Instill the fear that to speak or write or tweet or ask, “What is this with Russia?” will get you sued for libel—for the sake of Trump.
This man, already, as of 102 days in office, the worst president in the history of the United States, already the symbol of betrayal and treachery and the willingness to whore himself out to whichever foreign nation will give him a “win”—in the media or at the ballot box—this pitiful excuse for a man is a thug bent on destroying the freedoms of this country as we know them, and, God damn it, we are not going to let him do it.
TRUMP IS PANICKING AGAIN ABOUT RUSSIA
Post date • TUESDAY, MAY 2
On Russia, Trump appears to be running out of excuses. He may also be running out of time. He is not, however, running out of panic.
Two developments this week underscore that. The first involves one of those excuses, and . . . you guys are kidding, right? General Michael Flynn, who campaigned for Trump, who spoke at Trump’s convention, who guided the formation of Trump’s policy on Russia, who was briefing the Russian ambassador while on Trump’s transition team, who Kellyanne Conway said still had Trump’s full confidence as of four p.m. on February 13, who resigned as Trump’s national security adviser at ten p.m. on February 13, who is—in the best-case scenario—guilty only of lying to Trump’s vice president, who has offered to testify, somewhere, presumably against Trump, in exchange for immunity . . . He’s Obama’s fault.
Uh-huh.
“I just heard where General Flynn got his clearance from the Obama administration,” Trump told CBS. “When he went to Russia, it was 2015 and he was on the Obama clearance. When General Flynn came to us, as you now know, he already had the highest clearance you can have.”
Go on.
“They’re so devastated because this only came up two days ago . . . I watched one of your other competitors and they were devastated by this news, because you know what? That kills them. That’s the end of that subject.”
And then there was a ruling. And the ruling said Flynn wasn’t my fault. And the ruling also said he was Obama’s fault. And so you can’t ever talk about Russia again. Because the ruling is final. It’s a ruling. And China ate my homework.
What are you, six?
Trump—Mr. Business, Mr. Extreme Vetting, Mr. Full Confidence in Flynn—has just admitted that when he brought Flynn on, he and his entire team, his government-in-waiting, had no idea whether or not Flynn had the necessary national security clearance to become national security adviser. Although he knows Flynn traveled to Russia in 2015, on the payroll of Kremlin propagandists, to sit alongside Vladimir Putin, at the same table with Jill Stein, and he knows that Flynn was director of national intelligence until Obama fired him, he seems to think the idea that Flynn had gotten security clearance while Obama was president means that anything Flynn did after Obama fired him is somehow Obama’s fault.
Trump also believes—literally believes—that the fact that Flynn worked for the government while Obama was president somehow ends the story of the growing evidence of his campaign’s connections to the Russian interference with the 2016 election. “That . . . kills . . . them,” he said. “That’s the end of that subject.”
And this remarkable overconfidence dovetails with the sudden return to Trump’s early campaign pledge to change the Constitution so he can sue anybody who writes a news story he doesn’t like. When his henchman Reince Priebus went on ABC’s This Week, the first story Priebus used as an example of media irresponsibility—the only story Priebus used as an example of media irresponsibility—was that same saga of the Trump campaign and Russia.
I would leave it to John Dean or a historian to analyze the twelve stages of a massive political cover-up. But somewhere in them there has to be this succession of emotions: first comes utter panic at some development that might not be publicly visible, followed by a complete rationalization that you had managed to blame an outside party for it and were now and forever free, followed, in turn, by a public declaration that the subject was now closed.
We saw this with Watergate. “I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end,” said Richard Nixon in his 1974 State of the Union address. “One year of Watergate is enough!” The Republicans applauded, and Nixon almost smiled, and—a note to Trump—less than two weeks later, the House voted 410–4 to authorize the Judiciary Committee to investigate impeachment charges against Nixon.
If we are in the “utter panic at some development that might not be publicly visible” stage—what has caused it? Shoes continue to drop at a steady pace. Two of the shoes belong to Sebastian Gorka—reported to be leaving the White House. He was the guy who came up through the Fox News/Breitbart pipeline who showed up at the inaugural ball as an incoming Trump national security aide, wearing what might—or what might not—have been the ceremonial medal of a Hungarian group that was pro-Nazi during World War II. More pertinently, he was one of Trump’s loudest defenders about Russia.
Meanwhile, there is also a Russian shoe. A Russian national named Peter Yuryevich Levashov has been indicted on eight counts in Connecticut for, according to the Justice Department, “alleged operation of the Kelihos botnet—a global network of tens of thousands of infected computers, which he allegedly used to facilitate malicious activities . . .” The former member of the British Parliament Louise Mensch—who beat all of American media by five months to the story that the Justice Department had gotten a FISA Court order relating to Trump’s associates—has now posted, “Sources linked to the intelligence community say it is believed that a Russian hacker of the election, Pyotr Levashov, was paid directly by Boris Epshteyn on behalf of both Trump and the FSB.”
Pyotr Levashov! Why, that’s Peter Levashov’s name!
The FSB is one of the many Russian spy agencies. Epshteyn, who has denied both the allegations and the assertions that he is an FSB agent, is the Russian-born former Trump communications team member who just left the White House.
Mensch also quotes sources who say that the botnet that Levashov operated had a “command and control center” in Trump Tower.
And yes, with Mensch, and the British agent Christopher Steele, of the Steele dossier, and the British newspaper The Guardian leading world coverage of this story—and the BBC reporter Paul Wood, who isn’t far behind—yes, the British just may be your cousin who is just far enough away to see clearly that your girlfriend or boyfriend is no good and you need to get them out of your life immediately.
And then there is a shoe I wouldn’t ordinarily mention.
It is a story from a man named Claude Taylor, who identifies himself on Twitter as a “Veteran of three presidential campaigns, served on White House staff (Clinton).” He tweeted on Friday, “This just in from a source with knowledge of Comey’s investigation. ‘two grand juries have convened and I know that one is almost complete.’” Thin gruel under ordinary circumstances . . .
But Taylor’s seeming bombshell was then retweeted by a man named Rick Wilson, with just one word added: “Same.” Wilson is not just not a Democrat, as Taylor is, he is a former Rudy Giuliani adman and adviser, he dreamed up the awful ad linking Georgia senator Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden in 2002, and he tied then Senator Barack Obama to Reverend Jeremiah Wright in 2007.
Take Wilson and Taylor for whatever you think they are worth, but I am not ready to dismiss them, especially not after Taylor came back on Sunday to describe one of the alleged grand juries as having supposedly focused on violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, RICO racketeering, and the Russians and Trump Tower.
Are there grand juries ready to hand up, hand down, or hand out indictments?
I would not dare claim to know. But I do know what I see: Trump—at escalated levels of panic. Trump—floating a constitutional amendment that would keep us from talking about his Russia problem! Trump at the point of pretending that a
not very interesting fact about General Michael Flynn and his security clearance, which Trump should’ve known and anybody who had ever thought about it could probably have guessed, is somehow the final judgment on his Russia problem, that it “kills” those covering his Russia problem, and concludes for all time any discussion of his Russia problem—quoting him again about his Russia problem: “That’s the end of that subject.”
I do not dare to claim to know the whole story of Trump and Russia. But I willingly dare to claim that this is not the end of that subject.
A PLEA TO THE FREE WORLD: FOR GOD’S SAKE, ASK TRUMP!
Post date • WEDNESDAY, MAY 3
This is a plea from what’s left of the United States to the rest of the free world, specifically to the news media of the rest of the free world. Please—what happened in Berlin to Ivanka Trump has to happen everywhere any of the Trumps or the secretary of state or the vice president or anybody else connected to this misbegotten, evil man stops long enough to take questions.
Our media has been all but frozen out, replaced by propaganda outlets where nothing, no matter how outlandish or un-American—not even attacks on the very freedom of speech under which they operate—gets a follow-up question. On those few occasions when there is an opportunity to state that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the United States and the free world, our media has largely choked. It asks him questions not designed to be challenging to his fact-free worldview, but designed to be played on television. Or it self-censors, overcome at the crucial moment by desperate, stupid, and ultimately pointless attempts to, as a source at one cable outfit reportedly put it, “focus on Trump voters.”
Last Saturday, Trump compared immigrants to “snakes.” He called the rules of the Senate and the House “archaic.” His chief of staff would, the next morning, propose a constitutional attack on the First Amendment. He invited the murderous strongman of the Philippines to the White House. He held a rally apparently openly attended by white nationalists.
And after all that, this was the headline in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer (right under “Winner of 20 Pulitzer Prizes”): “Touting Progress.” Touting progress? Touting fascism!
We here, the liberal media, Trump’s “Fake News”—we pretend this is just another presidency and just another difference of opinion. Even The New York Times. As Robert Duvall called it in the movie Network, “The holy goddamn New York Times.” The same morning: “Remaking the Presidency, Trump Has Changed, Too. Expanding Power and Shunning Norms, Yet Adapting to Realities, After 100 Days.”
The hell he has! Adapting to what realities? As that newspaper hit the streets, his spokesman was talking about a constitutional libel amendment so that—as Trump put it eleven months before his inauguration—“we can sue them and win lots of money.”
In interviews preceding his hundredth day in office, Trump showed a succession of reporters the county-by-county map of his election—five months after that election—and at least half-seriously suggested to a reporter from The Washington Post that the paper print the map, now, on its front page. Instead of an article asking how crazy anybody who would do such a thing would have to be, this became an anecdote for the Washington Post reporter to joke about much later, on television.
Trump told a Washington Examiner reporter about his admiration for Andrew Jackson and how Jackson “was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’” Jackson left the presidency twenty-eight years before the Civil War started, and in fact had nearly precipitated a civil war thirty-two years before it started. Trump couldn’t have been more wrong about him if he had claimed Jackson rode to his inauguration in an automobile. And yet the American news media continues to treat Donald Trump as just another story, as the wacky neighbor who just happens to have nukes, and it continues to treat the Trump Presidential Crime Family as just another collection of White House relatives.
So again, my plea to the journalists of the world: Do what Miriam Meckel, the editor in-chief of a German business magazine, did. “You’re the first daughter of the United States,” began Ms. Meckel as she moderated a business panel featuring Ivanka Trump, “The German audience is not that familiar with the concept of a First Daughter. I’d like to ask you, what is your role, and who are you representing? Your father as president of the United States? The American people? Or your business?”
Ms. Trump, whose confused-beauty-pageant-contestant-grade stupidity has largely been hidden from the American audience, stumbled through her answer. Incredibly, she then began to laud her father’s treatment of women. “I’m very proud of my father’s advocacy . . . He’s been a tremendous champion of supporting families, and enabling them to thrive . . .”
The crowd began to hiss, boo, and make other verbal equivalents of eye-rolling.
“You hear the reaction from the audience,” moderator Meckel observed. “I need to address one more point. Some attitudes toward women your father has displayed in former times might leave one questioning whether he’s such an empowerer for women . . .” Since Trump’s election, no one in this country has asked a question that pointed or that realistic or that challenging of him or his spawn or his key appointees, and Miriam Meckel asked two of them.
“I’ve certainly heard the criticism from the media,” Ivanka Trump replied, again startled by reality and sounding surprisingly like her father, “that’s been perpetuated.” Miriam Meckel deserves all the Pulitzer Prizes, the Murrow Awards, the Cronkite Awards, the Emmys, the Peabodys, and any other trophy we can hand her. And she and other reporters and editors and just other citizens in Germany or England or France, or those foreign correspondents who are reporting from the United States for the BBC or Agence France-Presse or the Aardvark Daily of Wellington, New Zealand—or anyone who is anywhere that members of this family or this government might not be able to elude the media—you need to keep asking pointed, doubtful, skeptical questions that our reporters are too afraid to ask.
Ask Trump if he’s ever had a CAT scan. Ask Trump if he’s experiencing headaches or blurred vision or hallucinations. Ask Rex Tillerson if he’s worried that evidence continues to mount connecting his boss’s campaign to Russian electoral hacking while his boss has resumed blaming China. Ask UN Ambassador Nikki Haley if it’s a problem that Trump invited Duterte to the White House and congratulated Erdoğan on destroying democracy in Turkey. Ask any of the Trump children why their father has simultaneously enraged North Korea and South Korea and China. Ask them about the Carl Vinson Armada Bluff, and ask them about the conflation of Kim Jong-un with Kim Jong-il, and ask them about the White House education story on Snapchat that misspelled the word “Education,” and ask them about how the First Lady seemingly had to physically nudge Trump to put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. Or take anything from that crazy Associated Press interview where he said off the record that he watched CNN and then said on the record, two minutes later, that he never watched CNN—and ask him! Or that crazy Reuters interview where he admitted that he thought life as president would be easier than being a seventy-year-old con man who inherited his money from his daddy!—and ask him! Or take that crazy rally in Pennsylvania where he called immigrants “snakes,” when his own grandparents were immigrants and his mother was an immigrant and two of his three wives have been immigrants and four of his five kids are the children of an immigrant—and ask him!
Ask him! For God’s sake, ask him. Because the media of this country is too terrified of being accused of not being balanced to come out and state the obvious: that emotionally, the president is not at all balanced! And that while all of our lives depend on whether he gets less crazy or more crazy, apparently it is no longer worth the risk to American reporters to ask just how crazy he is at this moment!
THE HEALTH CARE REPEAL
Post date • THURSDAY, MAY 4
The well-dressed man in the neatly trimmed beard wa
s one of the last of the 558 people to testify to the commission. He had been chosen by his colleagues to represent them all, and none of them disavowed what he said—nor ever would. His colleagues had been willing to paralyze the nation, to not just affect at least 10 percent of the economy but to, at best, inconvenience and, at worst, literally threaten the lives of virtually all of its citizens. No matter what entreaties had been made to them—no matter what evidence of inhumanity had been presented, no matter the pleas and protestations, no matter the “moving spectacle of horrors,” as one of their opponents termed it—they would not listen. They had a mandate to protect what their side believed.
And their side had the money. And then the well-dressed man in the neatly trimmed beard said something that you can still find in the history books today. Of the victims of the inhumanity he and his moneyed colleagues were inflicting, he testified, “These men don’t suffer! Why, hell, half of them don’t even speak English.”
The man was named George F. Baer, and he was the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. His testimony was to the first real public hearing about the hellish, murderous virtual slavery facing the coal miners of this nation, called the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission.
This was in the year 1903. In Pennsylvania. The miners worked ten hours a day, six days a week, for which they would be paid $2.75 an hour. The boys who worked in the mines made thirteen cents per hour. And George F. Baer was—as were all the moneyed men of the coal and railroad industries—defending this. Baer had become their spokesman because a letter he had written had leaked and been published. “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country . . .”
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 38