Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Maybe John Bolton's Book Matters?

I haven't purchased John Bolton's book about working in the Trump administration. I don't want to reward the man who could have testified in a timely way and whose career was disastrous before he joined the Trump administration. Nor will I read pirated versions of the book because that's wrong.

I never expected much to come from this book.

But Bolton's book seems to have opened a floodgate of important information, as other sources are coming forth to the press. 

First, we had the story that Russian agents were paying bounties to "Taliban-related militants" who killed American forces in Afghanistan--and that the administration knew it. It took the Trump administration a full day to come up with the story that neither Trump nor Pence received the intel reports in question. Trump tweeted to that effect. 

Now we know--ok, we've always known--they were lying. Trump received written briefings in writing. And he's done nothing. 

Who knows whether the Russia-Afghanistan story would have appeared without Bolton's book? But the story confirms our sense that Trump is somehow beholden to Vladimir Putin. Americans have died, and Trump has done nothing to retaliate.

Now CNN is running another story concerning Trump's phone calls with world leaders. The big picture? Trump is especially accessible and responsive to dictators, especially Turkey's Erdogan, he insults our allies (he called Angela Merkel "stupid"), he doesn't prepare, and he puts his interests before the national interest. 

CNN: 
The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN's sources of Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders is consistent with the basic tenor and some substantive elements of a limited number of calls described by former national security adviser John Bolton in his book, "The Room Where It Happened." But the calls described to CNN cover a far longer period than Bolton's tenure, are much more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning -- in their sweep.
And,
One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.
"America First," my ass. 

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Not Even Trying -- And Worse

Justice Department lawyer Aaron Zelinsky has issued a statement in preparation for his testimony before Congress. He describes a "deeply corrupt process" in which the Department of Justice treated Trump ally Roger Stone differently from other defendants. The statement is brutal. Zelensky said the person responsible for conducting Stone's case received "heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break." And, he says, he was explicitly told the motivation to decrease Stone's case was political.

Last week we learned that Donald Trump almost surely lied in his responses to cases from Robert Mueller's investigative team. A newly released, and less redacted, copy of the Mueller Report indicates that 
According to multiple witnesses involved with the Campaign, beginning in June 2016 and continuing through October 2016, Stone spoke about WikiLeaks with senior Campaign officials, including candidate Trump.
Trouble is, Trump claimed he had no knowledge of these doings. And "William Barr announced after reviewing Mueller's report he 'did not find' that any Trump campaign associates coordinated with Russian interference in the election," per CNN. 

It's kinda hard to trust Barr. Last week Barr announced that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, had resigned his position. Trouble was, Berman had not resigned and had no attention of resigning. Instead, Berman was investigating Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and maybe Trump, and he wanted to assure the public his investigations would continue. In other words, Barr lied.
I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney.  I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.  I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate.  Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption.  I cherish every day that I work with the men and women of this Office to pursue justice without fear or favor – and intend to ensure that this Office’s important cases continue unimpeded. 
Barr wanted to replace Berman with SEC Chair Jay Clayton. But there were a couple of problems there. First, it's not Barr's job to replace Berman. Instead, there's a chain of succession until Congress approves a replacement. Berman held out until that chain of succession held out, leaving Clayton to wait. Second, there's a bigger problem. The SDNY is investigating Deutsche Bank -- remember, this very bank had been subpoenaed for Trump's tax records -- while Clayton has served as an attorney for the bank. 

Tying the bow: the guy investigating Trump was removed so that the guy who defended Trump's bank could replace him.

It's a lot lately. The other night, Trump told his small Tulsa audience that he'd actually discouraged government efforts to expand coronavirus testing because it made the numbers look bad. Rapidly Trump spokespeople rushed to explain that Trump didn't mean what he'd plainly said. He was just joking! But today Trump insisted: Yes, I meant what I said.

"I don't kid, let me just tell you, let me make it clear."

Faced with America's greatest public health crisis, the occupant of the White House has zero interest in mitigating the harm. All he cares about is optics. With the United States by far the world's leader in coronavirus outbreaks, and with cases rising in blue states, it's become apparent that Trump isn't failing to contain the virus. He's not even trying.

He told the Christian Broadcasting Network,
but I think we put ourselves at a disadvantage, I told my people. I said, "We've gotten so good at testing ... We test much more than any other nation," so you hear about all these cases.
Also,
By having more tests we have more cases...We did 25 million tests therefore the tests are gonna have more cases. By having more cases it sounds bad...Testing is a double edged sword....
 
But hey, Trump knows what's going on. Tuesday night he told an Arizona crowd.... Wait, stop. Isn't Arizona among our hottest coronavirus outbreaks? Not even trying. But having called the virus the "Kung Flu," the Racist in Chief told them: "COVID, COVID-19, COVID, I said what’s the 19. COVID-19, some people can’t explain the 19."

Some people can't explain the 19. Sweet Baby Moses.
 

Thursday, June 18, 2020

Secret Nazi Handshake?

The white right loves trolling, performing some racist (or sexist or homophobic) action to elicit protests, but maintaining just enough deniability to laugh off the whole thing. The technique works by attracting attention, by entertaining the racist base, and by sending coded hate speech.

This week Donald Trump's political campaign ran ads featuring an inverted red triangle, a symbol the Nazis used to designate political prisoners. Is this a coded Nazi message?
I hate putting myself in a conspiracy-mongering mode, but there are lots of reasons to be suspicious in this case. To begin, this kind of communication is standard on the racist right. But let's establish a broader context.
  • Earlier this week I wrote about the signs that Trump plans to go all-in on racism as a reelection strategy. I chose not to advertise the post, but now it's all the more relevant.
  • Isn't it odd that Trump chooses to go after Antifa, when the evidence for Antifa involvement in recent national protests is scant? Antifa means "anti-fascist," and plenty of experts identify fascist tendencies on Trump's part.
  • During his election campaign Trump and since his inauguration, it's been frequently pointed out that Trump uses symbols, metaphors, and social media posts that originate in Nazi-adjacent circles. Trump also tweeted content he'd received from Russian media, as national security expert Clint Watts told Congress.
  • The Jerusalem Post just noticed that Trump referred to the Secret Service as the "S.S." Maybe Trump was just saving characters?
  • Recently Trump told Ford employees their company had "good bloodlines." Henry Ford conducted business with Nazis during World War II, was a noted anti-Semite, and was very much into eugenics. So was Donald Trump, Senior.
  • Trump issued a 2020 campaign logo that clearly depended on an image developed in fascist circles.
  • Calling protesters "thugs," a racially coded term if ever there was one, Trump tweeted, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts." The quote comes from a segregationist Miami police chief in 1967 and was picked up by George Wallace. 
  • Trump tweeted that four Democratic Congresswomen, all persons of color, "should go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." All of them are US citizens, and three were born in this country.
  • Don't forget that Ivana Trump said her ex-husband kept of book of Hitler's speeches by the bed. One clear reason to be suspicious: there's little evidence Trump would read anything.
We could go on, but that's a whole lot of potential racist trolling. The level of trolling we're talking about requires some effort and sophistication. Neo-Nazis and the like are fond of high-level symbolism. For example, it's common to find the number 1488 among such groups. The number refers to literature produces by the white supremacist David Lane. You can look it up here.

It's entirely possible Donald Trump doesn't come up with this stuff on his own. He's either a willing or an unwitting vehicle of it. One of his chief political and communications strategists, Stephen Miller, has a known affinity for white supremacist literature and--get this--has been tasked with writing Trump's planned speech on race.

In addition to coded communication, white supremacists are extremely fond of symbolic allusions, particularly to dates. A guy like Stephen Miller, with support from a whole world of racists, could certainly come up with a plan for Trump to hold a rally during a period of heightened racial tension on Juneteenth, the day we celebrate the end of the Confederacy and the freedom of enslaved persons, and in Tulsa, site of the greatest massacre of black Americans. Sure he could.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Theological Disinformation

When we disagree with people, we generally give them the benefit of the doubt. We assume they mean well. We assume they may have something to teach us. (The Buddhists remind us that everything has something to teach us. Dammit.) Among Christians, it's all the more painful to write someone off as unworthy of engagement.

We're there with Eric Metaxas, who has used Dietrich Bonhoeffer to argue that electing Donald Trump is a Christian duty, and who now wedges Bonhoeffer against Black Lives Matter. 
In Metaxas we're dealing not with error but with disinformation. Metaxas authored a bestselling biography of Bonhoeffer. I'm no Bonhoeffer expert, but I know some things, and I read it with interest. About halfway in I began to smell something funky -- not good funky, either. As I continued on, Metaxas basically equated the Nazis with theological liberals and turned Bonhoeffer into a right-wing culture warrior.

Now, don't get me wrong. Bonhoeffer was no American progressive. He's hard to pin down on most anything. But as time moved forward, every review of Metaxas' book by an actual Bonhoeffer expert confirmed my suspicions, and in spades. It's awful.

Charles Marsh, a Bonhoeffer scholar whose work I greatly admire, devoted a lengthy Twitter thread to demonstrate just how misleading is Metaxas' take on Bonhoeffer and Black Lives Matter. The content didn't hold together as a single thread on Twitter, so I asked Charles' permission to represent it there. It's public content, so I'm sharing it here as well. You'll see just how devastating this thread is: an expert assessing a hack. Charles' words appear in italics.

Indulge me a long thread (my first, fingers crossed) in which I show readers the absurdity of this tweet. A more lively response (imho) can be found in my book, “Strange Glory. A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer” (Knopf, 2014)

Bonhoeffer’s life-changing encounters with the American organizing tradition initially came through two largely forgotten teachers at Union, Harry Ward and Charles Webb. (First of a dozen or so,) 

Methodist minister, professor of practical theology Christian socialist, Webber was known to friends & foes alike as the chaplain of organized labor. Bonhoeffer loved his book, “A History of the Development of Social Education in the United Neighborhood Houses of New York”. 

Bonhoeffer wrote, “I paid a visit almost every week to settlements, Y.M.C.A., co-operative houses, playgrounds, children’s courts, night schools, socialist schools, asylums, youth organizations, Association for advance of coloured people [sic]…. It is immensely impressive!”

In Webber’s courses DB went deep with the National Women’s Trade Union & the Workers Education Bureau of America and wrote reports on labor, selective buying campaigns, civil rights, “restriction of profits,” juvenile delinquency, “the activity of the churches in these fields. 

Webber introduced DB to the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, the Delta Cooperative, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the British cooperative movement. The last he visited a few years later while praying and making plans for the illegal seminary at Finkenwalde. 

Then there was Harry Ward, the Methodist activist and social reformer.

For an extraordinary portrait of Ward’s life and thought, I highly recommend this book by my friend and fellow Baptist boy. RIP, David.
Ward combined an old-time Methodist zeal for righteous action with a crusading Marxist critique of economic inequality. 

Bonhoeffer took Ward’s popular class, “Ethical Interpretations” (jointly taught with Reinhold Niebuhr), on developing the ethical and theological skills needed to interpret/evaluate “current events in light of the principles of Christian ethics.”

Bonhoeffer and his classmates were required to read and analyze newspaper articles, political journals, government reports, and various legal documents—all from the perspective of “the Jesus of the proletariat.”

Bonhoeffer said he listened closely as Ward enunciated his singular version of Pascal’s wager: Christians had the world to gain from living “as if” there existed an ethical God weighing every human action in the balance. This meant, at least for Ward, a socialist revolution. 

Next let’s meet Bonhoeffer’s classmate and interlocutor James Dombrowski and consider that DB read and admired his Columbia dissertation, “The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America.” 

Over the next three decades, Dombrowski would direct the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, serve as executive director of the Southern Conference Educational Fund and work behind the scenes with key figures in the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. (Six or seven more). 

One of Bonhoeffer’s most trusted classmates was a seminarian from Tennessee named Myles Horton, who called himself “the token hillbilly” at Union.

After he finished Union, Miles Horton returned to Tennessee and founded the Highlander Folk School-“specializing in education for fundamental social change.” In the 1930s/ ’40s, Highlander  emerged as a training centers for the Christian Left. 


In the 1950s, Highlander would shift focus from labor to  civil rights and help train the generation of church-based organizers that included Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ella Baker, pictured here.
These activist/theologians blew Bonhoeffer’s mind and illuminated a way of doing theology closer to the ground. 

And we haven’t even spoken about Bonhoeffer’s deep immersion in African-American Christianity and culture. Or explored the implications of his parting observation, “I heard the gospel preached (only) in the church if the outcasts of America.”

His cousin, fellow conspirator said the American year set his “entire thinking on a track from which it has not yet deviated and never will.” Progressive protestant ethics (he first rejected for its lack of doctrinal rigor) made Bonhoeffer into a theologian of the concrete. 

A straight line runs from the progressive American organizing tradition in white and black through the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. 

Had Metaxas bothered to look at the two large bankers boxes in the Berlin public library containing files, notes and clippings of the academic year 1930-31, he would have seen this evidence. And ignored it. 

Back in Berlin, Bonhoeffer listened with new purpose as his brother Klaus -murdered for his role in July ‘44 - explained: “People are flirting with fascism. If the radical wave of right-wing sentiment captures even the educated classes it will soon be over for the nation.”

Notice that Marsh doesn't attribute Metaxas' mischaracterization of Bonhoeffer to ignorance or even to poor research. Had Metaxas seen the evidence, Marsh writes, he would have ignored it.

Metaxas reflects a larger problem in Christian right politics, one I've been screaming about for awhile now: outright disinformation. Perhaps the most prominent case is David Barton, the high school math teacher and Christian school principal who styles himself as a historian. Barton is massively influential in Christian nationalist politics and in the churches that support it.

In 2012 Barton published The Jefferson Lies with the evangelical house Thomas Nelson. Note that I don't link it. Barton's entire project is to argue that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that its "Founding Fathers" were motivated by Christian conviction. Like Metaxas, Barton received immediate panning from actual historians, many of them conservative evangelicals. The response was so devastating that Thomas Nelson recalled the book.

Let me repeat that: Barton's own publisher lost faith in the book and recalled it.

So where is Barton today? You'd think he might be sitting in his basement, hiding from public scrutiny while counting his money. But no. His popularity on the Christian right has scarcely waned. He's still proclaimed an expert, still on TV, still commanding speaking fees, still providing disinformation. He's big with the Museum of the Bible people. (You'll find a short version of his story in Katherine Stewart's The Power Worshippers.)

Barton and Metaxas are popular not for their wisdom but because they say the things powerful people want them to say. They're agents of disinformation, and richly rewarded for it. There's a strong stream in American evangelicalism devoted precisely to that effort.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Storm Clouds

Yesterday Donald Trump want to Dallas, partially to raise money but also to discuss "race relations" with a "roundtable" of law enforcement officials. Trump took the time to preview his great speech on race relations. Of the effort to overcome bigotry and prejudice, Trump said, "It'll go quickly and it'll go very easily."

We might recall that Trump said it would be easy to fix health care and that the coronavirus was under control. Very easy. 

I see storm clouds. Trump will continue to use racism to amp up his base, and things will get worse before they get better.

What are we to make of the fact that Trump is planning a rally in Tulsa, the site of America's greatest massacre of black citizens, on June 19--or Juneteenth, the commemoration of emancipation? I don't know, but I do see conservative never Trump political strategist S.E. Cupp pointing out the obvious: 
1. Trump likely has no clue what the significance of Juneteenth and Tulsa are.
2. But Stephen Miller does.
And trying to claw his way back into civilization, Anthony Scaramucci calls the rally "a wink at his racist supporters." I buy that too.
 
It's never been a question whether Trump is racist. Trump is planning to deliver a major speech on race in the near future, but Washington Post opinion writer Dana Milbank points out that we already have enough words from Trump on the subject. Moreover, Milbank points out, Stephen Miller will be writing the speech, and we have strong public evidence of Miller's white nationalist views.

We've crossed a line. Trump will continue to use racist, sometimes overt, and sometimes subtle, to arouse his base. He'll continue to defend Confederate monuments and military base names. He'll keep using black spokespeople to counter others who actually represent popular opinion: in the White House today somebody named Raynard Jackson accused Joy Reid, Don Lemon, and Roland Martin of, well, here's what he said:
So you got radical liberal journalists like Joy Reid from MSNBC, Don Lemon from CNN, Roland Martin, who are putting more poison into the black community than any drug dealer — who are killing more black folks than any white person with a sheet over their face.
And Trump will continue to sound like he's grieved over the death of George Floyd while (a) expressing zero concern about police racism and (b) using Floyd as a propaganda prop.

It's gonna get worse and worse. With public opinion continuing to take the coronavirus threat seriously and to show increasing support for Black Lives Matter, Trump will surely escalate.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Ain't Always Complicated

It ain't always complicated, you know. Maybe you've met somebody, then you notice you're the one who always texts first. I've heard that happens. Don't know anything about it.

Today we're getting toward simple. Donald Trump is acting like a wannabe Putin. He hasn't thrown anybody out the window yet, we hope. Then again, has anyone seen Anthony Fauci this month?

But here's what he has done. A recent CNN poll has Biden leading Trump 55-41. That's a lot. Little Vladdy Wannabe's campaign literally sent a cease and desist letter, insisting that CNN retract and apologize for the poll.

Even in the era of Trump, this seems abnormal, no?

You may recall that the William Barr Department of Justice requested that a federal court dismiss the charges against retired General Michael Flynn. Facing charges of functioning as a foreign agent without registering, Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he held with Russian foreign minister Sergei Kislyak.

May I simply note that Trump's first National Security Director was a known Turkish agent who received checks from the Kremlin? 

Prior to Flynn's sentencing, the DOJ intervened. Prosecutors for the case all removed themselves from the case. Smelling rotten fish, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan knew he'd need backup, so he assigned retired judge John Gleeson to research the case and issue a report. 

The Government’s ostensible grounds for seeking dismissal are conclusively disproven by its own briefs filed earlier in this very proceeding. They contradict and ignore this Court’s prior orders, which constitute law of the case. They are riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact. And they depart from positions that the Government has taken in other cases.
He literally called the DOJ's move to drop the case "corrupt" and "highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the President."

Again, this isn't normal. A retired federal judge, brought in to referee a case, is telling us Trump's Department of Justice is corrupt. 

Then there's Trump's propaganda level from yesterday, which reached the level of Animal Farm's Napoleon. Video shows Buffalo police shoving Black Lives Matter protestor Martin Gugino to the ground. Gugino's head hit the sidewalk, yet police simply passed by as he was bleeding. The event sparked national outrage.

But the One America News Network identified Gugino as an Antifa activist. The reporter previously worked for the Russian Sputnik network--

--you cannot make this shit up.

With no evidence, Trump repeated the Kremlin/Sputnik/OneAmerica line via Twitter.
Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?
There's also no evidence the main was trying to disrupt police technology, though I guess that's possible.

But there's a problem. Rather than being an Antifa activist committed to using violence against fascists, it turns out Gugino is a Catholic Worker. He may be politically radical, but he's a pacifist.

As of this morning Gugino remained hospitalized and in a good deal of pain a full week after suffering his head injury, but a friend of his reports that he had a "good chuckle" at Trump's expense.

So here's the sum of it: Trump is trying to suppress a mainstream opinion poll, his Department of Justice has been declared corrupt in a report commissioned by a US District Court, and Trump is accusing Catholic Workers of being terrorists.

Oh. One additional bit of news. Trump says the US is unilaterally withdrawing troops from Germany. I suppose this is because (a) Germany is a functioning democracy that is now openly critical of Trump and (b) this will make Putin very damn happy. Over twenty House Republicans have asked Trump not to do it.

Turns out, Germany has asked for clarification but is receiving no reply from its former #1 ally. Per retired General Mark Hertling, who served as Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army, Germany reports:
Silence towards host country.
 No answer is also an answer...despite requests from various diplomatic channels, the (GE) government has received no response from US regarding reports of troop withdrawal

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Police State

Two things to know about Donald Trump: (1) he wants to be a dictator, which he's said himself, and (2) he's down about 8 points to Joe Biden in national polls, per Real Clear Politics' aggregate poll. Put those two items together, and you have a desperate coward who might just exploit a national emergency to consolidate power. 

(Ok, I added coward. But of course Trump is a coward.)

You have to take Trump at his word--except when you shouldn't. Because sometimes he tells the absolute truth about himself. This is what Trump told Playboy after China's Tienanmen Square massacre. 
When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.
Trump was pro-communist in 1990.

We have countless reasons for concern regarding the state of policing in the United States, the repeated violence against black people top among them. But we need to stop and think about what we know. The FBI has been warning us about the presence of white supremacists on police forces since--wait for it--2006.

I'm not confident enough to say more. But let's try out a theory. Supposing a certain percentage of local police officers are indeed white supremacists. If that's the case, they're also pro-Trump--because show me a white supremacist who's staffing the phone bank for Biden. So supposing this theory, what would we be seeing right now?

We'd be seeing police escalating the violence at the nation-wide protests against police violence against African Americans. 

I began to wonder about this when I was participating in a driving protest here in Lancaster, PA. The protest was entirely peaceful, thought the police were fielding some protests and heckling. Then for no justifiable reason, the police released pepper spray. Why?

Certainly many police officers have done better, as have some departments. But Donald Trump needs chaos in order to win the election. Or postpone it. Otherwise, Americans have generally seen who he is and are united in opposition to him.

Let's survey the news.

First, police are targeting reporters and photographers in the United States, Trump's "enemy of the people." I recommend you listen in to the journalists describing their own experiences.
Multiple officers broke off and came specifically over to us and started shooting at us. They had rubber bullets, tear gas. And then they had these canisters of pepper spray that they were spraying in people's eyes from, you know, less than an arm's length away.
As of June 1, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of the Committee to Protect Journalists, shared this.
To put some perspective on the unprecedented nature of the weekend's attacks on journalists: 

At @USPressTracker, we've documented 100-150 press freedom violations in the US per year, for the last 3 years. 

We are currently investigating *over 100* FROM JUST THE LAST 3 DAYS.
Today the tally reads:
OUR LATEST DATA:
*233+ total press freedom incidents*

41+ arrests/detainments
153 assaults (125 by police, 27 by others)
39 equipment/newsroom damage

Assault category breakdown:
53 physical attacks (33 by police)
35 tear gassings
21 pepper sprayings
55 rubber bullet/projectiles
Observe that the assaults and phsyical attacks are far more likely to come from police than from others.

The New York Times editorial board implied the obvious question.  
Just a few weeks ago, the police demonstrated remarkable forbearance as heavily armed groups turned out in several state capitals to oppose coronavirus-related public heath measures. Now the police are demonstrating an equally remarkable intolerance to protests against their own behavior.
And the evidence is everywhere. Please forgive the frequent appeal to Twitter links. 
Beyond the attacks on reporters, there's direct aggression against ordinary protestors.
Doesn't this photo from Long Beach, shared by @richardgrant88, say it all?

Maybe it won't work, but we should be vigilant. There are signs of cracks in Trump's support.

But never fear. Trump is going all Nazi, and he has plenty of Goebbels wanna-bes. When Episcopal bishop Marian Budde expressed outrage that Trump used a church as a political prop, White House spox Jenna Ellis replied, "The bishop is obviously a pawn of the leftist media that thrives on the destruction of all that is moral and just."

Trump doesn't care about the coronavirus pandemic, only in using it to grab power. As least as of June 1, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN's Jim Sciutto that "he has not spoken or met with President in 2 weeks & his contact w/Trump has become much less frequent. Their last interaction was May 18, during teleconference with the nation’s governors."

The big picture: we should expect things to get far worse before they get better. Trump is desperate and can't afford to lose. He'll do anything to keep that from happening. He wants the police and the military on his side.

Oh, and Jim Mattis just denounced Trump as a threat to the Constitution. I also recommend the piece by Admiral Mike Mullen, former Joint Chiefs chair. Democracy is at stake.

Monday, June 1, 2020

Bunker Mentality

The past few days have been hard for many of us, hell for many as well. The George Lloyd killing, the continuing protests, and the clear signs that people who need to hear those protests will never listen, all these things grind the spirit. 

We've also realized that the coronavirus and police violence share something in common: they both reveal the pervasive racism that shapes our society. Both pandemics disproportionately kill black people.

We also saw something else. Donald Trump is full of bluster, with racism dripping through his threats to respond to looting with bullets and his reference to thugs. But when protesters closed in on the White House, what'd he do? He literally turned off the lights and hid in his bunker. 

Donald Trump is a coward.
@tencents77/Twitter
But he's a corrupt coward. And while we were looking at other things this week, waves of evidence reminded us that there's something very wrong with Donald Trump's relationship with Russia.

First, thinking he was doing Trump some kind of favor (???), new DNI John Ratcliffe released the transcripts of Michael Flynn's pre-inauguration call with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak--and guess what, it was collusion indeed. As Republican and Democratic lawmakers together were gearing up to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, and before Trump was in the White House, Flynn was trying to smooth things out. The transcripts also confirmed that Flynn was guilty of precisely the crimes to which he plead guilty--lying to the FBI. 

Isn't it remarkable that Trump, who once said Flynn lied to him and to Mike Pence, now says Flynn is getting a raw deal?

Further purging anyone even close to the Russia investigation, the Trump administration also fired Dana Boente, the FBI's top lawyer. Boente, of course, has been cleared of any wrongdoing in the investigation by the FBI's inspector general, but we all know how Trump feels about watchdogs.

Violating the top rule of blogging, I've saved the biggest thing for last because it pulls so many things together. Trump called for an in-person G7 meeting at Camp David. Right away Angela Merkel said no thanks, I'm not coming to the United States in person during this pandemic. 

If there was ever proof that the United States no longer leads the world, that should do it.

But it got worse: Trump publicly said he'd like to invite Vladimir Putin. Putin got kicked out when the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014, and they're still there. But Trump wants to give his boss a seat at the meeting. 

Something is still wrong with Trump and Russia. According to Molly McKew, in two days Trump gained 400,000 Twitter followers. 

Right away, the UK and Canada both said: no way we're allowing Putin back into the G7. Besides Crimea, Russia is still undermining every major democracy. 

And this is where we are. Donald Trump is a coward, there's still something very wrong with Trump and Russia, and the United States no longer leads the free world.

PRRI's Census of American Religion; Authoritarianism; Election subversion

 This month the Public Religion Research Institute release its 2023 Census of American Religion , the most comprehensive such study we get....