Month: February 2017

Grappling with the hell they’ve wrought

by digby

A conservative radio host helps us understand how we got here. He recaps the last week’s weirdness and then writes this:

Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.

For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.

The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its base.

Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.

During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.

He can do this because members of the Trump administration feel confident that the alternative-reality media will provide air cover, even if they are caught fabricating facts or twisting words (like claiming that the “ban” on Muslim immigrants wasn’t really a “ban”). Indeed, they believe they have shifted the paradigm of media coverage, replacing the traditional media with their own.

In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning. During the campaign, actual “fake news” — deliberate hoaxes — polluted political discourse and clogged social media timelines.

Some outlets opened the door, by helping spread conspiracy theories and indulging the paranoia of the fever swamps. For years, the widely read Drudge Report has linked to the bizarre conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes that both the attacks of Sept. 11 and the Sandy Hook shootings were government-inspired “false flag” operations.

For conservatives, this should have made it clear that something was badly amiss in their media ecosystem. But now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.” Erroneous reports that the bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office or misleading reports that sanctions against Russia had been lifted will be seized on by Mr. Trump’s White House to reinforce his indictment.

Even as he continues to attack the “dishonest media,” Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.

The relationship appears to be symbiotic, as Mr. Trump often seems to pick up on talking points from Fox News and has tweeted out links from websites notorious for their casual relationship to the truth, including sites like Gateway Pundit, a hoax-peddling site that announced, shortly after the inauguration, that it would have a White House correspondent.

Legitimizing the Gateway Pundit, a blogger commonly known as the stupidest man on the internet, (I’m not making that up) is a perfect example of just how low they’ve sunk.

By now, it ought to be evident that enemies are important to this administration, whether they are foreigners, refugees, international bankers or the press.

But discrediting independent sources of information also has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own narratives, metrics and “alternative facts.”

All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

Mr. Kasparov grasps that the real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, asking, “What is truth?” — and not wait for an answer.

In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.

This may explain one of the more revealing moments from after the election, when one of Mr. Trump’s campaign surrogates, Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts,” she declared. Among “a large part of the population” what Mr. Trump said was the truth.

“When he says that millions of people illegally voted,” she said, his supporters believe him — and “people believe they have facts to back that up.”

Or as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” But Ms. Hughes’s comment was perhaps unintentionally insightful. Mr. Trump and company seem to be betting that much of the electorate will not care if the president tells demonstrable lies, and will pick and choose whatever “alternative facts” confirm their views.

The next few years will be a test of that thesis.

In the meantime, we must recognize the magnitude of the challenge. If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.

Perhaps just as important, it will be incumbent on conservative media outlets to push back as well. Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter. There may be short-term advantages to running headlines about millions of illegal immigrants voting or secret United Nations plots to steal your guns, but the longer the right enables such fabrications, the weaker it will be in the long run. As uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors.

The conservative media ecosystem — like the rest of us — has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.

His words will fall on deaf ears to the conservative media. They are THRILLED with this fake news business and most of them have demonstrated already what some of us knew all along: they are authoritarians and their paeans to “freedom and liberty” only applied to themselves. But they may find out that it doesn’t apply to them either before long. Trump is an authoritarian with real power and may even have a taste for totalitarianism. Unless these folks are ready to get into uniform and fight for Trump’s tiny hands, they may find they aren’t so free after all.

That sounds hyperbolic and maybe  it is. Trump is not very bright and I’m not sure about the brains of the people around him.They seem more crazy than smart too. But accidents do happen.

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QOTW: President Trump

by digby

He said a lot of stupid things this week. But this comment at the National Prayer breakfast should finally put to rest any illusions that he’s an isolationist:

“The world is in trouble and we’re going to straighten it out.”

When he says, “from now on it’s going to be ‘America First'” he means it’s going to be America in charge.

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Forget exceptionalism, it’s just straight up “might makes right”

by digby

Trump’s interview will air during half time at the Super Bowl:

It’s true that the US has not been so innocent. But our leaders don’t usually treat that fact as a point of pride or use it to excuse others for doing bad things. They’ve been hypocrites on the subject — but remember, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.Trump believes that even pretending to be moral is a weakness and that a great nation should makes its immorality and cruelty known to the world so “nobody will mess with us.”

Someone described this as simple “realism” yesterday and there’s an element of truth in the fact that the Realist school does say “the national interest” is what guides them, not a universal morality or belief in human rights. And that’s terrible enough. After all, the history of realpolitik proves that “the national interest” is a very elastic term. In the old days, fighting communism led us down many blind alleys.

But Trump isn’t guided by a “national interest” that we would recognize as realism. His definition of the “national interest” is to be “respected” and paid tribute by all the other countries. The US, is number one and must be treated as number one.

For instance, his obsession with confronting China over some man-made islands in the South China Sea cannot be seen as vital to American national security. A realist like Henry Kissinger could easily concoct some reason why it is, and alliances can often provide that reason. But here is Trump’s:

Look at what China’s doing in the South China Sea. I mean they are totally disregarding our country and yet we have made China a rich country because of our bad trade deals. Our trade deals are so bad. And we have made them – we have rebuilt China and yet they will go in the South China Sea and build a military fortress the likes of which perhaps the world has not seen. Amazing, actually. They do that, and they do that at will because they have no respect for our president and they have no respect for our country.

So he’s going to make them “respect” us. And then, he’ll take what he wants. To the victor belongs the spoils.

That’s Trumpism, not realism, not liberal interventionism, not neoconservatism.

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“that they should believe a lie”
by Tom Sullivan

Supporters told pollsters they liked Donald Trump for telling it like it is. Except that was never true. What Trump supporters like is he tells them what they want to hear. They don’t want the truth. He tells them lies. They don’t want facts. He feeds them disinformation. His administration dishes out propaganda, the kind Cold Warrior parents warned about.

Trump is a legend in his own mind. Even he doesn’t really believe it. He requires constant auto-reinforcement and adulation from those who surround him or he throws a Twitter tantrum. But that’s personal pathology. The societal one is more concerning. So is his party’s.

Two years ago, Heather Cox Richardson writing for Salon spoke about the Republican abandonment of truth for utility. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker attempted to write the search for truth out of the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement, replacing it with “meet the state’s workforce needs.” She traced the impulse back to William F. Buckley’s 1951 “God and Man at Yale” in which he proposed that The Enlightenment had led western civilization astray, in the mid-twentieth century, specifically, towards the New Deal.

Richardson wrote:

Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths. Maintaining that faith in reasoned debate was a worse “superstition” than the Enlightenment had set out to replace, Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology.

By the ascent of George W. Bush to the presidency, Buckley’s view had won:

As Movement Conservatives took over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our political system. It has given us, for example, a senator claiming words he spoke on the Senate floor were “not intended to be a factual statement.” It has given us “dynamic scoring,” a rule changing the way the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the economic impact of tax cuts, to reinforce the idea that cuts fuel economic growth despite the visibly disastrous effects of recent tax cuts on states such as Kansas. And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed version of the nation’s history. Politicians have always spun information to advance their own policies. The practice infuriates partisans but it reflects the Enlightenment idea of progress through reasoned argument. Movement Conservatives’ insistence on their own version of reality, in defiance of facts, is something different altogether.

Now Donald Trump is a president. A Republican president. With this walking bundle of pathologies, the descent into alternate reality returns and the slope is even steeper. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway insist we should accept the White House’s “alternative facts” over the evidence of our own eyes. And who, for instance, will ever forget the Bowling Green Massacre she fabricated?

What’s more confounding is how many Americans — Americans — buy into the kind of Soviet fantasy they once railed against.

Mikhail Iossel writes for The New Yorker that even Soviet citizens knew better than to believe the kind of propaganda Trump and his coterie spew daily. But in the name of making America great again, Trump’s supporters (the older ones, anyway) embrace what they once feared:

… Everyone knew that they, the Soviet people, lived in a veritable funhouse of a giant isolated world unto itself, in the parallel reality of that endless hall of crazily distorted mirrors. People were not fooled, to put it mildly. Still, there was nothing they, including myself and everyone I knew, could do with or about that understanding. There was no place for them to take it, to pour it out on. Being exposed to constant, relentless irradiation by that funhouse reality, forever aswim in a sea of lies, had made people lethargic and apathetic, cynical and fatalistic, dumbfounded into mute infantilism, drunkenness, and helpless rage in the meagreness of their tiny private, personal worlds.

Lethargic, cynical, fatalistic, etc. Hardly how Trump fanciers fancy themselves, but beware. Believe the lie, become the lie. What’s different is how amateur-hour similar propaganda efforts are here at home. No one is fooled.

“This American Life” took a skeptical look at the Trump travel ban over the weekend. They interviwed Benjamin Wittes, a national security expert from the Brookings Institution. Wittes wrote a scathing review of the Trump executive order, calling its purpose malevolent in addition to “the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.” Specifically, Wittes calls out the thinly veiled lie at the heart of it. Wittes writes:

What’s more, the document also takes steps that strike me as utterly orthogonal to any relevant security interest. If the purpose of the order is the one it describes, for example, I can think of no good reason to burden the lives of students individually suspected of nothing who are here lawfully and just happen to be temporarily overseas, or to detain tourists and refugees who were mid-flight when the order came down. I have trouble imagining any reason to raise questions about whether green card holders who have lived here for years can leave the country and then return. Yes, it’s temporary, and that may lessen the costs (or it may not, depending on the outcome of the policy review the order mandates), but temporarily irrational is still irrational.

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

Then you lie about why you’re really doing it, not because anyone will believe the lie, but because it’s company policy, as I once read about a meeting between a dissatisfied customer and a regional manager for GM:

“He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he lied anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”

And so it is with the Trump administration. I once believed the Bush II administration represented the apotheosis of Movement Conservative ideology, but I was wrong. Trump has discovered an even lower circle of hell.

The interview with Wittes brought me back to the voter fraud propaganda I referenced yesterday morning. Voter fraud is code speak the way Lee Atwater used “forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” Promoters of voter ID laws and other voting restrictions don’t give a damn about election integrity. They’re not really concerned that masses of invisible people are voting illegally undetected. That’s the thinnest of window dressings. They’re angry that the “wrong kind” of people are voting at all. But believers in “telling it like it is” won’t admit to the lie.

Trump and those supporting his travel ban aren’t as afraid of terrorist violence as they are of foreign Others encroaching on their turf. Trump’s travel ban, like voter fraud, is another institutionalized lie. No one is fooled. Like the Soviets before them, they don’t even care if nobody is fooled. Lying is company policy.

Saturday Night at the Movies




Home to roost: I Am Not Your Negro ***½


By Dennis Hartley

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves. – James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time (1963)

Last month, we celebrated the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose incredible example is unique in American history. You read all about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago when somebody said I took the statue out of my office. It turned out that that was fake news. Fake news. The statue is cherished, it’s one of the favorite things in the — and we have some good ones. […]I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed. – President Donald J. Trump, from his Black History Month speech, 2017


At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed – Frederick Douglass (born ca. 1818, died 1895)

While he hasn’t been dead as long as Frederick Douglass has, I have a feeling that the late James Baldwin, who is the subject of Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro will also be “recognized more and more” (you’ll notice). Specifically, anyone with half a brain who watches the film will recognize not only the beauty of Baldwin’s prose, but the prescience of his thoughts.

Both are on full display throughout Peck’s timely treatise on race relations in America, in which he mixes archival news footage involving the Civil Rights Movement, movie clips, and excerpts from Baldwin’s TV appearances with voiceover narration by an uncharacteristically subdued Samuel L. Jackson, who reads excerpts from Baldwin’s unfinished book, Remember This House.

Baldwin’s book (which he began working on in 1979) was to be a statement on the black experience, parsed through the lives (and untimely deaths) of Civil Rights icons Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Given Baldwin’s literary chops, and the fact he was personal friends with all three, and that each of these extraordinary individuals was working toward the same end but through different means, one can easily envision a classic in the making. But alas, it was not to be. By the time of his death in 1987, Baldwin had completed only 30 pages. So the director has essentially set out to “complete” Remember This House (or at least construct a viable facsimile), filling in the cracks with Baldwin’s own voice (via the vintage TV interviews).

While occasionally arrhythmic to the film’s flow, Peck is largely on the money whenever he interjects contemporary images that connect the dots with the Black Lives Matter movement. Baldwin’s sharp sociopolitical observances have no expiration date, and speak for themselves. This is particularly evident in the television clips, where Baldwin (whose persona is an amalgam of Mark Twain and Lenny Bruce) always seems light years ahead of the hosts and fellow guests.

Peck also gets a lot of mileage (and truckloads of irony) from a wealth of TV and print advertising images that speak volumes as to how African-Americans have been viewed by our society over the decades. In this respect, Peck’s documentary recalls The Atomic Café; particularly when he digs up a 1950s corporate film with a rather unfortunate title (“Selling the Negro”) that offers up handy tips to marketers who want to reach African-American consumers.

Most fascinating to me are Baldwin’s deconstructions on traditionally lauded race-relation themed films like The Defiant Ones (1958) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). He posits that, no matter how well-intentioned these and similar films of their era were, at the end of the day they were produced by white liberals, to be exclusively consumed by other white liberals, who could then pat themselves on the back for buying a ticket (unless I was reading him wrong). Even more provocatively, he sees little difference between them and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927).

Now that I think about it, Baldwin himself remains a bit of a cypher as credits roll, so it may have been unintentional misdirection to state at the top of my review that the author himself is the “subject”, particularly if you’re expecting a straight-ahead biography. Neither is it another retread “about” the Civil Rights Movement, although its history is woven throughout. It’s worth noting that Baldwin was not an active participant in the literal sense (which he admits in some excerpts), yet he was wholly present as an observer, chronicler and deeply insightful social commentator.

And indeed it is these insights and observations that stay with you after the lights come up. In a way it makes me sad that so many of Baldwin’s statements remain applicable to our current political climate, because it serves to remind that while we have made “some” progress in healing the racial divide since the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., the all-too-easy and all-too-recent triumph of Trumpism indicates that the fear and ignorance that fed the ugliness of “those days” never really went away. We’ve still got a lot of work to do.

Previous posts with related themes:


And justice for some: 12 Years a Slave and The Trials of Muhammad Ali
The Black Power Mixtape

More reviews at Den of Cinema

–Dennis Hartley

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by digby

The Australians can easily decide to ally with China. It actually might make more sense for the economically and for their own national security. Obviously the US has gone insane. They won’t be the only ones:

President Trump’s combative phone call with Australia’s prime minister over a refugee agreement has set off a political storm in that country, one that threatens to weaken support for a seven-decade alliance with the United States just as many Australians say they want closer ties with China. 

Enthusiasm for the alliance in Australia, one of America’s closest partners, which hosts American spy facilities and rotations of American Marines, had already been under pressure from China, with which Australia conducts the most trade. Reports that Mr. Trump had scolded Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday, before abruptly ending the call, are likely to further undermine confidence in the United States, Australian analysts said. 

“Trump is needlessly damaging the deep trust that binds one of America’s closest alliances,” said Professor Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University in Canberra. “China and those wishing to weaken the strongest alliance in the Pacific will see opportunity in this moment.”
In less than two weeks in office, Mr. Trump’s actions have strained alliances and alienated potential partners of the United States, and his phone call with Mr. Turnbull seemed to be one more example, this time with a country that has fought on America’s side since World War I.

His administration’s confrontational stance on Iran has undermined liberal voices in that country; his restrictions on immigration from somepredominantly Muslim countries have been widely criticized by allies; and his rejection of the Trans–Pacific Partnership trade deal threatens to push countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, closer to China.

He doesn’t need no stinkin’ allies.  He’s going to make the military so yuge and so strong that nobody will ever mess with us. We run this planet and the rest of these little wannabe countries had better understand it right quick.

That’s what Trump was selling folks, not isolationism. Sure, he doesn’t want to spend a dime to help anyone but the US — just like his followers he’s a selfish, bastard who doesn’t understand that there’s such a thing as win-win. The owrld is zero sum to these people — America, white people, Trump voters are on top. Everyone else can crawl for scraps. But they have nothing to say about it.

Trump is obviously mentally ill. I’m not sure where all these white Real Americans got these ideas.

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There’s a lot more immigrant hating coming down the pike

by digby

Depending on what happens in the courts with the ban on people from certain Muslim countries — I’m not sanguine, the Supremes are majority wingnut — we may or may not see expulsions of foreigners on visas. But there are many more xenophobic atacks on the agenda as well:

When President Trump ordered a vast overhaul of immigration law enforcement during his first week in office, he stripped away most restrictions on who should be deported, opening the door for roundups and detentions on a scale not seen in nearly a decade.

Some 6 million to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by the Los Angeles Times. They were based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive.

Far from targeting only “bad hombres,” as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.

The deportation targets are a much larger group than those swept up in the travel bans that sowed chaos at airports and seized public attention over the past week. Fewer than 1 million people came to the U.S. over the past decade from the seven countries from which most visitors are temporarily blocked.

Deportations of this scale, which has not been publicly totaled before, could have widely felt consequences: Families would be separated. Businesses catering to immigrant customers may be shuttered. Crops could be left to rot, unpicked, as agricultural and other industries that rely on immigrant workforces face labor shortages. U.S. relations could be strained with countries that stand to receive an influx of deported people, particularly in Latin America. Even the Social Security system, which many immigrants working illegally pay into under fake identification numbers, would take a hit.

The new instructions represent a wide expansion of President Obama’s focus on deporting only recent arrivals, repeat immigration violators and people with multiple criminal violations. Under the Obama administration, only about 1.4 million people were considered priorities for removal.

“We are going back to enforcement chaos — they are going to give lip service to going after criminals, but they really are going to round up everybody they can get their hands on,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. and an immigration lawyer for more than two decades.

Trump’s orders instruct officers to deport not only those convicted of crimes, but also those who aren’t charged but are believed to have committed “acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense.”

That category applies to the 6 million people believed to have entered the U.S. without passing through an official border crossing. The rest of the 11.1 million people in the country illegally, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, are believed to have entered on a valid visa and stayed past its expiration date.

Also among those 11.1 million are about 8 million jobholders, Pew found. The vast majority have worked in violation of the law by stating on federal employment forms that they were legally allowed to work. Trump’s order calls for targeting anyone who lied on the forms.

Trump’s deportation priorities also include smaller groups whose totals remain elusive: people in the country illegally who are charged with crimes that have not yet been adjudicated and those who receive an improper welfare benefit, used a fake identity card, were found driving without a license or received federal food assistance.

An additional executive order under consideration would block entry to anyone the U.S. believes may use benefit programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according two Trump administration officials who have seen the draft order.

The changes reflect an effort to deter illegal migration by increasing the threat of deportation and cutting off access to social services and work opportunities, an approach that 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney called “self-deportation.”

The White House insisted that it is intent on rooting out those who endanger Americans. Trump aides pointed to 124 people who were released from immigration custody from 2010 to 2015 who went on to be charged with murder, according to immigration data provided to Congress by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“It’s not that 6 million people are priorities for removal, it is the dangerous criminals hiding among those millions who are no longer able to hide,” said a White House official who would not be named describing internal policy debates.

“We’ve gone from a situation where ICE officers have no discretion to enhance public safety and their hands are totally tied, to allowing ICE officers to engage in preventative policing and to go after known public safety threats and stop terrible crimes from happening.”

The changes, some of which have already begun with more expected in the coming months, set the stage for sweeping deportations last seen in the final years of the George W. Bush administration. Factories and meatpacking plants were raided after talks with Congress over comprehensive immigration reform broke down in 2007.

After Obama took office, his administration stopped those worksite raids and restricted deportation priorities. Expulsions of people settled and working in the U.S. fell more than 70% from 2009 to 2016.

That era has come to an end.

“For too long, your officers and agents haven’t been allowed to properly do their jobs,” Trump told uniformed Border Patrol agents and immigration officers just after signing the order.

Although immigration agents will want to go after criminals and people who pose national security risks, Trump’s order gives them leeway and marks a return to “traditional enforcement,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates for restrictions on immigration.

“Almost everyone who is here illegally could potentially be considered a priority,” Vaughan said.

Just how many people are swept up will depend on new instructions being drafted for immigration agents that will be rolled out over the next several months. But already, signs point to immigration officials embracing Trump’s order.

In late January, Trump’s immigration policy experts gave a 20-page document to top Homeland Security officials that lays out how to ramp up immigration enforcement, according to two people familiar with the memo. A list of steps included nearly doubling the number of people held in immigration detention to 80,000 per day, as well as clamping down on programs that allow people to leave immigration custody and check in with federal agents or wear an ankle monitor while their cases play out in immigration court.

The instructions also propose allowing Border Patrol agents to provide translation assistance to local law enforcement, a practice that was stopped in 2012 over concerns that it was contributing to racial profiling.

In addition, Homeland Security officials have circulated an 11-page memo on how to enact Trump’s order. Among other steps, that document suggests expanding the use of a deportation process that bypasses immigration courts and allows officers to expel foreigners immediately upon capture. The process, called expedited removal, now applies only to immigrants who are arrested within 100 miles of the border and within two weeks of illegally crossing over and who don’t express a credible fear of persecution back home. The program could be expanded farther from the border and target those who have lived in the U.S. illegally for up to two years.

By giving more authority to immigration officers, Trump has put his administration on track to boost deportations more than 75% in his first full year in office. That would meet the level set in 2012, at the end of Obama’s first term, when more than 400,000 people were deported. It dropped to some 235,000 last year after illegal immigration fell and agents were given narrowed deportation targets.

In addition, Trump plans to empower local police to work with immigration agents to identify people they believe live illegally in their cities and towns, particularly those seen as violent, the White House official said, comparing the arrest of a suspected gang leader on an immigration violation to the FBI charging a mafia leader with tax evasion.

“The great thing about immigration law is it is a preventative law enforcement tool,” the official said.

Plans are in the works to expand a program that provides training for local cops on how to enforce immigration laws. The approach is similar to Arizona’s “papers, please” law that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012 on the grounds that the state was trying to enforce federal immigration laws. Civil liberties advocates warn that such programs risk targeting people for their appearance and could lead to rampant violations of search and seizure rights.

Elizabeth Ford, an immigration lawyer in Chardon, Ohio, near Cleveland, said she has already seen immigration officers detain migrants in the country illegally who have been charged with crimes but not convicted, even when those charges were later dropped.

Before Trump was even sworn in, immigration agents began detaining people as they left court, she said; agents previously only showed up after a conviction.

In addition, far fewer clients making asylum claims are being released while those claims are heard, she said, a stark change from just a few months ago.

“It will get even more aggressive,” she predicted.

Indeed, though Trump has backed off his campaign call to deport all 11.1 million people estimated to be in the country illegally, he is already facing pressure from his base to go beyond his executive order and end Obama’s program that has awarded work permits to more than 750,000 people brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

At Friday’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked when the program would be ended and permits would stop being issued.

“We’ve made it very clear that we’ll have further updates on immigration,” Spicer said, though he did not give an update on the status of the work permits program. “… The president has made significant progress on addressing the pledge that he made to the American people regarding immigration problems that we face, and I think we’re going to see more action on that in the next few weeks.”

It’s impossible to know how much the local law enforcement agencies will cooperate or how the courts will deal with it. But I think we must be prepared for them to try to do a lot of this. It’s fundamental to Trump’s worldview and promises — and he’s surrounded himself with white nationalist eager to “purify” the nation.

And Trump wants to take the gloves off. He’s down in Florida tweeting furiously today. He is fucking out of his mind:

He literally has no idea how our system of government works. He’s stunned that there are check and balances on his power and that a “so-called judge” could stop some blatantly unconstitutional act.

The sad truth is that the president does have a tremendous amount of power and unless members of his party decide that the need to save the country outweighs their opportunity to get their pet projects on his desk for him to sign, he can do a lot of damage even if the courts do their job.

This is going to be a long and difficult fight.

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“I wish it therefore it must be”

by digby

From Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times:

Probably the smartest thing anyone said about Donald Trump before his election was the explanation by Salena Zito in The Atlantic of why he could get away with making wildly exaggerated or flatly false statements: “When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

And yet Zito’s insight has turned out to be insufficient. In the mad days that have followed his inauguration, it has become clear that Trump takes himself both literally and seriously.

He mistakes his own impulses for facts. He does not know the difference between self-aggrandising symbolic gestures and lived human realities, and this tiny-minded literalism has very serious consequences for millions of people.

The most important thing to understand about the executive order keeping immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim countries out of the US is that it has no relationship whatsoever to its stated purpose. That purpose is, supposedly, to keep America safe from terrorism. The order is actually called “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States”.

As the chaos, anguish and shame erupted last weekend, Trump’s surrogates and supporters repeatedly evoked the memory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

He goes on to detail how the order fails to address he countries that were involved in 9/11 and notes the bizarre lack of interest in home grown white supremacist terrorists like Dylan Roof and that young man in Quebec last week, as well as the insistence that the river of blood caused by by gun violence and accidents:

The problem the executive order is really meant to address is not terrorism, but Trump’s own campaign rhetoric. The order relates, not to actual, living, breathing events or conditions, but only to language.

It is pure postmodern politics: The order is a text that refers only to another text, which is Trump’s stump speech on the campaign trail and its dark promise of a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” (If the lifting of the ban really has to wait for Trump to figure out what is going on, it will last indefinitely.)

Many people within the US media and political worlds, including some Republicans who support the intention of the order, wondered why Trump did not consult more widely before signing it. But this is to entirely miss the point. Once you start to consult, you recognise that you are intending to do something that will have consequences for real people in the real world – and that you have to modify your intentions to take account of those consequences.

What the world is struggling to come to terms with is that this is not what Trump is about at all. He is not engaged in rational politics. He is a character in a story of his own invention. And the only rules he understands are the rules of the narrative.

The president does not read books (though he watches a lot of TV), yet he instinctively understands the rule laid down by one of the greatest of storytellers, Anton Chekhov: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Trump gets this, and the anti-Muslim executive order shows him applying it. First, remove everything that has no relevance to the story, which in this case is all the real people with real lives that are being thrown into further turmoil, whether it is an Iranian mathematician studying at an Ivy League university or a desperate orphan fleeing Islamic State in Syria.

There is a paradox at work here: precisely because these people are in fact entirely irrelevant to what Trump claims to be doing – keeping America safe from terrorism – they are all the more easily erased. You just tell everybody to shut up and talk about the real story: 9/11, jihadists, Islamic State.

Next, Chekhov’s rule requires that Trump has to fire in his second chapter all the shotguns he put up on the wall in his first. That first chapter – his long rampage through the Republican primaries and the general election – was all about loading the big guns with vicious ammunition: fear-mongering, xenophobia, ethnic nationalism, anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim vitriol, white revenge for a perceived loss of power and privilege.

He knows that the shaping of the story requires that these weapons, once loaded, must be fired at somebody.

He is prepared to fire them. And it’s likely to have international consequences because he’s also obsessed with the idea that the US (and Trump himself, obviously,“l’etat c’est moi”) are being laughed at and he must bring the hammer down to make them respect America again.

And the following is fundamental to understanding Trump:

There has been much talk of liberals being in a bubble when it comes to Trump. But his first days in office have shown that the biggest bubble of all was the one occupied by the sneaking regarders and the old-school political cynics.

These are the people who – some with a slightly desperate smile, some with a superior smirk – have informed everyone that President Trump would not be the same as candidate Trump. In the wishful thinking of old-style conservatives and the buyer’s remorse of people who voted for him in the belief that he could not possibly be as boorish as he seemed, there was an assumption that old patterns still held.

The old pattern is, as the New York politician Mario Cuomo put it, that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Campaigns are primarily rhetorical; being in office is primarily practical.

But this is a political dictum – and Trump is not a politician. He is a reality TV star, a semifictional invention. If your character is a big, blowsy burlesque of a mogul, like Trump’s in The Apprentice, he doesn’t suddenly become a quietly competent chief executive. You stick with your shtick.

Forget poetry, forget prose – they are for people who read books. This is spectacle. This is entertainment. The vulgar, reckless narcissist, the pathological liar, the panderer to prejudice, is a vastly popular character. It gets the ratings with which Trump is so dementedly obsessed. Why on earth would he change it?

And besides, the political skill of being two people – one for the campaign trail, one for the office – requires some subtlety of mind. It may not be especially admirable, but those who are good at it are able to keep contradictory notions in their heads at the same time. They can juggle different realities: what they would like to do and what they can do.

But Trump has neither the brain nor the personality for such complexities. He is the one-dimensional man. And that dimension is all Trump. The narcissist has eyes only for his own reflection: when President Trump looks in the mirror, he sees only candidate Trump. He hears only his own voice from the platform.

To his credit, this is one thing Trump didn’t lie about: he said on the campaign trail that he was his own chief adviser. The president listens to the braggart, the bully, the blowhard that roars in his ear. And what it tells him is what the last Russian Tzar, Nicholas II, constantly told himself: “I wish it, therefore it must be.”

Donald Trump’s frantic signing of grandiose orders has about it the air of a despot’s last days, not his first. Deluded tyrants, their grip on reality faltering, simply issue more directives, ordering nonexistent tank divisions to take up their positions, or firing traitors. It is remarkable that Trump got to fire his first traitor, the acting attorney general, who he explicitly accused of betrayal, just 10 days into office. She will not be the last.

There is no place for argument or consultation or a weighing of consequences: I wish it, therefore it must be. Trump, in other words, takes himself, and his own desires literally. And this is both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness.

It should be borne in mind that literalism has a strong grip on American culture. The born-again evangelicals who were so crucial to Trump’s victory take the Bible literally as the word of God. (They are, of course, highly selective in their application of this principle, but that does not stop them from being literal-minded.)

And the right-wing “originalist” legal tradition that Trump honoured this week when he nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is also proudly literal: it purports to be able to discern what the framers of the US constitution really meant in the 18th century and be able to apply this meaning quite literally in the 21st.

Trump’s style resonates with these habits of mind, even in its narcissistic weirdness: he is a fundamentalist believer in the literal truth of the Book of Trump; an originalist interpreter of the constitution of Trumperica. This places him, for his fans, somewhere between God and the founding fathers.

However, taking himself literally is also Trump’s weakness – because what he is being literal about is a dystopian fiction.

The “American carnage” he evoked in his inaugural address, the graveyard landscape and ruined republic, the communities stalked by immigrant rapists and jihadi terrorists, does have some distant correlatives in an actual America. But it is so wildly distorted that it has no practical use as a map of the country Trump is supposed to rule. And Trump doesn’t know the difference between his crazy map, with “here be monsters” scrawled all over it, and the real territory it is supposed to chart.

What has been clarified this week is that Trump will not – and most likely cannot – do what a successful ruler needs to do: separate the fictional place in his head from the country he has to govern.

The president will go on as he has started, with empty gestures that have no purpose other than allowing him to claim that Trump has obeyed the sacred word of Trump. The misery wrought in people’s lives and the damage to the global standing of the US will never matter beside that great imperative.

This is the best analysis I’ve read of Trump. He’s living in his own narrative. And it has nothing to do with reality.

I urge you to read the whole thing. Have a drink handy.

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Trump the brilliant executive

by digby

 … had no clue that his system was out of whack until it blew up in his face.  In fact he’s so arrogant that it didn’t occur to him that he might need some input from people other than Breitbart.com executives, his 35 year old son-in-law and an ex-General who was fired for being looney tunes.

On the evening of Saturday, Jan. 28, as airport protests raged over President Trump’s executive order on immigration, the man charged with implementing the order, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, had a plan. He would issue a waiver for lawful permanent residents, a.k.a. green-card holders, from the seven majority-Muslim countries whose citizens had been banned from entering the United States.

White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon wanted to stop Kelly in his tracks. Bannon paid a personal and unscheduled visit to Kelly’s Department of Homeland Security office to deliver an order: Don’t issue the waiver. Kelly, according to two administration officials familiar with the confrontation, refused to comply with Bannon’s instruction. That was the beginning of a weekend of negotiations among senior Trump administration staffers that led, on Sunday, to a decision by Trump to temporarily freeze the issuance of executive orders.

The confrontation between Bannon and Kelly pitted a political operator against a military disciplinarian. Respectfully but firmly, the retired general and longtime Marine told Bannon that despite his high position in the White House and close relationship with Trump, the former Breitbart chief was not in Kelly’s chain of command, two administration officials said. If the president wanted Kelly to back off from issuing the waiver, Kelly would have to hear it from the president directly, he told Bannon.

Bannon left Kelly’s office without getting satisfaction. Trump didn’t call Kelly to tell him to hold off. Kelly issued the waiver late Saturday night, although it wasn’t officially announced until the following day.

That did not end the dispute. At approximately 2 a.m. Sunday morning, according to the two officials, a conference call of several top officials was convened to discuss the ongoing confusion over the executive order and the anger from Cabinet officials over their lack of inclusion in the process in advance.

On the call were Bannon, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, White House Counsel Donald McGahn, national security adviser Michael Flynn, Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State designee Rex Tillerson, who had not yet been confirmed.

One White House official and one administration official told me that Kelly, Mattis and Tillerson presented a united front and complained about the process that led to the issuance of the immigration executive order, focusing on their near-complete lack of consultation as well as the White House’s reluctance to make what they saw as common-sense revisions, such as exempting green-card holders.

Bannon and Miller pushed back, defending the White House’s actions and explaining that the process and substance of the order had been kept to a close circle because the Trump administration had not yet installed its own officials in key government roles and other officials were still getting settled into place.

Flynn, according to the White House official, partially sided with the Cabinet officials, arguing that they should be included in the process, even if the White House ultimately decided not to adopt their recommendations.

“Flynn’s argument was a process argument, that we are unnecessarily putting these guys in a tough position,” the White House official said. “If you are going to ignore them, you have to at least give them a chance to say their piece.”

Later on Sunday, a larger senior staff meeting was convened with White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, senior adviser Jared Kushner and Trump himself, where all tried to make sense of the process and chart a path forward.

The president made a decision at that meeting that, following the already scheduled rollout of a executive order on regulatory reforms, all other executive orders would be held up until a process was established that included the input of key officials outside the White House.

What this also means is that the draft EOs like the anti-LGBT “religious liberty” order which have been circulating have not necessarily been pulled back on the merits. They’ve just been “paused.” We’ll have to see if having more input from the cabinet will make a difference.

Trump has never run any large organization. He’s not very bright and he’s got psychological problems. So, he had no idea that he needed to hear from experts other than his little handpicked cadre of weirdos. That he now knows this isn’t going to help things. He is, in George W. Bush’s famous words, “the decider.” But he doesn’t have the capacity to weigh the facts independently and he doesn’t really trust anyone but his family, none of whom know anything either. So, the decision making will continue to be Trump running the world by the seat of his pants which he believes has been shown to be infallible because he’s now the president.

It’s bad. I cannot allow myself to imagine what will happen when a real crisis hits.

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Bay of Banghazi, no big deal


by digby

“Yeah, kill ’em, whatever. It’ll be unbelievable.” — Donald Trump

I’m just guessing that’s what he said, but it sounds right:

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations. 

As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

Normally,I would think that this was just standard CYA, (and frankly, the military stands resposible for bringing the pan to the president in the first place)  but in this case it’s entirely possible that Trump and his band of sociopathic Islamophobes just drooled and growled assent without having a clue what they were doing.

But if anyone thinks Trump will shed tears over he deaths of Navy Seals and dead civilians, think again. He has no feelings for other people.