"‘There are definite legal consequences to Cohen’s statement,’ said Jens David Ohlin, a law professor and vice dean at Cornell Law School. ‘This reeks of a criminal conspiracy. It doesn’t even matter if nothing came of the meeting [although that’s far from clear]. If Trump knew about the meeting and was okay with it, Trump and those around him could be guilty of an inchoate conspiracy.’"
(Via.). The Case for a Trump-Russia Conspiracy Is Getting Stronger - The Atlantic:
"D.C. and Maryland are suing President Trump for violating a little-known constitutional provision called "the emoluments clause." (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Just 10 days before his inauguration, Donald Trump called a news conference in New York to deal, among other things, with mounting questions about how he would separate his presidency from his vast business interests, including the new Trump International Hotel in Washington, and avoid violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
It was a rambling affair. He railed about Hillary Clinton, “fake news,” the Russia “witch hunt” and the “nonsense that was released” by intelligence agencies — before finally getting to the point. He introduced a lawyer, who hauled out stacks of folders, which Trump described as “some of the many documents that I’ve signed turning over complete and total control” of his businesses to his sons.
The lawyer, Sheri Dillon, then explained how, even though Trump would be receiving income from his business empire, the Constitution’s emoluments clause would not be a problem. The provision, Article I, Section 9, Clause 8, bars federal officeholders from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.”
But by Dillon’s standards, it did not apply to emoluments “that have absolutely nothing to do” with the office of president: that is, to transactions connected with a president’s private business.
The president’s lawyers would later elaborate with a similarly narrow definition of the clause. It applies only to foreign benefits “conferred that arise from services rendered to a foreign state” by the president “in his or her official capacity,” they argued in a brief. The clause is “office-and-employment-specific.” In other words, it bars only payments or presents or other emoluments given the president in connection with a decision he might make as president.
That would take Trump off the hook for, say, foreign payments to his hotels from which he profited because he did not get them in his “official capacity.”
It was for some a little too convenient, sending them scurrying to dictionaries for a definition of “emoluments,” since neither the framers of the Constitution nor the justices of the Supreme Court have provided one.
Among the seekers was John Mikhail, a law professor with a PhD in philosophy and associate dean at the Georgetown University Law School. But while reporters, for example, tended to look it up in Merriam-Webster, Mikhail went to dictionaries available to the framers of the Constitution in 1787, which is what litigants do when trying to figure out what the Founding Fathers meant.
(Courtesy John Mikhail, Georgetown Law)But Mikhail didn’t stop at a few dictionaries. With the aid of a Georgetown law student, Genevieve Bentz, he embarked on a lexicological odyssey into dozens of long-forgotten dictionaries, published over a 200-year period before 1806, 40 regular dictionaries and 10 legal dictionaries, listed here.
The research yielded a very different, much broader definition than that put forward by Trump’s lawyers. “Every English dictionary definition of ’emolument’ from 1604 to 1806″ uses a “broad definition,” including “profit,” “advantage,” “gain,” or benefit,” he wrote in his paper describing the research.
As to the “office-and-employment-specific” interpretation by Trump’s team, Mikhail wrote that “over 92 percent of these dictionaries define ’emolument’ . . . with no reference to ‘office’ or ’employment.’ ”
In other words, by his research, the emoluments clause would bar any benefit or profit to a president via a foreign state, whether in his capacity as president or in any other role, such as the owner of a hotel. It would, specifically, cover Saudi Arabia or Kuwait renting out space at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
“I sort of felt like I had them in the crosshairs,” he told The Washington Post on Thursday.
He did.
On Wednesday, Mikhail’s labors paid off. In a historic decision, U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte in Greenbelt, Md., ruled that a suit brought by the District of Columbia and Maryland could go forward instead of throwing it out, as the administration desired.
Messitte cited, in part, what he called the “exhaustive” research of Mikhail, mentioning him by name 17 times.
And while citing numerous other factors, the judge’s choice of definition proved crucial to the ruling, the first on the meaning of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. (There are two, one covering domestic gain, the other foreign.
The judge noted that Mikhail’s dictionary research was more extensive than that of the president’s lawyers, covering “virtually every founding-era dictionary.” Citing Mikhail again, Messitte said, “the President’s definition appears in less than 8% of these dictionaries” vs. 92 percent for the broader meaning.
(Courtesy of John Mikhail)“The clear weight of the evidence,” wrote the judge, “shows that an ’emolument’ was commonly understood by the founding generation to encompass any ‘profit,’ ‘gain,’ or ‘advantage.’
“Though the Court agrees that mere counting of dictionaries may not be dispositive, it nonetheless remains highly remarkable that [quoting Mikhail] ‘every English dictionary definition of “emolument” from 1604 to 1806 relies on one or more of the elements of the broad definition DOJ rejects in its brief.’ ”
Accepting the broader definition, everything else fell into place.
If the emoluments clause referred narrowly to compensation for official services, as Trump argued, that would make it a bribery clause.
A violation would therefore be almost impossible to prove, since bribery entails a quid pro quo. As the plaintiffs noted, he said, it didn’t make sense “that the Framers would have wanted to leave a large loophole that would preclude the [emoluments] Clause from accomplishing any meaningful purpose.”
Plus, the founders listed bribery among the crimes for which a president can be impeached. Why would they do that if it was covered by the emoluments clause?
Another thing that didn’t make sense: The foreign emoluments clause allows a president to accept things of value with the consent of Congress, he recalled. He said he doubted that the Founding Fathers would tolerate bribery of the chief executive as long as Congress said it was okay.
“It seems highly unlikely that the Framers would have intended bribery to be both an impeachable offense and, at the same time, an activity Congress could consent to when a foreign government donor is involved. The President makes no attempt to come to terms with this anomaly.”
Mikhail’s research was a massive undertaking, possible only because the old dictionaries are available not just in musty libraries anymore but on the Internet. A task of perhaps 15 years with journeys to scores of libraries could be achieved in a matter of weeks.
(Courtesy John Mikhail)Mikhail told The Post he and Bentz “worked feverishly night and day,” using online databases to dive into works like Thomas Blount’s “Glossographia,” published in 1656; Samuel Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language,” published in 1753; James Barclay’s “A Complete and Universal English Dictionary,” published in 1774; and dozens more, including the standard legal dictionaries of the era.
From these, Mikhail would ultimately produce blog posts at Balkinization, which were widely referenced by other legal blogs, followed by a carefully researched paper, followed by a joint amicus brief summarizing his findings, which was submitted to the court.
The government, he told The Post, was trying “to suggest that the meaning of the term emolument is tethered to an office — that was their term. … I already knew that a lot of dictionaries said otherwise, and had a pretty strong inclination that if I dug deeper into dictionaries it would continue to validate that fact. And that’s what we did.”
It’s by no means the end of the line. It was not a ruling on the merits. An appeal is likely. But Mikhail’s mining of a question never answered by the Supreme Court is likely to remain at the forefront of the litigation.
“Judge Messitte’s thoughtful opinion certainly was gratifying,” Mikhail told The Post Thursday, crediting his researcher as well as his collaborators on the amicus brief, Jack Rakove, Gautham Rao, Simon Stern and Jed Shugerman.
“I was obviously quite pleased for the issues to be resolved in the way that they were. I had a sense that he might come down this way,” having attended oral arguments. “But I didn’t really didn’t expect that he would do so so strongly. He really did embrace the theory that we had been proposing.”
"On Thursday, a court in Kazakhstan launched preliminary hearings of a corruption case against the former mayor of the Kazakh city of Almaty, Viktor Khrapunov, and his wife Leila Khrapunova, a couple with deep ties to the Trump Organization.
The former mayor and his wife have been accused of a wide array of crimes, including money laundering embezzlement, abuse of office, fraud and the creation of an organized crime group. They are currently living in Switzerland, but are being tried in absentia. The couple claims that the charges against them are politically motivated.
Reports and court documents have demonstrated that the couple has deep ties to Trump associates, including Trump’s current lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former Trump adviser Felix Sater. They have also been accused of using purchases in a Manhattan Trump tower to launder stolen money.
An investigation published last year by McClatchy, for example, showed that the international real estate and investment firm Bayrock Group, which has partnered with the Trump Organization on multiple projects, was previously in business with the couple."
"It's almost like a script for a bad movie.
Just as Facebook and Twitter face slowing user growth after attracting nearly half the world's population to their respective services, coordinated campaigns of harassment and abuse have begun to show their effects. User counts are dropping and stock prices are in freefall.
This week, social media is having a moment of reckoning.
It began Wednesday with Facebook, which announced that daily active user counts had fallen in Europe, to 279 million from 282 million earlier this year. Facebook also indicated it was no longer growing in the US and Canada, two of the most lucrative advertising markets. Just as Facebook was working through its second year of nearly nonstop scandals over unchecked political meddling and data misuse, it was becoming clear that the days of consistent and relatively easy growth were fading.
Then, on Friday, Twitter said it too was seeing user counts drop, to 335 million people who log in each month from 336 million just three months earlier, in part because of its efforts to, as it says, improve "the long-term health of the platform."
"WASHINGTON — For years, President Trump has used Twitter as his go-to public relations weapon, mounting a barrage of attacks on celebrities and then political rivals even after advisers warned he could be creating legal problems for himself.
Those concerns now turn out to be well founded. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to three people briefed on the matter.
Several of the remarks came as Mr. Trump was also privately pressuring the men — both key witnesses in the inquiry — about the investigation, and Mr. Mueller is examining whether the actions add up to attempts to obstruct the investigation by both intimidating witnesses and pressuring senior law enforcement officials to tamp down the inquiry.
Mr. Mueller wants to question the president about the tweets. His interest in them is the latest addition to a range of presidential actions he is investigating as a possible obstruction case: private interactions with Mr. Comey, Mr. Sessions and other senior administration officials about the Russia inquiry; misleading White House statements; public attacks; and possible pardon offers to potential witnesses."
(Via.). Mueller Examining Trump’s Tweets in Wide-Ranging Obstruction Inquiry - The New York Times:
"Some people are baffled by Donald Trump’s fawning admiration of the world’s strongmen. I am not.
If you know anything about Donald Trump’s formative years in his native New York, you know that this has been part of his life since the beginning.
In particular, he was a young man in the city when the hip-hop cultural movement was born here in the 1970s. He witnessed the birth and ascendancy of hip-hop in the city, the moguls it made, the bravado it brandished.
He liked it, envied it, aped it. He created of it something all his own: He learned to assert white privilege and emulate black power.
There have always been white people like Trump who fetishize black culture — thrill seekers who want to dip their toes into what they view as exotic, but also want to stay dry and removed from it.
Trump practiced the racism of exceptions: He disdained poor minorities — those who wanted to rent his property; criminal suspects like the Central Park Five, of whom he wrote, “I want to hate,” and whom he wanted to have executed. But he marveled at the exceptional, those who amassed money and power while projecting a counterculture aesthetic and ethos.
He admired the men who learned how to monetize swagger. He has learned from them and applied their lessons to his largely white world.
That’s why I think this racist actually believes on some level that he is not a racist. He counts his flirtation with rich black rappers and athletes as proof of his egalitarianism.
As Donald Trump Jr. told The Daily Caller in February while defending his father against charges of racism: “You know it’s amazing — all the rappers, all his African-American friends, from Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton, have pictures with him.”
Perhaps Trump’s most notable and consequential hip-hop relationship was his odd friendship with the troubled boxer Mike Tyson, who has also rapped from time to time. Tyson sometimes entered the ring with Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” blaring. In a way Tyson was the epitome of hip-hop: Brash, bold, raw, powerful, dangerous, reckless.
Despite Tyson’s many issues — his drinking, his drug use, his problems with the law, his rape conviction — Tyson remained a hero to Trump.
As Chris Ayres wrote earlier this month in British GQ about this strange relationship: “From an early age, Trump, like his brothers, Freddy and Robert, had been instructed by his father, Fred, to think and act like a ‘killer.’ And the world had seen no better or more celebrated killer than Iron Mike. In particular, Trump was fascinated by Tyson’s disruptive, asymmetrical tactics.”
Ayres makes a grand assertion, one that has merit:
“It was Tyson — not Steve Bannon or even Vladimir Putin — who planted the strategic seeds for Trump’s hostile takeover of the United States of America in 2016.”
I would say that it wasn’t only Tyson, but also New York City’s hip-hop culture writ large that Trump weaponized. He is the Elvis Presley of politics, a cultural appropriator who took the coarser side of the black men whose thrall he was in and repackaged their qualities behind a white face.
Indeed, his previous and present relationships with hip-hop royalty have put the hip-hop royals in a bind, because the racism we see was not their experience of him. For them, his racism was muted by their money.
In 2015 Russell Simmons penned an open letter to “To My Old Friend Donald Trump” in which he writes, “You’re smarter and certainly more loving than you let on.” And after Trump’s atrocious Charlottesville comments, Simmons said of Trump, “He’s not acting on any real belief.” In April, Kanye West tweeted: “You don’t have to agree with Trump but the mob can’t make me not love him.”
I guess the relationship status between Trump and some in hip-hop should read: “It’s complicated.”
In 2015, when Trump was a candidate, rapper Ja Rule said of him: “Trump is very entertaining. He speaks very openly and candidly about what he feels. I think it’s a breath of fresh air for everybody to hear it. It’s not always the politically correct thing, but I think that’s what people are enjoying about Trump being in the running. … Trump is crazy. He has always been an outspoken person. I’m not shocked by anything that comes out of his mouth at all. He’s like a rapper.”
At least Trump was a wannabe rapper. He wanted to be associated with the power rappers projected, with the glamour and the girls and the gangster motif. That is the same way he’s now operating on the world stage.
The problem for America is that men pretending to be strongmen will always yield to stronger men. They will always bow to the men they want to be. In the presence of the real thing their mimicry is made mockery. As we would say in hip-hop, Trump is faking the funk.
"When he promised to put America first in his inaugural speech, Donald Trump drew on a slogan with a long and sinister history – a sign of what was to follow in his presidency
Sarah ChurchwellLast modified on Mon 23 Apr 2018 07.49 EDT“Sadly, the American dream is dead,” Donald Trump proclaimed when he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. It seemed an astonishing thing for a candidate to say; people campaigning for president usually glorify the nation they hope to lead, flattering voters into choosing them. But this reversal was just a taste of what was to come, as he revealed an unnerving skill at twisting what would be negative for anyone else into a positive for himself.
By the time he won the election, Trump had flipped much of what many people thought they knew about the US on its head. In his acceptance speech he again pronounced the American dream dead, but promised to revive it. We were told that this dream of prosperity was under threat, so much so that a platform of “economic nationalism” carried the presidency.
Reading last rites over the American dream was disquieting enough. But throughout the campaign, Trump also promised to put America first, a pledge renewed – twice – in his inaugural address. It was a disturbing phrase; think pieces on the slogan’s history began to sprout up, explaining that it stretches back to efforts to keep the US out of the second world war.
In fact, “America first” has a much longer and darker history than that, one deeply entangled with the country’s brutal legacy of slavery and white nationalism, its conflicted relationship to immigration, nativism and xenophobia. Gradually, the complex and often terrible tale this slogan represents was lost to mainstream history – but kept alive by underground fascist movements. “America first” is, to put it plainly, a dog whistle. The expression’s backstory seems at first to uncannily anticipate Trump and (at least some of) his supporters, but the truth is that eruptions of American conservative populism are nothing new – and “America first” has been associated with them for well over a century. This is merely the latest iteration of a powerful strain of populist demagoguery in American history, from president Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) to Louisiana senator Huey Long a century later – one that now extends to Trump.
The slogan appears at least as early as 1884, when a California paper ran “America First and Always” as the headline of an article about fighting trade wars with the British. The New York Times shared in 1891 “the idea that the Republican Party has always believed in”, namely: “America first; the rest of the world afterward”. The Republican party agreed, adopting the phrase as a campaign slogan by 1894.
By 1916 'America first' had become so popular that both presidential candidates used it as a campaign sloganA few years later, “See America First” had become the ubiquitous slogan of the newly burgeoning American tourist industry, one that adapted easily as a political promise. This was recognised by an Ohio newspaper owner named Warren G Harding, who successfully campaigned for senator in 1914 under the banner “Prosper America First”. The expression did not become a national catchphrase, however, until April 1915, when President Woodrow Wilson gave a speech defending US neutrality during the first world war: “Our whole duty for the present, at any rate, is summed up in the motto: ‘America First’.”
American opinion was deeply divided over the war; while many decried what was widely perceived as a baldly nationalist venture by Germany, there was plenty of anti-British sentiment, too, especially among Irish-Americans. American neutrality was by no means always motivated by pure isolationism; it mingled pacifism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, nationalism and exceptionalism as well. Wilson was delivering the “America first” speech with his eye on a second presidential term: “America first” should not be understood “in a selfish spirit”, he insisted. “The basis of neutrality is sympathy for mankind.”
First in line … Republican national convention in Cleveland, Ohio, 2016.First in line … Republican national convention delegates in Cleveland, Ohio, 2016. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesThe phrase was rapidly taken up in the name of isolationism, however, and by 1916 “America first” had become so popular that both presidential candidates used it as a campaign slogan. When the US joined the war in 1917, “America first” was transposed into a jingoistic motto; after the war, it slipped back into isolationism. In the summer of 1920, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge delivered a keynote speech at the Republican National Convention, denouncing the League of Nations in the name of “America first”. Harding secured the Republican nomination and promptly sailed to victory that November using the slogan, which his administration would invoke ceaselessly before it collapsed amid the ruins of the US’s greatest political bribery scandal to date.
By 1920, “America first” had joined forces with another popular expression of the time, “100% American”, and both soon functioned as clear codes for nativism and white nationalism. It is impossible to grasp the full meaning of “100% American” without recognising the legal and political force of eugenicist ideas about percentages in the United States. The so-called “one-drop rule” – which said that one drop of “Negro blood” made a person legally black – was the foundation of slavery and miscegenation laws in many states, used to determine whether an individual should be enslaved or free. The logic of the one-drop rule extended from the notorious three-fifths compromise in the constitution, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. Declaring someone 100% American was no mere metaphor in a country that measured people in percentages and fractions, in order to deny some of them full humanity.
In 1920 Upton Sinclair published a furiously satirical novel called 100%: The Story of a Patriot, inspired by the case of a radical, Tom Mooney, who was sentenced to hang for a 1916 bombing on charges widely viewed as spurious. Sinclair’s novel is told from the perspective of Peter, “a patriot of patriots, a super-patriot; Peter was a red-blooded American and no mollycoddle; Peter was a ‘he-American’, a 100% American ... Peter was so much of an American that the very sight of a foreigner filled him with a fighting impulse.”
Peter fully believes that:
100% Americanism would find a way to preserve itself from the sophistries of European Bolshevism; 100% Americanism had worked out its formula: “If they don’t like this country, let them go back where they come from.” But of course, knowing in their hearts that America was the best country in the world, they didn’t want to go back, and it was necessary to make them go.
But “100% American” was not only xenophobic and nativist. When Senator Knute Nelson died in 1923, he was hailed in obituaries across the US as “100% American” – despite having been born in Norway. Why? Because Nelson was descended from “the true Nordic line”, “from the race which set up strong gods and bred strong men”.
“Nordic” was yet another code, used in the same ways that the Nazis would use “Aryan”. “Nordicism” held that people of northern Europe were racially superior to those of southern Europe (and everywhere else), a theory espoused by white supremacists such as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, whose The Passing of the Great Race: or The Racial Basis of European History (1916) became one of the most influential works of eugenicist scientific racism. But in practice, Nordic was used to describe anyone who was blond, white, Caucasian or Anglo-Saxon. Colloquially, “Nordic”, “100% American” and “America first” were used all but interchangeably.
A 1927 Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington DC.A 1927 Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington DC. Photograph: Buyenlarge/Getty ImagesIt should come as little surprise, then, that the Ku Klux Klan also adopted “America first” as a motto. In 1919 a Klan leader gave a Fourth of July speech declaring: “I am for America, first, last and all the time, and I don’t want any foreign element telling us what to do.” The fantasy of a US once populated solely by the racially pure Nordic “common man” was the Klan’s genesis myth as well, the prelapsarian past to which they intended to force the country to return – by violence if necessary.
In January 1922, the Klan staged a parade in Alexandria, Louisiana, bearing two flaming red crosses and banners with slogans including “America First”, “100% American” and “White Supremacy”. That summer the Klan took out an advertisement in a Texas newspaper: “The Ku Klux Klan is the one and only organization composed absolutely and exclusively of ONE HUNDRED PER CENT AMERICANS who place AMERICA FIRST.”
If the Klan were allowed to take over the US, one newspaper cautioned, 'we shall have a dictatorship'Within months, Americans were watching the rise of fascism in Europe, as Mussolini took power in Rome. Explaining “fascists” to American readers that year, the press found an obvious example ready to hand. “In our own picturesque phrase,” wrote the New York World, “they might be known as the Ku Klux Klan.” It does not require hindsight to view the Klan as a crypto-fascist organisation: their contemporaries could instantly see the likeness, and the danger. In November 1922 a Montana paper noted that, in Italy, fascism meant “Italy for the Italians. The fascisti in this country call it ‘America first’.” There are plenty of the fascisti in the United States, it seems, but they have always gone under the proud banner of “100% Americans”.
The autumn of 1922 also saw the first mention of a rising German fringe politician called Adolf Hitler in the US press. At the time, a young American journalist named Dorothy Thompson was living in Vienna, where she was reporting on the rise of antisemitism. By November 1923, she was in Munich trying to interview Hitler following his abortive Beer Hall Putsch, filing articles on the way he had updated German nationalism thanks to “suggestions from Mussolini”.
Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle warned its readers that the KKK was no different from “100 % patriotism in Europe”:
There should be no misunderstanding about the Klan. It represents in this country the same ideas that Mussolini represents in Italy; that Primo Rivera represents in Spain. The Klan is the American Fascista, determined to rule in its own way, in utter disregard of the fundamental laws and principles of democratic government.
If such people were allowed to take over the US, it cautioned, “we shall have a dictatorship”.
By 1927, the Klan had spread across the country. That May, roughly 1,000 Klansmen gathered to march in the Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, many in white robes and hoods, accompanied by 400 members of their women’s organisation, the Klavana. Some of the reported 20,000 spectators in Queens that day objected to the Klan’s presence in a civic parade; fights broke out, and it turned into a riot. In the days that followed, the New York papers revealed the names of a total of seven men who had been arrested in Queens. Five of them were identified as “avowed Klansmen” who had been marching in the parade and were arrested for “refusing to disperse when ordered”. A sixth was a mistake – a car had run over his foot – and he was immediately released. The seventh, a 21-year-old German-American, was not identified in the press as a Klansman. The reports only stated that he was arrested, arraigned and discharged. No one knows why he was there. His name was Fred Trump.
In September 1935, a month after announcing he would run for president, Senator Long of Louisiana was assassinated. Called “America’s first dictator”, Long had worried many observers with his blend of populism and authoritarianism. After his death, one writer referred to Long as “the Mississippi valley rendering of Il Duce”. Despite assurances from many Americans that it can’t happen here, Long’s rise to power had shown just how it could. Its growing presence was so clear that at the end of 1935 Sinclair Lewis published a novel inspired by Long’s career (but written before his murder), in which he imagined what American fascism would look like. The title of It Can’t Happen Here was “ironical”, Lewis told reporters: “I don’t say fascism will happen here,” he said, “only that it could.”
Lewis and Thompson had married in 1928, and his novel was heavily influenced by her circle’s conversation about the situation in Europe. She had just become the first American foreign correspondent to be ejected from Germany by Hitler, making her an international celebrity. “Whatever else the Hitler revolution may or may not be,” she wrote, “it is an enormous mass flight from reality.” On her return to the US, Thompson was given a nationally syndicated newspaper column; immediately she began writing about the emergence of bands of loosely organised fascists around the US, where a “Union party” had assembled to unite the right, creating an amalgamation of white supremacist fascist groups.
One of Thompson’s columns on American fascism was titled “It Can Happen Here”, in which she asked:
Whom do they hate? Life, which has treated them badly. Who is to blame? Some scapegoat is to blame. The Negroes working in the fields that should be theirs? Or the Jews? Do they not keep the prosperous shops? Or the Communists … or the trade unionists … Or the Catholics who have a Pope in Rome? Or the foreigners who take the jobs? These are to blame. Therefore exterminate them. We are poor and dispossessed. But we are white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. Our fathers founded this country. It belongs to us.
Just as Thompson’s column was published, in May 1936, William Faulkner finished Absalom, Absalom!, a novel driven by the proposition that what had defined southern history was the fact that poor white people gained self-respect and racial pride from their belief in their inherent superiority to black people. If that sense of racial superiority were ever threatened, the story predicted, they would erupt in violence. A year earlier, WEB Du Bois had explained that “white laborers were convinced that the degradation of Negro labor was more fundamental than the uplift of white labor”. Although white labourers remained poor, Du Bois wrote, they were “compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage”, the wage of racial superiority.
In the autumn of 1940, a coalition of Americans against US entry into the second world war formed the America First Committee. Charles Lindbergh would become their spokesman, Thompson perhaps their fiercest opponent. “I am absolutely certain in my mind that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi,” she wrote in 1941. “He hates the present democratic system and … intends to be President of the United States, with a new party along Nazi lines behind him.” By May 1941, Lewis had joined the America First Committee, while he and Thompson had quietly separated. According to Lewis’s biographer, he was “at that time vigorously opposed to American intervention in the European war … his sympathies with the America First people”.
In August 2017, seven months into Donald Trump’s presidency, a coalition of American fascists calling themselves Unite the Right staged a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. It came as a shock to many observers that the Klan and neo-Nazis could march in modern America, shouting: “Jews will not replace us.” It came as a greater shock that Trump refused to condemn them.
When the story emerged during the 2016 campaign that Trump’s father had been arrested at what was often described (erroneously) as a “Klan rally”, Trump at first denied that the Fred Trump in question was his father, saying they’d never lived at the address named in the newspaper reports. But although Donald never lived there, the Trump family did. There is no evidence that Fred was at the 1927 Memorial Day parade to support the Klan. What’s remarkable is that, of the parade’s 20,000 spectators, the only six who were arraigned after the riots were five “avowed Klansmen”, and Fred Trump.
Donald has spoken often, and proudly, of the father he idolised. “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy,” he stated in 2015. There is good reason to think eugenics plays a role in that legacy. “The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” said one of Trump’s biographers, Michael D’Antonio. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.” Trump also endorsed a garbled version of eugenics in a 2010 interview: “I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.” And while it is true that no one knows why Fred Trump was arrested along with five members of the Klan in 1927, it is also true that his later record would not suggest he was there to protest against the Klan. Maybe it was all just a coincidence.
Or maybe not. In October 2017, the New York Times reported that Trump’s close adviser, Stephen Miller, chose “100% Americanism” as a quotation for his high school yearbook page. Trump made international headlines in January 2018 when he demanded during discussions of immigration from Haiti and Africa why he would want “all these people from shithole countries”, adding that he wanted “more people from places like Norway”. Commentators noted that Norway is overwhelmingly ethnically white, but many were puzzled by what seemed an arbitrary preference. “Why Norway?” asked a Houston Chronicle report, highlighting the “racialism” of the choice; it added that the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer had approved Trump’s remarks, which indicated: “Trump is more or less on the same page as us.” The Chronicle did not, however, mention that the page in question continues to specify Nordicism per se – and “America first” – as its racial ideal for the US.
We cannot hear a dog whistle if we are not in its range. We cannot understand the subtexts of our own slogans if we do not understand their contexts; we risk misreading our own moment if we don’t know the historical meanings of expressions we resuscitate, or perpetuate. We are all asking urgent questions about the present, but there are far more surprising answers than many think to be found in the past. The backstory of loaded phrases can help us understand how we found ourselves facing these problems today – and even, perhaps, how to stop them from detonating into violence once more •
End of the American dream? The dark history of 'America first' | Books | The Guardian: ""
This is fake, stock photo.
"The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas shared fake news images on Facebook of African-Americans who allegedly “walked away” from the Democratic party.
Modal TriggerGinni Thomas' postFacebookGinni Thomas, a lawyer and conservative activist, shared a number of posts from “The Citizens Mandate” that appeared to show former members of the Democratic party — but the individuals are models posing for stock images.
“Thank you, #WalkAway movement, for showing us there are American citizens appalled at what they are seeing in the Democrat Party and its activists,” Thomas wrote on July 16 along with the mocked up image of an African American woman.
The item showed the model along with a list of inflammatory reasons she purportedly left the political party.
The image is a stock photo that can be found by a simple image search.
Modal TriggerGinni Thomas' postFacebookThomas shared a second post from the Citizens Mandate page on Saturday that showed an African American man who the group also claimed had left the party.
“My wife and I both work full time and still cannot afford to send our own kids to college,” read the image Thomas shared on Saturday.
That man is also a stock image model.
This what not the first instance of Thomas sharing questionable material on social media
Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginni Thomas, shares fake news pics on Facebook: ""
"The moral of the Helsinki freak show, the NATO tragicomedy and the children in cages near the border isn’t just that Donald Trump lacks any discernible conscience, real regard for this country or mature appreciation of history and our exalted part in it. It’s that this next election matters — immeasurably."
(Via.). Opinion | Disgusted With Donald Trump? Do This - The New York Times:
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A conservative's take on Trump's unpresidential behavior. It is always necessary to look at things from one's opponent's viewpoint.
My official pundit’s opinion on Donald Trump, Russian election interference, collusion, kompromat and impeachment is that I’m waiting for the Mueller investigation to finish before I have a strong opinion. This allows me to cultivate the agnostic’s smug superiority, but it also leaves me without a suitably en fuego take after something like the immediately infamous Trump-Putin news conference — not because the president’s behavior wasn’t predictably disgraceful, but because the nature and scale of the disgrace can’t be assessed without a certainty about Trump’s motives that’s somewhat out of reach.So maybe this is a good time to step back and sketch out the three main ways to understand Trump’s relationship to Russia and Putin and the 2016 hacking of his Democratic rivals, the three major theories that make sense of our president’s strange conduct before and since. I’m not going to formally choose among them, but for people interested in betting I will offer odds for each.
Scenario 1: Trump Being Trump
In this theory of the case, you can explain all of Trump’s Russia-related behavior simply by finding him guilty of being the person we always knew him to be — vain, mendacious, self-serving, sleazy and absurdly stubborn, with a purely personalized understanding of allies and adversaries, a not-so-sneaking admiration for strongmen and the information filter of an old man who prefers his own reality to the discomforts of contrary information.
Thus Trump is friendly to Putin for the same reason that he praised the Chinese Politburo after Tiananmen Square and now praises Xi Jinping; the same reason that he likes the Saudi royals and buddies up to Recep Tayyip Erdogan; the same reason that after a brief period of bellicosity he’s ended up as a tacit apologist for Kim Jong-un. We have ample evidence, going back decades, that Trump simply likes authoritarian rulers, that he admires their supposed toughness and doesn’t give a fig about their cruelty, that he thinks they would make more reliable allies and partners for the United States than the ingrate democracies of Western Europe. And as Ben Domenech of The Federalist noted after the Helsinki performance, we also have ample evidence that he likes people who seem to like him and considers anyone who criticizes him an enemy: “Thus, the Euros are bastards, and Xi and Kim and Putin are not bad guys.”
If Trump seems to have a more intense affinity for Putin than for other autocrats, two further explanations may suffice. First, his history of doing business deals with Russians makes him particularly inclined to seek geopolitical deals with Russia — an inclination that’s essentially a shadier version of the affinity that the Bush family and other Arabists had with the Saudis and the Gulf States, cross-pollinated with the sleazy campaign-finance relationships that the Chinese cultivated with the Clinton White House.
At the same time, his vanity and amour propre, joined to his rage against his doubters, makes it impossible for Trump to admit that anyone else helped him win the White House — so he cannot bring himself to fully acknowledge and criticize Russian election meddling because to do so might call into question not only his legitimacy but his self-conception as a political grandmaster.
And what about the election-season contacts with suspicious Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, the Don Jr. meeting and the Roger Stone forays? In this theory they’re indicators that Trump, a shady guy surrounded by shady guys and professional morons, might well have colluded given the opportunity — but they don’t prove that any such opportunity presented itself. After all, neither the hacking nor the leaking of emails required his campaign’s cooperation, so there was no reason for the Russian side to advance beyond a deniable low-level meeting and WikiLeaks D.M.s, and thus no real opportunity for the Trump team to be a true accessory to the underlying crime.
This narrative does not exonerate Trump; indeed, it provides various grounds to condemn him. But those grounds are the same grounds that were obvious during the campaign: We watched him blow kisses to dictators then, complain about our allies then, promise a détente with Russia while exploiting the D.N.C. hacking then, double and triple down on falsehoods and bogus narratives then, cling to self-destructive feuds (the Khans, Alicia Machado) in the same way that he clings to public flattery for Putin … and after all this, he was still elected president. So be appalled when he behaves appallingly, but do not be surprised, do not confuse Trump being Trump with Trump being treasonous — and recognize that he isn’t leaving office until you beat him at the polls.
Overall it’s a theory that fits Trump’s personality extremely well, fits the available facts reasonably well, and doesn’t require any new revelations or heretofore-hidden conspiracies. So I continue to give it a … (consults extremely scientific methodology) … 65 percent chance of being the truth.
Scenario 2: Watergate With Russian Burglars
But in outlining the previous scenario I’ve conceded that people around Trump, including his own family members, did show a willingness to collude with dubious figures — and this concession alone means I can’t go along with Trump apologists and anti-anti-Trumpers who insist that collusion theories don’t have any evidence behind them. At the very least, they have the evidence of Don Jr.’s obvious enthusiasm and Stone’s conspicuous maneuvering. And then there is the reasonable point that if he were anyone else, much of Trump’s own behavior — the firing of James Comey, the rage against the investigations, the frequent lies and denials of the obvious, the unnecessary self-destruction — would look a lot like the behavior of a guilty man.
Because Trump is Trump, I think it’s more reasonable to see this behavior as of a piece with all his other irrational-seeming, self-destructive behavior on questions unrelated to l’affaire Russe. But there’s always the possibility that this characterological analysis is a form of overthinking, and that when the truth comes out we’ll look back and say that his guilt should have been obvious all along.
And what kind of guilt would it be? There are various possibilities, but the latest Mueller filing supplies one possible answer: In addition to the email leaks, we now know that the Russian hackers also accessed Democratic campaign analytics, a prize that (far more than the emails) would have been hard to fully weaponize if they weren’t shared directly with the Trump campaign.
Is there evidence of this weaponization? Not necessarily: A Twitter theory that the Trump team’s late spending shifts were suspiciously targeted and timed runs into the difficulty that 1) anyone could see by the fall that his electoral path ran through the Midwest and 2) the Democrats didn’t see his Wisconsin-Pennsylvania upsets coming, so why would their stolen analytics have helped Trump’s people target their way to victory?
But the Russians presumably hoped to do something with those analytics, people in Trump’s circle did show a willingness to communicate with them … and we know not only from Richard Nixon but also from Lyndon Johnson that the temptation to spy on your opponent’s campaign can be irresistible to politicians more experienced than Donald Trump.
So a Watergate-style endgame with a Russian twist is hardly a paranoiac’s fantasy: If the Trump campaign got stolen campaign data and Trump knew enough about it to inform his firing of Comey, that’s collusion and a case for impeachment wrapped into one scenario. And the odds that something like this is the truth I boldly place at … (calculates) … 25 percent.
Scenario 3: The Muscovite Candidate
That leaves 10 percent for the most dramatic theory, which is that any collusion wasn’t just something Trump’s team stumbled into during the campaign but something connected to a much longer-running Russian intelligence operation, and that Trump’s relationship to the Russian state is not just a personal or ideological affinity or a campaign-season alliance but a partnership forged through blackmail or bribery or both.
Most of that 10 percent covers the narrow version of this theory, in which Putin and Co. are blackmailing Trump with damaging financial information from his recent Russian dealings or with the mythical-or-is-it pee tape. A much smaller fraction of the fraction is left for the more baroque theory, elaborated (with caveats, but also way too much credulity) by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine recently, that Trump was actually compromised-cum-recruited by Russian intelligence all the way back in 1987, and that his whole worldview was somehow made in Moscow to help unmake the West.
There is a great deal of enthusiasm for this kind of theory, on social media especially, and on many days I think it’s embarrassing or risible — a birtherism of the center-left, an exculpatory fantasy from an establishment thrashing about to evade its own responsibility for the rise of populism, a “brown scare” about an omnicompetent Putin and a fascist international that mirrors similar paranoias on the right.
The first two narratives I’ve offered seem far more parsimonious, Trump seems like too brazen a sinner to be effectively blackmailed, and his worldview seems very palpably his own. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s actual Russia policy, with its combination of the public bromance with Putin and more hawkish policies behind the scenes, would be a pretty a strange way for a Kremlin stooge to play his part.
But one of the vows I took after Trump's stunning political ascent was to refuse to be that surprised again, to refuse to simply laugh at scenarios that seem outlandish or unlikely — because, as they say, that kind of reflexive laughter is how you got Trump. And much as I’m inclined to put the Muscovite Candidate scenario at 1 percent or 0.1 percent, as I worked on this column the number kept creeping upward. After all, there’s got to be something in those tax returns … of course the Russians spy on foreign celebrities when they visit … the way he talks about Putin is, well, weirder than the way he talks about other foreign leaders …
Don’t fit me for that #Resistance shirt just yet; my money is still on the strange-but-not-that-crazy explanations for our president’s behavior. But in the age of Donald Trump, everyone should hedge their bets.
Opinion | Trump and Russia: One Mystery, Three Theories - The New York Times
