Month: July 2018

They’ve been fans of the strongman for quite some time

by digby

People still seem surprised that the right wingers are suddenly fans of Russian and Vladimir Putin. They shouldn’t be. I wrote about this back in 2015, during the GOP primary:

Steve Doocey is running the country

by digby

I’m not kidding:

“He comes down for the day, and whatever he saw on ‘Fox and Friends,’ he schedules meetings based on that,” said one former White House official. “If it’s Iran, it’s ‘Get John Bolton down here!’ … If he’s seen something on TV or [was] talking to Hannity the night before, he’s got lots of flexibility to do whatever he wants to do.”

That story is from a Politico profile of John Kelly about all the trouble he’s seen as White House chief of staff. I still don’t feel sorry for him.

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Fingers crossed

by digby

According to the NYT’s Nate Cohn, it’s looking good for the Democrats in November. But take nothing for granted …

The battleground in the fight for control of the House is starting to come into focus with 99 days to go until the November election. It’s not exactly the battleground that analysts expected.

It’s not dominated by well-educated, suburban districts that voted for Hillary Clinton. Instead, the battleground is broad, and it includes a long list of working-class and rural districts that voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016.

The broader battleground is a positive development for Democrats. It’s a reflection of how much the Republican structural advantage in the House has eroded over the last year. What remains of it isn’t helping the Republicans as much as analysts assumed it would, at least not yet.

The broader battleground has also opened up a gap between two common ways of thinking about the midterms. National polls and historical voting patterns suggest that Democrats are only slight favorites to take the House, while early polls of individual districts, special election results and the ratings of expert prognosticators suggest that Democrats are in a stronger position.

To this point, we have mainly seen polls of the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters whether they intend to vote for a Democrat or Republican for Congress. Democrats have generally led on this ballot by six to eight percentage points over the last few months, which is around what analysts believe Democrats need to have an even shot of retaking the chamber.

There’s a lot more at the link.

Illegitimi non carborundum
by Tom Sullivan

Is it time to question the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency? Virginia Heffernan asked over the weekend:

A nation devoted to majority rule has a minority president. Who squeaked into office on an electoral college technicality. Against most data projections. Using dark money. Using voter suppression. Using Russian disinformation.

And, most chilling of all, with a massive assist from the Russian military, which not only hacked the Democrats, but also hacked voting software and a voting-system manufacturer.

Some people were motivated to vote for Trump because they believed Russian lies about Hillary Clinton’s health or email. But at least they got to cast their votes, and have them counted.

Others, many who planned to vote against Trump, were kept from the ballot entirely. In Wisconsin, as Mother Jones has reported, discriminatory ID laws prevented 45,000 eligible voters from participating in the election, including 23,000 in two heavily Democratic counties. Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes.

I get it, but have little time to pointlessly grind my teeth over it. Problem is, we have no constitutional provision for a presidential recall, whatever our definition is for “illegitimate.” There are few recourses for opponents but to neuter Trump electorally (which has an appealing ring to it) or to impeach him (which seems unlikely to succeed) or to drive him from office with massive public protest (which seems unlikely both to happen and to succeed, pending more from Robert Mueller). It is among the flaws in the system bequeathed to us.

So God grant us the strength, the courage, and the wisdom to kick some ever-lovin’ electoral ass this fall. There is little more satisfying than that.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Dishonest or delusional? It’s getting harder to tell

by digby

Come on. This is bad, even for him:

Speaking at a roundtable in Iowa, where he was joined by state and local officials, as well as a few members of his Cabinet, the president highlighted forthcoming health plans that serve as an alternative to the ones offered under ObamaCare.

Trump said Department of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who was at the event, “has come up with incredible healthcare plans.”

“Alex, I hear it’s like record business that they’re doing,” Trump said of the plans, which aren’t available for another five weeks. “We just opened about two months ago and I’m hearing that the numbers are incredible — the numbers of people getting really, really good healthcare instead of Obamacare, which is a disaster.”

The administration announced its association health plans last month. The plans, which allow small businesses and other groups to band together to buy health insurance, are part of a broader administration effort to offer slimmed-down, cheaper plans as an alternative to ObamaCare plans.

Trump did not cite any numbers regarding the health plans at Thursday’s event, while Acosta said he’d heard Iowa businesses are “putting those associations together.”

The Labor Department has said associations cannot establish association health plans until Sept. 1.

He is their strategic ally

by digby

It’s no surprise that the man who wrote that screed is a favorite of White Supremacists, is it?

The traffic sign that greets visitors on the south side of Ulysses, a tiny town in rural far north-central Pennsylvania, is suitably quaint — a silhouette of a horse-drawn cart reminding drivers that the Amish use the roads, too. But on the north side of town, along the main thoroughfare, is a far different display: a home dedicated to Adolf Hitler, where star-spangled banners and Nazi flags flutter side by side and wooden swastikas stand on poles.

White supremacy has had a continuous presence in Ulysses and surrounding Potter County since the Ku Klux Klan arrived a century ago, giving the town — with a population today of about 650 — improbable national significance. In the mid-2000s, it hosted the World Aryan Congress, a gathering of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Klan members.

This year, after a sting operation, federal prosecutors charged six members of an Aryan Strike Force cell with weapons and drug offenses, contending that they had plotted a suicide attack at an anti-racism protest. A terminally ill member was willing to hide a bomb in his oxygen tank and blow himself up, prosecutors said. The group had met and conducted weapons training in Ulysses.

Neo-Nazis and their opponents here say that white extremists have grown more confident — and confrontational — since the rise of Donald Trump. Two months before the 2016 presidential election, the KKK established a “24 hour Klan Line” and sent goody bags containing lollipops and fliers to hundreds of homes. “You can sleep tonight knowing the Klan is awake,” the message read. A regional newspaper ran Klan advertisements saying, “God bless the KKK.”

Local police said the group had not openly recruited in years.

Two weeks later, the area’s two neo-Nazi groups, the National Socialist Movement (NSM) and Aryan Strike Force, held a “white unity meeting” in Ulysses to discuss their response to Trump and plan joint action. One organizer would not say when the groups had last met, simply commenting: “It’s just a good time.”

Potter County is staunchly Republican and has voted Democratic once since 1888; Trump received 80 percent of the vote, tying with Herbert Hoover for the highest percentage won.

“I can tell you with certainty that since November 2016, activity has doubled, whether it’s feet on the street or money orders or people helping out,” said Daniel Burnside, 43, a woodcarver who owns the Nazi-themed home and directs the state chapter of the National Socialist Movement, a far-right group that was founded in Detroit in the mid-1970s. It has a presence in many states, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, and the NSM was among the groups taking part in the violent August 2017 rally in defense of Confederate statues in Charlottesville.

“We have meetings every 30 days,” he said. “ There’s more collaboration.”

Daniel Burnside poses for a portrait on July 7, 2018, in Galeton, Pa. (Brett Carlsen/For The Washington Post)
Burnside, who declined to say how many local residents were involved in his group, was born in Ulysses and raised there by a grandfather who he said was a Nazi sympathizer who fought in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Burnside said his beloved grandfather drank himself to death because of the war’s impact on him.

The younger Burnside said he joined the NSM four years ago but has long harbored anti-Semitic views and is a practicing Odinist — the pagan religion Odinism is popular among some neo-Nazis. Burnside does not see Trump as a leader of the NSM cause but as a politician who amplified long-standing white-nationalist views at the right time.

“Personally, I don’t know about Trump,” he said. “You won’t necessarily see MAGA hats at an NSM meeting. We’re anti-Semitic. Something’s off about Trump with the Jews. That said, we’re strategically aligned. When Trump says something that aligns with us — close the borders, build the wall, look after your own — that’s good: We’ve been saying this for 25 years, but he has made it mainstream.”

“We’re still a white nation, and I respect that he supports that,” Burnside added. “He’s also highlighted social problems. The kids who go to bed hungry, people who can’t pay their bills, the damage being done to society.”

Joe Leschner, 38, a white restaurant manager, fled the county this year because of what he said was abuse aimed at him and his wife, Sashena, who is black, after Trump’s election.

After he discovered a KKK leaflet outside their home, Leschner organized an anti-racism gathering in Ulysses. “And these guys drove by us and gave the gun signal, like they’re going to shoot us,” he said.

One of those who Leschner said made a pistol gesture had previously been jailed for 10 years for an aggravated assault on a black man. This year he was convicted of possession of firearms he was not legally allowed to own and intent to sell drugs.

Photographs of the Leschners were circulated on VK, a Russian-run social media site, with users posting death threats, he said.

“A guy came up to us in a restaurant and said, ‘You have got to be kidding me.’ I wanted to say something, but just couldn’t. This was where I grew up, at the restaurant where I got my first job. My wife was almost in tears,” he recalled.

“We had to leave,” said Leschner, who now runs a restaurant in Frederick, Md. “Most people aren’t racist, but there are enough that are and enough who let it happen.”

They’re right about one thing. He’s made it mainstream.

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Puppet POTUS

by digby

As seen in the Colorado State Capitol Hall of Presidential Portraits today…#putinpotus pic.twitter.com/cW2cmqtmWM— Steve Fenberg (@SteveFenberg) July 26, 2018

Visitors to the gallery of US presidents in the Colorado state Capitol could be excused if they did a double take this week.

There, displayed near paintings of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and in a space set aside for President Donald Trump, was a portrait of a very different president:

Vladimir Putin.

According to the group that funds the portraits, the mug of the Russian leader was placed in Trump’s would-be spot by an unknown prankster Thursday morning. It was discovered during a tour.
This might not have happened but for one problem: The state hasn’t raised the $10,000 needed for a Trump portrait, leaving an empty spot on the third-floor rotunda in Denver.

Colorado Citizens for Culture, an arts-advocacy group that collects donations for the paintings, said that before the Putin prank it had raised exactly $0 for Trump’s portrait. Since news of the stunt spread, two donors had chipped in a total of $45 by midday Saturday.

Colorado State Sen. Steve Fenberg, a Democrat, tweeted a photo of the Putin painting, writing, “As seen in the Colorado State Capitol Hall of Presidential Portraits today…#putinpotus.”

Even this level of mockery doesn’t move him. And this is a man who felt the need to defend the size of his penis on national television during a presidential debate. It just doesn’t make any sense.

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They’ve been interviewing “Trump voters” for a very long time

by digby

I saw someone making a crack about journalists interviewing Trump voters in some diner in middle America this morning and I was reminded of this piece (among many, many others) that I wrote over a decade ago. It could have been written 50 years ago for that matter. An excerpt:

I would actually take the argument another step and point out that Broder and others also venture out into the American landscape with a sort of pre-conceived notion of what defines “the people” that appears to have been formed by TV sit-coms in 1955. They seem to see extraordinary value in sitting in some diner with middle aged and older white men (sometimes a few women are included) to “ask them what they think.” And invariably these middle-aged white men say the country is going to hell in a handbasket and they want the government to do more and they hate paying taxes. There may be a little frisson of disagreement among these otherwise similar people on certain issues of the day because of their affiliation with a union or because of the war or certain social issues, but for the most part they all sit together and politely talk politics with this anthropologist/reporter, usually agreeing that this president or another one is a bum or a hero. The reporter takes careful notes of everything these “real Americans” have to say and take them back to DC and report them as the opinions of “the people.”

Meanwhile, someone like me, who lives in a big city on the west coast and who doesn’t hang out in diners with middle aged white men are used as an example of the “fringe” even though I too am one of “the people” as are many others — like hispanic youths or single urban mothers or dot-com millionaires or elderly southern black granddads or Korean entrepreneurs (or even Sheryl Crow.) We are not Real Americans.

This fetishization of that other mythical “Real American” seems to stem from a public epiphany that the previous “Dean” of the DC press corps, Joseph Kraft, had almost 40 years ago when confronted with the disconcerting sight of violence in the streets perpetrated by nice white boys and girls:

“Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?

“The answer, I think is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the of presidential candidates who appeal to them.

“To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.

“The most important organs of and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites.

“In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public.”

Joseph Kraft defined “Middle America” as a blue collar or rural white male, “traditional in his values and defensive against innovation.” Ever since then, the denizens of the beltway have deluded themselves into thinking they speak for that “silent majority.” (And what a serendipitous coincidence it was that this happened at the moment of a right wing political ascension that also made a fetish out of the same blue collar white male.) The converse of this, of course, is that they also assume that the “fringe” liberals from the coasts are way out of the mainstream, even to the extent that editors of Time simply make up data to conform to Kraft’s outdated observations.

It reached the zenith of synergistic absurdity during the Lewinsky scandal when the cosmopolitan beltway courtiers finally went all in and portrayed themselves as as the salt-of-the-earth provincial town folk who were appalled by the misbehavior ‘o them out-a-towners from thuh big city:

When Establishment Washingtonians of all persuasions gather to support their own, they are not unlike any other small community in the country.

On this evening, the roster included Cabinet members Madeleine Albright and Donna Shalala, Republicans Sen. John McCain and Rep. Bob Livingston, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, PBS’s Jim Lehrer and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, all behaving like the pals that they are. On display was a side of Washington that most people in this country never see. For all their apparent public differences, the people in the room that night were coming together with genuine affection and emotion to support their friends — the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt and his wife, CNN’s Judy Woodruff, whose son Jeffrey has spina bifida.

But this particular community happens to be in the nation’s capital. And the people in it are the so-called Beltway Insiders — the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it.

They call the capital city their “town.”

And their town has been turned upside down.

Here you had the most powerful people in the world identifying themselves with Bedford Falls from “It’s A Wonderful Life” when the court of Versailles or Augustan Rome would be far more more apt. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. Thirty years after Kraft’s epiphany, this decadent world capital that had recently seen the likes of Richard Nixon’s crimes and John F. Kennedy’s philandering (and corruption of all types, both moral and legal at the highest levels for years), were now telling the nation that they themselves were small town burghers and factory workers upholding traditional American values. And even more amazing, the rest of America was now morally suspect and needed to be led by these purveyors of Real American values:

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The polls show that a majority of Americans do not share that outrage. Around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on; in Washington, despite Clinton’s gains with the budget and the Mideast peace talks, people want some formal acknowledgment that the president’s behavior has been unacceptable. They want this, they say, not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well.

They were just defending their lonely little outpost against the interlopers:

This is where they spend their lives, raise their families, participate in community activities, take pride in their surroundings. They feel Washington has been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president.

“It’s much more personal here,” says pollster Geoff Garin. “This is an affront to their world. It affects the dignity of the place where they live and work. . . . Clinton’s behavior is unacceptable. If they did this at the local Elks Club hall in some other community it would be a big cause for concern.”

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”

“This is a company town,” says retired senator Howard Baker, once Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. “We’re up close and personal. The White House is the center around which our city revolves.”

Bill Galston, former deputy domestic policy adviser to Clinton and now a professor at the University of Maryland, says of the scandal that “most people in Washington believe that most people in Washington are honorable and are trying to do the right thing. The basic thought is that to concede that this is normal and that everybody does it is to undermine a lifetime commitment to honorable public service.”

“Everybody doesn’t do it,” says Jerry Rafshoon, Jimmy Carter’s former communications director. “The president himself has said it was wrong.”

Pollster Garin, president of Peter Hart Research Associates, says that the disconnect is not unlike the difference between the way men and women view the scandal. Just as many men are angry that Clinton’s actions inspire the reaction “All men are like that,” Washingtonians can’t abide it that the rest of the country might think everyone here cheats and lies and abuses his subordinates the way the president has.

“This is a community in all kinds of ways,” says ABC correspondent Cokie Roberts, whose parents both served in Congress. She is concerned that people outside Washington have a distorted view of those who live here. “The notion that we are some rarefied beings who breathe toxic air is ridiculous. . . . When something happens everybody gathers around. . . . It’s a community of good people involved in a worthwhile pursuit. We think being a worthwhile public servant or journalist matters.”

“This is our town,” says Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Democrat to forcefully condemn the president’s behavior. “We spend our lives involved in talking about, dealing with, working in government. It has reminded everybody what matters to them. You are embarrassed about what Bill Clinton’s behavior says about the White House, the presidency, the government in general.”

And many are offended that the principles that brought them to Washington in the first place are now seen to be unfashionable or illegitimate.

Muffie Cabot, who as Muffie Brandon served as social secretary to President and Nancy Reagan, regards the scene with despair. “This is a demoralized little village,” she says. “People have come from all over the country to serve a higher calling and look what happened. They’re so disillusioned. The emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn’t quite as sordid as this.”

“People felt a reverent attitude toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” says Tish Baldrige, who once worked there as Jacqueline Kennedy’s social secretary and has been a frequent visitor since. “Now it’s gone, now it’s sleaze and dirt. We all feel terribly let down. It’s very emotional. We want there to be standards. We’re used to standards. When you think back to other presidents, they all had a lot of class. That’s nonexistent now. It’s sad for people in the White House. . . . I’ve never seen such bad morale in my life. They’re not proud of their chief.”

That “demoralized little village” was all a-twitter, wasn’t it? You’d never know that they were running the most powerful nation the world has ever known, would you?

Yet, even while they ostentatiously ranted and wailed hysterically with anachronistic notions of bourgeois American values, they still carried on as if the White House and the nation’s capital belonged to them instead of the American people, which is the very definition of elitism. What an achievement! The very rich and powerful (but we won’t talk about that) “bourgeoisie” now had to save degenerate “Middle America” from itself.

When the equally phony George W. Bush came to town it was love at first sight, and why wouldn’t it be? Here you had a man whom these people could truly admire — a rich man of the bluest blood, born into one of the most powerful families in America who nonetheless pretended to be some hick from Midland Texas. He took great pride in his phoniness, just as they did, and they all danced this absurd kabuki in perfect step for years each pretending to the other that they were all “just regular guys.”

You can see then why some of us have concluded that the Dean and his cadre of establishment courtiers don’t actually care much about what “the people” think about anything. And it should also be obvious why we are so skeptical of their reporting skills when they venture out on their anthropological expeditions to find only examples of Americans who strangely hew to their own Hollywood casting of themselves — an America of Sally Quinns warmly played by plucky Donna Reed and David Broder himself, brought to life by loveable Wilfred Brimleys. (“They came in and they trashed the place. And it’s not their place.” Can’t you just hear it?)

Of course political reporters should go out and interview Americans and write stories about what those Americans have to say about the issues of the day. But those interviews are not any more representative of what “the people” as a whole think than are the liberal blogs or Sally Quinn’s fictitious “small town” or the fans at a NASCAR race. This is especially true when it’s filtered through the phony bourgeois posturings of a bunch of highly paid reporters and insiders who have contrived a self-serving little passion play in which they are regular blue collar guys from Buffalo and corn fed farmers from the Midwest (Real Americans!) who just happen to summer on Nantucket and get invitations to white tie state dinners with the Queen of England. Pardon us fringe dwellers for being just a tad skeptical that these forays out into “America” are informing us about anything more the embarrassing neuroses of some very spoiled elites.

The fetishizing of the “Real American” didn’t start with Trump. Now it’s just become a surreal funhouse mirror.

They need to stop doing this.

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A royal pain

by digby

Here’s an interesting historical monarch parallel to Trump. There are many of them. I hadn’t seen this one:

In 1670, Charles II of England, whose father had been tried by Parliament and executed in 1649 as a tyrant who waged war against his own subjects, concluded a secret agreement with France, England’s most powerful rival and longstanding enemy.

According to the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover, which were known only to two of Charles’s closest advisors, Charles agreed to declare himself Catholic and to make England a Catholic country, as well as to aid Louis XIV in his planned war of aggression against the Dutch Republic. In return, Louis paid Charles annual subsidies amounting to £250,000-£500,000 (the equivalent today of about a quarter or a half billion dollars per year), a sum that Charles used largely for his own lavish expenses, including paying off his numerous mistresses.

Charles began to make good on his religious commitment to Louis through the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, which suspended penal laws against Catholics and Dissenters. On the military side, Parliament reluctantly agreed to finance the first year of war with the Dutch, although only in exchange for a repudiation of the Declaration and passage of a Test Act, which excluded Catholics from all public offices.

However, as the first six months of the Third Anglo-Dutch War brought England only losses in naval battles of lives and treasure, some of Charles’s ministers began to leak the religious terms of the secret treaty to members of Parliament. At the same time, England was flooded with thousands of copies of pamphlets from Holland (accurately) accusing Charles of wanting to make England Catholic in collusion with the French king.

With public sentiment having turned strongly against the war, in late 1673 Parliament refused to vote a war budget for the following year, and Charles was forced to make a separate peace with the Dutch in which England gained nothing.

Thus Charles sold out his country for his personal gain, pursuing a foreign policy directly the opposite of the traditional interests of the nation as a result of a secret deal with the country’s enemy. Instead of opposing the expansionary ambitions of Catholic France, he acted as though he was allied with England’s rival, as indeed he was.

The correspondences between Charles’s collusion with France and Trump’s with Russia are numerous and extensive. In both cases the coordination, although secret, was widely and justifiably suspected or inferred. In 2008, the future President’s eldest son declared that a “disproportionate” amount of funding for the family business was coming from Russia. The fragmentary and largely opaque records of the Trump business over the last decade (even without access to his tax returns) reveal a pattern of shady purchases of Trump properties by Russian billionaires that fits the classic pattern of money laundering.

We also know from emails of the eldest son that he, the candidate’s campaign manager, and the candidate’s son-on-law met with Russian agents at Trump Tower while the candidate was in the building, in order to obtain compromising information about the opposing candidate, and that the son said he would “love it” if such information were to be released later in the campaign. The candidate himself openly called on Russia to release such stolen information, and it was in fact made public by a company with ties to Russian intelligence and to an ally of Mr. Trump at a crucial point in October of 2016.

The 45th President is certainly behaving very strangely if there is in fact no agreement with Russia. He repudiates the findings of all the US intelligence agencies, which agree that Russia interfered in the election. He attacks as enemies of the people journalists who bring to light evidence of his campaign’s extraordinary number and level of contacts with the Russians—all of which he and his allies denied vociferously for months. He insults, ridicules, and alienates the country’s longest and strongest allies, but he is bizarrely unable to find the mildest word of criticism for Russia or its murderous autocratic leader.

When the story became public that Charles was conspiring with France to make England Catholic, the king vigorously denied the charge in a speech to Parliament whose import could be accurately summarized as “NO COLLUSION!!!”

Despite these parallels, the divergences between the situations of Charles and Trump are also clear. Perhaps surprisingly, because Charles was after all a monarch, some of these give Trump’s project of collusion the greater likelihood of success.

In the most important divergence between the two cases, Charles faced a Parliament that was overwhelmingly determined as a matter of principle not to allow the nation to revert to Catholicism. For more than a century, the English had defined themselves as a Protestant nation, and that meant an anti-Catholic nation. Even apart from religious differences, hostilities with France went back centuries.

By contrast, Trump is abetted by Republican majorities in both houses of Congress that have been supine in the face of his blatant violations of the Constitution (the emoluments clause) and the laws. The Republican majority on the Supreme Court has equally proven willing to allow what lower courts have consistently found to be violations of the Constitution (the Muslim ban).

The institutions that are supposed to check and curb the power of an autocratic President are failing, principally because national and state Republican officials have proven to be committed only to the principle of keeping themselves and their party in power.

It is true that Charles did not have to deal with a free press, while some of the US press has since the election been working to uncover Mr. Trump’s innumerable scams, misdeeds, shady deals, and pathological lies.

It is also true that Charles pardoned his top Catholic minister after he was convicted of correspondence with the enemy, as Trump has unmistakably signaled he intends to pardon his top aides if they are convicted of any crimes. Charles was even able to charge with treason one of his ministers who joined the opposition after learning of the secret treaty; the current President has similarly called his former FBI director a criminal.

But when that minister, Shaftesbury, fled to Holland he brought with him his secretary, John Locke, who then formulated the political theory that declares the right of the people to change their government to remedy serious grievances. Locke’s theory justified the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688 that overthrew Charles’s successor, his openly Catholic brother James. (Locke’s theory also underlies the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.)

The Revolution of 1688 led to the joint rule of the Dutch leader, William, and his Protestant wife, James’s daughter Mary. It thus defeated Charles’s secret plans, preserving the Protestant identity of England. Through a series of extremely fortunate accidents, it did so without involving civil war or bloodshed; hence, it is sometimes called the “Bloodless” Revolution.

However, the Parliament that invited William and Mary to replace James and negotiated the terms of their reign—which included divided government and a Bill of Rights—was not elected to perform that function, but its members took it upon themselves to do so.

In order to preserve a representative government from the threat of an oppressive regime that violates a country’s fundamental law and identity, it is at times necessary to resort to means that lie outside those prescribed by that fundamental constitution.

If the country is lucky, the constitution can be reestablished without bloodshed. But if it is not so fortunate, the further the nation slides into autocracy, the more difficult it will be to reestablish divided government.

Whether he’s Mad King George, Louis XIV or this guy, he’s certainly a royal pain.

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They know he’s lying and they don’t care

by digby

People are more likely to believe intelligence agencies such as the CIA and FBI over Trump — who has shifted positions on whether he accepts US intelligence findings on the matter — with regard to whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election at 72% to 15%.

Even Trump supporters (56%) believe intelligence agencies over Trump.

I guess they figure he needs to lie because he’s going to require more such help in the future. And that’s fine.

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