Month: September 2017

Trump may be mad at Price but it isn’t because he hates “waste”

by digby

So fiscal conservative HHS secretary Tom Price gouged the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars using private planes to fly around the country like he’s Donald Trump or something. He may not last. Trump said he wasn’t happy about it.

But that’s not why he won’t last. Trump was lying. He is mad at Price but not because of the travel. That’s just and excuse for him to go, if he does.

This is why Trump is mad at him:

Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price is, to put it mildly, not having a great week. The failure of Republicans’ repeal-and-replace effort, coupled with the ongoing reporting about the private flights he took on taxpayers’ dime, has weakened his stature within the Trump administration.

A source who has watched President Trump and Price interact at length told my colleague Jonathan Swan that Price burned his credibility when health care failed to get across the finish line in Congress.

Early in the administration, Trump, House and Senate leaders, Price and then-chief of staff Reince Priebus met in the Roosevelt Room to discuss health care. Trump asked whether a deal would pass, and both Priebus and Price emphatically said “yes.”

The two have never really gelled, Swan’s sources tell him. Price is wonky, and Trump seems to endure their meetings more than enjoy them.

So, it’s really that Price failed to give Trump his repeal bill like he promised. And I would guess that

I’m hearing major NY Times reporters say that the president really hates waste and he won’t stand for it. I’m sure he likes that very much. And others are saying that this doesn’t present the image Trump wants to present of a populist leader of working people and the striving middle class. One of them even mentioned that he gives up his yearly salary.

That would be Trump, the guy who has a gold plated apartment in a gold plated tower in the middle of Manhattan, is married to a super model and travels at taxpayer expense every week-end to one of his many golf resorts for which he pockets the cash from every member. That would be the president who refused to release his tax returns or divest himself of his international business which is going strong selling the name of the president of the United States all over the world.

This would be the man who was still doing deal with Russia as he ran for president of the United States.

That’s the guy these elite reporters are telling is worried about his “populist” image because he “doesn’t like waste.”

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On Tuesday, Politico reported that Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida made a trip to Puerto Rico to assess the damage from Hurricane Maria:

Saying he needs to “raise the alarm” about Puerto Rico’s dire straits, Sen. Marco Rubio told the White House on Tuesday that the federal government needs to take over recovery efforts on the island quickly to prevent a Hurricane “Katrina-style” disaster in the U.S. territory. 

“This has the potential of being a serious humanitarian crisis in a U.S. territory impacting United States citizens,” Rubio told POLITICO on Tuesday before delivering a similar message in a face-to-face meeting with Vice President Mike Pence. “There’s going to have to be a lot more hands-on federal engagement for us to be able to successfully carry out the mission.”

The White House announced that President Trump would be going to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands next Tuesday. In the meantime, no other American officials are allowed to go.

Rubio was not the only one to evoke the government’s disastrous response to Katrina back in 2005. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said this:

The response has been anemic. Back when we had Katrina I said at a news conference that God would not be pleased with our response. And God would certainly not be pleased with this response.

Last Sunday Hillary Clinton tweeted this:

President Trump, Sec. Mattis, and DOD should send the Navy, including the USNS Comfort, to Puerto Rico now. These are American citizens

The administration belatedly announced two days later that they were sending the Comfort, a hospital ship. It leaves four days from now and will take another five days to get there.

Over the weekend, Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, gave numerous interviews saying he hoped the government would send more than the bare minimum of help, even as he thanked FEMA and the military. On Monday the mayor of San Juan, the island territory’s capital, tearfully begged for more assistance, saying that a humanitarian crisis was unfolding before our eyes.

Meanwhile, in between obsessing about NFL players protesting police brutality and insulting John McCain for refusing to vote for the latest Obamacare repeal bill, the president grudgingly tweeted about Puerto Rico, apparently suggesting that the island’s debt problems had to be “dealt with” as a condition of disaster aid. On Monday he held a press conference with the Spanish president in which he claimed that Puerto Rican officials were telling “anyone who will listen” what a great job Donald Trump was doing:

[A] massive effort is underway, and we have been really treated very, very nicely by the governor and by everybody else. They know how hard we’re working and what a good job we’re doing. As Gov. Rosselló just told me this morning, the entire federal workforce is doing great work in Puerto Rico, and I appreciated his saying it. And he’s saying it to anybody that will listen.

When asked for follow-up, Trump helpfully explained that Puerto Rico is “an island sitting in the middle of an ocean,” which for some reason made it “tough” to get supplies there. But the main thrust of his comments was what a great job he was doing:

The governor of Puerto Rico is so thankful for the great job that we’re doing. . . . The governor said we are doing a great job. . . . We have had tremendous reviews from government officials . . . and this morning, the governor made incredible statements about how well we’re doing. . . . So everybody has said it’s amazing the job that we’ve done in Puerto Rico, we’re very proud of it. . . . I think we’ve done a really good job . . . and we are going to do far more than anybody else would ever be able to do and it’s being recognized as such.

George W. Bush was vilified in the wake of Katrina for saying eight words that captured his obliviousness to the depth of devastation and horror: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” He was of course speaking to his hapless FEMA director Michael Brown, who resigned shortly thereafter. Bush’s approval ratings never recovered. Those words will forever be part of his legacy of failure.

Bush had been on a fundraising trip and was photographed with John McCain and a birthday cake while New Orleans was underwater and people were stranded on rooftops. It was seen as a political truism that no president could ever be caught short that way again. Trump had seemed to understand that lesson when Harvey and Irma hit, and although he is terrible at any aspect of the job that requires empathy or personal interaction with strangers, he and Melania dressed up in some casual gear and flew down to the disaster area to be photographed pretending to give a damn. It even boosted his lousy poll numbers a bit.

With Puerto Rico, other than to insist that everyone is incredibly impressed with what a terrific, fabulous, amazing job he is doing, he isn’t even trying. For some reason, he doesn’t seem to think the American people will hold it against him the way they held it against Bush when an American city drowned before their eyes.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? Donald Trump has never acknowledged that the 3.5 million people of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens. He talks about how far away the island is and how big the ocean is that separates us. He never mentions that it’s part of our country. As Amy Davidson Sorkin in the New Yorker put it, “instead of emphasizing that closeness, or a sense of mutual obligation, Trump has, so far, focused on how different Puerto Rico is, and what its people owe him, which is, above all, their gratitude.”

Trump must not have heard Gov. Rosselló when he said:

We are U.S. citizens that just a few weeks ago went to the aid of other U.S. citizens even as we’re going through our fiscal downturn and as we were hit by another storm. Now, we’ve been essentially devastated. Complete destruction of the power infrastructure, severe destruction of the housing infrastructure; food and water are needed. My petition is that we were there once for our brothers and sisters, our other U.S. citizens, now it’s time that U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico are taken care of adequately, properly.

I suspect that if the president were to focus on the job at hand instead of worrying about NFL ratings and his imaginary tax cut plan, if he were to address the American people with exactly that message, most Americans would rally to their fellow citizens.

Unfortunately, all we’re getting so far is “Trumpie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” It remains to be seen if he will be held to account for this callous and shocking behavior or if this is yet another norm Donald Trump has blown to smithereens. Only 3.5 million lives hang in the balance.

Let them eat more tax cuts
by Tom Sullivan

Jobs. There were going to be jobs. Lots of jobs. Good jobs that would put food on the table and pay the monthly bills.

Instead, the president proposes to let them eat tax cuts. He told an Indianapolis audience yesterday what they really want instead:

“Thank you very much. You just want massive tax cuts. That’s what you want. That’s the only reason you’re going so wild.”

A couple of impressions of the chief executive’s tax reform proposal:

“Republicans’ tax framework is not tax reform,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “It is a framework that gives away the store to the wealthiest while sticking the middle class with the bill.”

Perhaps “framework” is being too kind. Writing for Vox, Edward Kleinbard calls the plan, “a sketch of an outline of a preliminary notion of a tax cut for some — and a tax hike for others.”

Calling the outline “the old supply-side hooey,” the New York Times Editorial Board described the preliminary notion as, “a wish list of tax cuts for the wealthy, with lots of ‘we’ll get back to you on that’ promises where the details are supposed to be.” The column continues:

This much is clear: The tax “framework” published by Republican leaders on Wednesday would greatly increase the federal deficit, would not turbocharge economic growth and could leave many middle-class families worse off by ending deductions they rely on. It would do little or nothing to improve the lot of the working class, a group President Trump says he is fighting for. It would instead provide a windfall to hedge fund managers, corporate executives, real estate developers and other members of the 1 percent. And can it be just a happy coincidence that Mr. Trump and his family would benefit “bigly” from this plan?

How very like Lord Mountebank.

But the Times’ Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Alan Rappeport highlight one item that has resurfaced repeatedly since the Bush II administration — a tax repatriation holiday:

Perhaps the most significant, yet murky, shift is the move from a worldwide tax system to a territorial tax system for multinational corporations. In theory, this means that companies would not be taxed on their overseas earnings. But to prevent erosion of the tax base, Republicans plan to impose some form of tax on foreign profits. The transition to the new system would also include a one-time repatriation tax at yet-to-be-determined rates to encourage companies to bring offshore profits back home.

The chance for major corporations to bring home (at a steep tax discount) untaxed profits held offshore will be spun, as George W. Bush sold it, as a boon to job creation and reinvestment in the economy. It was neither. But the “one-time” American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 did provide one of the best quotes of the new century from a former Bush economic advisor:

“There will be some stimulative effect because it pumps money into the economy,” said Phillip L. Swagel, a former chief of staff on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, which had opposed the tax holiday. “But you might as well have taken a helicopter over 90210 [Beverly Hills] and pushed the money out the door. That would have stimulated the economy as well.“

In Indianapolis last night, “the greatest jobs president that God ever created” described another way his plan would benefit common folk. He told his audience, “To protect millions of small businesses and the American farmer, we are finally ending the crushing, the horrible, the unfair estate tax, or as it is often referred to, the death tax.” The Post’s fact checker called that statement “absurd“:

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, only about 5,500 estates in 2017 — out of nearly 3 million estates — would have to pay any taxes. About half of estates subject to the tax would pay an average tax of about 9 percent. That’s because for a married couple, about $11 million is exempt from taxation.

Only 80 — that’s right, 80 — of taxable estates would be farms and small businesses.

They may not be able to pay their monthly bills or put food on the table, but struggling Americans can take comfort in knowing that, in one nation under Don, after loved ones die, their meager inheritances that wouldn’t be taxed before won’t be taxed in the future.

Conservative pundits and politicians frequently complain that half the country pays no taxes, i.e., poorer Americans. (They mean income taxes, not payroll, property, sales, and other taxes. But don’t bother them with the details when they’re on a troll.) These supposed deadbeat non-taxpayers should have “skin in the game,” you know, before they are allowed a say in governing this democracy, i.e., a vote.

Watch how fast the same critics line up behind the Vaporware President’s promise that Americans they complain pay nothing will pay even less.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

They’re already gunning for Warren

by digby

This is just the beginning, folks

Rebecca Traister at NY Magazine takes a look at early efforts to “Hillaryize” Elizabeth Warren:

The elite, ambitious candidate, saying one thing on the stump but another to wealthy donors, willing to cede big dreams for incremental, pragmatic fixes … You recognize her, right? Of course you do. She’s Massachusetts Senator and progressive firebrand Elizabeth Warren, who in the past few weeks has cosponsored Bernie Sanders’s new Medicare-for-all-bill, introduced a bill to preempt state right-to-work laws, prepared to take on leaders of Wells Fargo and Equifax on the Senate floor … and been hit with a blast of right-wing messaging and mainstream news coverage that feels positively uncanny.

The playbook that the right is running against Warren — seeding early criticism designed to weaken her from the left — is pretty ballsy, given that Warren has been a standard-bearer, the crusading, righteous politician who by many measures activated the American left in the years before Bernie Sanders mounted his presidential campaign. Warren is the candidate who many cited in 2016 as the anti-Clinton: the outspoken, uncompromisingly progressive woman they would have supported unreservedly had she only run. Yet now, as many hope and speculate that she might run in 2020, the right is investing in a story line about Warren that is practically indistinguishable from the one they peddled for years about Clinton. And even in these early days, some of that narrative is finding its way into mainstream coverage of Warren, and in lefty reactions to it.

It’s a literal investment, one that may mean that conservatives see Warren as among the most dangerous of their future presidential opposition. Last week, Politico reported on efforts by the right to obstruct plenty of potential Trump 2020 challengers, many of them up for reelection in 2018, including Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. But most notable was the $150,000 dollars sunk by conservative hedge-fund billionaire and Breitbart benefactor Robert Mercer into a Super PAC called Massachusetts First, built specifically to target Warren.

Mercer’s contribution to Massachusetts First is the biggest he’s made to any candidate or political entity in 2017, according to Politico, citing Federal Election Commission Records. And despite the fact that Warren is unlikely to face a perilous challenge in her bid for reelection in Massachusetts in 2018, radio ads funded by Mercer have been running all summer, painting the senator and former faculty member at Harvard Law as a “hypocrite professor” who was “raking in hundreds of thousands each year” while her students were “taking on massive debt to listen to Warren lecture them.” As Politico notes, these moves against Warren in the context of a race she’s not likely to be vulnerable in demonstrate that Republicans “are aiming to replicate the pounce-early-and-often model they used against Clinton in 2014 and 2015.”

But in Warren’s case, it’s not just the pace and timing of attacks that recall right-wing anti-Clinton strategy. It’s also the portrayal of her as hypocritical and untrustworthy. The Massachusetts First website describes its mission as providing “the full and real story” of Warren’s failings, a construction that suggests that her self-presentation is inauthentic, as Clinton’s was often presumed to be.

Then of course there is the emphasis on Warren’s personal wealth, here deployed in contrast to those struggling under the burden of student debt, casting as her victims the kinds of young people who were drawn to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign and its emphasis on free college. Presenting Warren as the wealthy establishment enemy of needy students is a particularly nifty trick, given that she has made the reduction of student loan debt one of her political crusades, and that this spring she joined with Sanders on the College for All Act. But even the radio ads’ evocation of Warren’s “lectures” offer a view of a woman who is not an ally of young people, but rather at didactic and disdainful remove from them.

The familiar themes of those radio ads bore fruit on a national scale last week, when right-wing Boston radio host Jeff Kuhner confronted the Massachusetts senator after her appearance at a Boston TV station, posting the video on twitter on September 18. The video shows Kuhner questioning Warren about the price of her Cambridge home and about her Harvard salary, repeatedly calling her a hypocrite, piggybacking on the narrative of the Mercer-backed radio ads: “You are part of the one percent … You are a multi-millionaire and you have a mansion in Cambridge, do you not?” Kuhner presses her. “You’re part of the one percent and yet you rail against the one percent. Do you not see the hypocrisy there?”

After posting the video, Kuhner repeatedly tweeted the clip at Donald Trump and conservative news outlets, alongside descriptions of Warren as a “phony Indian, a phony progressive & a phony senator,” who “made millions shilling for big banks, corporations & insurance giants” and “got rich by flipping homes, taking advantage of old ladies. She embodies crony capitalism.” Again, what was odd about the approach was not the revelation that conservatives hate, fear, and want to defeat Elizabeth Warren; it’s that they’re deploying a populist critique — one that questions, rather than emphasizes and makes a bogeyman of, her left bona fides — to do so.

By the end of the week, the Kuhner clip began to gain traction, and was posted at bigger and bigger conservative sites, including The Gateway Pundit, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times , Fox News, and The American Mirror, which was finally linked on Twitter by Drudge.

Most of the right’s coverage of Kuhner’s interaction with Warren described her as “frazzled” or “triggered,” claiming that she “scrambles” when confronted. None of that is true; the video shows her answering his charges cogently, pointing out that the kinds of economic policy she believes in — low college costs and higher wages — permitted her the degree of economic mobility she’s enjoyed. Nevertheless, the descriptive and highly gendered language used to frame the clip by the right closely echoes the popular portrayal of Hillary Clinton as spasmodic, easily rattled and high-strung, paving the way for fake news about Clinton’s ill-health and mental fragility. “Fake Indian Elizabeth Warren is so easy to frazzle; all one has to do is call her out on her lies and hypocrisy and she loses her cool,” read the Gateway Pundit.

Read on. There’s more and it’s all depressing.

With what we’re learning about the American public’s susceptibility to propaganda and outright sexism during the last election it’s pretty clear the Republicans are already on it for 2020 — and they know what will work against Warren. I wish I didn’t agree with them but I do.

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A large majority agrees that Trump is unfit

by digby

And he proves it more every single day.

The latest Quinnipiac Poll:

President Donald Trump is not “fit to serve as president,” American voters say 56 – 42 percent, and voters disapprove 57 – 36 percent of the job he is doing as president, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.

There are deep party, gender and racial divisions on whether President Trump is fit to serve, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll finds:

Trump is not fit, Democrats say 94 – 5 percent and independent voters say 57 – 40 percent. Republicans say 84 – 14 percent that he is fit.
Men are divided 49 – 49 percent, as women say 63 – 35 percent he is not fit.

White voters are divided as 50 percent say he is fit and 48 percent say he is not fit. Trump is not fit, black voters say 94 – 4 percent and Hispanic voters say 60 – 40 percent.

American voters disapprove 62 – 32 percent of the way President Trump is handling race relations. Disapproval is 55 – 39 percent among white voters, 95 – 3 percent among black voters and 66 – 28 percent among Hispanic voters. President Trump is doing more to divide the country than to unite the country, American voters say 60 – 35 percent.

The anti-Twitter sentiment remains high as voters say 69 – 26 percent that Trump should stop tweeting. No party, gender, education, age or racial group wants to follow the Tweeter-in- Chief. Voters say 51 – 27 percent they are embarrassed to have Trump as president.

“There is no upside. With an approval rating rating frozen in the mid-thirties, his character and judgement questioned, President Donald Trump must confront the harsh fact that the majority of American voters feel he is simply unfit to serve in the highest office in the land,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

“A divider, responsible for the deepening chasm of racial discord. That is the inescapable characterization of President Trump from voters who see race relations deteriorating on his watch.

“Weary and wary of the Twitter-happy president’s blizzard of provocative tweets, voters say dump the device for good.”

American voter opinions of most Trump qualities remain low:

59 – 37 percent that he is not honest;
60 – 38 percent that he does not have good leadership skills;
56 – 42 percent that he does not care about average Americans;
67 – 30 percent that he is not level headed;
61 – 37 percent that he is a strong person;
55 – 42 percent that he is intelligent;
61 – 36 percent that he does not share their values.
Democrats and Republicans

American voters disapprove 78 – 15 percent of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, worse than their 70 – 25 percent disapproval in a June 29 Quinnipiac University poll. Even Republican voters disapprove 61 – 32 percent. Voters disapprove 63 – 29 percent of the job Democrats in Congress are doing, virtually unchanged from June.

Voters say 47 – 38 percent, including 44 – 32 percent among independent voters, that they would like to see Democrats win control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 Congressional elections.

Voters also say 49 – 40 percent, including 47 – 34 percent among independent voters, they would like to see Democrats win control of the U.S. Senate next year.

By a narrow 48 – 44 percent voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy. He gets mostly negative approval ratings for handling other key issues:
38 – 57 percent for handling foreign policy;
38 – 59 percent for immigration;
34 – 59 percent for the environment;
34 – 60 percent for health care;
47 percent approve of his handling of terrorism and 45 percent disapprove.

He is a bigger disaster than the three category five hurricanes that have hit America combined.

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Oopsie o’ the day

by digby

Russian trolls are very weird

Trump’s Wall Street buddies and Puerto Rico

by digby

Trump is worried about his Wall Street pals

You saw those belated and telling tweets by Donald Trump late Sunday night already. That’s him, after a full week-end of wanking about the NFL protests to give his racist base something to live for, finally deciding to acknowledge that a catastrophe was unfolding in Puerto Rico. But he couldn’t help but mention Puerto Rico’s debt which was clearly a topic that had been discussed in the White House.

D-day asked some of the debt holders what they planned to do to help and this is what they said. It’s not pretty. Think about how many times Wall Street forgave Trump’s business failures when he went bankrupt over and over and over again as you read this:

PUERTO RICO, FACING absolute devastation after Hurricane Maria barreled through last week, desperately needs immediate funding to restore critical infrastructure, particularly its hobbled electric grid. The entire island — home to over 3.5 million American citizens, roughly equivalent to the state of Connecticut — lost power, and satellite imagery shows how little electricity has come back. This affects not only electricity and telecommunications service but access to clean water, as many pumping stations run on the same grid.

A group of bondholders, who own a portion of Puerto Rico’s massive $72 billion debt, has proposed what they are calling relief — but in the form of a loan. So they’re offering a territory mired in debt the chance to take on more debt.

The announcement came after The Intercept spent two days reaching out to 51 of Puerto Rico’s known creditors, asking them if they would support a moratorium or cancellation of debt payments for the island, given the humanitarian crisis. Prior to this announcement, only three of the 51 creditors had so much as donated relief funds to charity or offered sympathy for island residents, all of them banks who actually have to face consumers, and so are a bit more adept at handling public relations. No creditor had supported debt relief.

Of the 51 creditors contacted by The Intercept, only Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and Scotiabank have pledged no-strings-attached money for Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands, in the form of donations to relief organizations totaling $1.25 million. Citi has also waived certain fees for citizens within disaster zones.

Puerto Rico’s other creditors contacted by The Intercept would not say whether donations were made by their firms or their top executives, which include some of the richest people on earth. Holders of Puerto Rican debt include John Paulson, who got rich betting against the housing market during the financial crash; Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine Capital, who in 2015 called Puerto Rican debt his “best idea” for investors; and Marc Lasry of Avenue Capital Group and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team.

Read on, it tells you everything you need to know.

Trump had a little press conference today and barely talked about Puerto Rico. H did mention that he wouldn’t be lifting he Jones Act to allow foreign ships to help with the effort as he did with Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. He explained that shipping interests didn’t  want it so there’s that.

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Trump’s Deep State is alive and well. And it’s coming for you, not him.

by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

One of the more laughable right-wing turnarounds in the era of Donald Trump has been conservatives’ recently discovered concern for civil liberties. Where once they blindly defended the U.S. intelligence agencies as patriotic bulwarks against all threats foreign and domestic, the investigations into their Dear Leader have them sounding like card-carrying members of the ACLU.

It’s nice that they are finally concerned with the powerful institutions that operate in the dark, but it’s just a little bit curious that they only acknowledged a right to privacy when it affected a wealthy and powerful Republican who is suspected of colluding with a foreign government to tilt an election in his favor. When the so-called Deep State was revealed to have been collecting vast amounts of the private communications of average citizens with no due process, they were all for it.

So was Donald Trump, come to think of it. During the campaign, he stunned the nation with a proposal to require every Muslim to register with the government. He followed that up with the idea of creating a national Muslim database which he described as “good management.” When asked by a reporter what the difference between a registry for Muslims and the registry for Jews under Nazi Germany would be, he replied, “You tell me.”

During the Republican primary Trump endorsed mass surveillance of American citizens. Questioned about whether the provisions of the Patriot Act allowing for bulk data collection should be restored, he said, “As far as I’m concerned, that would be fine.” As he explained to radio host Hugh Hewitt:

I tend to err on the side of security, I must tell you. When you have the world looking at us and would like to destroy us as quickly as possible, I err on the side of security. I assume when I pick up my telephone people are listening to my conversations anyway, if you want to know the truth.

During the campaign there were reports of Trump eavesdropping on guests at Mar-a-Lago and rumors that his staff at Trump Tower assumed their offices were bugged. So perhaps his belief that people are always listening to his conversations was yet another projection of his own behavior.

In any case, there is no aspect of Trump’s history that would lead anyone to believe that he has even the slightest concern about civil liberties.

Nonetheless, because the press has been receiving leaks from throughout the government about Russian interference in the election, along with every other detail about the inner workings of this White House, Trump’s supporters have been frantically clutching their pearls about the excesses of the Deep State. It’s true that some of that leaked information has clearly come from people in the intelligence world, and the motives are always suspect in such cases. But the assumption that this is some kind of conspiracy of spooks who hate Donald Trump is far fetched. Virtually every department in the government, including the president’s closest White House advisers and members of his family, have been leaking like a sieve.

Despite Trump’s self-serving complaints about President Obama supposedly wiretapping him and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice “unmasking” members of the Trump transition team, there is no better friend of the authoritarian police state than Donald Trump. He is the last president who would ever try to rein in any excesses — unless they specifically applied to himself.

For instance, there is no indication that Trump’s administration has suspended the Orwellian Obama-era “Insider Threat Program,” which required government employees and contractors from the Peace Corps to the Pentagon to spy on their co-workers and report any “suspicious activity” to the authorities. As McClatchy reported back in 2012:

Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions. . . .

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.

You can look at the FBI “brochure” on the program right on its website.

The Trump administration is taking that concept to a whole new level. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke told the National Petroleum Council that he believes 30 percent of the department are not “loyal to the flag.” He is working hard to get rid of all the traitors and according to the Post has taken “the unusual step of sharing the names of executives who were dismissed after an inspector general report determined that they had engaged in poor behavior.”

Just this week, BuzzFeed reported that the Department of Homeland Security plans to collect information about all immigrants, even naturalized citizens (and natural born Americans who interact with them) from social media and search results. This was casually announced as if it were perfectly normal for the government to do such a thing, as if social media and search results were just anodyne public records and not highly detailed portraits of individuals’ most private communications. (Check out this article about one woman’s Tinder records if you don’t believe that.) DHS is apparently moving ahead with this program, despite the fact that a narrower pilot program initiated by the Obama administration in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack pretty much concluded it was a waste of time.

It is always a good idea to be skeptical of secret government institutions and demand oversight and accountability. If the born-again civil libertarians on the right were even slightly sincere, that would be an excellent step in the right direction. Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s civil liberty is their only concern. Immigrants, government employees, Muslims and anyone else Trump’s administration considers “disloyal to the flag” are fair game.

Talk radiofication
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Grant Peters via Flickr/Creative Commons.

Chris Hayes last night stated aloud something many of us have had kicking around the dusty corners of our skulls.

The reality-show president is a showman, to be sure. He was once associated with professional wrestling. He appeared at WrestleMania. Yet he is combative and pathetically needy. He prompts his Cabinet members to praise him. He boasted for the cameras yesterday that the governor of Puerto Rico told him “the entire federal workforce is doing great work in Puerto Rico, and I appreciated his saying it, and he’s saying it to anybody that will listen.”

Meanwhile on the ground in Puerto Rico, “People are starting to die already,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz told reporters.

But the constraints of the presidency provide him less leeway for his freewheeling style. He is easily bored discussing the tedious details of policy. Policy discussions don’t place him at the center of the maelstrom where he feels most himself. He’s got to stir the pot so his fans won’t forget to love him.

Hayes suggested that in his new role, the real estate magnate has turned to the conservative talk radio model for getting daily affirmations from his base.

“What Donald Trump wants to do is run against Colin Kaepernick, Antifa, and undergraduates,” Hayes told Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall last night on MSNBC’s “All in with Chris Hayes.”

“It really is primal with him,” Marshall agreed. He is a master of weaponizing negative feelings and using them against his enemies.

“You know, I think with Trump we get too hung up on the military and the flag,” Marshall said. “There’s enemies and there’s allies. There’s his people and there’s THEM.”

Like Limbaugh and Savage and Beck and Hannity before him, the president knows his base needs to be fed red meat each day. He’ll get the love he craves if he gives it to them and begin to stray if he doesn’t.

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Still fuming over Sessions

by digby

He can’t get past it:

President Donald Trump again indicated he was dissatisfied with his attorney general, following comments over the summer in which he criticized Jeff Sessions and suggested he might fire him.

The president also said at a White House dinner Monday that he had the upper hand in his dispute with the National Football League, according to guests at the gathering.

Mr. Trump expressed frustration with Mr. Sessions’ March decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s probe of Russian election meddling, according to three people at the dinner for conservative leaders.

“You could feel it dripping with venom,” one dinner guest said of Mr. Trump’s comment. “It was something else.”

[…]

Mr. Trump was answering a guest’s question on a policy technicality when his mood appeared to shift, the people said. He advised the guest to reach out to the attorney general on the issue, then said of Mr. Sessions: “He recused himself on Russia, which he should never have done.”

Mr. Trump also suggested Mr. Sessions was ineffective at his job. “He basically told everyone in the room to go tell Sessions to get moving” on various policy fronts, one person said.

In Alabama the other night he said people should convince Sessions to indict Hillary Clinton.

He’s got a screw loose, particularly when it comes to Sessions who is his most loyal soldier. I’m not sure we really know this is all about.