Tag Archives: The President

At Least We Know Death Is a Certainty

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Despite being on a news vacation, I heard that The New York Times got copies of some of Txxxx’s tax returns. I read the Times article, but will let a few other Times readers comment.

Ralph from Nebraska:

This stunning report takes some time to read and digest and we will all find numbers that amaze and annoy us. I was once a bankruptcy lawyer and I often had to explain this scenario to clients: If you borrow money and don’t repay the money the IRS sees the money that you didn’t repay as income on which you need to pay taxes. Here’s the number that jumped screaming off of my I Pad: $287,000,000. During the last ten years our President has stiffed his creditors to the tune of $287 million. 

STSI from Chicago:

There is something rotten in our tax system that allows someone like Dxxxx Txxxx to spend years litigating the IRS so that he can pay little or no taxes owed. Dxxxx Txxxx is the poster child for how the US tax code has been exploited and scammed by individuals who use taxpayer money to fund their legal battles with the IRS. Congress needs to address this issue and level the playing field so that every American pays his or her fair share of taxes due.

Ron S. from Los Angeles:

I run two small, moderately profitable businesses. I deduct legitimate business expenses, but I also make monthly estimated tax payments to the IRS, knowing full well if I claim losses year after year I will be audited. That Dxxxx Txxxx cheats the system is not only no surprise, it also shows how the U.S. tax system is set up one way for the rich and another way for everybody else.

B. Reed from Washington DC:

Txxxx is a crook who deserves to be prosecuted. But I wish this was an anomaly because it isn’t. . . . How people can see this stuff and not be radicalized and demand dramatic change is beyond me. . . . 

It’s beyond me too.

By the way, we have an election 36 days from now, in which Dxxxx Txxxx and lots of his Republican enablers are candidates for high office.

I’m Not Joe Biden But I Approve This Message

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Can 2020 Get Any Worse?

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Of course it can.

But think how good 2021 can be by comparison.

Stunning Disclosures That Aren’t Breaking News

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Feeling the effects of a two weeks-long news vacation, I took a calculated risk and reviewed the subjects my two favorite columnists have written about. There wasn’t anything especially intriguing from Paul Krugman of The New York Times. But The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman got me reading with this headline: “Stunning new disclosures blow huge holes in Trump’s Potemkin facade”. 

From way back on September 9th, in other words, old news for you:

President Txxxx’s argument for reelection has two fundamental pillars. First, his handling of the pandemic was uniformly stupendous, vanquished the coronavirus to the point where it’s largely behind us and revealed that he has cared deeply about its victims all along.

Second, now that pandemic has been largely crushed, the most dire threat to ordinary Americans’ lives and communities is a terrifying specter of organized left-wing political violence that threatens civil collapse, and only Txxxx can stop it.

A host of new revelations — some involving Txxxx’s early understanding of the coronavirus threat, and others concerning his efforts to fabricate a leftist domestic terrorist menace — have blown up this multifaceted Potemkin facade.

The new revelations also illustrate in stark new detail just how corruptly Txxxx and his cronies have manipulated the levers of government to make all those illusions appear as truths.

[Note: The President Commits Murder in the First Degree]

We begin with the explosive disclosures in Post associate editor Bob Woodward’s new book about the Txxxx administration. With the U.S. death toll from covid-19 now approaching 200,000, Woodward’s conversations with Txxxx — all of which are on tape — reveal that the president knew all along how bad the pandemic would be.This is what Txxxx told Woodward on Feb. 7:

You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. … This is more deadly. This is 5 percent vs. 1 percent and less than 1 percent. You know, so this is deadly stuff.

So to be clear, on Feb. 7 — when there were only 11 confirmed cases of covid-19 in the United States — Txxxx both emphasized the danger of the virus being passed through the air and explicitly declared he understood it was far more deadly than the flu.

Then on March 19, Txxxx told Woodward this:

Well I think Bob, really to be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.

Txxxx admitted he knew the pandemic was worse than he said publicly, and that he deliberately minimized it to avoid panic. Remember, it has already been reported that the “panic” he feared was spooking the markets because that threatened his reelection.

Only one month later, on March 9, Txxxx dismissively compared the coronavirus with flu, claiming flu kills tens of thousands annually and that “life & the economy go on.” Txxxx downplayed the virus and said it was under control numerous times throughout February and March and beyond.

Even if a leader might in certain circumstances be justified in holding back information to avoid a panic, this was not one of those circumstances. In this case, there were very specific measures that we needed Americans to take to limit the virus’s spread, including social distancing, avoiding large indoor gatherings and wearing masks.

Every time the president said the pandemic wasn’t serious, he persuaded people not to take those measures. Not only that, he actively discouraged people from taking them, cheering on protests of lockdown orders in Democratic-controlled state capitals. He did this with the full knowledge that it would worsen the pandemic, leading to more deaths.

[The President Covers Up / Makes Up Threats to National Security]

Now on to the second revelation: House Democrats just released a complaint from a new whistleblower at the Department of Homeland Security. It makes a series of extraordinary charges about senior DHS officials seeking to manipulate intelligence to boost Txxxx politically.

The complaint from the whistleblower, Brian Murphy, a senior official at DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, claims intense pressure was brought to bear to hype the threat of leftist violence. The complaint says two top DHS officials — acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf and deputy Ken Cuccinelli — halted the distribution of a Homeland Threat Assessment because of how it “would reflect upon President Txxxx.”

“Two sections were specifically labeled as concerns: White Supremacy and Russian influence in the United States,” the complaint continues.

On Russian influence, the complaint says, Wolf ordered Murphy in May 2020 to report on efforts by China and Iran to interfere in our election, and to “cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference.”

Incredibly, the complaint says Murphy “would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger.”

The hyping of China and Iran seemed designed to false-equivalence away Russian interference, as Txxxx wants. Notably, we’ve already seen previous intelligence reports on foreign interference play this same deception game.

On white supremacy, the complaint describes discussions in May and June of 2020 with Cuccinelli about the DHS threat assessment at which this happened:

Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent “left-wing” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to make the requested modifications, and informed Mr. Cuccinelli that it would constitute censorship of analysis and the improper administration of an intelligence program.

That is simply remarkable — both in its downplaying of the right wing extremist threat and in its hyping of a leftist one.

Now remember that many of Txxxx’s top national security officials — including Attorney General William P. Barr, national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and acting Customs and Border Protection chief Mark Morgan — have made public statements hyping the notion of a left-wing domestic terror threat. . . .

Much of [the Republican] convention was devoted to manufacturing illusions of an active, far-reaching and organized leftist domestic extremist threat.

Now we’re learning that intelligence may have been actively perverted to support this narrative in a manner that prompted a whistleblower to repeatedly object — and now to come forward.

All this comes as Barr is set to release a review of the origins of the Russia investigation that could discredit its findings, facilitating another round of Russian sabotage. Meanwhile, Txxxx’s intelligence officials are no longer providing in-person briefings on that sabotage, limiting members of Congress’s understanding about what Russia is doing and further easing their ability to meddle in our election. . . . 

Every time we think we’ve penetrated through to the very worst of this corruption, another layer gets peeled back, revealing still more. . . . 

The Exhilaration of Incoherence?

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My vacation from the national news is now nine days old. It’s boring at times, but not too bad. The only bit of “news” that’s slipped through is that (1) the president said something especially bad (which wasn’t news at all) and (2) what he said may have been that his supporters should break the law by trying to vote more than once (he thinks that voting two or three times is much easier to do than it is).

What follows isn’t really news, therefore. It’s news analysis that I found interesting. From Varun Gauri at Three Quarks Daily:

The style and rhetoric of the Txxxx era appears to be historically unique, the result of the narrow and unexpected electoral victory of a man who honed his skills performing as a reality TV idiot savant. But I believe that the rhetorical style of Txxxxism — nonsense, incoherence, giving truth the middle finger— will outlast Txxxx.

When people say that Txxxxism will outlive Txxxx, they usually refer to the political economy. Typically, they mean [for example] that rising levels of immigration and the coming emergence of America as a majority-minority nation evoke nostalgia and a politics of resentment . . . But I think that it is not only the structural forces that are likely to endure, but also the trappings of Txxxxism, what we think of as its ephemera — the circus atmosphere, the sensation that up is down, the experience of having fallen through the looking glass.

To understand the appeal of rhetorical Txxxxism, first consider a few stylized facts. First, as Ezra Klein has argued, Txxxx’s poll numbers are amazingly stable. Despite the loss of more than 180,000 Americans to Covid-19, an unemployment rate over 8%, and rising racial tensions, Txxxx’s approval rating hardly moved, from 41% in late to 2019 to 42% today. His support is only loosely tied to facts on the ground. . . .

Second, nor is Txxxx’s appeal about his policy goals. It’s not as as if the administration has set out a series of appealing policy initiatives, only to be frustrated by checks and balances or federalism. There are barely any policy goals to speak of. . . . Apart from appointing conservative Supreme Court Justices skeptical of abortion rights, there are hardly any policies even on the agenda that carried Txxxx in 2016, including comprehensive immigration reform, the opioid crisis, and urban violence. Instead, what we see is theater for xenophobes . . .

Third, Republican partisans appear to support an idealized version of the man. Despite Txxxx’s notorious cable TV watching habits and frequent golf trips, 66% of Republicans believe him to be a “harder worker” than any president in history. Despite the barrage of lies and millions in federal tax dollars directed to his own business interests, 72% believe him to be “honest and trustworthy.” Despite not appearing to know how World War 1 ended or who Frederick Douglass was, and advocating bleach and other quack cures for covid, 77% believe he understands “complex issues.”

It’s as if support for Txxxx is the coat of arms for his coalition. Republican partisans support each other supporting Txxxx, whatever they think of Txxxx himself. They recognize each other and constitute a group through their Txxxx support. They support the idea of Txxxx. He’s the flag around which they rally.

How does this work? Larry Bartel’s recent survey of Republican partisans is revealing. It finds that anti-democratic attitudes among Republicans (e.g., using force to save a traditional way of life) are strongly correlated with ethnic antagonism; they are much more weakly correlated with political cynicism, partisanship, cultural conservatism, and even affection for Txxxx himself. In other words, support for the norm busting of Txxxxism is less about the man himself and more about the ethnic advancement, and the identity, of the group supportive of norm busting.

Like support for a military coup, the rhetorical style of Txxxxism, whose salient aspects are a flaunting disregard for facts and truth, even the exhilaration of incoherence, is a form of norm busting. It is an attack on standard forms of discourse. It is also an implicit attack on the function of key institutions, including the scientific establishment (which identifies facts), the media (which filters facts), and the political parties (which translate facts into policies).

The pleasures of this kind of norm busting, provocative incoherence, are the pleasures of trolling. Incoherent provocation leads supporters of traditional norms to become indignant, and squander energy trying to make sense of contradictory and truth-free statements. It’s delicious to see defenders of key institutions (like me) get their knickers in a twist. It’s fun, a minor form of sadism, to “own the libs”. . . .

The rhetorical style of Txxxxism shows that the coordinating focal points for the Republican coalition can even be devoid of semantic content. Txxxxian Republicans recognize each other, and constitute themselves as a group, when they troll the outsiders by flaunting incoherence. Those actions are also a power play — the demonstration that coordination is laughably easy; coherence and language and messaging are superfluous.

It has long been understood that there is a psychic payoff to coordination without discourse; the use of symbolic rituals, as Durkheim described, can create collective effervescence and a sense of group belonging. But what is happening here is not only coordination without discourse but coordination against discourse. Republican partisans are demonstrating that power does not arise from discussion; it arises merely from will and mutual recognition. Political power is that easy for us, the trolls seems to say. We know ourselves, even without words. . . .  

The Republican coalition has long struggled to overcome elements of incoherence in its ideology, though perhaps no more than the average large-scale political coalition — the support for small government sits uneasily with a massive military as well as with the religious regulation of private life. But what we are witnessing now is qualitatively different. Although there may be continuities with the history of anti-scientific positions in the party, current events have the quality of a self-conscious political discovery. That is why I believe the exhilaration of incoherence will remain significant in Republican discourse.

Txxxxism has shown that a largely homogenous group in the United States can coordinate, and recognize itself as a political actor, by flaunting incoherence. Txxxx’s successor may or may not be performer, a reality TV personality more interested in showmanship than policy. But because this approach is relatively inexpensive (a leader doesn’t need to invest in learning policy or persuading people about their positions), democratic (anyone can troll), and pleasurable for supporters, the next Republican leader will be tempted to use the rhetorical style of Txxxxism, or face challengers who do. Flaunting incoherence is fun, fast, and cheap . . .

Unquote.

I don’t understand the psychology of people who openly deny reality, flaunting incoherence but also flaunting their ignorance and their willingness to lie. Coherence, knowledge and honesty tend to make a person look better. Putting that aside, the author may be right about  future Republican candidates trying to copy Txxxx, but they’ll never find anyone as good at self-serving incoherence as he is. The guy has a remarkable talent/pathology. It will be extremely hard to match.