Month: January 2017

Tactical methods for tricking the president

by digby

This is what it’s come to. The Republicans are trying to figure out how to trick the imbecile who will be living in the White House into doing what they need him to do. But it’s not easy because he’s an undisciplined pathological liar.

From National Review:

After Rand Paul announced he had spoken with Trump, who agreed with him about making repeal and replace simultaneous, one congressional staffer suggested at a Capitol Hill meeting on health care that his boss could call Trump and get him to say the opposite. After Trump’s news conference last week, several members and staffers suggested (independently) that Trump must mean that repeal and replace should take effect simultaneously, rather than that they should be enacted simultaneously, in which case congressional Republicans were already on the same page as Trump. (And of course, that could very well be what Trump meant.) After Trump’s Washington Post interview this past Sunday, the conservative health-care universe, including some people on Trump’s own team, quickly concluded that the separate administration plan he described was entirely a figment of Trump’s imagination.

If you read that whole article you’ll see that the Republicans in congress are trying to use a Machiavellian strategy to repeal Obamacare. They really, really want to do it. I’m not even sure they know why anymore. It’s the Holy Grail.

But that paragraph suggests that Trump’s stupidity may be what stops it. He is without any fundamental beliefs other than doing and saying anything to make the sale and when it comes to governing he doesn’t know what “the sale” is or who he’s selling it to. So he’s entirely unpredictable. But that means there’s a chance that he’ll screw his own people for reasons that have nothing to do with the policy which he doesn’t understand at all.

We have a puerile fool for president and a Republican Party that’s at peak crazy. Pray for them to metaphorically shoot each other in the foot. For the time being, that’s the best we can hope for, at least until enough of the population wakes up* and puts them out of office.

*And that means mobilization. Lot’s of things for citizens to do to make that happen. Read all about it.

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“The Donald” and “the Mooch”

by digby

I wrote about  “adviser and public liaison to government agencies and businesses” Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci for Salon today:

A long time ago in an alternate universe far, far away, I wrote a Salon column about how the Republican Party was in trouble because rich gadflies had decided to get personally involved in electoral strategy and that could only spell their doom. These were foolish wealthy donors for the most part, people who believed the size of their bank accounts meant they were renaissance geniuses who can do anything.

Needless to say my prophesy didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. One of those gadflies is going to be inaugurated president of the United States in two days. And it turns out that the central focus of my long-ago column has been named a top adviser to that new president.

His name is Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci, and he could be a character out of an Elmore Leonard novel. In fact, in my 2014 article I wrote, “the man’s hijinks make Donald Trump look like a prince by comparison.” (I didn’t know the extent of Trump’s high jinks at the time.) Scaramucci has a big mouth and a big wallet and he has been ostentatiously rubbing elbows with the political elite for quite some time.

Scaramucci made a ton of money in hedge funds and, like his new boss, he loves to show off his wealth as a reality-TV star. In 2009, he starred in a show called “Untold Wealth: The Rise of the Super Rich.” (Like Trump, Saddam Hussein and Louis XIV, his taste runs toward gold and mirrors.) He has been a regular on CNBC, offering himself up as an expert on all things financial and has cultivated many friends in high places.

But Scaramucci has particularly concentrated on politics, hosting a sort of mini-Davos called SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (or SALT for short) named after his hedge fund. He invites sports and entertainment stars to rub shoulders with major officials, politicos and wealthy master of the universe types in Las Vegas for a little networking and a lot of partying. According to Ken Vogel, who wrote about this conclave for Politico, Scaramucci was seen as “a validator who can steer major Wall Street money to hedge funds and super PACs alike.” The Mooch is a liaison, a middleman, a matchmaker.

He is also self-aggrandizing and has a reputation for indiscretion, spilling campaign finance secrets on Twitter and posting on Facebook backstage pictures of luminaries at the 2012 GOP convention. He made a particularly egregious gaffe by alerting a reporter to a closed-door fundraiser where Karl Rove was recorded telling fellow Republicans they needed to “sink” Todd Akin, the Senate candidate of “legitimate rape” fame. (That flap seems almost quaint in the age of Trump.)

Vogel quoted a conservative Wall Streeter characterizing Scaramucci as someone with the profile of Sheldon Adelson but without the bank account:

“Do people take him seriously? I think they do because of his image and his brand, more so than because of his political giving. The only thing similar between his politics and his business, including SALT, is that it’s all about him.”

It’s easy to see why Trump would be impressed. Scaramucci is an obnoxious, crude, indiscreet, wealthy egomaniac. What’s not to like? Naturally Trump has hired him as his “adviser and public liaison to government agencies and businesses.”

This week Scaramucci is attending the actual conclave in Davos rather than his home-grown imitation, reassuring all the big-money players that Trump isn’t really going to do anything that will displease them. According to The Wall Street Journal, Scaramucci told that gathering:

“If you guys get a little bit upset about the tweeting or some of the things that [Trump is] saying, I want to put your mind at ease. Directionally, this is a super-compassionate man. He’s not necessarily communicating in a way that the people in this community would love, but he is communicating very, very effectively to a very large group of the population in Europe and in the United States that are feeling a common struggle right now that maybe many of us here in this room do not feel.”

He also reportedly said that Trump is “one of the last great hopes for globalism” but it’s broken and only he can fix it. He used China as an example, explaining that Trump doesn’t want a trade war but expects “symmetry” and therefore demands that China “reach now towards us and allow us to create this symmetry because the path to globalism for the world is through the American worker and the American middle class.”

I’m sure the rest of the world thinks that sounds perfectly fair and will happily sublimate the needs of their own people because Donald Trump says so. After all, Scaramucci vouches for his good intentions, assuring everyone that Trump is “the least racist person” Scaramucci has ever met.

But even more interesting than the Mooch’s PR outreach to the global masters of the universe is his personal dealmaking on the eve of the inauguration and his ascension to an important post in the White House. In the middle of Trump’s monumental Russian scandal, Bloomberg reported yesterday that Scaramucci openly admits that he “discussed possible joint investments in a meeting in Davos with the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund that the U.S. sanctioned in 2015.”

He also gave interviews to Russian media outlets, expressing the opinion that the sanctions haven’t worked because Russians get mad at those who inflict them.

Since he is notoriously indiscreet, Scaramucci also blurted out that he’d been working for months on the deal. (Remember, this wealth fund has been under U.S. government sanctions since 2015.) He told Bloomberg that he would have to determine whether he can continue to work this deal from the White House, what with ethics rules and all.

Luckily, Scaramucci happens to have sold his own hedge fund — this week — so it should all be fine. That is, unless some stodgy old ethics lawyer thinks it might be inappropriate for a liaison from the White House to arrange private business deals with Russian businesses to benefit who knows whom or if you believe that when the U.S. imposes sanctions on a foreign country for violations of international law they should be honored by American businessmen who are about to become White House advisers. But if all of that is no problem, then the Mooch should be in the clear.

Hope you guessed his name

by digby

What could go wrong?

President-elect Donald J. Trump made his first visit to Washington on Tuesday in more than a month, appearing at a dinner where he predicted “record” crowds at his inauguration and praised the Harley-Davidson motorcycle riders who plan to protect it from protesters. 

In the stream-of-consciousness style he employed at his campaign rallies, Mr. Trump said, “I saw the Bikers for Trump — boy, they had a scene today. I don’t know if I would want to ride one of those, but they do like me. That’s like additional security with those guys, and they’re rough. And they get on that Harley, usually Harley, made right here in America.”

Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul to waste

And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game …

No-way: Betsy DeVos faces a tough crowd
by Tom Sullivan

Newsweek sums up why Democrats are acutely suspicious of Betsy DeVos, daughter-in-law of billionaire Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway, and Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary:

Liberals have been acutely suspicious of DeVos. They view her and her husband, Amway heir Dick DeVos, as right-wing activists masquerading as education reformers and philanthropists. Indeed, members of the DeVos family have donated to conservative causes, including anti-LGBTQ initiatives, and have profited in investments in educational companies. She has also been portrayed as both a profiteer and religious zealot, with Lily Eskelsen García of the National Education Association, for example, calling her “dangerously unqualified.” That sentiment has been echoed by many of the nation’s largest teachers unions.

At her confirmation hearing yesterday before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, DeVos faced biting questions from Democrats about her qualifications. Crooks and Liars has a clip of Sen. Al Franken’s questioning. “Stewart Smalley” was noticeably absent:

At one point, her answers showed she did not understand the difference between proficiency and growth when evaluating student’s performance on standardized tests.

Growth is the measure of how much a student learns year-to-year compared to his or her peers. Proficiency is the attainment of specific objective benchmarks, usually determined via standardized testing. There’s a huge difference between the two, and the debate is one that heavily influences public education policy.

Franken let DeVos know he wasn’t impressed, chiding, “It surprises me that you don’t know this issue.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts made it plain that DeVos had no personal experience with managing anything like a “trillion-dollar student loan bank.” Nor had she nor any of her children ever applied for a federal student loan. DeVos would not commit to enforcing against private educational institutions rules in place for protect against waste, fraud and abuse.

Warren later remarked:

“Tonight at her confirmation hearing, I asked Betsy DeVos a straight forward set of questions about her education experience and commitment to protecting students cheated by for-profit colleges,” Warren said in a message posted to her Facebook page. “If Betsy DeVos can’t commit to using the Department of Education’s many tools and resources to protect students from fraud, I don’t see how she can be the Secretary of Education.”

Freshman Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire asked how DeVos would protect students with disabilities (like Hassan’s) from being denied an adequate education as required by law if they attend a voucher school. Earlier, Sen. Tim Kaine asked whether all schools receiving taxpayer funding should have to meet have to meet the requirements of special education law. DeVos answered, ”
“I think that is a matter better left to the states.” So Hassan came back to that with regard to private and voucher schools. Would DeVos enforce the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) that protects children’s rights?

“Were you unaware that it is federal law?” Hassan asked.

“I may have confused it,” DeVos said.

“I’m concerned that you seem so unfamiliar with it,” Hassan said, adding that some private school voucher programs supported by DeVos aren’t honoring students’ rights under IDEA.

DeVos said that if confirmed, she’ll be sensitive to the needs of students under the law.

“It is not about sensitivity,” Hassan said. “It is ensuring that every child has equal access to a high-quality education. The reality is the vouchers that you support do not always come out that way. That is why it is something we need to continue to explore.”

Dana Goldstein observed at Slate that while DeVos did a fair job of presenting herself as a moderate, “she revealed herself to be either underprepared for the job or stiffly wedded to an ideological, market-oriented vision of education policy.”

Rachel Tabachnick’s 2011 profile of DeVos’
“dominion theology” makes the ideology behind
“Biblical Capitalism” sound more like that of a cult.

Perhaps the weirdest exchange yesterday came in an exchange with Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Murphy asked, “Do you think guns have any place in or around schools?”

DeVos said that is decision “best left to locales and states to decide.”

When Murphy asked her again, DeVos said, “I will refer back to Senator Enzi and the school he was talking about in Wyoming … I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.”

Lyins and tigers and bears.

Let’s hope this is fake news

by digby

… or we are in deeper trouble than we realize:

On Monday night, Michael Flynn Jr. — son of and former chief of staff for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — tweeted out a story published on Voltaire Network entitled, “General Flynn’s Proposals to Reform Intelligence.”

The story, published last month with a Damascus dateline and authored by Thierry Meyssan — a 9/11 truther who published a book in 2002 entitled, “The Big Lie” — previews how Flynn plans to rollback “the big reforms that took place during the Bush and Obama years.”

Perhaps most significantly, the story says the “radical overhaul” Flynn is planning involves the elimination of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, an office created by President Bush in 2004, with power centralized under Flynn instead.

“The 16 agencies should no longer be accountable to the National Intelligence Director but only to the National Security Adviser,” Meyssan writes. “In other words, they will be accountable to General Flynn personally.”

The story cites anonymous sources, which some informed observers believe include Flynn Jr. himself. Last month, CNN broke news that Flynn Jr. was working in an official capacity for the Trump transition team, but the Trump team quickly distanced themselves from him after Flynn Jr.’s social media posts amplifying unfounded conspiracy theories and racist memes came under scrutiny.

Flynn Sr. is an open Islamophobe who has close ties with Russia. In December 2015, he sat at the same table with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an event commemorating the 10th anniversary of Russia’s state-owned RT television network, an outlet described in the recently unclassified intelligence report about Russia’s manipulation of the presidential election as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” Flynn gave remarks blasting President Obama and said he didn’t know whether the 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria widely thought to have been the responsibility of the Russia-backed Assad regime was a “false flag.”

Last week, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, citing an unnamed “senior U.S. government official,” reported that on December 29 — the same day the Obama administration announced retaliatory measures in response to the election meddling — Flynn “phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times.”

Subsequent reports indicate Flynn and Kislyak talked on the phone five times that day. By contrast, the Obama transition team didn’t talk to Kislyak a single time before Obama was sworn in.

This may very well be bullshit. Flynn Jr is even nuttier than his father and that’s saying something. The idea of putting the entire Intelligence Community under him is outrageous.  What’s scary about this is the fact that it’s quite believable. He has got a very big ax to grind.  Now Trump does too. I could see them doing it.

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He’s either a pathological liar or he’s senile

by digby

Once again, how can someone like this be president?

President-elect Donald Trump told a radio interviewer in October, 2015 that he had met Vladimir Putin “one time…a long time ago” and that he “got along with him great” – a statement that conflicts with his later denials during the campaign that he had ever met or spoken with the Russian President…

Trump discusses Putin with conservative radio host Michael Savage, telling him “it’s wonderful” that the Russians were “really hitting ISIS hard” in Syria.

“Have you ever met Vladimir Putin?” Savage asks.

“Yes,” Trump answers, emphatically.

“You have?” Savage follows up.

“Yes, a long time ago. We got a long great, by the way.”

Savage then asked, “If you win the presidency, do you feel you can do business with Vladimir?

“Yes, I do. I think I would get along very well. I had the Miss Universe pageant, believe it or not,  in Moscow two years ago. I got many of the Russian leaders, the top people in Russia, honeslty … These are people, they are looking to do things.”

Trump’s responses to Savage add to the confusing, flatly contradictory comments the President-elect has made about his past dealings with the Russian president. While in Moscow during the Miss Universe content, Trump had given an interview to MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts—who was co-hosting the event—in which, when asked whether he had a “relationship” with Putin, he replied: ” “I do have a relationship, and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today.” He later said in a National Press Club speech in November 2015 that while in Moscow for the Miss Universe contest: “I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer.”

But when later repeatedly pressed last July 31 by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, Trump gave a very different answers about Putin.  “I ‘ve never met him,” Trump said then. “I have no relationship with Putin. I don’t think I’ve ever met him. I never met him. … I mean if he’s in the same room or something. But I don’t think so.” …”

“You’ve never spoken to him on the phone?” Stephanopoulos followed up.

“I have never spoken to him on the phone, no,” Trump replied. “Well, I don’t know what it means by having a relationship. I mean he was saying very good things about me, but I don’t have a relationship with him. I didn’t meet him. I haven’t spent time with him. I didn’t have dinner with him. I didn’t go hiking with him. I don’t know — and I wouldn’t know him from Adam except I see his picture and I would know what he looks like.”

During the Stephanopoulos interview, Trump sought to clarify comments he made about Putin during a November 2015 Fox Business channel debate. In the debate, when discussing Putin and the Ukraine crisis, Trump said: “I got to know him [Putin] very well because we were both on 60 Minutes. We were stablemates, and we did very well that night.”

In the Stephanopoulos interview, Trump explained what he meant. We did 60 Minutes together,” Trump said. “By the way, not together-together, meaning he was probably shot in Moscow….And I was shot in New York.”

And to think Clinton was defeated by this man because everyone thought she was dishonest because of the emails and benghazi and other trumped up nonsense.

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Wimmin, quitcher bitchin:

by digby

The New York Times reports on a new study of gender attitudes in America, in which a lot of Republican men (white, of course) believe they are oppressed. By women.

To be a woman in the United States is to feel unequal, despite great strides in gender equality, according to a wide-ranging poll about gender in postelection America released Tuesday. It’s catcalls on the street, disrespect at work and unbalanced responsibilities at home. For girls, it’s being taught, more than boys, to aspire to marriage, and for women, it’s watching positions of power go to men.

Men, however, don’t necessarily see it that way.

Those are some of the findings from the poll, by PerryUndem, a nonpartisan research and polling firm whose biggest clients are foundations. It surveyed 1,302 adults in December via the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago’s AmeriSpeak panel.

Eighty-two percent of women said sexism was a problem in society today, and 41 percent of women said they had felt unequal because of their gender.

Men underestimated the sexism felt by the women in their lives, the survey found. And while most respondents agreed it’s a better time to be a man than a woman in our society, only Republican men thought it was a better time to be a woman than a man.

As women across the nation prepare to march in protest of an election in which gender loomed large, the poll results reveal nearly unanimous support for gender equality and policies that would help women — but deep partisan divides in the perception of inequality and of who’s thriving and who’s losing in society.

Many Americans seemed to think others had it better than they did, especially Republican men.

Over all, only 37 percent of respondents thought it was a good time to be a woman in the United States. Fewer thought it was a good time to be a minority woman; 24 percent said it was a good time to be a Latina, and 11 percent a Muslim woman.

The share of people who say they have felt unequal in American society because of aspects of their identity.

Republican men seem to see it differently. Just over half thought it was a good time to be a woman, while only 41 percent of them thought it was a good time to be a man.

Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric has appealed to people who feel this way. At his victory rally in Cincinnati last month, he said about women: “I hate to tell you men, generally speaking, they’re better than you are. Now, if I said it the other way around, I’d be in big trouble.”

Dennis Halaszynski, 81, is a retired police captain in McKeesport, Pa., and a registered Democrat who voted for Mr. Trump. “It’s easier being a woman today than it is a man,” he said in an interview. “The white man is a low person on the totem pole. Everybody else is above the white man.”

Women “should be highly respected,” he said, but they are no longer unequal: “Everything in general is in favor of a woman. No matter what happens in life, it seems like the man’s always at fault.”

Democrats of both genders were much more likely to have felt unequal because of some aspect of their identity – 68 percent, compared with 47 percent of Republicans. Gender, race and religious views were the biggest reasons. The only reasons Republicans were more likely than Democrats to feel unequal were their religious views and military status.

And everyone says they believe in equality, of course. It’s just that a lot of people think that all the specific paths to making that happen (if it isn’t already true, which 42% of male Trump voters believe), including are unfair. To white men. We can’t have that.

And anyway, it’s not that bad:

Even men who said women were still treated unequally underestimated the sexism that women experience.

While 41 percent of women said they frequently or sometimes heard sexist language in their daily lives, 26 percent of men thought their partners did. Fifty-four percent of women said they had been touched by a man in an inappropriate way without consent, while 31 percent of men thought their partners had.

“The typical catcalling or comments or inappropriate gestures that men make toward you, I don’t think there’s any women who haven’t experienced that sort of harassment,” said Cristina Hall, 44, who works in customer service in San Diego.

But she was not surprised that men didn’t realize it. “I think when people don’t go through certain experiences, it’s hard for them to understand that it even happens,” Ms. Hall said. “Maybe they’ve never done it to a woman. Plus as women, we don’t typically say anything because of fear we’re not going to be believed or retaliation or shame.”

About 40 percent of women said acts of sexism would be more likely because Mr. Trump won, including sexual assault and feelings of entitlement among men to treat women as sexual objects.

That’s already happening.

His female voters all trust Ivanka will deliver for them, so that’s good.

Meanwhile, this gets right to the heart of the problem. Nobody wants to be a feminazi, amirite? The boys really don’t like it:

Despite the widespread support for gender equality and certain feminist policies, only 19 percent of respondents said they considered themselves feminists. There was no clear consensus on who best represented feminism today. The largest shares of people, both women and men, named two black women: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

Whatever. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the last election, in spades, is that the most important person in American politics is a white male Real American Trump voter and the woman who wants to please him. Best get used to serving that fine fellow. Just like always.

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Weaseling Out of Things Is A Core Trump Skill

by Spocko

The media still hasn’t figured out how to deal with Trump and his weaseling skills.

They are using the, “If a democrat did this…” model. That one was blown out of the water early. But Trump has even surpassed the “It’s Okay When You Are Republican” model. And they are light years away from the “If a regular person did this”…” model. Normal, Democratic, Republican and Decent people norms haven’t been applying to Trump.  The media hasn’t adapted, but we need to.

Now I could coach the press on how to bust him, but they are too busy trying to figure out how to stop being humiliated daily.

A white weasel standing up near a hole  in the brown, winter grass. Photo credit: Jana M. Cisar / USFWS weasel, winter coat weasel white weasel

It’s great to get damning info and evidence of corruption, but we must keep working up the chain of this scandal/story. We know that it will be dismissed, spun, handled, ignored and normalized.

“Bring back our police!”


by digby

I wrote about Trump’s fundamental authoritarian racism for Salon this morning:

When Donald Trump tweeted out his angry reaction to Rep. John Lewis’ announcement that he would not attend the inauguration, a lot of people were aghast that he would accuse a Civil Rights icon of “all talk, talk, talk — no action.” They couldn’t believe the incoming president would so crudely caricature Lewis’ district as being “in horrible shape and falling apart not to mention crime infested” when Lewis represents Atlanta, which Forbes recently ranked as the ninth-best place in America for businesses and career development, and among the best for job growth and education. The city’s crime rate has also been steadily declining since the ’90s. In other words, as usual, Trump was not telling the truth.

It’s important to recognize what was really going on there, however. It seems obvious to me that Trump had never heard of Lewis and had no idea where he is from. He was reflexively repeating his standard campaign talking points about the “inner city” in which he complained that nobody has ever done anything about the dystopian hellholes he believes all African-Americans inhabit. Trump claimed to be the only man in the country who could fix the problem, although he never shared the details. If you look at his history, however, it’s not hard to figure out what he plans.

Trump’s view of race in America is very simple: If police could take the gloves off it would fix whatever problems exist. He is particularly adamant about applying the death penalty. He famously took out a full-page ad in New York newspapers after the arrests of the young men known as the Central Park Five (four of them black and one Latino) in the rape and beating of a white jogger in 1989. The five men spent years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence and the confession of another man, a career criminal with a long prison record. Trump has said he still believes they are guilty.

The big, bold title of the ad was “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY, BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Even then, Trump wanted to make America great again by going back to the days of his youth when the cops could crack some heads. The ad said:

When I was young, I sat in a diner with my father and witnessed two young bullies cursing and threatening a very frightened waitress. Two cops rushed in, lifted up the thugs and threw them out the door, warning them never to cause trouble again. I miss the feeling of security New York’s finest once gave to the citizens of this City. Let our politicians give back our police department’s power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of “police brutality” which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s. We must cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population of this City. Give New York back to the citizens who have earned the right to be New Yorkers.

Trump has a few bedrock beliefs he has held for decades: The world is laughing at America, Asian nations are making fools of the U.S. on trade, we must bring back the death penalty and law enforcement must be given more power. This was the fundamental philosophy that propelled him to the presidency.

Throughout the campaign he reiterated his strong pro-police stance. But it wasn’t until the mass shooting of police officers in Dallas in July that he came out roaring out with his declaration:

The attack on our Dallas police is an attack on our country … It’s time for our hostility against our police and against all members of law enforcement to end and end immediately right now …

I am the law and order candidate.

He used the line repeatedly from then on in, including in his angry acceptance speech at the Republican convention. Eventually he was endorsed by the National Fraternal Order of Police, the unions representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, and numerous local police organizations throughout the country. Trump was celebrated by cops everywhere he went, and there are many pictures to prove it. He likes them and they like him.

After the election, the Fraternal Order of Police issued a wish list for the first 100 days. It includes reinstituting racial profiling, deporting Dreamers (undocumented immigrants brought here as children) and ending sanctuary-city programs. Whatever advances we may have made toward reform of the criminal justice system don’t look as if they are going to hold.

Trump’s loyalty and reverence for the police, and his racist 1970s stereotypes of African-American communities makes for a dangerous brew, particularly considering recent Pew Research center findings about attitudes in law enforcement. That report paints a highly disturbing portrait of police officers who increasingly see themselves as under siege and who long for more power and authority — with important differences in attitudes between white and black police officers, particularly regarding the protests against police shootings. That points to a potentially volatile situation.

Trump often brings up the distressing gun violence in Chicago as if it wer emblematic of all major American cities. It’s not, actually. This week a new Justice Department study about Chicago’s finest was released, suggesting that the gloves are already off — police in the Windy City routinely use whatever force they deem necessary, and there is very little accountability for it. Illinois recently repealed the death penalty after it was revealed that at least 13 men had been wrongly condemned to Death Row.

Apparently, Trump’s “get tough” policing doesn’t work in real life. Not that he is likely to believe that. As he said during the campaign and as far back as 1990 in this Playboy interview:

In order to bring law and order back into our cities, we need the death penalty and authority given back to the police … It sets an example. Nobody can make the argument that the death penalty isn’t a deterrent.

In reality, anyone who knows anything about the subject will make precisely that argument. Trump simply won’t listen. He believes what he believes and from what we can tell, he is incapable of changing his mind about any of it.

by digby

This really happened:

As Salon reports, neo-Nazi icon Mike Enoch — the pseudonym used by the man who created the pro-white nationalist website The Right Stuff — has resigned from his role at the website after being outed by rivals as a New York website developer named Mike Peinovich. 

 The real shocker, however, wasn’t the identity of Peinovich, but the identity of his wife, who happens to be a Jewish woman. This is particularly surprising because Peinovich often makes “jokes” about the Holocaust on his podcast, where he also regularly talks about killing Jewish people.

In a post on The Right Stuff’s password-protected forums, Peinovich admitted that he’s married to a Jewish woman and said he didn’t want to see anyone making excuses for his longtime deception of his fellow white nationalists. 

“Yes my wife is who they say she is, I won’t even bother denying it, I won’t bother making excuses,” he wrote. “If this makes you want to leave the movement, or to have nothing to do with TRS, then I understand. Don’t lie for me. Don’t try to defend me to those attacking me. Don’t jeopardize your own reputation by defending things that you don’t think you can.” 

While Peinovich’s downfall has drawn many cheers from his rivals in the white nationalist movement, many longtime fans were depressed by this revelation. 

“Enoch’s rants were both enlightening and triggering, but now I cannot listen to them the same way again,” wrote one. “It just feels like they’re just more actors in the same play being orchestrated by the Jews.”

2017 folks.