Post-Traumatic Discourse

Trump is too stupid to know just how stupid he is

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/2/25/1743434/-Because-Trump-is-too-stupid-to-know-just-how-stupid-he-is

A Wave Of Global Disappointment In Democracy Brought Trump To The White House

Harvard's Yascha Mounk explains how lack of faith in democracies is spreading around Europe.

By Chauncey DeVega

The Chauncey DeVega Show is the official podcast of Salon.com politics writer Chauncey DeVega. The weekly show features a relaxed and free-form conversation with artists, authors, musicians, researchers, academics, journalists, activists, actors and directors.

Yascha Mounk is the guest on this week's special fundraising month episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show. He is a lecturer on political theory at Harvard University's Government Department, a postdoctoral fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund, and a nonresident fellow at New America's Political Reform Program. Mounk is the author of three books including the forthcoming The People versus Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. He writes a column at Slate in addition to hosting The Good Fight podcast.

In this week's episode of the podcast, Yascha Mounk and Chauncey DeVega discuss how Trump rode a wave of global discontent about liberal democracies into the White House, how a lack of faith in democracies is spreading around Europe and other parts of the world, right-wing authoritarian populism, what can be done to save democracy, the responsibility of teachers and other educators in this moment of crisis, and what we know and don't know about how and why democracies succeed or fail.

DeVega also shares how the Trump administration is trying to kick immigrants out of the country if they dare to use public services such as Head Start or food stamps. He also reminds folks of the human cost of Trump's white supremacist war on black and brown immigrants by sharing a story about home healthcare workers and their importance to the most vulnerable Americans.

 


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.

All the brands that have cut ties with the NRA following gun-control activists' boycotts

By Kate Taylor and Leanna Garfield

• Gun-control activists are organizing boycotts and calling for companies to cut ties with the National Rifle Association.
• The NRA has partnerships with companies that offer members special deals, such as discounts on car rentals or hotel bookings.
• The car-rental giant Enterprise and the First National Bank of Omaha are among the companies that have cut since ties with the NRA.

---

Gun-control activists are organizing boycotts of companies with ties to the National Rifle Association — and they're already producing results.

People on social media are calling for boycotts of companies that offer or have offered special deals to NRA members who, as part of their membership, receive discounts on things like car rentals and prescription drugs.

While companies such as FedEx and Hertz still offer such discounts, other companies have cut ties.

Here are all the brands that have cut ties with the gun-rights group after the recent boycotts as well as past efforts by gun-control activists.

Delta Airlines

Delta

On Saturday, the airline tweeted that it is "reaching out to the NRA to let them know we will be ending their contract for discounted rates through our group travel program. We will be requesting that the NRA remove our information from their website."

United Airlines

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The airline announced on Saturday that it is cutting ties to the NRA.
"United is notifying the NRA that we will no longer offer a discounted rate to their annual meeting and we are asking that the NRA remove our information from their website," the company tweeted.

Hertz

Hertz rental cars are seen in a rental lot near Detroit Metropolitan airport in Romulus.

Thomson Reuters

On Friday, Hertz tweeted, "We have notified the NRA that we are ending the NRA's rental car discount program with Hertz."

Allied Van Lines

Allied Van Lines

In a statement to Business Insider, an Allied representative said the moving company is discontinuing its discount program with the NRA immediately. "We have asked them to remove our listing from their benefits site," the representative said.

MetLife

Thomson Reuters

MetLife told Business Insider on Friday that it would discontinue its NRA discounts program. "We value all our customers but have decided to end our discount program with the NRA," a representative said in an emailed statement.

SimpliSafe

SimpliSafe

On Friday, the home-security company SimpliSafe told Business Insider that it would withdraw from the NRA discount program. "We have discontinued our existing relationship with the NRA," SimpliSafe CEO Chad Laurans said in a statement.

First National Bank of Omaha

First National Bank

On Thursday, the bank said it would not renew a contract with the NRA that allowed members to receive an NRA-branded Visa card. "Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA," the bank said on Twitter in response to a call for a boycott. Previously, First National Bank offered members of the gun-rights organization an NRA Visa card, which offered a $40 cash-back bonus.

Paramount Rx

Thomson Reuters

On Friday night, Paramount Rx released the following statement to BI: "The prescription discount program that is made available to NRA members is offered through a third-party vendor. We are working with that vendor to discontinue the program and remove the offering."

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Alamo Rent a Car, and National Car Rental

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The car-rental giant Enterprise Holdings announced on Thursday that it would end its NRA discount program, effective March 26. The three car-rental brands that Enterprise operates — Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Alamo Rent a Car, and National Car Rental — will stop offering discounts to NRA members.
A representative did not respond to Business Insider's follow-up questions about why Enterprise was ending the program, though the company has been flooded with boycott threats on social media. Avis Budget Group and Hertz, two rivals of Enterprise, still offered NRA discounts as of Friday morning.

Symantec

Symantec

The cybersecurity company announced on social media Friday that it had "stopped its discount program with the National Rifle Association."

Best Western

Best Western Weinebrugge

Best Western has been targeted by boycott efforts because it has offered discounts to NRA members as recently as 2016. In response, the hotel chain has tweeted dozens of times that it "does not have an affiliation with and is not a corporate partner of the National Rifle Association."

"Best Western ended any association with the NRA in 2014," a representative said in a statement to Business Insider.

Best Western has been targeted in past NRA boycott efforts.

In 2012, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the activist group Avaaz organized a boycott of Best Western and Wyndham Hotel Group, calling for them to cut ties with the NRA. At the time, both hotel chains were listed on the gun-rights group's website as "friends of the NRA" and offered members discounts at hotels.

Wyndham Hotel Group

Wyndham

While Wyndham Hotel Group previously offered a 10% discount to NRA members, the hotel chain cut ties with the organization late last year. In response to boycott threats this week, the Twitter accounts for Wyndham and its rewards program tweeted dozens of times that the hotel chain was "no longer affiliated with the NRA."

Republic Bank

Republic Bank

"The NRA Prepaid Card program was previously under review. Upon conclusion of this review, we decided to discontinue the offering," a representative said in a statement.

Avis and Budget

Getty Images/John Moore

A representative for Avis and Budget told Business Insider that the brands would stop the NRA rewards program, effective March 26, 2018.

Corporations start dropping support for the NRA and you too can do your part to help: Tell Amazon, Roku, Apple, and Google to dump the NRA TV channel

Wonder why Wayne LaPierre wasn't in the Army during Vietnam?

Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All Of Us Now

Thomas L. Friedman FEB. 18, 2018

resident Trump in Washington on Friday. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

Our democracy is in serious danger.

resident Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.

That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chiefs.

In sum, Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief. It is impossible yet to say which explanation for his behavior is true, but it seems highly likely that one of these scenarios explains Trump’s refusal to respond to Russia’s direct attack on our system — a quiescence that is simply unprecedented for any U.S. president in history. 

Russia is not our friend. It has acted in a hostile manner. And Trump keeps ignoring it all.

Up to now, Trump has been flouting the norms of the residency. Now Trump’s behavior amounts to a refusal to carry out his oath of office — to protect and defend the Constitution. Here’s an imperfect but close analogy: It’s as if George W. Bush had said after 9/11: “No big deal. I am going golfing over the weekend in Florida and blogging about how it’s all the Democrats’ fault — no need to hold a National Security Council meeting.”

At a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller — leveraging several years of intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. — has brought indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups — all linked in some way to the Kremlin — for interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections, America needs a resident who will lead our nation’s defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy.

What would that look like? He would educate the public on the scale of the problem; he would bring together all the stakeholders — state and local election authorities, the federal government, both parties and all the owners of social networks that the Russians used to carry out their interference — to mount an effective defense; and he would bring together our intelligence and military experts to mount an effective offense against Putin — the best defense of all.

What we have instead is a resident vulgarly tweeting that the Russians are “laughing their asses off in Moscow” for how we’ve been investigating their interventions — and exploiting the terrible school shooting in Florida — and the failure of the F.B.I. to properly forward to its Miami field office a tip on the killer — to throw the entire F.B.I. under the bus and create a new excuse to shut down the Mueller investigation.

Think for a moment how demented was Trump’s Saturday night tweet: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign — there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

To the contrary. Our F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A., working with the special counsel, have done us amazingly proud. They’ve uncovered a Russian program to divide Americans and tilt our last election toward Trump — i.e., to undermine the very core of our democracy — and Trump is telling them to get back to important things like tracking would-be school shooters. Yes, the F.B.I. made a mistake in Florida. But it acted heroically on Russia. What is more basic than protecting American democracy?

It is so obvious what Trump is up to: Again, he is either a total sucker for Putin or, more likely, he is hiding something that he knows the Russians have on him, and he knows that the longer Mueller’s investigation goes on, the more likely he will be to find and expose it.

Donald, if you are so innocent, why do you go to such extraordinary lengths to try to shut Mueller down? And if you are really the resident — not still head of the Trump Organization, who moonlights as resident, which is how you so often behave — why don’t you actually lead — lead not only a proper cyberdefense of our elections, but also an offense against Putin.

Putin used cyberwarfare to poison American politics, to spread fake news, to help elect a chaos candidate, all in order to weaken our democracy. We should be using our cyber-capabilities to spread the truth about Putin — just how much money he has stolen, just how many lies he has spread, just how many rivals he has jailed or made disappear — all to weaken his autocracy. That is what a real resident would be doing right now.

My guess is what Trump is hiding has to do with money. It’s something about his financial ties to business elites tied to the Kremlin. They may own a big stake in him. Who can forget that quote from his son Donald Trump Jr. from back in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.” They may own our resident.

But whatever it is, Trump is either trying so hard to hide it or is so naïve about Russia that he is ready to not only resist mounting a proper defense of our democracy, he’s actually ready to undermine some of our most important institutions, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, to keep his compromised status hidden.

That must not be tolerated. This is code red. The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.

Trump’s staggering dereliction of duty

By Ruth Marcus

National security adviser H.R. McMaster is in the news — and apparently in the presidential doghouse — for stating the obvious: that evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election is “now really incontrovertible.” So it is appropriate to take, as this column’s theme, the title of McMaster’s book on the Vietnam war, “Dereliction of Duty.”

McMaster was writing about military leaders’ failure to stand up to presidents who insisted on pursuing an unwinnable war. Now, in the White House in which McMaster serves, the dereliction of duty starts at the top. And, as the past several days have shown, resident Trump’s failure is dereliction on a grand, unprecedented scale: We find ourselves at war without a commander in chief; in national mourning without a consoler in chief; and in political gridlock without a negotiator in chief.

The first is the most appalling and most terrifying. “Incontrovertible,” McMaster said, and so it is for anyone who bothers to read the indictment of 13 Russians for running a massive operation not only to disrupt the election but to do so to Trump’s benefit. But of course Trump never has and apparently never will be able to accept this. Is it his fragile ego that cannot tolerate the implicit challenge to his legitimacy? Is it something more sinister?

This much is clear: For whatever reason, Trump is unwilling to accept the reality of what happened in 2016 and, more alarming, unwilling to do his duty to seek to prevent it from happening again. We are at war with an enemy plotting to undermine our democracy, and our supposed leader, far from working to halt this, seems determined to ignore it. Where is Trump’s outrage now that the evidence against Russia is public, not that he needed to wait for that? It is invisible.

Instead, Trump’s anger is directed against McMaster, for omitting the untrue party line: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems.

Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

Trump’s anger is directed against the democratic institutions that have rallied to discover what happened and seek to prevent its recurrence: “If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!”

Laughing their asses off in Moscow, indeed. There has been not one word, not one syllable of residential anger directed toward the people who did this.

But there is no depth to which Trump will not sink in defense of the only thing he holds dear: himself. And so, the nation witnessed a tweet in which the resident, a leader to whom the country once looked for healing in times of national tragedy, instead used innocent victims, high school children mowed down in their own school, to make his bogus, self-interested point: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

Did he? Did he really use dead children to attack an investigation into his campaign and his conduct in office? Yes, he did. This is a person devoid of empathy. He can experience the world only through the prism of his own ego. He can read the requisite words from a teleprompter — “To every parent, teacher, and child who is hurting so badly, we are here for you — whatever you need, whatever we can do, to ease your pain” — but he is incapable of feeling them. No one who imagines the shattered heart of a grieving parent could have written that despicable tweet.

Finally, a word about the “dreamers,” and the impending, unnecessary tragedy of Trump’s own making. He wanted a “bill of love” to protect the dreamers, Trump told us. “I will be signing it,” he said of any congressional deal to allow these promising innocents to remain. Trump broke the inadequate status quo for dreamers when he rescinded President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order allowing them to stay. Then he failed to fix it. Then, with an unnecessarily belligerent and premature veto threat, Trump got in the way of lawmakers of good faith attempting a solution.

“Dereliction of duty” is not a strong enough term to describe this man’s abysmal performance.

Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.
 
Read more here:
 
Karen Tumulty: We’ve just hit a new presidential low

The Post’s View: What Trump still doesn’t get about Russian interference in the election

The Post’s View: Mr. Trump to the ‘dreamers’: Drop dead.

Brian Klaas: Russia is at war with our democracy. When will we finally start defending it?

Quinta Jurecic: Institutions can’t save America from Trump

Another Particle Blaster Incident

Florida Gunman Who Killed 17 Previously Trained With White Nationalist Group

The man charged in this week’s Florida school shooting allegedly trained with a white supremacist group.

A spokesman for the right-wing group Republic of Florida claimed accused gunman Nikolas Cruz had been “brought up” by another member of the organization and took part in at least one training exercise in the Tallahassee area, reported ADL.

Jordan Jereb, who is believed to be the militia group’s leader, confirmed the association after self-described ROF members claimed on the online 4chan forum that Cruz had been a member.

The anti-government paramilitary group, which is only a few years old, describes itself as a “white civil rights organization fighting for white identitarian politics” and promotes the creation of a “white ethnostate.”

Jereb told ADL that his group had not directed Cruz to commit the shooting at his former school, and he said the ROF did not support his action.

Source

Nothing Is True

Let's give Dotard Trump the parade he wants...

Note To Trump-Humpers: None Of Your Conspiracy Theories Exonerates Your Man

Posted by Rude One

Whenever some dingleberry of seeming bias against resident Donald Trump is sharted out by his state media on Fox "news," the resident and his supporters will crow that he is "vindicated" of one thing or other, usually that his campaign conspired with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election. Someone on some goddamn website or Twitter account finds some utterly minor thing that, blown up with graphics and set to sinister music, can be made to seem like the Deep State run by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is just setting up poor, innocent, pure, God-chosen Donald Trump in order to frame him for some crime he wouldn't ever even contemplate committing.

They did it with the Uranium One bullshit, declaring that "the real Russia scandal." They did it with the Nunes memo, which just showed that the FBI follows leads. They accuse Republicans Robert Mueller and James Comey of bias, which seems to mean, "If you want to investigate whether Donald Trump and people around him might have committed crimes." And they're doing it with the text messages of a couple of FBI agents now, with the latest supposedly implicating President Obama (spoiler: it doesn't and you're stupid if you think it does).

But here's the deal: Not one of these things clears Trump or his awful family or his merry band of plague rats and rabid dogs that we are forced to call "the White House."

Let's lay it all out as clearly as possible once again (because this is shit I've talked about before).

- Hillary Clinton could have totally given away 20% of the U.S. uranium deposits to the Russians in order to secure donations to her family's charity (honestly, just writing that seems so patently absurd, it hurts my brain a little). Sure, she would have had to have bribed or threatened the dozens of other people involved in any decision about uranium, but, shit, she's Hillary Clinton, allegedly the stone cold murderer of dozens of political enemies, so, sure, yeah, let's say this could totally happen.

- The FBI could have totally lied about the Democratic Party's involvement in the Steele dossier, as the Nunes memo asserts (even though, factually, the FBI didn't lie, but we're saying if horseshit were gold here), in order to continue surveillance of Carter Page, which they had started in 2013, but, obviously, they totally knew that he would be named by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers and just got a jump on it.

- James Comey could have totally been compromised into not charging Hillary Clinton with a crime on the emails, which somehow translates into something something no collusion Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch in the parlor with a candlestick. (I really don't understand the "fuck evidence and punch reality in the dick" mindset.)

- Agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page could have been totally biased against Trump and their texts about what an asshole he is indicate that they had preconceived notions about whatever part of the investigation they worked on. And there could totally be a secret society of FBI agents meeting in some off-site coven to do some hoodoo to Trump. And today's big revelation, that Page had texted in September 2016, "potus wants to know everything we’re doing," could totally mean Obama wanted to interfere with the Hillary email investigation and not that he wanted to know if the United States was being cyber-attacked by Russia, which is definitely what it was, but, you know, Hillary using a private email server is worse than Watergate times Teapot Dome times Iran-Contra, motherfuckers.

Goddamn, you people are fucking nuts.

And, you know, the only way that any of these conspiracies make sense as being real is if there is a massive uber-conspiracy involving everyone from grunt-level agents to the former president of the United States to discredit Trump and his administration, and, even then, it would have had to start 5 years ago.

Of course, all Trump needs for all this to work is a few craven Republicans, like Devin Nunes and Ron "Secret Sauce" Johnson, to run interference, as well as media outlets permanently attached to his poisonous man-teats. The idiot hordes will gobble it up like Jesus jizz.

Yet, if every single one of those conspiracies were true, it still does nothing to prove that Trump isn't a money-launderer who is in the back pocket of Vladimir Putin and other rich as fuck Russians, it does nothing to prove that Russia didn't use a bunch of different methods to tilt the election to Trump, and it also does nothing to change the outcome of the 2016 presidential race (the excuse that Trump and his spokeslackeys use as the reason why Democrats care about a foreign government fucking with our electoral process or that Trump may be compromised, not that they might actually give a shit that our sovereignty might have been breached).

If Donald Trump were innocent, you wouldn't need a single one of the crazy conspiracies to explain it all away. You'd have the truth. But truth is now just a ragged angel whose wings have been perforated by the birdshot of unending lies.

Several Eagles will skip Donald Trump White House visit after winning Super Bowl

By Matt Lombardo

mdlombardo@njadvancemedia.com,

NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

MINNEAPOLIS -- Several Eagles players plan on skipping the traditional White House celebration after winning Super Bowl LII over the New England Patriots on Sunday night.

Wide receiver Torrey Smith, defensive end Chris Long, and safety Malcolm Jenkins are among the players planing to boycott visiting President Donald J. Trump.



Here is the exact moment the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl, finishing off the New England Patriots, 41-33, in Super Bowl LII (52) at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minn. on Sunday, February 4, 2018 (2/4/18). (Video by Eliot Shorr-Parks | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Trump has repeatedly attacked NFL players for silent acts of dissent whether it is kneeling or raising fists during the national anthem in advocating for criminal justice reform and eradicating social injustice.

"They call it the anthem protest," Smith said this week. "We're not protesting the anthem. It's a protest during the anthem. I understand why people are mad, or may be offended when someone takes a knee.

"My father when he dies, is going to be buried with an American flag draped around his casket, being that he served in the army. I understand why some people are offended by it. Also, there are soldiers that have issues going on right now, and they are things that effect them. They're things that effect my father. He understands both sides of the issue."

Meanwhile, Long -- who also skipped the post Super Bowl White House trip last year as a member of the New England Patriots -- says that he does not want his children to grow up having been influenced by Trump's actions or policies.

"No," Long said during the Pardon My Take Podcast. "I'm not going to the White House. Are you kidding me?"

Officer Friendly

Trump authorizes release of controversial Republican memo

Donald Trump has authorized the release of a controversial Republican memo, and has sent word to the House Intelligence Committee the document may be made public, a White House official said.

www.cnn.com/2018/02/02/politics/republican-intelligence-memo/index.html

Trump vs. The Deep State