Trump makes fascistic appeal to police and military at Minneapolis rally
US President Donald Trump held his first public rally after the initiation of impeachment proceedings by congressional Democrats, addressing a crowd of 20,000 Thursday night at the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He sought to combine his habitual fascistic rhetoric, fomenting hatred against immigrants and Muslims, with an appeal to antiwar sentiment, highlighting his decision earlier in the week to pull all US soldiers out of Syria as a step towards stopping “endless wars.”
However, he hinted at much greater wars to come, either against foreign countries like China or within the United States itself, boasting of his massive build-up of the US military machine, and telling the crowd, “We’re bringing the soldiers home. We may need them for something else.”
President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Target Center, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
The rally was preceded by a politically motivated campaign of vilification against two local Democratic politicians: Representative Ilhan Omar, whose congressional district includes the Target Center; and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who backed his police chief in forbidding local cops to appear at the campaign rally in uniform.
Omar, who is a Muslim immigrant from Somalia, and Frey, who is Jewish, were clearly targeted because of their race and religion as well as their party affiliation. The decision to hold a rally in Omar’s district was taken during the summer, after Trump had settled on a strategy of portraying four liberal representatives, all female and all of minority descent, as the face of his Democratic Party opposition.
In August the Israeli government barred entry to Omar and Rashida Tlaib, a Detroit-area Democratic congresswoman, because they wished to visit Tlaib’s grandmother and other Palestinians on the West Bank, rather than officials of the Netanyahu government. The exclusion was clearly engineered by Trump as part of his campaign against the group of four Democrats who became known as “the squad.”
In the course of his speech, Trump vilified Omar, as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another of the four representatives, denouncing them as “socialists” and “radical leftists.” He chided the crowd at Target Center for the election of Omar, who won her congressional race last November by a margin of 267,798 to 74,440, while predicting that he would carry the state of Minnesota in the 2020 presidential election.
The Minneapolis rally was the first of a series, the rest of which are linked to off-year election contests in four southern states. Trump will appear at a rally in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Friday night, ahead of Saturday’s first round gubernatorial election, in which right-wing Democratic incumbent John Bel Williams faces several Republican challengers. Later Trump will campaign for gubernatorial candidates in Mississippi and Kentucky, where the voting is on November 5.
The off-year contests, which also include elections for the entire Virginia state legislature, will be the first to test public opinion in the wake of the beginning of impeachment proceedings by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. The Trump White House and Republican Party officials are concerned over the possibility that political setbacks in states long dominated by the Republican Party could strengthen the impeachment drive.
While Trump laid more stress in Minneapolis on Republican voter turnout than at previous rallies, he was clearly still focused largely on the building of an extra-parliamentary movement based on direct appeals to the ranks of the police and military, anti-immigrant bigots and Christian fundamentalists.
In his warm-up appearance before his father took the stage, Eric Trump praised the police, saying, “We owe everything to you.” He led the crowd in a chant of “lock them up,” referring to former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, whom Trump has accused of corruption in business dealings in Ukraine and China.
Trump took the stage with a backdrop of dozens of police dressed in red “Cops for Trump” t-shirts, which they adopted after being barred from wearing dress uniforms at a partisan campaign rally. He made numerous appeals for police support throughout his interminable, meandering address, which went on for some 90 minutes.
Trump aimed his vitriol at his usual targets, including the Democratic Party, the media, and the polls which show him losing badly in 2020 (including by double-digits in Minnesota). He made only passing reference to the decision of House Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry, again defending his efforts to enlist Ukraine and China in digging up negative information on Biden and his son.
Overall, the speech was a fascistic rant. Trump portrayed himself in populist fashion as a tribune of the people, beleaguered by the Washington elite. He attacked the media and his bourgeois political opponents, treating the pro-corporate Democratic Party as though it was a hotbed of Bolshevism.
Trump clearly has decided to double down in his attacks on Joe and Hunter Biden, and particularly the son, a parasite who has cashed in on his father’s prominence in the Obama administration, and before that in the Senate.
His vulgar and bullying rant served Trump’s purpose of portraying himself as the opponent of the Washington establishment, doing battle on behalf of ordinary Americans. He made it clear that any campaign against Biden as the Democratic nominee would be based on portraying Biden’s son as a criminal and his father as the enabler.
Trump’s attack on Ilhan Omar as an “America-hating socialist” set a tone of anti-communism and anti-Muslim racism that permeated the entire speech. He claimed that if the Democrats won the 2020 elections, they would open the floodgates to immigrants and refugees who would swamp the country. He pointed out the large number of Somali refugees in Minneapolis, drawing boos from the crowd, and declared that local governments should be allowed to bar such an influx of outsiders.
In his gutter language and shameless, brazen lying, Trump shows himself to be a political criminal who is trying to whip up fascistic sentiments and build an ultra-right, authoritarian movement, regardless of electoral considerations and outcomes. He seeks to demonstrate to the financial aristocracy—of which he is a particularly depraved representative—that he will defend them against socialist ideas which are increasingly popular among working people and youth (although not, of course, in the leadership of the Democratic Party, contrary to Trump’s claims).
Hence his appeal to the police and soldiers, as well as to the Border Patrol and other elements of the anti-immigrant Gestapo, which are all to be used as shock troops against an insurgent movement of the American working class, foreshadowed in the strikes by public school teachers and by autoworkers at General Motors.
Trump’s main advantage is that his Democratic Party opponents are themselves a faction of the ruling elite, and terrified of any popular movement from below. For that reason, the Democrats have confined their opposition to Trump entirely to backroom maneuvers, such as the tactics of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff in the impeachment inquiry, with hearings held behind closed doors and private contacts with the military-intelligence apparatus.
Pelosi and Schiff are excluding any genuine democratic issue from the impeachment inquiry. They seek to rebuke Trump, or even oust him under certain circumstances, solely for the offenses he has committed against the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon, not for his real crimes against immigrants, against democratic rights, against the working class as a whole.
In particular, the Democrats have allowed Trump to posture as an antiwar politician by mounting a hue and cry over his decision to pull the last US soldiers out of Syria, allowing Turkey to go forward with a military offensive against Syrian Kurdish forces, who were allied with the US military for the past four years in the conflict against ISIS.
Trump concluded his Minneapolis rally with a defense of his Syria policy, declaring that he was getting out of “endless wars” and admitting that the US government had spent $8 trillion and killed “millions” of people across the Middle East, with the result that the region was worse off than before.
The transparent insincerity of his claims to empathy with the sacrifices of the soldiers was underscored by his declaration, “We may need them for something else.” As an example of what Trump has in mind, on at least three occasions during the rally, when protesters sought to interrupt him, he gave orders to the police to remove them, which were carried out quickly. There were also multiple arrests outside the arena, as hundreds of anti-Trump demonstrators picketed the Target Center. In Trump’s America, voicing opposition to the “commander-in-chief” is clearly meant to become a crime.
Is Trump the Worst President in History?
by Richard Striner
The Kitchen-Table Case for Impeaching Trump
“Truthfully,
It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral Behavior By
The President” WASHINGTON
POST
Trump's sister
quits as a federal judge 10 days into formal probe of her possible role in
massive family tax scam that could have ended in her impeachment
ANN COULTER
EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
"During the same month that
Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee
released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis
as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream
of cheap, foreign
migrants."
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of
the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1
percent income
bracket."
TRUMPS INFORMS NARCOMEX:
THE PACT BETWEEN MEXICO AND TRUMP… NO WALL, NO REAL
ENFORCEMENT.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/did-trump-promise-mexico-no-pardon-for.html
Fox News host Tucker
Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded
as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign
promises.
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral
Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight
Committee Wednesday that the “whole Trump family” was potentially
comprised by a foreign power ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Banks
Give Congress Documents on Possible Trump Dealings with Russians
A group of
banks has turned over documents on Russians who may have done business with
President Donald Trump following a request from Congress, a Thursday report
states.
Millennials lose it when
the guy who owns their favorite companies fundraises for Trump
I. HE DISDAINS
EXPERTISE
Illustration: Paul Spella; Nicholas Kamm; Olivier Douliery / AFP /
Getty; Erik S. Lesser / AP; Kevin LaMarque / Reuters
II. HE TRUSTS ONLY
HIS OWN INSTINCTS
III. HE RESISTS
COHERENT STRATEGY
Illustration: Paul Spella; Eric Thayer / Reuters
IV. “HE IS
REFLEXIVELY CONTRARY”
V. HE HAS A
SIMPLISTIC AND ANTIQUATED NOTION OF SOLDIERING
Is Trump the Worst President in History?
by Richard Striner
Richard Striner, a professor of history at Washington College, is
the author of many books including Father
Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery and Lincoln’s
Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power.
As the
chance of getting rid of Donald Trump — through impeachment or by voting him
out — continues to dominate the headlines, the historical challenge
is compelling. No president has been a greater threat to the
qualities that make the United States of America worthy (at its best) of our
allegiance.
The rise of
Trump and his movement was so freakish that historians will analyze its nature
for a long time. From his origins as a real estate hustler, this
exhibitionist sought attention as a TV vulgarian. Susceptible
television viewers found his coarse behavior amusing. Then he announced that he
was running for the presidency and it looked for a while like just another
cheap publicity stunt.
But
his name-calling tactics struck a chord with a certain group of
voters. Our American scene began to darken. Before
long, he was hurling such vicious abuse that it ushered in a politics of
rage. As his egomania developed into full megalomania, the “alt-right”
gravitated toward him.
The
“movement” had started.
More
and more, to the horror of everyone with power to see and understand, he showed
a proto-fascist mentality. So alarms began to spread: mental health
professionals warned that he exemplifies “malignant narcissism.”
Never
before in American history has the presidential office passed into the hands of
a seditionist. And the use of this term is
appropriate. With no conception of principles or limits — “I want”
is his political creed —he mocks the rule of law at every turn.
At a
police convention in 2017, he urged the officers in attendance to ignore their
own regulations and brutalize the people they arrest. He pardoned
ex-Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of
court. He appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA so he could wreck
the agency and let polluters have the spree of their lives.
Trump
is fascinated by powerful dictators with little regard to human rights or
democracy. He compliments Vladimir Putin and hopes to invite that murderer
to stay in the White House. He likes Rodrigo Duterte of the
Philippines, a tyrant who subverts that nation’s democracy.
So,
Trump certainly has the personality of a fascist. But he is not
quite as dangerous as other authoritarians in history.
In the
first place, he lacks the fanatical vision that drove the great tyrants like
Hitler and Stalin to pursue their sick versions of utopia. He is
nothing but a grubby opportunist. He has no ideas, only
appetites. The themes that pass for ideas in the mind of
Donald Trump begin as prompts that are fed to him by others — Stephen Miller,
Sean Hannity, and (once upon a time) Steve Bannon. To be sure, he would fit
right in among the despots who tyrannize banana-republics. But that
sort of a political outcome in America is hard to envision at the moment.
Second, American
traditions — though our current crisis shows some very deep flaws in our
constitutional system — are strong enough to place a limit on the damage Trump
can do. If he ordered troops to occupy the Capitol, disperse the
members of Congress, and impose martial law, the chance that commanders or
troops would carry out such orders is nil.
Third,
Americans have faced challenges before. Many say he is our very worst
president — bar none. And how tempting it is to
agree. But a short while ago, people said the same thing about
George W. Bush, who of course looks exemplary now when compared to our
presidential incumbent.
The
“worst president.”
“Worst,”
of course, is a value judgment that is totally dependent on our standards for
determining “badness.” And any number of our presidents were very
bad indeed — or so it could be argued.
Take
Andrew Jackson, with his belligerence, his simple-mindedness, his racism as
reflected in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Take all the
pro-slavery presidents before the Civil War who tried to make the enslavement
of American blacks perpetual: John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan. Take
James K. Polk and his squalid war of aggression against Mexico. Take
Andrew Johnson, who did everything he could to ruin the lives of the
newly-freed blacks after Lincoln’s murder.
The
list could go on indefinitely, depending on our individual standards for
identifying “badness.” Shall we continue? Consider
Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, so clueless in regard to the
comparatively easy challenge of preventing corruption among their
associates. Or consider Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover, who
blinded themselves to the desperation of millions in economic
depressions. And Richard Nixon, the only president to date who has
resigned the office in disgrace.
Which
brings us to Trump.
However
incompetent or even malevolent some previous American presidents were, this one
is unique. The Trump presidency is a singular aberration, a defacement of norms
and ideals without precedent. However bad some other presidents were
all of them felt a certain basic obligation to maintain at least a semblance of
dignity and propriety in their actions.
Not
Trump.
Foul
beyond words, he lurches from one brutal whim to another, seeking gratification
in his never-ending quest to humiliate others. He spews insults in every
direction all day. He makes fun of the handicapped. He
discredits journalists in order to boost the credibility of crackpots and
psychopathic bigots. He accuses reporters of creating “fake news” so
he can generate fake news himself: spew a daily torrent of hallucinatory
lies to his gullible followers.
He
amuses himself — with the help of his money and the shyster lawyers that it
pays for — in getting away with a lifetime’s worth of compulsive frauds that
might very well lead to prosecutions (later) if the evidence has not been
destroyed and if the statute of limitations has not expired.
So
far, however, he is always too brazen to get what he deserves, too slippery for
anyone to foil.
Anyone
with half of ounce of decency can see this wretched man for what he
is. They know what’s going on, and yet there’s nothing they can do
to make it stop. And that adds to Trump’s dirty
satisfaction. Any chance to out-maneuver the decent — to infuriate them —
quickens his glee. It makes his victory all the more rotten, incites
him to keep on taunting his victims.
It’s
all a big joke to Donald Trump, and he can never, ever, get enough of
it.
The
question must be asked: when in our lifetimes — when in all the
years that our once-inspiring Republic has existed — have American institutions
been subjected to such treatment? How long can American morale and
cohesion survive this?
Nancy
Pelosi has said that in preference to seeing Trump impeached, she would like to
see him in jail. Current Justice Department policy — which forbids
the indictment of presidents — makes it possible for Trump to break our
nation’s laws with impunity. Impeachment is useless if the Senate’s
Republicans, united in their ruthlessness and denial, take the coward’s way
out.
So the
prospect of locking him up may have to wait. But the day of
reckoning for this fake — this imposter who will never have a glimmer of clue
as to how to measure up to his office — may come in due time. Then
the presidential fake who accuses his victims of fakery will live with some
things that are real: stone walls, iron bars, a nice prison haircut,
and the consequences of his actions.
The Kitchen-Table Case for Impeaching Trump
The president’s abuses of power are
materially hurting regular people.
After months of waiting, the House
Judiciary Committee has finally voted to open an impeachment inquiry into
President Donald Trump. With that tedious “will-they-or-won’t-they” question
out of the way, the logical next question is: can impeachment succeed? The
answer is a resounding yes. But getting there will require a strategic
reorientation away from a sluggish and legalistic examination of Trump’s
offenses via recalcitrant witnesses and toward a broader consideration of how
his systemic abuses of power have materially hurt regular people.
The continued
reticence of so many Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to support
impeachment is based on two premises. The first is that impeachment is modestly
unpopular, which is true, so far as it goes. The second is the
conventional wisdom that impeaching President Clinton backfired on House
Republicans.
Look a little
closer at the second contention, however, and it quickly falls apart. The case
against Trump is vastly stronger than that against Clinton. While Clinton’s alleged
crimes were largely committed in the interest of avoiding embarrassment,
Trump’s represent clear abuses of power with malignant implications. The second
flank of the argument—that impeaching Clinton “backfired” on Republicans—is
more myth than reality. Republicans may have
lost the House in the next election cycle, but Clinton’s impeachment was a
nontrivial factor in Al Gore’s 2000 loss. Therefore, we join other observers in choosing to view this “example”
as evidence in support of impeaching Trump.
But the
polling argument is particularly short-sighted. Voters take cues from political
leaders about how to react to political events. For months, the overwhelming
cue on impeachment from Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe
Biden has been to stand down. This inhibition has created a negative feedback
loop in which impeachment-phobic lawmakers convince voters not to support
impeachment, and then point to lukewarm public support to justify their
passivity. Rinse and repeat.
Five months
after the release of the Mueller report, this message has pretty well stuck.
After all, if the special counsel’s findings were so serious, they should have
been acted on immediately, right? Much as a gourmet meal is never as good
reheated, Democrats cannot expect to ignore evidence of impeachable conduct in
the spring and have it be as fresh and tasty when zapped in the autumn. Just
take a gander at this week’s House Judiciary hearing with Corey Lewandowski to
see how unappetizing this fare has become.
While the
Mueller report surely provided enough evidence to justify impeaching Trump on
substantive grounds, hesitant lawmakers have largely drained it of much of its
political force (and impeachment is an inherently political process).
To overcome
this damage, impeachment backers will have to make opposition to impeachment
untenable with voters, thereby short-circuiting the aforementioned negative
feedback loop. That means focusing on the ways in which Trump’s corruption has
made life harder and more dangerous for millions of Americans. In other words, impeachment
should focus above all on his failure to carry out his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 1 of the
Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” By
emphasizing how impeachment is relevant to the “kitchen-table” issues that keep
regular people up at night—like low wages or exorbitant healthcare premiums—the
House Judiciary Committee can inspire a swell of grassroots pressure that will
give reluctant legislators no choice but to back the effort.
The issues tackled in Mueller’s report,
like obstruction of justice, are removed from people’s day-to-day lives. Of
course, there is nothing inherently insufficient with such a basis for impeachment;
were it not for the Democratic leadership’s opposition, impeachment proceedings
would have begun in April. Still, more Americans agonize over how to pay back
their student loans, or whether to incur the costs of seeing a doctor when
uninsured, than discuss “the role of law.” The Mueller report, therefore.
likely strikes most Americans as “political” and is less likely to
inspire new broad-based support for impeachment.
The same goes
for the proposed lines of inquiry in Judiciary’s newly expanded investigations. The committee will
reportedly examine Trump’s alleged abuse of presidential pardons, hush-money
payments, and use of office for personal enrichment. While these scandals are
undoubtedly important, they don’t penetrate the lives of ordinary people.
That doesn’t
mean that Democrats should not pursue any of these alleged crimes; the public
deserves to know as much as possible about any president’s corruption, and
Congress is best suited to furnish those answers. But these matters should not
sit alone at the center of the Democrats’ case for impeachment. An impeachment
inquiry is a way to control the national conversation. While bills passed by
House Democrats predictably get little attention from most of the media, an
impeachment hearing is guaranteed to achieve the scarcest political resource in
2019—the attention of voters.
Given that
platform, lawmakers have a lot to choose from. In light of recent revelations
that the number of uninsured people has risen for the first time since 2009, lawmakers might want to
start by investigating how Trump has undermined the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
You might say
that Trump’s health care moves are reprehensible, but are they really
impeachable? Ask Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania representative who was the
catalyst behind Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and the author of an article of impeachment
accusing Johnson of failing to “take care” that the Tenure of Office Act be
faithfully executed. Other articles accused Johnson of offenses including
insulting Congress and unlawfully firing his Secretary of War, but this one got
at his most serious transgression: failing to honor and enforce the laws as
Congress had intended.
Trump has made
no secret of his disdain for Obama’s healthcare law, but whether he likes it or
not, it’s his duty to administer it unless and until Congress passes a new one
or repeals it. Rather than faithfully carrying out that responsibility, Trump
has sought to destroy the law. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order directing agencies to use all of the tools at their
disposal to undermine the statute—and they have faithfully complied. His
administration also shortened the open enrollment period,
cut ACA’s advertising budget, and slashed tax credits for enrollees. Trump
is not coy about his intentions. “I have just about ended Obamacare,” he once said. Congress should
demonstrate its commitment to improving Americans’ health care access by
nailing Trump for his considerable efforts to “end” a lawful program by
executive action that he could not repeal legislatively.
There are
other matters that need a deeper probe. Lawmakers should investigate whether
Trump’s administration has intentionally slowed the allocation of aid to Puerto
Rico. Last week, as Puerto Ricans braced for Hurricane Dorian’s potential
landfall, many did so without a proper roof over their heads, surrounded by many other reminders of
Hurricane Maria’s destruction. This hardly seems like an accident: two years
after Maria, the scandal-riddled Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) has only approved funding for nine projects out of
10,000 applications. Meanwhile, in an unprecedented move, the executive branch
is holding up a Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery
(CDBG-DR) headed for the U.S. territory. The administration’s refusal to
effectively administer this recovery aid is not some distant problem. Puerto
Ricans (including the diaspora living in Florida and elsewhere on the U.S.
mainland) feel it every day in the way of destroyed roads, damaged schools, the
lack of a proper roof over many of their heads, or having been forced to leave
the island altogether.
It seems
impossible to imagine that Trump’s failure “to take care” is unrelated to the
animus he has shown toward Latinx communities since the day he announced his presidential campaign. More
broadly, it is even harder to argue that a president can faithfully execute the
law under our Constitution when he openly views the government’s obligations to
people as dependent on their race or religion—as his “Muslim ban” makes
evidently clear.
Lawmakers
should also look into Trump’s decision to allow three unconfirmed, unqualified,
Mar-a-Lago members to essentially run the Department of Veterans’
Affairs from the resort. Has Trump’s reliance on his paying customers to run
the VA in any way hurt the millions of veterans who rely on the department’s
services each year? The public has a right to know. The House Committee on
Veterans’ Affairs opened an investigation into these
puppeteers last winter, but the administration’s stonewalling appears to
have hindered meaningful progress.
Trump’s
appointees have harmed regular people in myriad other ways. Take, for example,
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ failure to administer loan forgiveness
programs, even after having been ordered by a court to do so. That has left thousands
of people suffering under the crushing yoke of student loans they were promised
would be discharged. At the same time, her department’s laughable oversight of loan servicers
is delaying forgiveness for hundreds of
thousands more. Given her absolute disregard for her responsibilities as
Education Secretary, why has she not been removed? Quite clearly, Trump feels
no compunction about running afoul of his obligation to “take care” to execute
the law, even if that means flat out ignoring court orders.
House members must not only persuade
voters to embrace impeachment with the righteousness of their case, but also
with the urgency of their actions. That means issuing subpoenas far more
liberally—and suing when necessary to enforce them without delay. Indeed, the
fact that Trump admits “we are fighting all the
subpoenas” reflects acknowledgement that he is undermining Congressional
oversight, which was itself a key
element of the
third article of impeachment against Richard Nixon.
Basic
political horse sense suggests that investigating how Trump’s team is hiding
evidence of their alleged lawlessness would help generate attention to the
actions they are covering up. If pursued effectively, such a probe can impose a
steep political cost.
Ultimately,
Congress should view its investigatory scope broadly. It should vigorously
examine as many instances of Trump’s corruption as possible. But his crimes
against the American people should sit at the center of their effort.
To treat them
as secondary, as lawmakers have done thus far, misses the larger point. The
intentional harm Trump has inflicted on Americans, whom he is tasked with
protecting, represents by far his most egregious violation of his
Constitutional oath of office. Lawmakers should respond accordingly.
PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: pathological
liar, swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster,
tax evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators
THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see
jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a
Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in penalties. She wants Trump and
his eldest children barred from running other charities.”
ANN COULTER
TRUMP’S PARASITIC
FAMILY
Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
(MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ), refer to
Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him that he
had Jared “in my pocket.”
Following meetings at the White House
and also with the Kushners over their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari
Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim reported back to the emir that “the
people atop the new administration were heavily motivated by personal financial
interest.”
“Truthfully,
It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral Behavior By
The President” WASHINGTON
POST
Trump's sister
quits as a federal judge 10 days into formal probe of her possible role in
massive family tax scam that could have ended in her impeachment
·
Trump's older sister resigned as an appellate
court judge shortly after a probe opened into her involvement in a family
tax scheme
·
·
10 days ago an investigation into whether
Maryanne Trump Barry violated judicial conduct rules launched
·
·
The case was closed after Barry resigned
because retired judges are not subject to the rules
·
·
Barry had not heard a case in two years after
transitioning to inactive shortly after Trump's inauguration
·
·
The Trump siblings were probed after an
investigation found they were involved in a tax scheme related to the transfer
of their father's real estate empire
·
President Donald Trump’s older sister Maryanne Trump Barry, 82,
retired as a federal judge just days after an investigation opened into her
possible role in family tax fraud scheme.
Barry was a federal appellate judge in the
third district, which includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and the
investigation could have led to her impeachment.
She had not presided over a case in more than
two years, but was still listed as an inactive senior judge in the third
district – usually the step taken before full retirement.
Barry did not give any reasons for her
retirement.
The probe into the Trumps was first opened
last fall, after a New York Times investigation found the Trump siblings
engaged in tax schemes in the 1990s, including fraud, that increased their
inherited wealth.
+4
Maryanne Trump Barry resigned as a federal
appellate judge 10 days into an investigation into whether she violated
judicial conduct rules
An investigation into the Trump siblings
opened after the New York Times reported that they transferred their father's
real estate assets improperly in the 1990s
The formal investigation into whether Barry
violated judicial conduct rules started ten days ago, but was closed after
Barry announced her retirement since retired judges are not subject to judicial
conduct rules.
These reviews could result in the censure or
reprimand of federal judges, but in some more extreme cases, the judge could be
referred to the House of Representatives for impeachment.
It appears Barry will receive somewhere
between $184,500 and $217,600 annually, the same salary she earned when she
last met certain workload requirements before changing her status to inactive.
The Times investigation into the Trump’s
alleged that Fred Trump transferred his real estate empire profits and
ownership to his four children, including the president, Barry, brother Robert
Trump, and their sister Elizabeth Trump Grau, in ways designed to dodge gift
and estate taxes.
+4
Barry, pictured above with sister Elizabeth
Trump Grau, was a senior inactive judge, which is the step taken usually before
full retirement, and had not heard a case in over two year.
Trump's lawyer Charles Hardner said that the
allegations made as a result of the Times' investigation is '100 per cent
false' and accused the newspaper of defamation
“The New York Times’s allegations of fraud
and tax evasion are 100 per cent false, and highly defamatory,” a lawyer for
Trump, Charles Hardner, said last October.
Barry was elevated to the United States Court
of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1999, and shortly
after Trump’s inauguration, in February 2017, she notified the court she would
stop hearing cases without citing a reason.
At this point she became a senior inactive
judge and gave up her staff and chambers.
TRUMP COMPARES PETE BUTTIGIEG TO MAD MAG ALFRED E NEUMAN....
Pete compares the Swamp Keeper to a conman, huckster, cheat, pathological liar,
bankrupt tax-evading phony billionaire, golf cheat, adulterer and whore chaser
with Tang-rinsed hair!
ANN COULTER: WILL THE
GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES DESTROY AMERICA?
I would also go to all of the working class that are in America,
construction workers in particular. Their salaries have not just
stagnated, they have gone down in the last 20 years. These are the least among us. We are the only ones not speaking
out of self-interest. …
Most of the people who are advocating for open borders …
they have a vested in interest in having either the cheap labor or the
Democratic voters. Their neighborhoods aren’t the ones being
overwhelmed. They get the cheap maids, the cheap nannies,
and then they strut around like they’re Martin Luther King.
No, you are talking in your
self-interest, Chamber of Commerce, and Koch brothers, and Nancy Pelosi, and
Chuck Schumer. It’s Donald Trump and our side who are actually
caring about our fellow Americans — the kids who are getting addicted to black
tar heroin. …
The heroin problem in this country is 100 percent a problem of not
having a wall on the border. And 70,000 Americans are dying every year. That’s
more that died in the entire Vietnam War. That is a national emergency.
ANN COULTER
ANN COULTER
EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact,
Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat
and is seeking millions of dollars in penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest
children barred from running other charities.”
TRUMP’S
CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
Only a
complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers
than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
Efforts by the big business
lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include
increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered
for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
THE DEATH OF THE
AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
THE ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER BY
PHONY POPULIST SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP
Companies say they often pay good
wages to their imported H-2B workers, often around $15 per hour. But that price
is below the wages sought by Americans for the seasonal work which leaves them
jobless in the off-season. The lower wages paid to H-2Bs also allows companies
to pay lower wages to their American supervisors. NEIL MUNRO
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND
HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE
SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not
so far. This has been right by the letter of the special counsel’s charter.
He’s released the document. What I’m looking for is relief and
understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting likelihood that the
President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel comfortable, and no
evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re still in the process
of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say, if [Attornery General
William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with
third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by
its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
ANN COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite
direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
TRUMP’S CATCH AND RELEASE… all the “cheap” labor climbing our
borders, jobs and welfare lines!
THE ENTIRE REASON TRUMP
NOMINATED KIRSTJEN NIELSEN WAS BECAUSE OF HER LONG HISTORY OF ADVOCATING OPEN
BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
In newly confirmed federal data from the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency, Breitbart News has learned the massive scale and
scope of DHS’s ramped up Catch and Release policy.
For months, DHS officials have said privately that the Catch and
Release program has been taken to new heights, while ICE
union officials declared this week that the program was
in “overdrive” under the direction of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. JOHN BINDER
TRUMP AND THE MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper and his family of parasites up their
ar$es??
TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
A massive tax cut for his plundering Goldman Sachs infested
administration.
TRUMP’S SECRET AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP
WAGES DEPRESSED.
"During the same month that
Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee
released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis
as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream
of cheap, foreign
migrants."
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE
RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report:
Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit
After He's Gone
"Trump's
alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S
TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of
the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1
percent income
bracket."
TRUMPS INFORMS NARCOMEX:
THE PACT BETWEEN MEXICO AND TRUMP… NO WALL, NO REAL
ENFORCEMENT.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/did-trump-promise-mexico-no-pardon-for.html
Swamp Keeper Trump prepares
for the inevitable move to impeach him and ask for asylum in Scotland.
Fox News host Tucker
Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded
as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign
promises.
“His chief promises were
that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare,
and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson told Urs Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.
TRUMP POSITIONS HIMSELF FOR IMPEACHMENT
MAY LEAVE THE COUNTRY FOR HIS GOLF COURSE IN
SCOTLAND
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral
Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
“Mueller and the anti-Trump camp within the ruling elite know
very well that the billionaire New York real estate and gambling
speculator-turned president is mired in criminal activity, which is certain to
be reflected in the material seized from Cohen. They have Trump by the throat,
and Trump knows it.”
*
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world
hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
*
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight
Committee Wednesday that the “whole Trump family” was potentially
comprised by a foreign power ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
"Trump's alleged comment is
maddening and disheartening, but at least he's being straightforward
about his indefensible and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you
with this reminder of the
scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing
about it."
Banks
Give Congress Documents on Possible Trump Dealings with Russians
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
8 Aug 20195,146
2:41
A group of
banks has turned over documents on Russians who may have done business with
President Donald Trump following a request from Congress, a Thursday report
states.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Bank of
America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank gave
lawmakers thousands of documents as part of a joint investigation
by the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees into possible
foreign influence over President Trump and members of his family. The former committee is chaired by none other than impeachment
crusaders Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). These financial institutions are expected
to transfer more documents to congressional investigators in the coming weeks,
the Journal said.
Lawmakers issued subpoenas for the information in April.
“Separately, Deutsche Bank, Mr. Trump’s
primary bank, has turned over emails, loan agreements and other documents
related to the Trump Organization to the office of New York Attorney General
Letitia James, in response to a civil subpoena sent earlier this year,
according to people familiar with the New York investigation,” the
newspaper reports.
In April, President Trump, his
three oldest children, and the Trump Organization sued Deutsche Bank
and Capital One to prevent them from handing over their financial records
to Congress. The president and his former real estate company also filed a
lawsuit to block a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee seeking
financial documents from Mazars, an accounting firm.
Last month,
President Trump filed a civil lawsuit to
prevent the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining his tax returns
from New York state officials.
The lawsuit, which was filed July 23rd in Washington against the
House panel, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and New
York State Department of Taxation and Finance commissioner Michael
Schmidt, seeks an injunction to block a new state law. The law would allow the
Democrat-controlled House and Ways Means Committee to obtain the president’s
tax returns.
“Once it became clear that Treasury
would not divulge the President’s federal tax returns, New York passed a law
allowing the Committee to get his state returns,” reads the court filing. “That
hyper-specific condition was, not coincidentally, already satisfied for the
intended target of the Act: President Trump.”
The committee sued the Treasury Department and IRS officials in
an attempt to enforce a law that allows its chairman, Rep. Richard Neal
(D-MA), to obtain any taxpayer’s returns.
Millennials lose it when
the guy who owns their favorite companies fundraises for Trump
While the multiple mass shootings and
stabbings in the U.S. in the past few weeks upset many, nothing exercised the
minds of wealthy fit liberals as learning that the investor of their favored,
elitist, expensive gyms, or as the wealthy fit liberals refer to them, fitness
centers, they attend was hosting a fundraiser last night for... President
Donald J. Trump (R). And hosting it, no less, in the exclusive,
elitist playground of the East Cost liberal and wealthy: the Hamptons.
Entrust it to Vox, to ponder the dilemma of the oh, so self-labeled hip who
exercise at, or work out as they refer their imposed sweat inducing contortions
at, Equinox and Soul Cycle, to keep their butts tight and their minds closed.
But it can be
particularly surprising to consumers when brands that have cultivated
progressive and inclusive images are found to be associated with campaigns or
causes that stand for the opposite.
Stephen Ross
is a billionaire real estate developer (reported net worth: $7.7 billion) and
owner of a private investment firm that has backed many of the latter kind of
brands. He’s also hosting a fundraiser for the Trump 2020 campaign at his
Hamptons mansion on Friday, August 9, where tickets will range from $100,000
for a lunch and photo opp to $250,000 to attend a roundtable discussion,
according to the Washington Post.
Rich
people hosting fundraisers for Trump is not itself particularly notable,
but the fact that Ross’s firm has financed companies beloved in part for their
progressive images has caused many patrons to call for a boycott. Among the
brands Ross has invested in are Equinox, which has supported LGBTQ charities in
the past; the spinning behemoth SoulCycle; the organic tampon brand Lola; and
the budget gym Blink Fitness, as well as food chains like Momofuku and its
pastry offshoot Milk Bar, and the fast-casual pizza spot &pizza.
OMG! What to do?
New York Magazine to the rescue with additional information on those boycott targets for the
morally outraged, tight-bodied, and narrow-minded. And it is
extensive.
When the news
broke that Stephen Ross, a real-estate executive and venture capitalist, was
set to throw an extravagant fundraiser for Donald Trump in the Hamptons on
Friday, reverberations of shock and horror were felt in millennial communities
far and wide, from Brooklyn to downtown L.A. to Austin and Portland,
Oregon. Why? Because Ross is the chairman of the Related
Companies, a parent company of both Equinox and SoulCycle, where many a young
urban professional flocks daily to sweat out their existential dread. ...
Unfortunately
it gets even worse. Ross has a hand in so many millennial lifestyle
entities that there are probably a few influencers whose entire feeds must be
cleansed of products tied to Trump cash. If you think you’re
untouched, don’t be so sure[.] ... The giant, tangled rat king of capitalism
means that unless you live like my friend John, who still has a flip phone and
claims to have never ordered anything online, you’re part of a teeming network
of unsavory dealings.
But anyway,
here is a list of all the pertinent things Ross partly owns as you decide how
much of your life must be canceled[.]
Read the list to learn how those with
unfit morals will suffer. Then, exercising your rights, smile
and then go for a nice walk.
Top Military Officers
Unload on Trump
The commander in
chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings
from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?
Illustration: Paul Spella; Michael Heiman / Getty
For
most of the past two decades, American troops have been
deployed all over the world—to about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds
of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation
of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They
possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years,
these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump.
To get a sense of
what serving Trump has been like, I interviewed officers up and down the ranks,
as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees. Among the
officers I spoke with were four of the highest ranks—three or four stars—all
recently retired. All but one served Trump directly; the other left the service
shortly before Trump was inaugurated. They come from different branches of the
military, but I’ll simply refer to them as “the generals.” Some spoke only off
the record, some allowed what they said to be quoted without attribution, and
some talked on the record.
Military officers are
sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. Cognizant of the
special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the
chain of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian
overseers. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trump’s case is
telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. In 20 years of
writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions
express such alarm about a president. Trump’s pronouncements and orders have
already risked catastrophic and unnecessary wars in the Middle East and Asia,
and have created severe problems for field commanders engaged in combat
operations. Frequently caught unawares by Trump’s statements, senior military
officers have scrambled, in their aftermath, to steer the country away from
tragedy. How many times can they successfully do that before faltering?
Amid threats spanning
the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to
terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the
president’s Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy
troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White
House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander
in chief who is both ignorant and capricious. In May, after months of threatening Iran, Trump ordered the carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to shift
from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. On June 20, after an American
drone was downed there, he ordered a retaliatory attack—and then called it off minutes before it was to be launched. The next day he said he was “not looking for war” and wanted to talk with Iran’s leaders, while also promising
them “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” if they crossed him. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and dispatched a three-aircraft-carrier flotilla to waters
off the Korean peninsula—then he pivoted to friendly summits with Kim Jong Un, with whom he announced he was “in love”; canceled long-standing U.S. military exercises with South Korea;
and dangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the
country altogether. While the lovefest continues
for the cameras, the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military
exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.
Such rudderless
captaincy creates the headlines Trump craves. He revels when his tweets take
off. (“Boom!” he says. “Like a rocket!”) Out in the field, where combat is more
than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. He is not a president who thinks
through consequences—and this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious
nations behave.
The generals I spoke
with didn’t agree on everything, but they shared the following five
characterizations of Trump’s military leadership.
I. HE DISDAINS
EXPERTISE
Trump has little
interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and
those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and
experience—are stupid, or slow, or crazy.
As a personal
quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the
careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in
chief. Disdain for
process might be the defining trait of
his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good decisions—history makes
that clear—but eschewing the tools available to a president is choosing
ignorance. What Trump’s supporters call “the deep state” is, in the world of
national security—hardly a bastion of progressive politics—a vast reservoir of
knowledge and global experience that presidents ignore at their peril. The
generals spoke nostalgically of the process followed by previous presidents,
who solicited advice from field commanders, foreign-service and intelligence
officers, and in some cases key allies before reaching decisions about military
action. As different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in temperament and
policy preferences, one general told me, they were remarkably alike in the
Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard questions, wanted prevailing views
challenged, insisted on a variety of options to consider, and weighed potential
outcomes against broader goals. Trump doesn’t do any of that. Despite
commanding the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in the
world, this president prefers to be briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at
decisions without input from others.
One prominent example
came on December 19, 2018, when Trump announced, via Twitter, that he was
ordering all American forces in Syria home.
“We have defeated
ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” he
tweeted. Later that day he said, “Our boys, our young women, our men, they are
all coming back, and they are coming back now.”
This satisfied one of
Trump’s campaign promises, and it appealed to the isolationist convictions of
his core supporters. Forget the experts, forget the chain of command—they were
the people who, after all, had kept American forces engaged in that part of the
world for 15 bloody years without noticeably improving things. Enough was
enough.
At that moment,
however, American troops were in the final stages of crushing the Islamic
State, which, contrary to Trump’s assertion, was collapsing but had not yet
been defeated. Its brutal caliphate, which had briefly stretched from eastern
Iraq to western Syria, had been painstakingly dismantled over the previous five
years by an American-led global coalition, which was close to finishing the
job. Now they were to stop and come home?
Here, several of the
generals felt, was a textbook example of ill-informed decision making. The
downsides of a withdrawal were obvious: It would create a power vacuum that
would effectively cede the fractured Syrian state to Russia and Iran; it would
abandon America’s local allies to an uncertain fate; and it would encourage a
diminished ISIS to keep fighting. The decision—which prompted the immediate
resignations of the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, and the U.S.
special envoy to the mission, Brett McGurk—blindsided not only Congress and
America’s allies but the person charged with actually waging the war, General
Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command. He had not been consulted.
Trump’s tweet put General Votel in the position of telling our
allies, in effect, We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than
ever.
Trump’s tweet put
Votel in a difficult spot. Here was a sudden 180-degree turn in U.S. policy
that severely undercut an ongoing effort. The American contingent of about
2,000 soldiers, most of them Special Forces, was coordinating with the Iraqi
army; the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, consisting primarily of Kurdish
militias and Syrians opposed to President Bashar al-Assad; and representatives
of NATO, the Arab League, and dozens of countries. This alliance had reduced
ISIS’s territory to small pockets of resistance inside Syria. America’s troops
were deep in the Euphrates Valley, a long way from their original bases of
operation. An estimated 10,000 hard-core Islamist soldiers were fighting to the
death. Months of tough combat lay ahead.
Votel’s force in
Syria was relatively small, but it required a steady supply of food,
ammunition, parts, and medical supplies, and regular troop rotations. The
avenue for these vital conveyances—through hundreds of miles of hazardous Iraqi
desert—was truck convoys, protected almost exclusively by the SDF. To protect
its troops during a retreat, America could have brought in its own troops or
replaced those truck convoys with airlifts, but either step would have meant
suddenly escalating an engagement that the president had just pronounced
finished.
For the American
commander, this was a terrible logistical challenge. An orderly withdrawal of
his forces would further stress supply lines, therefore necessitating the SDF’s
help even more. Votel found himself in the position of having to tell his
allies, in effect, We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than
ever.
Field commanders are
often given orders they don’t like. The military must bow to civilian rule. The
generals accept and embrace that. But they also say that no careful
decision-making process would have produced Trump’s abrupt about-face.
Votel decided to take
an exceedingly rare step: He publicly contradicted his commander in chief. In
an interview with CNN he said that no, ISIS was not yet defeated, and now was
not the time to retreat. Given his responsibility to his troops and the
mission, the general didn’t have much choice.
Votel held everything
together. He took advantage of the good relationship he had built with the SDF
to buy enough time for Trump to be confronted with the consequences of his
decision. A few days later, the president backed down—while predictably
refusing to admit that he had done so. American forces would stay in smaller
numbers (and France and the U.K. would eventually agree to commit more troops
to the effort). The 180-degree turn was converted into something more like a
90-degree one. In the end, the main effects of Trump’s tweet were bruising the
trust of allies and heartening both Assad and ISIS.
II. HE TRUSTS ONLY
HIS OWN INSTINCTS
Trump believes that
his gut feelings about things are excellent, if not genius. Those around him
encourage that belief, or they are fired. Winning the White House against all
odds may have made it unshakable.
Decisiveness is good,
the generals agreed. But making decisions without considering facts is not.
Trump has, on at
least one occasion, shown the swiftness and resolution commanders respect: On
April 7, 2017, he responded to a chemical-warfare attack by Assad with a
missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase. But this was not a hard call. It was
a onetime proportional retaliation unlikely to stir international controversy
or wider repercussions. Few international incidents can be cleanly resolved by
an air strike.
“How did we even get to that point?” one general asked me in
astonishment. What kind of commander in chief would risk war with Iran over a
drone?
A case in point is
the flare-up with Iran in June. The generals said Trump’s handling of it was
perilous, because it could have led to a shooting war. On June 20, Iran’s air
defenses shot down an American RQ-4A Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone the Iranians said had
violated their airspace. The U.S. said the drone was in international airspace.
(The disputed coordinates were about 12 miles apart—not a big difference for an
aircraft moving hundreds of miles an hour.) In retaliation, Trump ordered a military strike on Iran—and then abruptly called
it off after, he claimed, he’d been informed that
it would kill about 150 Iranians.
One general told me this explanation is highly improbable—any careful
discussion of the strike would have considered potential casualties at the
outset. But whatever his reasoning, the president’s reversal occasioned such
relief that it obscured the gravity of his original decision.
“How did we even get
to that point?” the general asked me in astonishment. Given what a tinderbox
that part of the world is, what kind of commander in chief would risk war with
Iran over a drone?
Not only would a
retaliatory strike have failed the litmus test of proportionality, this general
said, but it would have accomplished little, escalated the dispute with Iran,
and risked instigating a broad conflict. In an all-out war, the U.S. would
defeat Iran’s armed forces, but not without enormous bloodshed, and not just in
Iran. Iran and its proxies would launch terrorist strikes on American and
allied targets throughout the Middle East and beyond. If the regime were to
fall, what would come next? Who would step in to govern a Shiite Muslim nation
of 82 million steeped for generations in hatred of America? The mullahs owe
their power to the American overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953, an
event widely regarded in Iran (and elsewhere) as an outrage. Conquering
Americans would not be greeted by happy Persian crowds. The generals observed
that those who predicted such parades in Baghdad following the ouster of Saddam
Hussein instead got a decade-long bloodbath. Iran has more than twice Iraq’s
population, and is a far more developed nation. The Iraq War inspired the
creation of ISIS and gave renewed momentum to al‑Qaeda; imagine how war with
Iran might mobilize Hezbollah, the richest and best-trained terrorist
organization in the world.
Sometimes, of course,
war is necessary. That’s why we maintain the most expensive and professional
military in the world. But a fundamental reason to own such power is to avoid wars—especially
wars that are likely to create worse problems than they solve.
General Votel, who
commanded American forces in the region until he retired in March, told me that
if the U.S. had carried out a retaliatory strike, “the trick for the military
in this case would be to orchestrate some type of operation that would very quickly
try and get us to an off-ramp—give them an off-ramp or provide us with an
off-ramp—so we can get to some kind of discussion to resolve the situation.”
Trump’s attack might have targeted some of the Iranian navy’s vessels and
systems that threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Votel said, or it might
have leveled a measured strike against the air defenses that struck the drone.
Ideally it would have been followed by a pause, so diplomatic processes could
kick in. The strike would have demonstrated to Iran that we have the capability
and willingness to strike back if provoked, and made clear that in a serious
fight, it could not prevail. But all of this presumes a sequence that would
unfold in an orderly, rational way—a preposterous notion.
“This is all
completely unpredictable,” Votel said. “It’s hard for me to see how it would
play out. We would be compelled to leave large numbers of forces in the region
as a deterrent. If you don’t have an off-ramp, you’re going to find yourself in
some kind of protracted conflict.” Which is precisely the kind of scenario
Trump has derided in the past. His eagerness to free the U.S. from long-term
military conflicts overseas was why he made his abrupt announcement about
pulling out of Syria. Evidently he didn’t fully consider where a military
strike against Iran was likely to lead.
The real reason Trump
reversed himself on the retaliatory strike, one general said, was not because
he suddenly learned of potential casualties, but because someone, most likely
General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aggressively
confronted him with the extended implications of an attack.
“I know the chairman
very well,” the general said. “He’s about as fine an officer as I have ever
spent time around. I think if he felt the president was really heading in the
wrong direction, he would let the president know.” He added that Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo may have counseled against an attack as well. “Pompeo’s a
really bright guy. I’m sure he would intervene and give the president his best
advice.”
III. HE RESISTS
COHERENT STRATEGY
If there is any broad
logic to Trump’s behavior, it’s Keep ’em confused. He believes that
unpredictability itself is a virtue.
Keeping an enemy
off-balance can be a good thing, the generals agreed, so long as you are not
off-balance yourself. And it’s a tactic, not a strategy. Consider Trump’s
rhetorical dance with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. No president in
modern times has made progress with North Korea. Capable of destroying Seoul
within minutes of an outbreak of hostilities, Pyongyang has ignored every
effort by the U.S. and its allies to deter it from building a nuclear arsenal.
Trump has gone back
and forth dramatically on Kim. As a candidate in 2016, he said he would get China
to make the North Korean dictator “disappear in one form or another very
quickly.” Once in office, he taunted Kim, calling him “Little Rocket Man,” and
suggested that the U.S. might immolate Pyongyang. Then he switched directions
and orchestrated three personal meetings with Kim.
“That stuff is just
crazy enough to work,” one of the generals told me with a what-the-hell? chuckle.
“We’ll see what happens. If they can get back to some kind of discussion, if it
can avert something, it will have been worth it. The unconventional aspect of
that does have the opportunity to shake some things up.”
In the long run,
however, unpredictability is a problem. Without a coherent underlying strategy,
uncertainty creates confusion and increases the chance of miscalculation—and
miscalculation, the generals pointed out, is what starts most wars. John F.
Kennedy famously installed a direct hotline to the Kremlin in order to lower
the odds of blundering into a nuclear exchange. Invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein
stumbled into a humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War—a conflict that killed
more than 100,000 people—after a cascading series of miscommunications and
miscalculations led to a crushing international response.
Unpredictability
becomes an impediment to success when it interferes with orderly process. “Say
you’re going to have an engagement with North Korea,” a general who served
under multiple presidents told me. “At some point you should have developed a
strategy that says, Here’s what we want the outcome to be. And then
somebody is developing talking points. Those talking points are shared with the
military, with the State Department, with the ambassador. Whatever the issue
might be, before the president ever says anything, everybody should
know what the talking points are going to be.” To avoid confusion and a sense
of aimlessness, “everybody should have at least a general understanding of what
the strategy is and what direction we’re heading in.”
Which is frequently
not the case now.
“If the president
says ‘Fire and brimstone’ and then two weeks later says ‘This is my best
friend,’ that’s not necessarily bad—but it’s bad if the rest of the relevant
people in the government responsible for executing the strategy aren’t aware
that that’s the strategy,” the general said. Having a process to figure out the
sequences of steps is essential. “The process tells the president what he
should say. When I was working with Obama and Bush,” he continued, “before we
took action, we would understand what that action was going to be, we’d have
done a Q&A on how we think the international community is going to respond
to that action, and we would have discussed how we’d deal with that response.”
To operate outside of
an organized process, as Trump tends to, is to reel from crisis to
rapprochement to crisis, generating little more than noise. This haphazard
approach could lead somewhere good—but it could just as easily start a very big
fire.
If the president
eschews the process, this general told me, then when a challenging
national-security issue arises, he won’t have information at hand about what
the cascading effects of pursuing different options might be. “He’s kind of
shooting blind.” Military commanders find that disconcerting.
“The process is not a
panacea—Bush and Obama sometimes made bad decisions even with all the options
in front of them—but it does help.”
IV. “HE IS
REFLEXIVELY CONTRARY”
General H. R.
McMaster, who left the White House on reasonably good terms in April 2018 after
only 14 months as national security adviser, is about as can-do a professional
as you will find. He appeared to take Trump seriously, and tailored his
briefings to accommodate the president’s famous impatience, in order to equip
him for the weighty decisions the office demands. But Trump resents advice and
instruction. He likes to be agreed with. Efforts to broaden his understanding
irritate him. McMaster’s tenure was bound to be short. Weeks before accepting
his resignation, the president let it be known that he found McMaster’s briefings
tedious and the man himself “gruff and condescending.”
Distrusting
expertise, Trump has contradicted and disparaged the intelligence community and
presided over a dismantling of the State Department. This has meant leaving
open ambassadorships around the world, including in countries vital to American
interests such as Brazil, Canada, Honduras, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Russia,
and Ukraine. High-level foreign officers, seeing no opportunities for
advancement, have been leaving.
“When you lose these
diplomats and ambassadors that have all this experience, this language
capability, this cultural understanding, that makes things very, very difficult
for us,” one of the generals said. “And it leads to poor decisions down the
line.”
Trump so resists
being led that his instinct is nearly always to upend prevailing opinion.
“He is reflexively
contrary,” another of the generals told me.
According to those
who worked with him, McMaster avoided giving the president a single consensus
option, even when one existed. He has said that he always tried to give the
president room to choose. After leaving the White House, he criticized others
in the national-security community for taking a different approach, accusing
them of withholding information in hopes of steering Trump in the direction
they preferred. McMaster has not named names, but he was most likely talking
about Mattis and General John Kelly, who, after serving as Trump’s
homeland-security secretary, became the president’s second chief of staff.
McMaster has said that he considered such an approach tantamount to subverting
the Constitution—but if his allegation is true, it shows how poorly equipped
those people felt Trump was for the job. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s
report records numerous instances of civilian advisers trying to manage the
president, or simply ignoring presidential directives they deemed ill-advised
or illegal.
During his brief
tenure on Trump’s staff, McMaster oversaw the production of a broad
national-security strategy that sought to codify Trump’s “America first”
worldview, placing immigration at the head of national-security concerns, right
alongside nuclear proliferation and terrorist attacks. The idea was to build a
coherent structure around the president’s scattershot diplomacy. Trump rhapsodized
about the document at its unveiling, according to someone who was there,
saying, “I love it! I love it! I want to use this all the time.”
He hasn’t. Like its
author, the document has been dismissed. Those who were involved in writing it
remain convinced, somewhat hopefully, that it is still helping guide policy,
but John Bolton, McMaster’s successor, said scornfully—a few months before he,
too, was ousted by Trump—that it is filed away somewhere, consulted by no one.
Trump is no more
likely to have read the thing than he is to have written his own books. (Years
ago, after he published The Art of the Deal, he asked me if I was
interested in writing his next book. I declined.) Trying to shape this
president’s approach to the world into a cogent philosophy is a fool’s errand.
For those commanding America’s armed forces, it’s best to keep binoculars
trained on his Twitter feed.
V. HE HAS A
SIMPLISTIC AND ANTIQUATED NOTION OF SOLDIERING
Though he disdains
expert advice, Trump reveres—perhaps fetishizes—the military. He began his
presidency by stacking his administration with generals: Mattis, McMaster,
Kelly, and, briefly, Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser.
Appointing them so soon after their retirement from the military was a mistake,
according to Don Bolduc, a retired brigadier general who is currently running
as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. Early on, the biggest
difference Bolduc saw between the Trump administration and its predecessors,
and one he felt was “going to be disruptive in the long term,” was “the
significant reliance, in the Pentagon at least, on senior military leadership
overriding and making less relevant our civilian oversight. That was going to
be a huge problem. The secretary of defense pretty much surrounded himself with
his former Marine comrades, and there was, at least from that group, a distrust
of civilians that really negatively affected the Pentagon in terms of policy
and strategy in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, by following the same old failed
operational approaches.” Trump’s reliance on military solutions is problematic
because “there are limits to what the military can solve. I think initially the
Trump administration held this idea that general officers somehow have all the
answers to everything. I think the president discovered in short order that
that’s really not the case.”
Bolduc also pointed
out an unusual leadership challenge caused by having a general of McMaster’s
rank serve as national security adviser—he did not retire when he assumed the
post. “McMaster, for whom I have tremendous respect, came in as a three-star
general. Leaving him a three-star forces him on a daily basis to have to engage
with four-star generals who see his rank as beneath theirs, even though his
position is much more than that.”
The problems posed by
Trump’s skewed understanding of the military extend beyond bad decision making
to the very culture of our armed forces: He apparently doesn’t think American
soldiers accused of war crimes should be prosecuted and punished. In early May,
he pardoned former Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of
murdering an Iraqi prisoner. Two weeks later, he asked the Justice Department
to prepare pardon materials for a number of American servicemen and contractors
who were charged with murder and desecration of corpses, including Special
Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who stood accused by his own
team members of fatally stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner and shooting unarmed
civilians. (He was ultimately acquitted of the murders but convicted of posing
for photos with the boy’s body.) Trump subsequently chastised the military
attorneys who had prosecuted Gallagher, and directed that medals awarded to
them be rescinded. All of the generals agreed that interfering with the
military’s efforts to police itself badly undermines command and control. When
thousands of young Americans are deployed overseas with heavy weaponry, crimes
and atrocities will sometimes occur. Failing to prosecute those who commit them
invites behavior that shames everyone in uniform and the nation they serve.
“He doesn’t
understand the warrior ethos,” one general said of the president. “The warrior
ethos is important because it’s sort of a sacred covenant not just among members
of the military profession, but between the profession and the society in whose
name we fight and serve. The warrior ethos transcends the laws of war; it
governs your behavior. The warrior ethos makes units effective because of the
values of trust and self-sacrifice associated with it—but the warrior ethos
also makes wars less inhumane and allows our profession to maintain our
self-respect and to be respected by others. Man, if the warrior ethos gets
misconstrued into ‘Kill them all …’ ” he said, trailing off. Teaching soldiers about ethical conduct in
war is not just about morality: “If you treat civilians disrespectfully, you’re working for the enemy! Trump doesn’t understand.”
Having never served
or been near a battlefield, several of the generals said, Trump exhibits a
simplistic, badly outdated notion of soldiers as supremely “tough”—hard men
asked to perform hard and sometimes ugly jobs. He also buys into a severely
outdated concept of leadership. The generals, all of whom have led troops in
combat, know better than most that war is hard and ugly, but their
understanding of “toughness” goes well beyond the gruff stoicism of a John
Wayne movie. Good judgment counts more than toughness.
Bolduc said he came
up in a military where it was accepted practice for senior leaders to blame
their subordinates, lose their temper, pound on desks, and threaten to throw
things, and the response to that behavior was “He’s a hard-ass.
Right? He’s tough. That is not leadership. You don’t get
optimal performance being that way. You get optimal performance by being
completely opposite of that.”
Bolduc worries that,
under Trump’s command, a return to these antiquated notions of “toughness” will
worsen the epidemic of PTSD plaguing soldiers who have served repeated combat
tours. Senior military officers have learned much from decades of war—lessons
Bolduc said are being discarded by a president whose closest brush with combat
has been a movie screen.
The military is hard
to change. This is bad, because it can be maddeningly slow to adapt, but also
good, because it can withstand poor leadership at the top. In the most crucial
areas, the generals said, the military’s experienced leaders have steered Trump
away from disaster. So far.
“The hard part,” one
general said, “is that he may be president for another five years.”
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