Month: November 2018

Evangelical conservatives join with MBS in the wake of the Khashoggi murder

by digby

I wish I could say that I’m surprised by this but honestly, I’m not. These people have a nihilist agenda dressed up as Christianity. They are basically a doomsday cult:

A group of U.S. evangelicals, including former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), held a rare meeting Thursday with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman at his palace.

The delegation to Riyadh was led by Bachmann and communications strategist Joel Rosenberg, who are each known for pushing an apocalyptic worldview relating to events in the Middle East, and the heads of other Israel-tied evangelical organizations, reported Al Jazeera.

“We’re under no illusions about the challenges that are in Saudi Arabia and that remain,” Rosenberg said. “But I think it’s respectful to go and listen to leaders who have the opportunity to make life better for Christians and Muslims and potentially for Israel as well and who are against the crazies in Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“I’d ask people to pray,” he added. “Pray for the (Jordanian) king, pray for the crown prince, pray for the people of Saudi Arabia — and I think it’s the right thing to do.”

The unusual visit came a day short of the one-month anniversary of Washington Postcolumnist Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

An adviser to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday the journalist was “dissolved” after he was murdered and dismembered.

The crown prince, who has denied any involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance, reportedly described the journalist as a dangerous Islamist shortly after he vanished in a phone call with White House adviser Jared Kushner and national security adviser John Bolton.

The American right-wing Christian delegation, which included Mike Evans, founder of the Jerusalem Prayer Team, met with Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi ambassador to the U.S. prince Khalid bin Salman and secretary-general of the Muslim World League Mohammed al-Issa.

Saudi Arabia has long insisted that normalizing relations with Israel requires its withdrawal from Arab lands captured in the 1967 Middle East war — which Palestinians seek for a future state.

“We aren’t here for a short-term purpose,” Bachmann told CBN News. “We are not here for a photo op, we could care less about that. We’re here to build long-term relations and to benefit our brothers and sisters that are here in this region.”

Johnnie Moore, the group’s spokesman who also serves as the White House’s unofficial liaison to conservative evangelicals, said they “discussed” Khashoggi’s killing, but declined to elaborate, and he insisted they were not representing Israel or Trump in any way.

They said the White House knew nothing of their visit. Maybe. But it doesn’t make any difference. They are on the same page. There is a temporary alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia forming to combat Iran and they are as excited as John Bolton is about that.

It brings the Rapture that much closer.

Hallalujah.

Update: More on American conservative (alleged) Christians, who provide the single most fervent bloc of Trump supporters. They don’t just support him they love him with a passion:

CBN consistently stoked fears in several articles that “radical leftists” were behind the caravan, and that it was full of “felons” and “exotics” — one of its sources’ terms for migrants of Middle Eastern or African origin. Little attention, if any, was paid to migrants’ reasons for leaving their homes behind, or the social and political instability in Honduras that is attracting the travelers to the United States. (CBN has not responded to an emailed request for comment.)

The nativist rhetoric spouted by outlets like the Christian Broadcasting Network and plenty others has proved toxic. Elsewhere, intimations of Soros-related conspiracy theories have proven fatal. A Pittsburgh man is suspected of fatally shooting 11 people at a synagogue in Squirrel Hill on Saturday. He frequently posted nativist sentiments and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the caravan and other political issues on the far-right social networking site Gab. In one post, he apparently blamed Jews for aiding and abetting “invaders” — meaning the Honduras migrant caravan.

In the wake of that violence, it’s worth asking a wider point: How did white evangelicals come to so fully embrace the Trumpian rhetoric on immigration? How did a religious group whose foundational sacred text explicitly mandates care for the poor, the sick, and the stranger become a reliable anti-refugee, anti-immigrant voting bloc?

They don’t really believe in Christian teachings, obviously. They were really waiting for their own Messiah. And they got him.

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 “It’s my only form of fighting back. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t do that.”

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

All presidents lie at one time or another. Some have told monumental lies (“Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”) and others have told self-serving lies (“I did not have sex with that woman”) but no president has told an average of 8 lies per day on every subject, important or not, as Donald Trump has done. After observing him for the past two years we can be confident in saying that he is the most dishonest president in history.

Even he cannot really deny it. Jonathan Karl of ABC news interviewed him this week and said “I remember, you remember well in the campaign, you made a promise. You said, ‘I will never lie to you,’ So can you tell me now, honestly, have you kept that promise at all times? Have you always been truthful?” In a revealing reply, the president said:

Well, I try. I mean, I do try. I think you try, too. You say things about me that are not necessarily correct. I do try, and I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth. I mean sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change. But I always like to be truthful.

He tries. He likes to be truthful. When he can, he tells the truth. Apparently, most of the time he cannot. And we know why. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about so he makes things up.

But just as he reveals himself in that comment, the last couple of weeks have revealed something else. If anyone wondered if there were any limits to what he would say and do to win, he has shown us that there are not. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte points out, the sharp escalation in xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric, boosted through a feedback loop with Fox News, makes that clear. And nothing will stand in his way, not even a week of violent threats and assaults, leaving 11 dead by assailants who parroted his lies and racist demagoguery.

That’s not to say he wasn’t personally upset by those awful events. He was. Vanity Fair reported that until they happened he’d been in a buoyant mood, assured by his pollsters that the midterms were going well. His rallies were raucous events featuring his greatest hits. He had gone sharply negative, particularly against the media, and was feeling the energy and excitement that brings among his followers. Then these violent extremists came along and inflicted carnage and terror and ruined all his plans. He has even said as much, in tweet form.

Again, according to Vanity Fair, there had been some talk of having him do a prime-time address on the topic of “unity,” but he quickly shot that down and went with his top advisers, former Fox News executive Bill Shine, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and long-time GOP henchman David Bossie, who told him what he wanted to hear: give that bloodthirsty base some red meat and go after immigrants twice as hard. There is no word if anyone considered that this tactic might be reprehensible in light of the fact that the synagogue shooter was motivated to kill Jews at worship not just out of his long-standing anti-semitism but because Trump and his fellow travelers at Fox news were pushing the idea that the caravan of refugees walking through Mexico was financed by the “globalist” (i.e. Jewish) George Soros.

Not that it would make a difference. Trump was chuckling at the White House when members of a worshipful crowd yelled out Soros’ name and chanted “lock him up” just a day after the horrific massacre took place. As recently as yesterday when asked if he still thinks is being financed by George Soros he said, “I don’t know who but I wouldn’t be surprised, a lot of people say yes.”

He also admitted once again that he is upset about the violence interrupting GOP “momentum” at his rally on Thursday night:

Trump on mail bomb campaign and Pittsburgh massacre: “We did have two maniacs stop a momentum that was incredible.” pic.twitter.com/ffn4C5jklW

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 2, 2018

Just as he gave away the game when he declared he was a nationalist  — adding “we’re not supposed to use that word” thereby admitting that he knows exactly why he shouldn’t say it — in his manic quest to rile up his base into a nativist frenzy, he let it slip that he knows exactly why whining about losing “his momentum” over a national tragedy is grotesque. Not that it stopped him in either case.

He knows what he’s doing. Since he is so thoroughly entwined with Fox News that it’s impossible to know where he begins and it ends, and his rallygoers are enraptured by his every utterance, he believes that there are more than enough people like him in America and that if he can light a fire under them he can win this election. So every day, he’s throwing more gasoline on the fire. He’s sending troops to the border, first it was 800, then 5,000 and now he’s talking about 15,000.

On Thursday he gave his followers another giant thrill by saying that he told those soldiers to shoot any migrants who throw rocks. “Consider them a rifle” he said. He has revived the “birthright citizenship” issue, apparently believing he has the power to interpret the constitution however he chooses and so he plans to end the longstanding bedrock American principle by presidential fiat.  And he has announced that he will build refugee camps on the border and will reinterpret the law which allows asylum seekers to turn themselves over to the authorities for processing anywhere in United States territory, meaning they can do this after having illegally crossed the border. And then there was that despicable racist ad.

He hasn’t yet taken up Fox News line that the migrants are carrying disease as yet although it may only be a matter of time. At the moment he is content with portraying this ragtag group of desperate people, many of them mothers and their children, as criminals and terrorists who are invading the country.

Axios interviewed the president for a TV show to be aired this week-end on HBO and posted this excerpt:

Axios: “Tens of thousands of people go into a stadium to listen to you, and then people go on social media and they get themselves so jazzed up. There’s got to be a part of you that’s like: ‘Dammit, I’m scared that someone is gonna take it too far.'”

Trump: “It’s my only form of fighting back. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t do that.”

This reveals his attitude about his entire presidency. Just because he understands that he’s using this inflammatory rhetoric to gin up his base doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe it himself. He’s not a cynic and he isn’t just being a “pragmatic strategist.” If he were, he would have taken the opportunity to have that “unity” speech and try to bring a few of the Independent and female defectors back into the fold. All presidents benefit from moments they can bring people together and coming this close to an election, it could have made a difference for the Republicans.

He chose not to do it because he doesn’t want to. I hope everyone is prepared for the fact that even if the Democrats pull off a big win next Tuesday — which is far from guaranteed — he is going to be ratcheting up the hostility and the anger every day for the next two years. This “fight” is all he knows how to do.

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Guns To The Right of Us, Guns To The…

by tristero

Michelle Goldberg this morning:

“These are some trying times, so I do believe more black men and women are arming up,” Maitreya Ahsekh, chairman of the Houston chapter of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, told me. His group, named after the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, started in 2014. In 2016, members faced off against armed anti-Muslim demonstrators outside a Nation of Islam mosque in South Dallas. (One of the group’s founders was later arrested in an F.B.I. campaign against “black identity extremists.” He was imprisoned for five months before the charges against him were dismissed.) 

In addition to Ahsekh’s group and the Socialist Rifle Association, there are the gun-toting anti-fascists of Redneck Revolt, an organization founded in Kansas in 2009 that now has chapters all over the country, and the queer and trans gun group Trigger Warning, started last year. Left-wing gun culture has already grown enough to produce defectors; in March The New Republic published an essay titled, “Confessions of a Former Left-Wing Gun Nut.” 

“Everybody’s afraid. Everybody’s scared. They don’t know what to do,” said Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the One People’s Project, an antifa organization. “They’re looking at this crowd that brags about how they have all the guns and they’re going to start a second civil war and all this nonsense.” Jenkins carried a gun when he went to face off against white-nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Va., last year. He understands why most on the left still support gun restrictions, but said, “The bigger concern for me is not being protected when a threat comes your way.”

And every gun maker in America is opening up a bottle of their finest whiskey and toasting the opening up of an incredibly lucrative new market: Decent citizens who have been so scared shitless by the antics of the armed bands of Trumpists that they’ve concluded they too better arm up. Profits will be soaring soon.

So will the bullets. It’s only a matter of time. We need to remember Gandhi’s great observation:

“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

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Donald Trump’s Election Invasion Special
by Tom Sullivan

Drama and conflict and migrants, oh my! It’s Donald Trump’s Election Invasion Special.

Leaked military planning documents show the sitting president’s plan to deploy troops to the southern border to repel refugees is “a waste of time” for which there is no evidence of need, Newsweek reporter James LaPorta told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Thursday night. Pentagon sources agree the move to deploy as many as 15,000 troops is a pre-election political stunt.

Unclassified documents obtained from two Defense Department officials support that conclusion:

The U.S. intelligence community assessed that the “most likely course of action” was a dwindling of migrants as it reached the U.S. southern border, with limited transcontinental criminal organizations exploiting the group and “no terrorist infiltration,” an assessment that runs counter to past statements made by the president.

That stunt is estimated to cost perhaps $50 million, a Pentagon official told Newsweek. Late Wednesday, Trump pledged to erect “a wall of people” to fend off women and children on foot. Needed, of course, because the physical wall he pledged in 2016 Mexico would pay to build does not exist.

The DoD document projects that of the originally estimated 7,000 migrants, “only a small percentage” will reach the border weeks from now.

Trump, of course, disagrees with trained intelligence analysts:

Trump insisted the media is underestimating the caravans. “You have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than it’s reported actually. I’m pretty good at estimating crowd size. And I’ll tell you they look a lot bigger than people would think,” he told ABC.

The biggest border threat the military anticipates is from armed “patriot” groups claiming to be there in support of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents:

“Estimated 200 unregulated armed militia members currently operating along the southwest border. Reported incidents of unregulated militias stealing National Guard equipment during deployments. They operate under the guise of citizen patrols supporting CBP [Customs and Border Protection] primarily between POEs [Points of Entry],” according to the documents.

So, while Republican gubernatorial candidates Brian Kemp (GA) and Kris Kobach (KS) are watching like hawks for black and brown people “stealing votes” by voting, the military is more worried about armed crackpots stealing its stuff than women and children stealing into the country.

But Trump thinks with $50 million he could stage quite a show. Is $50 million enough to count as an extravaganza? Or just gross misappropriation of government resources?

* * * * * * * * *

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

“Consider it a rifle”

by digby

Asked if he envisions the US military firing at migrants at the border, President Trump says: “I hope not.”

“I will tell you this, anybody throwing stones, rocks … we will consider that a firearm, because there’s not much difference when you get hit in the face with a rock.” pic.twitter.com/mnsc56EFT7

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 1, 2018

“[If] they want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House. “We’re going to consider it — and I told them, ‘consider that a rifle.’ When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say ‘consider it a rifle.'”

His comments raise serious questions about rules of engagement the thousands of troops being sent to operate along the U.S. border are supposed to follow, and it doesn’t fall in line with what Pentagon officials have outlined so far.

Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, head of U.S. Northern Command, said this week that “everything that we are doing is in line with and adherence to Posse Comitatus,” a congressional act dating back to the 1800s that prohibits the military from participating in domestic law-enforcement activities.

And a Pentagon memo, obtained by the Washington Post, also states that the troops — who will deploy with their service and non-lethal weapons — are authorized to use deadly force only when “faced with imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm, and where lesser means have failed or cannot be reasonably employed,” the paper reported.

Earlier this week, a second caravan of Central American migrants heading toward the U.S. border on foot clashed violently with Mexican police and immigration officials outside Guatemala. One person was killed and dozens more injured, the LA Times reported, and “many migrants” were taken into custody.

Trump was asked whether he could see the armed active-duty military personnel on the border firing at anyone if a similar situation occurred in the U.S.

“I hope not, I hope not,” the president replied. “… But I will tell you this: Anybody throwing stones, rocks like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military and Mexican police, where they badly hurt police and soldiers, we will consider that a firearm because there’s not much difference when you get hit in the face with a rock.”

Trump on caravan: They’ve overrun and hurt badly Mexican soldiers.

Just got off the phone with Mexico @SEGOB_mx. They tell me two federal police officers were struck by rocks during a confrontation at border. Injuries were “not serious or life threatening.”

— Leyla Santiago (@leylasantiago) November 1, 2018

By the way, right wing Militia are going to the border to “help.” Even if professional soldiers know they cannot do this since they would be violating laws of war, these Militia members may not. Or they may just assume (probably correctly) that Trump will pardon them if they do it.

Oh, and this:

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Rush is soooo happy

by digby

Limbaugh is ecstatic about Trump’s new racist ad and says, “this is what pushing back looks like.”

Anyway, this ad that is running on Trump’s Twitter feed, the Democrats are fit to be tied, ’cause everything in their playbook is old. Everything they relate to is old. They say, “It’s the Willie Horton ad all over again!” The reason they’re worried about it is the Willie Horton was effective, and so is this Trump ad. Murderers are coming into the country. This caravan is not made up of a bunch of innocent young women and children and illegal immigrants in general. It includes gang members and coyotes for the drug cartels and so forth.

We all know what’s going on here.

It’s just one person has the ability and the audacity to call it all out.

Trump is the racist asshole they’ve been waiting for.

By the way, he defends the Willie Horton ad too:

RUSH: That’s Don Lemon there. “Oh, my gosh!” Oh, my gosh. There aren’t any white terrorists in this ad, though, Don. Sorry.

So many of you ask, “What was the Willie Horton ad? What was that?” Let me tell you about Willie Horton was a murdering rapist. He was a prisoner in Massachusetts. The then governor — The Loser, Michael Dukakis — was running for president in 1988, the year this program debuted, and he had a prisoner furlough program.

Dukakis, The Loser, oversaw the prison plan that let Willie Horton out of jail. When he’s out of jail he went in and created mayhem and murder and rape or whatever at a gas station. So the Republicans put together an ad explaining what happened here. It was “the infamous Willie Horton ad.” This is the ad they still can’t get over 30 years later, and they’re still blaming Ailes. Ailes did not make the ad! Roger Ailes did not make it.

He had nothing to do with the Willie Horton ad! Talk about the long shadow. (interruption) The Democrats… (interruption) that’s exactly right! The Democrats brought Willie Horton in a Democrat candidate debate during the primaries! It was some other Democrat that accused Dukakis of being soft on crime by leading these guys out like Willie Horton! The Republicans were not the first to bring Willie Horton up! But they did a commercial.

And it was just right on the money. I mean, it’s exactly what happened. There was nothing made up about it. But they had the mug shot of Willie Horton in the ad, and so that allowed the Democrats to run around and start accusing the Republicans of racism. “How dare you show a picture of Willie Horton?” Well, what are we supposed to do? That’s who he is. “Yeah. But using the mug shot,” as though they don’t do that. “The mug shot? That’s horrible! That’s so racist.”

He’ right about it not being Ailes. I don’t know why people are saying that all over TV today. He also claims he doesn’t remember who really made that ad which is undoubtedly bullshit. It was a Lee Atwater strategy and Floyd Abrams made the ad. (Abrams was behind a whole bunch of Clinton lies during the 90s which Rush eagerly passed on to his rabid Clinton hating audience.)

The first person to mention the Massachusetts furlough program in the 1988 presidential campaign was Al Gore. During a debate before the New York primary, Gore took issue with the furlough program. However, he did not specifically mention the Horton incident or even his name, instead asking a general question about the Massachusetts furlough program.

Republicans eagerly picked up the Horton issue after Dukakis won Democratic nomination. In June 1988, Republican candidate George H. W. Bush seized on the Horton case, bringing it up repeatedly in campaign speeches. Bush’s campaign manager Lee Atwater said, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”

Campaign staffer James Pinkerton returned with reams of material that Atwater told him to reduce to a 3×5 index card, telling him “I’m giving you one thing: You can use both sides of the 3×5 card.” Pinkerton discovered the furlough issue by watching the Felt Forum debate. On May 25, 1988, Republican consultants met in Paramus, New Jersey, holding a focus group of Democrats who had voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. These focus groups convinced Atwater and the other Republican consultants that they should ‘go negative’ against Dukakis. Further information regarding the furlough came from aide Andrew Card, a Massachusetts native whom President George W. Bush later named as his Chief of Staff.

Over the Fourth of July weekend in 1988, Atwater attended a motorcyclists’ convention in Luray, Virginia. Two couples were talking about the Horton story as featured in the July issue of Reader’s Digest. Atwater joined them without mentioning who he was. Later that night, a focus group in Alabama had turned completely against Dukakis when presented the information about Horton’s furlough. Atwater used this occurrence to argue the necessity of pounding Dukakis about the furlough issue.

Beginning on September 21, 1988, the Americans for Bush arm of the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC), under the auspices of Floyd Brown,began running a campaign ad entitled “Weekend Passes”, using the Horton case to attack Dukakis. The ad was run as an independent expenditure, separate from the Bush campaign, which claimed not to have had any role in its production. The ad referred to Horton as “Willie”, although he later said he had always gone by William.

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The white college-educated women vs the white non-college educated men


by digby

by digby

The Wall Street Journal: The Yawning Divide That Explains American Politics

I don’t know if white college-educated women will come out to vote in greater numbers than white non-college educated men.
But the ones I know hate Donald Trump with the heat of a thousand suns and are very motivated to put a check on him in this election. If everyone else in the coalition is half as motivated, the Democrats will take the house.

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They aren’t just running on racism. Misogyny is on the menu too.

by digby

The whole Kavanaugh mess was a slam on feminism. The way they behaved with feral, macho anger showed that in living color. Rape victims were portrayed as an “angry mob.” Having the temerity to stand up against a man who would set back women’s rights a hundre years if he had the chance made them act crazy.

That over-the-top response to women’s anger is the way abusers manipulate women.

That’s not all. Here we have Heidi Heitcamp’s opponent scolding Democratic congressional women for wearing white to Trump’s State of the Union — because associating with the suffragists is very bad.

This is, of course, part and parcel of the campaign against Heitkamp for voting against Kavanaugh and, let’s face it, having the temerity to be a feminist. That’s just not ok.

Republicans are fine with women in politics as long as they don’t advocate for women’s rights. Good girls who will uphold the status quo are welcome.

Here’s how it’s supposed to be done ladies:

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“The president is self-destructing”

by digby

Vanity Fair reports on the expected exodus from the White House after the midterm election. Many of them will go to the campaign. But this piece about how Trump decided on his closing arguments”

Fabrizio has leveled with the president’s advisers that Democrats will take the House, the source briefed on the polling told me. Trump has responded to this worsening political environment with extreme frustration. “He was really upset the momentum had been killed by the pipe bombs,” one Republican close to the White House told me. Another former White House official in touch with colleagues said that Trump’s mood has been grim. “The president is self-destructing,” the official said.

To forestall electoral disaster on Tuesday, advisers have been debating strategies for regaining momentum. One idea being discussed, according to a Republican briefed on the conversation, would be for Trump to deliver a prime-time Oval Office address on the topic of “unity.” Trump, however, shot down the notion and instead is lurching in the other direction: turning out his die-hard base with hard-core anti-media and anti-immigration rhetoric. The base messaging strategy is being driven by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Shine and outside advisers Corey Lewandowski and Dave Bossie, a person familiar with the situation told me. Bossie and Lewandowski did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump has followed their advice by ramping up his “enemy of the people”-style attacks on the media, and whipping up right-wing hysteria about the migrant caravan slowly wending its way through Mexico to the U.S. border. “That’s why he sent [more than] 5,000 troops down there. It’s obviously political,” an outside adviser said. This week, Trump told Axios’s Jonathan Swan that he’s considering ending birthright citizenship by executive order, a dubious maneuver that legal experts from both parties—including Kellyanne Conway’sown husband, George Conway—have reiterated would be rendered unconstitutional. “All of this feels like Hail Mary passes—throw red meat to drive turnout,” a former West Wing official said. “In a way, the Kavanaugh bump peaked too early.”

Can you believe the cynicism of this “strategy?” I know it’s obvious and we’re all aware of what a psycho he is. But seriously, this shows that he knew what the options were, how he could behave in a different way in the afermath of a national tragedy and he rejected it. He wants to be a racist pig because it makes him happy and he believes it makes his voters happy.

Meanwhile, the rumored departures:

There was always bound to be West Wing turnover after the midterms, but the increasing likelihood that Democrats will take the House—and with it, usher in an era of perpetual investigations and hearings—could drive more senior officials to the exits. “There’s going to be a lot of departures,” the former West Wing official said. Earlier this week, a rumor swirled through Washington that Conway could be leaving, fueled in part by her husband’s op-ed about the unconstitutionality of ending birthright citizenship and Conway’s own removal of her White House title from her Twitter bio. (A person close to Conway called the speculation “silly.”) Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is also said to be looking for an off-ramp, a former West Wing official said. According to the source, Mnuchin is getting pressure from his wife, Louise Linton, who has been unhappy about her coverage in the media. “She’s been poorly treated in Washington and she’s like, ‘I want the fuck out,’” the source said. (Through a Treasury spokesperson, Mnuchin said, “That is a ridiculous comment.”) Already, there have been discussions about who would replace Mnuchin. Trump is said to like Jonathan Gray, who was recently elevated to president and C.O.O. of the private-equity behemoth Blackstone, and appears to be the heir apparent to Stephen Schwarzman. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The fate of Chief of Staff John Kelly is still the longest-running West Wing subplot. While many Trump advisers have expected Kelly to leave after the midterms, there’s a growing sense among others I spoke with that Kelly’s position is secure. Ivanka Trump recently told a friend that her father won’t fire Kelly, a source familiar with the conversation said. And on a phone call with a former West Wing official earlier this month, Trump said he worried that Kelly would campaign against him if he was fired. Bill Shine recently told a friend, “This guy isn’t going anywhere.”

Why would Trump care if Kelly campaigned against him? That suggests a more unusual relationship than we know. Maybe Kelly has given him a preview of what that would be like and Trump is afraid of it? Interesting…

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QOTD: Trump

by digby

It’s not from today. But it’s relevant. It’s the quote that titled Bob Woodward’s book:

“Earlier generations … knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility restraint,” Woodward quoted Obama as saying.

Trump replied, “Real power is fear.”

An authoritarian imbecile is in the White House. And he’s ginning up his authoritarian imbecile followers to commit violence.

Why?

Do politicians’ words, the president’s especially, matter?

Since he has been in office, President Trump has relentlessly demonized his political opponents as evil and belittled them as stupid. He has called undocumented immigrants animals. His rhetoric has been a powerful contributor to our climate of hate, which is amplified by the right-wing media and virulent online culture.

Of course, it’s difficult to prove that incendiary speech is a direct cause of violent acts. But humans are social creatures — including and perhaps especially the unhinged and misfits among us — who are easily influenced by the rage that is everywhere these days. Could that explain why just in the past two weeks we have seen the horrifying slaughter of 11 Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, with the man arrested described as a rabid anti-Semite, as well as what the authorities say was the attempted bombing of prominent Trump critics by an ardent Trump supporter?

You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to understand that the kind of hate and fear-mongering that is the stock-in-trade of Mr. Trump and his enablers can goad deranged people to action. But psychology and neuroscience can give us some important insights into the power of powerful people’s words.

We know that repeated exposure to hate speech can increase prejudice, as a series of Polish studies confirmed last year. It can also desensitize individuals to verbal aggression, in part because it normalizes what is usually socially condemned behavior.

At the same time, politicians like Mr. Trump who stoke anger and fear in their supporters provoke a surge of stress hormones, like cortisol and norepinephrine, and engage the amygdala, the brain center for threat. One study, for example, that focused on “the processing of danger” showed that threatening language can directly activate the amygdala. This makes it hard for people to dial down their emotions and think before they act.

Mr. Trump has managed to convince his supporters that America is the victim and that we face an existential threat from imagined dangers like the migrant caravan and the “fake, fake disgusting news.”

Were the men arrested in the synagogue shootings and bombing attacks listening? Robert Bowers, for example, apparently blamed Jews for helping transport members of the Central American migrant caravan. It seems he did not think the president was going far enough in protecting the country from invaders. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he wrote online before the murderous rampage. And Cesar Sayoc Jr., accused of mailing bombs to CNN, echoed the president in a tweet: “More lies con job Propaganda bye failing failing CNN garbage.”

But you don’t have to be this unhinged to be moved to violence by incendiary rhetoric. Just about any of us could be susceptible under the right conditions.

Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton, and colleagues have shown that distrust of an out-group is linked to anger and impulses toward violence. This is particularly true when a society faces economic hardship and people are led to see outsiders as competitors for their jobs.

Mina Cikara, a psychologist at Harvard and a co-author of that study, told me that “when a group is put on the defensive and made to feel threatened, they begin to believe that anything, including violence, is justified.”

There is something else that Mr. Trump does to facilitate violence against those he dislikes: He dehumanizes them. “These aren’t people,” he once said about undocumented immigrants suspected of gang ties. “These are animals.”

Research by Dr. Cikara and others shows that when one group feels threatened, it makes it much easier to think about people in another group as less than human and to have little empathy for them — two psychological conditions that are conducive to violence.

A 2011 study by Dr. Fiske and a colleague looked at “social cognition” — the ability to put oneself in someone else’s place and recognize “the other as a human being subject to moral treatment.” Subjects in the study were found to be so unempathetic toward drug addicts and homeless people that they found it difficult to imagine how those people thought or felt. Using brain M.R.I., researchers showed that images of members of dehumanized groups failed to activate brain regions implicated in normal social cognition and instead activated the subjects’ insula, a region implicated in feelings of disgust.

As Dr. Fiske has written, “Both science and history suggest that people will nurture and act on their prejudices in the worst ways when these people are put under stress, pressured by peers, or receive approval from authority figures to do so.”

So when someone like President Trump dehumanizes his adversaries, he could be putting them beyond the reach of empathy, stripping them of moral protection and making it easier to harm them.

If you still have any doubt about the power of political speech to foment physical violence, consider the classic experiment by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who in the early 1960s studied the willingness of a group of men to obey an authority figure.

Subjects were told to administer electrical shocks to another participant, without knowing that the shocks were fake. Sixty-five percent of the subjects did what they were told and delivered the maximum shock, which if real could have been fatal. The implication is that we can easily be influenced by authority to do terrible harm to others — just by receiving an order.

Now imagine what would happen if President Trump actually issued a call to arms to his supporters. Scared? You should be.

Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, and a contributing opinion writer.

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