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Month: March 2018

So Trump said he’d lift sanctions all the way back in 2015?

So Trump said he’d lift sanctions all the way back in 2015?

by digby

Yes he did. And he said it was because he was so close to Putin. Mother Jones’ Mark Follman reports:

While researching the strange story of two Russian gun aficionados who cultivated Donald Trump’s presidential campaign via the National Rifle Association, we came across a little-noticed but noteworthy episode concerning Trump and US sanctions against Russia. Sanctions have been a source of extraordinary conflict between the president and Congress and a matter of clear significance to special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation.

Just a month after Trump announced his campaign for the White House, he spoke directly to Maria Butina, the protégé of the powerful Russian banking official and Putin ally Alexander Torshin. During a public question and answer session at FreedomFest, a libertarian convention in Las Vegas in July 2015, Butina asked Trump what he would do as president about “damaging” US sanctions. Trump suggested he would get rid of them.

“I am visiting from Russia,” Butina said into the mic.

“Ahhhhh, Putin!” Trump interjected, prompting laughter from the audience as he added a mocking riff about the current president: “Good friend of Obama, Putin. He likes Obama a lot. Go ahead.”

“My question will be about foreign politics,” Butina continued. “If you will be elected as president, what will be your foreign politics especially in the relationships with my country? And do you want to continue the politics of sanctions that are damaging of both economy [sic]? Or you have any other ideas?”

After going off on Obama and digressing into trade policy, Trump responded: “I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin… I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin, OK? And I mean, where we have the strength. I don’t think you’d need the sanctions. I think we would get along very, very well.”

He always seemed very, very sure that he and Putin would “get along very, very well.”

Here’s the answer:

It’s certainly plausible that he just thought the magic of his stable genius would make sanctions unnecessary because Putin would simply do whatever he wanted… I guess.

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More on the unleashed Trumpie

More on the unleashed Trumpie

by digby

Last night Trump held a rally in Pennsylvania which was a pretty standard, if lengthy, Trump event. He successfully worked his adoring crowd into a frothing frenzy. But he was as blatantly racist an dishonest as he’s been since he became president, seemingly feeling his oats. As I’ve been writing, I suspect this reflects the stress he’s under and his instinct to just go for it when that happens.

This week, President Trump ripped the steering wheel out of John Kelly’s hands and played chief of staff and communications director, all wrapped into one:

Trump kept his own senior staff on edge, with top officials uncertain from hour to hour what was happening with two globally consequential issues: tariffs and North Korea.

Want to know what it’s like to work for this president? A senior administration official, who likes Trump but can’t keep up, tells Jonathan Swan:


“No single individual in history has been able to direct an entire news cycle on a whim, and he’s using that power at his sole discretion, with the WH policy, press, and comms teams just along for the ride.”

“SURPRISE, we’re taking major trade actions. WAIT, maybe we’re not.”

“ACTUALLY, yes we are, and we’re going to do it TODAY. “

“SURPRISE, there’ll be a big announcement in a few hours. You’ll want to watch. *Media gives it hours of breathless attention,* followed by one of the most significant foreign policy announcements in recent memory.”

“Both at a policy level (e.g. what trade actions to take, whether or not to accept Kim invitation) or a comms level (when/how to announce these decisions), Trump is doing what he wants, when he wants, how he wants.”

“The WH staff I talk to are constantly having to make the decision whether to push back on him, push forward with him, or head for the exits in exasperation.”

What an impressive management style. Gabriel Sherman has more on this:

Even before he decided to launch a trade war and roll the nuclear dice by agreeing in the course of a West Wing afternoon to a risky sit-down with Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump was telling friends he was tired of being reined in. “I’m doing great, but I’m getting all these bad headlines,” Trump told a friend recently. A Republican in frequent contact with the White House told me Trump is “frustrated by all these people telling him what to do.”

With the departures of Hope Hicks and Gary Cohn, the Trump presidency is entering a new phase—one in which Trump is feeling liberated to act on his impulses. “Trump is in command. He’s been in the job more than a year now. He knows how the levers of power work. He doesn’t give a fuck,” the Republican said. Trump’s decision to circumvent the policy process and impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum reflects his emboldened desire to follow his impulses and defy his advisers. “It was like a fuck-you to Kelly,” a Trump friend said. “Trump is red-hot about Kelly trying to control him.”

According to five Republicans close to the White House, Trump has diagnosed the problem as having the wrong team around him and is looking to replace his senior staff in the coming weeks. “Trump is going for a clean reset, but he needs to do it in a way that’s systemic so it doesn’t look like it’s chaos,” one Republican said.

Sources said that the first officials to go will be Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom Trump has clashed with for months. On Tuesday, Trump met with John Bolton in the Oval Office. When he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago next weekend, Trump is expected to interview more candidates for both positions, according to two sources. “He’s going for a clean slate,” one source said. Cohn had been lobbying to replace Kelly as chief, two sources said, and quit when he didn’t get the job. “Trump laughed at Gary when he brought it up,” one outside adviser to the White House said. (The White House declined to comment.)

Next on the departure list are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Trump remains fiercely loyal to his family, but various distractions have eroded their efficacy within the administration. Both have been sidelined without top-secret security clearances by Kelly, and sources expect them to be leaving at some point in the near future. One scenario being discussed is that Kushner would return to New York to oversee Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign with his ally Brad Parscale, who was hand-selected by the Trump family. One Trump friend referred to it as a “soft landing.” Ivanka will likely stay on longer, perhaps through the summer, before decamping home to New York to enroll the children in a Manhattan private school. Both are presumed to remain in close contact with Trump, who often places significant value on the opinions expressed outside his administration, anyway.

Sources cautioned that the couple plans to hang on as long as possible, so as not to make it appear that Kelly railroaded them out of the West Wing. They continue to be furious at the chief. “Why do you have to embarrass Jared like that?” Ivanka complained to a friend recently. Kushner is doing everything he can to appear engaged despite his lack of a security clearance. “He is looking at everything he can do that doesn’t require a clearance,” a former White House official said. Another source added, “The White House is trying to fluff him up again.”

People who have spoken with Trump said his reset is being driven in part by the looming midterms, and he’s been fielding advice from Corey Lewandowski and Dave Bossie. They’ve counseled him to return to his 2016 campaign message. Another source said Trump has felt newfound validation after a CPAC straw poll last month showed him with a 93 percent approval rating. “He felt the crowd desiring more,” a Republican close to the White House said. “He knows there’s going to be a battle ahead.”

Fasten your seatbelts …

The GOP celebrates all the women in the Trump administration

The GOP celebrates all the women in the Trump administration

by digby

They put out an Instagram to honor all the women Trump has appointed to senior-level government campaign positions. These women were among those they counted:

I’m not sure why they didn’t count Tiffany and the Trump sons’ wives. Seems unfair.

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Kidnapping on the streets of America

Kidnapping on the streets of America

by digby

This is us:

I keep hearing that the American people will rise up when they see immigrants being forcefully taken from their homes and family because it’s so awful.

Well, this is happening every day. This is America, 2018.

Perla Morales-Luna clung to a young woman’s arm as Border Patrol agents tugged her away.

The agents, one dressed in uniform, pulled her until she released her grip and shoved her into a U.S. Customs and Border Protection van waiting at the curb, her three daughters watching.

“Get in the car!” someone yelled.

Voices cried and screamed in the background. Moments later, the van drove off.

The dramatic scene unfolded in National City on Saturday during what federal authorities called a targeted operation to arrest a woman who allegedly has ties to a transnational smuggling organization and is suspected of being in the country illegally. But video of the encounter that spread across social media on Thursday alarmed immigrant rights activists, who questioned the aggressive detention tactics by federal authorities, who forcibly took her into custody in front of her family.

“It’s really a grotesque way of detaining and enforcing immigration law,” said Benjamin Prado, coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee’s San Diego U.S.-Mexico Border Program, a human rights group working with the Morales family. “It is very quickly accelerating to a very tyrannical form of detention and arrest, snatching people up off the street.” 

Border Patrol spokesman Theron Francisco said Morales was identified as an organizer for the smuggling operation, but he did not know details about her involvement. She is being held on suspicion of being in the country illegally.

Morales is waiting to be transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for removal proceedings, Francisco said.

It’s unclear if Morales will face criminal charges. That could suggest federal authorities are still investigating her alleged ties to the smuggling ring, or it could be a way for the agency to justify the tactics used in her arrest, said Niels Frenzen, director of the USC Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic.

Prado said Morales was walking near her home with her three daughters when the arrest occurred. Now, her three daughters are being cared for by an uncle.

A teacher of one of Morales’ daughters who posted the clips on Facebook did not return requests for comment.

“Our biggest concern is the manner in which this raid took place, the violent manner in which they detained her and pushed her in,” Prado said. “The terror and trauma that is being imposed on the children, her daughters.”

This is what that sadistic piece of work Jeff Sessions came to California to insist must be allowed to happen on all of our streets whenever ICE thugs want to do it. And they want the state and local authorities to be required to help them do it.

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What do you tell your kids?

What do you tell your kids?

by digby

What do you tell your kids? It’s fine that the president is a racist, misogynist ignoramus because his tax cuts are spectacular.

Or …

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The most powerful man in the world

The most powerful man in the world

by digby

The toddler will save the day:

Summoned to the Oval Office on the spur of the moment, the South Korean envoy found himself face to face with President Trump one afternoon last week at what he thought might be a hinge moment in history. 

Chung Eui-yong had come to the White House bearing an invitation. But he opened with flattery, which diplomats have discovered is a key to approaching the volatile American leader. “We could come this far thanks to a great degree to President Trump,” Mr. Chung said. “We highly appreciate this fact.” 

Then he got to the point: The United States, South Korea and their allies should not repeat their “past mistakes,” but South Korea believed that North Korea’s mercurial leader, Kim Jong-un, was “frank and sincere” when he said he wanted to talk with the Americans about giving up his nuclear program. Mr. Kim, he added, had told the South Koreans that if Mr. Trump would join him in an unprecedented summit meeting, the two could produce a historic breakthrough. 

Mr. Trump accepted on the spot, stunning not only Mr. Chung and the other high-level South Koreans who were with him, but also the phalanx of American officials who were gathered in the Oval Office. 

His advisers had assumed the president would take more time to discuss such a decision with them first. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, both expressed caution. If you go ahead with this, they told Mr. Trump, there will be risks and downsides. 

Mr. Trump brushed them off. I get it, I get it, he said.
Where others see flashing yellow lights and slow down, Mr. Trump speeds up. And just like that, in the course of 45 minutes in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump threw aside caution and dispensed with decades of convention to embark on a daring, high-wire diplomatic gambit aimed at resolving one of the world’s most intractable standoffs.
The story of how this came about, assembled through interviews with officials and analysts from the United States, South Korea, Japan and China, is a case study in international relations in the Trump era. 

A president with no prior foreign policy experience takes on a festering conflict that has vexed the world for years with a blend of impulse and improvisation, and with no certain outcome. One moment, he is hurling playground insults and threatening nuclear war, the next he is offering the validation of a presidential meeting. 

Whether the high-stakes gamble ultimately pays off, no one can know. Given two unpredictable and highly combustible leaders, it seems just as likely that the meeting will never take place. If it does occur, the challenges are so steep, the gulf so wide and the history so fraught with misunderstanding, suspicion and broken promises that the prospect of an enduring resolution to the impasse seems remote. 

But Mr. Trump has staked his reputation as a deal maker on the presumption that he can personally achieve what no other president has before him.

His “reputation” is bullshit hype that nobody really believes. I’d guess that Kim has probably done his homework on that too
. So why anyone would write something that implies he is actually a great deal maker” at this point is beyond me. Nonetheless, I recommend reading the whole piece because it shows just what a shambolic operation the White House really is and how close we could come to a major, very very dangerous, mistake at some point.

Trump is feeling pressure from the Russian investigation and he’s lost many of his internal allies in the White House. He’s also discovered that if he just decides to do something there’s not much anyone can do about it. He’s the president and he has tremendous power.

This is becoming more and more real:

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With every instrumentality at their disposal by @BloggersRUs

With every instrumentality at their disposal
by Tom Sullivan

Han von Spakovsky’s “Ya Got Trouble” routine may not have found its way to the fictional River City, Iowa. But for decades now, plenty of real places across the country have heard his pitch about the caliber of disaster represented by the fictional presence of rampant voter fraud in their communities.

He’s not selling boys bands. He’s selling vote suppression.

A federal judge in Kansas City, Kansas is not buying. Judge Julie Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, heard arguments last week in the case of Fish v. Kobach, a challenge to the state’s controversial “proof of citizenship” voting law. It pits the ACLU and state plaintiffs denied their right to vote against Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Kobach has promoted amending the National Voter Registration Act to waive provisions for states that adopt a proof of citizenship voter registration requirement.

Tierney Sneed has been covering the trial for Talking Points Memo.

Intent to defraud is irrelevant, von Spakovsky argued as a witness for the state. Whenever a non-citizen registers or votes “they are defrauding citizens,” he argued. But what about the thousands of qualified citizens denied their votes by the restrictive laws? “Would that not also be defrauding the electoral process?” Robinson asked:

“As long as you have an open process to allow the potential voter to obtain the ID to vote,” that’s neither discriminatory nor unconstitutional, then the system is not being defrauded, he said.

Robinson said she was taking from that answer that von Spakovsky wanted to consider the context around burdens in this case. But, conversely, in non-citizen voting — whether that person made a mistake or there was an administrative error — context shouldn’t be considered, she said, describing von Spakovsky’s apparent view.

Why should you only look at it contextually when talking about citizens? Robinson asked.

Von Spakovsky tried to avoid the contradiction again, and said that context should be considered in prosecutions.

“I am not asking about prosecution,” Robinson said. She was asking him how he characterized voter fraud, she said.

Again, von Spakovsky brought up the distinctions he saw between prosecutions and the effect of when a non-citizen casts a ballot.

But Robinson appeared unconvinced. For thousands who are actual citizens, Robinson said, “that’s not diluting the vote? And that’s not impairing the integrity of the electoral process, I take it?”

Neither is the process served when people self-censor by staying home, argues the New York Times in an editorial. They are not, as some believe, protesting poor choices, but “putting their lives and futures in the hands of the people who probably don’t want them to vote.” People like von Spakovsky.

In Virginia, in Alabama, and perhaps this week in Pennsylvania, the Times argues, protesting at the ballot box can make a difference. The Times promises to examine why people abstain in a series of columns between now and November.

Disillusionment with the major parties is part of the problem: “Some people wouldn’t vote if you put a ballot box in their living room.” So are the frustrations of failing election technology. But so is the vote suppression on trial in Kansas.

The Editorial Board writes:

Keeping people from voting has been an American tradition from the nation’s earliest days, when the franchise was restricted to white male landowners. It took a civil war, constitutional amendments, violently suppressed activism against discrimination and a federal act enforcing the guarantees of those amendments to extend this basic right to every adult. With each expansion of voting rights, the nation inched closer to being a truly representative democracy. Today, only one group of Americans may be legally barred from voting — those with felony records, a cruel and pointless restriction that disproportionately silences people of color.

But with each expansion of voting rights come redoubled efforts by the modern analogues of white male landowners to roll them back.

A 96-year-old woman in Tennessee was denied a voter-ID card despite presenting four forms of identification, including her birth certificate. A World War II veteran was turned away in Ohio because his Department of Veterans Affairs photo ID didn’t include his address. Andrea Anthony, a 37-year-old black woman from Wisconsin who had voted in every major election since she was 18, couldn’t vote in 2016 because she had lost her driver’s license a few days before.

Stories like these are distressingly familiar, as more and more states pass laws that make voting harder for certain groups of voters, usually minorities, but also poor people, students and the elderly. They require forms of photo identification that minorities are much less likely to have or be able to get — purportedly to reduce fraud, of which there is virtually no evidence. They eliminate same-day registration, close polling stations in minority areas and cut back early-voting hours and Sunday voting.

These new laws may not be as explicitly discriminatory as the poll taxes or literacy tests of the 20th century, but they are part of the same long-term project to keep minorities from the ballot box. And because African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, the laws are nearly always passed by Republican-dominated legislatures.

Those legislatures have declared war on voters not of their persuasion and have prosecuted that war with every instrumentality at their disposal, from redistricting blue cities to undermining public education to gerrymandering to naked voter suppression. We know too well in North Carolina that since 2011 the courts have been the last line of defense against the reactionary Republican hegemon. Those lines won’t hold for long. So long as Republicans hold their majorities, their war will continue and democracy as an American ideal will wither.

“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” goes the modern proverb. Those who don’t or won’t vote are the fricassee.

* * * * * * * *

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

Of campuses and campiness:” Submission” ; “Girls vs. Gangsters” By Dennis Hartley

Saturday Night at the Movies


Of campuses and campiness: Submission (***) and Girls vs. Gangsters (*½)

By Dennis Hartley

While it was likely in production before the “Me Too” movement took hold, writer-director Richard Levine’s Submission feels tailor-made for the current conversation regarding sex, power and patriarchy in the workplace; in this case, the world of academia.

Based on Francine Prose’s 2000 novel “Blue Angel” (itself a modern reimagining of the narrative driving the eponymous 1930 Josef von Sternberg film starring Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings), Submission stars Stanley Tucci as Ted Swensen, a liberal arts college professor who teaches writing. A walking cliché, Ted is a blocked novelist whose one acclaimed work (a novel called “The Blue Angel”, surprise surprise) is long behind him.

As Woody Allen once said, “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” And so Ted has resigned himself to a life of tenured security and quiet desperation. You could say the same about his marriage. He has a loving wife (Kyra Sedgewick), who empathizes with his droll assessments of dreaded soirées with his stuffy colleagues. Their marriage is cozy, if not remarkable; it’s comfortable, like a favored pair of worn slippers.


You’re beginning to wonder when that boulder is going to crash through the window to break up all of this monotony and knock the dust off Ted’s typewriter keys, aren’t you?

Her name is Angela (Addison Timlin), a new pupil in Ted’s class. At first appearing sullen and withdrawn, Angela’s demeanor noticeably brightens once she’s one-on-one with Ted after class. When she showers praise on “The Blue Angel”, Ted is flattered, but keeps his tone cautiously neutral as he agrees to read over the “first chapter” of her novel.

Ted’s skepticism vanishes as he realizes Angela’s writing is not only much better than he expected; it demonstrates a remarkably developed voice for a person of her age. He casually asks her if she has any more pages that he can look over, and critique. Of course she does. The hook is set. However, the question soon becomes: who is reeling in whom?

While we’ve seen this movie before (it’s a little bit Educating Rita, a bit more of All About Eve, and a whole lotta Election), it is bolstered by strong performances from Tucci and Timlin, as well as by the supporting cast. As I noted at the top of the review, I don’t think that this film was consciously intended as a nod to “woke” culture, but we’ll take it.

And now for something completely different. As far as wacky adventure-comedies concerning young Chinese women having a wild and wooly bachelorette weekend in an exotic foreign city go, I suppose you could do worse than Barbara Wong’s Girls vs. Gangsters 2. Perhaps arguably, as hard as you try…you could only do marginally worse.

I’m sensing your biggest question (aside from “WTF is Mike Tyson doing in this film?”) is: “How in the wide world of sports did I manage to miss “Girls vs. Gangsters 1”? Tricky, that question. There is an explanation. There was a previous 2014 Hong Kong film called Girls, also directed by Ms. Wong (aka Zhenzhen Huang), featuring the same characters. I’m afraid that I also managed to miss that one, so don’t let that get you down.


So anyway, our fun-loving trio Hei Man, Kimmy, and Ka Nam (Ivy Chen, Fiona Sit and Ning Chang) have been BFFs since high school. One of them is set to tie the knot, so the girls decide to celebrate by taking up an invitation from a mutual friend who is currently working on a film in Vietnam to fly in and hang out for the weekend. It gets a little fuzzy from there. They visit a huge estate owned by a local gangster, engage in a drinking contest, and wake up the next morning on a beach, naked and chained to each other. Fun!

The remainder of the film (which grinds on and on…too lengthy at nearly 2 hours) has them attempting to retrace their steps, find the member of their party who is missing, and figure out why one of them has a tattoo of some random dude on her neck. If it’s starting to sound suspiciously like the Hangover franchise meets Bridesmaids, your suspicions are well-founded. And by the time the gals encounter Mike Tyson (living in a jungle compound), you may begin to suspect that someone slipped a mickey in your drink, too.

The locales are colorful, and the three leads bring a certain goofy, manic energy to the table, but the film is ultimately too over-the-top for its own good. Also, something may have been lost in translation, but employing a line like “You’ll be raped 100 times!” for comic intent is questionable in any modern comedy; much less one directed by a woman.

More reviews at Den of Cinema
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Dennis Hartley

This is why all of Trump’s accomplices sleep so well at night

This is why all of Trump’s accomplices sleep so well at night

by digby

This:

A former Navy sailor who pleaded guilty to a felony count of unauthorized possession and retention of national defense information for snapping photos on a nuclear attack submarine has received a pardon from President Donald Trump — and his attorney says Fox News deserves the credit.

The legal team for Kristian Saucier compared his case to the handling of the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. That grabbed Trump’s interest, and it’s now paid off in the form of a presidential pardon, announced Friday.

Last week, Saucier appeared on “Fox & Friends,” a program that the president records and watches during his morning “executive time.” Trump frequently sends tweets that correspond with segments on the morning show.

Ronald Daigle, a lawyer hired to advocate for Saucier’s pardon, told HuffPost that Fox News played a key role in getting the case on Trump’s radar.

“Absolutely,” Daigle said when asked whether going on Fox News was a big part of their strategy. “They were big supporters of Kris right from the beginning. They supported Kris.”

In 2016, shortly after then-FBI Director James Comey announced the results of the Clinton email investigation, Saucier’s legal team began comparing the submariner’s case to Clinton’s. The Justice Department responded that Saucier was “grasping at highly imaginative and speculative straws,” but the case got Trump’s attention.

Saucier was sentenced to a year behind bars prior to the 2016 election ― a sentence he completed before his pardon. One reason that federal prosecutors likely handled the case the way they did: Saucier destroyed a laptop, a camera and the camera’s memory card shortly after he was interviewed by the FBI. Pieces of a laptop were later found in the woods near a Saucier family home. Prosecutors tend to treat suspects more harshly when they are accused of destroying evidence.

Since the election, Saucier’s team has “sent tons of marketing materials to the White House” and distributed press releases in an effort to “capture the president’s opinion,” Daigle said.

Saucier’s team was aiming for a “political” pardon rather than a pardon that goes through the normal process of the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, Daigle said. Saucier was not yet eligible to go through that lengthy procedure.

“I flipped the process around,” Daigle said. “We were doing something to try to capture the attention of the president. When we put the pardon in, we did a press release for that. When we heard back from the pardon office, we put a press release for that. Every step of the way, we’re trying to do what we can to be on the radar, and hopefully the president will hear us. We think he heard us more than once.”

Daigle believes that Trump simply ordered that a pardon be prepared for his signature and that the Justice Department had very little involvement. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on its role in the pardon.

I’m sure he’ll just order that a pardon be prepared for Kush and Ivanka and Flynn and, Cohen and any of the others including himself. He is beginning to truly grok that he has a ton of power that nobody can do anything about. This is one thing he has total power to do. And he’s doing it.

And does anyone believe that the GOP Eunuch Caucus will stand up to him? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

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“Let them call you racist. Wear it as a badge of honor”

“Let them call you racist. Wear it as a badge of honor”

by digby

“You’re part of a movement that is bigger than Italy, bigger than Poland, bigger than Hungary…”

I see London, I see France:

Steve Bannon may have fallen from President Trump’s graces for now, but on Saturday, he was the darling of France’s far right movement. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist whom the president praised before he excoriated him at the beginning of January, found his nationalist, populist and “anti-globalist” message in good company once again.

“I did not come here as a teacher. I came here as an observer, and to learn,” he said through a translator from the stage in Lilles, France, sporting his infamous laid-back jacket and khaki pants.

On Saturday, Bannon received a warm welcome from the audience of French far-right leaders of the National Front, not the least of which when he told them to embrace any charges of racism and wear them “as a badge of honor.”

“Our populist nationalist movement in the United States is maybe 10 or 15 years old,” Bannon said. “We are here to learn from you.”

Bannon said he’s observed this all over the world, in places like Japan, Korea, the Middle East, the U.S., and now in Western Europe.

“History is on our side. And the biggest reason — the globalists have no answers to freedom. Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor,” Bannon said, applause erupting from the audience. “Because every day, we get stronger, and they get weaker.”

Just before the election I wrote a piece about Bannon and the European far-right in the event Trump lost. It hasn’t played out as I thought but this speech today shows that he is still part of this underlying movement. And he’s right about one thing. The movement is growing.

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