There’s interesting news on the Jack Smith front. Word has leaked out that his devoted manservant Dan Scavino testified before the Grand Jury and backed up the story that Trump did absolutely nothing during the insurrection despite pleas from everyone around him to take action to end it. And Scavino’s not the only one:
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has uncovered previously undisclosed details about former President Donald Trump’s refusal to help stop the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago as he sat watching TV inside the White House, according to sources familiar with what Smith’s team has learned during its Jan. 6 probe.
Many of the exclusive details come from the questioning of Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, who first started working for Trump as a teenager three decades ago and is now a paid senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign. Scavino wouldn’t speak with the House select committee that conducted its own probe related to Jan. 6, but — after a judge overruled claims of executive privilege last year — he did speak with Smith’s team, and key portions of what he said were described to ABC News.
New details also come from the Smith team’s interviews with other White House advisers and top lawyers who — despite being deposed in the congressional probe — previously declined to answer questions about Trump’s own statements and demeanor on Jan. 6, 2021, according to publicly released transcripts of their interviews in that probe.
Sources said Scavino told Smith’s investigators that as the violence began to escalate that day, Trump “was just not interested” in doing more to stop it.
Sources also said former Trump aide Nick Luna told federal investigators that when Trump was informed that then-Vice President Mike Pence had to be rushed to a secure location, Trump responded, “So what?” — which sources said Luna saw as an unexpected willingness by Trump to let potential harm come to a longtime loyalist.
House Democrats and other critics have openly accused Trump of failing to do enough that day, with the Democrat-led House select committee accusing Trump of committing “an utter moral failure” and “a clear dereliction of duty.” But what sources now describe to ABC News are the assessments and first-hand accounts of several of Trump’s own advisers who stood by him for years — and were among the few to directly engage with him throughout that day.
Along with Scavino and Luna, that small group included then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and Cipollone’s former deputy, Pat Philbin.
According to sources, when speaking with Smith’s team, Scavino recalled telling Trump in a phone call the night of Jan. 6: “This is all your legacy here, and there’s smoke coming out of the Capitol.”
Scavino hoped Trump would finally help facilitate a peaceful transfer of power, sources said.
In his wide-ranging indictment against Trump, announced this past August, Smith accuses the former president of trying to unlawfully retain power by, among other things, “spread[ing] lies” about the 2020 election and pressuring Pence to block Congress from certifying the results when it convened on Jan. 6. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
[…]
According to what sources said Scavino told Smith’s team, Trump was “very angry” that day — not angry at what his supporters were doing to a pillar of American democracy, but steaming that the election was allegedly stolen from him and his supporters, who were “angry on his behalf.” Scavino described it all as “very unsettling,” sources said.
At times, Trump just sat silently at the head of the table, with his arms folded and his eyes locked on the TV, Scavino recounted, sources said.
After unsuccessfully trying for up to 20 minutes to persuade Trump to release some sort of calming statement, Scavino and others walked out of the dining room, leaving Trump alone, sources said. That’s when, according to sources, Trump posted a message on his Twitter account saying that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Trump’s aides told investigators they were shocked by the post. Aside from Trump, Scavino was the only other person with access to Trump’s Twitter account, and he was often the one actually posting messages to it, so when the message about Pence popped up, Cipollone and another White House attorney raced to find Scavino, demanding to know why he would post that in the midst of such a precarious situation, sources said.
Scavino said he was as blindsided by the post as they were, insisting to them, “I didn’t do it,” according to the sources.
Some of Trump’s aides then returned to the dining room to explain to Trump that a public attack on Pence was “not what we need,” as Scavino put it to Smith’s team. “But it’s true,” Trump responded, sources told ABC News. Trump has publicly echoed that sentiment since then.
At about the same time Trump’s aides were again pushing him to do more, a White House security official heard reports over police radio that indicated Pence’s security detail believed “this was about to get very ugly,” according to the House committee’s report.
As Trump aide Luna recalled, according to sources, Trump didn’t seem to care that Pence had to be moved to a secure location. Trump showed he was “capable of allowing harm to come to one of his closest allies” at the time, Luna told investigators, the sources said.
[…]
More than a half-hour after Trump was first pressed to take some sort of action, Trump finally let Scavino post a message on Trump’s Twitter account telling supporters to support law enforcement and “stay peaceful.” It was 2:38 p.m.
Minutes later, Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot when she tried to break through a barricaded entrance near the House chamber.
And the violence at the Capitol continued to escalate.
At least six close aides kept pushing him to do something. Mark Meadows confirmed that when Kevin McCarthy called to ask him to do something, he responded “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
Apparently, it was Jared Kushner who persuaded him to do that silly video finally telling people to leave the Capitol in which he said, “We love you, you’re very special” after which he returned to the TV to watch the carnage he had instigated. Looking at the footage he apparently said, “this is what happens when they try to steal an election.”
He never expressed a word of contrition. Then:
According to the sources, shortly before 6 p.m. on Jan. 6, Trump showed Luna a draft of a Twitter message he was thinking about posting: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots. … Remember this day for forever!” it read.
The message echoed what Trump had allegedly been saying privately all day.
Sources said Luna told Trump that it made him sound “culpable” for the violence, perhaps even as if he may have somehow been involved in “directing” it, sources said.
Still, at 6:01 p.m., Trump posted the message anyway.
This must be what Trump means when he says he should have immunity because he was just doing his job as president.
Has there ever been a more nakedly ambitious politician in history? I honestly don’t think so.
Orwell: “She had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.” https://t.co/C2unF7B3y8
I still don’t think Trump is going to choose her for VP no matter how hard she licks his boots. She just isn’t out of central casting in his book. But she’s certainly giving a hell of an audition.
Jamelle Bouie writes in his newsletter about the shock of 2016 and how it led to the media obsessing over “the Trump voter” and what they were thinking:
One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.”
You may remember the constant discussion, while Trump was in office, over the effect his chaos and corruption might have on voters. Would they care? Where this “they” often meant the blue-collar voters associated with Trump’s victory. And if they didn’t care, could we say with any confidence that the American people cared?
They did!
What’s been lost — or if not lost then obscured — in the constant attention to Trump’s voters, supporters and followers is that the overall American electorate is consistently anti-MAGA. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. The MAGA-fied Republican Party lost the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump lost the White House and the Republican Party lost the Senate in 2020. In 2022, Trump-like or Trump-lite candidates lost competitive statewide elections in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Republicans vastly underperformed expectations in the House, winning back the chamber with a razor-thin margin, and Democrats secured governorships in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin, among other states. Democrats overperformed again the following year, in Kentucky and Virginia.
“Since 2016,” wrote Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in a post for his newsletter last summer, “Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five states everyone agrees Democratic hopes in the Electoral College and the Senate depend on.”
He continues:
When Trump was sworn in, Republicans held four of those five states’ governorships, and six of the ten Senate seats. Moreover, Republicans defied history by losing nearly across the board in those states last year, the only time anything like that has happened to a Party running against such an unpopular president in a midterm.
Too many commentators have spent too much time fretting over Trump’s voters — and how they might react to the effort to remove the former president from the ballot — and not enough time thinking about the tens of millions of voters who have said, again and again, that they do not want this man or his movement in American politics.
Because 2016 was not the only election that mattered. Trump’s voters are not the only ones who count. There’s been no shortage of critics of the disqualification effort who have asked us to consider the consequences for American democracy if Trump’s supporters believe he was cheated out of a chance to run for president a third time. It’s a fair point. But I think we should also consider the consequences for American democracy if the nation’s anti-MAGA majority comes to believe, with good reason, that the rules — and the Constitution — don’t apply to Trump.
He is so right. This fetish for the Trump voters is somewhat understandable because they are so — out there. I can’t help myself either. But this is bigger than that and the media really needs to consider what all their fretting over what they’re saying does to the rest of us. And covering that side of the aisle without acknowledging what the majority has been saying ever since 2016 is journalistic malpractice. The country has been sending a big message every single election and it isn’t “I love Trump.”
President’s private dining room just off the Oval Office. (January 6 Committee Exhibit.)
ABC News has a this tantalizing Jan. 6 story this morning:
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has uncovered previously undisclosed details about former President Donald Trump’s refusal to help stop the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago as he sat watching TV inside the White House, according to sources familiar with what Smith’s team has learned during its Jan. 6 probe.
Many of the exclusive details come from the questioning of Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, who first started working for Trump as a teenager three decades ago and is now a paid senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign. Scavino wouldn’t speak with the House select committee that conducted its own probe related to Jan. 6, but — after a judge overruled claims of executive privilege last year — he did speak with Smith’s team, and key portions of what he said were described to ABC News.
[…]
Sources said Scavino told Smith’s investigators that as the violence began to escalate that day, Trump “was just not interested” in doing more to stop it.
Scavino and other close advisers including “then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and Cipollone’s former deputy, Pat Philbin,” had interactions with Trump as the fighting raged inside and outside the U.S. Capitol.
According to what sources said Scavino told Smith’s team, Trump was “very angry” that day — not angry at what his supporters were doing to a pillar of American democracy, but steaming that the election was allegedly stolen from him and his supporters, who were “angry on his behalf.” Scavino described it all as “very unsettling,” sources said.
Trump sat with his arms folded watching the insurrection on TV in his private dining room just off the Oval Office:
After unsuccessfully trying for up to 20 minutes to persuade Trump to release some sort of calming statement, Scavino and others walked out of the dining room, leaving Trump alone, sources said. That’s when, according to sources, Trump posted a message on his Twitter account saying that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Trump’s aides told investigators they were shocked by the post. Aside from Trump, Scavino was the only other person with access to Trump’s Twitter account, and he was often the one actually posting messages to it, so when the message about Pence popped up, Cipollone and another White House attorney raced to find Scavino, demanding to know why he would post that in the midst of such a precarious situation, sources said.
Scavino made a point of telling prosecutors he was blindsided by Trump’s tweet. As someone accustomed to posting Trump’s tweets, Scavino testified “I didn’t do it,” according to ABC’s sources.
Marcy Wheeler questions that account at emptywheel, reminding readers it comes from “people who chose to stick around — some of whom, including Scavino, continue to stick around — knowing that if Trump ever turns on them he wouldn’t stop short of using his mob to get them killed.”
Expert 3, with “knowledge, skill, experience, training, and education beyond the ordinary lay person regarding the analysis of cellular phone data, including the use of Twitter and other applications on cell phones” will sort out for jurors “when Trump’s phone was unlocked and using Twitter on January 6.”
Why would Pat Cipollone confront Scavino about the Tweet if “Scavino and others walked out of the dining room” — implicitly, walked out together — “leaving Trump alone”? Cipollone would only confront Scavino if he had believed that Scavino were still there with Trump, as his testimony describes he had been until just before Trump sent the Tweet.
The warrant on Twitter — which would have shown whether it is really true that Scavino was the only other person with access to Trump’s Twitter account — is not the only way Jack Smith tested this claim, knew the answer to this claim before interviewing Scavino.
The “he” in “demanding to know why he would post that” could refer to Cipollone asking Scavino about Trump, not Scavino. ABC’s account makes it unclear. It comes via “sources” and through multiple reporters. But Wheeler’s point is that the stories told remain muddy.
Marcy advises:
As you read the rest of the ABC piece, keep two things in mind. This leaked testimony concentrates on other aspects of the claims made to Jack Smith about how Twitter was used that day, such as this description of Luna’s testimony, describing that he warned Trump before the then-President sent a Tweet making him look “culpable” the day of the attack.
According to the sources, shortly before 6 p.m. on Jan. 6, Trump showed Luna a draft of a Twitter message he was thinking about posting: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots. … Remember this day for forever!” it read.
The message echoed what Trump had allegedly been saying privately all day.
Sources said Luna told Trump that it made him sound “culpable” for the violence, perhaps even as if he may have somehow been involved in “directing” it, sources said.
Still, at 6:01 p.m., Trump posted the message anyway.
That testimony — that Luna warned Trump the Tweet would make him look like he was responsible for the violence — will only strengthen the extent to which this Tweet was already going to be used to prove that Trump ratified the violence, effectively showing that Trump remained in a conspiracy with those who violently attacked the Capitol even after watching them do so.
Which brings me to the second point. Multiple people who gave this testimony — and probably the person or persons who shared it with ABC — claim to believe that they witnessed that Trump almost murdered his Vice President, someone who had been just as (or in Scavino’s case, almost as) loyal as they had been.
This trial cannot get underway soon enough for me.
Jeff Sharlet posted a long thread on Saturday reflecting on reporters’ initial reaction to his use of the the term “fascism” in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” One element dovetails with a post I’d already prepped from Jessica Valenti’s “Abortion, Every Day” substack.
When I launched THE UNDERTOW I did an event w/ a NYT politics reporter who scoffed at use of "fascism." When pressed, he didn't seem to know what it means. Here's my definition, informed by years of reading and… "fieldwork." With illustrations! A thread. 1/ pic.twitter.com/3KvuKLqIzX
“The anti-abortion movement is launching a national campaign to trick women into carrying doomed pregnancies to term,” Vessica Valenti wrote in October in a post titled “Calculated Cruelty.” She summarized it in a followup post on Friday and cautions that the movement has moved upstream of abortion clinic protests to targeting prenatal testing that might reveal fatal fetal abnormalities:
The short version, though, is that a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country are working together to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, and to do away with the prenatal testing that provides those diagnoses. They’re not just targeting legislation, but individual women—embedding themselves in hospitals, doctors’ offices and anywhere else patients might be getting bad news about their pregnancy.
Worst of all, these groups are calling it “prenatal diagnosis counseling” and perinatal hospice care*—manipulating women in their most vulnerable life moments under the guise of offering real help. That characterization is also politically strategic: it means that when Democrats oppose funding to anti-abortion groups that lie to women about their fetal diagnoses, the GOP can claim that they’re actually callously refusing women counseling and care.
Crisis pregnancy centers are going underground, Valenti suggests. Or rather, planting “moles” inside traditional medicine. The anti-abortion movement “has rejected ‘viable’ and ‘nonviable’, and is working to get legislators and medical professionals to do the same” to further sow confusion. But more than that.
“The goal isn’t just to confuse and mislead people about their pregnancies, but to divorce abortion from healthcare—bolstering the lie that abortion is never necessary to save someone’s health or life,” Valenti writes.
The cruelty of what this means in practice cannot be overstated. Because conservatives’ strategy to stop women from ending doomed pregnancies isn’t just legislative—it’s about ensuring individual patients never know the truth about their diagnoses in the first place.
Consider the heartlessness it takes to go to someone who has just been given the worst news of their life and then lie to them about what it means. Or to keep that information from them entirely: one of the goals of this initiative is to make it difficult, if not impossible, for pregnant women to get prenatal tests at all.
What does this look like?
This week, The Catholic Spirit spoke to Dr. Robin Pierucci, a neonatologist who works with Be Not Afraid, one of the groups behind this anti-choice campaign. I want you to read what she says to patients who have just found out that their pregnancies aren’t viable: “Congratulations.”
“I love reminding them that the first diagnosis is, ‘it’s a baby,’ and no other diagnosis ever negates diagnosis number one. The baby is inherently valuable and worthy of our love.”
I’m going to say this with all the restraint I have in my soul: I cannot believe someone hasn’t knocked this lady out. I mean really. Congratulations??
The effort is organized. They are drafting legislation and pushing for federal and state funding for “perinatal hospice nurses.”
Valenti cautions, “Republicans know what they’re doing. They know that their laws will hurt and kill women. And for all their rhetoric about saving babies, they also know that more infants will die as a result of this work.”
Don’t ever let people forget that Republicans are willing to watch women and babies suffer and die in service to their cause. And their cause has never, and will never, be us.
Getting back to Sharlet, in addition to a “mythological past rooted in grievance,” several other myths are central to fascism: family, purity, whiteness, “cleverness” (transgressiveness as displays of courage), and “a reverence for violence as a purifying force, as an exhilarating, even titillating experience.” The recipe employs conspiracy theories as a binder.
Another feature that will be present if it’s fascism: misogyny, not just as a constant, but as an element of a purity-based nationalism. I call it gender nationalism.
Sharlet admits that in writing “The Undertow … I used to think full-fledged fascism wan’t possible in the U.S. Not because of democracy; because of fundamentalism. The missing ingredient, I thought, was cult of personality. We’d never switch out Christ for a man. I was wrong.”
Sharlet summarizes:
So, “fascism”: A “purity” myth. A nationalist myth. Misogyny. All concentrated in a cult of personality, sanctified thru violence deemed not only necessary but thrilling, a militant eroticism.
The point of “The Undertow” is that so much of this movement is operating below the radar. The New Apostolic Reformation, as Paul Rosenberg reminded Salon readers last week, does the same. Researcher Fred Clarkson warns that this is deliberate, “They are wily because they are worried that the rest of society will figure out who they are and what they are up to.”
*Note: In light of (I am loathe to say, “in honor of”) the 3rd anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, I am re-posting this piece, originally published March 25th, 2023.
Castle by the sea, fig. 1: Richard Nixon’s “La Casa Pacifica” (California)Castle by the sea, fig. 2: Donald Trump’s “Mar A Lago” (Florida).
There’s an old theatrical performer’s axiom that goes “Always leave ‘em wanting more.” In August of 1974, President Richard Nixon made his Watergate-weary exit from the American political stage with a nationally televised resignation soliloquy and left ‘em wanting more…answers. Any immediate hopes for an expository epilogue to this 5-year long usurpation of the Constitution and Shakespearean tragedy were abruptly dashed one month later when President Gerald Ford granted him a full pardon. Like King Lear, the mad leader slunk back to his castle by the sea and out of public view. […]
[Actor Frank Langella] uncannily captures the essence of Nixon’s contradictions and complexities; the supreme intelligence, the grandiose pomposity and the congenital craftiness, all corroded by the insidious paranoia that eventually consumed his soul, and by turn, the soul of the nation.
In a 2019 CNN panel discussion regarding lessons learned from Nixon’s ill-fated second term, former Watergate Special Prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste had this to say:
“As I said in my book, written shortly after I left the office [as Special Prosecutor] …For the future, the lessons of Watergate are wonderful, in that the system worked–in this circumstance…but they almost didn’t work. For the future, does it take something more than what we have experienced in Watergate [regarding] the type of evidence: demonstrative, incredibly powerful evidence of criminal wrongdoing for a President of the United States to be put in a position of either resigning, or certainly [being] impeached and convicted?”
Panel member Carl Bernstein was more succinct, offering this take:
“The system worked in Watergate. But it worked ultimately because there was a ‘smoking gun tape’. It’s very questionable whether the system would have worked without that gun.”
Bernstein was referring to Nixon’s self-incriminating statements regarding a coverup and obstruction of justice…captured for posterity via a secret recording system the President himself had arranged to be set up in order to document all his Oval Office conversations.
I probably don’t need to remind you who the occupant of the White House was in 2019.
Several days after that CNN panel discussion aired (45 years after Nixon resigned), the media, members of Congress and concerned citizens found themselves poring over the 400 pages of the highly anticipated Mueller Report (officially titled as Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election) and asking themselves the $64,000 question:
“Is there a ‘smoking gun’ buried somewhere in here…or a reasonable facsimile thereof?”
As we’ve learned in the fullness of time, in regards to allegations of “conspiracy” or “coordination” between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, the Mueller report concluded that the investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”. However, it also said that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred “in sweeping and systematic fashion”.
As for obstruction of justice allegations, the report “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, [and] it also does not exonerate him”. On the latter point, the “investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations”.
The report also states that once Trump was aware that he was being investigated for obstruction of justice, he started “public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the president, while in private, the president engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.”
With the spectre of criminal charges hanging over his third bid for the White House, Donald Trump has scheduled a massive rally in Texas this weekend.
The campaign event, planned for Saturday, marks the former president’s return to a traditionally conservative state in which he remains very popular.
But his decision to hold the rally in Waco – best known for an armed standoff 30 years ago – has raised eyebrows.
The 1993 tragedy is seen as a landmark event for the American far-right.
A city of about 140,000 people in the heart of Texas, Waco is celebrated these days as host to Baylor University, the Dr Pepper Museum and the home-improvement reality show Fixer Upper.
Three decades ago, however, it was where FBI agents, the US military and Texas law enforcement laid siege to a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians.
The small, insular Christian sect was led at the time by David Koresh, 33, an apocalyptic prophet who allegedly believed he was the only person who could interpret the Bible’s true meaning.
Under Koresh, the Branch Davidians had stockpiled weapons in order to become an “Army of God”.
Authorities intended to conduct a surprise daylight raid on 28 February 1993 and arrest Koresh, but what ensued was a 51-day standoff that left 76 people dead, including more than 20 children and four federal agents. […]
Two years after the siege, Timothy McVeigh – a young man who had shown his support at Waco and became fixated with the federal response as evidence of an impending New World Order – bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring nearly 700 others. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history.
The raid also had an impact on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who – as a young radio host in 1998 – organised a campaign to rebuild the Branch Davidians’ chapel as a memorial to those who had died. Mr Jones was among the most prominent early voices to back Mr Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign.
“Waco still resonates in this anti-government space as something that shows the federal government doesn’t protect people, is out to violate their civil rights, is out to take their guns,” [co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism non-profit Heidi] Beirich said.
“Nowadays that very much feeds into the ‘deep state’ conspiracies that we see on the far-right; the attacks on the FBI; the idea that federal law enforcement is a weapon of Democratic presidents.”
Mr Trump has often drawn on these frustrations, painting himself as the victim of a secret cabal of government operatives and effectively tearing down the walls that separated the mainstream Republican Party from its more extremist and radical fringes.
The former president’s sense of victimhood has only intensified since he left office. His conspiracies about the 2020 election still abound and he has framed the legal action he is facing on multiple fronts as an effort to destroy him.
Depending upon whom you might ask, MOVE was an “organization”, a “religious cult”, a “radical group”, or all of the above. The biggest question in my mind (and one the film doesn’t necessarily delve into) is whether it was another example of psychotic entelechy. So what is “psychotic entelechy”, exactly? Well, according to Stan A. Lindsay, the author of Psychotic Entelechy: The Dangers of Spiritual Gifts Theology, it would be
…the tendency of some individuals to be so desirous of fulfilling or bringing to perfection the implications of their terminologies that they engage in very hazardous or damaging actions.
In the context of Lindsay’s book, he is expanding on some of the ideas laid down by literary theorist Kenneth Burke and applying them to possibly explain the self-destructive traits shared by the charismatic leaders of modern-day cults like The People’s Temple, Order of the Solar Tradition, Heaven’s Gate, and The Branch Davidians. He ponders whether all the tragic deaths that resulted should be labeled as “suicides, murders, or accidents”.
Keeping Lindsay’s definition of “psychotic entelechy” in mind:
“Potential death and destruction”?
One could also ask if “MAGA” is an “organization”, a “religious cult”, a “radical group”, or all of the above. I mean, they do have a flag:
I’m just asking questions.
Nixon famously stated in the David Frost interviews, “I’m saying that when the president does it…it’s not illegal.” Mind you, he made that statement several years after he had resigned from the office of the president in shame, ending a decades-long political career in the most humiliating manner imaginable. Yet he never publicly apologized for any of the questionable actions he engaged in while serving as the President of the United States.
If that pathology reminds you of somebody else…perhaps a specific “somebody” currently vying for the presidency (yet again), you will not be surprised to learn that there is a disturbingly prescient link between Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump, in this letter:
Nightmare fuel.
How ironic that Nixon, the man who many historians posit lost his 1960 presidential bid because he was not as telegenic as JFK and never did get the hang of the medium (even once he eventually became the leader of the free world) was nonetheless canny enough to recognize a master manipulator of the idiot box when his wife saw Trump on a TV show.
As this post goes to press, tonight’s scheduled episode of Richard Nixon’s Ghost Presents: The Donald Trump Show will have just wrapped up on C-SPAN …live and direct from Waco, Texas.
Howard Beale: “Why me?”
Arthur Jensen: “Because you’re on television, dummy.”
Which brings me to why I felt this was the perfect week to pull out my dusty DVD of Robert Altman’s brilliant (and underappreciated) 1984 film adaptation of Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone’s one-man play Secret Honor (****) to take it for a spin on current events.
Originally titled as “Secret Honor: The Last Testament of Richard M. Nixon” when it opened in 1983 at Los Angeles Actors’ Theater, the film is a fictional monologue by Nixon, set in his post-presidential New Jersey office. Part confessional, part autobiographical, and (large) part batshit-crazy postcards from the edge rant, it’s an astonishing piece of writing; a pitch-perfect 90-minute distillation of Nixon’s dichotomy.
Philip Baker Hall (most recognizable from the Paul Thomas Anderson films Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia) pulls out all the stops in a tour-de-force turn reprising his stage role.
His Nixon is at once darkly brooding and explosively feral, pacing his claustrophobic office like a caged animal, swigging Chivas Regal and alternately pleading his “case” before an unseen Court of Public Opinion and howling at the moon (not dissimilar to how late night TV satirists envisioned Donald Trump pacing the Oval Office, wolfing cheeseburgers and unleashing Tweet storms from the Id).
Nixon, who is taping his monologue on a cassette recorder (in a blackly comic reference to his purported technical ineptitude, he spends the first several minutes of the film fumbling and cursing while trying to figure out how to work it) largely speaks in the first person, but oddly switches to the third at times, referring to his “client” whenever he addresses “your honor” (it’s no secret Trump often refers to himself in the third person).
The word salad soliloquies Nixon utters as he prowls the long dark night of his soul in arctic desolation share spooky parallels with the word salad soliloquies that Trump bellows as he prowls podiums in the full light of day at his public rallies.
Nixon frequently rants at his “enemies”. He is particularly obsessed with “those goddam Kennedys”. This is one of the more revealing insights into Nixon’s psychology contained in Freed and Stone’s screenplay; Nixon, ever self-conscious about his modest Quaker roots, is obviously both resentful and envious of the Kennedys’ privileged patrician upbringing, Ivy League education, movie-star charisma, and physical attractiveness.
He also lights into the other usual suspects in his orbit: Henry Kissinger, President Eisenhower, liberals, “East coast shits”, Jews, the FBI, and the media (you know…the “deep state” and “fake news”).
In rare moments of lucidity, he sadly recalls the untimely deaths of his brothers (Arthur, who died in 1925 at age 7, and Harold, who died in 1933 at age 23, both from TB) and speaks tenderly to the portrait of his late mother (although it gets weird when he refers to himself as her “loving dog”…and promptly begins to bark).
Hall is mesmerizing; while he doesn’t physically resemble Nixon, he so expertly captures his essence that by the end of the piece, he is virtually indistinguishable from the real item. It takes substantial acting chops to carry an entire film; Hall has got them in spades.
Film adaptations of stage plays can be problematic, especially in a chamber piece. But since this is, after all, Robert Altman…not to worry. He cleverly utilizes the limited props to his full advantage; for example, the four CCTV monitors in the office pull double duty as both a metaphor for Nixon’s paranoia and a hall of mirrors representing his multiple personalities (shades of the symbology in Pete Townshend’s rock opera Quadrophenia).
It also helps that Hall’s performance is anything but static; he moves relentlessly about the set (in a supplemental interview on the Criterion DVD, Hall recalls the original running time of the play as 2 ½ hours…I can’t begin to imagine the mental and physical stamina required to deliver a performance of that intensity night after night). DP Pierre Mignot deserves major kudos for his fluid tracking shots.
Watching the film again in context of all the drama and angst surrounding the ongoing saga of former POTUS/current presidential hopeful Donald J. Trump, I was struck by both its timelessness as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked power and corruption, and its timeliness as a reminder of what democracy looks like at its lowest ebb-which is where we may be now (sadly).
As Oliver Stone reminded us in the closing credits of JFK: What is past is prologue. Stay tuned.
You have to watch whole thing. He is the dumbest man to ever obtain the presidency. He’s basically saying that Lincoln wanted to be famous and so he refused to negotiate and started the war. The entire comment is so incredibly ignorant, shallow and basically infantile it’s stunning:
Trump on The Civil War: I’m so attracted to seeing it. There was something that could’ve been negotiated… Abraham Lincoln, if he negotiated it, we wouldn’t know who Lincoln was. He wouldn’t have been the Abraham Lincoln. But that would’ve been ok. pic.twitter.com/RbmnXCvypI
Any “negotiation” he would have entered into would have ended up allowing slavery to expand to the entire country. That’s how good he is.
He cannot learn. This isn’t the first time he’s made an ass out of himself with this issue. Here he is from 2017:
“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Examiner, according to a transcript released Monday. “People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
Trump ruminated after lauding Jackson, the populist president whom he and his staff have cited as a role model. He suggested that if Jackson had been president “you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.”
Jackson had been dead for 16 years when the civil war broke out.
By the way, Putin was invading Ukraine during the entire Trump presidency. If he is president again he will also “negotiate” that one by giving western Europe to Putin. Who knows? Maybe Alaska too. As long as Putin says he’s great he’ll say he got a good deal.
If I adopted MSNBC’s policies against showing Trump or his followers spreading lies, I wouldn’t post that. I have more respect for my audience. I think you’re all smart enough to be able to understand why I do it. These videos are an example of how cultists think and how some of them can possibly come to understand how illogical their thought processes are:
“People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world,” William J. Bernstein writes, in “The Delusions of Crowds” (Atlantic Monthly). Instead, they “rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.”
Bernstein’s book, a survey of financial and religious manias, is inspired by Charles Mackay’s 1841 work, “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Mackay saw crowd dynamics as central to phenomena as disparate as the South Sea Bubble, the Crusades, witch hunts, and alchemy. Bernstein uses the lessons of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to elucidate some of Mackay’s observations, and argues that our propensity to go nuts en masse is determined in part by a hardwired weakness for stories. “Humans understand the world through narratives,” he writes. “However much we flatter ourselves about our individual rationality, a good story, no matter how analytically deficient, lingers in the mind, resonates emotionally, and persuades more than the most dispositive facts or data.”
It’s important to note that Bernstein is referring not just to the stories told by cults but also to ones that lure people into all manner of cons, including financial ones. Not all delusions are mystical. Bernstein’s phrase “a good story” is possibly misleading, since a lot of stories peddled by hucksters and cult leaders are, by any conventional literary standard, rather bad. What makes them work is not their plot but their promise: Here is an answer to the problem of how to live. Or: Here is a way to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice. In both cases, the promptings of common sense—Is it a bit odd that aliens have chosen just me and my friends to save from the destruction of America? Is it likely that Bernie Madoff has a foolproof system that can earn all his investors ten per cent a year?—are effectively obscured by the loveliness of the fantasy prospect. And, once you have entered into the delusion, you are among people who have all made the same commitment, who are all similarly intent on maintaining the lie.
The process by which people are eventually freed from their cult delusions rarely seems to be accelerated by the interventions of well-meaning outsiders. Those who embed themselves in a group idea learn very quickly to dismiss the skepticism of others as the foolish cant of the uninitiated. If we accept the premise that our beliefs are rooted in emotional attachments rather than in cool assessments of evidence, there is little reason to imagine that rational debate will break the spell.
The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves. The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether. Especially if cult life is proving unpleasant, the capacity for critical thought can reassert itself. Rothschild interviews several QAnon followers who became disillusioned after noticing “a dangling thread” that, once pulled, unravelled the whole tapestry of QAnon lore. It may seem unlikely that someone who has bought into the idea of Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children can be bouleversé by, say, a trifling error in dates, but the human mind is a mysterious thing. Sometimes it is a fact remembered from grade school that unlocks the door to sanity. One of the former Scientologists interviewed in Alex Gibney’s documentary “Going Clear” reports that, after a few years in the organization, she experienced her first inklings of doubt when she read L. Ron Hubbard’s account of an intergalactic overlord exploding A-bombs in Vesuvius and Etna seventy-five million years ago. The detail that aroused her suspicions wasn’t especially outlandish. “Whoa!” she remembers thinking. “I studied geography in school! Those volcanoes didn’t exist seventy-five million years ago!”
I expect that most of the people Klepper interviews never give another thought to what he said. But you can tell that few of them are startled enough by what he’s led them to (without being hostile in any way) that they realize they may have gone down the wrong rabbit hole.
This was 90 minutes after barricades were breached & 60 minutes after it was a full scale riot w/officers being beaten. During this 90 minutes people inside the WH, Congress & his own family begged him to tell them to stop. Instead, while they were hunting Pence, he posted this. pic.twitter.com/d2jmGez7tl
Most Republican officials know that he’s lying. The election was not stolen. They knew it then and they know it now. They are fine with this because they believe it benefits them.
Maybe they could take a stand as to what reality really is in that headline? And maybe they could be just a little bit more assertive about it in the piece as well?
Rarely in American politics has a leading presidential candidate made such grave accusations about a rival: warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution. Claiming that he is eager to persecute political rivals. Calling him a dire threat to democracy.
Those arguments have come from President Biden’s speeches, including his forceful address on Friday, as he hammers away at his predecessor. But they are also now being brazenly wielded by Donald J. Trump, the only president to try to overthrow an American election.
Three years after the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump and his campaign are engaged in an audacious attempt to paint Mr. Biden as the true menace to the nation’s foundational underpinnings. Mr. Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.
The result has been a salvo of recriminations from the top candidates in each party, including competing events to mark Saturday’s third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol.
The eagerness from each man to paint the other as an imminent threat signals that their potential rematch this year will be framed as nothing short of a cataclysmic battle for the future of democracy — even as Mr. Trump tries to twist the very idea to suit his own ends.
“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him — not America, not you,” Mr. Biden said Friday, speaking near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”
On Friday evening, at his own rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, Mr. Trump fired back, calling Mr. Biden’s remarks “pathetic fear-mongering” and again accusing him, without any evidence, of wielding federal law enforcement to attack his political opponents.
“They’ve weaponized government, and he’s saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Mr. Trump said incredulously.
The early maneuvering by Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump points to an election that will be fought on extraordinary ground. While the economy, abortion rights and the ages of the candidates are all expected to be central campaign issues, both men argue that what is fundamentally at stake is whether the country’s nearly 250-year-old system of government endures.
How nice of them to help Trump frame his bogus “I know you are but what am I” claims as just another interpretation of the threat to democracy. Just saying “brazenly” and issuing a passing disclaimer like “without any evidence” does not properly convey reality. And yet, they present this story as a battle for reality!
This is going to be a problem. The reflexive impulse to “be fair” leads to whitewashing what Trump is doing which is lying while Biden is accurately reflecting exactly what Trump is doing.
Yes, Trump is going to say that Biden is a threat to democracy. He’s been saying the elections are all rigged for Democrats sits he first started running for president. But that doesn’t make it true and the media is going to have to stop the “both sides” their coverage of this or many voters are going to believe that their arguments cancel each other out and get more cynical and more polarized and our country will slip further and further away from political sanity.
