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Opinion | Rush Limbaugh and the Petrification of Conservatism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ush-limbaugh-conservatism.html conservatism gop history politics crisis culture trump US media
shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • his political legacy feels like the result of an unfortunate encounter between a 1980s young Republican and a tempting monkey’s paw.
  • I wish there was a conservative media infrastructure to compete with the mainstream media! our youthful conservative wished. I wish the right had a bigger footprint in the culture than just George Will columns and National Review! I wish my movement was rich and powerful, a veritable universe unto itself!
  • Thanks in no small part to Limbaugh, all of that has come to pass. The price, alas, is that in the world outside the right’s infrastructure, the conservatism of our young Reaganite has suffered a long run of political disasters and cultural defeats.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • in the long arc of the Limbaugh era, you can see pretty clearly how success and self-marginalization can be effectively combined.
  • Reaganite conservatism in ’80s America was a 55 percent proposition, popular with younger voters, with only a mild version of today’s yawning gender gap.
  • But you don’t need 55 percent of the country to build a huge talk-radio audience or an incredibly successful cable news network or a vast online ecosystem. You need a passionate audience, a committed audience, a church of Dittoheads.That was what Limbaugh built for himself
  • then everyone else on the right went in the same direction: First, Limbaugh’s talk radio imitators, then Roger Ailes with Fox News, and then — disastrously — a great many Republican politicians, who realized that an intense ideological fan base was enough to win them elections in safe districts and might make them media celebrities in the bargain.
  • This pattern created problems that compounded one another. As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative governance, contributing to debacles that doomed Republican presidents — Iraq for George W. Bush, Covid for Donald Trump
  • These debacles helped make conservatism less popular, closer to a 45 percent than a 55 percent proposition in presidential races, a blocking coalition but not a governing one.
  • And this in turn made the right’s passionate core feel more culturally besieged, more desperate for “safe spaces” where liberal perfidy was taken for granted and the most important reasons for conservative defeats were never entertained.
  • Such a system, predictably, was terrible at generating the kind of outward-facing, evangelistic conservatives who had made the Reagan revolution possible
  • to go back and watch Reagan and Buckley is to see an entirely different approach to politics — missionary and confident, with a gentlemanly comportment that has altogether vanished.
  • In its place today is a fantasy politics, a dreampolitik, that’s fed by a deep feeling of grievance and dispossession.
  • the right’s infotainment complex is itself a major reason for that consolidation. Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.
  • Dan McLaughlin, in an instructive piece for National Review, counts Limbaugh as one of the right’s five most important 1990s-era figures, along with Ailes, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Antonin Scalia
  • as they grew old within the right’s infrastructure, Limbaugh and Ailes and Newt and Rudy all seemed to cede their individuality and converge into a single character, a single noisy voice.
  • Which were the media impresarios and which were the political leaders? Which one was married four times, which ones only three, which was the office predator? Which one was most likely to say something indefensible in defense of Donald Trump?
  • Only Scalia, secure from certain temptations in his lifetime judicial appointment, retained both his individuality and his outward-facing influence to the end.
  • For the rest, for Limbaugh especially, we can say that their gifts were ample, their ascent remarkable, their influence enduring — and yet their most important legacy has been ashes and defeat.
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The triumphant GOP is mired in crisis after crisis - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html crisis gop trump presidency politics
shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • There is a crisis of identity. Donald Trump now leads a coalition including the Republican establishment — and people who despise the Republican establishment. The insurgent president-elect — lacking relevant experience, adequate personnel and actual policy proposals — cannot exercise power without the help of those he ridiculed.
  • Trump has chosen to incorporate this conflict into the structure of the West Wing.
  • This is less a team of rivals than an ideological cage fight.
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  • The biggest frustration reported by Republicans who have met with Trump is his inability to focus for any period of time. He is impatient with facts and charts and he changes the subject every few minutes. Republican leaders need policy leadership — or permission to provide it themselves.
  • Not everyone who helps a president become president is fit to help him govern. Bannon — whose Breitbart News invited the alt-right into the conservative mainstream and who has made a business model out of spreading conspiratorial nonsense — belongs in this category, along with Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Corey Lewandowski and the rest of the distracting campaign sideshow.
  • this is also a governing crisis. Trump won office promising to undo globalization, bring back manufacturing jobs and fulfill “every dream you ever dreamed.” So expectations are pretty high. But Trumpism, for the most part, consists of cultural signals and symbolic goals, not a set of developed proposals.
  • The final crisis faced by the GOP — and just about everyone else — relates to the quality of our political culture. Trump won office in a way that damaged our democracy. He fed resentment against minorities, promised to jail his opponent and turned shallow invective into an art form. If he governs as he campaigned, Trump will smash the unity of our country into a thousand shards of bitterness.
  • the long-term political crisis faced by the triumphant GOP. Trump won the presidency in a manner that undermines the GOP’s electoral future. He demonstrated that the “coalition of the ascendant” — including minorities, millennials and the college-educated — is not yet ascendant. But in a nation where over half of children under 5 years old are racial or ethnic minorities, it eventually will be.
  • Republicans may end up depending on a younger generation of leaders — Ryan, Ben Sasse, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Jeff Flake, Marco Rubio — to demonstrate the possibility of unifying aspiration and civil disagreement.
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Trump meets his real enemy - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html trump crisis corruption
shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Trump will continue to bask in the faithful’s chants of “Lock her up,” as he did at a West Virginia rally Tuesday night, but Hillary Clinton is no longer his adversary. His enemies now are the facts and the truth. They cannot be jailed and have no personal shortcomings to exploit. Trump and his defenders are reduced to arguing that truth doesn’t exist.
  • Trump’s speech was a catalogue of antipathies and a gauge of his fight-back plan: He will make his survival synonymous with the aspirations of voters who despise liberals, fear cultural change and see Trump as their last-ditch defender in a hostile world.
  • “The Democrat Party is held hostage by the so-called resistance: left-wing haters and angry mobs,” he declared. “They’re trying to tear down our institutions, disrespect our flag, demean our law enforcement, denigrate our history and disparage our great country — and we’re not going to let it happen.”
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  • Through the sheer force of his malevolence, Trump hopes to bait his foes into engaging on matters far more favorable to him
  • Trump’s effort took a major hit with the success of Mueller’s team in convicting Manafort. But Cohen’s plea inflicted damage of a higher order because it tied Trump to a crime. This was not a bank shot. It was a direct hit.
  • Democratic candidates are coming to see an attack on corruption as the theme that will unite their party, appeal to less partisan voters — including at least some in Trump’s 2016 “drain the swamp” constituency — and highlight the broad range of misdeeds by the president, his advisers and his administration.
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Opinion | How Giuliani Might Take Down Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rudy-giuliani-trump.html RICO crime conspiracy
shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Those explosive — and arresting — hearings led to the 1970 passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, a law designed to allow prosecutors to go after enterprises that engaged in extended, organized criminality. RICO laid out certain “predicate” crimes — those that prosecutors could use to stitch together evidence of a corrupt organization and then go after everyone involved in the organization as part of an organized conspiracy. While the headline-grabbing RICO “predicates” were violent crimes like murder, kidnapping, arson and robbery, the statute also focused on crimes like fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering and even aiding or abetting illegal immigration.
  • What lawmakers heard Wednesday sounded a lot like a racketeering enterprise: an organization with a few key players and numerous overlapping crimes — not just one conspiracy, but many. Even leaving aside any questions about the Mueller investigation and the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen leveled allegations that sounded like bank fraud, charity fraud and tax fraud, as well as hints of insurance fraud, obstruction of justice and suborning perjury.
  • RICO was precisely designed to catch the godfathers and bosses at the top of these crime syndicates — people a step or two removed from the actual crimes committed, those whose will is made real, even without a direct order.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Exactly, it appears, as Mr. Trump did at the top of his family business: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates,” Mr. Cohen said. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen said, “doesn’t give orders. He speaks in code. And I understand that code.”
  • The sheer number and breadth of the investigations into Mr. Trump’s orbit these days indicates how vulnerable the president’s family business would be to just this type of prosecution. In December, I counted 17, and since then, investigators have started an inquiry into undocumented workers at Mr. Trump’s New Jersey golf course, another crime that could be a RICO predicate
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Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930 trump politics US
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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Ta-Nehisi Coates: Kanye West in the Age of Donald Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...559763 responsibility history freedom racism
shared by Javier E on 07 May 18 - No Cached
  • West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
  • West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.
  • It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.
  • It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community
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Sohrab Ahmari and the Rise of America's Orbánists - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...591697 liberal democracy right-wing authoritarian culture history
shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • The past few weeks have witnessed a nasty internecine fight among religious conservatives about whether liberal democracy’s time has passed
  • French and Ahmari. They are yelling at each other in a walled garden; conservative pundits in ideological magazines have little influence over a base whose opinions are guided by the commercial incentives of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and the partisan imperatives of the Republican Party
  • French’s adherence to liberal democracy is a commitment to a set of rules under which these goals can be pursued in a pluralistic society: through public discourse, the courts, and the ballot box. For Ahmari and his ilk, this is insufficient. He seems to believe not only that the state should always settle such disputes in his favor, but that it should prevent cultural and political expressions he finds distasteful.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • In a since-deleted tweet, Ahmari praised Alabama Public Television for refusing to air an episode of the cartoon Arthur in which the titular character’s male teacher marries another man; his attack on French was preceded by another since-deleted eruption, over Drag Queen Story Hour at a public library, in which he cried, “To hell with liberal order”; and he has since suggested the humanities should be defunded because “they may be lost to us for good.
  • the United States that illiberals would like to see: one that resembles Orbán’s Hungary, where rigged electoral systems ensure that political competition is minimal, the press is tightly controlled by an alliance between corporations and the state on behalf of the ruling party, national identity is defined in religious and ethnic terms, and cultural expressions are closely policed by the state to ensure compliance with that identity
  • Although the intraconservative critiques leveled by Ahmari and his allies sometimes take on the language of opposition to market fundamentalism, they are not truly opposed to the concentration of power and capital.
  • These critics observe the decline in wages and community that has resulted from this concentration, and propose to do nothing at all about it other than seize that power for themselves
  • The same sort of protests that the right decries as illiberal when deployed against right-wing speakers on college campuses are suddenly a legitimate tactic when used against Drag Queen Story Hour. The objective here, in Ahmari’s words, is to defeat “the enemy,” not adhere to principle
  • Indeed, the illiberal faction in this debate retains Trump as its champion precisely because the president is willing to use the power of the state for sectarian ends, despite being an exemplar of the libertinism to which it is supposedly implacably opposed
  • Sohrab Ahmari, writing at First Things, attacked National Review’s David French for adhering to a traditional commitment to liberal democracy while “the overall balance of forces has tilted inexorably away from us.”
  • the support Ahmari has drawn suggests that the conservative intelligentsia will offer less resistance to authoritarianism than it did in 2015 and 2016.
  • even before Trump ran for president, some Republican elites were plotting to diminish the political power of minorities and enhance those of white voters. Whatever their disagreements, the leaders of both the populist and establishment wings of the Republican Party have concluded that they cannot be allowed to lose power simply because a majority of American voters do not wish them to wield it.
  • Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate
  • Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187,
  • Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic.
  • This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them
  • a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.
  • Undetectable in the dispute on the right is any acknowledgment of the criticisms of liberal democracy by those who have been fighting for their fundamental rights in battles that are measured in decades and even centuries; that the social contract implicitly excluded them from the very rights white Christian men have been able to assert from the beginning
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Trump impeachment trial: Democrats warn Trump 'will do it again' if acquitted | US news... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...chment-trial-closing-arguments politics US trump
shared by brickol on 04 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • the Democratic representative Adam Schiff mounted an impassioned closing argument in the Senate impeachment trial on Monday, urging the chamber to hold the president to account
  • The House impeachment managers, who are prosecuting Trump, pleaded with Senate Republicansto find Trump guilty of the charges in the two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
  • Schiff blasted Trump in personal terms, warning that Trump had tried to cheat in the 2020 election and will keep trying if acquitted.
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  • But a mostly party-line vote on Friday not to call witnesses in the trial signaled a lack of interest on the Republican side.
  • Trump maintains that his conduct has been irreproachable, and all but a handful of the 53 senators in the majority have seamlessly agreed.
  • The closing arguments set the stage for a vote to acquit Trump on Wednesday afternoon. The senators will hold separate votes on each article of impeachment, with an out-of-reach two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump and remove him from office.
  • the members of the upper chamber finally had the chance to make speeches about the charges against Trump starting on Monday afternoon, when the trial adjourned temporarily for regular Senate business.
  • Trump’s defense focused their closing argument on the urgency, they said, of keeping Trump’s name on the ballot in 2020.
  • But Trump’s defense also continued to offer a blanket defense of Trump’s conduct. “The president has done nothing wrong,” Cipollone said. “These types of impeachment must end.” Schiff said Republican partisanship had blinded them to Trump’s wrongdoing.
  • Trump directed his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to pursue conspiracy theories on the ground in Ukraine tied to former vice-president Joe Biden and the 2016 election. That plot set in motion the character assassination of a US ambassador, a perceived regional retreat by the US, the suspension of a promised White House meeting and military aid to Ukraine, a direct demand by Trump himself that the Ukrainian president do him a “favor” and a whistleblower complaint.
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Trump election fraud investigation in Georgia enters new phase with grand jury set to b... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trump
shared by katherineharron on 04 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is set to intensify this week, as a grand jury convenes, offering the local district attorney her first shot at seeking subpoenas for records and interviews.
  • Two grand juries are set to convene in Fulton County on Thursday, opening a path for Willis' next phase in her probe. A person familiar with the investigation said they are likely to rely heavily on subpoenas rather than voluntary requests for records and interviews, in part to establish a clear court record of their pursuit of evidence.
  • "There may be nothing there," said a person familiar with the investigation, "or it may be more extensive that we thought."
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Willis has said her investigation will expand past Trump's call with Raffensperger to include any efforts to influence the election in Georgia. She is also investigating a phone call between Trump loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham and Raffensperger, the abrupt departure of Byung "BJay" Pak, the US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and the false allegations of election fraud Rudy Giuliani made before Georgia legislators.
  • The former President's legal troubles began to mount in the wake of a stunning January 2 phone call. In the 62-minute call, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that Trump won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud. "The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you've recalculated," Trump said in one part of the call.
  • "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state," Trump said. A person familiar with the investigation said Willis will not hesitate to dig into the details surrounding the call, even if Trump's team tries to claim various types of privilege to shield the former President from investigative inquiries.
  • "The repeated calls sort of start to tell the story that this was not, again, an official trying to talk to another official about problems that he or she might see in an election," Michael J. Moore, the former US attorney for the Middle District of Georgia between 2010 and 2015 under President Barack Obama, told CNN. "They paint a picture about intent and that's an important element for every prosecutor."
  • "He might say, his lawyers might say, 'No, no, no. He's calling to complain. He's Kvetching. He's saying I got cheated,' " Williams said. Trump's defense could be, "I'm not calling him to ask him to cheat for me, I'm calling him to ask him to undo the cheating," Williams added. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In a previous statement to CNN on February 9, Trump's senior adviser Jason Miller said there was nothing "improper or untoward" about the call between Trump and Raffensperger.
  • In the final days of the Trump administration, after numerous public attacks from Trump following the election, some members of the Secretary of State's office retained attorneys out of fear the then-President could leverage resources for political retaliation, a source with the office told CNN. And while Republican officials in Georgia have been eager to move beyond the drama of the election, they are expected to be drawn back into the investigation as Willis runs down the details surrounding the call with Raffensperger, as well as outreach from Trump and his GOP allies to other state officials
  • Trump also had contact with Georgia's Attorney General Chris Carr and Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp.
  • Graham, a South Carolina Republican, was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when he called Raffensperger on November 13 and inquired whether Raffensperger could discard all mail-in ballots from counties that had shown higher rates of unmatched signatures, the Republican secretary of state told the Washington Post at the time. Graham has denied the assertions from Raffensperger, who has stood firm on his account. Graham's spokesman Kevin Bishop has said that accusations that the senator's call was inappropriate were "ridiculous."
  • Willis has also expressed interest in exploring testimony from Giuliani before Georgia state senators, in which Giuliani promoted unfounded theories about why Trump won Georgia and a handful of other states that Trump had, in reality, lost. Giuliani told a room of mostly Republican lawmakers that Georgia's voting machines could not be trusted, tens of thousands of absentee ballots were illegally cast and not properly counted, and that the legislature should appoint its own electors who supported Trump. "It's your responsibility if a false and fraudulent count is submitted to the United States government, and it is clear that the count you have right now is false," Giuliani said during the hearing.
  • Giuliani said "the law gives you a lot of leeway to view the case in the light most favorable to your client."
  • "There are lots of different pieces and they're different acts and different people involved," Cunningham said. "Lawsuits all over the place, hoping to find a judge who would issue a temporary restraining order, asking a general assembly to intervene, of course raising all kinds of allegations of fraud, pressure threatening the Governor, threatening the Secretary of State."
  • While Willis wasted no time in launching her investigation into the former President, she said during the AP interview that she has no set timeline for completing her inquiry. "I'm in no rush," she said. "I think people think that I feel this immense pressure. I don't."
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Opinion | Tell Me the One About the Presidential Candidate Who Ran for Mayor - The New ... - 0 views

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  • Gail Collins: Bret, my city (and yours — if you work here you at least have rooting rights) tends to switch back and forth between regular party Democrats and feisty independents. De Blasio, a deep, dull Democrat, was preceded by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, who were very, very different versions of the political outsider.
  • Gail: And New York has had some. But except for Nelson Rockefeller our gubernatorial Republicans weren’t very exciting. Have we ever discussed the George Pataki years? No? At least with Andrew G. we’d have a Republican who knows how to putt …
  • Bret: Hemlock or cyanide? Devoured by a saltwater crocodile versus bitten by a venomous sea snake? A year of solitary confinement in a supermax prison or an all-expenses paid trip to Cancún in the company of Ted Cruz? I’m trying to think of equivalently horrible alternatives.
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  • If it’s time for a new outsider, it does sort of seem that Andrew Yang ought to fit the bill. Yet he’s run a rather strange campaign — lots of interesting ideas but often the kind you hear from a guy who’s on a six-month internship at City Hall before being posted someplace else.
  • But we’ve had more than 45 mass shootings in the United States just since the Atlanta killings last month. Many of which we haven’t even heard of because there were more injuries than deaths.
  • Bret: It may be my congenital contrarianism, Gail, but after spending the better part of the pandemic feeling optimistic about the future, I’ve now sunk into deep fatalism. Cases are edging up again, driven by the new virus variants, and the steep decline in Covid deaths since January also seems to have bottomed out at an average rate of around 700 a day, which is just horrific.
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These Businesses and Institutions Are Cutting Ties With Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • A growing number of companies and institutions have taken actions against President Trump and his associates since the deadly rampage at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday by the president’s supporters.
  • Facebook’s announcement came four days after it banned Mr. Trump from posting on its platform at least through the end of his term — after years of defending its hands-off approach.
  • And several digital platforms — including Snapchat, YouTube, Twitch, Reddit and Twitter — also recently limited or suspended Mr. Trump on their services.
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  • The P.G.A. of America announced on Sunday night that its board of directors had voted to terminate an agreement to play the P.G.A. Championship — one of golf’s four prestigious global major men’s championships — at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.
  • Citigroup, which gave $1,000 in 2019 to the campaign of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the senators who voted against the certification of the Electoral College results, said it had paused all campaign contributions until March.
  • Morgan Stanley said it suspended contributions to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results of the election, but has not suspended contributions across the board.
  • Deutsche Bank, which has been Mr. Trump’s primary lender for two decades, and Signature Bank, are also seeking distance from him and his business.
  • “Last week’s attempts by some congressional members to subvert the presidential election results and disrupt the peaceful transition of power do not align with our American Express Blue Box values,”
  • The New York State Bar Association has started an inquiry into whether Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, should be removed from its membership
  • AT&T, Amazon, Comcast, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Ford, Best Buy and Marriott International also said they had suspended or ended contributions to members of Congress who voted against the certification of the Electoral College vote last week.
  • Hilton said it had already suspended its political contributions because of the impact of the pandemic, and that, because of the Capitol Hill violence, it would keep its PAC suspended indefinitely.
  • Wagner College on Staten Island also said on Friday that its board of trustees had voted to rescind the degree it gave to Mr. Trump in 2004.
  • In 2017, both Lehigh and Wagner considered revoking the degrees after Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” who violently clashed in Charlottesville, Va. The schools later decided to let Mr. Trump keep the degrees.
  • The P.G.A. of America announced on Sunday night that its board of directors had voted to terminate an agreement to play the P.G.A. Championship at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.
  • The hotel giant Marriott International said it was taking similar action.
  • Four of the country’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, said they would temporarily stop sending donations from their political action committees.
  • The banks have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and donated to candidates of both parties
  • The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced on Friday that it was suspending political contributions to Republicans in Congress who tried to block the electoral vote tallies for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • The association is one of the nation’s largest federations of insurance companies, which provide health insurance to about 109 million Americans.
  • The decision to strip Mr. Trump’s resort of hosting the second of four major tournaments on the tour’s calendar was a heavy loss to a president who has emphasized his portfolio of golf resorts and spent significant time on the course while in office.
  • Lehigh University in Pennsylvania awarded Mr. Trump a degree in 1988, after its president called the real estate developer a “symbol of our age — all the daring and energy that the word tycoon conjures up.” On Friday, two days after the attack on the Capitol, the university said in a statement that its board of trustees had “voted to rescind and revoke the honorary degree.”
  • Wagner College on Staten Island — the New York City borough where Mr. Trump has remained popular — announced on Friday that its board of trustees had voted to rescind the degree it gave to Mr. Trump in 2004. No explanation was given.
  • On Sunday, Laurie L. Patton, president of the college, said it had initiated the process to consider revoking that degree because of Mr. Giuliani’s role in “fomenting the violent uprising against our nation’s Capitol building,” which Ms. Patton called “an insurrection against democracy itself.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
  • The online payment platform Stripe will no longer process payments for Mr. Trump’s campaign website, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
  • Under the terms of that policy, Stripe users must agree not to accept payments for “high risk” activities, including for any business or organization that “engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property.
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Prospect of Pardons in Final Days Fuels Market to Buy Access to Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • The brisk market for pardons reflects the access peddling that has defined Mr. Trump’s presidency as well as his unorthodox approach to exercising unchecked presidential clemency powers. Pardons and commutations are intended to show mercy to deserving recipients, but Mr. Trump has used many of them to reward personal or political allies.
  • Brett Tolman, a former federal prosecutor who has been advising the White House on pardons and commutations, has monetized his clemency work, collecting tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly more, in recent weeks to lobby the White House for clemency for the son of a former Arkansas senator; the founder of the notorious online drug marketplace Silk Road; and a Manhattan socialite who pleaded guilty in a fraud scheme.
  • Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer John M. Dowd has marketed himself to convicted felons as someone who could secure pardons because of his close relationship with the president, accepting tens of thousands of dollars from a wealthy felon and advising him and other potential clients to leverage Mr. Trump’s grievances about the justice system.
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  • After Mr. Trump’s impeachment for inciting his supporters before the deadly riot at the Capitol, and with Republican leaders turning on him, the pardon power remains one of the last and most likely outlets for quick unilateral action by an increasingly isolated, erratic president.
  • He has also discussed issuing pre-emptive pardons to his children, his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and Mr. Giuliani.
  • He has paid Mr. Tolman at least $10,000 since late last year to lobby the White House and Congress for a pardon for his son Jeremy Hutchinson, a former Arkansas state lawmaker who pleaded guilty in 2019 to accepting bribes and tax fraud, according to a lobbying disclosure filed this month.
  • That system favors pardon seekers who have connections to Mr. Trump or his team, or who pay someone who does, said pardon lawyers who have worked for years through the Justice Department system.
  • “This kind of off-books influence peddling, special-privilege system denies consideration to the hundreds of ordinary people who have obediently lined up as required by Justice Department rules, and is a basic violation of the longstanding effort to make this process at least look fair,” said Margaret Love, who ran the Justice Department’s clemency process from 1990 until 1997 as the United States pardon attorney.
  • “The criminal justice system is badly broken, badly flawed,” said the former senator, Tim Hutchinson, a Republican who served in Congress from 1993 to 2003.
  • . Any explicit offers of payment to the president in return could be investigated as possible violations of bribery laws; no evidence has emerged that Mr. Trump was offered money in exchange for a pardon.
  • A filing this month revealed that Mr. Tolman was paid $22,500 by an Arizona man named Brian Anderson who had retained him in September to seek clemency for Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder. Mr. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise and distributing narcotics on the internet.
  • The former Trump campaign adviser, Karen Giorno, also had access to people around the president, having run Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida during the 2016 primary and remaining on board as a senior political adviser during the general election.
  • Though the name was never publicly disclosed, Mr. Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison. In the meeting, at the Washington office of his lawyer, Mr. Kiriakou said he had been wronged by the government and was seeking a pardon so he could carry a handgun and receive his pension.
  • In July 2018, Ms. Giorno signed an agreement with Mr. Kiriakou, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, “to seek a full pardon from President Donald Trump of his conviction” for $50,000 and promised another $50,000 as a bonus if she secured a pardon.
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Trump Weighs Many Pardons as Presidency Winds Down - WSJ - 0 views

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  • President Trump was expected to issue as many as 100 pardons and commutations on his final full day in office, but on Monday was leaning against some of the more controversial proposed grants of clemency at the urging of his advisers, said people familiar with the discussions.
  • The coming round of pardons, expected Tuesday, has been the talk of Washington in recent days, as allies on Capitol Hill and close to the White House have traded tips on how soon the list might come and who might be on it. Mr. Trump is also working to firm up his defense team for his second impeachment trial as he heads into his last full day of the presidency.
  • In recent months, the president had discussed the prospect of pardoning himself, other members of his family—including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump —as well as his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. But Mr. Trump has been leaning away from those pardons in recent days as advisers have counseled him that they would be unnecessary, the person familiar with the conversations said, while noting that Mr. Trump has been known to suddenly reverse course.
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  • Mr. Broidy was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C., in October and accused of failing to report work for which he was paid at least $6 million by the man accused of masterminding the alleged fraud, Jho Low, to try to influence the Justice Department investigation into the scandal.
  • In 2001, President Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a major donor to the Democratic Party and Mr. Clinton’s presidential library, on his last day in office. President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, convicted on charges related to passing classified documents to WikiLeaks, just days before leaving the White House.
  • The two men met on Sunday, and the former New York mayor isn’t currently expected to be part of the president’s team, another person familiar with the plan said, though the person cautioned: “Never say never.”
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Impeachment watch: The next House impeachment witness is the most important so far - CN... - 0 views

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  • Bill Taylor, currently the top official at the US Embassy in Ukraine, will get his moment before congressional investigators Tuesday. Taylor was one of the officials whose text messages were released by House Democrats earlier this month. His explanation for why he said he felt the US was trading foreign aid to Ukraine for political favors to the President could be a key piece of evidence for House investigators.As investigators build their case for impeachment against President Donald Trump, half of Americans now say Trump should be impeached and removed from office, according to a newly released CNN poll. That's a new high in CNN polling on the topic.
  • Kurt Volker handed over the text messages that showed concern about a quid pro quo.Marie Yovanovitch said she was targeted by Rudy Giuliani and stood up for foreign service officers.Fiona Hill said that her boss, former national security adviser John Bolton, compared the shadow diplomacy being done on President Donald Trump's behalf to a "drug deal."George Kent, according to The Washington Post, said Trump soured on Ukraine after talking to Russia's Vladimir Putin and Hungary's Viktor Orban. He also backed up Yovanovitch and said he lit flares in 2015 about Hunter Biden.Gordon Sondland said Trump told him to work with Giuliani on Ukraine.
  • Taylor is expected to be asked about the text messages he sent US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland in September, before the whistleblower complaint was released.
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  • During a bizarre Q&A with reporters before a meeting with his extremely depleted Cabinet on Monday, Trump questioned whether the whistleblower needs protection.Democrats and the whistleblower's attorneys have raised questions about the individual's safety in potential congressional testimony. Trump took the opportunity of the Cabinet meeting to again attack the whistleblower.
  • "You know, these whistleblowers they have them like they're angels. So do we have to protect somebody that gave a totally false account of my conversation? I don't know. You tell me."
  • The top Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer, wrote to the Director of National Intelligence and Intelligence Community Inspector General demanding to know how they're going to protect the whistleblower's identity.
  • Losing Republicans is clearly something Trump worries about, which he transmitted Monday as he complained about Democrats, who unlike Republicans, he said, are "vicious and they stick together.""They don't have Mitt Romney in their midst," Trump said, referring to the Utah Senator who has criticized Trump and who we learned today goes by the pseudonym Pierre Delecto on Twitter.
  • One hard deadline is Election Day 2020. The ultimate question for Democrats could end up being whether they need to follow every lead they discover in order to vote that Trump committed high crimes or misdemeanors.
  • The President has invited foreign powers to interfere in the US presidential election.Democrats want to impeach him for it.It is a crossroads for the American system of government as the President tries to change what's acceptable for US politicians. This newsletter will focus on this consequential moment in US history.
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Democrats see impeachment proceedings taking longer than some initially expected - CNNP... - 0 views

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  • House Democrats are facing a time crunch to quickly wrap up their investigation into allegations President Donald Trump abused his office in pushing Ukraine to probe his political rivals, prompting growing expectations that votes on impeaching Trump could slip closer to the end of the year.
  • But that has proven to be more complicated than it initially seemed, according to multiple Democratic lawmakers and sources. The reason: Each witness has so far provided more leads for investigators to chase down, including new names to potentially interview or seek documents from. Plus, Democrats have had to reschedule several witnesses, including some this week in part because of memorial services for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, and others because they needed more time to retain lawyers.
  • "Every time we have a deposition, it leads us in a slightly different direction," Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, two of the three panels leading the investigation, said Monday. "We don't know how many additional pieces of testimony we may need. We just don't know."
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  • "I think it's more like between Thanksgiving and Christmas" for the end of the investigation, said one Democratic member involved in the probe. "After that, it's a strategic decision about when to bring it to the floor."
  • "We are committed to moving as methodically but expeditiously as possible -- but we will interview witnesses, release transcripts and hold open hearings at time appropriate given the collection of facts," the source said.
  • There are still a number of more witnesses in a variety of agencies -- State, Pentagon, Energy, Office of Management and Budget and the White House national security council -- who have firsthand knowledge of Trump's handling of Ukraine, the work of his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and why congressionally approved military aid was held up for Ukraine.
  • Democrats still hope to talk to some big name witnesses, like Bolton, who privately raised concerns about Giuliani's efforts. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's statement Thursday — quickly retracted — that the White House held up aid pushing for Ukraine to investigate the 2016 Democratic National Committee server has added him as a potential target. And it's still uncertain if the committees will talk to the whistleblower whose complaint about Trump spawned the investigation.
  • At some point, the three House committees leading the probe plan to hold public hearings after all their witnesses have been behind closed doors. Plus, the committees say they will release transcripts of their depositions -- some of which have gone as long as 10 hours -- and that process can often take days, if not weeks, to complete.
  • "When you're shocked by the chief of staff basically saying that there was a quid pro quo, it's a little hard to make any predictions whatsoever about what the timing will be," Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "You know shocking things happen every single day. My belief is that the speaker of the House would like to get this wrapped up by the end of the year. I think that's probably possible."
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The White House's impregnable stone wall is starting to crumble (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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  • When the House of Representatives launched its impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump over the Ukraine scandal, the White House decried it as "invalid" and "baseless," and ordered some subpoenaed officials not to testify to Congress. This obstructionist strategy worked once before, as the White House effectively stonewalled the House Judiciary Committee's investigation of Robert Mueller's findings on Russian election interference by instructing executive branch employees not to comply with subpoenas.
  • Former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch defied the White House's instruction to remain silent and instead testified to the House about the efforts of Trump's counsel, Rudy Giuliani, to have her removed from her post; one House member said she gave a "gripping and emotional account of presidential abuse of power."
  • Fiona Hill, Trump's former top Russia adviser, testified White House officials were alarmed by Trump's potentially illegal conduct toward Ukraine even before the July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky. And Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified Trump ordered diplomatic professionals to deal with Ukraine through Giuliani, which left Sondland "disappointed" -- particularly when he discovered (later, he claimed) that Giuliani's agenda included prompting Ukraine to investigate Trump's political rivals.
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  • Now that the parade of witnesses has started, Congress and the public will learn more about Trump's efforts to push Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. Bill Taylor -- the top US diplomat in Ukraine, who famously texted Sondland that it would be "crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign" -- provided devastating testimony Tuesday. In his opening statement, Taylor established clear as day that there absolutely was a "quid pro quo" of American foreign aid in exchange for Ukrainian investigations of Trump's political rivals.
  • Trump has defended himself by noting that Zelensky stated he felt "no pressure" while dealing with Trump over delivery of foreign aid to Ukraine. And indeed, Zelensky has said, "nobody pushed me." But even if Zelensky truly felt no pressure, it hardly matters criminally or in impeachment.
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Ex-White House chief Kelly claims he warned Trump about impeachment | US news | The Gua... - 1 views

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  • ohn Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, said he “felt bad” for having left Trump’s side, because his advice was not followed and the president therefore faced impeachment.
  • Kelly said that on leaving, he “said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man’, someone who won’t tell you the truth’”. “Don’t do that,” the retired marine general said he told Trump. “Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”
  • Trump denies having done so but the House foreign affairs, intelligence and oversight committees have heard extensive testimony to the contrary.
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  • The former South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney replaced Kelly and still fills role in an acting capacity. He is under pressure, having told reporters Trump did make Ukraine the subject of a quid pro quo, withholding nearly $400m in US military aid while asking for political favours, the issue at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
  • The top US diplomat for Europe told the committees he had not known US aid may have been withheld in order to pressure Ukraine’s new president to conduct investigations helpful to Trump, a source told Reuters. The source said Reeker was prepared to say he had largely left Ukraine policy to Kurt Volker, then US special representative for Ukraine negotiations, and others.
  • Taylor wrote that he thought it was “crazy” to withhold aid for help with a political campaign.
  • Taylor testified that he was told the aid would be withheld until Ukraine conducted the investigations Trump requested. Sondland and Taylor have testified and detailed their concerns about the influence of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
  • Another diplomat, George Kent, testified that he was told to “lie low” and defer to three political appointees. Yovanovitch has accused the Trump administration of recalling her based on false claims.
  • The House committees have scheduled several depositions for next week, all behind closed doors. On Monday, former deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman is due to testify. On Tuesday, lawmakers expect Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top expert on Ukraine.
  • On Friday this week, Kupperman received a subpoena. He asked a federal court if he should comply or follow Trump’s directive not to, because he “cannot satisfy the competing demands of both the legislative and executive branches”. Without the court’s help, he said, he would have to make a decision that could “inflict grave constitutional injury” on Congress or the presidency.
  • Also on Friday, a federal judge rejected a claim by Trump and his Republican allies that the impeachment process was illegitimate because the full House had not voted to authorize it. The judge ordered the administration to give the judiciary committee secret material from the former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.
  • The impeachment inquiry is expected to lead to a House vote before Christmas, most likely sending Trump to the Senate for trial. A conviction is unlikely but the White House and Republicans have faced criticism for their response so far, chaotic and confrontational rather than coordinated and effective.
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6 highlights from Ukraine envoy Bill Taylor's 'explosive' testimony - 0 views

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  • President Donald Trump has insisted there was no "quid pro quo" in his dealings with the Ukrainian government, and "no pressure" on Ukraine's president to open an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.But in his remarkable 15-page statement delivered to Congress on Tuesday, Trump's top diplomat to Ukraine painted a picture of both.
  • "I found a confusing and unusual arrangement for making U.S. policy towards Ukraine. There appeared to be two channels of U.S. policy-making and implementation, one regular and one highly irregular."
  • The "irregular, informal channel" included then-Special Envoy Kurt Volker, European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
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  • Taylor heard from an Office of Management and Budget staffer in a National Security Council conference call that a hold has been placed on Ukraine aid.
  • "that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelenskiy did not 'clear things up in public,' we would be at a 'stalemate.'
  • Taylor said "the Ukrainians did not 'owe' President Trump anything, and holding up security assistance for domestic political gain was 'crazy.'"The hold on the aid was lifted on Sept. 11.
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How key Republicans inside Facebook are shifting its politics to the right | Technology... - 0 views

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  • David Brock, founder and chairman of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, said: “Mark Zuckerberg continues to kowtow to the right and rightwing criticism. It began when he met with a bunch of rightwingers in May 2016 and then Facebook changed its algorithm policies and we saw a lot of fake news as a result.
  • “I think there’s a consistent pattern of Zuckerberg and the Breitbart issue is the most recent one where the right is able to make false claims of conservative bias on Facebook and then he bends over backwards to accommodate that criticism.”
  • The Republican strain in Facebook was highlighted in a recent edition of the Popular Information newsletter, which stated that the top three leaders in the company’s Washington office are veteran party operatives. “Facebook’s DC office ensures that the company’s content policies meet the approval of Republicans in Congress,” Popular Information said
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  • oel Kaplan, vice-president of global public policy at Facebook, manages the company’s relationships with policymakers around the world. A former law clerk to archconservative justice Antonin Scalia on the supreme court, he served as deputy chief of staff for policy under former president George W Bush from 2006 to 2009, joining Facebook two years later
  • Warren noted on Twitter this week: “Since he was hired, Facebook spent over $71 million on lobbying—nearly 100 times what it had spent before Kaplan joined.”
  • Kaplan has reportedly advocated for rightwing sites such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller, which earlier this year became a partner in Facebook’s factchecking program. Founded by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, the Daily Caller is pro-Trump, anti-immigrant and widely criticised for the way it reported on a fake nude photo of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
  • Facebook’s Washington headquarters also includes Kevin Martin, vice-president of US public policy and former chairman, under Bush, of the Federal Communications Commission – where a congressional report said his “heavy-handed, opaque and non-collegial management style … created distrust, suspicion and turmoil”
  • Katie Harbath, the company’s public policy director for global elections, led digital strategy for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee. She has been the principal defender of the company’s decision to allow political advert
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5 things to know for January 15: Dem debate, Iran, impeachment, immigration, health - CNN - 0 views

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  • Global leaders are parsing the consequences of last week's plane crash caused by an Iranian missile attack.
  • House Democrats have released a stash of new text messages and hand-written notes from indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas that could affect the upcoming impeachment trial.
  • Has all the talk of impeachment and elections made you forget about the border wall? The White House hasn't forgotten. The administration is considering diverting another $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding to build the wall. That's five times the amount Congress initially authorized in February. About $3.7 billion of this money would come from military construction projects and $3.5 billion from counterdrug program funding, according to internal figures first obtained by the Washington Post. With the money, the government could complete about 885 miles of new fencing by the spring of 2022.
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  • The World Health Organization released a list of urgent health challenges that the world will be likely to face in the coming decade, and it's a serious reality check.
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