United States Authoritarianism: August 20 — August 26

Cindy Brown
Aug 27, 2017 · 14 min read
  1. This is why your head is spinning.

2. Trending on twitter today (Sunday)

3. Interesting backstory behind Bannon’s departure.

Opponents’ mythology around Mr. Bannon often held that he was the evil genius who pushed the president to make some of his more audacious decisions. And Mr. Bannon’s political opponents believe his departure has removed one of the biggest impediments to stability inside the White House.

But more likely, Mr. Bannon’s exit will clarify that only one person, Mr. Trump, for better or worse, has always been his own chief strategist. While several administration officials interviewed said they see Mr. Kelly as perhaps the last hope for fixing the fractured administration, they concede that only Mr. Trump can right his listing presidency.

4. This reads out like Days of our Lives

5. Indeed.

The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are. It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership. In the wake of last weekend’s horror and tragedy, let us finally, finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda of voter suppression, renewed mass incarceration and the expulsion of immigrants.

There is a direct link between Trump’s comments this week and those policies, so where is the outrage about the latter? Where are the Republican leaders denouncing voter suppression as racist, un-American and dangerous? Where are the Republican leaders who are willing to call out the wink (and the direct endorsement) from President Trump to the white supremacists and acknowledge their own party’s record and stance on issues important to people of color as the real problem for our country?

6. Yet another military ship collision (WTF?). POTUS pouts.

https://twitter.com/W7VOA/status/899438645576445952

7. Good call. But it’s extraordinary times to force that.

8. That climate report we thought Трамп would bury? He just disbanded the entire department.

9. Indeed.

https://twitter.com/Athenae/status/899652841127673856

10. Toddler in Chief? The damage to the U.S. is just incalculable. Granted, it started long before Трамп, but he’s blowing the top off.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/21/the-trump-as-toddler-thread-explained-and-curated

11.

12. Are we there yet? I’d say as a nation, somewhere in 3/4. Definitely in some groups/regions, up to 4/5. I’m not sure that 6 is necessarily after 5 — I see evidence of 6, certainly, which probably means some organizations are happily planning :-/

This is why we must publicly push back, call on our leaders to repudiate this, expand sanctuary cities, counter protest the Nazis and white supremacists who like to play pretend and call themselves alt-right or white nationalists, but really all of them: Nazis.

13. /sigh

The Post reports this morning that more than two dozen Republican Party committees have spent nearly half a million dollars holding campaign fundraisers at hotels and golf courses owned by President Donald Trump since he took office in January. Together with $793,000 Republican committees paid to Trump companies in rent and legal fees, Trump-owned companies have raked in $1.3 million in 2017 — from the president’s own party.

The Republican National Committee, congressional campaigns, state parties, and the Republican Governors Association all paid Trump properties to host fundraisers, simultaneously using the Trump brand to fill campaign coffers and line the first family’s pockets.

It’s just the latest piece of mounting evidence that Trump, and the companies in which he maintains a stake and his family members still control, are profiting off of his presidency, creating conflicts of interest never before seen in the Oval Office. Because we’ve never had a president with such wide-ranging business interests and complete unwillingness to avoid conflicts of interest, Trump is taking to the country into uncharted waters — and we are likely only seeing the tip of the iceberg of the ways in which he will profit from his businesses by using his presidency as a marketing tool.

14. This is the glaring fault line in the U.S. right now. They should have included evangelicals just for the lulz of seeing 91% approval from those moral bankrupts.

15. Fitting.

16. Climate change denier in chief.

17. /sigh

Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes.

President Trump “modeled violence as a way to advance politically and validated bullying during and after the campaign,” Mines wrote in Foreign Policy. “Judging from recent events the left is now fully on board with this,” he continued, citing anarchists in anti-globalization riots as one of several flashpoints. “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.”

18. OK, that one’s sublime.

19. Do tell.

later, relevant tweet

https://twitter.com/davidaxelrod/status/900413728344203267

20. Hmmm…

https://twitter.com/markknoller/status/900131035521982464

21. Indeed

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/900086273049862149

22. Code.

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/900190159928479745

23. The lies just keep piling up. And stupid shit ones, too.

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/900194166474518528

24. Mmmhmmm…The morning after analysis:

[H]e ranted about being mistreated by the media in the wake of Charlottesville, relentlessly attacked an array of enemies including both of Arizona’s Republican senators, and portrayed himself as the true victim of a violent clash between white supremacists and counter-protesters that left one woman dead. Journalists and other social-media commentators watched, stunned, as he proceeded to spend the rest of his hour-long speech unloading on the mainstream press, praising a CNN pundit who was fired for tweeting a Nazi slogan, and re-litigating his entire response to Charlottesville, line by line, in what has become a hallmark of the Trump presidency: a full-on public meltdown.

At one point, he went on a 25-minute rant against the press, with multiple gestures towards the pen at the back of the Convention Center. He blamed them for misrepresenting his remarks on the terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend. And then, when reading from printed copies of those remarks, he misquoted himself, conveniently failing to mention that he had blamed “both sides” for the atrocities.

When not reading off the teleprompter, Trump appeared angry. He threatened to shut down the government if he didn’t get funding for his famed border wall. He blamed the filibuster for stalling much of his agenda, even as he claimed to have passed more bills than any president since Harry Truman. And he went after congressional Republicans for being insufficiently obedient, even as his relationship with GOP leadership reaches new nadirs.

25. Good.

26. He didn’t pardon Arpaio last night but there’s this opinion.

If Donald Trump carries out his threat to pardon Arizona’s ex-Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, he will be granting the fantasy of every wannabe law enforcement officer, rogue police officer, Nazi sympathizer, Klansman, alt-right and white-supremacist ideologue in the nation: an American police state comprising self-declared Aryan peoples. The “Delusionals” as I refer to them, would believe that they had been given permission by Trump to perpetuate overt acts of violence and discrimination upon African Americans, Asians, Jews, Latinos, members of the LGBTQ community, Native Americans, Muslims, and non-Aryan immigrants from around the world.

27. Surround yourself with quality people…oh wait.

As anyone associated with the Trump administration knows, it only takes one outburst — a few haphazard emojis here, a call to The New Yorker there — to cement a new reputation. This week, in the time it took her to type out an Instagram screed, Louise Linton transformed herself from the Treasury secretary’s wife to a Real Housewife of the Treasury.

28. I’m growing rather fond of that Трамп Chicken, myself.

https://twitter.com/abc15/status/900160367682240512

29. Whoa.

But the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is not laughing.

As a result of the horrific neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in a woman being murdered in a vehicle attack, combined with the mounting frequency of racial hate crimes in America this year, CERD has taken the extraordinary step of issuing an “early warning” to the United States.

“We are alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred,” said CERD chairwoman Anastasia Crickley in a statement.

Though the report does not mention Trump by name, CERD takes a thinly veiled swipe at him for falsely claiming “many sides” are to blame for Nazi violence, admonishing “high-level politicians and public officials” to “unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech.”

This is not the first early warning issued to the United States. A CERD report in 2006 rebuked the Bush administration for exploiting and developing the ancestral land of the Western Shoshone tribes in Nevada without permission.

But to put it further in perspective, CERD has issued only seven “early warnings” in the past decade. Among the other flagged countries were Iraq, where ISIS massacred women and children; Burundi, whose president refused to transition power and tortured and murdered ethnic minorities; and Kyrgyzstan, where Uzbek communities were being destroyed and killed by mob violence.

30. Another resignation letter with embedded message:

31. This is not now this works. This is not how any of this works.

32. Still not how this presidenting thing works.

According to a report from Rachael Bade and Josh Dawsey at Politico, Republican hardliners in the House at first asked Defense Secretary Mattis to immediately ban Pentagon payments for gender-affirming surgeries. Mattis refused, arguing against acting so quickly.

The same hardliners then went to Trump. To their surprise, Trump didn’t just ban such payments — he decided to ban all trans service members too. “This is like someone told the White House to light a candle on the table and the [White House] set the whole table on fire,” a senior House Republican aide told Politico.

The president moved so quickly, in fact, that members of the military were apparently not alerted about the policy change before Trump’s tweets


33. You think?

34. Holy crap.

35. /snort

If Trump wanted to actually hurt the media, the best thing to do would probably be to calm down for a bit and try to be somewhat more boring. The odds are that would be good for his poll numbers too.

Nice try, vox…

36. Another note on Трамп’s utter incapacity to play well with others.

37. And why would the Moscow Muppet be upset over anything protecting Mueller…unless he was planning on going after Mueller??

Trump dialed up Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Aug. 7, two days before a blunt call with the Senate majority leader that spilled over into a public feud. Tillis is working with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) on a bill designed to protect Robert Mueller, the independent counsel investigating the president’s Russia connections, from any attempt by Trump to fire him.

38. Gosh darn. Lie down with dogs, etc.

39. That would be ironic. Lots of damage being done in the meantime though.

40. Because of course Трамп will throw a tantrum.

41. The actual fuck?

https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/901203828741222400

42. This is so much fucking bullshit.

https://twitter.com/Stonekettle/status/901236465182572545

Remember, Arpaio violated 4th amendment rights. This is the sort of illegal activity that the Prez has condoned by his actions. Here’s an article published before the pardon that outlines why this is such a problematic pardon.

But the Arpaio case is different: The sheriff was convicted of violating constitutional rights, in defiance of a court order involving racial profiling. Should the president indicate that he does not think Mr. Arpaio should be punished for that, he would signal that governmental agents who violate judicial injunctions are likely to be pardoned, even though their behavior violated constitutional rights, when their illegal actions are consistent with presidential policies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/opinion/trump-arpaio-pardon-arizona-sheriff.html

43. This Friday News Dump is getting ridiculous. Sheesh, I go away from the computer for a FEW HOURS! JUST A FEW!

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/901245625790017536

44. The internet takes no prisoners.

45. I… this is the guy who resigned last month as director of the United States Office of Government Ethics.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/901238645906190337

46. This is unspeakable.

47. Mealy mouthed but it’s important Congress recognizes the danger that is the Arpaio pardon.

48. Ugh.

Monstrous:

49.

50. I’m doubtful. I think Трамп will limp along for the next 3.5 years. I’ll be thrilled if I’m wrong.

Of interest:

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