a lot of synergy. Not only is he securing the the heavily-armed right-wing lunatic voting block from Ted Cruz, but in doing so he makes the threats of violence in Cleveland that mush more threatening:
“He’s joined in that thought by members of the Republican establishment, who, according to Stokols, are beginning to get comfortable with the idea of a Trump nomination, seeing as how, in the quest for party preservation, it might be preferable to a riot in the streets of Ohio, which is an open-carry state.”
Boy, that sure sounds like GOP leaders are actively rationalizing embracing Trump specifically because if his threats of riots and violence...and the fact that Ohio is an open-carry state. It’s kind of hard to do much about right-wing death squads roaming the streets of Cleveland with open-carry laws. Good thing for the GOP that you won’t be able to carry guns at the actual convention, but with Roger Stone already threatening to publicly give you the hotel rooms of GOP delegates it’s hard to see why Trump’s threats and innocently threatening tweets aren’t something the GOP has to take seriously. And the RNC appears to see that too and is basically coming around to idea that the party is going to be successfully and publicly threatened into submission by the party’s likely nominee.
We’ve come a long way from the GOP’s 2012 autopsy. And with the way things are going, you just have to hope the 2016 autopsy doesn’t involve actual autopsies.
The Trump campaign took another turn for the weird Thursday: First, we get the news that Trump actually took an unexpectedly humanizing stance towards the transgendered community. It was a little odd considering he’s leading the Republican presidential race. After all, demonizing the transgendered community was looking like the kind of political weapon the party was going to be using more and more going forward. It’s exactly the kind of wedge social issue the party loves.
And then, later in the day, we curiously get following reports out of a meeting between the Trump campaign and Republican Party leaders in Hollywood, Florida, where Trump’s senior adviser appeared be pushing the message the Donald Trump was merely “projecting an image” to voters and that image was about to change to make him more palatable to general election voters.
Now, the fact that the Trump campaign would acknowledging to senior GOP leaders that he’s basically acting isn’t really surprise. What’s surprising is that news reports about this admission that the Trump campaign is all an act even got reported at all. Was this an unintentional leak, because the report below doesn’t really indicate that this was was something the Trump wanted to keep under wraps. After all, it doesn’t really help with a candidates perceived authenticity if his campaign acknowledges it’s all an act.
Unless, of course, the candidate has such high negatives with that proclaiming “it was all an act! Don’t worry. I’ll be way less crazy once you elect me,” is an image booster. And considering Trump’s unprecedented high negatives for a leading candidate, who knows, maybe the new image his campaign is trying to project is that it’s a campaign that merely projects images, with the implication being that voters shouldn’t take too seriously all the things Trump has said thus far to generate those high negatives. Sure, that’s kind of a risky stance, but don’t discount the potential upside here, because that same message will also be heard by all of his existing supporters who might be wondering what the hell happened to the ‘old Trump’ should the the general election usher in a ‘kinder, gentler Trump’.
In other words, if the Trump campaign can pull this off and project itself as a campaign of projections, he’s basically the Rorschach candidate and that’s not necessarily the worst approach for a candidate with Trump’s negatives. He could go from being the candidate most voters hate to the candidate that’s whatever you believe he might be beneath the projections. He would become the ultimate Hollywood candidate with political shape-shifting special effects, which is why Hollywood, Florida was such a great location for this meeting.
And, in an odd way, he would become a candidate of hope: if he takes enough positions on enough different issues, you can just pick and choose Trump’s positions you like the most and hope that’s the real Trump. For instance, if you fear the transgendered and view his recent stance with disgust, don’t worry, he walked back that position the next day and basically states should be able to set up whatever anti-trans laws they want. So which Trump is the real Trump? Well, for election purposes, it’s whatever Trump you believe is the Trump for you:
“The part that he’s been playing is now evolving into the part that you’ve been expecting. The negatives will come down, the image is going to change.”
Welcome to the next phase of the 2016 campaign: trying to guess which Trump is the real Trump while Trump, himself, pushes this meme too:
It’s a pretty clever, if unorthodox, campaign strategy. You have to wonder what inspired the idea. Hmmm....
Former Indiana University head basketball coach Bobby Knight just gave a historically interesting defense of Donald Trump’s ‘presidential’ qualities in the lead up to next week’s Indiana primary. What did Knight find most presidential about Donald Trump? Knight’s confidence in Trump’s willingness to use nuclear weapons:
“They told him that he wasn’t presidential, and Harry Truman, with what he did in dropping and having the guts to drop the bomb in 1944, saved, saved billions of American lives...That’s what Harry Truman did and he became one of the three great presidents of the United States. And here’s a man who would do the same thing because he’s going to become one of the four great presidents of the United States.”
Billions of American lives were saved? Wow. They don’t cover that in the history books. And keep in mind that Trump also reiterated his pledge to not take off the table the use of nuclear weapons against ISIS while simultaneously asserting that nuclear weapons, and not climate change, is the single greatest problem the world faces.
And in Trump’s defense, he’s sort of correct...assuming he becomes president. Because if president Trump starts dropping nukes, climate change won’t be the biggest problem any more. Nuclear exchanges will easily take that slot. Although it’s also worth keeping in mind that one of the biggest threats associated with nuclear weapons is actually climate change.
Josh Marshall had a piece on Donald Trump’s recent foreign policy speech that makes a point that’s probably going to be more and more important to understand as Trump inevitably pivots to the center after the primaries to make a broader to the US electorate: Part the Trumpian strategy we can see emerging is an attempt to sell Trump’s policies as “realism” that defies traditional policies from the US left or right establishment. And as Marshall notes, yes, Donald Trump is actually presenting a coherent “realist” foreign policy vision...but only if you incoherently assume the US is a has-been military power that’s been systematically abused by its allies and had much of its past wealth and glory maliciously stolen from it. In other words, it’s a “realist” policy for some parallel universe America. So if you assume the US is no longer the unrivaled global military and economy superpower that it actually is, Trump’s vision is actually pretty compelling. Because popular revanchism makes for great politics, even when you’re already on top:
“While there are some superficial similarities, Trump’s foreign policy sees a United States that has been abused and cheated by enemies and allies alike. The goal is to set matters right and reclaim what is rightfully ours — in terms of the global economy and trade, our unmatched military power and the costs of the protection we extend to allies with that unmatched military power. By any reasonable historical or foreign policy big-think standard, this isn’t Realism but Revanchism — a policy of revenge and reclaiming rightful ownership. Such a vision is almost always destabilizing and dangerous. Revanchism may be understandable and perhaps even salutary when the revanchist power has actually lost something. But when the revanchist power already has all the stuff and is the strongest military power in the world, it’s almost certainly a recipe for disaster.”
Will Donald Trump lead the United States to reclaim all its lost glory? We’ll find out in November. There’s got to be all sorts of past trophies the US could go around the globe hunting down. Maybe he could reconquer Panama? Who knows what he’ll come up with!
But it’s also worth pointing out that the revanchist nature to Trump’s domestic policies really could have some real realism behind. Not the xenophobic hate mongering, but all of the talk of trade and tariffs and the job losses in the US manufacturing sector. Because at least in that case we really have seen some significant losses incurred by American workers over the past several decades that one could reasonably hope to regain through some combination of policy measures. And while Trump’s domestic policies which are centered around mega-tax cuts for the rich would do little to regain that past economic glory for all those workers who really have lost out with the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector, at least there was something really lost for voters to hope to regain. In other words, as opposed to his foreign policy revanchism masking as “realism”, Trump’s domestic revanchism at least has a realistic basis even if his proposed solutions will end up doing more harm than good. Higher tariffs will undoubtedly help some sectors, but that help has to be more than outweighed by the incredible damage a Trump presidency would do to all the other programs that help those same workers too to make a Trump presidency net-helpful for working class Americans.
It’s also worth noting that the success Donald Trump has had in selling an unrealistic revanchist platform probably had a lot to do with the success past US oligarchs have had in achieving their revanchist platforms. After all, if all the social and economic gains of the New Deal era up through the social revolutions of the 1960’s hadn’t triggered the giant revanchist freakout by the US elites that led to the Reagan revolution, South Strategy dog-whistle tactics, and the rest of the contemporary conservative movement over the past forty years, a large number of those economically devastated Trump supporters who are hoping for a Trumpian miracle in their own lives probably wouldn’t be nearly as susceptible to his revanchist appeal. So, in a sense, Trump’s fantasy revanchist future for the masses is the predictable response the very real revanchist past and present of economic contemporary elites:
“Powell, Harlow, and others sought to replace the old boys’ club with a more modern, sophisticated, and diversified apparatus — one capable of advancing employers’ interests even under the most difficult political circumstances. They recognized that business had hardly begun to tap its potential for wielding political power. Not only were the financial resources at the disposal of business leaders unrivaled. The hierarchical structures of corporations made it possible for a handful of decision-makers to deploy those resources and combine them with the massive but underutilized capacities of their far-flung organizations. These were the preconditions for an organizational revolution that was to remake Washington in less than a decade — and, in the process, lay the critical groundwork for winner-take-all politics.”
Now that’s how you do revanchism. And without the wild success of the elites’ socioeconic revanchism of the past generation (which no doubt helped Donald Trump) and the growing number of socioeconomically screwed workers still waiting for the revanchist “trickle-down” scam to work its magic, Trump’s revanchism for the masses would probably have little popular appeal.
So whether or not Donald Trump’s unrealistic revanchism is going to translate into political success, it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that the popular appeal of the revanchism he’s peddling is partly rooted in the popular discontent generating by the ongoing success of one of the most successful revanchist movements in American history. It’s reactionary fantasy revanchism in response to real revanchism. Could it work at the ballot box? Well, why not? Stranger things have happened.
If you’ve been pining for a joint Trump/Cruz dream ticket this November, never give up that cheery optimism. But you might want to give up that particular dream:
“What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, before the shooting? It’s horrible.”
Trump/Cruz 2016! It can still happen. Give it time. At least a couple months. Although if the evidence starts piling up that Ted Cruz’s dad really was working with Oswald in New Orleans in the period before JFK’s assassination that would certainly complicate selecting Cruz for Veep. What if Rafael gets frisky again?
So was there anything behind the National Enquirer’s claims? Well according to the article below, maybe, maybe not, it depends on who you ask:
“The tabloid hired photo experts who compared the elder Cruz’s photos from the late 1950s and early 1960s with the ones released by the Warren Commission. The man in the white shirt next to Oswald was never identified by the commission, and the Enquirer is now saying it was Cruz and blasted on its May 2 cover that “Ted Cruz Father Now Linked to JFK Assassination!””
So, at a minimum, the Rafael Cruz is being named as a guy the Warren Commission knew of, but was never able to identify, which would suggest quite a few people have looked over that photo over the years and that photo wasn’t just doctored by someone. But Rafael Cruz presumably wasn’t one of the possible suspects people were looking into all those years so it’s going to be interesting to see what, if any, additional evidence comes out now that photographic evidence of someone who appears to be Rafael Cruz is part of the national discourse.
It’s also going to be rather interesting to see what additional nuggets of this nature emerge from the National Enquirer over the rest of the campaign season. After all, for the first time ever, the National Enquirer endorsed a candidate this year. Guess which one:
“It’s widely known that Pecker, the Enquirer CEO, is a personal friend of Trump’s, a relationship an anonymous Enquirer source told New York magazine is “very close.” The tabloid endorsed Trump’s campaign for President in March, which appeared to be the first time it had ever endorsed a presidential candidate.”
That’s a pretty big endorsement. And not just for what it says about Donald Trump but also what it mean the National Enquirer won’t say about Donald Trump but could. The silence huuuge.
This is one of those Trumpian moments that’s got to give Roger Stone heartburn: When asked if Donald Trump really believes that Ted Cruz’s father was connected to Lee Harvey Oswald, Trump replied that of course he didn’t believe that. He just said it because he wasn’t the presumptive nominee at the moment he said it and apparently felt justified saying something he didn’t believe. And, yes, he actually said that:
“So I was not a presumptive winner at that time. I was going against them, they were going against me.”
Well, there goes the inevitable “the Clinton’s killed JFK Jr.” meme. Well, ok, the meme will no doubt be aggressively pushed in coming months since Roger Stone is writing a book making that assertion, but so will the “Trump will say anything when he’s in a campaign and he admits it” meme. And that’s a meme that doesn’t just apply to Trump’s forays into conspiratorial speculation. He basically admitted that he feels perfectly fine just throwing random stuff out there as long as he’s facing a political opponent.
So now, whenever Trump says anything that sounds outlandish, the default response is “oh yeah, and Rafael Cruz killed Kennedy, right?” That seems like Trump potentially committed a big political “oops” right there. Unless, of course, Rafael Cruz really was involved with Oswald and that subsequently gets confirmed, in which case Trump may have actually sort of helped expose the connection...and then covered it up by casually dismissing it as a crass political ploy. Oops.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee told lobbyist and donors on Thursday that candidates should feel free to skip the GOP convention in GOP. It was a rather notable declaration by a major Republican organization soon after Donald Trump become the party’s uncontested presumptive nominee, but not as notable as the declaration by the party’s highest elected official: Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House and the highest elected GOP official in the country, just refused to endorse Donald Trump. At least, he refused to endorse Trump “at this point”. He’s apparently waiting for Trump to unify “all wings of the Republican Party and the conservative movement” before he gives his endorsement. And as the article below also points out, this is on the same day freshman Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse called for a third-party run this fall as part of a last ditch attempt to maintain some sort of ‘purity’ within the conservative movement. So after Donald Trump’s historic surge to become the GOP’s most controversial nominee in decades, due in large part to the GOP base’s extreme loathing of the GOP “establishment” types like Paul Ryan, it looks like Trump won’t get the backing of the much loathed “establishment” unless he spend the next couple of months trying to placate it:
“A Republican strategist involved in Senate races told CNN that he’s worried Ryan has set up a situation that will be difficult for him to eventually get out of.”
Uh, yeah, that’s certainly something for Ryan to be worried about. Especially since Trump predictably responded later in the day with I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda.” If the ball is in Trump’s court, as Ryan sees it, it looks like Trump’s response is going to be take the ball and writing nasty words about GOPers like Paul Ryan on it.
So the question of whether or not Trump has earned Paul Ryan’s support is now staged to be one of the biggest open questions between now and GOP and convention in July. What could Trump do meet Ryan’s “unifying the party” criteria? Well, it’s worth pointing out that one of the main sources to GOP establishment concerns over Trump as the nominee doubles as an opportunity to “unify the party”...assuming unifying the party entails Trump disavowing the variously politically toxic elements of the party that have rallied around Trump and fueled his rise. For instance, the next time David Duke comes out in support of Trump, will another disavowal do the trick? It’s an open question:
““Antisemitism has no place our society, which needs to be united, not divided,” said Mr. Trump, who has been accused of using overtly racial appeals to motivate his largely white, working-class political base.”
Well, at least Trump isn’t unifying the GOP with white supremacists quite as much as before. That sounds like the kind of ‘step forward’ the GOP establishment is trying to extract from Trump as the price to pay for the party’s full backing. At least, it seems like the kind of ‘step forward’ that could put Trump on the path towards gaining that full party backing...assuming he doesn’t take two steps back just before he makes that step forward:
“I don’t have a message to the fans...A woman wrote an article that’s inaccurate.”
Of course he has no message to his fans. Except, apparently, that that they were doing the right thing in subjecting Julia Ioffe to an onslaught of images of her face edited onto Holocaust photos and caricatures of Jews being executed. That definitely appears to be part of his message to his fans. But it was also a message to folks like Paul Ryan that aren’t quite sure if they’re ready to climb aboard the Trump Train. So will Paul Ryan and the rest of the GOP that hasn’t yet purchased tickets for the Trump Train express be ready to purchase those tickets soon? It’ll be a trainwreck either way, but we’ll see.
Guess which Silicon Valley billionaire just ended up on the list released by California’s secretary of state of the Trump campaign’s list of selected GOP convention delegates. Hint: He really, really likes Ted Cruz. And called Trump “symptomatic of everything that is wrong with New York City,” back in 2014. But is apparently totally fine with Trump now:
“Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder, hedge-fund manager, and L.G.B.T.-rights advocate, is listed on the California ballot as a delegate for Trump at the upcoming Republican convention, according to a list of delegates submitted to California’s secretary of state by the front-runner’s campaign. He is listed as one of three representatives from California’s 12th congressional district. State election law dictates that delegates are selected by the candidates themselves, not the party, and the Trump campaign has been vetting potential delegates for several weeks.”
Yes, the guy who once penned a piece for Cato Unbound explaining why democracy and capitalism are incompatible now that women can vote is now a Trump delegate. Well, ok, that kind of fits. If Thiel wasn’t a right-wing nut job who always supports right-wing nut jobs this would almost be surprising, if only because of Thiel’s previous backing for Ted Cruz. And while this announcement probably had to sting Cruz a bit, at least Thiel’s checkbook will probably be there for Ted’s next presidential run.
So were there any other not-so-surprising surprises in the Trump campaigns list of California delegates? Yep, and for the next not-so-surprising surprise it’s worth keeping in mind what the above article pointed out: The Trump campaign is vetting these delegate lists:
“For many, many years, when I would say these things, other white people would call me names: ‘Oh, you’re a hatemonger, you’re a Nazi, you’re like Hitler,’...Now they come in and say, ‘Oh, you’re like Donald Trump.’ ”
Yep!
And now that Johnson claims he was very open about his White Nationalist pro-Trump activities on the application:
So was this just an innocent mistake, or this for real? Well, according to the Trump campaign, it’s all an innocent “database error”:
“But when the Daily News pointed out that Johnson was indeed listed on the California Secretary of State’s website as a delegate, Hicks said he had been included because of a “database error,” though she did not immediately clarify whether she was blaming an internal campaign error or the California Secretary of State’s office.”
While this could obviously be the latest iteration of the Trump campaign’s pattern of embracing, and then disavowing (and then reembracing) White Nationalist supporters, who knows, maybe all the political footsie has resulted in the Trump campaign’s staff getting infiltrated by white supremacists who are operating on their own. Either scenario seems very possible since they’re almost the same scenarios at this point. What a fun mystery.
Donald Trump had an unexpected prompt disavowal of one of his supporters who posted a desire to see President Obama executed for treason, as opposed to the distressed, delayed disavowals he’s issued over the vocal support from figures like David Duke. Perhaps this recent prompt disavowal had to do with the fact that the man calling for Obama’s execution is Trump’s long-time butler. It is a bit awkward. But if Trump’s rule for prompt disavowals is that he only has to disavow the support of those who have a long history with him, there’s some more belated prompt disavowing still to do:
“On his Twitter feed, Stone claimed that Hillary Clinton “must be brought to justice — arrested , tried , and executed for murder,” and called Bernie Sanders a “Soviet agent” who “should be arrested for treason and shot.” Stone also said philanthropist George Soros should be “detained, charged, tried, convicted and executed” and called for Connecticut governor Dan Malloy to be hanged.”
Ok, well at least we sort of know where the line is that gets a Trump disavowal if you cross it: if you’re close to Trump, and call for the execution of elected officials, you might get a prompt disavowal. It’s a fuzzy line.
No word yet on whether or not Trump has turned down Duke’s recent request to be Trump’s running mate. His eventual earlier disavowals of Duke presumably preclude a Trump/Duke ticket, but you never know!
Back in August, when Donald Trump was a relatively new occupant of the GOP’s still-full 2016 Clown Car and not yet its driver, Paul Krugman asked a question that simultaneously has many answers and yet no single answer: why is it that all of the GOP presidential candidate take such a deeply unpopular stances on things like “entitlement reform”, which everyone knows means gutting Social Security and Medicare? Why is that such a uniform stance when so many people are competing for the nomination? It’s a question that comes up election after election and the partial answers can range from ideological madness to a deep confidence in GOP vote-rigging. But for this election, thanks to Donald Trump’s candidacy, there was a slight modification to the question: why is it that every GOP candidate, except Donald Trump, is pledging to do something so unpopular despite the political costs?
“What this means, in turn, is that the eventual Republican nominee — assuming that it’s not Mr. Trump —will be committed not just to a renewed attack on Social Security but to a broader plutocratic agenda. Whatever the rhetoric, the GOP is on track to nominate someone who has won over the big money by promising government by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent.”
Well, the nominee is indeed Mr. Trump, so does that mean we’re going to see the first GOP presidential candidate in decades who isn’t going to have gutting entitlements one their agenda? After all, he has been pretty adamant about not wanting to touch Social Security.
Well, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about here, and if Trump, the politician, is adamant about anything, it’s being adamant about being adamant about everything...and yet simultaneously vague. And that’s part of why he can be adamant about anything at all, including being adamant about the stuff that’s the opposite of what he was already adamant about:
“Cutting the popular social insurance programs would “probably” be necessary, Trump said, “unless I’m really 100 percent right about the ripoff of our country by other countries.”.”
Huh. So it turns out that Trump isn’t simply demanding that Mexico pay for his planned border wall. Mexico is effectively going to have to start helping paying our Medicare bills. Or else Medicare gets the axe. Yikes. He’s going to have to eat A LOT of taco bowls for that kind of diplomatic push.
But assuming President Trump can’t somehow use tariffs and mass deportations to close any holes in the long-term entitlement programs, does that mean grandma is definitely going on the cat food diet? Well, when you factor in that most of the hysteria about a looming entitlement program crisis is divorced from reality and it wouldn’t actually be that difficult a fix, then there is hope for grandma.
Although, when you also factor in that Donald’s Trump’s proclaimed tax plan would cost the trillions of dollars in revenues and probably induce a general budget crisis, than perhaps we shouldn’t be so hopeful. Especially after Donald Trump’s policy adviser, Sam Clovis, signaled to the pro-austerity Peter g. Person Foundation that, contrary to Trump’s repeated assertions otherwise, a Trump administration would indeed be open to modifying the programs...but only after Trump’s tax plan gets passed. His tax plan that’s projected to cut tax revenues by $10 trillion over the next decade:
“Clovis said Trump’s economic policies would spur growth, and he estimated a $4.5 trillion to $7 trillion surplus over 10 years. The conservative Tax Foundation has estimated Trump’s tax plan, which calls for simplifying the tax code and slashing corporate rates, would cut U.S. tax revenues by about $10 trillion.”
So Trump’s $10 trillion tax cut is projected by the Trump advisers to stimulate growth so much that it actual leads to a $5–7 trillion surplus over the next decade. Which, of course, means that those entitlements programs are going to be looking awfully unaffordable should this latest iteration of supply-side tax cut mania doesn’t actually result in some sort of miracle economy. Sorry grandma.
And note the new advisors he’s brought in to help flesh out his plans:
That’s right, in order to address the $10 trillion price tag for Trumps tax package, he’s enlisted Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow to “retool” the plan. So long grandma. It’s a reminder that when Donald Trump takes over as the driver of the GOP’s 2016 Clown Car, the car isn’t otherwise empty now that he had no more opponents. It just gets filled with new minion clowns.
Fox News host Megyn Kelly interviewed Donald Trump for her new interview show on the Fox broadcast network. It was unclear what to expect from the interview given the past sparring between the two, but it turns out we actually learned something about Trump and what makes him tick. Or at least we learned what he would like us to believe makes him tick. And based on his comments, it would appear that Donald Trump would like us to believe that Donald Trump behaves like Donald Trump because he’s wounded and in need of healing...and that’s why he wounds others:
“To look back and say, “Gee, I wish I didn’t do that’ – I don’t think that’s good. I don’t even think in a certain way that’s healthy”
Remorse is unhealthy, whereas hurting others to heal yourself is just something one does. You have to wonder what other ethical gems are hiding in that psyche.
But also keep in mind that, while comments like this might make him come off as kind of a psycho, it also makes him a humanized, wounded psycho that only does what he does because of all the pain he’s suffering. He hurts because he’s been hurt. Very deeply apparently. And fighting for survival.
So remember, the next time you see an advertisement that’s basically a montage of hurtful, degrading Trump comments, that’s just Donald trying to process all the hurt he’s feeling so he can survive another day. He’s actually quite deep and feels deeply. Except for remorse. He doesn’t feel that. But he feels lots of other emotions, hence all the hurt and subsequent hurting of others.
You have to hand it to him: No one sells sociopathy quite like The Donald. It’s pretty brilliant.
The Trump campaign had another pair of “oops” moment this week regarding its delegates when one of its Maryland delegates was indicted for the unlawful transport of explosive materials, the illegal possession of a machine gun, and using a minor to produce pornography. And then there’s the campaign’s latest “white pride” delegate who was just profile in the Chicago Tribune. Oops. And this is all, of course, in the wake of the revelation that William Johnson, leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party was selected as one of the campaign’s California delegates due to a “database error”. So what’s next? Well, if William Johnson’s predictions in a recent interview are accurate, what’s next is that Trump will win the election in November at which point we’ll learn that there were more “database errors” who will be a lot more willing to self-identify themselves as “proud” database errors:
“At Johnson’s request, the AFP delegate for Trump agreed to be interviewed by Mother Jones, but later backed out. Johnson said there are additional white nationalist Trump delegates who have been in touch with movement leaders, though “I don’t actually know who they are. There are people who are surreptitious,” he said.”
It sure sounds like the open white nationalists are having success at infiltrating the almost open white nationalist Trump campaign which, itself, is sort of an insurgency within the not quite but almost as openly white nationalist Republic Party. It’s been a good year for white nationalism (on top of a pretty good few decades).
So if the white nationalists have been joining the Trump campaign with such ease, you have to wonder what else is hiding in that campaign? And what possible impact could the Trump unorthodox delegate selections have in the actual election? That’s hard to say, although if this trickle of trouble remains steady throughout the next few months it seems like it could have at least some sort of effect on the public’s perception of Trump’s character and judgement. Don’t forget that William Johnson wasn’t hiding his views at all when that “database error” happened and the guy had been running pro-Trump white nationalist robocalls for months. But whatever impact the Trumpian delegate selection process has on how the public perceives Trump’s agenda, it’s probably not going to have as big an impact as the Trump campaign’s decision to not even vet itself:
“Marital infidelity, connections to mob-related persons, bankruptcies, the hiring of undocumented workers, policy flip-flops, deals gone bad, legal troubles—Trump’s life is an opposition researcher’s dream. That was no secret to his political lieutenants, who prior to his announcement discussed the need to conduct a deep dive into the tycoon’s background. The point was to do more than Google searches and perusing of the many books written on Trump—and to instead mount a full forensic examination of everything Donald. Especially before anyone else did. (Trump’s aides had heard a rumor that wealthy conservative donors, perhaps including the Koch brothers, were underwriting a private opposition research effort aimed at the former reality TV star.)”
Yep, it’s not just the Trump delegation that’s filled with yet to be disclosed secrets. Trump’s own life is filled with yet to be disclosed secrets. And that’s no secret.
And that’s all part of why the Trump campaign’s lack of vetting Trump himself could be such a fascinating election issue: When you consider that the campaign seasons in the lead up to an actual vote is the period when democracies are supposed to vet their potential leaders, the Trump campaign’s obvious vetting issues, combined with the constant flip-flopping and secrecy of Trump’s policy stances, are a great reminder that a vote for Trump at this point is a vote against vetting. It’s a vote against a lot of other things too, but also vetting.
One of the big questions of the day that’s probably going to be a question historians are probably going to ask for centuries to come about the character of humanity’s 21st century leadership is whether or not the global elites basically believed that man-made climate change was a real phenomena and just chose to play dumb and do what it takes to ensure nothing meaningful is done to prevent it or reduce the impact. Because if it turns out that folks like, say, Donald Trump really do believe that man-made climate change science is pointing towards potentially catastrophic scenarios but chose for whatever reason to tell the public that it was all a giant hoax, well, that would basically be super-villain behavior.
And if it turns out that a whole bunch of the people in Trump’s social strata are engaged in the same malicious nihilism, well, then we have a league of super-villains trying to destroy the planet. And the greater the oncoming environmental catastrophe, the greater the incentives future historians will have to ask the question of whether or not humanity’s 21st century elites intentionally set the planet on an collision course with doom. It’s going to be a pretty compelling future question. Especially if it also turns out that those same elites who were telling us it’s all hoax were quietly preparing their personal empires to deal with catastrophic climate change:
“The statements in the filings contradict positions publicly held by Trump, who has weighed in repeatedly on climate change in recent years – mostly to dismiss it outright. In 2012, he tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” though he has since insisted the tweet was a joke. In 2013, he tweeted, “We should be focused on clean and beautiful air-not expensive and business closing GLOBAL WARMING‑a total hoax!” In January 2014, he tweeted, “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.””
Huh. So at the same time Donald Trump is advocating policies that will destroy coastal real estate around the world, he’s trying to make his own golf courses climate-change proof. Well, at least future historians will be able to give him plenty of credit for super-villain league ambitions. Less credit for super-villain league originality.
Buffalo New York Congressman Chris Collins, one of the Trump campaign’s allies in congress who has emerged as a surrogate or sorts, dropped a bit of a bombshell last week when he suggested that Trump’s proposed wall with Mexico was really just rhetoric. Well, not quite rhetoric. There will be a wall, according to Collins, but it will be a “virtual wall” and undocumented immigrants will be virtually deported through the virtual wall:
“They go out that door, they go in that room, they get their work papers, Social Security number, then they come in that door, and they’ve got legal work status but are not citizens of the United States...So there was a virtual deportation as they left that door for processing and came in this door.”
Wow. That’s quite a twist. And the best part is that Mexico will probably be more than happy to pay virtual money for this virtual wall. It’s win, win, win!
Except it’s not a win for the anti-Latino segment of the Trumpian hordes that’s been salivating over the prospect of rounding up and deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants for years, and that’s a pretty big segment. So how will they react if President Trump makes virtual mass deportations across the virtual wall his method for making good on his campaign pledge? It seems like they would be non-virtually livid.
But, of course, the real disappoint with that kind of virtual betrayal of his supporters will be taking place within the broader context of everything else that’s going on during a putative Trump presidency. And there’s nothing stopping Trump from doing an array of other anti-Latino/anti-immigrant actions to sort of make up for the fact that his key campaign pledge that propelled him to victory was a sham all along. For instance, what if, instead of building a wall to keep Mexicans out of the US, Trump chose a VP that could dedicate his presidency to building a wall between Democratic voters and the voting booth. Would that be enough “red meat” to keep a disappointed base from feeling like they were just bamboozled by another billionaire? Based on the Trump supporters in the following article, choosing a VP who would build that wall between voters and the voting booth would probably go a long way. Especially if the VP is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach:
“Kobach, a former aide to then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft, was the lead author of immigration laws passed by Arizona and Alabama in recent years, which are seen as the strictest immigration measures in the nation. The laws require law enforcement to try to determine a person’s legal status during any legal stop if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person is undocumented.”
That’s right, Kansas’s secretary of state is not only a one-man voting rights wrecking crew. He was also the architect of Arizona’s notorious SB-20170 “papers please” law which was sponsored by neo-Nazi fellow traveler Russell Pearce and would have basically forced latinos to carry around proof of citizenship wherever they go or face potential arrest and jailing. You can see why the white nationalists describe above would LOVE Kobach for VP. But he also seems like a pretty good general fit for the Trump campaign in general. Kobach certainly aligns well with the Trumpian component of the national zeitgeist.
Of course, this all assumes that Rep Collins was correct and Donald Trump really does have no plans for anything other than a virtual wall with virtual mass deportations. But given the absurdity of Trumps proposals, it’s hard to rule Rep Collins’s suggestion out. And while we proles may not get to know Trumps real intentions before the election, Trump himself presumably knows if his wall pledge was a real or virtual pledge. And if Trump does know it’s a virtual pledge, he also knows he’s going to have to really do something dramatic and really mean to Latinos in order to please the Trumpian hordes once they find out they’ve been fooled. So, while Kobach as VP might be a little too risky for the general election, Kobach for attorney general or something along those lines could be the kind of post-election decision a president-elect Trump could make this Fall in anticipation of the big “virtual” disappointments he’d eventually have to admit.
It’s all one of those unpleasant thoughts that makes the prospect of a Trump presidency that much more unpleasant, although it would be kind of nice if his mass deportation/wall plans really are virtual plans. And should we end up with a Trump president, keep in mind that there is still hope. Granted, it’s virtual hope, but that’s pretty good.
While Donald Trump may be branding himself as an anti-politician who cuts through the political bluster to get things done it’s easy to forge that he’s actually a highly skilled politician. For instance, when you can convince both neo-Nazis calling for the death of Jewish reporters critical of Trump and Jewish conservatives that you’re secretly on their side you’re obviously highly adept at strategic bluster. And, in this case, strategic silence:
“I don’t think he’s going to go out and hurt Jews — between Ivanka, and the grandchildren ... that’s not going to happen...He’s not Hitler.”
Wow. Not Hitler. That’s a high bar. Still, Trump does seem to have a magic touch. At least with stalwart GOPer Jews. Maybe not so much with the rest of the GOP-leaning Jewish electorate but we’ll see.
Either way, given the reality that one of the lasting impacts of someone like Hitler is a historical lowering of the bar for all leaders (“hey, at least [insert horribly destructive leader X] isn’t Hitler!”), it’s worth keeping in mind that by breaking the contemporary GOP mold and openly embracing or at least quietly tolerating the neo-Nazi faction of American politics, Donald Trump has basically lowered the contemporary bar for the foreseeable future for the GOP. Going forward, any Republican politician who simply says, “I don’t agree with the KKK and I won’t hesitate to make that clear,” is now a moderate Republican who you apparently shouldn’t be scared to elect. Because, hey, [insert horribly destructive GOP candidate X] is no Donald Trump, but just a traditional, respectable Republican. There’s nothing to fear. In other words, if Donald Trump wins, the GOP gets one more chance to destroy the nation from the executive branch. But if he loses, and loses big, the entire GOP going forward can claim to be ‘moderate’, or at least more moderate than Trump, simply by condemning neo-Nazis.
Donald Trump is proving to be quite a politician. And at least he’s not Hitler!
William Johnson, the leader of the white nationalist “American Freedom Party” party which has been robocalling for Trump, is reportedly begging the Republican National Committee to allow him to volunteer for the Trump campaign at the party’s convention, promising to be respectful and not make a scene now that he’s no longer an official Trump delegate.
Along with the robocalling, it’s a somewhat puzzling tactic to keeping publicly clamoring for an official position in the Trump campaign for someone like Johnson who claims to be one of Trump’s biggest fans. One the one hand, it should be obvious to someone like Johnson that the open embrace by Trump of an overt white nationalist like Johnson might not actually help Johnson’s favorite candidate to get elected (didn’t he get the memo?). But on the other hand, perhaps Johnson has already come to the conclusion that an open Trumpian embrace of a white nationalist like Johnson really doesn’t make that much of a difference at this point. It wouldn’t be an unreasonable conclusion at this point:
“Here’s what happens. We’re in front of a very hostile judge. The Judge was appointed by Barack Obama ... Frankly he should recuse himself ... This should have been dismissed on summary judgment easily. Everybody says it, but I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel ... The judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great, I think that’s fine ... You know what? I think the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump when I give all these jobs, OK? ... I’m telling you, this court system, judges in this court system, federal court, they ought to look into Judge Curiel. Because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace, OK?”
So that’s one more little preview of what a Trump Presidency would be like: If you’re Hispanic, any criticisms of President Trump can be invalidated simply by pointing out that you’re Hispanic. And if you’re a Hispanic judge, you should probably recuse yourself of any cases involving the Trump administration for never quite articulated reasons having to do with you being Hispanic. But still please understand that President Trump loves Hispanics and they love him back. It’s just you that doesn’t love him...because you’re Hispanic.
And if you’re Hispanic and can’t still quite make sense of all that, don’t strain yourself too much. It’ll be crystal clear to the target audiences.
One of the more interesting and frightening behavioral patterns of today’s GOP is that when the party has a bad presidential election year, a meme begins to take hold in the right-wing media and base that the party lost because it wasn’t ‘conservative’ enough. Sure, the party itself might engage in something like the “GOP autopsy” of 2013 that concluded that the party wasn’t inclusive enough to reach out to minority groups. But the message that takes hold within the care right-wing media and voter base is that the candidates were too wishy-washy and didn’t portray bold, pure vision that could attract new voters. In other words, the candidates weren’t bat sh#t crazy enough.
So with the 2016 race shaping into one where a number of the top elected GOP officials, most notably House Speaker Paul Ryan, have only barely endorsed Donald Trump, it’s going to be very interesting to see what sort of meme might emerge assuming Trump doesn’t become President elect Trump this November. Will a loss be because Donald Trump’s loudmouthed bigot shtick didn’t actually sell that well? Or will a loss be framed as the of the party leadership’s tepid embrace of the GOP’s bold, courageous new leader? We’ll have to wait and see. But as the article below makes clear, if Trump does lose, there’s probably going to be no shortage of excuses and rage for that loss directed at Paul Ryan less than enthusiastic Trumpian support:
“Ryan it seems is beginning his fight to preserve the conservatism he believes should be at the center of the party’s identity just as Trump is redefining what it means to be a Republican.This week Ryan and Trump officially came together to unite the party, but these policy papers will likely reveal their visions to be very different still.”
That’s right, Paul Ryan is trying to retain and reinvigorate the contemporary GOP’s facade of ‘conservatism’ that masks the party’s oligarchical agenda right at the same time Donald Trump is trying to create a whole new facade to mask the party’s oligarchical agenda.
It’s quite a conundrum for the party’s top elected official. Especially when you consider that Paul Ryan is obviously salivating at the prospect of his own 2020 bid for the White House. If Trump, Ryan is the obvious leader of the party and front runner for 2020. But if Trump loses and trashes the GOP’s national image in the process, Ryan’s 2020 bid is going to be a lot harder. And while Ryan could scuffle with Trump as a sort of back up plan to salvage the party’s traditional image in the wake of a big Trump defeat, that also sets Paul Ryan up to be the big scapegoat who cost Trump the election if Trump loses but just barely loses. There just aren’t any great options for someone in Paul Ryan’s position.
And that’s all part of why it’s going to be very interesting to see how Paul Ryan handles the task of simultaneously back Trump while keeping his distance with an eye on 2020. For instance, when Donald Trump attacks the judge in his Trump University lawsuit for bias because the judge’s parents were Mexican, it’s not really clear what Paul Ryan should do. Sure, ethically it’s pretty clear. But for someone in Paul Ryan’s position, it’s not really clear, which is why we probably shouldn’t be surprised that Ryan just condemned Trump’s comments about the judge in an interview as being a form of logic Ryan just can’t understand and then talked about he still endorses him:
“Ryan went on to say Trump “clearly says and does things I don’t agree with” and said he would continue to speak up if necessary.”
Yep, Paul Ryan completely disagrees with Donald Trump’s racist attacks against a judge, calling it “reasoning I don’t relate to.” But that hasn’t changed his Trump endorsement because Republicans need a “willing partner” in the White House to help advance their policies. And if that “willing partner” is an open bigot, well, so be it! At the same time, Ryan pledges to continue to speak up if necessary. It’s presumably the kind of bold leadership that should do wonders in the 2020 primaries.
And when it comes to condemning Donald Trump’s open bigotry while still endorsing him, it appears that Paul Ryan will have plenty of more options to demonstrate that kind of bold leadership this year:
“I’ve had terrible rulings, I’ve been treated very unfairly. Now, this judge is of Mexican heritage...I’m building a wall. I’m building a wall.”
Say hello to the new Trumpian GOP facade: If you oppose or criticize the GOP, it’s because you’re just angry about something the GOP did or wants to do to your particular demographic, and therefore you’re a bigot. Or, rather, an anti-bigot bigot and that anti-bigot bigotry invalidates your criticism of the GOP.
And while House Speaker Paul Ryan claims to vehemently disagree with above reasoning, he still endorses the guy pushing it. It’s complicated reasoning. At least, he still endorsed Trump before Trump doubled down on the “you can’t judge me if you’re ethnically Mexican” argument. But now that it appears this is going to be a central theme to the Trump campaign we get to see if Ryan sticks to his pledge to continue to speak up if necessary.
So is it once again necessary according to Ryan? We’ll find out. But as Ryan certainly knows, the more he trashes Trump, justifiably or not, the more likely it is that Paul Ryan ends up being the scapegoat in 2017. At least if Trump loses a close race.
But if Ryan makes criticizing Trump a regular thing and Trump loses BIG, Ryan gets to claim the “I told you so” mantel and can walk away from a 2016 electoral disaster even more likely to be the 2020 GOP nominee. Will he do so? It’s possible, but there’s going to be a lot more complicated reasoning involved in that leadership decision.
With Donald Trump making the Mexican heritage of the judge overseeing lawsuit over the charges that Trump University was a scam, it’s easy to forget that there have been multiple Trump University scam investigations. We already knew about the 2013 investigation where Florida’s GOP attorney general dropped the investigation following a $25,000 Trump donation to her super PAC. But now we’re learning about another state investigation that was dropped in 2010 for reasons a former Texas state regulator is saying could have only been political given the strength of the evidence he had acquired. And the person who ordered this state regulator to drop the investigation is Texas’s then-Attorney General and current governor Greg Abbott. But we may not learn too much more about this case of apparent political corruption since Texas’s current Attorney General put a gag order on the former state regulator:
“It had to be political in my mind because Donald Trump was treated differently than any other similarly situated scam artist in the 16 years I was at the consumer protection office.”
While this latest Trump University revelation will no doubt continue to feed into the growing image problem Trump has a giant scam artist, part of what makes this particular charge of political corruption possibly more interesting than the case involving Pam Bondi in Florida is that Bondi dropped those charges in 2013, a couple years after Donald Trump had already established himself as the King of the Obama ‘Birther’ movement in 2011. But the case in Texas was dropped in 2010.
So you have to wonder, given the fact that Trump was undoubtedly aware by 2011 that he was potentially facing all sorts of lawsuits in a variety of states, was Trump’s sudden political realigned into a hard core GOPer in recent years driven largely by a desire to make him politically indispensable to at least one political party in order to avoid at least some of the potentially embarrassing lawsuits? Because when you look at the structure of Trump’s business empire, selling the Trump “brand” is a pretty big part of that empire and a series of lawsuits and investigations that label Trump University a scam could have seriously damaged the value of the “Trump” branding component of his web of businesses.
In other words, could it be that when Trump called President Obama possibly the “greatest scam in the history of our country” in 2011 over the ‘Birther’ claims, that Trump just engaged in a giant scam in order to create political value for himself so he could get political protection from the various investigations into his scams? That’s probably worth investigating.
Uh oh. House Speaker Paul Ryan’s cold feet about his Donald Trump endorsement are getting colder now that Trump is making his attacks against the Mexican American judge overseeing some of the Trump University lawsuits a central emerging theme of the Trump campaign. And with Trump’s rhetoric only heating up, Ryan and the rest of the GOP had better find political shelter soon because that heated up rhetoric is only going to make their feet colder and it’ll be a lot hard for Dr. FrankenGoper to run from his Trump Monster creation with frostbitten feet:
“But, Ryan said that Republicans would still be better off with Trump in the White House than Hillary Clinton.”
Oh no, he’s still endorsing Trump after repeatedly railing against him as a racist! Are his cold feet going numb? Perhaps. Or perhaps someone needs to inform Speaker Ryan that having a heart of ice doesn’t make his feet immune to frostbite. Especially when Trump is reportedly instructing his campaign to turn his racially inflaming rhetoric into a full fledged racist campaign brush fire:
““The people asking the questions—those are the racists,” Trump reportedly said, seeming irritated. “I would go at ’em.””
Yes, it appears that Trump himself is now overriding his campaign strategists and instructing his staff to aggressively label as the REAL racists any reporters who raise questions about the racist nature of his attacks on Judge Curiel. So “I know you are, but what am I?” is now apparently the official response to charges of racism by the GOP’s new standard bearer. Somehow it doesn’t seem like that’s going to warm Paul Ryan’s poor frigid feet.
Let’s hope no amputations end up being required once this is all over. It’ll be hard for the GOPers to walk the populist oligarch tightrope without all their toes. But it’s hard to see how some sort of surgery won’t eventually be necessary if those cold feet don’t warm up sooner or later.
And preferably sooner, because as the article below suggests, it would appear that Trump’s staff is already taking his orders to heart and the Trumpian rhetoric is only heating up and expanding beyond mere racism. And that means the GOPers’ ice cold feet have an arctic blast heading their way:
“He is not backing down because the media wants to pressure, call him names, call him racist...Doesn’t matter which GOP individual comes out, they’re not there and they don’t have the facts. That’s why Mr. Trump is the nominee.”
Katrina Pierson does have a point: Mr. Trump is the nominee, which would suggest that the cold feet GOPers like Paul Ryan are feeling isn’t actually shared by the GOP electorate.
So if anything can warm Paul Ryan’s cold feet up, perhaps the best method is for Ryan and the rest of the GOP leadership to keep in mind that their fears of Donald Trump destroying the GOP by rebranding it as a haven for racist misogynists who have fallen under the racist and misogynistic siren’s song of a billionaire are probably largely unfounded fears because that’s what the party was already viewed as by the public at large long before Trump threw his hat in the ring. So there’s a good chance Donald Trump won’t make the GOP’s public image significantly worse than it already was. Maybe it will just be a slightly different flavor of a now familiar kind of bad taste.
In other words, it’s hard for the GOP’s general public image to get much worse so there isn’t really a lot for the GOP to lose here. . So, in a way, because the public image that Paul Ryan and the rest of the GOP leadership can’t really get much worse, the GOP leadership’s current Trumpian conundrums could be worse. Hopefully increased awareness of the GOP already toxic image will warm Paul Ryan’s poor cold feet.
Check out Donald Trump’s bank of choice: Deutsche Bank! As the article below points out, it’s a long relationship going back to the early 90’s, with at least $2.5 billion lent. But there have been past differences too, especially following the crash of 2008 when Trump tried to wriggle out of his debt by claiming the crash was an act of god. And as a consequence of all the the commercial lending arm of Deutsche Bank basically wants nothing to do with Trump. But that’s ok, since the Private Bank branch has decided Trump is an ok customer. Or at least a good enough customer to lend Trump $300 million in recent years:
“But not everyone within Deutsche Bank wanted to sever the relationship. The company’s private-banking arm, which caters to ultrarich families and individuals, picked up the slack, lending well over $300 million to Trump entities in the following years.”
It’s nice now they were able to find a way to kiss and make up. And continue lending Trump hundreds of millions of dollars. Presumably there’s a leadership quality on display there. But the fact that Donald Trump recently borrowed a large sum a money to one of the financial world’s biggest serial regulatory violators does seem like the kind of thing that could become an issue in the 2016? At least it’s seems very possible. Especially since Deutsche Bank still faces multiple investigations, still really, really wants to see the post-crisis regulations go away, and Trump still has at least $100 million that it’s waiting for Trump to pay back:
“Trump and Deutsche Bank patched things up, and hundreds of millions of dollars in credit subsequently flowed from the German behemoth to Trump. But with all his debt to Deutsche Bank coming due before the end of what would be Trump’s second term as president, there’s more to this relationship than what’s on the financial ledger. The American public, too, has much at stake when it’s possible that the next president will be deeply in debt to a global financial player that has been caught trying to use its influence to rig the financial system”
That would indeed appear to be a notable conflict of interest. Especially since it could lead to decisions that aren’t just super helpful to Deutsche Bank but all of Wall Street. That’s not very populist.
Still, since Trump is a billionaire, he’ll presumably just argue that there’s no need for the public to be concerned about that potential conflict of interest because why should he care about $100 million when he has billions? We’ll see how that argument goes if it comes to that. It might not go well.
With the US once again looking into the causes of act of home-grown ISIS-inspired terrorism following the slaughter in Orlando, it probably isn’t going to come as a surprise that that some sort of toxic mix of mental illness and poisonous religious fundamentalism once again appear to be the twin forces driving this attack since anyone that did what Omar Mateen did would have to be either completely insane and/or have a really skewed notion of what constitutes a pious life. So the fact that the Mateen’s ex-wife describes him as a violent and unstable individuals is probably the least surprising aspect of this whole tragedy. And while some sort of deeply religious home life would also be expected for a case like this, the particular religious background of this shooter is indeed pretty unusual:
“After watching his videos — none of which were recorded in English — CBS News’ Ahmad Mukhtar said it seemed possible that Seddique Mateen is delusional. “He thinks he runs a government in exile and will soon take the power in Kabul in a revolution,” notes Mukhtar.’ ”
Ok, so it looks like the father of the gunman has his own pro-Taliban Afghan political TV show that and is either leading a secret “transitional revolutionary government” of Afghanistan with US congressional support, or he’s totally delusional. Keep in mind that the shooter praised the Tsarnaeve brothers in his 911 phone call during the attack and reportedly told co-workers previosly that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers, although the FBI later concluded that no direct relationship existed. Still, it’s worth nothing the strange ‘spooky’ echos between the US intelligence connections Tsarnaev family and the bizarre “transitional Afghan government with US intelligence help” claims of Mateen’s father.
So trying to make sense out of insanity is basically unavoidable with an event like this and while Omar Mateen was clearly a homicidal mad man, whether or not his father is also delusional or running some sort of strange scam/propaganda operation is an open question at this point. Unfortunately, that’s not the only open question of an individual’s sanity raised by these events. Yes, Donald Trump shared some thoughts on the Orlando massacre:
““They cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words radical Islamic terrorism,” he continued. “There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.””
That’s right: because President Obama doesn’t breathlessly repeat the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” in the wake of an act of radical Islamic terrorist, it must mean he’s on the radical Islamic terrorists’ side! It’s the only explanation! This is coming from the guy with a nearly 50/50 chance of becoming the most powerful person on the planet in November.
So it looks like the GOP’s general response to the Orlando attack is going to be to use the opportunity to engage of one more round of “Obama is a secret Muslim” bashing. Real helpful.
But since Hillary Clinton is already using the term “radical Islamic terrorist” (while mocking the Right’s fixation with it), the question is raised of what the Trump campaign is going to use to ascribe guilt for the attack to Hillary. And whenever there’s a question about what kind of sleazy attack Donald Trump might use to further debase our national discourse
Roger Stone has the answer:
” “I also think that now that Islamic terrorism is going to be front and center, there’s going to be a new focus on whether this administration, the administration of Hillary Clinton at State, was permeated at the highest levels by Saudi intelligence and others who are not loyal Americans,” Stone said on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily.” “I speak specifically of Huma Abedin, the right-hand woman, now vice-chairman or co-chairman of vice—of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.””
Hillary’s top aide is a secret Saudi agent! It’s no wonder Obama, a secret ISIS sympathizer, hired her. And now you know.
Of course, using that same logic, what does that say about Trump’s loyalties? After all, Bill Clinton reportedly had a phone call with Donald Trump last year just weeks before Trump announced he was running when Bill may have encouraged Donald Trump to run for president. So, according to Trump/Stone-style speculation, isn’t it reasonable for us to assume that Donald Trump is also a secret ISIS/Saudi agent, perhaps working to destroy the GOP’s reputation forever so that Obama and Hillary can usher in Sharia Law over a then-discredited opposition party? And might Trump’s calls for a ban on Muslims, combined with his general insanity, also be an attempt to actually weaken the international “soft power” of the United States and lend credibility and status to groups like ISIS and Wahhabist theocracy?
In other words, are the American people really supposed to believe that Donald Trump is acting the way he acts and can’t stop trying to debase America’s highest office? There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.
@Pterrafractyl–
I have many more questions than answers about this incident, but a number of things come to mind as points of inquiry:
a)–Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend, Mr.Todashev, spent time in Florida, whether or not Mateen actually knew the Tsarnaev brothers.
b)–The Nusra Front (the cadre with which an associate of Mateen enlisted) is part of a loose coalition of jihadist groups backed by elements of U.S.intel.
c)–In FTR #392 (https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-392-desert-flowers-the-bushes-of-arabia/), we noted Saudi money and jihadi elements present in Orlando. Remember, also, in this context, that Disney’s resorts division received much financial support from Prince Alwaleed. Shortly after being cited as an alleged Al-Qaeda financier by Zaccharias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker,” Al-Waleed got out of “the business business” and donated his wealth to charity.
d)–The investigation into Sami al-Arian, the key George W. Bush supporter who claimed he won Florida for Dubya in 2000, precipitated the Operation Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002. See: https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-538-bushs-buddy%e2%80%94the-acquittal-of-sammy-the-aryan/
e)–The imam of the mosque at which Mateen worshipped is, take a deep breath, pro-Trump! http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/283218-orlando-shooters-imam-is-pro-trump
Keep up the great work!
Dave
@Dave: And the twists keep coming with this case. Now we’re learning that Omar Mateen apparently admitted he was gay to ex-wife, or at least had a history of going to gay clubs, before they were married. In addition, a former classmate used to go to gay bars with Mateen and at one point Mateen tried to pick him up. Mateen was also known to use a gay dating app was seen as a patron at the club he attacked, Pulse, at least a dozen times before. So it’s looking like Omar Mateen was either engaged in some very in depth and long term ‘scouting’ to plan an attack on the gay community or he was a confused young gay man that somehow morphed into an extremely self-loathing suicidal anti-gay gay jihadist.
Adding to all this is that Mateen’s second wife, Noor Salman, who he was still married to when he did this attack, claims that she knew about Mateen’s plans and even drove him to Pulse and a gun store at one point. She also claims she tried to talk him out of it, but it’s looking like she’s probably going to be facing charges for not turning him in.
And as the article indicated by the below, Salman appears to come from a deeply religious family, with one anecdote her mother refusing to dine at the house of family friends due to the fact they owned dogs. At the same time, it sounds like Mateen wouldn’t actually allow Salman’s mother visit her in Florida.
So in addition to Mateen’s father’s politics, which appear to be less jihadist and more along the lines of “the enemy of Pakistan is my friend [including the Taliban]”, Mateen’s current wife Noor, who appears to be a co-conspirator of sorts in his plans, came from a deeply religious household. Whether or not she turns out to a fully radicalized wife like Tashfeen Malik in the San Bernardino shooting or more of a passive assistant remains to be seen. But now we know that Omar Mateen’s increasingly bizarre attack on Orlando’s gay community, a community he may have been trying to join for years, wasn’t concocted and executed completely on his own:
“That’s because she told the FBI she was with her husband, Omar Mateen, when he bought ammunition and a holster, several officials familiar with the case told NBC News. She also told the FBI that she once drove him to Pulse nightclub, because he wanted to check it out. And even though she told the FBI she tried to talk him out of it, NBC News reported that authorities are now considering whether Salman failed to tell them what she knew before the attack.”
So whether or not it turns out that Omar Mateen was being directly influenced and radicalized by someone else close to him, it’s looking increasingly like Mateen was a self-loathing gay Muslim and, for reasons yet to be determined, he decided to basically commit suicide by attacking the very same gay community that could have been a safe-haven from exactly the kind of hate-filled, and often self-hate-filled, people Mateen turned into.
The Democratic National Committee shared some unpleasant IT news yesterday: two separate groups of Russian hackers hacked the DNC’s server. Both groups appear to be working separately. One group had access for a year, while a second group only recently joined in on the fun. And what did that second group seem most interested in? The DNC’s opposition research on Donald Trump:
“The other, which the firm had named Fancy Bear, broke into the network in late April and targeted the opposition research files. It was this breach that set off the alarm. The hackers stole two files, Henry said. And they had access to the computers of the entire research staff — an average of about several dozen on any given day.”
Huh. That’s an interesting target. Especially given the Putin-Trump bromance. But also keep in mind that the report indicated that the Clinton, Trump, and various GOP campaigns were also targeted. There just hasn’t been any info on those hacking attempts or outright hacks publicly released yet. So it seems unlikely that this was part of some pro-Trump Kremlin Watergate operation.
At the same time, it’s also worth keeping in mind that there is one very big reason why the Russian government might actually be VERY interested in the Democrat’s opposition research on Donald Trump: Donald Trumps real estate empire has done a lot of business with Russian oligarchs. And it’s the kind of business that typically raises the eyebrows of money-laundering investigators:
“In February, a member of Russia’s ruling party, Vladimir Pekhtin, was forced to resign from the Duma when a blogger published documents showing that he owned three Miami properties worth more than a combined $2 million. Pekhtin’s holdings were especially embarrassing because he had not disclosed his overseas properties in his annual financial disclosure filing, as is legally required under a bill he had written as chairman of the Duma’s ethics committee. In Russia, which saw illegal capital outflows of more than $200 billion from 1994 to 2011, charges of corruption and lavish spending overseas have become major political issues.”
Well, while there are plenty of other possible reasons why opposition research on Trump was specifically targeted in the most recent hack, the fact that the Kremlin is cracking down on illegal capital outflows and Donald Trump is apparently the king of foreign high-end real estate in the Miami market which is know for being a money-laundering haven and has a heavy Russian presence seems like a pretty big reason why the Kremlin, or any Russian oligarch who has done business with Trump, might be really interested in learning about what the Democrats have learned about the Republicans nominee. Dirt on Trump is sort of dirt on Russian power structure too and most of that dirt is presumably going to be public by November.
Given all that, you have to wonder what other groups might be trying to get an early look at all that Trumpian dirt.
@Dave: Here’s another wrinkle to the Orlando shooter’s background: when the FBI investigated him previously, they dispatched an informant who unsuccessfully attempted to lure him into a plot:
““It looks like it’s pretty much standard operating procedure for preliminary inquiries to interview the subject or pitch the person to become an informant and/or plant an undercover or informant close by to see if the person bites on the suggestion,” Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo to the FBI Director exposed some of the FBI’s pre‑9/11 failures, told AlterNet. “In the case of Mateen, since he already worked for a security contractor [G4S], he was either too savvy to bite on the pitch or he may have even become indignant that he was targeted in that fashion. These pitches and use of people can backfire.””
Well, while we don’t know if this attack was the result of the FBI’s prior entrapment attempts belatedly backfiring, the FBI still might want to review the possible costs of its ‘plant terror seeds and see what blossoms’ counter-terrorism methods.
In addition, the FBI might want to look into Mateen’s contacts with organizations beyond Islamist terror groups. Organizations his father was associated with. Organizations like the CIA:
“The name of the nameless Afghan satellite channel, Payam Afghan, is said to be widely-known in Southwest Asia as a CIA-Pakistani ISI construct, as this picture from Flicker shows.”
Note that Congressmen Rohrabacher, Ed Royce ®, and Charlie Rangle (D) have all confirm meeting with the senior Mateen to discuss Afghan/Pakistan relations. Also note that Mateen’s father’s Afghan nationalist tv show is vociferously opposed to all things Pakistan, which would presumaly include the ISI. And yet Payam Afghan, the sattelite tv station running this channel, a characterized as a widely-known CIA-ISI construct.
So while it’s certainly possible that Omar Mateen ‘self-radicalized’ over the internet, especially given the number of personality “red flags” he was generating over the course of his life, let’s hope investigators still keep in mind that there’s going to be no shortage of ‘blowback’ catalysts in the lives of individuals whose fathers are on the intelligence community’s international propaganda payroll producing anti-Pakistani tv shows on a CIA-ISI funded satellite tv network.
Donald Trump had an interesting campaign fundraising pitch yesterday: he’d really like more GOP fundraising support, but if he doesn’t get that’s fine because he’s got lots of cash and can just do it all on his own. While the “I’m so rich I don’t need anyone’s money” might help when selling yourself to the public, it’s rather counter-intuitive fundraising strategy. We’ll see how it goes.
In related news, Donald Trump announced a big speech for Wednesday that set off rumors that it would include his VP selection, although Trump later tweeted that it would mostly be a critique of ‘crooked Hillary’. Either way, it will be interesting to see if the speech includes any sort of generic fundraising pitch because, unless Trump really is planning on spending a billion of his own dollars this year, he really does need to start raising some money. And, somewhat ironically, based on the Trump campaign’s recent FEC fundraising numbers and the tepid relationship Trump has had with the GOP’s mega-donors thus far, if the speech does happen to include a VP selection, the GOP had better hope his VP is an actual billionaire:
“Perhaps the most revealing detail about the May filing is that Trump actually did loan his campaign additional funds — a bit over $2 million. But this shows more just how hard up Trump is. His campaign is in desperate need of funds. Like I said, $1.3 million cash on hand is stone broke for a summer presidential campaign. He clearly has no principled resistance to loaning his campaign more money. And he’s in desperate need of a few tens of millions of dollars. Put this together with having to be shamed into coughing up the $1 million contribution to a vets organization and the implication is clear: Trump is very hard pressed to come up with even a few million dollars. And this from a man purportedly worth $10 billion.”
Stingy billionaire or broke billionaire? That’s not a great selection of public images but it appears to be the options the Trump campaign has at this point unless he suddenly frees up a lot of cash very soon and starts spending it. And it’s only going to get more and more expensive the close we get to November.
Keep in that that Trump is already promising that his June fundraising numbers are going to be “incredible”, and maybe that will be the case. Maybe the Trumpian hordes will flood his campaign with small dollar donations and he’ll be able to claim the ‘populist’ mantel. But if those hordes reasonably conclude that Trump’s frequent touting about how he won’t owe anyone anything because of his ability to self-fund indicate that he doesn’t actually need donations, it’s looking like the GOP mega-donors are going to have to start shelling out bilionaire-league donations if they want their orange antihero to win the day. And then what would that do to Trump’s “I’m uncorruptibly rich” shtick?
It all the kind of news that makes Trump’s recent joke about dropping out of the race for $5 billion a lot more funny. Still, this is Trump we’re talking about and we can’t forget how much free publicity the guy is able to generate just by being Trump. So maybe he’ll be able to get the publicity, and contributions, he needs simply by standing in front of the cameras and going off on a Trumpian rant like he always does. Just turn on the razzle dazzle, add a few pitches for contributions, and watching the money come pouring in. Heh.
The Traditionalist Worker Party’s spokesman has a message for America following the multiple stabbings at their neo-Nazi in Sacramento: You haven’t seen the last of the Traditionalist Worker Party. Especially if you’re planning on attending the GOP convention:
“Traditionalist Worker Party spokesman Matt Parrott told McClatchy on Monday that about 30 members of his group, which held a rally at the California state capitol over the weekend where at least five people were stabbed, will head to the convention to “make sure that the Donald Trump supporters are defended from the leftist thugs.”
That was the thinking behind Sunday’s rally in Sacramento, which was organized along with the Golden State Skinheads: to publicize what they see as acts of aggression against Trump supporters. The rally dissolved into chaos, with anti-fascist and anarchist protesters physically clashing with the approximately 30 skinheads who showed up at the event. At least 10 people were injured.”
So the Traditionalist Worker Party, led by Mathew Heimbach, who has already been caught on video roughing up a protestor at a Trump rally, viewed their march as a kind of Trump rally and wanted Americans to associate the street brawls between anti-fascists and neo-Nazis with “acts of aggression against Trump supporters”. And they apparently held this rally in the hopes of violence breaking out so they could make that association between neo-Nazis and Trump supporters.
Ok. That seems like a reasonable association to make. Thanks for the reminder.
For Americans concerned about the possible role foreign money is playing in influencing US election following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, it’s worth noting that the lobbying that pushed for a recently passed House bill which would formally allowed for completely anonymous donations to tax-exempt groups, like political super PACs, wasn’t paid for with foreign money. It was paid for with nice wholesome domestic Koch brothers money. Phew! Nothing to worry about:
“Information about donors “is not used for any real, legitimate purpose” he said, “but, by and large, seems to be used by people or activists groups to get lists together to target and intimidate people, and that’s completely inappropriate.””
That’s the view of Koch’s Freedom Partners: if you force political nonprofits to disclose their donors to the IRS, there’s no legitimate use for that information and the IRS will just harass Republicans. And it’s a view apparently shared by every GOP member of the House Ways and Means Committee and the view House GOP caucus as a whole since the House passed the bill earlier this month. Of course, the bill would have to pass in the Senate and be signed into law by President Obama if this bill was to become law, but it’s still pretty notable that a bill that makes foreign political donations basically untraceable just passed the House of Representatives.
So, since this bill isn’t actually a law yet, we’ll just have to wait for President Trump to sign it into law. Someone should probably inform the Trump campaign about that last part:
“As one of my colleagues noted, they need to be raising a ton of money right now, like before midnight tomorrow. Why? Because the June fundraising report will drop in late July, right during the GOP convention. If it looks as ridiculous as the last one, that will be a big problem. So basically, Iceland, Denmark, Australia, blast out the rafters. They appear to be desperate and incompetent and, because they’re desperate and incompetent, traumatizing members of parliament in countries around the world because of it.”
Keep in mind that even if the House bill became law, it still wouldn’t allow for direct campaign donations like what the Trump campaign is soliciting from foreign MPs. But it would facilitate a pretty hefty injection of foreign money into nonprofit super PACs, which is apparently what the House GOPers think is of no concern. Still, it’s pretty hilarious that just a couple weeks after the House passes the anonymous super PAC donor bill, we get reports that the Trump campaign is harassing every single MP in UK, Canada, Australia, Iceland, and Denmark for campaign donations. Oh, and Finland too.
So it it possible that this was done intentionally avoid embarrassing fundraising figure right in the middle of the GOP convention? It seems totally implausible even for the Trump campaign and some sort of email list screw up seems like the Occam’s Razor answer here.
But if this wasn’t just a screw up, the July fundraising number theory is the best motive we have in part because it’s the only plausible motive we have. Unless, of course, the Trump campaign doesn’t understand how a bill becomes law, like a bill recently passed by the House that anonymizes foreign donations, and also doesn’t understand the differences between super PAC donations and campaign donations. Sure, that’s a pretty implausible explanation too and if the Trump campaign really was trying to solicit foreign donations it’s unclear why it would have sent the solicitations to every MP in multiple European countries. It’s hard to keep that a secret.
But the mere possibility that this was done intentionally does raise a useful question when considering the potential impact of the Koch’s anonymous money bill: let’s say that bill was already law. Does anyone think the Trump campaign wouldn’t be actively soliciting secret foreign donations? Just how confident are we that the Trump campaign wouldn’t be quietly hitting up MPs and wealthy people around the world right now if it could get away with it? Don’t forget, this is the alleged billionaire with extensive mob ties, foreign oligarch ties, and who once cashed a 13 cent check. Would someone like that be likely to turn down foreign donations if laws are in place to make it the perfect crime.
How about the rest of the House GOP members who voted for bill? Why wouldn’t they be constantly offered secret foreign super PAC donations and why shouldn’t we believe they would be more than happy to accept those donations when they pass laws like this? Perhaps we’re to assume that, in post-Citizens United world, they won’t need the money.
We already knew that Donald Trump was a student of Hitler’s speeches, according to a 1990 interview of Ivana Trump. And it’s long been clear that flirting with neo-Nazis and is going to be a key component of his campaign messaging strategy, with a particular emphasis on “accidentally” retweeting the tweets of his white supremacist supporters.
Well, it looks like we’re seeing the next phase of Trump’s voter outreach strategy: tweeting anti-semitic tweets that appear to be created by the Trump campaign itself:
“Usually, he’s responded to criticism in the past by playing dumb, as if he’s unaware of what he’s doing. And that same pattern held true — somewhat — on Saturday morning. Moments after tweeting out the Star of David image, he put out a second image with the same language, but with a red circle instead of a star. The first tweet remained up for some time, however, before eventually being taken down.”
But, insists Roger Stone, it was just a sheriff’s badge! Heh. As many Jewish GOPers like Ari Fleischer must be thinking these days, “It would be nice to make it through a 3‑day weekend without his campaign hurting itself.” Let’s hope he’s actually hurting himself.
So that’s how Donald Trump decided to start off the 4th of July holiday weekend: with a homemade anti-semitic tweet directed at Hillary. And in a way might clear up one of the mysteries created when Trump recently questioned whether or not Hillary was truly a Methodist. While it would be reasonable to assume that he was implying that she’s a secret Muslim, this latest tweet suggests that maybe he was implying that she’s secretly Jewish? And that Obama and Hillary are part of a Muslim/Jewish cabal to destroy America?
Who knows if that’s the direction Trump is taking is allusions or it’s just a random mishmash at this point. Maybe he’s just trying to cover his bases.
Uh oh. It looks like the Trump campaign wasn’t the original source of the Hillary Clinton-Star of David tweet. It originated as an alt right neo-Nazi meme a week earlier on the /pol/ forum. Of course:
“Mic discovered Sunday that Donald Trump’s Twitter account wasn’t the first place the meme appeared. The image was previously featured on /pol/ — an Internet message board for the alt-right, a digital movement of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white supremacists newly emboldened by the success of Trump’s rhetoric — as early as June 22, over a week before Trump’s team tweeted it.”
Yes, two days before Independence Day and two weeks before the GOP convention, the GOP’s nominee retweeted neo-Nazi meme. Once again.
It’s going to be alright. Or rather, it’s going to be alt right. That’s the overt face of the GOP this year. And alt right face. No more dog whistling. We’re on the verge of electing a smirking neo-Nazi troll to the most powerful office on the planet and he’s skating by with minimal push back and the bulk of the GOP establishment fully on board.
Ok, so it’s not going to be alright. But if there’s one good thing about situations that aren’t alright it’s they make one appreciate just how precious alright situations truly are and how potentially rare they are if we don’t work on keeping things alright and might prompt pondering on to make things alright. The future isn’t usually particularly bright when things aren’t already alright. Inertia works that way. But they can always be made better. Unless you’re doomed. so watching one of the two major US parties casually nominate an open alt right troll is the kind of situation that should prompt one to take some time and ponder how much worse things can get, and remain, if alt right neo-Nazi trolling becomes normalized as a form of anti-PC protest.
How can things be made better? Is the GOP doomed? Does that mean the rest of us are too? These are the kinds of questions we unfortunately need to be asking now that a neo-Nazi troll is one unfortunate election away from trashing the world. Trashing the world is not alright. How do we avoid trashing the world? That’s a question we actually have to urgently ask. And answer. Soon.
Happy Independence Day Eve.
Here’s one more reason why we should probably expect more neo-Nazi ‘oops’ tweets from the Trump campaign: Trump can’t lose. At least he can’t lose with the neo-Nazis. For instance, here we have a tweet from David Duke celebrating the original Trump tweet with the Star of David as a ‘red pill’ for society. And what’s Duke’s response after Trump replaces the Star of David with a plain ‘ol circle? He welcomes the exposure of “the hidden hand”:
“After the Trump camp pulled an anti-Hillary Clinton tweet that included a six-point star and posted an edited version, Duke tweeted Saturday that he welcomes the exposure of “the hidden hand.””
Well, ok, so it’s pretty clear that there’s basically nothing Trump can do to piss off the neo-Nazis...except maybe ignore them. But the same doesn’t apply fore the rest of society which is why so many are questioning whether or not Trump is a full blown anti-Semite or just crassly courting them.
Well, as Josh Marshall suggests below, it’s almost unambiguous that Trump is indeed a racist if you examine his person history. But while he does appear to hold stereotypical views of different groups, like Jews, he doesn’t appear to hold any personal animus towards Jewish people. Instead, the non-stop flirtation with neo-Nazis and the Alt Right appears to be more driven by a personal desire for adulation and a recognition that when he pushes those kinds of memes he gets rewarded by an increasingly dedicated fan base. Also, he just seems to be more at home with people of a racist, bigoted persuasion. His tribe is the hyper-tribalist ‘Alt Right’, even if he isn’t personally attached to all its themes, and that’s why he keeps doing things like this. It’s what he knows.
So if Josh Marshall is correct in his Trumpian analysis, Trump is not, in his heart, an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi. There’s not enough overt hate in his heart for that. But he does appear to share many of their views and also has a deep need for authority and praise. And, lo and behold, discovered that by embracing neo-Nazi memes he can fulfill those deep authoritarian need. In other words, while the neo-Nazis might be using a Trump campaign to mainstream their ideas, he’s using them too, and not just for vote. For the seemingly unconditional love. They complete him:
“In the case of Jews, I think Trump is an anti-Semite in the sense of believing in stereotypes of Jews — there’s quite a bit of evidence of this. But I don’t think he has a standing hostility for Jews. It just happens to be that the white nationalists and alt-right racists he’s bonded with so deeply are virtually all also anti-Semites. So that’s just another part of the milieu, the pool of hate filth he’s swimming in. It’s almost akin to the way adaptive genetic mutations can sometimes drag along unrelated genetic traits simply because they’re proximate to each other on the DNA strand.”
Yes, if you’re a Jewish American concerned about the growing bonds between the GOP and overt neo-Nazis, at least it appears that Donald Trump’s neo-Nazi love might not be reflective of personal hostility towards Jewish people. He just really, really, really craves the approval of neo-Nazis. In part this is because the white nationalist faction of American politics appears to be the group he’s most at home with and surrounds himself with, but also because that’s the group that’s been giving him nearly unconditional love at this point. So you should be worried less about the US electing a Hiterlian figure and more about the US electing a figure who is willing to do what it takes to get the adulation of the kinds of voters that would love a Hiterlian figure. It’s a worrisome situation.
But perhaps that analysis of Donald Trump’s needs and emotional motivations can give us a path out of this national predicament: Is there a way we could send a signal to Trump that he would be deeply, profoundly loved by many, many people if he renounced his campaign and declared it all a massive hoax? Just imagine him holding a press conference and being like “Surprise, this was all a joke. I’m not really going to ban Muslims or build a wall. This was all intended to be an exercise to see how far America would go in electing an authoritarian nut job and America failed. Shame on us.” And then he renounced his platform, dropped out of the race, and threw a giant global solidarity rave at multiple Trump hotels around the world.
Wouldn’t lots of Americans LOVE Trump at that point? Sure, not the neo-Nazis, but for every neo-Nazi he loses just imagine how many Trump supporters he would immediately pick up. Donald Trump: Master of the Con-con. He could become a beloved historic figure! If the guy is willing to do anything to find a crowd who love him, there’s no reason it has to be something foul. And the more over-the-top the Trump campaign’s antics get the easier it will be to eventually reverse course and yell, “Surprise! You’ve been Trumped!”
He could even make a TV spinoff involving apprentices he mentors in hoaxes that help humanity all get along. There’s undoubtedly a network somewhere that would pick it up.
Donald Trump gave a speech yesterday where he said he wish his staffers had never deleted the now notorious Star of David tweet. And it included quite a VP teaser: “Newt has been my friend for a long time. And I’m not saying anything, and I’m not telling even Newt anything, but I can tell you, in one form or another, Newt Gingrich is going to be involved with our government...That I can tell you.”:
“He gets it. And he says I’m the biggest thing he’s ever seen in the history of politics.”
Newt Ginrich: Fascist Ego Fluffer Veep of Doom. It would be a fitting final chapter for Newt’s political career. But let’s face it, Newt has always wanted to be President. He has to be relishing these rumors.
But whether Newt gets tapped for that position or not, it’s worth noting that while the VP selection is always at least somewhat important for a president candidate, in the case of Donald Trump his choice for Vice President is quite possibly going to be one of the most substantive decisions he’s going to make during the campaign. Why? Because, thus far, one of the key features of Trump’s candidacy has been the fluid nature of his views and positions. The guy took 5 different positions on the abortion issue in three days. He’s against cutting Social Security and for cutting it. He’s going to build a wall with Mexico. But maybe it will be a virtual wall. Is he intentionally retweeting neo-Nazi dog-whistles or just repeatedly making an innocent mistake? With the Trump campaign, the ambiguity of what he stands for isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
But while Trump has been running as a Rorschach Candidate so far, once someone like Newt Gingrich gets tapped as the choice for VP, there’s no changing that. And whoever Trump chooses almost instantly becomes the most meaningful voter guide to Trump’s real values. Unlike policy positions, Trump can’t choose multiple VP candidates simultaneously. There can be only one.
So whoever Trump taps to become VP, the American electorate might finally see what a Trumpian administration is going to look like. And if one of the latest rumors sweeping DC has any truth to it, Trump’s VP pick might also give us a much better idea of who would actually be president if Trump wins the election:
“Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.
“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said, minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.”
That’s a bit ominous. So is a vote for Trump really going to be a vote for Trumps VP? That appears to be a question of timing:
So if Trump wins on November 8, but then drops out before Dec 19, the Electoral College could just elect whoever they want. If he drops out after Dec 19 and before Jan 20, it’s probably going to be the vice president-elect that’s sworn in. And, of course, if he leaves office after Jan 20 he would replaced by the vice president.
In other words, Newt Gingrich is quite possibly a lot closer to becoming President than almost anyone is assuming right now. At least that assuming Trump’s mischievous smile and cryptic comments really are indicative of what he has in mind. So is installing President Gingrich going to be Donald Trump’s career-defining ‘I’m The Best, F#%$ You World!’ mega-grift? Considering he’s the Rorschach Candidate, it’s rather difficult to interpret the mischievous smiles and cryptic comments and it is a rather outlandish scenario. But given the surrealist hoax-like nature of the Trump campaign thus far, it’s hard to rule the possibility out.
That’s all something to keep in mind, especially if Newt really does end up being Trump’s pick(he’s got competition). Because if you’re the President, and Newt Gingrich is your Vice President, that means your pulse is the only thing standing between Newt Gingrich and the Presidency. Isn’t it a lot safer to get out of the way in advance?
It sounds like Donald Trump might need to forget who David Duke is and belated sort of denounce him again. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise probably isn’t going to be super thrilled either. Yes, David Duke appears to recognize that, with Trump as the GOP nominee, this just might be the right year for another Duke run:
“I’ve said everything that Donald Trump is saying and more...I think Trump is riding a wave of anti-establishment feeling that I’ve been nurturing for 25 years.”
Well, he does have a point.
At least if Duke does run we’ll finally be able answer an unfortunate, yet, compelling question contemporary politics unfortunately begs: who wins in a race between David Duke without the baggage and David Duke with the baggage? Of course, the answer is that David Duke wins in either scenario, but it will still be grimly interesting to see how the vote goes.
With recent polls showing an alarming close race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the key swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, it’s unfortunately the case that every utterances that come out of Trump’s mouth over the coming months has to be taken at least somewhat seriously. For instance, when Donald Trump condemns the calls for moments of silence to commemorate the Dallas shooter Micah Johnson, we unfortunately have to point out that, no, there were no calls for moments of silence. It was dangerously unserious statement. But as Josh Marshall notes, it was a dangerously unserious statement made by a man with an apparent authoritarian personality who is on the verge of becoming the next president which is why we have to take it so seriously:
“...Indeed, if anything the continuing protests have been tempered calls for an end to violence on all sides. For all the horror, the outrage has spawned moments of bridge-building, unity. So these are combustible times. But they’re not the times Trump is describing. Indeed, what Trump said in the passage above is something verging on the notorious “big lie”....”
Keep in mind that Trump made the claim that he saw these calls for moments of silence twice in one day: at a rally and during an interview on Fox News. So this wasn’t a standard “some people say...” kind of innuendo. He really wanted to push that meme.
Given that this behavior is part of a well established Trumpian pattern of spreading disinformation that promotes his agenda, and given that the Trump agenda appears to be an agenda of ramping up racial tensions and constantly pushing ‘race war’ memes, it’s worth noting that we might actually be on the verge of seeing a second consecutive Republican president that lies the US into a completely avoidable and disastrous war. But unlike President Bush lying the US into a war in Iraq, a Trump administration would clearly do everything it can to lie the US into a war with itself. The madness is coming full circle. Imagine that.
With all the attention given to Melania Trump’s bewildering Republican National Conventions speech, which was plagiarized almost word for word from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention speech, there’s been no shortage of concern that all the focus on Melania’s speech cribbing ended up overshadowing an opening convention night that bore a stunning resemblance to a CPAC convention, filled with violent undertones, fear-mongering and disturbing attempts at incitement. It’s also worth noting that Melania’s plagiarism also distracted from the fact that she Rickrolled the nation, although there’s understandably very little concern over the lack of focus on that part.
So that happened. Along with all the distractions. But in an odd way, Melania’s plagiarism kerfuffle and associated distraction concerns does actually have the potential to remind us of one of the key aspects of the Trump candidacy: Donald Trump’s particular strain of celebrity authoritarianism that is being treated as a kind of reimagining of the Republican Party is, itself, a giant distraction from the fact that the only thing changing with the larger GOP platform is that it’s getting crazier with each election. And that kind of change is nothing new:
“But rather than leaping at this chance to broaden its appeal, the party decided to bow to its traditional base of older, white voters. Therein lies the problem for Republican elites interested in convincing the rank-and-file that they need to accommodate new constituencies and ideas. The base is getting older. Conservative Republican voters believe that their traditional values, despite having grown increasingly unpopular in the last eight years, are American values. Unless someone else comes along after Trump who can convince the Republican base that they need to shake up their positions on social issues, the party will appear increasingly out of touch with the mainstream. For now, however, the party will continue to exist in a state of existential confusion, their platform working like a series of walls between the Grand Old Party and the very voters it needs to survive.”
Yep, Trump came along, offered the GOP a golden opportunity to engage in some crucial soul searching and reform. And instead of guiding the GOP into a more inclusive future with broader appeal, Trump skipped the soul searching, completely caved to the far-right social conservatives, and acquiesced to a platform that’s like the worst of all worlds: overt nativism and the same far-right social conservatism that’s made the GOP an aging, dying party. Now that’s bold leadership!
So now, thanks to the GOP’s grand missed opportunity, not only does the party still find itself in need of someone to ride in on a white horse to save the party from its traditional demons, that mystery person is going to have to purge the GOP of all the additional Trumpian demons unleashed over the last year too. Who could that be?
Well, there’s always Mitt Romney. Believe it or not he’s reportedly eying a 2020 run and he loves the idea of riding in on a white horse to save the day. That’s convenient. But, of course, he’s Mitt Romney, which is pretty inconvenient. And it’s definitely not going to be Paul Ryan.
So who could that mystery person be who is simultaneously capable of speaking to the GOP id as it exists today and guide it towards a saner tomorrow? Hmmm....
A recent poll out of Ohio showed Donald Trump garnering...wait for it...a whole zero percent of the African American vote. Now, keep in mind that the poll had a margin of error of 3.4 percent, so maybe Trump’s support in Ohio’s black community is closer to three percent than zero percent. Perhaps. But if so, it might be getting a lot closer to zero if the people who have known Trump for decades help the rest of America get to know the Trump they’ve known for years:
“I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza — black guys counting my money!” O’Donnell’s book quoted Trump as saying. “I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else. ... Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else. I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is; I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”
Keep in mind that the exchange discussed there is supposed to have taken place in the 70’s. So who knows, perhaps he’s changed. For instance, when this happened last November...
...maybe it was a completely innocent mistake that he retweeted false statistics from a white supremacist twitter account named WhiteGenocideTM. Maybe.
In other news, the co-author of Trump’s autobiography The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwarz, is warning the world that Trump exhibited the characteristics of a sociopath when he observed him and that civilization would be at risk if he ever got his hands on the nuclear codes. So who knows, maybe Trump was acting like a sociopath back when he was writing the book but is a totally changed person now. Maybe.
This is rather amusing, or would be amusing if it wasn’t a symptom of a broken society: Donald Trump bragged on the campaign trail yesterday about how well he was doing with women. He actually has a record high 24 point gender gap with women, but he bragged about how well he was doing anyway. Sort of:
“Fifty percent of our country is men, where I am doing very, very well, record-setting numbers, folks...That’s the good news. Let me give you the bad news. The women, I don’t know what is going on with the women here, but I think, I think I’m doing well with the women.””
Ok, so Donald Trump isn’t sure, but he may or may not be doing well with women voters. Still, he’s apparently feeling pretty confident that he’ll eventually get their support. And who knows, with his “law and order” campaign theme, maybe he’ll be able to close that record high gender gap by scaring the bejeesus out of everyone voters. Are you more scared of ISIS or Trump? That’s the campaign pitch he’s almost certainly going to make. Especially to the ladies.
Interestingly, and appallingly ironically, with Roger Ailes out as the CEO of Fox News over charges that he is a serial sexual predator (and apparently created a culture there that encourages similar behavior by others in management), it’s entirely possible that Ailes could be Trump’s secret weapon to get women voters by becoming the new mastermind of the Trump’s “Law and Order” pitch just like Ailes did for Richard Nixon in 1968:
“For Trump, the candidate of law and order, the benefits are also obvious. No one knows better than Ailes how to energize and mobilize conservative voters. He was the mastermind behind Richard M. Nixon’s innovative 1968 television campaign, which was also based on law and order. So Ailes could help Trump fully exploit the issue and perhaps ride it into the White House.”
It is unfortunate looking like a year made for Ailes’s talents. Might it happen? Well, as the article below points out, Trump himself has been teasing reporters that many “are thinking he’s going to run my campaign.” So that does sound like a real possibility. And if it happens, we shouldn’t be shocked if Trump actually ends up closing that gender gap, assuming the hiring of Ailes doesn’t, itself, widen the gap. But if that backlash doesn’t happen, it’s not like Ailes isn’t a pro at psychologically manipulating the masses. This is what he does.
So don’t be super shocked if Roger Ailes climbs aboard the Trump Train. As Trump made clear, he really likes Roger and can’t understand how anyone could accuse him of anything:
“Some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them...Now all of a sudden, they are saying these horrible things about him; it’s very sad because he’s a very good person.”
Get ready for campaign mastermind Roger Ailes. And quite possibly President Trump.
You have to wonder what position Ailes will get in Trump’s administration. Chief of Staff?
Check out the Trump campaign’s latest campaign shakeup: There’s a new campaign chief executive: Breitbart chief Steve Bannon, patron media saint of the Alt-Right! What a huge change! Might this be part of the long-awaited “pivot” towards the general election? Well, it’s not a pivot in direction since the campaign is still almost exclusively focused on pushing far-right/Alt-right memes. But it is a pivot if you imagine Trump pivoting downward at the waist while his feet remaining firmly planted towards his far-right/Alt-right base, which is otherwise known as a bow:
“The campaign’s new chief executive, Stephen Bannon, joins from Breitbart News—where he helped mainstream the ideas of white nationalists and resuscitate the reputations of anti-immigrant fear-mongers.”
Well, it always helps when new leadership understands the culture of the organization. He should fit right in.
So, OK, that probably doesn’t qualify as a pivot. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a pivot still coming. Specifically, the pivot in the reasoning employed by rest the establishment for explaining why exactly the GOP isn’t basically a far-right, and increasingly seditious, white nationalist party run by and for bigots and the billionaires who find them useful. There’s probably going to be all sort of those kinds of pivots over the next few months. And probably years. Perhaps even decades.