“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody….whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial boards, or the president," Bill Barr tells @ABC News.
If it was anyone else, I would think he was threatening to resign. But that’s highly unlikely. He has been Trump’s toadie every step of the way and everyone knows it. This shows that he’s starting to feel the heat. And he’s now asking for sympathy for the fact that he’s been Trump’s top henchman and is now being held accountable for it by his own department.
He’s trying desperately to clean up his mess. In fact, he says “he can’t do his job at the department” with all this “background” noise, meaning that the president publicly giving Barr orders and spilling the beans about all their authoritarian plans is making it hard for him to have the president’s back.
It’s possible this is all pre-cooked with the White House, but according to the NY Times’ Maggie Haberman on CNN there was no heads up to the WH staff. Maybe he and Trump put this together privately but it is very hard to believe that Trump would be ok with this. He is not a strategic thinker and he’s never once done anything as savvy as let someone insult him or tell him what to do in order to achieve a larger mutual goal.
Stay tuned to see if Trump claps back. I honestly don’t know. He must realize he’ll never have a more loyal assassin than Barr. But he is pure id and maybe this mild criticism will send him over the edge.
This sadly doesn’t surprise me. Trump is still a child bully himself s naturally it’s catching on with the kids. Here he is today:
Mini Mike is a 5’4” mass of dead energy who does not want to be on the debate stage with these professional politicians. No boxes please. He hates Crazy Bernie and will, with enough money, possibly stop him. Bernie’s people will go nuts!
Mini Mike Bloomberg is a LOSER who has money but can’t debate and has zero presence, you will see. He reminds me of a tiny version of Jeb “Low Energy” Bush, but Jeb has more political skill and has treated the Black community much better than Mini! https://t.co/qIef5VhjDr
Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered “Ban Muslims” at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the president’s proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: “This is Trump country.”
Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.
Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim, according to the analysis. Students have also been victimized because they support the president — more than 45 times during the same period.
Although many hateful episodes garnered coverage just after the election, The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.
“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected,” said Ashanty Bonilla, 17, a Mexican American high school junior in Idaho who faced so much ridicule from classmates last year that she transferred. “They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”
This is one reason why women everywhere are repelled by him. They are seeing this barbarian model behavior they have told their children is unacceptable.
And this fatuous response actually made me laugh out loud:
Asked about Trump’s effect on student behavior, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham noted that first lady Melania Trump — whose “Be Best” campaign denounces online harassment — had encouraged kids worldwide to treat one another with respect.
Everyone knows how this works. They even used to sing about it in mainstream Broadway musicals back in the 1950s:
The Trump Family, circa 1986. as they were escaping communism
Here's Donald Trump Jr claiming to have stood in the breadline as his mother escaped a communism. Considering his dad & grandfather were millionaires and was born into enormous wealth, that he keeps a straight face during this outrageous lie is incrediblepic.twitter.com/zZn4FZrkg6
Don Jr in the middle wearing his communist kids tuxedoIvana and Donald Trump relax in the living room of their Manhattan apartment on March 12, 1979.
She didn’t exactly grow up in a gulag:
When Ivana Trump was growing up, the family lived in one of the city’s distinctive, cube-shaped “Bata houses,” designed in the 1920s as futuristic experiments in family housing by architects from the modernist school of Le Corbusier, thousands of which still dot the hillsides around the factory.
Ivana Trump came of age during the 1960s, when the desire to leave Czechoslovakia was overwhelming for young people who had seen what existed beyond the country’s borders. As the decade wore on, Czechs became more aware of what was available in the West—a mere four hour drive—yet far away for people without hard currency. But only those favored by the regime got to travel abroad. Sports was one way to gain that favor.
Czech communists were proud of their sports stars and film stars, but those who defected disappeared from national news. Czech media reported on tennis star Martina Navratilova’s every move until she left for the West, after which they didn’t even cover Wimbledon. It was a little harder to erase film stars, but when director Milos Forman defected, he was persona non grata until he cut a deal to shoot Amadeus in Prague in the 1980s, bringing millions in hard currency to his home country.
Pushed by her father and her own ambition, Ivana Trump became a good skier and made the junior national ski team, which allowed her to travel extensively. Uphill from Zelnickova’s apartment, there’s still a ski hut and a bunny hill with a jump, where local kids can practice. When Ivana Trump was a kid, she also practiced on winter weekends at her family’s humble country house in the foothills of the Carpathians, and eventually, at a ski camp in the Italian Alps.
In those years, the Czech ski team was small and relatively poorly trained. But by the time she got to college in Prague, Ivana Trump had been to Italy and Austria many times, and was intoxicated by the scent of perfume, chocolate, fashion and hard currency. A striking blonde, she fit into Prague’s hip, young and mobile crowd. “Ivana didn’t want to stay here,” Zelnickova (who at 91 divides her time between New York and Zlin) recalled. “She was always ambitious, and her father treated her like a boy.”
To get out, she married an Austrian skier for the passport. She earned a masters in physical education, but her fate was not to teach gym to future socialist Olympians. She left Czechoslovakia legally on her Austrian passport in September 1972, moving to Canada, and eventually, to New York.
Somehow I really doubt that when she and the kids returned to visit the grandparents that they had to stand in any breadlines.
Medal of Freedom winner Rush Limbaugh went full gay-basher yesterday:
They are sitting there and looking at Mayor Pete. 37-year-old gay guy, Mayor of South Bend. Loves to kiss his husband on the debate stage. And they are saying, okay, how is this going to look? 37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband on stage next to Mr. Man, Donald Trump. What’s going to happen there?
And they got to be looking at that, and they’ve got to be saying, that despite all the great progress and despite all the great wokeness and despite all the great ground that’s been covered, America still not ready to elect a gay guy kissing his husband on the debate stage president. They have to be saying this, don’t they?
Now, there may be some Democrats who think that is the ticket. There may be some Democrats who think that’s exactly what we need to do, Rush. Get a gay guy kissing his husband on stage, to ram it down Trump’s throat and beat him in the general election. Really. Having fun envisioning that.
As Karoli Kuns at Crooks and Liars points out, “this is all part and parcel of the Manly Men mantra that is the steel holding together Trump’s campaign.” This is true. Republicans have done that for decades now. That’s why they call the Democrats “the Mommy party.” I have probably written a hundred thousand words on that over the years.
But Trump is on a whole other level. Under him, the party is not a band of manly warriors fighting side by said to save the nation from the barbarians at the gate. It’s about him and him alone.
I was reminded of something I wrote just about four years ago:
Marco Rubio, the putative runner-up for the Republican nomination, told the press yesterday that he would not win the race by being mean. When the “Today” show’s Willie Geist asked him why he still didn’t need to attack Donald Trump, he said, “That is a media narrative… I’m not in this race to attack anyone… I didn’t run for office to tear up other Republicans.”
He’s such a nice young man, isn’t he? So well-mannered. But you have to wonder just what race he thinks he’s running in because whether he likes it or not he’s about to be deluged with a flood of toxic insults which may leave him permanently scarred. As a headline at The Week put it: “Donald Trump is about to do terrible things to Marco Rubio.”
That article was written by Paul Waldman, who astutely observed: As bullies go, Donald Trump is unusually skilled. When Trump decides to go after you, he considers carefully both your weak points and the audience for his attack. So when he decided to pummel Jeb Bush — apparently for his own amusement, as much as out of any real political concerns — he hit upon the idea that Bush was “low energy,” something Bush had a hard time countering without sounding like a whiny grade-schooler saying, “Am not!”
More than anything else it was a dominance display, a way of showing voters he could push Jeb around and there was nothing Jeb could do about it. With a primary electorate primed by years of watching their candidates fetishize manliness and aggression, the attack touched a nerve. Donald Trump may be the best bully American politics has ever seen. He’s a blond-tufted silverback gorilla who’s laid waste to each rival, one by one.
He’s still got Cruz and Rubio circling warily but his blood is up and he’s ready to dispatch them both. Over the course of the last few weeks, he’s whittled away at Cruz’s reputation (with Rubio’s wide-eyed assistance) and managed to turn him into the mentally unstable ghost of Lee Atwater. Now it’s Rubio’s turn. And poor Rubio doesn’t seem to be aware of what’s about to hit him.
t’s not easy to defend against Trump. As Waldman points out, Trump throws a bunch of insults at the wall to see what will stick. Once he finds what works, and he’s very good at recognizing a person’s weak points, he never lets up. Rubio is going to find that being the “nice guy” is unlikely to shield him from the onslaught.
How did this happen? Trump is a circus clown, a WWE sideshow of a candidate who has no idea about policy and apparently no knowledge of how the U.S. Government actually functions. He seems to think the president’s job is to order police agencies and the leaders of foreign countries to do his bidding. He apparently believes the job is Emperor of the World. So, perhaps it’s understandable that none of his rivals or the rest of the Party thought he could possibly last. He would step on his own tongue one too many times and that would be that.
However, it’s been obvious for some months now that this guy was the definition of a Teflon Don. And that’s because whenever he insults someone, whether it’s war hero John McCain or Fox news anchor Megyn Kelly even the Pope, it’s all about that “display of dominance.” (On one of the cable networks they asked Nevada Trump voters about the pope dust-up and one of them simply said, “The pope started it” which is exactly how a schoolyard bully’s posse would respond.)
The piece went on to quote various aghast Republican consultant types who were begging them the take off the gloves against Trump and fight fire with fire.
I think we’ve learned that doesn’t really work any better, haven’t we? Republican voters and their elected officials are immune to insults toward Donald Trump. And they love it when he does it to others.
But I think the observation of the dynamic remains correct. Everything he does is a dominance play, like a big gorilla roaring and pounding his chest to scare off any competition. It works with his band of timorous Republicans very well. Democrats seem impotent to do anything about it. It works.
We will have to see if enough voters are impressed with this behavior to eke out another victory next November.
It took immense courage for those four prosecutors to quit over Trump’s interference in the Stone sentencing. But it’s just a start.
To truly get attention, dozens will need to resign en masse from Justice. And another several dozen from State. And another several dozen from…
And the reasons for the resignations needs to be unambiguous. As in, “I am resigning to protest the autocratic interference in the administration of justice by Donald Trump and his political appointees.”
Finally, there needs to be a safety net for these courageous people, i.e., jobs for them to fall back on while they are out of government. That will take cash, a far better use of Steyer and Bloomberg’s billions than their stupid vanity races.
Before we examine the further Trumpification of our government of laws not of men, let’s have a look at what the architects of this national disaster don’t have to say about their responsibility for it.
Charlie Pierce (via Driftglass) on Tuesday noted this post last Sunday from the NH Journal:
National #NeverTrump leader Bill Kristol, founder of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, confirmed to NHJournal that he is part of the effort, which involves tens of thousands of New Hampshire voter contacts and a six-figure budget.
“Yup. I’m happy to have joined with some others to help remind New Hampshire independents, who might be accustomed to voting in the Republican primary, that this year, they may be able to make more of a difference by voting for a responsible and electable candidate in the Democratic primary,” Kristol said.
Oh, hell no, cried Pierce, skeptical of Never Trump allies diving into “the vital work of slaying the monster they all spent 40 years creating.”
Cook Political’s Dave Wasserman (h/t Digby) calculates New Hampshire independents responded to Kristol’s prodding:
By my calc, NH Dem turnout (vs. '16) in towns won by…
Takeaway: most of Dems' turnout increase was attributable to Kasich/Rubio types crossing over from '16 GOP primary – not heightened progressive/Sanders base enthusiasm.
While Kristol, et. al. are mucking about in the Democrats’ primaries, their faux-tanned, reanimated corpse is drowning “and justice for all” in the lake. Feeling bulletproof after surviving impeachment, Trump has launched a personal vendetta against all them what done him wrong. He’s bending the executive branch to his will to make it happen:
In the span of 48 hours this week, the president has sought to protect his friends and punish his foes, even at the risk of compromising the Justice Department’s independence and integrity — a stance that his defenders see as entirely justified.
Trump complained publicly about federal prosecutors’ recommended prison sentence for one of his longtime friends and political advisers, Roger Stone. After senior Justice Department officials then overruled prosecutors to lighten Stone’s recommended sentence, the president congratulated Attorney General William P. Barr for “taking charge” with an extraordinary intervention.
Next Trump sought to intimidate the federal judge in the Stone case, badgering her on Twitter for previous rulings, and attacked the four prosecutors who resigned from the case in apparent protest of the Justice Department’s intervention. Then Trump floated the possibility of a presidential pardon for Stone, who was convicted by a jury in November of tampering with a witness and lying to Congress.
Trump in his spare time is urging retaliation against FBI officials who participated in the Russia investigation.
“We are now truly at a break-glass-in-case-of-fire moment for the Justice Dept.,” tweeted David Laufman, former Chief of Counterintelligence & Export Control at a Justice Department that still believed justice was in its mission statement. Now its job is whatever Trump tweets it is.
“I didn’t speak to them, by the way. Just so you understand,” Trump said of the Justice Department. “They saw the horribleness of a nine-year sentence for doing nothing.”
Now that he’s president, Trump code-speaks via Twitter. His followers know what he wants done and they do it without being ordered. Trump gets what he wants and plausible deniability to boot.
Ego the Celestial (Kurt Russell) from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 hoped to reshape the entire galaxy into Himself. Donald Trump is way ahead of him in that department. He’ll soon be branding D.C. federal offices with TRUMP in gold letters. Republicans will help him do it.
When Kennedy was elected, when he was assassinated, when the rest of the 1960s happened (the civil rights movement, the Great Society, more assassinations, riots, and the moon landing), and then Watergate in the mid-1970s, I was too young to fully appreciate what it was like to live through history. Now I can. It’s as exhausting as it is frightening.
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I mentioned in my Salon piece this morning that Rudy has said that he is continuing the Biden crusade because he believes it will “vindicate” the president. Considering the events of this week, I believe that William Barr is fully on board with that which may explain why he’s given Rudy his own US Attorney to work with to continue the smear whether Biden is the nominee or not:
Since his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, President Donald Trump has privately encouraged his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to keep investigating the Biden family and Ukraine, and to keep updating him and his administration, including the Justice Department, on his findings, according to two people familiar with their discussions.
Reached for this story on Monday evening, Giuliani repeatedly declined to comment on specifics, but did say that his relationship with the president remained intact and that he’d just “talked to him twice today.” Asked what those conversations regarded, the Trump attorney replied, “no comment.”
“In my conversations with the president, he has, on more occasion than one, said that he wants to get to the bottom of the Ukraine issue in a very similar way that he’s talked about investigating the ‘Russia hoax,’” said another source close to Trump.
“I think he feels like the chains are off now,” said one senior administration official. “It’s like things have taken a turn. The gloves are off. And everything that used to be hush hush is now just… out in the open.”
Trump has a deep need to claim that he was right all along and that’s going to take some investigations and prosecutions. His only political agenda beyond getting re-elected and showing the rest of the world who’s boss is reversing every one of Barack Obama’s accomplishments. I think he feels branding Joe Biden and his son as corrupt is part of that mission.
But it won’t be enough unless he can truly make them pay. I have no doubt that he will, before long, take credit for Biden’s collapse in the polls. He won’t be able to help himself. But it won’t be enough. He needs to bring down the full force of the US government on Biden’s head to truly prove his dominance.
I like this. If she goes down she’s going to go down fighting the barbarian in the White House.
Just look at this horror:
Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!
Donald Trump can continue his corrupt rampages and vendettas because elected Republicans do nothing. They lack the courage and backbone shown by four career prosecutors who stepped down rather than facilitate the Attorney General’s corrupt scheme. But we are not powerless.
I am the only candidate to propose an independent DOJ task force to investigate crimes by Trump administration officials. Every Democratic candidate must commit to it—so Trump officials know they will be held accountable by career prosecutors once he is out of office.
This piece by David Neiwert about the alliance between the Trump administration and the “sovereign citizens movement” is unbelievable. Well, actually it’s all too believable which is just … chilling:
Far-right “constitutionalist” theories—the kind claiming that the U.S. Constitution’s text places severe limits on the power of the federal government, handing supreme power to local authorities—have been around for decades, but their multifarious claims and arguments have never been acknowledged by any American court, nor has their legitimacy ever been recognized by any federal or state authority. Until now.
The Trump administration has been quietly empowering far-right extremist ideology on public lands in the West, two recent investigative reports inform us. Under a policy declared last November by Bureau of Land Management acting chief William Perry Pendley, the BLM now defers enforcing the law to local “constitutionalist” sheriffs, creating widespread chaos and environmental destruction.
It’s mind-boggling.
This “deference” to the “sovereign citizens” isn’t all that surprising coming from this administration. Trump pardoned the Bundys, after all. He obviously sees them as political allies, which is weird since they don’t recognize the federal government that he heads. It reality he’s clueless and just thinks these guys are MAGA because they are “tough guys” who are white and carry guns.
And, of course, the contrast between this and what William Barr is doing to states and local governments that declare themselves sanctuary cities is stark. These “sovereign citizens” break federal laws every day, they destroy the environment and threaten federal law enforcement. “Sovereign citizenship” doesn’t exist. “Sovereign statehood” does.
I suspect Trump and his henchmen believe that these people are future MAGA storm troopers. And they’re probably right.
Here’s one of Miller’s acolytes, ascending to a high office with tremendous power, from CNN:
Chad Mizelle, a Trump administration official who is viewed as an ally of senior White House policy adviser and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, has been tapped to be the Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney.
The appointment, announced in an internal message obtained by CNN, comes after a year of turmoil in the top ranks of the department and amid major ongoing legal battles, including over the ban on trusted traveler programs for New York residents and a fight over asylum agreements to send migrants to Central America. Mizelle, who was the acting chief of staff at the department, previously served at the Justice Department as counsel to the deputy attorney general and he completed a stint at the White House. He was appointed as acting general counsel by President Donald Trump, according to the department.
They’re putting all the baby fascists in places of great authority:
Mizelle has less than 10 years’ experience as an attorney and will now run the DHS Office of the General Counsel, which oversees 2,500 attorneys and is ultimately responsible for all of the department’s legal determinations.
Mizelle, a 2013 graduate of Cornell Law School, was an associate with a law firm where he represented New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in challenging his “Deflategate” suspension, according to a resume obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by American Oversight, a non-partisan ethics watchdog that investigates what it says is misconduct in the Trump administration.
Mizelle also served as a law clerk at the DC circuit court and was an attorney volunteer for the Trump campaign in 2016, according to his resume.
I guess the Democrats can’t say all that much about this guy’s resume since one of their top presidential candidates has a similar level of experience. But they can certainly take up his harsh anti-immigrant ideology. Of course, Trump will lean on his loyal minions in the Senate to confirm him because this is the re-election message he wants to send: “I can do anything I want and I want to put fascists in charge.”
