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katyshannon

Republican debate focuses on terror, national security - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...republican-debate-updates

republican debate terror national security US politics

shared by katyshannon on 16 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The simmering rivalry between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz spilled into the open Tuesday night during the final Republican presidential debate of the year, as the two senators tussled over a string of issues that served to highlight front-runner Donald Trump's discomfort with policy substance.
  • event here was dominated by national security and terrorism in the aftermath of the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.
  • But Trump, who has fueled intense controversy by proposing a ban on Muslims entering the United States, often faded into the background. He even struck an uncharacteristically conciliatory tone by pledging his commitment to the Republican Party -- putting to rest rumors of an independent run -- and holding his punches from the surging Cruz.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Rubio and Cruz dug deep on policy.
  • Bush shot back: "Donald, you're not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency."
  • There was no one on stage more eager to hit Trump than Jeb Bush. With his campaign floundering as his poll numbers have dropped to the low single-digits, Bush asserted himself more effectively than in previous debates. Right out of the gate, the two men exchanged tense words on Trump's plan Muslim ban proposal, as well as the real estate developer's recent vow to go after family members of ISIS terrorists.The latter, Bush said, was "another example of (Trump's) lack of seriousness."
  • The long-simmering feud between the two men has intensified as they've risen in the polls and the senators have sought to seize the second-place spot after Trump. Cruz has attempted to straddle the line between presenting himself as an outsider and making the case that he can be commander-in-chief. Rubio has tried to blunt Cruz's rise by attacking his national security policy as too isolationist -- a potent attack at a time when national security is dominating the campaign.
  • Rubio blasted Cruz for voting for the USA Freedom Act, which made it more difficult for the government to access certain kinds of information about people's telephone records.
  • Cruz called Rubio's accusation false, and said the law ultimately "strengthened the tools of national security and law enforcement to go after" terrorists.He also hit Rubio on one of his biggest political vulnerabilities: his work on the "Gang of Eight" comprehensive immigration reform bill. Calling the legislation a "massive amnesty plan," Cruz accused Rubio of working with Democrats to give President Barack Obama a "blanket authority" to accept refugees.
  • Rubio hit back, saying Cruz supports the legalization of people who are in the country illegally. He also slammed his colleague for supporting a controversial H-1B visa program, which supports immigration of highly skilled foreign workers.
  • Cruz and Rubio were also split on whether the turmoil in the Middle East would ease if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was removed from power.
  • "If we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria and it will worsen U.S. national security interests," Cruz said.Rubio rejected this notion, saying while the United States must sometimes work with "less than ideal governments," Assad was simply an "anti-American dictator."
  • Heading into Tuesday's debate, the stakes were higher than ever for the White House hopefuls. The Iowa caucuses are just seven weeks away and ISIS-inspired terror attacks have shifted the dynamics of the 2016 campaign.
  • Trump remains the undisputed national GOP presidential front-runner. A Monmouth University poll on Monday placed him at 41%, the first time he's cracked the 40% threshold in a national survey.
  • Trump does, however, face a real threat from Cruz in Iowa. Recent polls showed the senator either neck-and-neck with or ahead of Trump in the state.
  • On Tuesday night, Cruz continued to show little appetite for publicly engaging Trump. Asked to respond to Trump's Muslim ban proposal, the Texas senator said he could certainly "understand why Donald made that proposal."
  • Four lower-polling White House hopefuls kicked off the evening by raising alarm about the threat of radical Islam -- and went after Trump for the Muslim proposal.
  • Santorum and Graham -- who dominated the discussion -- were joined by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former New York Gov. George Pataki. All four are at risk of being next on the chopping block if they're unable to gain real momentum soon.
Javier E

The Trump Debate Inside Conservative Citadels - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vative-think-tanks-bannon.html

conservativism thinktank trump politics Culture influence intellectual

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Mr. Stern, who’s worked at the Manhattan Institute for more than two decades, tendered his resignation from its flagship publication, City Journal. “This is very important. It’s about the future of our country. It’s about the degradation of language and ideas,” Mr. Stern insisted. He, along with several others I spoke to, felt the think tank and City Journal were acting like Sweden in the face of the Trump threat.
  • “This now seems to be the only way for me to protest the magazine’s intellectual abdication on the most urgent crisis facing the nation today: the election of an unfit, dangerous man to the presidency, plus the myriad ways in which the forces of Trumpism and Bannonism are tearing the country apart,” Mr. Stern wrote in a resignation letter
  • to one journalist previously published by City Journal, that doesn’t justify the way the publication has responded to the Trump presidency. “While City Journal’s desire to sit out the Republican civil war was perfectly understandable, it is not a viable long term option now that Donald Trump is president,” he wrote me. “A political journal in the Trump era” that hardly engages with the president “isn’t like ignoring a 900-pound elephant. It’s like ignoring an invasion from Mars.”
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  • At The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, nearly every editor and writer of the “Never Trump” persuasion left the paper in the past year, this writer included. George Will did not have his contract renewed at Fox News after his anti-Trump views fell afoul of a network in thrall to the president.
  • At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, nonpartisan research group, at least two people left over the way the think tank responded to Mr. Trump’s election. “The ability to criticize became very limited. We had to be more and more populist and right wing in our views and our analysis,” one former employee told me. He said that the reason was explained clearly by the leadership: “We were told time and time again that for eight years we’ve been out in the wilderness. Now we have an opportunity for access. We can’t pass it up.”
  • For a sense of what it looks like for the bomb throwers to run the joint, one needn’t look far. The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors
  • “Heritage has gotten away from its core function, which was to provide top-notch policy research to advise conservative lawmakers. It’s become the de facto arm of Bannonism,” one person close to Heritage told me. In recent weeks, the think tank has hosted the president. The home page of its website boasts: “Donald Trump and many newly elected Republican congressmen promised they’d drain the swamp. And Heritage is here to help them do just that!”
  • “Bannon and Trumpism is a definitive threat to the country. The ideology is a dramatic departure from a long American tradition of America being a global leader,” added Mr. Radosh. “Bannon has spoken of wanting an international alliance with all these emerging right-wing populists in Europe. It is a fundamental rejection of liberalism.”
Javier E

Trump's Fate 2018 & 2020: Odds Favor Trump | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...ate-2018-2020-odds-favor-trump

trump gop appeal demagogue Crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • Voters may say that they find Trump puerile and repellent while in private enjoying that he is as petty as they are and hits back at those who long ago needed a smack. That disconnect could explain why polls are now less relevant and why those who voted for Trump can fudge and mislead about their politics more than Trump himself does. Trump’s take-no-prisoners style may serve some people’s vicarious need to push back against the progressive trajectory of the country, in a way that voting for a Cruz or a Rubio in the primary did not.
  • We pundits talk about being “presidential” and “elevating the office” over the lowest common denominator of the mob. Perhaps. But what if after $20 trillion in debt, unwon wars in the Middle East, the 2008 meltdown, nuclear missiles 20 minutes from Portland and San Diego, and a country without borders and torn apart by race, the proverbial people do not want an aspirational president who leads only to more such lofty aspirations? What if they instead prefer someone who is in some sense unpresidential or at least anti-presidential, if being status quo “presidential” got us where we are?
  • Stylistically or politically, what exactly would acting unpresidential these days consist of — politicizing the IRS, allowing the VA to decay, surveilling, unmasking, and leaking communications of U.S. citizens, or inviting into the White House misogynistic and profane rappers whose lyrics are about hating the police?
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  • it may be that it was not just Trump’s conservative populist message but also Trump himself, the unique populist loudmouth messenger, who won the Electoral College. Trump prevailed not only because he appealed to the concerns of flyover country, but also because he voiced these concerns in a way that no other Republican would have.
  • In other words, the very manner in which Trump agonizes our elite is also precisely what may still energize half the country — the half that lives supposedly nowhere but in electoral terms is very much somewhere.
zoegainer

How White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump Extremism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...used-with-trump-extremism.html

white christians captiol riot US trump Politics history Culture

shared by zoegainer on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Before self-proclaimed members of the far-right group the Proud Boys marched toward the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, they stopped to kneel in the street and prayed in the name of Jesus.
  • The presence of Christian rituals, symbols and language was unmistakable on Wednesday in Washington. There was a mock campaign banner, “Jesus 2020,” in blue and red; an “Armor of God” patch on a man’s fatigues; a white cross declaring “Trump won” in all capitals. All of this was interspersed with allusions to QAnon conspiracy theories, Confederate flags and anti-Semitic T-shirts.
  • that the most extreme corners of support for Mr. Trump have become inextricable from some parts of white evangelical power in America. Rather than completely separate strands of support, these groups have become increasingly blended together.
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  • “We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light,” she said, declaring that she was rising up like Queen Esther, the biblical heroine who saved her people from death.
  • Like many Republicans in Congress, some evangelical leaders who have been most supportive of Mr. Trump distanced themselves and their faith from the rioters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, called the violence “anarchy.” The siege on the Capitol “has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity,” he said. “Our support of President Trump was based on his policies.”
  • The riot on Wednesday, carried out by a largely white crowd, also illustrated the racial divide in American Christianity.
  • Hours before the attack on the Capitol, the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta had been elected to the U.S. Senate after many conservative white Christians tried to paint him as a dangerous radical, even as his campaign was rooted in the traditional moral vision of the Black church. And for years many Black Christians have warned white believers that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on race was going to end badly.
  • In Kalamazoo, Mich., Laura Kloosterman, 34, attended mass on Wednesday and prayed that Congress would decline to certify Mr. Biden’s victory. She had read claims online about flawed voting machines undercounting votes for Mr. Trump — there is no evidence for these claims, which Mr. Trump and right-wing voices online have promoted.
  • These false beliefs have forged even stronger connections between white evangelicals and other conservative figures.
blythewallick

'Get Over It'? Why Political Influence in Foreign Policy Matters - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-inquiry-foreign-meddling.html

politics US history trump policy GOP

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • A July 25 call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine is the basis for an impeachment inquiry into whether Mr. Trump withheld American military aid until Ukrainian officials investigated former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter.
  • “Many countries are rivals of ours and of our democratic system,” Mr. Potter said. He listed as two chief examples China and Russia, countries that Mr. Trump has publicly suggested could help him achieve his political aims. “In some cases, they’re going to want policies that help them and therefore hurt us. In other cases, though, they just want us to fail.”
  • Are protections against this kind of thing in place? Yes. The ability of a foreign nation to gain access and influence over America’s democratic process has been a concern since the early days of the republic.
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  • Mr. Trump has denied any explicit quid pro quo — a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something — in his call with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He has repeatedly referred to it as a “perfect” conversation.
  • So what’s the problem?At its most basic level, asking another government for help — whether a quid pro quo existed or not — means that Mr. Trump would find himself indebted to another country.
  • Is this illegal?Asking a foreigner for aid in an American political campaign is illegal, which Ellen L. Weintraub, the head of the Federal Election Commission, has made clear.
  • Isn’t this business as usual?No. Both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations have resisted the idea of enlisting help from foreign powers for political advantage.
  • The Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The C.I.A. has planted misinformation and, at times, used cash as a way to achieve foreign policy aims.
  • “We often consider ourselves and hold ourselves out as an example of how other countries should conduct themselves,” Mr. Potter said. “When we have internal battles or things have gone wrong here, it is much harder to do that.”
  • Has this happened in previous U.S. elections? Sort of.The only impeachment involving foreign policy came in the case of a senator, William Blount, who was accused in 1797 of scheming to transfer parts of Florida and the Louisiana Territory to Britain. The House impeached Blount, but he fled Washington. The Senate opted to expel him rather than convict him at trial.
  • remystewart on 21 Oct 19
     
    This article talks about Trump's call with the president of Ukraine which has become the basis of Trumps' impeachment inquiry. This article, talks about the White House chief of staff and how he is investigating the theory that it was Ukraine not Russia who hacked the Democratic Party emails in 2016 which would show that Trump was elected in 2016 without the help of Russia. The Cheif of Staff speaks on how there will always be a big political influence on foreign policy. The negatives of other countries getting involved in our elections start on the basis of other countries' ideals and morals compared to ours. The author, Katie Rogers, states that this has "sort of" happened before in the US but not to this extent. She believes that we as a country need to put a lot of effort into political influence on foreign policy before the next election.
cartergramiak

In Visiting a Charred California, Trump Confronts a Scientific Reality He Denies - The New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...ires-trump-climate-change.html

trump Policy global warming politics

shared by cartergramiak on 14 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • When President Trump flies to California on Monday to assess the state’s raging forest fires, he will come face to face with the grim consequences of a reality he has stubbornly refused to accept: the devastating effects of a warming planet.
  • “It’s mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview on Sunday. “He doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t particularly believe in science. It’s all about him and his re-election.”
  • Mr. Trump has doubled down on his anti-climate agenda as a way of appealing to his core supporters.
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  • voters may hold him and his administration accountable for brushing aside scientific experts and failing to effectively mobilize the government to minimize natural disasters that have claimed lives, damaged property and threatened economic prosperity.
  • “Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles, a supporter of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, said
  • “As an historic figure, he is one of the most culpable men in America contributing to the suffering and death that is now occurring through climate-related tragedy,” Jerry Brown, the former California governor
  • The president’s record is also more consequential, experts say, because the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere has now passed the point at which scientists say it would be possible to avert many of the worst effects of global warming — even if tough emissions policies are later enacted.
  • “In both cases, there is no plan to deal with crisis,” he added.
  • the president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.
  • At the event in front of supporters in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Trump declared himself “a great environmentalist.”
  • The report is clear about the causes — burning fossil fuels — and the effects: It found that the increased drought, flooding, storms and worsening wildfires caused by the warming planet could shrink the American economy by up to 10 percent by the end of the century.
  • he said of global warming, “I don’t know that it’s man-made,” and suggested that even as the planet warmed, “it will change back again” — an idea scientists have long debunked.
  • And Mr. Trump’s first appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, declared early in his tenure that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement starkly at odds with the scientific consensus.
  • He said Mr. Trump had put in place “common sense policies that have kept our air, water and environment clean.”
  • Taken together, those rules represented the country’s first significant step toward reducing greenhouse gases, while putting the world’s largest economy at the forefront of the global effort to fight climate change.Now they are in shambles.
  • If Mr. Biden is elected, he has vowed to rejoin the Paris agreement and reinstate those rules, while pushing to enact even stronger policies, spending up to $2 trillion to promote the development of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
clairemann

How Joe Biden Outmaneuvered Donald Trump On Climate | Time - 0 views

time.com/...biden-trump-energy-climate

US trump election policy politics climate

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump thought he had hit the jackpot during the final presidential debate when his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, declared that he would “transition away from the oil industry.”
  • “He’s going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?”
  • say his reaction points to a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of the electorate’s shifting views on climate change, but of how profoundly the issue has already shaped the presidential race
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  • the 2020 election is the first in history where climate change has played a pivotal role in a major candidate’s campaign, even if the issue wasn’t always in the headlines.
  • For the last two years, Trump has repeatedly played to his base with various rejections of climate science. The Biden campaign, in contrast, has used the issue to carefully build a broad coalition.
  • A landmark climate report in the final months of 2018 sparked a global awakening on the issue and, in the U.S., the Sunrise Movement pressed politicians on the topic in high-profile protests.
  • Last summer, Biden introduced his first full-throated plan, which proposed a $1.7 trillion federal outlay over ten years to tackle climate change.
  • Biden’s all-in strategy on climate may have already paid dividends: analysts say the youth vote has surged in early voting.
  • Biden leaned in rather than back down. Two-thirds of Americans support aggressive action on climate change, according to a Pew Research poll released in June, one of many showing heightened voter concern over the issue.
  • a growing group of Americans rank the issue among their top concerns and cite it as a motivating factor in their political engagement.
  • To activate these voters, Biden created a handful of task forces and committees to address the issue. Climate change played a key role in a “unity task force” composed of Biden and Sanders supporters. Meanwhile, Biden convened a separate “advisory council” made up of high-profile environmental, labor and environmental justice leaders as well as climate activists to develop a common-ground plan.
  • Historically, candidates track to the center to appear more palatable for a general election audience. Widespread voter concern over the spread of COVID-19 also could have bumped the issue from Biden’s agenda.
  • In recent years, young people have been the most vocal activists calling for action on climate change, and Biden allies saw taking a vocal stance on the issue as a strategic move to push young people, who often stay home on Election Day, to the polls.
  • the campaign framed the $2 trillion program as an opportunity to create jobs, invest in protecting communities of color and decarbonize the economy. “It was not that they went off in a room and came up with it,”
  • “If you go out and talk to most young people in America right now, the issue at the top of their list is going to be climate change.”
  • “They asked us questions—policy questions, personal questions: what are you dealing with? What are you hearing?” says Justin Onwenu, a community organizer at the Sierra Club in Michigan and a member of the DNC’s platform committee. “I think that went a long way.”
  • “I’m the first person I’m aware of that went to every major labor union in the country and got them to sign on to my climate change plan,” Biden said on Pod Save America on Oct. 24. The move to engage unions almost served a prebuttal of the Trump campaign’s primary climate talking point: that addressing the global warming would be too expensive and cost jobs.
  • In recent years, Trump’s climate policy has largely consisted of rolling back regulations and aiding fossil fuel companies, policies that remain deeply unpopular with American voters. This cycle, the campaign’s message — which was sometimes disrupted by off-the-cuff remarks from Trump — has shifted the focus slightly, asserting not that climate change isn’t real, but that addressing it would be too costly.
  • “Joe Biden has even admitted that he will be an anti-energy president,” said Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and President Trump’s first energy secretary on a call of journalists. “Biden’s radical proposal to eliminate oil and gas and coal from the US power grid by 2035 will have a devastating consequence on workers and families.”
  • Trump’s messaging may resonate in some parts of Pennsylvania where the fracking industry employs some 25,000 and indirectly supports many more jobs. Trump has hammered home the talking point in messaging in the state, including TV ads running there.
  • Biden clarified that move would be gradual and not be completed during his time as president. He would, instead, end subsidies for fossil fuels. At the same time, he reiterated his promise to create more jobs in clean industry.
  • There’s a sense among the activists and strategists who have spent months if not years plotting how to engage voters on climate that the acknowledgement of the oil industry’s long-term decline may not have struck the chord that it would have even a few years ago.
  • “I think [Biden] has been on the defensive a bit,” on fracking, said Michael Catanzaro, a former energy and environmental policy advisor in the Trump White House, before the debate. “But I think it’s actually working for him… he’s talking to union voters. He’s using his blue collar roots to push back pretty hard.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Wave That Could Carry Trump to Re-election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-2020-campaign.html

populism elite backlash immigration climate change policies

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • our “America First” president ought to be viewed in a global context
  • surveys taken more than a year before Election Day are meaningless
  • Mr. Trump benefits from incumbency and continued economic recovery, and he’s riding a wave of national populism that has yet to crest.
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  • Only two of the nine presidents up for re-election since World War II have lost. In the past century the public has booted a party from the White House after a single term just once
  • The United States is not engaged in a major war. And the economic recovery that began in mid-2009 has continued under Mr. Trump, with unemployment at half-century lows. Manufacturing employment has increased. Economic growth approached 3 percent last year. The Dow Jones industrial average has increased by about a third since Inauguration Day 2017
  • The willingness and capacity of electorates to absorb large numbers of newcomers would be on the ballot. The answer was not what leaders had in mind.
  • Mr. Trump is wary of foreign entanglements, and a slowdown is not the same as a recession. Sustained peace and prosperity improve Mr. Trump’s chances of a second term.
  • Behind the rise of outsider politicians such as Mr. Trump are the interrelated issues of unchecked immigration, terrorism and the imposition of carbon taxes and other measures to mitigate climate change
  • Elites’ inability or lack of interest in tackling these problems — or even seeing them as problems — generates a crisis of representation in which large numbers of voters look for alternatives
  • Mr. Trump was among the first heralds of an anti-elitist turn that has disrupted politics from London to Melbourne. The issues animating this upheaval have not disappeared.
  • The attacks at the Bataclan theater in Paris in November 2015, at an office party in San Bernardino, Calif., two weeks later and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June 2016 heightened fears of terrorism. Elites downplayed the ideology of the assailants for fear of an anti-Muslim backlash, opening themselves up to charges of political correctness
  • Efforts to fight climate change through regulation, international treaties and carbon pricing provoked a similar anti-elitist response.
  • What unites these issues is the idea that elites insulate themselves from the costs of the policies they impose on others. It is the idea on which Mr. Trump and his anti-elitist supporters base their campaigns
johnsonma23

The Gospel According to Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gospel-according-to-trump.html

trump new york times US

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The Gospel According to Trump
  • IT is no secret that Donald J. Trump’s ruinous rise in the Republican presidential primaries has been powered, in large part, by a naked agenda of religious division and fear-mongering
  • But while his anti-Muslim provocations have rightly drawn the largest share of public outrage, Mr. Trump has in fact been using his bully pulpit throughout this election season to attack religious minorities of all stripes.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In the Gospel According to Trump, there is only one blessedly normal, all-American faith: mainline Protestant Christianity.
  • Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists
  • are Mr. Trump’s “chosen ones.
  • Take Mr. Trump’s bizarre speech last month to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he kept inexplicably returning to the same well-worn tropes that anti-Semites have been using for a century
  • “I’m Presbyterian,” Mr. Trump said. “Boy, that’s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.”
  • More recently, he tried to blunt Ted Cruz’s surge in the Iowa polls by using the senator’s Cuban heritage to exoticize his Christian faith. “I do like Ted Cruz,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Des Moines, “but not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba.”
  • But Mr. Trump’s religious posturing is not about theology, it’s about branding — and if his religious worldview seems impossibly dated, that’s by design.
  • s “Make America Great Again”
  • Mr. Trump’s target demographic is not America’s most devout, but its most anxious and aggrieved, and what he’s selling isn’t salvation, but a bygone era of plentiful factory jobs
  • By focusing his rhetorical firepower largely on minority faiths that have grown in size and influence in the United States over the past 60 years — displacing the old Protestant monopoly — Mr. Trump is stoking a tribal hostility toward those who worship differentl
  • He promptly recalibrated, telling me about a Jewish friend (“great guy, rich guy”) who had moved to Utah and fallen in love with the local creedal breed. “You know,” he said, “people don’t understand the Mormon thing. I do. I get it. They are great people!
Javier E

Opinion | Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...p-evangelicals-cyrus-king.html

patriar trump king authoritarian gop evangelical right-wing

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Cyrus, in case you’ve forgotten, was born in the sixth century B.C.E. and became the first emperor of Persia. Isaiah 45 celebrates Cyrus for freeing a population of Jews who were held captive in Babylon. Cyrus is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.
  • “The Trump Prophecy” was produced with the help of professors and students at Liberty University, whose president, Jerry Falwell Jr., has been instrumental in rallying evangelical support for Mr. Trump. Jeanine Pirro of Fox News has picked up on the meme, as has Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, among many others.
  • The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump.
  • A lot of attention has been paid to the supposed paradox of evangelicals backing such an imperfect man, but the real problem is that our idea of Christian nationalism hasn’t caught up with the reality. We still buy the line that the hard core of the Christian right is just an interest group working to protect its values. But what we don’t get is that Mr. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes and anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction.
  • Another important thing to understand about Cyrus is that he is not a queen. In the Christian nationalist world, legitimate political power is largely male power. Mr. Drollinger insists that the Bible describes only “male leadership.”
  • while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.
  • This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.
  • in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.
Javier E

Is there a neo-Nazi storm brewing in Trump country? | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...neo-nazis-america-donald-trump

alt-right nazi party nativism trump politics culture

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Members of the “alt-right”, a mixed group of racists, nationalists, antisemites and misogynists, understand that many news stories are built on a framework of conflict and outrage, fueled by the power of a shocking image or the lure of a supposedly telling contrast. “The media’s dependence on social media, analytics and metrics, sensationalism, novelty over newsworthiness, and clickbait makes them vulnerable,”
  • People who have had personal run-ins with Heimbach – who have experienced him in action – say the media should not simply ignore his activities. Instead of glamorizing them or portraying them as cartoonish monsters, scrutiny should attempt to reveal their impact.
  • The Kentucky neo-Nazi summit in April attracted about 150 people, about 75 of them members of the Traditionalist Worker party.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • Heimbach claims that his party has 600 dues-paying members nationwide. They do not call themselves Nazis. Heimbach said the term Nazi is a slur, and that he draws inspiration from many fascist and national socialist regimes, not just Germany’s.
  • Ryan Lenz, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks American hate groups, sees no justification for his argument. It is fair to label Heimbach a Nazi because he is an avowed national socialist, Holocaust denier and antisemite.
  • “In this context, Nazi is not a slur. It’s not an attack. It’s an accurate description,” he said.
  • “Most of these people are malignant contrarians who have a lot of loyalty and trust issues,”
  • Jonathan Munshaw, who covered Heimbach’s early tactics for the Towson student newspaper, said he only ever verified one Towson student who was part of the White Student Union: Heimbach himself. But students on campus truly believed that the group was much bigger, Munshaw said – and they were terrified.
  • At a campus town hall meeting, Evans recalled, Heimbach had said: “I am going to bleed this university white.”
  • “It sent shockwaves through the campus,” Evans said. As a result of Heimbach’s activism, he thought attendance at campus events dropped. People didn’t want to leave their rooms.
  • Evans countered Heimbach’s views publicly – and, as a result, he was featured on white supremacist websites, one of which dubbed him a “black supremacist”.
  • Evans said he had received a death threat at his college graduation, and walked across the stage fearing that he would be shot in front of his mother and his girlfriend.
  • It was the perfect recipe for a television segment: the white supremacist, the black students arguing against him. “It was an easy story,”
  • In interviews and speeches to other neo-Nazis, Heimbach is less circumspect, quoting Goebbels and speaking fondly of Mussolini.
  • Heimbach serves as a lynchpin between the scattered groups of the radical right – the one who can build connections with “the working-class skinhead movement and the upper-class academic racists”, said Lenz, who has been interviewing Heimbach periodically since he graduated from college.
  • His argument, Lenz said, is: we’re all compatriots in nationalism, and therefore we should stand together, whether we believe in the Holocaust or not.
  • Heimbach had only been a white nationalist in college. But supporters of his White Student Union responded by sending him books in the mail that helped shift his views about the Holocaust. “At the end of the day,” he said, “you end up at national socialism.”
  • Lenz said he does not know how Heimbach, who says he is forced to work low-paying jobs, can afford to travel constantly across the country and fly to Europe every year to meet with far-right groups. He said Heimbach had denied having a wealthy patron who funded the trips. Heimbach said he paid for the trips himself, with some contribution from his party
  • By the month before Trump’s election, Heimbach had shifted gears and developed a new message discipline “capable of spinning answers to questions like someone who had spent years in a spin room”
  • Trump was Heimbach’s dream come true. In early 2016, Heimbach had described the presidential candidate as the “gateway drug” to outright white nationalism.
  • “I don’t think I ever even heard him say the word white,” she said. Instead, it was: “‘People are coming in, close the border, and they’re taking our jobs and our communities’ – it was very dog whistle-y.
  • When the protester’s group finally raised their banners toward the end of Trump’s speech, Heimbach’s group immediately rushed them, not just to tear down their anti-Trump banner but also to punch them, several protesters alleged in a lawsuit. The onslaught “was so intense and violent” that the protester, who was in the back, said she was overwhelmed.
  • The protester said Heimbach and his group had insinuated their way into the middle of the crowd, and when a moment of tension arrived they suddenly turned violent, and other men around them mirrored their behavior, shouting, pushing, furious. Trump, from the stage, had called: “Get ’em out!”
  • American neo-Nazis look at Golden Dawn’s rise and take hope. Heimbach has met with far-right nationalists across Europe, he said, including three visits with Golden Dawn over the past three years.
  • Heimbach can put on a show of moderation. He doesn’t think everyone should have to live in a white ethno-state. That’s just his preference. He doesn’t hate other races. He just thinks that black Americans have, on average, a “lower future time orientation”.
  • But Trump’s rise to power has encouraged the extremists to try to bridge their divides. Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan leaders were jubilant over an openly xenophobic, politically incorrect presidential candidate who promised to stop illegal immigration and enact a Muslim ban – and they have pursued news coverage, attracting headlines and staging dramatic photos
  • He is a Holocaust denier, believing that the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews by the Nazi regime did not happen, that it’s all a “Bolshevik conspiracy”. He has expressed sympathy for the racist killer Dylann Roof and praised white supremacist Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.
  • Real Christianity, he said, is “patriarchal, homophobic, racist and antisemitic”. He laughed. “I see that as a good thing.”
  • Heimbach lives in Paoli, Indiana, with his wife and son; his fellow party leader, Matt Parrott; and Jason, the young white nationalist who moved from New York City to join him and who now edits his video projects and produces white nationalist music. Three other white families who support their views have moved to Paoli to join them, Heimbach said – two from northern Indiana, one from Virginia. They try to get together weekly for board game nights and home-brewed mead. They play Risk – “of course, the battle of world domination” – and Cards Against Humanity.
  • “My parents didn’t exactly know what I was thinking or up to. I think in modern America, [there are] a tremendous amount of parents who would be horrified and scandalized with what their young sons and daughters are reading on white nationalist forums or reading on the Daily Stormer,” he said.
  • “My folks said that they didn’t raise me like this, that they didn’t approve of this and that I had to make a choice, if I was going to do this or choose my family. And I said to them, this is choosing my family, because I want my siblings and their grandchildren to have a future. They didn’t understand.”
  • Heimbach’s speech was well received. But as the night went on, the divide between the traditional neo-Nazi groups and the new, internet-savvy “alt-right” began to show. The speeches grew so dull, despite the periodic Nazi salutes and chants of white power, that most of the younger extremists melted away into the dark, leaving a smaller and smaller audience to listen to old Nazis drone on.
  • In the political analysis of Trump voters, neo-Nazi advocates like Heimbach and some on the left tend to agree: Trump voters are a white identity movement, motivated to vote for him at least in part by outright racism, a claim Trump supporters vehemently reject.
  • The locals in Pikeville greeted the influx with outrage and shock. Outside a Pikeville tattoo parlor the day before the neo-Nazis were coming to town, a group of local men expressed disgust at the agenda and concern that the event would discourage students of different races from coming to the local university.
  • Both women were increasingly angry that Heimbach had chosen to come to Kentucky to spread his message. “He’s targeting us,” Wooton said, “because he thinks that we’re stupid.” “And he’s wrong about that,” Porter said.
Javier E

American Jewish voters still despise Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...jews-still-despise-trump

american jews trump

shared by Javier E on 25 May 19 - No Cached
  • like most Americans, they don’t rank foreign policy at or near the top of their concerns. In fact, for Jews, Israel ranks dead last in their list of concerns. We can speculate whether that is a function of the current Israeli government; a sense that Israel is a robust and successful nation that does not require our constant attention; a widening rift between Israel and diaspora Jewry; or whether, just as with every other group of Americans, Jewish Americans’ domestic concerns that affect their lives swamp issues related to foreign affairs.
  • Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) say Jews in the United States are less secure compared to two years ago. A majority (59 percent) think President Trump is at least partially responsible for recent targeted attacks on synagogues, and a plurality (38 percent) have concerns that President Trump is encouraging violent ultra-right extremists. A broad majority (71 percent) disapprove of President Trump’s handling of anti-Semitism, including a 54 percent majority who strongly disapprove.
  • Should we be surprised that the friend (Trump) of their enemy (white nationalism) is their enemy? The president denies that their enemy is even a threat and therefore earns their enmity. Trump’s replacement rhetoric (the United States is “full”), his blood-and-soil nationalism and his contempt for the rule of law strike at the heart of Jews’ worries about their safety and security in a multiethnic society. Their ancestors left places such as Russia so as not to be at the whim of anti-Semitic autocrats; the United States was supposed to be their refuge.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • First, what Trump is doing for Israel for domestic consumption is not aimed at nor impressing American Jews. It is aimed, as is everything, at securing his right-wing base, which is disproportionately white and evangelical.
  • the far left’s dual loyalty and other anti-Semitic tropes (e.g. controlling the U.S. government by political money) are morally disgraceful and ludicrously misdirected at Jewish Americans. For better or worse, American Jews aren’t motivated by Israel. They are, however, greatly offended by anti-Semitism, whether it comes from the right or left, and will expect both political parties to drum out anti-Semites.
malonema1

What Trump Means When He Calls Gary Cohn a 'Globalist' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555269

US trump

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The term “globalist” is a bit like the term “thug.” It’s an epithet that is disproportionately directed at a particular minority group. Just as “thug” is often used to invoke the stereotype that African Americans are violent, “globalist” can play on the stereotype that Jews are disloyal. Used that way, it becomes a modern-day vessel for an ancient slur: that Jews—whether loyal to international Judaism or international capitalism or international communism or international Zionism—aren’t loyal to the countries in which they live.
  • It’s possible to use the term “globalist”—even about a Jew—innocently, just like it’s possible to use the term “thug” about an African American with no racist intent. And perhaps that’s what Trump was doing when he applied it to Cohn. The problem is that this requires giving Donald Trump a benefit of the doubt that he forfeited long ago.
  • When Trump uses anti-Semitic language, his defenders often counter that his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren are Orthodox Jews. Sure, but even bigots contain multitudes. Trump may feel genuine affection for Jared Kushner, and likely Gary Cohn too. But that doesn’t change the fact that he employs anti-Semitic tropes in ways that make him almost unique among contemporary American politicians. After all, history is filled with politicians who fomented anti-Semitism yet enjoyed warm relationships with individual Jews.
Javier E

Opinion | What Will Happen to the Republican Party if Trump Loses in 2020? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...publican-party-trump-2020.html

gop conservatism future trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • the history of the modern Republican Party is the history of paradigm shifts.
  • If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes.
  • For decades conservatives were happy to live in that paradigm. But as years went by many came to see its limits.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government. “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?” we asked. Only a return to the robust American nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt would do: ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility.
  • George W. Bush, who made his own leap, to Compassionate Conservatism. (You know somebody has made a paradigm leap when he or she starts adding some modifying word or phrase before “Conservatism.”) This was an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism.
  • am’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns
  • Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities.
  • The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods
  • The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.
  • Most actual Republican politicians rejected all of this. They stuck, mostly through dumb inertia, to an anti-government zombie Reaganism long after Reagan was dead and even though the nation’s problems were utterly different from what they were when he was alive
  • Donald Trump and Bannon took a low-rent strand of conservatism — class-based ethnic nationalism — that had always been locked away in the basement of the American right, and overturned the Reagan paradigm.
  • Bannon and Trump got the emotions right. They understood that Republican voters were no longer motivated by a sense of hope and opportunity; they were motivated by a sense of menace, resentment and fear. At base, many Republicans felt they were being purged from their own country — by the educated elite, by multiculturalism, by militant secularism.
  • During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and Bannon discarded the Republican orthodoxy — entitlement reform, fiscal restraint, free trade, comprehensive immigration reform. They embraced a European-style blood-and-soil conservatism. Close off immigration. Close trade. We have nothing to offer the world and should protect ourselves from its dangers.
  • Over the last three years, it’s been interesting to watch a series of Republican officeholders break free from old orthodoxies and begin to think afresh.
  • future is embodied by a small group of Republican senators in their 40s, including Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse.
  • they start with certain common Trumpian premises:
  • Everything is not OK. The free market is not working well. Wages are stagnant. Too much power is in the hands of the corporate elites. Middle America is getting screwed. Finance capitalism is unbalanced. American society is in abject decline. If Reaganism was “Let’s be free,” the new mood is “Take control.
  • Economic libertarianism is not the answer. Free markets alone won’t solve our problems
  • We need policies to shore up the conservative units of society — family, neighborhood, faith, nation. We need policies that build solidarity, not just liberty.
  • The working class is the heart of the Republican Party. Once, businesspeople and entrepreneurs were at the center of the Republican imagination. Now it’s clear that the party needs to stop catering to the corporate class and start focusing on the shop owners, the plumbers, the salaried workers
  • China changes everything. The rise of a 1.4-billion-person authoritarian superpower means that free trade no longer works because the Chinese are not playing by the same rules
  • The managerial class betrays America. Many of the post-Reagan positions seem like steps to the left. But these Republicans combine a greater willingness to use government with a greater hostility to the managerial class.
  • From these common premises the four senators go off in different directions.
  • Hawley is the most populist of the group. His core belief is that middle-class Americans have been betrayed by elites on every level — political elites, cultural elites, financial elites
  • The modern leadership class has one set of values — globalization, cosmopolitanism — and the Middle Americans have another set — family, home, rootedness, nation
  • Cotton has a less developed political vision but a more developed attitude: hawkishness.
  • Sasse is the most sociological of the crew. He is a Tocquevillian localist, who notes that most normal Americans go days without thinking of national politics. His vision is centered on the small associations — neighborhood groups, high school football teams, churches and community centers — where people find their greatest joys, satisfactions and supports.
  • over the long term, some version of Working-Class Republicanism will redefine the G.O.P. In the first place, that’s where Republican voters are
  • Government’s job, he says, is to “create a framework of ordered liberty” so that people can make their family and neighborhood the center of their lives.
  • Levin thinks the prevailing post-Trump viewpoints define the problem too much in economic terms. The crucial problem, he argues, is not economic; it’s social: alienation. Millions of Americans don’t feel part of anything they can trust. They feel no one is looking out for them.
  • “What’s needed,” Levin says, “is not just to expand economic conservatism beyond growth to also prioritize family, community and nation, but also to expand social conservatism beyond sexual ethics and religious liberty to prioritize family, community and nation
  • The Republican Party looks completely brain-dead at every spot Trump directly reaches. Off in the corners, though, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment on the right.
  • The Wall Street Journal editorial page stands as a vigilant guardian of the corpse, eager to rebut all dissenters. The former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are staunch defenders of Minimal-Government Conservatism
  • there’s also the possibility that Republicans will abandon any positive vision and revert to being a simple anti-government party — a party of opposition to whatever Biden is doing.
  • Behind these public figures there is a posse of policy wonks and commentators supporting a new Working-Class Republicanism,
  • Second, the working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men.
  • None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people
nataliedepaulo1

Obama on Jimmy Kimmel: Trump Isn't Funny Anymore - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...505295

politics obama

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Obama on Kimmel: Trump Isn't Funny Anymore
  • Obama, with his uninvited guest, brought a note of the ominous to the otherwise cozy late-night couch, suggesting that the era of 2011—the time when Trump could exist simply as a punchline—is over.
  • And yet here we are. Trump has been anti-establishment not just when it comes to politics, but also when it comes to the broader sphere of entertainment: Comedians have been unsure, exactly, how to treat him. The president was in that sense making a political argument that was also about comedy: He was saying, essentially, that the time for simple jokes about Trump—the kind he made in 2011, the kind so many people have been making since Trump became a political candidate—has ended.
  • nataliedepaulo1 on 27 Oct 16
     
    In this article, Obama talks about how the idea of Trump isn't a joke anymore, it is a serious issue.
cjlee29

Ted Cruz, Attacking Donald Trump, Uses Transgender Bathroom Access as Cudgel - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ansgender-rights-bathroom.html

shared by cjlee29 on 29 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • HighlightBookmarkSticky
  • As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seeks every possible edge to stop Donald J. Trump, he has seized on a once-obscure issue with a proven power to inflame conservatives: letting transgender women use women’s bathrooms.
  • a state with many social conservatives that is all but a last stand for him in his fight to deprive Mr. Trump of the Republican presidential nomination.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Mr. Cruz has alternated between mockery and outrage nearly every day in highlighting Mr. Trump’s stance
  • Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree that grown men should be allowed to use the little girls’ restroom
  • campaign’s private polling indicates that the bathroom issue has the power to help close the gap
  • In leveraging the issue, Mr. Cruz has raised the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms
  • conservatives around the country have effectively invoked to defeat anti-discrimination laws
  • The topic could surface in July at the Republican convention, where a fight is already brewing in the platform committee to overturn the party’s historical objection to same-sex marriage.
  • Even with the transgender protections deleted, the bill died.
  • Social conservatives in Indiana have been on high alert since last year, when Gov. Mike Pence and fellow Republican lawmakers amended a so-called religious freedom law
  • He said Mr. Cruz’s attack on Mr. Trump was meant to show that Mr. Trump is a liberal who supports the right of transgender people to “choose the bathroom that aligns with their identity that day.”
  • But it was North Carolina that thrust the issue into the nation’s consciousness last month, after state lawmakers passed a law prohibiting transgender people from using a public restroom that does not correspond to the gender on their birth certificate.
  • Later, Mr. Trump amended his stance, saying it was up to cities and states to decide on their own.
  • That did not stop Mr. Cruz from saying the country had gone “stark raving nuts
  • She added that 85 to 90 percent of sexual assault victims know their attackers. “Pay attention, read the news, get an understanding,” she said. “This whole argument about going to the bathroom is just ridiculous.”
Javier E

Trump's America will be on vivid display at annual conservative gathering - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9845-576c69081518_story.html

trump conservative conference

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The conservative movement in America now belongs to President Trump.
  • Thousands of activists will arrive in Washington this week for an annual gathering that will vividly display how Trump has pushed the Republican Party and the conservative movement toward an “America first” nationalism that has long existed on the fringes.
  • Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, said the gathering this year will be an acknowledgment of the “realignment going on politically in the country” and of the rising import of “American sovereignty” to conservatives nationally.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “There used to be Pat Buchanan’s people, the populist revolt-types and the establishment of the anti-establishment, who’d get a third of the vote in the primaries and we’d beat them back,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant who led a super PAC that supported former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. “Now they’ve hijacked the Republican Party.”
  • And Breitbart, which has been a sponsor of CPAC for years, has more visibility than ever. As Bannon has pointed out to associates, a site that once organized panels titled “The Uninvited” for guests too controversial for CPAC is now shaping the movement’s agenda.
  • Meanwhile, the libertarian flavor of the conference during the Obama years has faded. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who won the conference’s presidential straw poll three years running, is not coming to CPAC.
  • Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who has given a series of speeches recently on “Trumpism,” said he is “impressed that CPAC has very intelligently anticipated the direction that Trump is going to take the country and understood that he’ll be the dominant voice on the right for the foreseeable future.”
  • Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser who worked on the businessman’s CPAC arrangements in the years before the 2016 campaign, said the conferences were “pivotal” for Trump because they gave him a tangible sense of how his celebrity could be translated to a career in conservative Republican politics.
  • “It’s definitely a show,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, a co-founder of GOProud who left the Republican Party in 2015. “It’s a show that is now designed to perpetuate a fight. Donald Trump lives for the fight. He feeds off the fighting. So does, frankly, the Breitbart organization. It’s all about us versus them. It’s not about ideas.”
Javier E

This Is What the Trump Abyss Looks Like - 0 views

nymag.com/...he-trump-abyss-looks-like.html

trump demagogue politics Culture authoritarian mob Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • there is a credible argument that, given soaring inequality, and globalization’s disproportionate impact on the middle classes and working poor, tax relief for many in the lower half of the earning population is a good idea. I agree. So why not give it to them, rather than the obscenely wealthy? And why not make it revenue-neutral or even debt-reducing as well as helpful to social stability?
  • You could indeed pay for big middle class tax cuts or an increase in tax credits for the working poor if you doubled the estate tax, or adding a new tax bracket - say, 45 percent - for those earning over $1 million a year. This would be a political master-stroke for the Trump administration (which is why Steve Bannon was rumored to favor something on these lines). It would instantly rebrand the GOP. It might even get buy-in from the Democrats. It could pass without using reconciliation rules in the Senate, thus helping entrench it in the system. It would help defuse our dangerous tribalism. It would do a lot to restore generational fairness, and counter the emergence of a rich caste of people who are fabulously wealthy for doing nothing. It would support work rather than privilege, a meritocracy rather than an oligarchy.
  • If the Democrats were smart, they would propose something like this themselves - and get ahead of the GOP, using it as a platform for 2018. And if the Republicans could abandon zombie Reaganism, they could rescue themselves from the electoral oblivion they so richly deserve. There’s a win-win here for both parties and the country.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The key is to sustain a sense of the urgency of the moment, a resolute refusal to accept this descent into an illiberal authoritarianism, and a decision to put all our differences aside for a year in order to mobilize a turnout next year that eclipses Obama’s. We have to turn the mid-terms into a presidential election. Sane Republicans need to vote for the Democrat. Leftists have to put aside their divisive identity politics. Liberals need to coalesce around a simple strategy - not impeaching but checking Trump decisively.
  • the only reliable and sane solution is a massive mobilization of the anti-Trump majority at the polls next year. The huge Democratic fundraising advantage is encouraging; as are the new grass roots organizations that are going in strength. Maybe an unexpected leader from the left or center might emerge. Maybe a strong Democratic message that can somehow keep its minority edge and simultaneously re-engage the white Obama-Trump voters in the midwest.
  • He is the total master of an enormous mob that, so far, has completely overcome the elites. He achieves this mastery through incendiary oratory, hourly provocations, and relentless propaganda. His rallies are events of mass hysteria and rage. His propaganda machines - Fox News, Limbaugh, Breitbart, Drudge - rarely crack
  • And there is no one in our political life capable of matching this power. Name one, if you can. And when you look at the Democratic field of 2020, no one seems up to it at all. Among the few responsible Republicans left, what we see is either utter cowardice in the face of an enraged base, or the kind of courage that manifests itself too late to make a difference, which is to say no real courage at all.
  • this base support is unshakable. It is not susceptible to reason. No scandal, however great, will dislodge it - because he has invaded his followers’ minds and psyches as profoundly as he has the rest of ours. He is fused with them more deeply now, a single raging id, a force that helps us understand better how civilized countries can descend so quickly into barbarism.
  • In a country led by a swirling void, all sorts of inhibitions slowly slip away. Nativism, racism, nationalism: these are very potent catalysts of human darkness
  • by far the most important development in all this, the single essential rampart, is how, through all this, Trump has tightened his grip on 35 percent of the country. He has done this when he has succeeded but also critically when he has failed, because he has brilliantly turned his incapacity to be president into an asset with his base. No wall? Congress’ fault. Obamacare in place? The GOP’s fault. No tax cut? Ditto. The only way forward? A deeper and deeper trust in him. Only he can fix the Congress by purging it. Only he can fix the Courts through nominees who will never stand up to him.
  • And we know something after a year of this. It will go on. This is not a function of strategy or what we might ordinarily describe as will. It is because this president is so psychologically disordered he cannot behave in any other way. His emotions control his mind; his narcissism overwhelms even basic self-interest, let alone the interest of the country as a whole. He cannot unite the country, even if, somewhere in his fathomless vanity, he wants to. And he cannot stop this manic defense of ego because if he did, his very self would collapse.
  • This is why he lies and why he cannot admit a single one of them. He is psychologically incapable of accepting that he could be wrong and someone else could be right. His impulse - which he cannot control - is simply to assault the person who points out the error, or blame someone else for it.
  • Yes, the forms of the Constitution remain largely intact after nine months. But the norms that make the Constitution work are crumbling. The structure looks the same, but Trump has relentlessly attacked their foundations
andrespardo

Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump | Robert Reich | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...hment-trial-state-of-the-union

trump

shared by andrespardo on 07 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • ut why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?
  • But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.
  • hey talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging”.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly.
  • peaking at a factory in Pennsylvania in June 2016, he decried politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families”.
  • Racism did play a part. But to understand why racism had such a strong impact in 2016, especially on the voting of whites without college degrees, it’s important to see what drove it. After all, racism in America dates back long before the founding of the Republic, and even modern American politicians have had few compunctions about using racism to boost their standing.
  • Clinton and Obama chose not to wrest power back from the oligarchy. Why? In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. Clinton pushed for Nafta and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the “confidence” of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.
  • Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 supreme court opinion opening wider the floodgates to big money in politics.
  • There is no longer a left or right.
  • A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. As Eduardo Porter of the New York Times notes, since 2000 Republican presidential candidates have steadily gained strength in America’s poorer counties while Democrats have lost ground. In 2016, Trump won 58% of the vote in the counties with the poorest 10% of the population. His share was 31% in the richest.
  • Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement. Trump has harnessed the frustrations of at least 40% of America. Although he’s been a Trojan horse for big corporations and the rich, giving them all they’ve wanted in tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, the working class continues to believe he’s on their side.
Javier E

Trump blew it - not the WHO, Fauci or the Jews - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-blew-it-not-who-fauci-or-jews

trump jews WHO response blame pandemic alt-right

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles, therefore, took a different tack. He blamed the Jews. “God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ,” he proclaimed on his TruNews platform. This is the same Rick Wiles who in November called Trump’s impeachment a “Jew coup.”
  • this is the same Rick Wiles whose TruNews outlet was granted press credentials by the Trump administration to cover the World Economic Forum in January; Wiles stayed in a room booked by the administration.
  • blaming a globalist conspiracy. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) demanded an investigation into the WHO for “helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.” Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.), Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pro-Trump outlets such as the Federalist and Breitbart have proclaimed similar sentiments.
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  • if the WHO had harshly attacked the Chinese response, we would have gotten even less cooperation and information out of China.
  • The WHO began working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Jan. 1 — a day after China disclosed the virus — and sent out advisories to worldwide public-health leaders beginning Jan. 5. Its scientists first got into Wuhan on Jan. 20, and on Jan. 23 it warned of a 4 percent death rate, human-to-human transmission and potential exporting of the virus to “any country.”
  • The WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, visited Beijing and secured permission for a dozen scientists, including from the CDC, to tour the affected areas from Feb. 16 to Feb. 24.
  • The scientists issued a report warning that the virus is “spreading with astonishing speed” and called for governments to “immediately activate the highest level of national response,” including immediate and extensive testing and planning for closing schools and workplaces.
  • And yet, Trump slept. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said on Feb. 28.
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