QOTW: Jamie Raskin
by digby
Just this:
‘The president, aided and abetted by the attorney general, tears at the very fabric of our Constitution.’ — @RepRaskin listed all of Trump’s misdeeds and it is jaw-dropping pic.twitter.com/FwU2GXxIus— NowThis (@nowthisnews) May 8, 2019
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Con men and con women
by Tom Sullivan
Losing other people’s money to sustain his inflated self-image as a business genius is a skill Donald Trump perfected over a lifetime. He fooled New York’s elite. He fooled New York media. He fooled tens of millions of television viewers. He fooled 63 million voters into believing his is some kind of rags-to-riches success story. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes believes he might be the most successful con man of all time. Trump found you can live the high life fooling a lot of people all the time.
The New York Times this week exposed the lie that did not fool half the country in November 2016. Between 1985 and 1994, Trump lost $1.17 billion. Some of that was only on paper, but much of it was other people’s money. Only suckers take risks with their own. (Or pay taxes.) Even so, Trump lost boatloads of his own. He even lost his boat. And the Trump Shuttle. And his investment in the Grand Hyatt.
“The Art of the Deal,” Trump’s best-selling book of business advice, is itself a con. Tony Schwartz wrote the book for Trump. He tweeted Wednesday, “Given the Times report on Trump’s staggering losses, I’d be fine if Random House simply took the book out of print. Or recategorized it as fiction.”
When Trump agreed to be roasted on Comedy Central in 2011, Paul Waldman reminds readers, he allowed comedians to poke fun at “his hair, his racism and even the idea that he lusted after his own daughter.” Making fun of his bankruptcies or suggesting he was not as rich as he claimed were verboten.
Then what does all this — the yacht, the bronze tower, the casinos — really mean to you?
Props for the show.
And what is the show?
The show is “Trump” and it is sold-out performances everywhere.
— Donald J. Trump, 1990 interview with Playboy magazine
Waldman explains Trump’s con:
Trump’s own personal greed and his sense that the rules don’t apply to him have never been in question. But why would he be so threatened by people learning that he isn’t as wealthy as he claims? Part of it is ego, of course; he plainly equates money with one’s value as a human being. But it’s also because he built his career on the belief that if he could convince people he’s impossibly rich, he’d become impossibly rich and remain so.
Fake it until you make it. Even if you start out rich, as Trump did. Even if daddy has to keep bailing out your failures to maintain the illusion, as Fred Trump did.
Running concurrently with revelations about Trump’s massive losses, likely tax fraud, billionaire facade, and worse is the story of Anna Sorokin, 28, a.k.a. Anna Delvey. Originally from Germany, the “SoHo grifter” conned socialites and banks across Manhattan into believing she was a German heiress bursting with cash and planning a contemporary visual arts center.
She handed out $100 tips. She conned her way into an extended stay at a luxury hotel. She conned a friend into paying $62,000 for a trip to Morocco. She passed bad checks. She rented a private jet with a forged wire transfer from Deutsche Bank. She attempted to secure a $22 million loan using forged financial records purporting to show multimillion-dollar foreign accounts. That loan never went through, but another bank lent her $100,000 she never repaid.
Living as a mini-Trump, Sorokin conned the same New York social scene as Trump. Not having had Fred Trump’s tutelage, she just was not as skilled at it nor as heavily fortified by attorneys.
A jury convicted “Delvey” in April of three counts of grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, and misdemeanor theft of services. Even at trial, her fashion choices were the stuff of gossip columns. A wardrobe issue delayed her appearance in court. Sorokin was employing a courtroom stylist and still trying to keep up the fiction:
Her attorney, Todd Spodek, insisted Sorokin planned to settle her six-figure debts and was merely “buying time.” He portrayed her as an ambitious entrepreneur who had merely gotten in over her head but had no criminal intent.
Fake it until you make it. Sorokin’s problem is she does not actually have the oil baron father she claimed to bankroll her lifestyle and backstop her failures.
Donald Trump started out better-capitalized. As for no criminal intent? That is for New York courts to decide if Trump’s cons ever get that far.
Sorokin’s sentencing is today. She faces up to 15 years in prison.
Please, Please Wake UP, Ye Talking Heads
by tristero
On Rachel Maddow right now, I just heard Neal Katyal, the author of the Special Counsel regulations, claim that when the claims of executive privilege over the full Mueller report reach the Supreme Court, that they will turn Trump down just like Nixon was turned down during Watergate.
Not. Likely. To. Happen.
Katyal seems decent, he obviously knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the law and clearly believes Trump has to be removed from office. But despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he, like a lot of people, still believes the Republican-controled federal and judicial branches will continue to abide by 70 year-old plus norms.
Sad to say, those rules, always poorly observed, completely disappeared some time in the summer of ’16. This is a whole new political world we’re living in and assuming that a Supreme Court packed with the likes of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito and Roberts has any interest in adjudicating by any standard except rank partisanship is frankly antiquated thinking.
Once SCOTUS rules on Trump’s bogus claim of executive privilege after the horse has left the barn, I’ll reference this post. We’ll see whether my cynicism was warranted. I would so love to be proven wrong.
The Crux of the Biscuit
by tristero
Here’s your problem, right in a nutshell:
In a 2004 law review article, “The Limits on Congress’s Authority to Investigate the President,” Professor Marshall, who served in the Clinton White House, wrote that congressional investigations “provide a president’s opponents with considerable opportunity to engage in political mischief.”
In an interview, Professor Marshall said House Democrats should act cautiously.
“Congressional investigations obviously can be used purely as a tactic to harass or to divert a presidency from pursuing its agenda,” he said. “There has to be some sort of measured responsibility from the investigators. The Democrats have to make sure that what they’re doing really is soundly based in legitimate government reasons and not just a desire to inflict distraction on the presidency.”
Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in seeking to block a subpoena to his accounting firm, describe House Democrats as engaged in a “political war.”
“Instead of working with the president to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans,” the lawyers wrote in a lawsuit filed last month, “House Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the president politically. They have issued more than 100 subpoenas and requests to anyone with even the most tangential connection to the president.”
You read that right. Democrats are being urged to proceed “cautiously.” But Republicans have no such compunction. They’re blunt, direct, and bullying.
Let’s be clear: acting cautiously against Trump is a strategy bound to fail. By forcefully and intelligently, Democrats might actually be able to save at least a part of our democracy.
Adam Liptak is a great, knowledgeable, and intelligent reporter, all rarities, and I mean to cast no aspersions on him. But once, just once, in one of of these judicious mainstream analyses, it would nice if a reporter would dig up a mainstream Republican strategist urging caution when dealing with Democrats.
And a mainstream Democratic strategist who’s telling Democrats to take the gloves off.
What can short circuit the delay tactic of Executive Privilege Claims?
Back before the Mueller Report was released to the public, I though a lot of redactions in the Mueller report would be Executive Privilege ones. I was wrong.
Barr didn’t use Executive Privilege to redact info, but now the question of Executive Privilege and the Report comes up again.
At the time the report was released I asked my friend Lisa Graves, co-director of Documented , if she would be talking about redactions on the Lawrence O’Donnell show. I had a few questions about Executive Privilege that I know the answers to now, but I really wanted to know what smart moves Democrats could make given this current delaying tactic?
Trump does things like this all the time, ignoring norms and breaking conventions. The democrats on the committee always seem to be in reactive mode. Trump’s assertion of Executive Privilege is bogus, so what are the steps to flip it so it hurts Trump and speeds his impeachment?
Ian Millhiser over at ThinkProgress said,
Trump’s claim that the Mueller report is protected by executive privilege is hot garbageHe doesn’t have a legal claim, but he can probably run out the clock.
There are two big Executive Privilege cases cited in this NY Times piece. One in 1997 in which Clinton’s lost his claim of Executive Privilege another in 2016 where Obama lost his.
If I was in charge of the committee’s media strategy I would get the people who won against Obama and Clinton on Executive Privilege on TV, STAT. Heck, these people could even go on Fox News!
Get the lawyers who beat Obama on TV to say, ‘Executive Privilege FAILED when OBAMA tried it. An attempt by Trump will FAIL too.”
Experts answer technical questions about Executive Privilege for the media all the time, but what I want to know is, “How political are the people in the ruling bodies right now?”
What ideology controls the deciding institutions?Are they all Federalist Society judges? How political are the ones who would get this case first? Name some names. For example, would it be
Amy Berman Jackson, Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia?
She ruled against Obama in an Executive Privilege case. She was appointed by Obama. (She is also the judge who was taking no crap from Roger Stone.)
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| Amy Berman Jackson ruled against Obama’s Executive Privilege claim in 2016 |
Even is she isn’t the judge who would get the case, get some retired judges to comment. Can a judge throw the case out quickly with a warning, “This was already decided, this is bogus, stop doing this.”?
Since Executive Privilege was waived earlier, I wonder if there is a mechanical or automatic process that makes the release of the unredacted report possible?
What happens if someone releases the unredacted report to Congress? Maybe someone released it to congress already before this latest claim of Executive Privilege. Might they be following orders of a co-equal branch of government when they did this? What would the consequences be for that person?
I’m trying to think at least two steps ahead of Trump, so I’m going to guess the White House will next claim they can’t release the unredacted Mueller Report because of National Security concerns. Trump will say, “National Security” and people shut up, so it will be important to get the people in that area, who make those decisions, to be prepared to talk and explain what unredacted info they can give to congress and why it is okay for them to see it.
You don’t have to be from the future like me to know what Trump will do next. Just look for the obvious maliciously, incompetent norm-breaking act that could save his hide from getting busted for his treasonous actions.
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Oh look. Yet another assault on our system of checks and balances.
by digby
Are we concerned yet? Do we think something truly dangerous is happening or is this just more Trump being Trump, nothing to worry about?
Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent lower courts from imposing nationwide injunctions against the president’s policies.
Pence complained Wednesday in a speech to the Federalist Society that federal district courts have imposed more nationwide injunctions against Trump than the first 40 presidents combined. On Tuesday, an appeals court lifted such an injunction against a Trump policy that allows immigration authorities to force some migrants seeking asylum to wait in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated.
“A Supreme Court Justice has to convince four of his colleagues to uphold a nationwide injunction — but a single district court judge can issue one, effectively preventing the duly-elected president of the United States from fulfilling his constitutional duties,” Pence said in prepared remarks. “This judicial obstruction is unprecedented.”
“In the days ahead, our administration will seek opportunities to put this question before the Supreme Court,” Pence said.
It is not unprecedented. It’s the way things work. Contentious issues work their way through the courts, letting the legal theories and constitutionality be tested at several levels. That’s normal. They are not just there to rubber-stamp anything the president wants to do.
Trump and his authoritarian henchmen are using every possible avenue to create a presidential dictatorship.
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Barr doesn’t care about being popular. And that’s good because the public is not impressed.
by digby
Not that it matters because his job is to be Trump and the conservative movement’s henchman, but still — it’s interesting. Apparently, even a few Trump supporters either don’t a have an opinion or don’t think he handled it well:
According to the latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, fewer than 3 of 10 voters (29%) approve of the way Attorney General William has handled the release of the Mueller report. Less than 4 of 10 voters (39%) disapprove, and nearly a third of voters (32%) expressed no opinion. Voters remain divided on whether Barr’s primary goal in releasing information from the investigation was to inform the public of Mueller’s findings or to limit scrutiny of President Trump’s actions. While 35 percent say Attorney General Barr has mostly worked to protect Trump, another 32 percent say Attorney General Barr has mostly tried to inform the American people; 32 percent were undecided.
I’m going to guess that a lot of this has to do with the fact that the Fox News coverage is very opaque on all this, mostly just repeating the “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra so quite a few Republicans don’t have a clue about the controversy.
Democrats are more likely to the reality:
“Democratic voters are more likely to view Attorney General William Barr unfavorably in the aftermath of his contentious battle with congressional Democrats,” said Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president. “Two weeks ago, before his Senate Judiciary [Committee] hearing, 44 percent of Democrats had an unfavorable opinion of Barr, compared with 54 percent who said the same in this week’s poll.”
As the field of 2020 candidates grows, sixty-six percent of voters think the Republican party should nominate President Trump again. If the presidential election were held today, more than half of voters (53%) said they would ‘probably’ or ‘definitely’ vote for someone else, with nearly 4 of10 (37%) voters saying they ‘probably’ or ‘definitely’ vote to re-elect President Trump.
37% represents the core of Trump’s support. They haven’t budged since the day he was elected. It’s fairly obvious that there is literally nothing that will budge them.
Here’s a link to the full article. The above is from an email.
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Warren sees the big threat of Trump and the GOP: corrupt authoritarianism
by digby
I have not hidden my admiration for Elizabeth Warren in this Democratic primary. I’ve been a supporter on this blog for years. And Warren’s holistic view of the problems we confront as a nation and her smart policy proposals are even more impressive than I expected.
But I’m most impressed by what Greg Sargent lays out in this piece for the Washington Post:
Is President Trump an aberration whose defeat in 2020 would allow the nation to begin rebounding toward normalcy? Or does his ascendance reflect long-running national pathologies and deeply ingrained structural economic and political problems that will intractably endure long after he’s gone?
The answer to this question — which has been thrust to the forefront by the Democratic presidential primaries — is, in a sense, both. Trump represents both a continuation of and a dramatic exacerbation of those long running pathologies and problems.
As of now, Elizabeth Warren appears to be the Democratic candidate who most fully grasps the need to take both of those aspects of the Trump threat seriously. The Massachusetts senator is, I think, offering what amounts to the most fully rounded and multidimensional response to that threat.
In recent days, Warren has addressed the deeper issues raised by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report — and the reaction to it from Trump and Republicans — in by far the most comprehensive way.
Warren takes on the GOP
In an important moment on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Warren took strong issue with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s profoundly cynical effort to treat this all as a closed matter. “Case closed,” McConnell said, speaking not just about Mueller’s extensive findings of likely criminal obstruction of justice by Trump but also about Trump’s eagerness to reap gain from Russia’s sabotage of our elections, which McConnell blamed on Barack Obama.
In response, Warren again called for an impeachment inquiry, but she did more than that: She indicted the Republican Party as a whole for shrugging off Trump’s epic misconduct and wrongdoing.
Warren has also pointed out more forcefully than any rival has that Trump tried to derail an investigation not just into his own campaign’s conduct, but also into the Russian attack on our democracy — which Trump has refused to acknowledge happened at all, hamstringing preparations for the next attack.
As McConnell’s speech showed, the GOP is all in with that as well. And the GOP appears all in with Trump’s escalating efforts to treat House oversight of the administration as fundamentally illegitimate.
We are now learning that the Justice Department asked Trump to exert executive privilege to keep Mueller’s full findings concealed.
Meanwhile, Trump may try to block former White House counsel Donald McGahn, who witnessed multiple Trump efforts to obstruct justice, and possibly even Mueller from testifying to Congress. The administration won’t release Trump’s tax returns, violating the law. And Trump has vowed to resist “all” subpoenas.
Legal experts tell Adam Liptak at the New York Times that such wholesale resistance to oversight threatens the constitutional order, placing Trump, as one puts it, “above the law.” Few, if any, Republicans are raising an eyebrow about any of this.
Thus, Warren’s call for an impeachment inquiry is linked to a big argument — one broader than that of any other candidate — about how the GOP has actively enabled Trump’s authoritarianism, lawlessness, shredding of governing norms and embrace of the corruption of our political system on his behalf.
Warren is comprehensively treating Trump both as a severe threat to the rule of law in his own right, and as inextricably linked to a deeper pathology — the GOP’s drift into comfort with authoritarianism.
Trump’s authoritarianism and his corruption are two sides of the same coin. Trump’s tax returns, which he rebuffed a House request for — something his government participated in, with dubious legality — may conceal untold levels of corruption, from possible emoluments-clause violations to financial conflicts to compromising foreign financial entanglements.
Warren has responded to all this — and the GOP’s near-total comfort with it — by rolling out a sweeping anti-corruption measure that requires presidential candidates to release tax returns and requires divestment to avoid such corrupting situations in the future.
Thus, Warren is treating this two-sided coin of authoritarianism and corruption as a systemic problem in need of reform, one linked to the broader imperative of actually “draining the swamp,” as Trump vowed, only to plunge into full-scale corruption himself.
This is exactly correct. What Sargent describes is a kleptocratic system along the lines of … Russia. It has the veneer of democracy, but it’s a corrupt authoritarian oligarchy. That’s what Trump and the Republicans are doing. As Sargent says:
Trump exploited populist discontent and then embarked on a near-total betrayal via an embrace of GOP plutocracy, in the form of a massive corporate tax giveaway and a deregulation spree that further enabled elite corruption. These things, too, show Trump as both continuation and exacerbation — and Warren has offered the most systematic and comprehensive response to all of that, as well.
None of this is to say the other candidates don’t have great policies and virtues. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has in some ways offered a bigger response to inequality. Biden has said good things on Trump’s racism and on impeachment. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) has taken on Trump’s lawlessness.
But only Warren has done all of these things, and only Warren has woven them all into a big story — one that treats Trump as both a unique threat and a symptom of so much of what’s gone so horribly wrong.
Warren is appropriately alarmed by this. I don’t sense that too many others have grasped what is going on in quite the same way.
There’s more at the link.
*Standard disclaimer: I like many of the Democratic candidates and will vote for a tree stump if it is what Democrats decide to run against Trump. So I’m not going to engage is primary battles. Life is short…
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The Trump administration is going hard after the poorest Americans now
by digby
I guess they figure most of the people they will be hurting aren’t their voters so what the hell not?
The Trump administration is proposing regulatory changes that could result in cuts in federal aid to millions of low-income Americans.
The proposal by the Office of Management and Budget on Monday would change how inflation is used to calculate the official definition of poverty used by the Census Bureau to estimate the size of the country’s poor population. The measure is also often applied to determine eligibility for government benefits.
Lowering estimates of the inflation rate could mean that the poverty level would rise at a slower rate, resulting in fewer families and individuals able to qualify for food assistance like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, health assistance like Medicaid and other government programs.
Critics seized on the proposal as the administration’s latest broadside against those struggling hardest to make ends meet. Over the past two years, the Trump administration has also sought to cut housing subsidies and tried to expand the work requirements needed to qualify for food stamps.
“This policy would, over time, cut or take away entirely food assistance, health and other forms of basic assistance from millions of people who struggle to put food on the table, keep a roof over their heads and see a doctor when they need to,” said Sharon Parrott, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She also noted that the reductions stood in contrast to the administration’s 2017 tax law, which gave new benefits to high-income households.
The official poverty measure compares cash income, before taxes, against a threshold that is set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963. In 2016, the official poverty measure was 12.7 percent, which meant that 40.6 million Americans were considered to be living in poverty.
In 2019, a family of four with an income of $25,750 or less was considered poor, and therefore eligible for some federal programs, according to federal poverty guidelines.
But Ms. Parrott said that the poverty line fails to take into account costs like child care and rising rents. “Simply switching to a lower inflation measure would likely make the poverty line less realistic over time, rather than more accurate, in measuring what families need to get by,” she said.
Programs that use the poverty measure to determine eligibility also include Head Start, the national school lunch program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
They are leaving no stone unturned in their quest to destroy the so-called “administrative state.” Trump knows nothing of any of this, of course. He’s too busy wanking to Fox News. But all those Republicans in the White House are very busy beavers destroying the country in exactly the way the worst of the tea partyers always dreamed of doing.
If the Democrats do win back power (which is not guaranteed at all) the amount of work it will take just to rollback this assault on the entire edifice of government that’s been put in place since the New Deal is overwhelming.
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Foreign languages are not dangerous
by digby
I know this will shock you, but it runs out that whole bunch of Republicans are xenophobes and racists. Here’s some proof:
A new survey finds white Republicans are far more likely to be put off by foreign language speakers than their Democratic counterparts.
According to Pew Research Center, 47 percent of such Republicans say it would bother them “some” or “a lot” to “hear people speak a language other than English in a public place.” Just 18 percent of white Democrats said they would be similarly bothered.
Aside from politics, age and education are the major predictors of linguistic discomfort. Just 18 percent of whites younger than 30 said they would be bothered by a foreign language being spoken, compared with 43 percent in the 50 to 64 age group, and 45 percent among those 65 and older.
Among all racial groups, whites (34 percent) are most likely to be bothered hearing foreign languages, followed by blacks (25 percent), Asians (24 percent) and Hispanics (13 percent). Among Americans overall, 70 percent put their level of unease at “not much” or “not at all.”
The study follows a spate of high-profile confrontations between English and non-English speakers. Last year, a Border Patrol agent detained and questioned two women — both U.S. citizens — when he overheard them speaking Spanish at a gas station in Montana. In New York, a man launched into a rant after hearing deli workers converse in Spanish and threatened to call immigration authorities.
The United States has no official national language, although a number of states have declared English to be their official language. More than 1-in-5 American residents speak a language other than English at home, according to census data. In many regions of the country the percentage is much higher than that. The data show that the majority of those foreign language speakers are also fully proficient in English, meaning they are bilingual by choice.
The report comes on the heels of a Pew study on the nation’s demographic shifts. When asked about the projected makeup of the United States in 2050, some 37 percent of Republicans said that “having a majority of the population made of up of blacks, Asians, Hispanics and other racial minorities” would be bad for the country — the highest share among any demographic group surveyed. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans said that a majority nonwhite population would “weaken American customs and values,” while an identical percentage predicted it would lead to greater conflict between racial and ethnic groups.
Republicans also stood out in that survey for their skepticism of interracial marriage: Just one-third said “the fact that more people of difference races are marrying each other” was good for the country, while 16 percent said it was bad.
Other questions in the latest Pew survey shine a light on what’s driving Republicans’ displeasure with foreign language speakers: For one thing, Republicans are more skeptical of racial diversity in general. Just 39 percent of Republican respondents said it was “very good” that “the U.S. population is made up of people of many different races and ethnicities.” Among Democrats, 71 percent hold that view, as do 57 percent of Americans overall.
More than 1 in 5 Republicans support the view that having a population comprising “people of many different races and ethnicities has a negative impact on the country’s culture.” That compares with 12 among the total population.
Meanwhile, solid majorities of every demographic group — blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans — would prefer employers not take race into account when making hiring decisions, even if doing so resulted in less diversity within the company.
Democrats and blacks may “prefer” that race doesn’t enter into the decisions but it does, and usually not in a good way — and they should be aware that diversity in the workplace is one of the few ways that makes people actually change their minds.
I really, truly don’t understand why anyone would even care if they hear a foreign language. I guess that’s because I live in a gigantic city where I can literally hear five or six different languages just walking on the beach or shopping at the mall. It’s so common that I barely even notice, and if I do I’m charmed by it.
I guess a whole lot of Americans don’t feel that way. Frankly, it’s profoundly disturbing that there are so many of them.
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