Month: June 2019

Four years ago today something crawled out from under a rock

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

It was four years ago (plus one day) when Donald Trump descended his golden elevator at Trump Tower and announced to the world that he was running for president to make America great again. It was a memorable day, although I don’t think anyone believed at the time it would be more than a bizarre blip in presidential campaign history.

It was a patented Trumpian spectacle, ridiculous and over the top. Needless to say, the speech itself was offensive and absurd. He called Mexicans rapists and criminals, bragged about his allegedly enormous wealth and said that the U.S. had never beaten China and Japan at anything. He lied about the crowd size and insulted the press. In other words, it was the template for all the speeches that were to come, throughout his campaign and his presidency.

The immediate reaction among the media was incredulity mixed with smug condescension. Most apparently assumed this was one of those laughable gadfly campaigns, like former Sen. Mike Gravel’s 2008 Democratic run, or the 2012 bid by Republican businessman and flat-tax fan Herman Cain. After all, Trump had feinted toward running for years, even launching a short-lived bid for the Reform Party nomination in 2000. And the GOP primary of 2016 was already proving to be one for the books. On the day Trump announced for president, the man leading in the polls was Dr. Ben Carson, a political neophyte who had recently declared that the United States is “very much like Nazi Germany.”

I wrote about the announcement for Salon and I saw it a bit differently than most. To me, this mixture of Tea Party right-winger and wealthy showbiz celebrity seemed like a potentially potent combination. He had enough money to self-finance, which meant he could stay in for the long haul. I looked up the numbers for his TV show and found that he had reached millions more people with his various iterations of “The Apprentice” than Fox News could ever dream of. He had the potential to reach a far bigger audience as a right-wing blowhard than most professional politicians.

While Trump’s guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar style was flamboyant, nothing he said was anything that a person who watched Fox News or listened to Rush Limbaugh wouldn’t nod along with in agreement. In fact, the headline for my piece was “We must take Donald Trump seriously: Yes, he’s a right-wing blowhard. But he’s rich & famous, and his kooky ideas fit snugly in the Tea Party mainstream.”

But there was something much darker happening that I didn’t see coming. That piece didn’t run as planned on the day after the Trump Tower announcement. It ran the following Saturday. That’s because on the evening after Trump’s announcement a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof went into a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and murdered nine African American church members, injuring three more. He confessed that he was hoping to start a race war.

That tragedy necessarily meant that any snarky pieces about Donald Trump were suddenly inappropriate. But looking back on it four years later, those two events were psychically connected.

Roof was not motivated by anything Donald Trump said in his announcement speech, of course. He probably didn’t even know about it. According to the FBI, he was “self-radicalized” on the internet and through contacts with other white supremacists. The manifesto he posted on a website called “The Last Rhodesian” featured derogatory opinions about African Americans, Jews, Hispanics and others, and featured pictures of him posing with the Confederate flag. He explained that the 2012 shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin made him “racially aware” because Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, had been right to shoot him.

But there are threads of similar ugly thought processes at work in these two events that took place within a day of each other. When Roof began to open fire on those people at the prayer meeting he reportedly said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

One day earlier on a stage in his golden Manhattan tower, Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency by saying, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people …”

These racist ideas have been with us a long time, and America’s history is full of the violent horrors that result from them. Neither Trump or Roof said or did anything that hasn’t been said or done before. Indeed, Trump himself had quite a history of racist activities, from the disgraceful rhetoric in the Central Park Five case to his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama.

But looking back, it feels as if something shifted in that 48-hour period four years ago this week. A rock was overturned and something truly grotesque crawled out, something that hadn’t seen the light of day for quite a while. Since Trump announced his candidacy, white supremacist violence has surged. That’s not limited to the U.S., although when it comes to racist violence, Trump has succeeded in making America No. 1. The president’s shameful reaction to the racist violence in Charlottesville, and his inflammatory rhetoric about the border — which clearly inspired the massacre of Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh — are just two incidents among many that illustrate how the white supremacist movement has taken on new life in the last four years, drawing strength and motivation from the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.

When a man gunned down 51 people in a pair of mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, this March, he too left a manifesto. In it, he claimed he supported Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity.” When asked if he thought white nationalism was a problem, Trump responded, “I don’t really.”

The president is holding a big rally on Tuesday in Orlando to announce that he’s running for re-election. I don’t think anyone will be surprised if he says the same things he said four years ago. He’s been repeating them almost daily ever since then. People still laugh and roll their eyes, just as they did back in 2015. But now we’ve seen the results of his rhetoric, and we know how he reacts when those results inevitably turns violent. It’s not a joke. It never was.

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Blue Mondays in June
by Tom Sullivan

Mondays are tough enough for most Americans without the added stress of awaiting Supreme Court pronouncements on whether a) the 2020 census will include a citizenship question for all households for the first time in decades, and b) partisan gerrymandering will be declared constitutional. A lot is riding on those with two Mondays left in June. With June 30, 2019 as the nominal “go to print” deadline for census questionnaires, today could be the day for some answer on Department of Commerce v. New York,, the census case (a). No doubt the North Carolina and Maryland gerrymandering decisions (b) will wait a week.

Decisions are due to post at 10 a.m. EDT/ 7 a.m. PDT.

But what am I thinking? Most Americans don’t pay much attention to Supreme Court cases. They are too busy working for an economy that doesn’t work for them. Who does it work for? But you know already.

Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project examined data from the Federal Reserve and found that from 1989 through 2018 the richest one percent grew their wealth by $21 trillion. Those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution (maybe you) lost $900 billion.

After explaining what those numbers include and exclude, Eric Levitz asks whether this conforms to any American sense of economic justice:

Put differently: Does the average American believe that, over the past three decades, our nation’s richest one percent have contributed roughly $22 trillion more to our collective well-being than the poorest 50 percent have? Does she think that the tens of millions of working-class people who spent the past 30 years cooking other Americans’ dinner, cleaning their toilets, caring for their children, harvesting their crops, ringing up their groceries — and performing the countless other poorly remunerated forms of labor that our society demands — collectively produced an infinitesimal fraction of the value that America’s corporate lawyers, hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists, specialist physicians, heirs and heiresses, and other high-paid professionals did?

That was a rather freighted rhetorical question.

In those accented European countries not worthy of calling themselves free (in the Lee Greenwood sense), income inequality is not as skewed as here, Levitz adds, where wealth builds primarily on the “passive income to America’s wealthiest citizens.” Levitz cites data from the 2018 World Inequality Report to support that assessment.

But we need not rely on such studies. Real people feel the effects of that inequity on a daily basis. You’ll be shocked, shocked to find who benefited (and who did not) from the Trump tax bill. In Connecticut, the Guardian reports, AT&T is laying off workers:

AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, promised in November 2017 to invest $1bn in capital expenditure and create 7,000 new jobs at the company if Trump’s hugely controversial tax cut bill passed. Many opponents had slammed the cuts as a corporate giveaway that benefited the super-rich. But big firms lobbied for it, saying – as AT&T did – that it would fund job-creating expansions.

The bill was voted into law in December 2017, reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. AT&T’s benefit was a tax windfall of $21bn and an additional estimated $3bn annually. But instead of creating jobs and increasing investment into the company, AT&T has eliminated 23,328 jobs since the tax cut bill was passed, according to a recent report by the Communications Workers of America. The CWA also said AT&T reduced their capital investments by $1.4bn.

General Motors is laying off workers and closing plants, lending credence to claims by Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, that the tax plan was “a scam, a giant bait-and-switch.”

Wells Fargo Bank’s 2018 tax savings were 47 times more than the value of minimum wage hikes it promised if the tax cuts took effect. Instead, Wells Fargo bought back $22.6 billion in stock, raised its CEO’s salary by 36 percent, and “announced plans in September 2018 to eliminate at least 26,000 jobs in the US over the next three years as many of those positions are being sent overseas.”

But Wells Fargo offers it is putting more of its after-tax profits into corporate philanthropy. For which it will enjoy good press and tax deductions while former employees enjoy scrambling to feed families and stay in their homes.

If this is not on the minds of voters the president is filling with fears of immigrants, it should be, writes E.J. Dionne. Conservatives have repeatedly teed up this bill of goods for America’s working class like Lucy with her football. They’ve promoted a worshipful attitude towards supposed “job creators” and lavished on them government largesse while recommending patience and austerity laced with blame for workers:

The vision of a lower-tax, lightly regulated economy, which gained ascendancy during the Reagan years, was always defended by its advocates as a bottom-up idea because it extolled the role of the entrepreneur who bravely started a business. If he or she worked hard enough and had something worthy to sell, the business would take off, creating jobs and new opportunities. It’s why Republican politicians argue obsessively that what’s good for “job creators” is good for the rest of us.

But this conception of economic life is not really bottom-up; it has little concern about concentrated economic power. Its policies reward those at the top. That’s where the term “trickle down” comes from. Investors and business people are the heroes of this story. The worker owes everything to them.

That’s not the way it feels. Ask employees no longer employees at AT&T, at GM, at Wells Fargo.

On Friday, I mentioned Nick Hanauer’s 2012 TED talk debunking the myth of the job creator. In 2014, he offered this warning:

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Productivity and growth may matter, but so do people’s lives, Dionne insists, “We don’t usually think of the word ‘moral’ as attached to the word ‘economics.’ It’s time we started.”

A change has to come. The question immediately before us is what kind. The clock is ticking. There may be a bomb attached.

Just a little reminder

by digby

I’m not saying it can’t change. But with all the polling out right now, it’s important to remember that in the polling averages, Trump dipped to 42 percent within one month of becoming president and hasn’t risen above it since. It’s frighteningly consistent.

I hope it isn’t a reflection of a bunch of people being too embarrassed to admit they really like him. I wish I didn’t think that was possible. But this consistency in his ratings shows me that at least 50 million or so of my fellow Americans approve of the imbecile’s leadership and nothing he’s done has changed it. That astonishes me. Bigly.

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Prove it Chief

by digby

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. began the Supreme Court’s term last fall seeking to assure the American public that his court does not “serve one party or one interest.”

He will end it playing a pivotal role in two of the most politically consequential decisions the court has made in years.

One initiative is to include a citizenship question in the 2020 Census, which has fueled a partisan showdown on Capitol Hill. The other could outlaw the partisan gerrymandering techniques that were essential to Republican dominance at the state and congressional level over the past decade.

The politically weighted decisions, by a court in which the five conservatives were chosen by Republican presidents and the four liberals were nominated by Democrats, threaten to undermine Roberts’s efforts to portray the court as independent.

They are among two dozen cases the court must decide in the next two weeks, and never before has the spotlight focused so intently on the 64-year-old chief justice.

Roberts sits physically at the middle of the bench in the grand courtroom and now, for the first time since he joined the court in 2005, at the center of the court’s ideological spectrum. With the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy last summer, the most important justice on the Roberts Court became Roberts himself.

Roberts in the past has shown himself to be far more conservative than Kennedy, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested recently that has not changed.

Kennedy’s retirement, she told a group of judges and lawyers in New York, was “the event of greatest consequence for the current term, and perhaps for many terms ahead.”

Roberts has been on a mission to convince the public that if the court is ideologically split, it is about law, not politics.

“We do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle, we do not caucus in separate rooms, we do not serve one party or one interest, we serve one nation,” Roberts told an audience at the University of Minnesota in October.

He repeated the message at Belmont University in Nashville in February. “People need to know we’re not doing politics,” he said.

In between was the well-publicized spat with President Trump, who just before Thanksgiving criticized an “Obama judge” serving on a lower court who had ruled against his administration in a contentious case centered on immigration policy and border security.

Roberts issued a rare public statement: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Trump shot back on Twitter: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”

So the citizenship question and gerrymandering cases, which have generally split along party lines, do not come at an opportune time.

Brianne J. Gorod, chief counsel of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, said the many questions about whether Trump’s citizenship question is intended to benefit Republicans should be a warning for Roberts.

“If Roberts votes to uphold this plainly unlawful administration action, it will give credence to Trump’s claim that he can simply look to the conservative justices on the Supreme Court to save him,” Gorod wrote on the Take Care blog.

“That would be a deeply troubling state of affairs — both for the court and for the country.”

Well, what else is new, amirite?

But it is a very, very big problem. I wish I had some instinct hat told me Roberts would end up being a reasonable mediator on some these highly charged super politicalcases, but honestly I doubt it.

We are in for a very rough ride, I’m afraid. Roberts is no Trump but I’m sure he’s more than willing to say up is down and black is white, claiming that he court isn’t partisan even as they place a chokehold on the democratic processes. He showed his hand in the Voting Rights Act case. He’s a rock-ribbed Reaganite steeped in the wingnuttia of the past 30 years. I expect him to be much more like William Barr than Anthony Kennedy (who was no prize, by the way…)

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Treasonous fake news

by digby

Can you see the problem here?

…..ALSO, NOT TRUE! Anything goes with our Corrupt News Media today. They will do, or say, whatever it takes, with not even the slightest thought of consequence! These are true cowards and without doubt, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2019

I knew that you could. It’s treason against the United States to print this totally untrue information in a newspaper.

Speaking of traitorous behavior, what can we say about a president who repeatedly threatens to defy the constitution and refuse to leave office after his term is up?

…..news is that at the end of 6 years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT), both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2019

Trump’s killing the messengers now

by digby

Don’t tell the King what he doesn’t want to hear and certainly don’t ever let anyone know the truth:

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is cutting ties with some of its own pollsters after leaked internal polling showed the president trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in critical 2020 battleground states, according to a person close to the campaign.

The move comes after NBC News obtained new details from a March internal poll that found Trump trailing Biden in 11 key states.

Portions of the campaign’s expansive March polling trickled out in recent days in other news reports.

But a person familiar with the inner workings of the Trump campaign shared more details of the data with NBC News, showing the president trailing across swing states seen as essential to his path to re-election and in Democratic-leaning states where Republicans have looked to gain traction. The polls also show Trump underperforming in reliably red states that haven’t been competitive for decades in presidential elections.

A separate person close to the Trump re-election team told NBC News Saturday that the campaign will be cutting ties with some of its pollsters in response to the information leaks, although the person did not elaborate as to which pollsters would be let go.

The internal polling paints a picture of an incumbent president with serious ground to gain across the country as his re-election campaign kicks into higher gear.

While the campaign tested other Democratic presidential candidates against Trump, Biden polled the best of the group, according the source.

In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan — three states where Trump edged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by narrow margins that proved decisive in his victory — Trump trails Biden by double-digits. In three of those states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida — Biden’s leads sit outside the poll’s margin of error.

Trump is also behind the former vice president in Iowa by 7 points, in North Carolina by 8 points, in Virginia by 17 points, in Ohio by 1 point, in Georgia by 6 points, in Minnesota by 14 points, and in Maine by 15 points.

In Texas, where a Democratic presidential nominee hasn’t won since President Jimmy Carter in 1976, Trump leads by just 2 points.

Portions of the internal Trump polling data were first reported by ABC News and The New York Times. The Times reported earlier this month that the internal polling found Trump trailing across a number of key states, while ABC News obtained data showing Trump trailing Biden in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida and holding a small lead in Texas.

The president denied the existence of any negative polling during comments last week in the Oval Office, saying his campaign has “great internal polling” and saying the numbers reported were from “fake polls.”

“We are winning in every single state that we’ve polled. We’re winning in Texas very big. We’re winning in Ohio very big. We’re winning in Florida very big,” he said.

I guess we’ll eventually find out which pollsters are being fired. But if it’s Tony Fabrizio they’ve lost a good one.

As the Russia scandal unfolded, I’ve often thought of this quote from Fabrizio:

“What was happening in this election that nobody was taking into account was Donald Trump was going to underperform in states like Texas, Arizona, Georgia. States that deliver Republican numbers,” Fabrizio said.

But, as he pointed out, running up the score in these states was completely irrelevant.

What was important was flipping traditionally Democratic-voting states and edging out Clinton in states that were toss-ups up until the final votes were tallied.

“When you really drill down on this election, if you change the vote in five counties, four in Florida, one in Michigan, we’d be having a totally opposite conversation right now,” Fabrizio said of the race. “For all the money that was spent, for the all the effort that was made, literally four counties in Florida, one county in Michigan puts us at 261 [electoral] votes and makes Hillary Clinton the president. So, remember that.”

You will recall that there was a lot of “interference” centered in those places.

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Our top diplomat is a rude jerk

by digby

Crooks and Liars caught Mike Pompeo on Fox News this morning:

Donald Trump’s Secretary of State became very perturbed after Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace asked him to comment on Trump’s belief that he would take information from foreign governments against his rivals without informing the FBI, a very clear violation of the law.

Towards the end of this morning’s interview, Wallace played video of Donald Trump’s response to George Stephanopoulos’ question about accepting aid from foreign powers to help get him elected.

Wallace then asked, “Is accepting oppo-research from a foreign government right or wrong?”

Secretary Pompeo: “Chris, you asked me not to call any of your questions that are ridiculous. You came really close right there.”
What a rude and unserious response to a serious question.

Forcing Donald Trump to account for his words and actions by the news media is now deemed ridiculous by the U.S. Secretary of State.

Pompeo continued, “President Trump has been very clear.”

Yes, he has. He said he would take dirt from hostile foreign countries – his idiotic Norway comment not withstanding, and said he “maybe” would tell the FBI.

“[Trump] clarified his remarks later,” Pompeo said.

Then he began to lie.

Pompeo continued, “He made it very clear even in his first comments, he said ‘I’d would do both.’ He said he’d call the FBI.”

Wallace rightly corrected the SOS and said, “He said ‘maybe’ I’d would do both.”

Pompeo then made an innocuous statement about Trump’s love of America and Wallace continued to grill.

Wallace said, “At the risk of getting your ire, the president told Fox and Friends on Friday, and I agree he kind of walked back — “

Secretary Pompeo interrupted Chris, “No, he didn’t walk it back.”

Wallace replied, “Yes, he did because he said “maybe” on Thursday and then on Friday on Fox and Friends, he said he would listen first and then if the information was bad that he would take it to the FBI or the attorney general, but he also made it clear to George Stephanopoulos that he did not see this as foreign interference.”

FNS played another clip from the ABC interview and Trump’s “own words” bore out Wallace’s point.

Trump clearly stated he would commit a felony to get reelected.

Wallace schooled Pompeo on American history to back up his point.

Wallace said, “He says it’s not interference, it’s information.” He continued, “The country, sir, and I don’t have to tell you, has a long history dating back to George Washington in saying that foreign interference in our elections is unacceptable.”

Secretary Pompeo: “President Trump believes that too.”

That’s another lie since he just heard Trump say exactly the opposite.

The SOS continued, “I have nothing further to add. I came on to talk about foreign policy and I think the third time you’ve asked me about a Washington piece of silliness, that chased down the story that is inconsistent with what I’ve seen president Trump do every single day.”

So, America’s top international statesman is a liar and a hothead too. Figures. But I doubt it’s helping.

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