The Scariest Days Of The Trump Presidency Could Be The Final 74
“He will create as much chaos as humanly possible,” said Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer who was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for, in part, arranging illegal hush money payments to keep women from revealing affairs they had had with Trump just prior to the 2016 election.
“Donald Trump will take to the airwaves, to radio and print media whining about how the election was stolen from him due to fraud and foreign interference,” Cohen said. “He could never accept the fact that he lost because he is incompetent and arrogant.”
The Scariest Days Of The Trump Presidency Could Be The Final 74
With the victory of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris, they — and the rest of the citizenry — face a historic task of national rebirth. The challenge of repair from all the wreckage left by Trumpism may be the work of not merely a political season, but of a generation.
First, this task requires an awareness of how long the Trump disaster was in the making and how many people and forces enabled it. And second, it requires a forthright confrontation with the fact that to rebuild a society and a political system, we must admit that they are broken. Institutionally, America is broken.
A shortlist of our broken institutions can seem painful and overwhelming: the presidency; the Senate; the Supreme Court; government agencies that run everything from law enforcement to criminal justice to the environment to public health; the election system, including the Electoral College; the news media; our global partnerships like NATO; and finally, our public schools and universities — places that are supposed to reimagine lives.
Fueling this decline and distrust are not only warring ideologies about the purpose of government, but also hostility to the very idea that facts and truth, as well as respect for scientific and humanistic knowledge, are the basis of a functioning democracy.
…Trumpism was a symptom, rather than the creator, of grievance politics and our rigid polarization. He hardly invented the racism he employed, but he had honed it well in his plutocratic and hyper-entitled world.
By the end of the 20th century, Professor Marty argued, Americans had engaged in myriad culture wars that rendered stories of any shared past all but impossible. He saw the country divided into “totalists” and “tribalists.” Totalists were people who felt left behind, cast aside by elites, and who craved a story of “wholeness” about the American nation. These folks felt assaulted by mass media and wanted nothing to do with complexity and conflicting identities.
Baby boomers, on the left and right, now ran the country, but they inherited a politics shaped by Reaganism, which thrilled to “city on a hill” mythology, but sought votes by stoking resentments and hatreds born of vast changes wrought by the 1960s. Ronald Reagan largely avoided explicitness, but his legion of followers believed civil rights, feminism and various liberation movements had gone too far. The sense of society as “imagined collectivities” shrank, Mr. Rodgers said. Americans were splintering into increasingly divided enclaves of thought. “The last quarter of the century,” he wrote, “was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.” The country may have unified in the immediate wake of Sept. 11, but soon broke into political camps already formed and growing in tenacity.
Mr. Trump’s presidency is the result of a long history of the Republican Party’s descent into moral bankruptcy, but also of a culture of social media-driven alienation involving all of us. The presidency of Barack Obama was startling progress, but the bitter reaction to him on the right came from well-cultivated precincts of media, think tanks, racial nationalism and corporate organizing.” Opinion | Confronting the Damage of Trumpism
He is trying to sell the country to his rich friends before he is forced out of DC. Then he will be asking them to bail him out of all his bankruptcies. Trump Administration, in Late Push, Moves to Sell Oil Rights in Arctic Refuge
“Trump can fairly be understood as one of the most inept presidents in American history, someone whose inability to control a pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of his citizens their lives, a death toll higher than all American combat deaths in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. Calling it ineptis perhaps too forgiving. Trump’s presidency was characterized by a pervasive attitude of indifference and cruelty that shaped real policy, especially where nonwhite Americans were concerned.” How reality caught up with the reality TV president — Vox
I’m no political pundit but I grew up w a dad who was a federal prosecutor & he taught me a lot & I’ve also sat a fair amount of poker w serious players & l’ll say this: I do not think Trump is trying to ‘make his base happy’ or ‘laying the groundwork for his own network’… Edward Norton on the monster style endgame chaoshttps://twitter.com/edwardnorton/status/1329728889296355328?s=21
Republican Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by Biden The report delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics/biden-inquiry-republicans-johnson.html Biden’s foreign policy: the return of American exceptionalism
Biden’s foreign policy: the return of American exceptionalism
“If President-elect Joe Biden was inclined to prosecute Trump, his only dilemma would be where to start. Trump’s own Department of Justice refused to indict him for alleged crimes uncovered related to hush-money payments to his extra-marital lovers, and for obstruction of justice alleged in the Russia investigation. He faces multiple state-level criminal inquiries stemming from his personal business practices, civil suits related to his alleged sexual assaults and his 2017 inauguration.
But Biden is reportedly wary of launching investigations into his predecessor — and has made clear he won’t tell federal law enforcement what to do. “I will not do what {Trump] does and use the Justice Department as my vehicle to insist that something happened,” Biden told NBC News on Nov. 24.
While Biden admirably does not intend on echoing Trump’s undemocratic “lock them all up” chants, his administration can simply allow independent prosecutors to make their own decisions by opening the books on the Trump administration to expose wrongdoing, self-dealing and unlawful activity.”
Donald Trump Has Hidden Evidence Of His Crimes For Years. Joe Biden Can Expose It.
Quaking Interlude 