The very BEST boys and girls:
Take a break. You deserve it. Shit is getting real …
"what digby sez..."
Month: September 2020
And Republican officials refuse to listen:
I spent over 300 mornings in the Oval Office briefing the president and his senior staff. I had the privilege to manage, edit and deliver the president’s Daily Brief a summary of the most timely and critical intelligence threats to the U.S. from 2010 to 2014.
As a Deputy on the National Security Council, I spent over 1,000 hours in the White House Situation Room providing the intelligence assessments which informed critical U.S. national security policy decisions — including the raid that rendered justice for the victims of 9/11.
Since I have been eligible to vote, I have never registered with a political party. I remain an independent with a history of voting for candidates I believe in — I focused on their policy and not their party. Before this election, I have never spoken out for or against a candidate for any office.
But I can be silent no longer.
In the summer of 1976, I was 14 years old and new to Colorado, my father took command of the Western Region’s National Guard. I enrolled in the brand-new Smoky Hill High School on what was then the far eastern boundary of Aurora. As a military brat, I was accustomed to moving around and not putting down roots — but as readers will know well, Colorado has a way of pulling on your heart and it became home. It remains so as my family spends as much time as possible in our Dillon residence.
Upon graduating from Cornell University, I joined the intelligence community as an analyst during President Ronald Reagan’s increasing investments in defense — a buildup that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union by the end of the decade. In my nearly four decades of service, I had the privilege of serving under six presidents — four Republican and two Democrat. The constant across all of those administrations was the oath I took to “protect and defend” the Constitution against “all enemies — foreign and domestic.”
I know what it takes to succeed at the highest levels of our government — intellectual curiosity, the strength of moral purpose and a commitment to selfless service. Broadly speaking, I can personally attest that Americans were very well served by those they elected to fill critical national security positions.
There is one important exception to that statement — our current president.
I have briefed him up close — and I have seen and felt the effect of his faults on our nation’s security. Out of respect for the confidential nature of Oval Office conversations, I will not provide details. Suffice to say that the person you see presiding over COVID-19 press conferences is the same one in the privacy of his office. He has little patience for facts or data that do not comport with his personal world view. Thus, the conversations are erratic and less than fully thoughtful.
While it is natural for there to be tension between the intelligence community and senior policymakers, President Donald Trump’s decision to rely upon the word of dictators like Vladimir Putin is an unprecedented betrayal of his oath to the Constitution. Our current president bases his decisions on his instincts, and his instincts are based upon a personal value proposition — what’s in it for me?
As a Commander in Chief, President Trump comes up tragically short. He fails to protect our soldiers when bounties are placed on their heads by his friend Vladimir. And not only does he not respect their service, but President Trump also belittles combat heroes who were taken as prisoners of war.
As a nation, we were fortunate that a true crisis did not occur during his first three years in office.
Then 2020 happened. This has been an unprecedented year for which many of us were not prepared. In moments of crisis, the American people demand — and deserve — a leader who will put the country first. Full stop. Because the reality and the science of COVID-19 conflicted with his personal views, President Trump knowingly downplayed the pandemic.
This is not about the economy, taxes, health care or any other normal ballot considerations. This is about American lives unnecessarily lost. This is about businesses unnecessarily closed. This is about being guided by service to all Americans. This is about centering decisions on a higher morality. President Trump’s actions — and inaction — demonstrates that he is not concerned about any of this.
And as damaging as his faulty leadership has been, four more years would be devastating.
We must elect a thoughtful, moral, responsible, respectful leader on Nov. 3. Our current president is not that leader.
Yesterday, almost 500 former national security officials endorsed Biden and excoriated Donald Trump. Some were high-level military who saw Trump up close:
Nearly 500 generals, admirals and former national security officials from both parties endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday, and blasted President Donald Trump as “not equal” to the challenges of the job in a letter released Thursday.
The letter, signed by 489 members of the group called the National Security Leaders for Biden, includes former Obama administration Defense Secretaries Ash Carter, Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, along with former Navy Secretary and NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, who served under both former Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush.
Among the retired senior officers is Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, who until last year was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump.
There are so many people who worked for Trump who are saying the same thing about him. How can it be that this is not having more of an impact? Is it that the press is treating this as partisan wrangling? It’s astonishing.
When it all blows up — as we’re already seeing with COVID-19, they cannot say they didn’t know.
“I can see a lot of people doing it.” Trump says that about Trump U instructors who lied to sell his course. He thinks everyone lies like him. And from the comments we’ve seen in the past week Republican senators do too. After all, they all excused their Supreme Court power grab by insisting that Democrats would do the same thing in their shoes.
This piece by Tim O’Brien, one of Trump’s biographers, makes an important point about Trump’s standard approach toward everything: brag, whine, blame and insult. He reprises all the BS Trump said about the vote being rigged back in 2016 and all of his shenanigans this time and then offers this:
It’s worth worrying about how deeply Trump is corrupting the election, of course — and monitoring him closely. After all, he’s corrupted many of the people around him, including his own children. And, as Barton Gellman pointed out in a meticulously reported and provocative feature in the Atlantic this week, Trump has powerful tools at his disposal to try to upend the results — on and well after Election Day. My colleague Jonathan Bernstein sorts through Gellman’s key conclusions here, including how willing Republicans in swing states would be to assist a Trump coup.
But amid all the hand-wringing over what he may or may not do, don’t let Trump snatch away your own agency and attention. David Axelrod, as canny and experienced a political observer as there is, reminded everyone not to get overly distracted by Trump’s performance art. “You do wonder if the POTUS would sooner have us talking about his outrageous comments on the election than the 202,000 dead of COVID-19 or the 870,000 additional Americans who filed for unemployment this week,” he tweeted.
Axelrod might be giving Trump too much credit. The president doesn’t think strategically. He thinks like a toddler.
When Trump amassed billions of dollars of debt he couldn’t repay in the early 1990s, he ran to his wealthy father and siblings to help bail him out. As things snowballed, he carped publicly about how poorly banks and investors were treating him. They weren’t taking away his hotels, airline, casinos, yacht and other properties because that’s what they did to deadbeats — they were doing it because they had suspect motives and weren’t loyal. His reality TV show never received an Emmy — not because the show was awful, but because the awards were unfair.
So it goes with his re-election bid, albeit with much more significant stakes. Trump wants to pretend the system is stacked against him because he knows he’s in danger of losing, perhaps badly. In 2016, his claims of a rigged election reached a crescendo when polls suggested he would lose. It can’t be his fault, and he can’t be a failure, if everything and everyone around him conspires against him.
I suspect Trump is also aware that if he is forced to exit the White House and lose its protections, he’s more vulnerable to fraud investigations that imperil him and his children. It’s likely that has him on edge, too.
So expect Trump to remain in overdrive, seeding the waters with tumult. But don’t let him scare you. Take a cue from the mourners on the steps of the Supreme Court who greeted his appearance at Ginsburg’s casket on Thursday with loud chants of “vote him out.” One way to discipline toddlers who can’t control what they say and do — especially when they’re trying to ravage democracy — is to give them a very long timeout.
Easier said than done. But he’s right. A lot of what Trump says is him just laying the groundwork to excuse his loss. The bigger problem is this Supreme Court gambit, with the full support of the Republican Party. Just as Trump was preparing for his loss in 2016, through a series of unfortunate events, he won. It could easily happen this time as well through the sad, untimely passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I don’t know it this is anything more than porn for desperate Americans hoping for a landslide but I thought I’d share it anyway. This is from the Never Trump site, The Bulwark:
How will the coming Supreme Court vote impact the presidential race?
On Thursday, I convened a focus group of 2016 Trump voters—all college-educated women in swing states—to ask them what they thought. What I heard was bad news for Republicans.
Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell seem to hope that nominating a conservative woman to the Court will pull suburban women back into their camp. The group I spoke with indicated the opposite.
Some quick background on this group: It was nine women and I had spoken to them once before (last week on September 16). I reconvened this group because it had an unusually high proportion of undecided voters (Yes, they exist!). Of the nine, one was definitely voting for Biden, one was leaning toward Trump, and seven were very much undecided. But all intended to vote in the upcoming election.
When I logged onto the Zoom call I began the discussion with an open-ended question: “How has your thinking about the presidential race changed—or has it—since we last spoke?”
Their answers surprised me. No one even mentioned the Supreme Court. Instead many of the women volunteered that they were leaning much more toward Joe Biden because of Donald Trump’s recent refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Their disgust was palpable.
As one woman said:
I’ve been hearing a lot, especially, about not making it a peaceful transition and it’s just making that bitter taste in my mouth grow a little bit more profound with each passing day. And it gets very frustrating just at the lack of professionalism…But I would say it’s probably pushing me further towards Biden but also pushing me more into looking into the Independent party.
I was caught a bit off guard, because after doing a year’s worth of focus groups, one of the things I’ve learned is that the crazy things Trump says that cause an uproar on Twitter and in Washington often don’t break through to regular voters.
And it’s not anywhere close to the first time Trump has made outrageous norm-busting comments about the integrity of the election. In the last few months he’s suggested postponing the election, encouraged voter fraud by telling people to vote twice, and said he’s entitled to a third term. Why was the transfer-of-power comment different?
I believe the answer is simple: The election is 40 days away and voters are paying closer attention.
I think that last comment is worth thinking about. Most people aren’t political junkies and they may just tune out the noise most of the time. What people like us see as an atrocity a day may just be in the background for a lot of people. But the election is upon us and regular people who aren’t normally engaged are focusing.
And he is acting like a despotic nutcase. I doubt many people will change their minds. But it’s possible that some might. Recall that his approval rating took a precipitous drop when he held those crazy coronavirus rallies in the White House. At the time much of the country was staying home watching TV. And they were stunned by what they were seeing. Likewise, in June when his ratings took another dive after his loathsome behavior after the killing of George Floyd.
There’s no guarantee of course. The timing of events is everything with this guy — he’s always dancing as fast as he can and he often gets lucky. But from the looks of it he’s going to keep ratcheting up the crazy.
Here’s what Trump and his administration did in just the last 24 hours:
First, he issued an executive order saying his administration would protect those with pre-existing conditions – even though it has backed a lawsuit before the Supreme Court that would strike down those protections (and other provisions) in the Affordable Care Act.
The problem here? “The order states that protecting pre-existing conditions was ‘the policy of the United States’ but did not provide any legislative guarantees that Americans would not lose such protections if the ACA were nixed by the Supreme Court,” per NBC News.
Then Trump promised to send seniors $200 gift certificates to help with their Medicare prescription drugs — with no real way to pay for it or constitutional justification how his administration (and not Congress) has the power of the purse here.
And finally, the Justice Department issued a press release Thursday saying it had started an inquiry into a handful of military ballots in Pennsylvania, bewildering lawyers and election experts because the release revealed the ballots were cast in favor of Trump, Politico writes.
“It is really improper for DOJ to be putting out a press release with partial facts,” Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt told Politico. “And it is career-endingly improper to designate the candidate for whom the votes are cast. There is no federal statute on which the identity of the preferred candidate depends.”
The first two actions — the executive order on the pre-existing conditions and then those $200 gift certificates to seniors — gave the illusion of activity. But they don’t do anything, at least not yet.
And the third — that DOJ press release — is trying to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the election.
That’s from NBC’s First Read and it a tepid recitation compared to the 5 alarm fire it should be. But then it’s not as if Trump sent some emails on a private server or anything like that. He didn’t use the word “deplorable.” But still, it’s worth noting.
As I’ve watched the Trump era unfold, I have generally assumed that most elected Republicans were just cowards who hoped the Democrats would save them from the unpleasantness of reining Trump in. They could let the Democrats get rid of Trump in 2020 and then, after the smoke had cleared and his followers had licked their wounds and moved on, they could pretend that everything that had happened was all Trump’s fault. They could then return to playing the role of moral arbiters and upright patriots, which they spent years selling to the public, and hope that nobody remembered what sniveling invertebrates they really are.
It turns out they aren’t cowards at all. They are craven opportunists who have observed the way Trump has exposed the weaknesses in our system and showed them how liberating the simple act of blatant shamelessness can be. They see how easily power can be seized, and that if the opponent doesn’t have a countervailing institutional strength, there is nothing to stop them from keeping it.
On some level, many of them know this is dangerous. Just a little over four years ago party leaders were wringing their hands over the possibility that an ignorant brute like Trump could possibly win the Republican nomination.
He hasn’t changed in the ensuing four years. They have. They’ve been seduced by the knowledge that they can get away with anything as long as they have the institutional power to do it. This week we learned that may includes denying the people their choice for the next president by openly manipulating the election.
They know that mail-in votes are perfectly legitimate. And they know that because their leader is so incompetent that the deadly pandemic is still raging in the country, many people would like to use that method to vote. They don’t care. Their actions this week have shown that they are going to go along with Donald Trump’s blatant plan to steal an election he almost certainly cannot win legitimately.
Rushing through a Supreme Court nominee, as I wrote on Wednesday, is simply a ploy to ensure that the lawsuits they already plan to file will end up before a court that has with five justices ready to install Trump for a second term. They probably don’t need the sixth, but they have the opportunity to give themselves a cushion and they’re taking it. That flagrant power play is part of a strategy meant to demonstrate that the millions of Americans who are watching all this unfold with a growing sense horror can’t do anything about it. (Recall Trump’s words to all 50 state governors in the wake of the protests over the George Floyd killing: “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time….” )
Trump was asked this week if he would agree to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the November election. As nearly everyone on the planet now knows. here’s what he said:
It’s a shocking statement, of course, and Trump was a fool to say that out loud, raising all kinds of fears that he wouldn’t agree to leave if he loses. But despite some mainstream media buying into Republican “assurances” that there will of course be a peaceful transition, they largely missed what’s really happening, as Dan Froomkin of Salon and Press Watch has pointed out.
Trump plans to “win.” As I noted on Wednesday, Trump told his rally audience this last weekend:
Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so that we can actually have an evening where we know who wins — not where the votes are going to be counted a week later, two weeks later.
Later in the week, he said this:
He was even more explicit on Tuesday:
I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices. This scam that the Democrats are pulling — it’s a scam — the scam will be before the United States Supreme Court. And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation, if you get that. I don’t know that you’d get that. I think it should be 8-0 or 9-0. But just in case it would be more political than it should be, I think it’s very important to have a ninth justice.
He couldn’t be any clearer about what he expects of his latest appointee if he put it in neon lights on the front of Trump Tower. He wants this election to end up before the Supreme Court and wants them to reappoint him on the basis of his bogus allegations of mail-in voting fraud. And his Republican accomplices did not contradict him.
Sure, they said there would be a peaceful transfer of power. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was weirdly specific about the date of the election in his comment, saying “the winner of the Nov. 3 election will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.” Considering that the alleged disputes are going to be all about counting mail-in ballots after Nov. 3, this isn’t the definitive statement many in the press took it for.
Indeed, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., introduced a bill on Thursday that would require all votes to be counted within the 48 hours around Election Day. Any votes not counted by then would be thrown out. Scott certainly knows no such bill will pass, which makes it all the more interesting that he would put that out there in the middle of this contentious campaign.
Many senators said that of course there would be a “peaceful transition,” but none of them questioned the idea that the president was planning in advance on having the Supreme Court decide the election. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., reassuringly said that “Republicans will stand up if he loses and refuses to leave,” as if that were the only question. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, expressed his dismay, but he is either too thick or too cynical to admit that his willingness to install a new justice right before the election is the mechanism by which Trump plans to illegitimately seize another term.
But leave it to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to put the new conventional wisdom about how this election will be decided right out there: “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Joe Biden, I will accept that result.” He later emphasized that “we need a full court” — and we know what that means.
All these Republicans know they could afford to wait until after the election is decided — in fact, under the normal terms of political self-interest, that would probably be smarter. But they are ready and willing to install a new Supreme Court justice before the election for the express purpose of handing Donald Trump a second term. If they succeed in doing so, they will irreparably destroy the legitimacy of the court, and quite possibly the legitimacy of our democratic system altogether.
But they don’t care about that. After all, “legitimacy” is unnecessary if raw power is the only currency that matters. It’s a shiny new American autocracy, and they’re here for it.
Update: I did not have the full Lindsey Graham quote when I wrote this and it’s even worse than I thought:
“I promise you as a Republican, if the Supreme Court decides that Joe Biden wins, I will accept the result. The court will decide, and if Republicans lose, we’ll accept the result.”
The court will decide …
In case election punditry (pundirty?) is not enough to your satiate desires both subtle and gross, here are some toys to play with while taking breaks from phone and text banking. But they’re not for the timid.
Cook Political’s uber-geek Dave Wasserman rolled some out this week on Twitter. Cook’s tool requires more sophisticated ability to game out demographics.
And no, “swingometer” is not a reference to Jerry Falwell, Jr, Wasserman adds.
NBC News offers Swing the Election:
Someone in the comments offered another interactive fidget spinner from Polivision that seems easy enough to use.
And of course, there is the standby interactive map from 270 to Win:
Or you can just use Google’s.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Joe Biden’s “low-key campaign style worries some Democrats,” reads the headline on an Associated Press story … before quoting criticism from the Texas Democratic Party chair and the acting president. Some is the chairwoman of the local African American Caucus in Charlotte who complains she received only one day’s notice of Biden’s Black economic summit there. She only heard about it on TV.
Biden fares better in another AP story focused on Biden leveraging his working-class roots in taking on an incumbent born with a golden spoon up his aspirations. This one begins:
“I’ve dealt with guys like Donald Trump my whole life, who would look down on us because we didn’t have a lot of money or your parents didn’t go to college,” Biden said, recalling his boyhood roots. “Guys who think they’re better than you. Guys who inherit everything they’ve ever gotten in their life and squander it.”
[…]
“The truth is,” Biden said, “he never really respected us.”
It’s at once a demonstration of Biden’s personal contempt for Trump and the Democratic challenger’s pride in his own family history as mostly working-class Irish Catholics. But, most importantly as voters begin casting early ballots, it’s a carefully tailored message aimed at voters who’ve abandoned Democrats in recent elections and helped Trump flip a band of Rust Belt states to fashion his own presidential victory map.
It seems to be working.
Even Ohio is a swing state again. Biden and Trump are in a dead heat in Iowa and Georgia and Biden is competitive even in Texas.
It cannot hurt that 489 members from National Security Leaders for Biden — former national security officials from both parties — signed a letter endorsing Biden on Thursday. Among them, “former Obama administration Defense Secretaries Ash Carter, Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, along with former Navy Secretary and NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, who served under both former Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush. Among the retired senior officers is Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, who until last year was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump.”
Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution military analyst, said, “There is real concern among some of these folks that we’re living on borrowed time with this guy having his finger on the nuclear trigger.”
About nuclear arms. Inside the Kremlin, analysts are scrambling to game out how Russia’s fortunes might fare under a Biden presidency (Bloomberg):
Increasingly alarmed at the prospect of a White House without Donald Trump, Russia is trying to determine what that’ll mean for sensitive issues from nuclear arms to relations with China, energy exports, sanctions and far-flung global conflicts, according to people familiar with the efforts. Though few see much prospect for improved ties if Trump is re-elected, Biden would likely be bad news for Russia, people close to the leadership said.
This could mean Russian social media disinformation campaigns to undermine Biden may get more frenetic. But now, Russia has to hedge its bets.
“It’s not clear what kind of help they could offer Trump,” former Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky tells Bloomberg, “but they’d give it to him as long as it didn’t provoke a big scandal … They don’t want to trigger a boomerang effect.” Read: economic sanctions.
The prospect of new Western sanctions on Russia has helped drive the ruble to the lowest levels since April.
What a pity.
Speaking of economic sanctions, South Carolina Republican senator and top Trump bootlick, Lindsey Graham is sweating bullets. Two recent polls show him in a dead heat with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison. Graham appeared like a deer in the headlight of Harrison’s fundraising freight train Thursday night when he ran to Fox News to plead for help.
Incompetent as Trump is, he has people around him smart enough and unscrupulous enough to try delaying election certification long enough in a few key states to throw the election to the House of Representatives. But that requires an election outcome close enough to do so.
Right now, things are trending in Biden’s favor. And bad news for Graham, The Economist projects a 68% chance of Democrats gaining control of the U.S. Senate. Even if the publication and Cook’s Political Report show the race as “lean Republican,” the look in Graham’s eyes last night showed something else.
“Great, kid! Don’t get cocky,” said a starship pilot in a galaxy far, far away. And all y’all? Get to work this weekend, please. We’re not out of this yet.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Richard Nixon was known to be dark character but, nonetheless, the tapes shocked people when they heard his blatant racism expressed in such crude terms. I don’t think there’s anyone who would say the same about Trump:
In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.
After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.
Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.”
When challenged on these views by subordinates, Trump has invariably responded with indignation. “He would say, ‘No one loves Black people more than me,’ ” a former senior White House official said. The protests rang hollow because if the president were truly guided by such sentiments he “wouldn’t need to say it,” the official said. “You let your actions speak.”
In Trump’s case, there is now a substantial record of his actions as president that have compounded the perceptions of racism created by his words.
Over 3½ years in office, he has presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights, endangering decades of progress against voter suppression, housing discrimination and police misconduct.
His immigration policies hark back to quota systems of the 1920s that were influenced by the junk science of eugenics, and have involved enforcement practices — including the separation of small children from their families — that seemed designed to maximize trauma on Hispanic migrants.
With the election looming, the signaling behind even second-tier policy initiatives has been unambiguous.
After rolling back regulations designed to encourage affordable housing for minorities, Trump declared himself the champion of the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He ordered aides to revamp racial sensitivity training at federal agencies so that it no longer refers to “White privilege.” In a speech at the National Archives on Thursday, Trump vowed to overhaul what children are taught in the nation’s schools — something only states have the power to do — while falsely claiming that students are being “fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”AD
The America envisioned by these policies and pronouncements is one dedicated to preserving a racial hierarchy that can be seen in Trump’s own Cabinet and White House, both overwhelmingly white and among the least diverse in recent U.S. history.
Scholars describe Trump’s record on race in historically harsh terms. Carol Anderson, a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln as president and helped Southern Whites reestablish much of the racial hegemony they had seemingly lost in the Civil War.
“Johnson made it clear that he was really the president of a few people, not the American people,” Anderson said. “And Trump has done the same.”
But as Hayes points out in the tweet above, they all attribute it to his “old fashioned” worldview — and that he’s just really dumb:
Most attributed Trump’s views on race and conduct to a combination of the prevailing attitudes of his privileged upbringing in the 1950s in what was then a predominantly White borough of New York, as well as a cynical awareness that coded racial terms and gestures can animate substantial portions of his political base.
The perspectives of those closest to the president are shaped by their own biases and self-interests. They have reason to resist the idea that they served a racist president. And they are, with few exceptions, themselves White males. […]
Several current and former administration officials, somewhat paradoxically, cited Trump’s nonracial biases and perceived limitations as exculpatory.
Several officials said that Trump is not a disciplined enough thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the white nationalist agenda, let alone embrace it. Others pointed out that they have observed him making far more offensive comments about women, insisting that his scorn is all-encompassing and therefore shouldn’t be construed as racist.
“This is a guy who abuses people in his cabinet, abuses four-star generals, abuses people who gave their life for this country, abuses civil servants,” the first former senior White House official said. “It’s not like he doesn’t abuse people that are White as well.”
As president, he has cast his record on race in grandiose terms. “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said July 22, a refrain he has repeated at least five times in recent months.
None of the administration officials interviewed for this story agreed with Trump’s self-appraisals. But several sought to rationalize his behavior.
Some argued that Trump only exploits societal divisions when he believes it is to his political advantage. They pointed to his denunciations of kneeling NFL players and paeans to the Confederate flag, claiming these symbols matter little to him beyond their ability to rouse supporters.
“I don’t think Donald Trump is in any way a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi or anything of the sort,” a third former senior administration official said. “But I think he has a general awareness that one component of his base includes factions that trend in that direction.”
Yeah, he’s very dumb but he’s a racist and he knows that his base is made up of racists who loves it when he “tells it like it is.”
In recent months, Trump has condemned Black Lives Matter as a “symbol of hate” while defending armed White militants who entered the Michigan Capitol, right-wing activists who waved weapons from pickup trucks in Portland and a White teen who shot and killed two protesters in Wisconsin.
Trump has vowed to safeguard the legacies of Confederate generals while skipping the funeral of the late congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon, and retweeted — then deleted — video of a supporter shouting “White power” while questioning the electoral eligibility of Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the nation’s first Black and Asian American candidate for vice president from a major party. In so doing, Trump reanimated a version of the false “birther” claim he had used to suggest that Obama may not have been born in the United States.
These add to an already voluminous record of incendiary statements, including his tweet that minority congresswomen should “go back” to their “crime infested” countries despite being U.S.-born or U.S. citizens, and his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” after torch-carrying white nationalists staged a violent protest in Charlottesville.
In a measure of Trump’s standing with such organizations, the Stormfront website — the oldest and largest neo-Nazi platform on the Internet — recently issued a call to its followers to mobilize.
“If Trump doesn’t win this election, the police will be abolished and Blacks will come to your house and kill you and your family,” the site warned. “This isn’t about politics anymore, it is about basic survival.”
As the election approaches, Trump has also employed apocalyptic language. He recently claimed that if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected, police departments will be dismantled, the American way of life will be “abolished” and “no one will be SAFE.”
Given the country’s anguished history, it is hard to isolate Trump’s impact on the racial climate in the United States. But his first term has coincided with the most intense period of racial upheaval in a generation. And the country is now in the final stretch of a presidential campaign that is more explicitly focused on race — including whether the sitting president is a racist — than any election in modern American history.
And there was Charlottesville which remains, along with Helsinki, Trump’s most iconic moment in office. (I suppose we have to add the drinking bleach comment during the deadly pandemic to that list as well.)
Speaking from his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., Trump at first stuck to a calibrated script: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.” Then, improvising, he added: “on many sides, on many sides.”
In six words, Trump had drawn a moral equivalency between the racist ideology of those responsible for the Klan-like spectacle and the competing beliefs that compelled Heyer and others to confront hate.
Trump’s comments set off what some in the White House came to regard as a behind-the-scenes struggle for the moral character of his presidency.
John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who was just weeks into his job as White House chief of staff, confronted Trump in the corridors of the Bedminster club. “You have to fix this,” Kelly said, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”
Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, threatened to resign and argued that there were no “good people” among the ranks of those wearing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us.” In a heated exchange, Cohn criticized Trump for his “many sides” comment, and was flummoxed when Trump denied that was what he had said.
“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn shot back, according to officials familiar with the exchange. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”
Trump relented that Monday and delivered the ringing condemnation of racism that Kelly, Cohn and others had urged. “Racism is evil,” he said, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups”
Aides were briefly elated. But Trump grew agitated by news coverage depicting his speech as an attempt to correct his initial blunder.
The next day, during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to highlight infrastructure initiatives, Trump launched into a fiery monologue.
“You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” By the end, the president appeared to be sanctioning racial divisions far beyond Charlottesville, saying “there are two sides to the country.”
For all their consternation, none of Trump’s top aides resigned over Charlottesville. […]
In some ways, Charlottesville represented a high-water mark for white nationalism in Trump’s presidency. Civil rights groups were able to use footage of the mayhem in Virginia to identify members of hate groups and expose them to their employers, universities and families.
“Charlottesville backfired,” Levin said. Many of those who took part, especially the alt-right leadership, “were doxed, sued and beaten back,” he said, using a term for using documents available from public records to expose individuals.
“When the door to the big political tent closed on these overtly white nationalist groups, many collapsed, leaving a decentralized constituency of loose radicals now reorganizing under new banners,” Levin said.
Some white nationalist leaders have begun to express disenchantment with Trump because he has failed to deliver on campaign promises they hoped would bring immigration to a standstill or perhaps even ignite a race war.
“A lot of our people were expecting him to actually secure the borders, build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” Black said.
“Some in my circles want to see him defeated,” Black said, because they believe a Biden presidency would call less attention to the white nationalist movement than Trump has, while fostering discontent among White people.
But Black sees those views as dangerously shortsighted, failing to appreciate the extraordinary advantages of having a president who so regularly aligns himself with aspects of the movement’s agenda.
“Symbolically, he’s still very important,” Black said of Trump. “I don’t think he considers himself a white supremacist or a white nationalist. But I think he may be a racial realist. He knows there are racial differences.”
“Racial differences….” Yes, he certainly does believe that. Indeed, he believes his own “good German genes” are very superior to everyone else’s (although he did compliment a crowd of white Trump voters in Minnesota the other day.)
I urge you to read the whole article which has a bunch of other interesting information, including about other members of the White House staff. Trump’s racial views are antediluvian and they are straight up racist. And he’s the leader of a coalition that is fine with that at best and enthusiastic supporters of it at worst.