“The evidence suggests Trump is a traitor”

David Cay Johnston; Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster/Bonk Johnston/AP)

Pulitzer-winning reporter David Cay Johnston: “The evidence suggests Trump is a traitor”

Investigative reporter who has covered Trump for 30 years dares to imagine impeachment — and President Nancy Pelosi

By Chauncey DeVega

April 23, 2018 9:00am (UTC)

The saga of resident Donald Trump consists of several parallel and intersecting stories.

There is the structural dimension. Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton was not entirely unpredictable or shocking. America's crisis in civic literacy, political polarization, rampant anti-intellectualism, deeply embedded sexism and racism, greed, broken schools and weakened democratic institutions, as well as a hollowed-out public sphere where people confuse celebrity with human worth, made the election of someone like Trump nearly inevitable.

There is Donald Trump the man, who seems to revel in the very worst human values. His closest family members -- including his father and grandfather -- taught him the "value" of unrepentant greed and ambition. He also displays the symptoms of malignant narcissism, as well as sociopathy. In all, Trump is a master of manipulation who leads a political cult.

How do these factors combine to form Donald Trump's residency and the type of society that he and the Republican Party want to create? Are matters actually worse than they appear, in terms of how we assess the political and social crisis of Trump's residency? What strategy should Democrats use to stop Trump and the Republican Party? If Trump is removed from office because of his increasingly obvious efforts to obstruct justice, how will his public respond? Will there be violence?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston. For 30 years, Johnston has covered Trump's life and career, as detailed in the bestselling book "The Making of Donald Trump." His new book is "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America."

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version of this conversation can also be heard on my podcast.

How was Donald Trump able to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House? 

Well, a series of events came together. First of all, Hillary Clinton had a lot of baggage, and as Donna Brazile's book “Hacks” shows, she ran a poor campaign and did not listen to the advice of people who told her she needed to pay attention to what Trump was doing.

Secondly, the Republican challengers were a clown car of utterly unqualified people, which meant his lack of qualifications was not so noticeable. The one qualified candidate in that field was John Kasich.

Next, Donald ran on an economic platform that, on the surface, spoke to inequality and frustration.

For example, in 2012, the bottom 90 percent of Americans reported a smaller income than in 1967.

Donald tapped into that problem, but he’s a con artist who promised to drain the swamp and then stocked it with swamp monsters.

Another factor was the utter failure of journalists to vet Donald Trump. You can read about Barack Obama's kindergarten playmates in Indonesia by name, the boys he smoked dope with in high school by name and some of the women he dated in college by name. But The New York Times, in the 16 months from Trump's [campaign] announcement to Election Day, had exactly four references that had "Trump" and "Mafia" in the same story, and they were all in passing and inconsequential.

They also didn't report on the two income tax fraud trials that Trump lost. There was just a lot of stuff about Trump that was never reported because his campaign was like looking at a car crash on the other side of the highway, but it had dancing girls and a marching band and so you couldn't turn away from it.

For 40 years, the Republicans have done serious work preparing for the day when, as a minority party, they wanted to still be in control. So they have reduced the franchise. They've passed laws like this horrible law in Michigan that lets you throw out ballots on the most bogus grounds, entire precincts. All that combined to help Trump win the Electoral College.

Why were so many journalists and pundits unable to understand the true power of Trump's campaign? So much of what he did and continues to do is political performance art drawn from professional wrestling and reality TV. It isn't complicated. 

Remember that campaign reporters cover the horse race. They focus on the sizzle and not the steak. Everybody was so taken by his unusual campaign that they just forgot about the basics.

You have studied and written about Donald Trump for three decades. What does the public need to know about his background, to understand his behavior as president?   

Here are the key things people should know about Donald Trump. He comes from a family of criminals: His grandfather made his fortune running whorehouses in Seattle and in the Yukon Territory. His father, Fred, had a business partner named Willie Tomasello, who was an associate of the Gambino crime family. Trump's father was also investigated by the U.S. Senate for ripping off the government for what would be the equivalent of $36 million in today's money. Donald got his showmanship from his dad, as well as his comfort with organized criminals.

I think it is very important for religious Americans to know that Donald Trump says that his personal philosophy of life is revenge. He has called anyone who turns the other cheek -- which is a fundamental teaching of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount -- a fool, an idiot or a schmuck. Trump is a man who says things that are absolutely contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. He also denigrates Christians. Yet you see all of these ministers endorsing him.

I've followed Donald for 30 years. I don't see any evidence that he has changed, and he certainly hasn't repented, which is a fundamental Christian obligation.

He is a racist through and through. He has been found in formal judicial proceedings to discriminate against nonwhites in rentals and employment.

It's important to understand that Trump is aggressively anti-Christian, despite claiming to be one. He is bluntly a racist. Most importantly, he is literally ignorant about almost everything.

Trump's voters will not abandon him under any circumstances. He leads the Republican Party and thus has its news media and other resources at his disposal. Some folks believe that there will be a "blue wave" of Democratic votes that will wash him and the Republican Party out to sea in 2018 and 2020. I don't see that happening. I think Trump wins in 2020. Am I being too cynical?

Well, he may win again in 2020. The November elections are the most important American elections since the Civil War, and I'm including 1932.

Based just on normal historic averages, the Republicans should lose control of the House by about four seats. They should lose control of the Senate as well, although the map is pretty awful for the Democrats. If Republicans retain control, then I believe what will happen over time is that someone who shares Trump's dictatorial and authoritarian tendencies but doesn't have his baggage -- someone who is a competent manager and just as charismatic -- will eventually arise and you can kiss your individual liberties goodbye. That will take time, but it's the trend we are heading towards.

On the other hand, if enough people go to the polls -- remember, roughly 100 million people did not vote in 2016 -- if the Democrats get organized, if they can persuade the public they have an agenda that goes beyond just getting rid of Trump and they get control of Congress, they will move to impeach him. They need a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict him, but they will certainly move to have public hearings.

Is Trump an ideologue?

No. That's the whole point of the first chapter of my book, “Resident Like No Other.” The 44 previous presidents were all over the map. There were smart people and dumb people, there were people of impeccable integrity such as Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, there were absolute scoundrels like Warren G. Harding. We had a murderous racist in the White House whose painting hangs in the Oval Office, now looking down on Trump. What distinguishes all those presidents, particularly Chester Arthur, the one closest to Trump, is that they tried in the context of their times to make America better.

Donald Trump is a man with this desperate need for adoration. He is an empty vessel, the exact opposite of Henry David Thoreau -- a "life unexamined." His only philosophy is the glorification of Donald.

If you were going to consult with the Democratic Party about how to defeat Trump and the Republican Party, what would you suggest?   

I think most of what Hillary said came across as "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." What I would say to the Democrats is, "Your first and fundamental mission is to tell people what you are for." Not that you're against Trump. Being against Trump doesn't get you very far. It will get you some people who hate Trump. But what are you for? What you want to say is: We will get the incredible burden of health care off the back of small businesses. We will make it so you don't have to stick with an employer because you have health care and you don't want to run the risk of switching or losing it. We want to relieve business of the burden of health care like every other modern country, and it will save everyone money.

We want to invest in the future of America. So we will put more money into education and basic science. Did you know that half the economic growth in this country since the end of World War II can be traced to taxpayer investments in science?

We want investments at home that will create jobs. Our country is falling apart in front of our eyes. That will create an enormous number of jobs, but it will also make the economy more efficient. We want to invest in that future, which will make us all much better off. We're about building a prosperous future. We're not about looking back, as Donald Trump is, to the past.

This is a crucial point. People who've been had by con artists are ashamed, and the world is full of cases, I've written about some of them, you see see it in movies and TV shows. They just can't face the fact that they were tricked. It makes them feel stupid and foolish.

Well, people who got conned by Trump -- it's painful for many of them and they will do anything to avoid it. You don’t want to confront them, you don't want to make them feel stupid.

What do you think will happen with the Mueller investigation? Trump is not acting like an innocent person.

Well, Mueller has assembled an extraordinarily talented team. Here is what Mueller is going to find. Mueller has the Trump tax returns. A competent prosecutor would have them by now. The Trump tax returns are the beginning point. You have to get the books and records -- Donald has a long history of hiding books and records when they're sought by auditors. As for the Russians, it is beyond dispute at this point that the Trump campaign was actively involved in a conspiracy.

He's not exactly what Putin wanted, but most importantly, Trump's not Hillary Clinton, who would have gone up to the edge of war to make Putin give up Crimea. She made that very clear in a campaign. He would be in severe pain if he didn't give up the Crimean peninsula in eastern Ukraine.

So he didn't want her, under any circumstances. Mueller is going to report on tax fraud, he's going to report on the Russians and he is going to show that the Trump campaign was knowingly being helped by the Russians. Remember that the Australian, Dutch and British intelligence agencies, and maybe others, went to the FBI, State Department and other contacts and said, "You folks have a problem. "

Where exactly Mueller will go beyond that, I don't know. His mission is the Russians, and the Russians are tied in with the tax returns. But remember this: The job of a prosecutor is not to bring the perfect case, it's not to bring the case that should be brought for political reasons. It's to bring the easiest, most solid case that wins. Mueller will do that. There is nothing that prevents indicting a sitting president, but it is an untested issue. Mueller is going to have to decide whether to indict him or to go to Congress.

If the overwhelming conclusion of the Mueller report is that the Russians put Trump in the White House, then you face a second terrible problem: What do you do about Mike Pence, who is also the beneficiary of Russian interference?

If the Congress impeaches and removes Trump and Pence, it will only be because the Democrats control Congress. So unless something else changes, we get President Nancy Pelosi. You can just imagine the people who will be in the streets screaming coup d’état if she's president. I think the only way to address that is for her, or whoever is speaker, to announce they will be a caretaker president who is not going to do anything extreme.

There is no good ending to the story. America will survive this, we'll get past it, but whenever Trump leaves, there's no good ending. If Trump is removed by impeachment or by the voters, whether in a Republican primary or a general election, I know what he will do. He's already told us what he will do by his actions. Trump will spend the rest of his days fomenting violence and revolution in this country.

He's careful not to directly say "revolution," but he will call the government illegitimate. He might even call it criminal, since he called Democrats who didn't stand up during his State of the Union speech treasonous. If they're going to impeach Trump, I believe they have to have a plan to indict, try, convict and imprison him. But Trump will be a role model for some people, and there may well be violence over it.

As Malcolm Nance and others have warned, Russia's interference in the 2016 election and likely infiltration of Trump's inner circle could be one of the worst intelligence disasters in American history, a failure of Benedict Arnold or Rosenberg proportions.  

Let me be very clear and quotable about this. At an absolute minimum, Donald Trump has divided loyalties, and the evidence we already have suggests that Donald Trump is a traitor. In fact, I would say that the evidence we already have, the public materials such as emails for example, strongly indicate that Donald Trump is a traitor. However, I don't even think he understands what he's done.

Chauncey DeVega

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

MORE FROM Chauncey DeVega • FOLLOW @chaunceydevega

A Matter Of Perspective

Earth Day Is A Reminder That Humans Have The Power To Change Our Planet

For nearly 50 years, Earth Day has provided an opportunity for people across the globe to come together and rally in support of the natural world. While the specific challenges have varied, the goal has remained more or less the same: to protect the rich, biological world that the current generation has inherited from being overwhelmed by the influences of humanity.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/earth-day-reminder-humans-have-power-change-our-planet

ALEISTER CROWLEY AND THE BUSH CONNECTION

Posted by VERITASLIB3RA

Few people understand that one of the most notorious individuals in British history may have contributed to the lineage of our current (*now past) president. Evidence points to the disturbing possibility that Crowley was the true father of Barbara Bush, the former First Lady and mother to George W. Bush. If you look at the below pictures, you can see the resemblance of Crowley and Bush are too apparent to dismiss. Anyone who remotely knows genetics can see these two people are related!!!

The story may seem difficult to believe at first, until one learns more about the social inter-relations that tied together these unlikely parties. Specifically, we must focus on a fascinating woman named Pauline Pierce, born Pauline Robinson—whose third child was named Barbara. Most sources divulge little about this woman. We learn more about her husband Marvin Pierce, the president of the McCall Corporation, which published McCall’s magazine and Redbook. He married Pauline, a beautiful young socialite, in 1919. Their first child, Martha, was born the next year; the second, James, was born in 1921. At this time, Aleister Crowley inhabited what must have seemed a very different world, as he embarked upon the great communal experiment of the Abbey of Thelema in Italy.

During the Abbey period, a Crowley follower had accidentally died during a magical (Crowley’s spelling) ceremony. The incident created a firestorm of unwanted publicity (the sensationalist British press labeled Crowley “The Wickedest Man in the World”), which prompted Mussolini’s government to expel Crowley and his followers from Italian soil.

When Crowley was 50 years old, he was residing in the home of Frank and Nellie O’Hara in Paris, France. In early 1924, Nellie was visited by her American friend, Pauline Pierce, the wife of Marvin Pierce, president of the McCall Corporation, which published McCall’s and Redbook magazines.

During Pauline’s visit, Crowley underwent what he termed the “supreme ordeal”, an initiation into the Masonic Ipsissimus Grade — the highest magickal achievement in his Order. The initiation rite included choosing one or more experienced attendants, charged with arousing and exhausting him sexually by every means possible, employing every artifice and stimulant. In that place and time, Nellie and Pauline were the most suited for this task.

Pauline returned to America, and on June 8, 1925, eight months after Crowley’s “supreme ordeal”, Pauline gave birth to a daughter she named Barbara. Barbara grew up to marry George H. W. Bush, who later became President of the United States. Is Aleister Crowley the father of Barbara Bush?

It’s very possible and highly likely that she knows her real father was Crowley and is working behind the scenes to carry on the agenda he started. Illuminati families are way more aware of things like this than we think they are. I suspect Crowley is indeed Barbara Bush’s real father.

Barbara Bush matches her real father, Aleister Crowley to near perfection. The face and eyes, it’s all very clear. (BELOW) Barbara Bush has no resemblance to the man on the right, Marvin Pierce (Her alleged father). But is a perfect match to the man on the left (Crowley)

Two very recent pics of Barbara Bush (Below) and her father, Aleister Crowley. You should be able to discern the evil in both, as a matter of fact, if you took the hair off Barbara Bush, she could be Aleister Crowley’s twin:

WATCH THE RESEMBLANCE

However, more than one person has noted the resemblance and it is astounding!—and this resemblance is not just physical. Many will recall the former First Lady’s haughty and thoughtless remarks in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster.

Those “in the know” were reminded of Aleister Crowley’s similar reaction to the loss of life which occurred during the ascent of Kangchanjunga, an expedition he commanded: “This is precisely the sort of thing with which I have no sympathy whatsoever.”

Barbara Bush (Who is also the cousin of George Bush Sr. in addition to being his wife) lso, said a truly despicable statement when asked about the war casualties in Iraq…She stated…”It’s not relevant, why should I concern my beautiful mind with that?” Hmm, Beautiful mind? No, she has an EVIL mind..the same as her father Crowley. But America..(and@NOX) WAKE UP!! This is the same disgusting first lady you admired for 8 years! (George Bush Sr. was the REAL president when Reagan was in power). She is not who she presents herself to be. She is the product of generational satanism. And each generation gets more and more evil than the one which preceded it.

Ephesians 5:11
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.“
___
https://welcome2jesus.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/aleister-crowley-and-the-bush-connection/

Here are the Comey memos, for your reading pleasure

Ex-FBI Director James Comey's memos

 

Memos drafted by former FBI Director James Comey detailing his interactions with Resident Donald Trump.

 

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4442900-Ex-FBI-Director-James-Comey-s-memos.html 

Trump's Head Will Spin 360 Degrees Over Lawyers

Lawrence O'Donnell reports that the law firm representing Trump in the Michael Cohen legal proceedings is led by two lawyers who called for the appointment of a special counsel after Trump fired James Comey.



Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman predicts how Donald Trump will react when he learns the leaders of the law firm representing him in the Cohen case asked Rod Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel after Trump fired James Comey. Ruth Marcus and Jonathan Capehart join.

James Comey You Big Dumb Dickhead

Posted by Rude One

When It Comes to Hillary Clinton, Oh, Just Fuck Right Off, James Comey

If I've said it before, I've said it a million got-damn times. If you didn't support Hillary Clinton because you believed in any of the made-up "scandals" from her career, from Vince Foster's "murder" to Emails of Doom to pizza pedophilia, you were the bitch of Fox "news" and the entire conservative machine that had created a narrative about Clinton that you bought into. I am not Breitbart's bitch, so I could put that aside and just consider her based on her positions and policies. (I'm not talking to anyone who didn't vote for Clinton because you disagreed with her or because you couldn't get over whatever the fuck you think happened with Bernie, which is its own kind of conspiracy theory, and, no, I don't give a shit about whatever you wanna say about that. It's very nice you believe that.)

And whatever you wanna say about why Hillary Clinton lost - bad candidate, didn't campaign in this or that state, grrr-Wall Street, grrr-war - one thing that cannot be denied is that much of the nation (although, you know, not a majority) did become the bitches of that conservative machine that runs a thrusting piston pounding the asses of the electorate with a dildo marked "Hillary=evil" or "Hillary=corrupt" and "any association with Hillary means you are evil and corrupt, too." Republicans counted on enough people gladly bending over to receive this fucking .

What we've learned now is that the former director of the FBI, James Comey, was also grabbing his ankles. In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition today, part of his "James Comey is gonna make a fuck-ton of cash" tour, Comey was questioned about why he made a statement about the conclusions of the FBI's investigation into Clinton's email server in July 2016. He admits, as he implies in his book, Higher Royalties...I mean, Loyalty, that, at least in part, he was influenced by the noise of cable news over things like Bill Clinton's visit to then Attorney General Loretta Lynch's plane on the tarmac in June 2016.

Comey says to the idea of resisting that noise, "[A] reasonable person might have done that. I think that would have been a mistake, because again it wasn't just what had happened that last week of June, it was a collection of things that led me to conclude that the general public would have serious doubts about the integrity of the Obama administration's decision to close an investigation of Hillary Clinton without transparency, given those things that had happened." And he goes on to say that he thinks that had he not spoken in July or released the letter to Congress about the "new" emails (which turned out to be nothing) discovered on Huma Abedin's computer, "I think the institutions would have been in worse shape had we done the normal thing" and not commented.

Comey told ABC's George Stephanopoulos's hair that he assumed, like everyone pretty much did, that Clinton was going to win and that, in some way, he was doing the right thing in releasing that letter because "If you conceal the fact that you have restarted the Hillary Clinton email investigation, not in some silly way but in a very, very important way that may lead to a different conclusion, what will happen to the institutions of justice when that comes out? Especially, given the world we're operating in, when Hillary Clinton's elected president? She'll be an illegitimate president, but these organizations will never recover from that."

Let's put aside the hypocrisy of Comey saying he needed to release something about these new emails, even though nothing at all had been found in them of any interest, while saying that he didn't say anything about the Trump investigation because it hadn't found anything definite yet. Let's put aside for a moment the idea of balance, that if he was gonna say a fuckin' word about any investigations of Clinton, he had an obligation to balance that with information about Trump so the American people had the full picture. Put that aside.

Instead, let's tell James Comey to just fuck right off on this. Because he might be this great and mighty public servant and FBI director, but Comey doesn't know jackshit about the very machine that's behind him, fucking him in the ass. If Clinton had won, it wouldn't have mattered if Jesus himself walked into Congress and said, "She didn't do shit." Republicans would have gone nuclear because that's the only way to justify all the Clinton hatred they based their entire election strategy on. Fox "news" would have been 24/7 on emails and every other stupid thing they could fan into a bullshit controversy. Shit, it's practically that now and Clinton ain't even president. It's all they know.

Comey thinks his gestures prevented an erosion of faith in institutions and in a potential President Clinton? You goddamned fool, these motherfuckers had over a half-dozen investigations of Benghazi because when one said, "Nope, it's all good. Sad, but good," they immediately had another going. And as for institutions, Republicans don't give a sad turtle shit about institutions. Do you think the assholes who had just prevented President Obama from making a Supreme Court choice out of pure spite and political fuckery would think twice about wrecking any agency that got in their way?

You big, dumb dickhead, the only thing that was standing between your precious institutions and their dismantling or complete politicization was the fact that a Democrat was president. Clinton would have prevented most of the shit that's happening now to the Justice Department. But you fucked it, Jim Comey.

You fucked it, and your specious fucking book tour won't unfuck it. At least own that shit. Stop saying you wouldn't have done anything differently. That just makes you another idiot who won't learn from the past.

But, then again, we should always remember: You are a Republican.

(Note: Goddamnit, I want to stop talking about the 2016 election. But we keep getting dragged back into it, like it's a cave we climb out of and then the trolls drag us back in, kicking and screaming.)

5 Things We Know About Sean Hannity & Michael Cohen!

Jesse Dollemore discusses the recent revelation that Sean Hannity is the third secret client of Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Here's what we know and don't know.

Firing Mueller

Is MSNBC Becoming Conservative? The Supposedly Liberal Network Loves Anti-Trump Republicans More Than Leftists

Loading up on semi-repentant conservatives and ignoring the activist left, MSNBC is doing the nation a disservice.

 

By Paul Rosenberg / Salon

April 15, 2018, 7:46 AM GMT 

 

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, MSNBC had at least two clear options: It could respond to a swelling progressive viewer base by moving left, or it could keep playing the Beltway game and move right, loading up with #NeverTrump Republicans, and dumping actual progressives.

In choosing the latter — albeit with a head-fake — the news channel has significantly skewed its coverage, to the detriment of progressive politics and its own viewers.

Oh, there’s plenty of Trump-bashing to please MSNBC's booming viewer base. But it’s often a cheap thrill, giving scant or no attention to what made Trump's presidency possible in the first place, let alone the challenge of building a coherent alternative. The channel is currently riding enjoying a ratings high, despite its leadership’s centrist intentions, but that's no formula for the long haul, either for MSNBC or America.

“Without doubt, it’s Trump and his antics that have provided MSNBC’s ratings boom.” said Jeff Cohen, author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." “A President Hillary Clinton would have continued our country’s unequal and militaristic status quo, and all the apologizing for her on MSNBC would have led to boring TV and lousy ratings."

Cohen founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986 (I was an early FAIR volunteer) and later worked on-air at CNN and Fox and as a producer for Phil Donahue at MSNBC, before Donahue's show axed for political reasons on the brink of the Iraq war (more on that below). Currently director at the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, Cohen belongs to the long but sparse tradition of independent progressives who’ve spent time in the innermost bowels of the media establishment and lived to talk about it.

“There are two big problems facing our country, and they have for decades -- right-wing extremism and Democratic corporatism," Cohen said. "MSNBC gives you exactly one-half of that story. It reminds me of the old George Carlin joke: ‘Here's a partial score in from the West Coast: Los Angeles 7.’"

Bernie Sanders’ 2016 candidacy threw a harsh light on the other half of the story, which helps explain why his supporters get so little MSNBC airtime, in contrast to other venues Cohen cited.

Overtly left-oriented outlets like Democracy Now!, The Young Turks and Common Dreams continue to cover both problems, Cohen observed.

If MSNBC wasn't devoid of strong, public Sanders supporters and other genuine progressives, you'd hear about both problems. Look at who MSNBC's heroes seem to be lately: war hawks and perjurers formerly with U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon.

Their parade of ex-military analysts have a track record of getting the facts wrong or dissembling, but that's ancient history not to be discussed as long as they're willing to even tepidly criticize Trump. I hope [Robert] Mueller puts together a strong case, but he's no hero of the left. Nor is [James] Comey. Nor is Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

Sanders’ supporters weren’t the only ones squeezed out, however. Even a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter like former Salon editor Joan Walsh was recently dumped by MSNBC — and rapidly hired by CNN — as the ranks of NeverTrumper contributors continued to swell. There’s room for George Will, Bill Kristol and David Frum, and even for dogged Trump apologist Hugh Hewitt, although the logic of listening to these people is virtually nonexistent.

It’s not just that these conservatives or conservative-adjacent commentators associated with so many past political disasters. It's also unfair to present them as representing any significant slice of pubic opinion. In his post-election analysis published in June 2017, Lee Drutman created 12 indices to analyze voters views, which he also condensed down into two broader ones:

• An economic liberalism-conservatism index (which combines views on the social safety net, trade, inequality and active government)

• A social/identity liberalism-conservatism politics index (which combines the moral issues index plus views toward African-Americans, immigrants and Muslims).

He then produced a scatterplot graph.

The large, and nearly empty, lower right quadrant represents libertarianism, broadly speaking, which is the home turf of most MSNBC-style Republicans. The dense cluster of blue dots in the lower left quadrant represent the Democratic base, which is clearly MSNBC’s core audience. But there are also many more blue dots (as well as red ones) in the upper left quadrant than in the lower right. These are, more or less, socially conservative but economically progressive voters to whom the Democrats lost much more ground to than expected in the 2016 election — exactly the folks who cost Hillary Clinton the election in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They are being effectively ignored by MSNBC’s programing at the same time that the channel's core viewers are being underserved, and treated to a diet that is oversaturated with lower-right NeverTrump Republicans.

A healthy political dialogue, free of corporate dictates, would allow the dominant voices in the lower left liberal-progressive quadrant to be fully heard in their own terms, rather than constantly being "balanced" with Republicans who do not represent a significant base, even within the Republican and/or conservative coalition. Instead, it would allow liberals and progressives to engage with thoughtful representatives of the upper left quadrant, who, believe it or not, actually exist.

What’s more, that would involve a much richer, more diverse mix of progressive voices, who are now virtually invisible on MSNBC: Rural progressives like Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb, for example, or leftist women of color like Current Affairs contributing editor Briahna Joy Gray.

A striking example of what’s missing at MSNBC can be seen in how the network virtually ignored the wave of red-state teacher strikes. On March 2, FAIR published an article noting that except for "one two-minute throwaway report" on a daytime show, MSNBC had not dedicated a single segment to the West Virginia teachers' strike, including on the programs of supposed progressive stalwarts Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. Hayes did a short segment later, after the FAIR story posted, but MSNBC returned to generally ignoring the issue since then.

To say that's underselling the importance of these strikes is to put it mildly. A month later, as teachers’ strikes had spread to Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona, political scientist Corey Robin’ called them “the real midterms” and described them as epochal. Looking back to the watershed year of 1978, Robin noted that national voters re-elected "a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate by wide margins," despite "two years of a historically unpopular Democratic president" (i.e., Jimmy Carter) with tanking approval ratings.

But those weren't the midterms that mattered most, in Robin's account. What really mattered in 1978 was "the passage of Proposition 13 in California, which radically gutted property taxes ... and made it extremely difficult to raise taxes in the future," launching a nationwide right-wing rebellion against taxes that fueled the landslide election of Ronald Reagan two years later. Now, in 2018, the wave of teacher strikes signals the beginning of a movement, Robin argued, "to confront the real governing order of the past 40 years: the Prop 13 order."

You could see the reality of this unfolding on social media, but you couldn’t hear anything close to that analysis on any MSNBC program. Indeed, you couldn’t hear any sustained discussion at all, from any side of the issue. Robin’s arguments are exactly the sort of thing that belongs on the network, given the reality of voters' views in Drutman’s chart.

I asked Robin what other issues he thought MSNBC ought to explored. “I've been fascinated by how Trump and the GOP got completely rolled on the budget, forced to adopt a budget with a lot of the spending that they hate,” he said — a subject that’s been noted in the media, but hardly explored in any depth. “I'd also love to get a lot more coverage on all these Democratic primaries: Who are these people running for office? What are their positions, their ideologies, etc.?” That, too, is largely terra incognita, with a few scattered exceptions, which is surprising given the record activity levels of campaign activity. “Last, I'd love to see good reporting on millennials,” Robin concluded — a particularly important subject, given that generation's strong progressive tilt and its obvious near-term electoral importance.

Returning to the teacher strikes, Elizabeth Catte is an on-the-ground expert who could further enrich the discussion. She’s the author of "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia," which, as she puts it, “uses radical history to challenge perceptions of the region as a hub of white, working-class woe.” Catte has appeared on MSNBC, but not as the regular contributor she should be. “The lessons of the West Virginia teachers' strike are complex,” she told me. “But one takeaway for Democrats, or anyone interested in understanding our current moment, should be that people are desperate for a better range of political options,” precisely what MSNBC ought to provide.

“West Virginians have witnessed a remarkable indifference among their elected leaders to the common good, and have instead seen their futures traded away for incentives aimed at fickle corporations and their investors,” Catte continued. “Democrats who have seen their fortunes fall in so-called Trump country should prioritize righting this imbalance or face squandering any political momentum these recent collective actions might offer.”

A better range of political options necessarily calls for different perspectives on economics — another way in which MSNBC falls short. Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle, hosts of the daytime business show that bears their names, are well-intentioned but highly conventional economic reporters. To their credit, they enthusiastically debunk a lot of right-wing garbage. But there are plenty of dubious dogmas they simply accept, such as the supposed virtues of balanced budgets, or blaming the federal budget deficit on Social Security and Medicare. MSNBC hardly ever offers time to economists who dispute such claims, such as Dean Baker (defender of Social Security and Medicare and early predictor of the housing bubble crash) or Stephanie Kelton (proponent of Modern Monetary Theory and the universal job guarantee), for example.

In addition, when Resident Trump recently announced his steel and aluminum tariffs, Velshi and Ruhle pointed out some typical and obvious Trump lies and misdirections, but offered no hint that are legitimate arguments for protectionism that have a long history. In contrast, Democracy Now! featured a debate between two progressives — Lori Wallach, author of "The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority," and Michael Hudson, author of "America’s Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914" -- which cast both sides of the argument in a very different light.

Numerous other examples could be offered. As indicated above, Drutman analyzed voter views in term of 12 different issue indices. There are progressive viewpoints that never get aired on MSNBC for virtually every one of those, and of course there is never any sustained dialogue about linking those different progressive viewpoints together.

There are a great many progressive ideas with substantial public support that rarely even get mentioned. The Progressive Change Institute's Big Ideas poll in early 2015 identified 16 ideas with 70 percent support or more, plus dozens more with majority support, that are rarely if ever mentioned on MSNBC. I wrote about it that July, in a story about Bernie Sanders' alignment with popular issues.

These included:

• Allowing the government to negotiate drug prices (supported by 79 percent)
• Offering students the same interest rates as big banks (78 percent)
• Universal pre-kindergarten (77 percent)
• Fair trade that protects workers, the environment and jobs (75 percent)
• Ending tax loopholes for corporations that ship jobs overseas (74 percent)
• Ending gerrymandering (73 percent)
• Letting homeowners pay down mortgages with 401k funds (72 percent)
• Debt-free college at public universities (71 percent)
• A $400 billion infrastructure jobs program (71 percent)
• Requiring the NSA to get warrants before collecting our data (71 percent)
• Disclosing corporate spending on politics and lobbying (71 percent)
• Medicare buy-in, available to all (71 percent)
• Closing offshore corporate tax loopholes (70 percent)
• A "Green New Deal," creating millions of clean energy jobs (70 percent)
• A Full Employment Act (70 percent)
• Expanding Social Security benefits (70 percent)

PCI and allied groups like the Democratic Socialists of America have identified a solid core of popular progressive ideas that certainly deserve a hearing under any reasonable theory of democracy. 

 

Instead of seeing their representatives in policy discussions at MSNBC, we get the same old tired mix of views that failed to excite voters enough to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016.
There’s a simple explanation for this: Corporate control and the conceptually narrow mindset that accompanies it, especially on matters of foreign policy.  This was not immediately obvious when MSNBC cancelled the Phil Donahue show, as Cohen recalls:

We were terminated by MSNBC because our skeptical questioning about whether it would be wise to invade Iraq and whether cause existed was so totally out of tune with the rest of the channel’s programming, which offered little debate on those questions. Internal NBC documents that leaked show that the termination was political and censorial. While we were terminated for asking the right journalistic questions, those who got it so totally wrong saw their careers at MSNBC and elsewhere flourish.

Keith Olbermann, then one of the network's stars, "started asking good questions in 2006,” Cohen acknowledged, “but three years is a long time before independence was exhibited.” That was three long years during which lies were exposed and opposition grew on the ground among the anti-war movement and the progressive public, with little or no cable news encouragement.
What really happened at MSNBC is much clearer in retrospect, Cohen said: “We now realize that in 2002 and 2003, lobbyists for GE/NBC and other media conglomerates were working hand-in-glove with George W. Bush's FCC - chaired by Colin Powell’s son Michael Powell - toward deregulation allowing these companies to get even fatter. Questioning or irritating Team Bush in any way at that juncture interfered with corporate objectives.”

In fact, the idea that MSNBC is a “liberal Fox News” fundamentally misunderstands both the media environment and recent network history. Fox News is a deliberately ideological propaganda station, conceived as such by Roger Ailes long before it ever went live. MSNBC is a commercial enterprise that stumbled into a center-left position simply because that was the available audience, given Fox News' and CNN’s prior positioning.  But no one master-planned it that way.

In fact, the network has at times lurched more to the right than the left. In 1999, for example, MSNBC paired Oliver North - yes, he of the Reagan administration and the Iran-contra scandal - with former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne as co-anchors of "Equal Time." This is of course a familiar format to cable news viewers: Rabid right-wingers coupled with tepid centrists who supposedly represent the left.

That was no fluke: At the tail end of the Bill Clinton era, MSNBC was clearly experimenting with a sharp right turn. The network also added shows in 1999 that featured reactionary dinosaur John McLaughlin and the now-infamous Laura Ingraham, then a young conservative bomb-thrower.

Compared to that, today's MSNBC might not look so bad. But compared to what America both wants and needs in terms of new ideas and a new direction, the so-called liberal network is still staggering around in the dark instead of lighting the way. In all the ways touched on above, MSNBC's corporate culture is sharply at odds with the most pressing concerns of its primary audience, not to mention, the whole nation. By ignoring the voices of those who are exploring bold solutions and challenging worn-out political orthodoxy, MSNBC is only reproducing the insular outlook that led the Democrats to political disaster over the course of the last decade, culminating in the debacle of 2016. We can't afford that.

Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area.

Michael Cohen And The End Stage Of The Trump Residency

Michael Cohen And The End Stage Of The Trump Residency

The war in Syria, explained

How Syria’s civil war became America’s problem.

16 tweets where Trump attacks Obama for exactly what Trump is doing in Syria now

Tonight the inevitable happened.

After reports of possibly heinous war crimes being committed by the Syrian government, after weeks and weeks of hostile propaganda coming from the United States and a completely incompetent government in perpetual disarray, Donald Trump announced that the United States would be bombing Syria.

Donald Trump’s opinions on foreign policy have not always been so … hawkish.

Let’s take a look back:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1756959

White supremacist blows himself up making ISIS style bombs

Friends and family say Ben Morrow was a Bible-toting lab worker. Investigators say he was a bomb-building white supremacist.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/suspected-white-supremacist-died-building-isis-style-bombs 

Lawmaker to Trump: Resign, it will get worse

Rep. Denny Heck (D-WA) says Resident Donald Trump should consider resigning because it's "becoming not a question if there was a crime, but how many."

If you have a weak stomach, I implore you not to look at this image

MSNBC’s Joe and Mika bash Trump for ‘humiliating America’ with his angry tweets

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski reacted in shock and dismay after President Donald Trump complained that he wasn't receiving enough credit for military gains.

Birther Taps Benghazi Conspiracy Theorist As Secretary Of State

As a congressman, Mike Pompeo was aggressive in accusing the Obama administration of negligence and a cover-up around the 2012 terrorist attack.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mike-pompeo-benghazi_us_5aa7e17ee4b03c9edfaffc07

Paul Ryan Is The Worst House Speaker Ever

Lawrence O'Donnell argues Paul Ryan earned that title through unprecedented and unrelenting cowardice and by surrendering his powers to the Trump residency.

Furious Republican Congressman Calls Trump A 'Motherfucker' In Conversation With Conservative Pundit

"He’s just a fucking idiot who thinks he’s winning when people are bitching about him."

 

By David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

 

A Republican Congressman has let loose and expressed his true feelings about resident Donald Trump to Erick Erickson, a far-right pundit. Erickson is a former Fox News contributor and was the editor of RedState. He will not identify the GOP lawmaker who is from a “very Republican” district for obvious reasons, writing the Congressman “is happy to be quoted, so long as I don’t name him.”

“If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherfucker,” the unnamed Republican Congressman we’ll call “Rep. X,” supposedly said to Erickson.

Erickson says Rep. X continued his rant, saying, “dammit he’s taking us all down with him. We are well and truly fucked in November. Kevin [McCarthy] is already circling like a green fly circling shit trying to take Paul’s [Ryan] job because nobody thinks he’s sticking around for Nancy [Pelosi]. She’s going to fuck up the cafeteria again too. [Lord’s name in vain], at least I’ll probably lose too and won’t have to put up with that shit.”

(Speaker Ryan announced today he is retiring at the end of his term.)

“It’s like Forrest Gump won the presidency, but an evil, really fucking stupid Forrest Gump. He can’t help himself. He’s just a fucking idiot who thinks he’s winning when people are bitching about him. He really does see the world as ratings and attention. I hate Forrest Gump.”

The House Judiciary Committee “just might pull the trigger if the President fires Mueller,” Rep. X supposedly said. “The shit will hit the fan if that happens and I’d vote to impeach him myself. Most of us would, I think. Hell, all the Democrats would and you only need a majority in the House. If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherfucker. Take him out with us and let Mike [Pence] take over. At least then we could sleep well at night.”

Rep. X calls Vice President Pence “competent.”

“I say a lot of shit on TV defending him, even over this,” Rep. X tells Erickson. Erickson describes the Congressman as someone who defends Trump on Fox News and in public but obviously has a different personal opinion. The media and Democrats on Capitol Hill often say many Republican lawmakers oppose Trump in private, but won’t in public. (There are several words for that.)

“But honestly, I wish the motherfucker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, shits all over Twitter, shits all over us, shits all over his staff, then hits golf balls. Fuck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.”

Of course.