After fighting tooth and nail for years to keep his tax returns secret, Donald Trump has been thwarted. Not by one of several court orders that he turn them over, but by an unnamed source who gave them to the New York Times.
(Anticipating angry reactions, I will say here that based on my very brief research, whoever leaked the tax returns probably broke federal law. However, the Times is very likely safe in publishing them on First Amendment grounds.)
Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.
He is in a years-long fight with the IRS over a $72.9 million tax refund he claimed and received. If he loses, he’ll owe $100 million or more.
The majority of his main businesses report losing millions, and in some cases tens of millions, every year.
Over the next four years, he is personally responsible for more than $300 million in loans coming due.
There is far more information in the article, of course, including the revelations that he wrote off as business expenses $70,000 worth of hairstyling during his time on The Apprentice, as well as the fees paid to the defense attorney who represented him during the Russia investigation.
The report has touched off a firestorm of speculation and political calculations. The president has called it fake news. (If the leaked returns are fake, he could easily set the record straight by releasing his actual tax returns.) There are massive amounts of information stemming from this reporting, and hundreds of rabbit trails to follow. I want to present you with some of the perspectives and possibilities I find most compelling and important to consider:
First, the president’s attorney points out that he did pay some income taxes in the 15 years preceding the election; that’s why he was able to claim a $72.9 million tax refund. (The second half of that sentence seems to me to cancel out the first, but I wanted to note it.)
Many of the president’s defenders are pointing out that virtually everyone takes advantage of every method possible for reducing tax liability, and Trump is no different; in fact, he is just better at it than everyone else. I suppose this is possible. If true, and legal, we need major tax reform, because there is no universe where it is fair for an actual billionaire to pay less in taxes than my family, and approximately half the families in the US. But I think three other scenarios are far more likely: 1. He is a terrible, terrible businessman. 2. He has committed tax fraud. 3. He is a terrible, terrible businessman who has committed tax fraud.
Many of Trump’s detractors are claiming these returns prove he is broke, and not really a billionaire after all. Forbes disagrees, saying he is still a billionaire, albeit one who is carrying over $1 billion in total debt, and that this makes his $750 tax payments even more scandalous.
Two Trump truisms in one here: His criticisms are always projection, and there is always a tweet.
There’s a lot more to this story than just the taxes, though. People who know a lot about security clearances are alarmed at the high level of debt carried personally by the president. Mark Zaid, a verified account on Twitter, is an attorney specializing in national security, security clearances, and government investigations. He had this to say:
Jason Kander, attorney and former Secretary of State for Missouri, said this:
I’m not aware of any evidence that the president is being blackmailed or having his debts exploited by foreign interests, but it’s obviously a concern whenever anyone is being considered for any level of security clearance—let alone the very highest. When the person with that highest clearance has fought for years to keep those debts hidden, concern turns to red flags and alarm bells.
The most extreme reactions have been those claiming that Trump has committed crimes in his tax and business dealings. I’m taking these allegations with a big grain of salt, but Michael Bromwich joining in really caught my attention. He is a former Inspector General of the Department of Justice, as well as former prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, which I’ve written about before. Of all the people who could comment on this topic, he is certainly one of the most knowledgeable. And he did not mince words:
He is referencing the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel memo, which set the standard that a sitting president cannot be indicted. He’s agreeing with those who believe Trump may refuse to leave office even if he loses the election, because it’s the only way to protect himself from facing charges. Others have wondered whether he may resign if he loses, making Pence president temporarily—long enough to pardon Trump for any crimes. This is, of course, all speculation. I only mention it because I believe someone of Bromwich’s stature gives this conjecture a lot more weight than your standard rumor.
It remains to be seen whether these revelations will affect the election. A lot of people who voted for him may be surprised to learn that the brilliant businessman they hired because he puts America first actually paid far more in taxes in 2017 to Panama, India, and the Philippines than he did to the US, and that most of his business ventures are hemorrhaging cash. It probably won’t. The vast majority of voters have already made up their minds. What is less certain is what will happen after the election, especially if Trump loses. Plenty of rich celebrities have been convicted of tax evasion, and even done prison time, but to my knowledge, no former presidents.
Regardless of what happens, I just keep thinking about all the things my family could have done this year if we’d only had to pay $750 in income tax.
The pre-election event I most feared has happened. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died.
Her now-empty seat on the Supreme Court has the potential to polarize our deeply divided nation even further. The last Supreme Court confirmation hearings were so poisonous I nearly quit Facebook. I saw Christine Blasey-Ford called a “lying skank,” and Brett Kavanaugh called a rapist and a “rich white man throwing a fit because for the first time in his life, he might not get what he wants,” by people who’d never met them and knew absolutely nothing about them except which political team they were batting for. I watched Senators whose job was to discover the truth instead using their time to showboat and create soundbites for their bases.
How did something as fundamental to our system of government as seating Supreme Court justices become so contentious? Why are Republicans like Lindsey Graham willing to do a complete 180 on filling this seat when he explicitly said he wouldn’t, and we have all the receipts?
“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination." pic.twitter.com/quD1K5j9pz
“That’s gonna be the new rule,” he said, after spelling out the exact situation we now find ourselves in. Yet he has already announced that he will do the opposite of what he promised, and support any nominee President Trump puts forward now. Why would a Senator who is up for reelection take such a huge risk: being seen by voters as a shameless opportunist and proven liar?
It wasn’t always like this.
Justice Antonin Scalia, a consummate originalist and hero to conservatives, was nominated by Reagan and confirmed by the Senate in 1986 by a 98-0 vote. Seven years later, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would become the leader of the liberal wing of the Court, was confirmed by a 96-3 vote. (If you are unfamiliar with the beautiful friendship between these two ideologically opposed justices, you should read this.)
So what has changed? There are entire books written about this topic, but let’s just hit the highlights:
Robert Bork: In 1987, just a year after Scalia was seated, Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Court. Senator Ted Kennedy attacked the nominee with blistering accusations based on some of Bork’s previous rulings, public statements, and his role in the Watergate scandal: “In Robert Bork’s America, there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women, and in our America there should be no seat on the Supreme Court for Robert Bork.” Bork’s fate was sealed, and his confirmation failed in a 42-58 vote, mostly along party lines. Democrats saw this as a righteous victory, keeping a dangerous and backwards ideology out of the Supreme Court. But to Republicans, it was a vicious political hit job whose unfairness was so unprecedented that it became a new word:
Clarence Thomas: Four years later, Democrats again hotly contested a Republican president’s nominee: Clarence Thomas. A former Thomas employee, Anita Hill, came forward with lurid allegations of sexual harassment, which Thomas categorically denied. Predictably, the Democrats generally believed Hill while the Republicans sided with Thomas. However, Democrats chose not to filibuster; Thomas received an up-down vote, and was confirmed to the Court—just barely: 52-48.
Miguel Estrada: In 2001, George W Bush nominated Miguel Estrada to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the court considered by many to be the second most important court in the country; more Supreme Court justices have come from there than any other court. Estrada had the support of a majority of the Senate, but Democrats took the extraordinary step of filibustering his appointment, at the request of liberal interest groupswho called Estrada “especially dangerous” because “he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.” In other words, Democrats didn’t want Republicans to put the first Hispanic—a conservative—on the Supreme Court. Democrats claimed Estrada failed to adequately answer their questions.
Using, then killing, the filibuster: Senate Democrats went on to filibuster a total of ten Bush circuit court nominees, all of whom would have been confirmed if they’d been given a vote in the Senate. In the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen writes, “After Democrats won control of the Senate and the White House, they set about trying to fill court vacancies — particularly on the D.C. Circuit — with judges so left-wing they knew they could not meet the 60-vote ‘standard.’ When Republicans (following the precedent Democrats had set) filibustered some of President Barack Obama’s nominees, Democrats again broke precedent and eliminated the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominees.” This is known as the “nuclear option.” Normally, it takes 60 votes to end debate in the Senate and move to a vote. But with the nuclear option, the majority party can suspend the normal rules and kill the filibuster with a simple majority vote. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) was unrepentant.
To put it simply, Democrats set a new, more vicious precedent. When Republicans followed that precedent, Democrats went even further, using the nuclear option (what Reid euphemistically called “filibuster reform”) to force through more judges.
His smug victory would be short-lived.
Merrick Garland: In 2016, Barack Obama’s final year in office, he nominated Merrick Garland to replace the deceased Justice Scalia. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) refused to even hold hearings for Garland, saying his decision was “about a principle, not a person.” He claimed that with an election coming up so soon (8 months), “The American people are perfectly capable of having their say on this issue, so let’s give them a voice. Let’s let the American people decide.”
McConnell’s fellow Republican Senators agreed. Chuck Grassley said, “The American people shouldn’t be denied a voice.” John Cornyn said, “The only way to empower the American people and ensure they have a voice is for the next President to make the nomination to fill this vacancy.” James Inhofe said, “I will oppose this nomination as I firmly believe we must let the people decide the Supreme Court’s future.” Many others all said the same basic thing.
True to their word, Senate Republicans held the seat empty for a record 422 days: the longest vacancy since Congress settled on a 9-seat Supreme Court in 1869.
Neil Gorsuch: Donald Trump’s nominee to fill Scalia’s seat faced a Democratic filibuster. Republicans responded by taking Harry Reid’s “filibuster reform” one step further, extending it to Supreme Court confirmations. They used the nuclear option to change Senate rules, and confirmed Gorsuch 54-45. As Thiessen explains, “Had Democrats not tried to block Gorsuch, they would still have the filibuster. And Republicans, who now have just a single-vote majority, would have a much more difficult time mustering the votes to change Senate rules today. But thanks to Democrats’ miscalculations, the GOP doesn’t have to.”
Brett Kavanaugh: I don’t have the stomach to do a deep dive into this ugly debacle. Personally, I found Christine Blasey-Ford a compelling and sympathetic witness whose story suffered from numerous inconsistencies, and later was mortally wounded by her own attorney, who admitted her political motivations at a feminist conference: “When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him…it is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.” I thought Brett Kavanaugh hurt his credibility with his combative testimony, but that ultimately the charges against him were never satisfactorily proven.
But it doesn’t matter what I think. I watched in horror as seemingly every other person in America became 100% convinced they knew the absolute truth of what did or didn’t happen that night so many years ago, and ruthlessly judged half the country based on that certainty. The Kavanaugh hearings illustrated like nothing before how hopelessly divided by tribalism we’d become.
I have only anecdotal evidence, but the Kavanaugh hearings seemed to galvanize Republicans who’d been on the fence about Trump.
The minority Democrats, without the filibuster, were powerless to stop a vote on Kavanaugh. He was confirmed 50-48.
Which brings us to today. Now, with six weeks left before the election, the Republican White House and Senate find themselves with an empty seat on the Supreme Court. Four years after insisting that the American people should make the choice in this situation via the election—indeed, after giving their word that they would not fill a seat in this exact situation—they are poised to prove that they never meant a word of it.
The truth is they denied Merrick Garland a vote because they didn’t want him on the Court, and they had the power to stop him. They’ll fill RBG’s seat despite their promises because they want to, and they have the power.
They learned all about using your power to get what you want, precedent be damned, from the Democrats. Some of whom, by the way, are already threatening to “pack the Court” once they retake the White House and Senate. They can just change the rules yet again, adding more seats to the Court and filling them with left-leaning justices. It’s a plan RBG condemned: “If anything would make the court look partisan,” she said, “it would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'”
But Democrats are rightly enraged by Republicans’ reneging on their promises and lighting their supposed principles on fire the instant it’s in their interest—which Republicans say they’re doing because Democrats would do the same.
And so it’s a race to the bottom, with each side becoming ever more brazenly committed to gaining and keeping power at any cost.
Something has to give. Someone has to choose to compromise, to find some common ground, or this will not end well for America.
So far, I haven’t blamed the president for COVID deaths. Blaming elected leaders for citizens’ deaths is a low blow, and almost always hyperbole. Yes, I’ve said he’s mismanaged our response to the pandemic; I’ve said he wasted precious time; he’s obviously undermined his own experts repeatedly. But I thought his behavior was born of stubbornness and wishful thinking, not active malevolence.
I was being far too generous.
President Trump gave Bob Woodward—one half of the journalistic team that brought down Nixon—eighteen interviews, which Woodward recorded. He also encouraged White House officials to talk to Woodward, believing his upcoming book would be sympathetic to Trump. (I said he was malevolent; I didn’t say he was smart.) On February 7—February 7—he revealed the following:
“It goes through the air, Bob…you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed…It’s also more deadly than your—you know, your, even your strenuous flus. You know, people don’t realize, we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here. Who would ever think that, right? Pretty amazing. And then I say, well, is that the same thing? This is more deadly. This is 5 per—you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent. You know? So, this is deadly stuff.”
In the same interview, he said it could also kill young people as well as the elderly.
To recap, by February 7, Trump knew that coronavirus was passed through the air and therefore highly contagious, could kill anyone, and was at least five times deadlier than the flu. He knew.
Armed with this information, the president then did the following:
Feb 27: At a press conference, Trump says of COVID, “View this the same as the flu…Treat this like you treat the flu, and it’s gonna be fine.”
Feb 28: Rally in South Carolina, thousands attend. “Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” Trump tells them. “They tried the impeachment hoax,” he says, then lumps the virus in with Russia and impeachment: “And this is their new hoax.”
Mar 9: More than a month after telling Woodward the virus was at least five times deadlier than the flu, he tweeted this:
That was 190,978 deaths ago.
But people listen to him. They believe him. They believe in him. He is the President of the United States of America. I have personally heard directly from multiple Trump supporters that the virus is a hoax, that it’s a tool of Democrats and media to affect the election, that it’s no worse than the flu. Millions of Americans believe these things he told them. He has inarguably influenced people’s perception of risk, and therefore their behavior—which has almost certainly led to thousands upon thousands of deaths.
Over and over and over, the president downplayed the risk this virus posed to Americans. In other words, he deliberately lied to us. His supporters can’t simply deny it: he said it directly to Bob Woodward, on tape, on March 19. “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
That’s the line he and the GOP are sticking with—it’s his only conceivable defense. In fact, just yesterday he told Sean Hannity, “I don’t want to scare people.” So let’s take a closer look at how consistent he’s been in choosing not to scare Americans.
Very calming. Definitely wouldn’t lead to scenes like this in the Michigan legislature shortly after:
He doesn’t want to scare anyone, but you should know that Joe Biden is going to destroy your neighborhood and the American Dream.
Even back in 2016, he didn’t want to scare me, but did want to let me know that if I didn’t vote for him, I would get chaos, crime, and violence.
He turned out to be right about that one.
He doesn’t want to scare anyone, but this past Friday in New Hampshire he warned voters, “Just look at Joe Biden supporters on the street screaming and shouting at bystanders with unhinged, manic rage.”
In 2018, he wasn’t trying to scare Americans when he tweeted that “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border,” a caravan he characterized as “an invasion.”
Yes, President Trump does not want to scare anyone—unless it’s politically advantageous for him.
Any competent, ethical leader could have landed somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between “not panicking the populace” and “deliberately lying to Americans for months and giving half the country a drastically inaccurate understanding of the threat we face.”
Naturally, Trump has lashed out at the man he gave those eighteen interviews to, accusing him of a “political hit job,” calling his book “boring,” and referring to him as “rapidly fading Bob Woodward.” But the president is forgetting one of the natural laws of Trumpian physics: there is always a tweet.
I don’t know if any of this will move the needle. Trump famously bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters, and what seemed hyperbolic at the time has proven to be shockingly accurate.
But I keep coming back to those rallies. He knew how contagious it was; he knew how deadly it was, and he still filled those arenas with thousands of people who loved him, so he could hear them cheer and chant his name while he lied to them. He cared more about his own insatiable need for praise than his supporters’ lives.
Remember the few years our country spent hearing about the Trump campaign’s ties to, and possible collusion with, Russia? Remember how President Trump insisted the entire time that the whole thing was a hoax? A witch hunt? Remember when the Mueller Report finally came out, and the president claimed it totally exonerated him?
Only for Robert Mueller to respond repeatedly that his report did no such thing?
Have you seen how right-wing pundits, FOX News, and most of the GOP have enthusiastically embraced Trump’s claim that it was all a hoax?
Well. The GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee recently released its fifth and final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. And wow.
Before I dive into the report highlights, let’s look at a few other highlights (lowlights?) from Trump’s history with Russia and its presidentdictator-for-life, Vladimir Putin.
In 2007, private citizen Trump wrote a congratulatory letter to Putin after he was named TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year.” Trump wrote, “…you definitely deserve it,” followed by, “I am a big fan of yours!” underlined in black marker.
A few years later, in 2013, Trump wondered via tweet whether Vladimir would be attending the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and whether Putin would “become my new best friend?” Eight days later, he sent another letter, inviting Putin to be his “guest of honor” at the pageant. He handwrote a note in black marker at the bottom: “THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN!”
Fast-forward to a press conference in July, 2016, during the presidential campaign. Trump said he hoped that Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails while she was Secretary of State. He went on: “I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” He later claimed it was a joke, but it turned out Russia was listening. Robert Mueller’s investigation found that the first Russian attempt to hack Clinton’s server happened that same day.
Concern in the intelligence community mounted, fueled partially by the now-infamous Steele Dossier, put together by a former British intelligence agent. The president fired FBI director James Comey, and Congress appointed a special prosecutor to look into the allegations. Trump insisted the whole thing was a witch hunt, and some Republicans claimed the Mueller investigation was illegal. I’ll leave it to Ann Coulter, one of candidate Trump’s earliest and biggest supporters, to contradict them:
Throughout the investigation, Trump indignantly insisted there had been no collusion, and that the Mueller investigation was a hoax. And in July 2018, he stood in Helsinki next to Vladimir Putin and sided with him against the entire American intelligence community. “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he said. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” This was after Trump spent two hours with Putin. We don’t know what they discussed, because they were alone other than two interpreters, and the president has taken steps to keep the content of every private meeting he’s had with Putin secret, including from his own administration’s officials.
Now, for the new Senate Intel Committee report. Keep in mind: the GOP controls the Senate, and therefore leads this committee. Some of its key findings:
First, one that will please Trump and his supporters: the Steele Dossier lacked credibility; the FBI gave it “unjustified credence,” and kept using it after it should have been apparent that it was unreliable. I’m afraid this is the only positive piece of information in the report for the president.
Ukraine did not interfere in the 2016 election. The committee found no evidence to support this conspiracy theory—one Trump believed in and acted on to the point that it led to his impeachment.
Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, posed a “grave counterintelligence threat.” Manafort shared secret campaign strategy and polling information with Russian Konstantin Kilimnik—remember that name—with whom he had formed a “close and lasting relationship” while working in Ukraine. “The committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.” (Paul Manafort was convicted on eight felony counts in 2018.)
“Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer.” Kilimnik, mentioned over 800 times in the report, was also mentioned in the Mueller report as having ties to Russian intelligence. The Senate report goes further than Muller did, making clear Kilimnik was himself a Russian agent. And Trump’s campaign chair was secretly in frequent communication with him, sharing confidential information with him.
“Kilimnik almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election.” If you’re keeping track, this means that a Russian intelligence agent who was in close communication with the Trump campaign helped spread the false Ukraine story, which Trump tried to use to deflect blame from Russia. This alone is a vastly damning conclusion; in normal times it would constitute a massive scandal.
The Trump campaign used its relationship with Roger Stone to seek advance knowledge of when Wikileaks would drop hacked documents, and use them to Trump’s advantage. Stone was later convicted of seven felonies for witness tampering and lying to Congress about this very issue. But Trump commuted his sentence.
Trump lied in his written answers to Robert Mueller about Stone and Wikileaks. The president claimed he didn’t recall ever talking with Stone or anyone else about Wikileaks. But the (GOP-led!) committee says, “Despite Trump’s recollection, the Committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his Campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.” In fact, the campaign directed Stone to access inside knowledge from within Wikileaks regarding the timing of leak drops, which he did, and which he communicated directly to Trump.
At Trump’s request, Stone drafted at least 8 pro-Russia tweets for him in July 2016. Trump apparently really, really liked Russia and wanted to make a good impression on Putin.
Jay Sekulow (one of Trump’s personal attorneys) discussed a potential presidential pardon with Michael Cohen (a former Trump lawyer) multiple times after Cohen was indicted. Cohen testified the pardon idea had come from Trump through Sekulow. Dangling a pardon over someone who’s about to be put on trial for lying and doing other potentially illegal things for you? That’s a pretty big incentive to shut up and not cooperate with prosecutors. It’s also unethical as all get out.
The infamous meeting at Trump Tower, attended by Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner, was worse than we thought. It was “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government.”“The committee assesses that at least two participants in the June 9, 2016 meeting…have significant connections to the Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services,” the panel concluded. “The connections the committee uncovered, particularly regarding Veselnitskaya, were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.” So, that’s the president’s son and son-in-law taking a meeting with at least two people with significant, extensive, and concerning connections to the Russian government, specifically in order to get dirt on another American and get him elected. But the FBI was supposed to ignore this, and investigating it was a made-up hoax. Okay.
The committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Steve Bannon to federal prosecutors over their concerns that the three had misled the committee in their testimony. The referrals were made in 2019, but apparently no investigations ever happened.
The White House “significantly hampered and prolonged the Committee’s investigative effort.” The Trump administration did everything in its power to obstruct the Senate’s investigation. Donald Trump, Jr. ignored a subpoena until he realized the Committee was seriously considering holding him in contempt of Congress.
Committee Chair, Senator Marco Rubio, insists that they found no evidence of collusion. One wonders what exceedingly narrow definition of “collusion” the Committee used in order to come to that conclusion. Perhaps the same sort of tortured logic Senator Rubio employed when he insisted that even though the president had committed an impeachable offense, he shouldn’t be removed from office.
The Trump campaign eagerly sought and accepted help from Russians in our election, and actively shared confidential information directly with a Russian intelligence agent. At the very least, this report proves that the Russia investigation was no hoax. The president will never admit this, and his supporters will never believe it. But for anyone still open to the truth, this report makes it clear.
Update: Just since I posted this ten minutes ago, I learned that Steve Bannon has been arrested—by US Postal Service agents. (I admit: I did not know such people existed.) Bannon was Chief Executive Officer of Trump’s election campaign from August 2016, and afterword served as Chief Strategist in Trump’s administration until 2017. He is accused of defrauding donors to an online crowdfunding campaign called “We Build the Wall.”
In case you’ve lost count, that’s four Trump associates just in this article who’ve been arrested/convicted of felonies.
Now we come to it. I’ve known I’d have to write about this, and I’ve dreaded it. Normally, I’d say that who we vote for is personal, and nobody else needs to know. But I’ve been blogging about politics for the better part of a year now, and I felt it would be inauthentic to keep this decision to myself.
You all know, I’m sure, that my voting for Trump was never going to happen. In 2016, I voted for an independent candidate because neither Clinton nor Trump were acceptable choices. I rejected the “lesser of two evils” argument, partly because I found them both equally unacceptable, and partly because I wanted to cast my vote for a candidate, not just against another.
In the three and a half years since, Trump has continually shown me that I was right not to vote for him. I was convinced his performance as president would be bad, but I could never have predicted how abysmal, how shockingly, insanely bad it has turned out to be. His few conservative policy wins have not outweighed his many anti-conservative ones, and certainly not his erratic, counterproductive, self-serving mode of “leadership.”
I worried back then that a man like Trump would reflect poorly on the GOP, that his vices and low character would become synonymous with “Republican”—or worse, with “conservative” (even though he is nearly the polar opposite of a conservative.) I should have worried harder. Not only have his vices and low character continued and expanded, they’ve been excused, defended, and in many cases adopted by virtually the entire party.
By the time the impeachment trial was wrapping up, I was questioning whether I had been proven wrong in not voting for Hillary. Hear me out, conservatives. I don’t believe she would have been a good president. I share your visceral dislike and distrust of her. But if she had won, the party wouldn’t be in this mess. The Republican president wouldn’t bear the shame of impeachment. We wouldn’t have watched Republicans debase themselves by defending him with claims that were proven false over and over. We wouldn’t have seen a slew of Republican Senators admit that their leader had abused his power, and then vote to acquit him anyway. The entire Republican party would not now carry the stain of excusing Donald Trump’s inexcusable behavior over the course of this presidency. I’m convinced the party would be in infinitely better shape today if Hillary Clinton had won.
In early 2020, though I knew I wouldn’t vote for Trump, I still wasn’t sure who I’d vote for.
Then came the virus.
I watched the denial and dysfunction in Washington, watched the disease spread, watched the death toll rise, and suddenly, everything became very simple.
There has to be an adult in charge.
Before the virus, it was just politics. It was weighing principles against policies, and judges against moral judgments. Now, it’s life and death.
The pandemic made evident how very influential the President of the United States is, and how cataclysmic the results can be if the person in office is unfit to lead. We can’t keep a tantrum-throwing mantoddler at the wheel. Lives are at stake.
I keep hearing from Republicans and evangelicals that this is the most important election of our lifetimes. I’ve been hearing that about every election since 2000, but for once, I think they’re right. We can’t take four more years of this. The damage has already been too great, both to the GOP and to the nation.
I have never voted for a Democrat in my life.
I’m voting for Joe Biden.
I know this will strike my conservative readers as a betrayal. Please know I have agonized over this decision. Please allow me to explain my position.
The Republican Party has aggressive, stage four cancer. It has metastasized throughout the party. From the local level on up, the GOP is riddled with it. It will be fatal to the party unless something drastic changes.
Chemotherapy sucks. Nobody enjoys it. It makes you feel sick—often sicker than the cancer did. It’s basically poison, and it does some collateral damage to healthy parts of the body while it’s killing the cancer. But doctors prescribe it and patients take it because it’s better than dying.
Trumpism is the cancer. Biden is the chemo.
More accurately: an unequivocal electoral rejection of Trumpism is the chemo. Trump and his enablers need to be annihilated at the polls. The Republican party must pay so dearly for having embraced Trumpism that it never dares to do so again. That’s the only way for it to survive in any useful form.
Please understand this: I want the GOP to survive. We need (at least) two healthy, functioning political parties in this country to balance one another and represent Americans on both the left and right. We need a party that will hold back government overreach and keep taxes reasonable and vigorously defend the Bill of Rights.
But that party must have integrity. It must be trustworthy. It has to put the Constitution above any individual. The GOP has utterly abandoned truth, justice, and common sense in service to Donald Trump.
The party is full of cancer, and it needs chemo.
I disagree with Joe Biden on almost everything, policywise. Just one example: he supports California’s AB 5 law, which is ruining the livelihoods of a lot of freelancers, and which, if adopted federally, could probably bankrupt my family. But he is an adult. He is experienced. He has consistently displayed humanity and empathy—no one can make a compelling argument that he’s a malignant narcissist or a sociopath—and this alone makes him a far better choice than Donald Trump.
There are legitimate reasons to question my decision. I can hear many of you already. Let me address some of your rebuttals right now:
“But socialism!” Yes, the left is leaning more and more toward Marxism, and many don’t even hide it anymore. I’ll be honest: if Bernie had won the nomination, I wouldn’t be writing this article. I could not have brought myself to vote for a self-proclaimed socialist. Biden is not a Marxist. He may be left of us, friends, but he’s not a Marxist. Heck, just ask a Bernie bro how they feel about Biden. They hate his guts; he’s too centrist.
“What about Tara Reade?” I looked into her claims that Biden sexually assaulted her. If her accusations were believable, they would have been disqualifying. I don’t believe her.
“What about the hair-sniffing?”
Joe Biden does have a long habit of apparently invading the personal space of women and girls, and a Nevada assemblywoman says he made her feel uncomfortable when he smelled her hair and kissed the back of her head. I won’t offer a defense of this behavior. He ought to knock it off. I will say that if you believe this makes him unfit to be president, then I have some very bad news for you about Donald Trump. (Also, for the record, the woman in this photo calls Joe Biden a “close friend” and defends him.)
“What about Hunter Biden?” Biden’s son, Hunter, got kicked out of the Navy for using cocaine, divorced his wife to date his own brother’s widow, only to knock up another woman. He’s taken lucrative positions that were apparently bestowed on him solely due to his father’s prominence in the US government. Hunter Biden sounds like a real dirtbag. I’m definitely not voting for him.
“Isn’t he going senile?” Joe Biden has dropped some head-scratchers. And at 77, he’s no spring chicken. But he has struggled with a stutter since childhood, which can make some of his verbal blunders appear worse than they really are. And he has admitted he is a “gaffe machine.” I’m not going to ascribe to dementia what can be adequately explained by age and a stutter.
“What about abortion?” This one gave me more pause than all the rest combined. One of the reasons I’ve never voted for a Democrat is that I couldn’t justify giving my vote to someone who would advance abortion. (Many on the left believe conservatives oppose abortion because of a perverse desire to control women’s bodies. They are wrong. We believe abortion kills a unique and innocent human being, and therefore we oppose it.) I didn’t want to support any candidate who would hurt the pro-life cause. But I’ve come to believe that abortion is a spiritual and cultural issue more than a political issue. I didn’t learn until earlier this year that the number of abortions in the US has dropped every year since the Carter administration. It didn’t matter whether a Republican or Democrat was in office. Pro-life groups can make a much bigger difference by continuing to provide support for moms and babies than by voting for or against politicians.
(Also, I’ll note that under Trump, Republicans held the White House, the Senate, and the House for two years, and Planned Parenthood is still getting our tax dollars.)
Some of my pro-life friends will vehemently disagree. I understand. Unborn lives matter. But they are not the only lives that matter, and other lives are on the line, too; and as I noted, abortions are steadily decreasing regardless of who occupies the White House.
“Aren’t you flip-flopping by choosing the lesser of two evils now, after refusing to do that in 2016?” I suppose someone could make a pretty strong argument for that, yes. My defense is this: Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump has proven to be the most corrupt, incompetent, and unfit president in modern history. He has to go.
“Why not vote third party?” I wish I could—really, I do. The two party system is failing us. I hope I live to see it change. The Libertarian Party is running Jo Jorgensen, and honestly, most of her platform makes me feel all warm and tingly inside. If I thought she had any chance, this might be a very different article. In 2016 I did vote third party. But remember, my sole goal this year is to stop America’s bleeding and save the GOP by curb-stomping Trumpism. A third party vote won’t run up the score against Trump and his enablers. The cancer has spread too widely for me to adopt a “wait and see” strategy. We need chemo, stat. Also, if I were to vote third party and then Trump won reelection, I would feel guilty about it forever.
“Won’t he wreck the economy?” Conservatives rightfully fear Democrat rule due to their insatiable hunger for bigger federal programs requiring government expansion and massive tax hikes. Friends, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the economy is already wrecked. The good news is he’ll have his hands full trying to get it up and running smoothly again, and his more progressive goals will likely take a back seat. Don’t take my word for it: that’s what JPMorgan thinks.
“If Biden wins, America will be destroyed.” People keep telling me that if Joe Biden wins, America will be destroyed. (I’m not exaggerating; word for word, this sentiment is everywhere on the right.) It sounds really scary. How will he end America, I wonder? By running up the deficit past a trillion dollars? By growing the national debt by trillions and trillions of dollars? Maybe he’ll start a costly trade war with China. Or use the power of his office to threaten private companies and attack individual Americans. Will there be mass unemployment? Citizens rioting in the streets? Ruthless government crackdowns on peaceful protestors? Will he throw gasoline on the flames of racial tensions by defending the Confederate flag? Will he accomplish America’s destruction by alienating and abandoning our allies? Or by heaping praise on the world’s worst tyrants? Will he convince millions of citizens that the free press is their enemy, so that they become incapable of distinguishing facts from lies and conspiracy theories? Perhaps he’ll mismanage things so epically that most of the countries in the world will see the US as a disease-ridden pariah and ban Americans from entering. Will he focus more on his reelection prospects than Americans dying by the tens of thousands? Perhaps he’ll destroy America by arguing that a president is above the law, and abusing his office. Maybe he’ll even have the audacity to claim that his authority as president is total. I’ll bet his party will fall in line as he does all of these things and more, and refuse to hold him accountable.
Truly, this is a horrifying thought. Can you even imagine such an America?
We should definitely do whatever it takes to stop this.
In a move that’s drawn inevitable comparisons to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, Attorney General Bill Barr issued a press release after 9 pm on Friday night, announcing the replacement of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “…I thank Geoffrey Berman, who is stepping down after two-and-a-half years of service as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.”
In a surreal turn of events, an hour later, Berman released this statement:
This exchange is understandably rocking Washington. There is a lot going on in this story. Let me try to break it down for you:
First, you need to understand Attorney General Bill Barr. He is a man who has consistently used his power as head of the Justice Department to protect the president’s political interests and to shield him and his associates from legal consequences. Examples:
The widely-held belief among Republicans that the Mueller report totally exonerated Trump comes not from the actual report, but from AG Barr’s letter to Congress, summarizing the not-yet-released report. Based on Barr’s letter, media reported that the investigation found no collusion and no obstruction of justice, when in fact, the report found considerable links between the Trump campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested the president had obstructed justice. But it was too late. The narrative had been established by the AG, and for millions of Americans, it remains unalterable fact. But in March of this year, a federal judge—a George W Bush appointee—excoriated Barr for his handling of the Mueller report. Barr’s inconsistencies, the judge writes, “cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump.” The judge concurred with Special Counsel Mueller that “Attorney General Barr distorted the findings in the Mueller Report.”
Federal prosecutors recommended a sentence of 7-9 years for Roger Stone, a Trump associate who lied to Congress about his contacts with Wikileaks during the 2016 election. The president tweeted angrily about the unfairness of such a sentence for his longtime ally, and the very next day, the DOJ undermined the prosecutors by filing a revised recommendation, asking for far less prison time for Stone. Four prosecutors quit the case, and one of them resigned entirely. Over 1,000 alumni of the Justice Department signed a letter calling on Barr to resign over this incident, saying, “Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.”
In May, in a stunning about-face, Barr’s DOJ moved to drop charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor. Flynn had already twice admitted under oath that he had lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. Faced with this unprecedented request, Judge Sullivan selected a former judge, John Gleeson, to weigh in. After reviewing the case, Gleeson blasted Barr and the DOJ, calling their claims “preposterous” and accusing them of “gross abuse of prosecutorial power.” He called the request “an unconvincing effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump.”
That’s who Bill Barr is. That’s who lied to you and me about Berman stepping down. So, the obvious question is: why? Why does Barr (read: Trump) want to be rid of US Attorney Berman? Planning to replace him, by the way, with Jay Clayton, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who has never been a prosecutor?
We can’t know for sure, but I have a few guesses.
First let’s talk about how Berman got the job. In November of 2016, US Attorney Preet Bharara had been in charge of the SDNY for seven years. He was asked by the president-elect to stay on in the position, and he agreed. On March 8, an ethics watchdog group sent him a letter, urging him to investigate Trump for potential violations of the Emoluments Clause—financial conflicts of interest due to his business ventures in foreign countries. Three days later, Trump fired him.
I can’t say conclusively that the events are linked, but it’s a fact that they occurred, and on that timeline.
In January of 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed Geoff Berman as interim US Attorney for the SDNY. Berman was a Republican—a Trump donor—and his appointment was opposed by Senate Democrats. US Attorneys are supposed to be chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But Trump left several US Attorney positions—including the SDNY—unfilled for so long that in Berman’s case, federal judges took advantage of a seldom-used power to make Berman’s position permanent, one week before his 120-day term was set to end. As explained in this 2018 article, under federal law, Berman is to serve as US Attorney until Trump nominates and the Senate confirms his replacement.
Which would seem to indicate that Barr does not have the power to force Berman out, as he does with most US Attorneys. This sets up an explosive battle between the DOJ (the executive branch) and the Southern District of New York.
But again, the question is: why does he want to force him out and replace him with a man who has never served as a prosecutor?
Why make a move like this, which is sure to draw scrutiny?
Again, all I have are guesses. Much like Trump’s tax returns, I have to assume that whatever he’s hiding is worse than the heat he’ll take for hiding it.
Berman’s SDNY prosecuted Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to eight felony counts and was sentenced to three years in prison. In court, while pleading for leniency, Cohen told the judge, “My weakness could be characterized as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump.”
Berman’s SDNY is conducting an ongoing investigation of Trump’s personal attorney and longtime ally, Rudy Giuliani. It has already brought charges against Giuliani’s associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were involved in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment.
It’s been reported that the SDNY is investigating Deutsche Bank for suspected money laundering. Deutsche Bank has long been reported to have loaned billions of dollars to Trump companies.
After the death of Jeffrey Epstein, Berman affirmed that the SDNY would continue its sex-trafficking investigation into the conduct charged in his indictment. Donald Trump’s (and Bill Clinton’s) connections to Jeffrey Epstein are well-known.
Read Berman’s statement again. He twice emphasizes that his investigations will continue. Reading between the lines, the investigations are what he’s trying to protect, and Barr is trying to stop.
No one knows yet who will win this standoff. But it’s a safe bet that the pattern of Trump and Barr subverting justice will continue until they no longer have power to do so.
UPDATE: I wrote this article on Saturday the 20th. Since then, Barr wrote a public reply to Berman, telling him, “Because you have declared that you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the President to remove you as of today, and he has done so.” (Apparently, though the AG does not have the power to remove a US Attorney appointed by judges, the president does.) However, when asked why he’s firing Berman, the president said it’s all up to Barr, and denied any involvement.
Berman, therefore, probably could have fought his ouster longer, but he has decided to leave immediately, and there seems to be one reason why. In Barr’s original press release, he said that Berman’s interim successor would be Craig Carpenito, current USA for New Jersey. With Berman being fired rather than stepping down, now his interim replacement must be his own Deputy US Attorney, Audrey Strauss. Berman says of Strauss, “She is the smartest, most principled, and effective lawyer with whom I have ever had the privilege of working.”
The House Judiciary Committee has opened an investigation of this matter.
By now we all know what happened: a white police officer knelt on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, for minutes on end while George begged for air and a watching crowd pleaded for his life. Eventually, George stopped moving. He stopped begging for air. They called for an ambulance, but the officer didn’t take his knee off of George’s neck until the medics arrived. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
The next day, this is how a police spokesman described the event to reporters: “Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and officers noticed that the man was going into medical distress.”
Here are some things you may not know. Knee-on-the-neck restraint is banned by several major police departments because of the high risk of injury. Minneapolis only allows it when the suspect is resisting arrest, which, based on the video we’ve all seen, George was not.
The officer who killed George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, had 18 prior complaints filed against him. Eighteen. Of those, two were “closed with discipline.” The discipline he received? Letters of reprimand. One of the other officers was the subject of an excessive force lawsuit in 2017 which the city settled. The lawsuit alleged that two officers had punched, kicked, and kneed the plaintiff in the face and body while he was handcuffed and defenseless.
Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in the street, on camera, in front of witnesses. He was fired, but as I write this five days later, he is still a free man. I’m no law expert, but I have to wonder: if his actions which killed a man were so clearly wrong that he could be quickly fired, why hasn’t he been arrested? The mayor of Minneapolis has asked the same question, but Chauvin is still walking around free.
On Tuesday night, hundreds of protestors marched to the police precinct to demand justice for George Floyd—whose killer, I will remind you, was a free man more than 24 hours later. Some protestors damaged windows and a squad car, and sprayed graffiti on the building. The department responded by sending a line of police in riot gear to shoot tear gas and rubber bullets at them.
“So far, I have been unable to prevent the police from firing indiscriminately into the crowd,” city council member Jeremiah Ellison said. “Moments ago, I held a towel to a teenage girl’s head as blood poured from it.”
Since then, the riots have worsened and spread, with many fires set and businesses looted. Let me say here for the record that I don’t condone looting, nor damaging private property. It’s counterproductive, violates the rights of private citizens, and gives ammunition to those who would prefer for police to never be held accountable.
But.
What else do we expect?
I noticed this paradox in conservatives several years ago. Yes, we believe in law and order, but first and foremost we believe in limited government and individual liberty. We passionately defend the second amendment, not because we believe we have a sacred right to hunt, and not even primarily to defend ourselves against individuals trying to harm us. We have always believed that the founders intended our right to bear arms to protect us from an oppressive or tyrannical government—indeed, this right was meant to keep the government from ever becoming oppressive or tyrannical. We believe our government should have a healthy fear of angering us. That’s why citizens showed up like this at Michigan’s capitol to protest lockdowns they see as infringing on their liberty:
Conservatives care deeply about keeping the government limited, and preserving individual liberty.
Yet when government power is wearing blue, many of them seem to think it should be unlimited.
What greater expansion of government power can there be than the power to kill American citizens with impunity? What greater infringement of individual liberty can there be than being killed in the street by one’s own government, deprived of any due process?
When American colonists got fed up with their government infringing on their freedoms, they destroyed state property. They vandalized stores. They formed militias. They rioted. They fought back.
Most conservatives I know don’t have a problem with any of that. They’re big fans, actually.
But based on what I’m seeing now, many of today’s conservatives have a bigger problem with frustrated and infuriated citizens fighting back in the only ways they feel they can than with agents of the state getting away with murdering citizens in the street.
Fellow conservatives: let me suggest we reevaluate our priorities.
If we don’t want to see riots, if we don’t want citizens to resort to violence and property damage in defense of their rights to life and liberty, we should demand that our government do better. We must demand our police do better. We must hold them to a high standard and stop making excuses for the bad ones in order to protect the good ones. Otherwise, what do we expect? How long do we expect American citizens to passively accept government oppression?
An officer of the state deprived George Floyd of due process, deprived him of dignity, and deprived him of his most foundational right as a human being: his right to life. The state did not hold their officer accountable, so George Floyd’s fellow citizens burned that police precinct to the ground.
“I call it the ‘super-duper missile.'” -President Donald Trump
It sounds like cruel satire, but that is an actual quote from the sitting president about new hypersonic missiles now in development. And while it’s a childish thing to say, and an easy target for mockery, it’s by far the tamest of his criticism-worthy moves lately.
I lost count long ago of the times Donald Trump did something stupid or cruel or corrupt and I chose to bite my tongue and not mention it publicly. Politics is divisive and off-putting to many people, and I don’t want to alienate every friend and relative who supports him. But the sheer, breathtaking scope and magnitude of his stupidity and cruelty and corruption cannot—must not—be ignored. That’s one of the main reasons I started this blog.
And the election is coming.
Even if I could survive without food and sleep, and had no other responsibilities, it would be impossible to write a full article every time he does something to debase the presidency. There are only 24 hours in a day. But today I will catalog some of the most recent examples. I hope you’ll keep them in mind as November approaches.
Tax returns:
Candidate Trump told us over and over that he would release his tax returns as soon as his audit was finished. Once he won the election, his tune changed, and four years later, he is the first president since Richard Nixon to refuse to release them. He has refused even though his records have been subpoenaed by New York state prosecutors and the House of Representatives, and even though a judge has ordered him to turn them over. His legal team has fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep Congress from seeing his tax returns, arguing that a president should be fully immune to investigation while in office. As one of the several judges who has ruled against him wrote, this argument is “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.”
Firing Inspectors General who displease him or investigate his favorites:
After Watergate, Congress created the role of Inspectors General as independent watchdogs, installed in federal agencies to root out corruption, waste, and lawbreaking. In the past twenty years, just one president, Barack Obama, has fired an Inspector General. He received bipartisan criticism for it, and never did it again. Donald Trump has fired five Inspectors General in six weeks. He usually does it on Friday nights, a favorite move of politicians who want to avoid media coverage. And he is replacing the fired Inspectors with loyal political allies, some of whom still hold their jobs within the agencies they are supposed to be investigating. It has been too much even for Senator Chuck Grassley (R), who wrote a letter to the President reminding him that he is required to give Congress 30 days notice before removing an IG (he didn’t) and that “Inspectors General are not removed for political reasons.” Mitt Romney was more direct:
Accusing states of trying to rig the election:
In October 2016, polls looked bad for Trump. Most people (myself included) thought he would lose. He preemptively threw out reasons for why he might lose: the election was rigged; it was rigged by the media; it was rigged by the Democrats; there was massive voter fraud taking place. Now, in 2020, polls are looking worse for him than they did in 2016, even in swing states, and once again he is making wild and false accusations, already laying the groundwork for his excuses should he lose. He falsely tweeted that Michigan was illegally mailing millions of ballots. He later deleted it, since they in fact mailed applications, just like several Republican states have done. He also tweeted his oft-repeated claim that mail-in voting results in massive fraud—which is also false. He publicly threatened to withhold federal funding from Michigan and Nevada unless they caved to his demands about how to run their own elections. A quid pro quo, if you will.
More not cruel satire, but actual quotes from the sitting president:
On coronavirus testing per capita: “There’s many per capitas. And, you know, when you say ‘per capita,’ there’s many per capitas. It’s, like, per capita relative to what?”
On testing negative for coronavirus: “I tested very positively in another sense so — this morning. Yeah. I tested positively toward negative, right. So, I tested perfectly this morning. Meaning I tested negative. But that’s a way of saying it. Positively toward the negative.”
These from the man who says of Joe Biden: “He’s not mentally sharp enough to be president,” and “He was never known as a smart person.”
Knife in the back of the first Senator to endorse him:
Jeff Sessions (R, Alabama) was the first Senator to endorse Candidate Trump. Trump made him Attorney General. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation after bipartisan Congressional demand that he do so. Trump has never forgiven him for this perceived betrayal, and now that Sessions is again running for an Alabama Senate seat, the president is chucking him directly under the bus.
The two proceeded to have a public Twitter spat.
There’s more, if you care to see it. But the greatest part of this kerfluffle was the reaction from Ann Coulter, the right wing immigration hawk who was an early and outspoken supporter of Candidate Trump, and who literally wrote a book called “In Trump We Trust.”
She was not having any of it, and I think it’s safe to say she has soured on Trump.
If only there had been a group of conservatives around in 2016 to warn Ann and others that Trump was unfit for office. Sigh.
Accusing his critic of murder:
Joe Scarborough, former Republican member of Congress and current co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC, has been critical of Donald Trump, and their public catfights are nothing new. But now Trump has taken their feud to a level almost too demented to be believed. He has now repeatedly tweeted a debunked conspiracy theory accusing Scarborough of having an affair with and then murdering his aide, Lori Klausutis. She was only 28 when she died in 2001 of an undiagnosed heart condition, but the president urged his 80 million Twitter followers to “Read story!”
This “story” was published by the same right-wing misinformation site that claimed Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex ring operating out of a DC pizza restaurant.
Here, the President of the United States retweets Matt Couch, who is currently facing a lawsuit for defamation from the family of Seth Rich, a DNC staffer whose tragic murder was twisted into a conspiracy theory. This theory was relentlessly pushed by Couch as well as Sean Hannity of FOX, and the Washington Times, both of which were eventually forced to issue embarrassing retractions—but not before they had made the lives of Rich’s grieving family hell.
Lori Klausutis’s widower sent a wrenching letter to Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, pleading with him to delete the president’s tweets. “These conspiracy theorists,” he says, “including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their bile and misinformation on your platform disparaging the memory of my wife and our marriage.” He goes on: “I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him—the memory of my dead wife—and perverted it for perceived political gain.” (Dorsey declined.)
The president is condemning another grieving family to be hounded and tormented by his credulous followers. It is irresponsible and cruel beyond belief, bordering on sociopathic.
Calling female opponents fat and ugly and skanks:
This is nothing new. We’ve known for a long time now how Donald Trump enjoys talking about his opponents, and especially how he likes to mock women’s looks. But I refuse to become accustomed to a president behaving this way. I would be grieved to my soul if my son grew up to act this way; I’d be ashamed to show my face in public. Behavior like this debases the office and humiliates our nation. Don’t accept it. Don’t get used to it.
Praising a Nazi sympathizer for having “good bloodlines”:
Last week in Detroit, during a speech at a Ford plant, after mentioning Henry Ford, the president commented, “good bloodlines, good bloodlines.” That comment, when describing anything other than show dogs or thoroughbreds, is inadvisable at best. But when directed at a man who was a raging antisemite, who proudly accepted the highest honor Nazi Germany gave to foreigners, it’s pretty horrifying.
There are two possible explanations here: the president knows all about Henry Ford’s record of antisemitism and affinity for Nazism, and was tossing red meat to the similarly-aligned extremist segment of his base (possible but unlikely). Or, he knows nothing about Ford’s history and simply made a cringey statement that was only coincidentally horrifying due to his ignorance (likely). Neither is reassuring in a president.
Giving shout-outs to white supremacists:
Michelle Malkin, once a respected conservative commentator, has been shunned by the right now that she has aligned herself with Holocaust deniers and outright white supremacists. She defends the “groypers,” a loathsome group led by Nick Fuentes, who grins in one of his YouTube videos while doubting whether 6 million “cookies” could have really been baked in ovens. She actually called herself the “mother of groypers.” She’s no longer invited to CPAC, the Young America’s Foundation kicked her out, and Daily Wire and National Review dropped her column. But she says things the president likes, so she’s okay by him. He retweeted a video from America First (Nick Fuentes’s organization) featuring a speech by Malkin, and wrote “Thank you, Michelle!”
The video was later removed by Twitter.
I had several more to add, but this article has to end at some point. A couple of these stories, like the firing of the Inspectors General and the accusations against Joe Scarborough, deserve thorough articles of their own, but there is simply too much to cover. None of these is from before April, and most are from this past week. And this is not unique. It’s been going on like this, week after week, for three and a half years. A constant tidal wave of stupidity, ignorance, cruelty, and corruption.
I was a Republican my entire life, until Trump happened. I’m still a conservative. That’s why I’m writing about this. There must be a viable alternative to the Democratic party in order for America to have a healthy, balanced system of governance, and it absolutely must be better than this.
Donald Trump is morally, intellectually, and temperamentally unfit for office, and he has to go.
Right now, as you read this, a battle is being waged against an invisible enemy. Not COVID-19, oh no. Those tents set up in Central Park, you think those were for treating coronavirus patients? You poor, blind sheep. Can you handle the truth? It’s all a cover. The quarantine is a cover for a secret rescue operation. The ground beneath Central Park is filled with tunnels where Hillary Clinton and other satanic Democrats have been keeping children as sex slaves, harvesting their adrenal glands, and occasionally feasting on their flesh.
But don’t despair! Our great President, Donald J. Trump, last month gave the order for patriots in our military to rescue the mole children. (Tragically, after being kept underground for most of their lives, some of them are now deformed.) They stormed the tunnels and brought those children out into safety, treating them in the tents and then transferring them to the ships in the harbor under cover of darkness and quarantine. You may have heard stories of earthquakes around that time? Ha. More cover stories. Explosions. They were blowing those tunnels to hell.
What? You don’t believe me? You want to know what evidence I have? I’m so glad you asked!
My source is a government insider with top security clearance. They go by “Q” online to protect their anonymity.
You’ve heard that QAnon is a crazy conspiracy theory? Well of course you have! That’s what they want you to think.
You want to see evidence of a mole child who’s been rescued from the tunnels? The evidence is Q’s word for it, and photos of soldiers setting up pack-n-plays in a tent. Trump can’t let too much proof of this leak out just yet; he’s got a lot more Satan-worshipping pedophiles to track down in preparation for The Storm. (The day he finally has them mass arrested and sent to Guantanamo.) Plus, there are tents. There’s a quarantine. At the same time. What more evidence do you need?
You say I can’t prove there were child sex slaves in tunnels under Central Park? Oh yeah? Why don’t you prove there weren’t child sex slaves in tunnels under Central Park? Were you there? Have you been inside the tents at night? Have you tunneled under the ground in Central Park to see for yourself? Didn’t think so. You can’t prove they weren’t there.
Honestly, I feel sorry for you. Your eyes haven’t been opened yet. You’re not connecting the dots. You’re just following all the other sheeple blindly along.
Okay, that’s enough of that. The above illustration is a real thing that real people really believe. Tens of thousands of them believe it. QAnon is a conspiracy theory that claims that a cabal of liberal Hollywood stars, Democrat politicians, and high-ranking government officials are running an international child sex-trafficking ring, and Donald Trump is secretly taking them down behind the scenes. Now when you see photos of Trump rallies with people wearing or holding up the letter “Q,” you’ll know why. I share this with you because while QAnon is one of the most fringe examples, there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there right now, especially on the far right, and they’re gaining a concerning amount of popularity.
The current President first rose to political prominence due to his pushing of a conspiracy theory: that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Since then, he has repeated debunked antivax claims that vaccines cause autism as late as 2015. He repeated a National Enquirer story insinuating that Ted Cruz’s father helped Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate JFK. He believed so much in the totally baseless conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked DNC emails that it helped lead to his impeachment. He has repeatedly retweeted accounts with QAnon in their bios, and even tweets with QAnon hashtags, lending legitimacy to the movement and cementing their belief that he is with them, that he is allowing this secret information out a little at a time, to those with the wisdom to see.
Add in a constant drumbeat of “Journalists are the Enemy of the People,” “IMPEACHMENT HOAX!” and vague “Deep State” accusations, and it’s not surprising that widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories is growing on the far right.
What is surprising is how acceptance of conspiracy theories—and inability to recognize conspiracy theories—is growing in the middle, far from the fringes. This week, as many of you know, a “documentary” called Plandemic went viral on Facebook and other platforms. I personally saw dozens of my FB friends share the video, and scores of comments ranging from “Big if true,” to “I knew it!”
At first I ignored it, because the subtitle alone could not have shouted “conspiracy theory” any louder.
But so many people posted it, I decided I ought to watch so I could form my own opinion. Only a few minutes in, I couldn’t understand why so many people were sharing the video uncritically. Judy Mikovits, PhD, star of the movie, claims she was arrested, dragged from her home in shackles, and held without charges, all wrongfully, all because she’d written a breakthrough paper that was later stolen from her by colleagues. She claims, straight-faced, that she has no Constitutional rights. I kept expecting, any second, for the filmmakers to produce evidence to back up her claims. A photograph, a document, witnesses. They never did. We were obviously meant to accept her word as gospel truth.
The entire movie went on that way. One woman’s claims, a few anecdotes, and some YouTube videos whose makers were never even identified. That was the sum total of the “evidence” of a sinister global plot to take over our lives.
The rest of the day, as I watched person after person after person share that video unquestioningly, all I could think was, “Public education has failed us.”
It took me 30 minutes of Googling to learn that Judy Mikovits is a darling of alt-right conspiracy theorists, appearing on the antivax misinformation website, Natural News. The breakthrough paper she touts in Plandemic was withdrawn due to errors, and because it was impossible to replicate (a fatal flaw, which we all learned about in school studying the scientific method). She was fired from her job. (She later filed a suit against her former employer, which the court eventually dismissed when she repeatedly failed to comply with court orders.) She was arrested, and while she claims she was held without charges, a website that tracks “the scientific process” has had an article up since 2011 citing the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department website as listing her being arrested and charged with “a felony violation of California Penal Code section 1551.1,” a “Fugitive from the Law” statute. (It seems she had gone on the run with lab items she’d stolen from her former employer, and which they’d already sued her to recover.) I also learned that the claims of two doctors featured prominently in the “documentary,” that we shouldn’t wear masks and should immediately end the lockdowns, have already been thoroughly debunked by the American College of Emergency Physicians, the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, an epidemiologist from UC Irvine, a biologist from the University of Washington, and other ER doctors.
This woman and this film are plainly untrustworthy.
And yet, the video spread like a virus.
Confirmation bias is one heck of a drug. We are all susceptible to it. I know I am—though since I’ve been in the wilderness, I think it has been easier to withstand. Yourbias.is puts it frankly: “We are primed to see and agree with ideas that fit our preconceptions, and to ignore and dismiss information that conflicts with them.” If you think the lockdowns have gone on too long, if you think the WHO has bungled the response to this virus, if you don’t trust the government, if you think there’s corruption in Big Pharma—all of which are rational beliefs to hold—you’re primed to agree with a “documentary” that confirms your beliefs. You may just watch it, nodding your head, saying “This all rings true,” and hit share, never noticing that there wasn’t an ounce of evidence to back it up. It felt right.
Then, when somebody points out that Ms. Mikovits was fired, you feel defensive. “Of course she was!” you say. “She was a whistleblower!” When they point out that she was arrested: “She was falsely accused! They had to keep her quiet.” When they tell you she’s unreliable and has credibility issues: “Well, it makes sense that there would be negative information about her out there. Powerful people want to make her look bad.”
This is a hallmark of conspiracy theories. They are out to get the truth-tellers, so any evidence countering the truth-tellers’ claims or calling their credibility into question is automatically dismissed. It becomes quite literally impossible to argue against; the claimant becomes bulletproof.
“But if even half of this is true…!” I saw this yesterday. Why would half of it be true? If your source is not credible, if you’ve already caught them in multiple lies, why would you assume any of what they’re telling you is true? And even if it is, how can you possibly determine which half is true and which half is crazy talk?
“Well, it doesn’t mean that every single thing she says is false. Why don’t you refute her claims instead of her?” I saw this, too, and this one is a doozy. On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Until you realize that in order to comply, you’d have to spend days and weeks of your life researching the wide array of accusations she made in that video, everything from patents that Anthony Fauci may or may not hold, to whether Bill Gates’s participation in vaccine development is philanthropic or nefarious, to whether there are beneficial bacteria in the ocean that boost our immune systems when we swim. This is where Brandolini’s Law comes into play (please pardon the French): “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” Put more colloquially: A lie is halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.
I’m not going to spend days and weeks of my life refuting Judy Mikovits’s claims. I shouldn’t have to. She has no credibility. The burden of proof is on her and the filmmakers, and they offered none. Why should I be expected to prove a negative? Why should anyone?
How about this: I’ll prove there’s no global plot to take control of our lives just as soon as you prove there were no child sex slaves imprisoned in tunnels under Central Park.
Back in November, I wrote about the leftward bias of the news media. I’m writing about it again, because it’s a serious problem that’s stoking our divisions and pushing people toward even less reliable information sources. When the networks we ought to be able to trust for objective news are so obviously not objective, it’s no wonder many Americans are writing them off entirely. I plan to add to this series now and then, in hopes that my liberal readers will gain some appreciation for the complaints of conservatives, as well as the extent of the issue.
See if you can spot the subtle difference in framing by the Associated Press:
Neither headline is factually incorrect. But are they unbiased?
Last week in Georgia, State Senator and Democratic Party Leader Nikema Williams urged Governor Brian Kemp (R) to take action against a 1950s anti-mask law aimed at the KKK. She and others feared the law would be used to racially profile people of color wearing masks in public to protect themselves against COVID-19. Kemp did so, suspending the law. Here’s how a local news organization chose to cover the story:
They’ve since deleted the tweet. But can WGXA now credibly claim to be an objective, trustworthy news source?
You’d think that fashion would be a safely apolitical column to write. You’d be wrong.
This one is another from 2016, but I include it because it was so egregious, and because it was perpetrated by an especially trusted journalist. America’s sweetheart, Katie Couric, produced a documentary on guns and gun control. In it, she interviews a gun rights group, the Virginia Citizens’ Defense League. She asks them a predictable question: “If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?” They’re stumped! Eight seconds of awkward silence follows, with the gun rights mouthbreathers staring dumbly at her, or looking down at the table.
Except that’s not what happened at all. In the actual interview, they immediately answered her question. Three people responded to her, one after another, for six minutes. No stunned silence. The filmmakers simply edited out their answers, and substituted footage of them sitting quietly from another section of the interview—when they had directed the group to sit quietly. I realize this is from a documentary, not a news program. But this is Katie Couric. She’s been a host on all of the Big Three news networks, and at the time this documentary was being made, she was Yahoo’s Global News Anchor. People trusted her to be impartial. She was not. (I will give quick kudos here to NPR for reporting fairly on this story.)
Unless you’re a news or politics junkie, chances are you haven’t heard the name Tara Reade. But I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume you have heard the name Christine Blasey Ford. They both accused powerful men of sexually assaulting them. Both waited decades to come forward with their stories. Both their accounts suffer from inconsistencies. Both would likely fail the “preponderance of the evidence” standard used in civil court. One of them became a heroine, a household name, and a patron saint of the #MeToo movement. The other can at least prove that she has been in the same room with her accused attacker. Unfortunately for her, she’s accusing a Democrat. She’s being treated just a tiny bit differently.
Let’s play another game of spot the difference:
“Her soft voice cracked as she spoke. She smiled a lot; her attempts to make everyone see how agreeable and reasonable she is were heart-rending. But she was also poised and precise, occasionally speaking as an expert — she’s a psychology professor — as well as a victim. Watching her push through her evident terror was profoundly inspiring.” That’s how the New York Times columnist described Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court nominee. She’s less generous toward Tara Reade, bringing up Reade’s “bizarre public worship of President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” as if that has anything to do with whether or not she was assaulted, and summarizing the accusation and its fallout as a “strange, sad story.” But the focus of her ire is right wing pundits who’ve been asking why #BelieveAllWomen doesn’t seem to apply to Ms. Reade, and why she hasn’t received the outpouring of support from the left that Ms. Ford enjoyed.
Conservatives, you see, even when they’re not a main character in the story, are always the villains.
True, these are opinion columns. Let’s look at how the real news covered these stories.
In the 19-day period from when the allegations against Kavanaugh went public through the day he was confirmed by the Senate, CNN published close to 700 articles about the story. But CNN waited 24 days before publishing one article about Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden—and it’s not so much about her allegations as about how Democrats are “grappling” with them. It remains the sole article on CNN about Tara Reade’s accusations.
When Julie Swetnick made absurd and defamatory allegations of gang rape against Brett Kavanaugh, which no other witness ever corroborated and which she herself eventually walked back, the New York Times reported on them the same day. When Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of assaulting her, the Times waited 19 days before publishing a story.
But it gets better. A tweet about their late-breaking story included some text from the article:
Amazing. “We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond the well-documented pattern of behavior that easily qualifies as sexual harassment.”
The Times later deleted the tweet and deleted those words from its article. But wait! There’s more.
The Times published another article, an interview with executive editor, Dean Baquet, explaining why they waited so long to report on Reade’s allegations. When asked why they deleted that sentence, Baquet said, “I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And that’s not what the sentence was intended to say.”
The campaign thought the phrasing was awkward.
The campaign.
THE CAMPAIGN.
The executive editor of the New York Times just came right out and admitted his paper changed an article about sexual assault allegations against the Democratic Party nominee because the candidate’s campaign didn’t like it.
If the Times doesn’t like being accused of being an arm of the DNC, they should stop acting like one.
We ought to be able to trust mainstream news outlets. Journalists ought to keep their biases out of their reporting.
At the very least, they ought to hide them better than they do.
Wilderness Dispatch 