ponderthescriptures.com just reporting tRUMP, aka, caligula, the evil of, the case against r. scott burton

Six hours of paralysis: Inside Trump’s failure to act after a mob stormed the Capitol, Parker, Dawsey, Rucker, washingtonpost.com “As senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who — safely ensconced in the West Wing — was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their pleas.

“‘He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV,’ said one close Trump adviser. ‘If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.’

“Even as he did so, Trump did not move to act. And the message from those around him — that he needed to call off the angry mob he had egged on just hours earlier, or lives could be lost — was one to which he was not initially receptive....

“Trump ultimately — and begrudgingly — urged his supporters to ‘go home in peace.’ But the six hours between when the Capitol was breached shortly before 2 p.m. Wednesday afternoon and when it was finally declared secure around 8 p.m. that evening reveal a president paralyzed — more passive viewer than resolute leader, repeatedly failing to perform even the basic duties of his job…

“This portrait of the president as the Capitol was under attack on Jan. 6 is the result of interviews with 15 Trump advisers, members of Congress, GOP officials and other Trump confidants, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details.”

“Trump should be impeached. But that alone won’t remove white supremacy from America, Hillary Clinton, washingtonpost.com "Almost 20 years later [after 9/11], we are living through another failure of imagination — the failure to account for the damage that can be done to our nation by a president who incites violence, congressional leaders who fan the flames, and social media platforms that sear conspiracy theories into the minds of Trump's supporters. Unless we confront the threats we face, we risk ensuring that last week's events are only a prelude to an even greater tragedy.”

“Republicans wrestle over removing Trump,” Alexander Olson, thehill.com “‘As this was unfolding on television, Donald Trump was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building,’ Sasse told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt in an interview. ‘That was happening. He was delighted.’

“‘I’m sure you’ve also had conversations with other senior White House officials, as I have,’ Sasse told Hewitt.

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“Particularly damaging to Trump was a clip that emerged showing him and his family in a festive mood watching video monitors of the pro-Trump mob gathered around the Capitol with the party song ‘Gloria’ blaring.

“The video filmed by Donald Trump Jr. showed his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle dancing and urging viewers to fight, with an enthusiastic White House chief of staff Mark Meadows flashing a thumbs up shortly before rioters overran Capitol Police and ransacked Senate and House offices.

“In the background, the president and his daughter Ivanka Trump, a senior White House adviser, could be seen intently watching coverage of the crowd.”

“Donald Trump Isn’t Going Anywhere Anytime Soon,” Jessica Wildfire, medium.com “He won’t ever concede victory. Not only that, but he’ll spend the rest of his life insisting he won. Think about it. He’s never admitted to being wrong once in his entire life. Ten years after the fact, he still won’t even acknowledge Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

“Trump will never stop. He doesn’t know how.

“He’ll be leaving office with a sizable base of support. His mob of deplorables will continue donating their savings to his piggy bank and committing acts of violence in his name.”

“This is How Donald Trump Broke America,” Umair Haque, medium.com “America leads the world by a massive way — a terrible way. It has the most deaths and the worst Covid outcomes of any nation, except perhaps its junior partner in disgraced stupidity, Britain.

“More than 330,000 people are dead. Mutliply that by two, because that’s the number that’s going to be hit as the pandemic tails off — if it does. That brings us close to three quarters of a million deaths.

“No calamity or war in America history comes remotely close to this staggering, jaw-dropping number. And the even grimmer truth — one which Americans are either too numb or foolish to grasp — is that 99% of those deaths were needless. If America had acted like Vietnam, it would have had just 120 deaths. If America had acted like South Korea, it would have had just 3,200 deaths. If America had acted like New Zealand, it would have had just 1,200 deaths.

“So. Why isn’t Donald Trump being held accountable for all this mass death?...

“Sure, Trumpists played a role, flouting lockdowns, not wearing masks, calling it tyranny — but again, it was Trump who led them to that, justifying it, inciting it, modelling it. The epitaphs of the Covid dead are dug by Donald Trump’s horrific irresponsibility.

“A decent lawyer, I imagine, could make any of several cases, without too much effort. Negligent homicide, manslaughter, dereliction of duty. Any number — any number — of abrogations of responsibility if not outright criminal acts come to mind.”

“There Are No Disputed States, Only A Mad President, Laid Bare,” Eric J. School, medium.com “And on a recorded phone call this weekend with the Georgia Secretary of State that was distributed by the Washington Post, Trump’s ‘evidence’ of fraud first and foremost is the comparative size of the crowd at his rallies. Which of course is proof of nothing. And he keeps returning to that. As evidence. Really. Read it; listen to it if you don’t believe me (I’ve just given you a link): it’s where he starts, and he keeps coming back to it. Then, after you do, tell me he’s not completely delusional….”

“F*** You, Ted Cruz,” Nicholas Grossman, medium.com

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“A bunch of Republican voters believe ‘the election was rigged’ because political and media leaders told them so. Trumpist leaders lie about the election, Trump supporters believe those lies, and Trumpist politicians claim that voters believing their lies means those lies have to be treated as not- lies. This despite the fact that the allegations are such obvious lies that Trump’s lawyers aren’t even alleging them in court.”

“America’s acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy,” Robert Reich, theguardian.com “Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8%of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America.

“Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy….

“Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy….

“And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his reelection.

“A president can also lie about the results of an election without a shred of evidence – and yet, according to polls, be believed by the vast majority of those who voted for him.”

“Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands,” Finton O’Toole, irishtimes.com “The power of his instinct was that he knew how to tap into a hatred of government that has been barely below the surface of American culture since before the foundation of the US.

“That instinct proved sufficiently well attuned that he got nearly 75 million votes in November, even while his malign incompetence was killing his own people. He got those votes, moreover, having made it abundantly clear that he would never accept the result of the election unless he won. They were votes for open autocracy.

“This is his legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.

“In this end is his new beginning. Stripped of direct power, he will face enormous legal and financial jeopardy. He will have every reason to keep drawing on his greatest asset: his ability to unleash the demons that have always haunted the American experiment — racism, nativism, fear of "the government."

“Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands. It is, for him, not goodbye but hasta la vista. Instead of waving him off, those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his heart.”

“Biographer Michael D'Antonio on the most ‘subversive and traitorous federal official’ in history,” Chauncey Devega, salon.com “There was not any corner of the mainstream media that was prepared to deal with a person as malevolent as Trump, who was not operating out of any commitment to the country or to the oath of office. The press was paralyzed by the enormity of Trump's malevolence. Reporters kept waiting for the moment when they could say, ‘Oh, see, he is capable of something better. We were right not to declare him depraved.’ The mainstream news media waited so long for such a moment that now their judgment has become irrelevant.

“It was so utterly apparent to anyone who bypassed the news and just watched Trump on television that he was fascistic, that he's a racist, that he's perfectly comfortable fomenting violence if he

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believes it's in his own interest to do so. Trump broke the minds of the national press. Trump and his behavior exceeded their imaginations. Even when there were mental health experts sounding the alarm from the very beginning about Donald Trump…

“For me, the best way of explaining Trump is that he does not share common reference points for what life is really about. Love is not one of his reference points. Service to others is not one of his reference points. Joy, as you understand it, is not understood by him. All he knows is the pursuit of power through dominance over others. Trump will achieve that dominance through whatever means are necessary. If it is violence, then Trump will use it.”

“Trump Reportedly Entertained Michael Flynn’s “Martial Law” Proposal in Meeting, Jake Johnson, commondreams.com “Axios reported Saturday that senior Trump administration officials, whom the outlet did not name, are growing ‘increasingly alarmed that President Trump might unleash — and abuse — the power of government in an effort to overturn the clear result of the election.’

“‘Their fears include Trump’s interest in former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s wild talk of martial law; an idea floated of an executive order to commandeer voting machines; and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top- level security clearance,’ according to Axios.

“In response to the Axios story, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) dismissed the Trump advisers’ supposed alarm as ‘all for show,’ given that they’ve repeatedly enabled the president’s past abuses.

“‘They have empowered him as he destroys democratic institutions and embarrasses the U.S. globally,’ Omar tweeted. ‘They are shameless.’”

“What Will Trump Attempt in His Last Days? We Must Prepare for Anything,” William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org “His niece, Mary Trump, has stated publicly that her uncle is a grand master when it comes to gaslighting himself, i.e., talking himself into believing in the preposterous if it suits his internal narrative of the heroic victim. What was once a grift, in his mind, may well have become holy writ….

“Is it plausible, though, that Trump would dare to undertake this doomsday martial law scenario? To answer that, ask yourself how many times you’ve said, ‘He wouldn’t do that, he can’t!’ only to see him do just that with extra ‘that’ on the side….

“‘Sources who have gotten used to Trump’s eruptions over four years sound scared by what’s transpired in the past week when I’ve talked to them,’ Maggie Haberman of The New York Times tweeted on Saturday. ‘I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,’ tweeted Jonathan Swan of Axios on the same day. ‘I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell / Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.’”

“Trump Continues to Ignore COVID as His GOP Enablers Make It Worse,” Heather Digby Parton, truthout.org “It may seem as if President Donald Trump has done nothing since losing to Joe Biden but watch TV and rage tweet about his stolen election fantasy, however, he’s actually been quite busy.

“He’s reportedly considering a military coup or an executive order to seize the voting machines in swing states that Biden won. He spent a lot of energy pushing Attorney General Bill Barr to pursue some of his wild theories about the alleged election theft and pressed him to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Biden’s son Hunter. He’s also been engaged in purging the federal government of those he considers disloyal, particularly at the Pentagon, where he has spent the final few weeks of his presidency installing some of his closest collaborators for reasons that remain unclear.

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“So you can’t say he is doing nothing — he’s just not doing his job.”

“Sending Trump to Hell,” Ariel Dorfman, tomdispatch.com “For some time now, I’ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.

“The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he’s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I’ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife…

“Witnessing the infernal realities President Trump has unleashed on America, I can't help wondering where Dante would have placed our miscreant-in-chief in his afterlife of horror. In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, I realized one obvious thing: the 45th president has such a multitude of transgressions to his name that he fits almost every category and canto that Dante invented for the sinners of his age.” https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176765/tomgram%3A_ariel_dorfman%2C_trump%27s_divine_fate/

“As Trump stews over election, he mostly ignores the public duties of the presidency,” David Nakamura, washingtonpost.com “On Thursday, six American service members were killed in a helicopter crash during a peacekeeping mission in Egypt. Tropical Storm Eta made landfall in North Florida, contributing to severe flooding. The number of Americans infected with the novel coronavirus continued at a record-setting pace, sending the stock market tumbling.

“At the White House, President Trump spent the day as he has most others this week — sequestered from public view, tweeting grievances, falsehoods and misinformation about the election results and about Fox News’s coverage of him….

“The contrast between the nation grappling with an ongoing global crisis and a president consumed with his own political problems highlighted a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Trump’s assault on the integrity of the U.S. election system: He is leveraging the power of his office in a long-shot bid to stay in the job while ignoring many of the public duties that come with it.

“...his public schedule has not included the daily presidential security briefing since early October…” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-ignores-duties/2020/11/12/02bfbc36-2507-11eb-a688- 5298ad5d580a_story.html

“Trump’s Frivolous Lawsuits Are the Tip of the Iceberg in His Refusal to Concede,” Marjorie Cohn, truthout.org “Mindful that many more people than usual would vote by mail to protect themselves from the coronavirus, Trump sowed the seeds of doubt about the validity of mail-in ballots. With no evidence whatsoever, he fabricated claims of massive voter fraud. With no regard for the health risks, Trump encouraged his minions to vote in person, insisting the election results must be known on Election Day. Trump’s supporters obliged and most voted at the polls. It was therefore no surprise that the overwhelming number of mail-in ballots were cast by Democrats.

“...on election night, the count appeared to favor Trump since most Democrats cast mail ballots, which take longer to count. Some states, including Pennsylvania, forbid the counting of any

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ballots until Election Day. A Democratic-sponsored bill in Pennsylvania would have allowed mail-in ballots to be opened and counted before Election Day in light of the anticipated surge due to the pandemic. But Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature defeated the bill. Since Trump’s strategy was to declare victory on election night, the GOP forces likely sought to prevent mail-in ballots from diluting Trump’s apparent early lead. Furthermore, election workers didn’t even open mail ballots until November 4, since several counties required all workers to conduct the election on November 3. This explains why it took longer to report the vote counts in Pennsylvania…

“…his flurry of lawsuits is also designed to cast doubt on the integrity of the election. As Robert Reich noted, ‘Trump backers are trying to push Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint their own slates of Trump electors. That’s why the campaign has launched empty legal challenges to perfectly normal vote counts – trying to sow enough doubt to give the state legislatures political cover to appoint their own electors…’

“Trump is mounting a full-court press to steal the election from Joe Biden. The refusal to accept the election results by Trump and his congressional and Justice Department accomplices, coupled with his obstruction of the transition process, do not bode well for a peaceful transfer of power.” https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-frivolous-lawsuits-are-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-in-his-refusal-to- concede/

“Well… That Didn’t Go as Planned,” Patrick Thompkins, medium.com “Donald Trump isn’t a good man. He isn’t a smart man. He is about as complex and deep as a puddle. Equal parts opaque and dirty. And yet, the facade he projects, the poorly constructed strong man persona, resonates with tens of millions. Is it an indictment of our governmental system? Or an indictment of the American people?...

“At the end of the day, all the valid criticisms leveed against Trump and his supporters meant nothing. How do you change a race's trajectory when the participants of that race are impervious to criticism, feedback, correction, or even shame? You can’t. It’s Thelma and Louise barreling toward the cliff….

“I was wrong because I had hope. Hope that the American people would wake up and see a con man had been running the country for four years. A grifter who uses his own private properties as a siphon of American tax dollars. An incubus who turned the presidency into a permanent business venture for his entire family.

“But that hope is gone now. Americans didn’t learn anything in four years. They don’t see what the rest of the world sees.” https://medium.com/well-that-didnt-go-as-planned

“During the Trump Era, Everyone and Everything in America Failed,” Jon Schwarz, theintercept.com “Donald Trump made people ask this question for the first time in history: Is there such a thing as a lazy fascist?

“Before Trump, it seemed obvious that fascists were filled with vigor, always available for a mass torch-lit rally at midnight. Trump clearly has the instincts of a fascist: a lust for power, cruelty toward out-groups, and romanticization of a past that never existed. But he also can’t execute any plan that requires more than five seconds of effort. Are you a fascist if you vaguely want to be Supreme Leader, but that seems like a ton of work, and your top priority is getting through all the hours of ‘Fox & Friends’ on your DVR?

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“In fact, Trump’s basic life incompetence is so extreme that it’s amazing he’s only gone bankrupt six times. As president, he couldn’t do the most simple things in his immediate self-interest….

“For instance, the U.S. government did have detailed plans and a great deal of expertise to deal with the eruption of something like the novel coronavirus. All Trump had to do was appoint a Colin Powell-like figure to supervise everything, and then get out of the way. This would almost certainly have led to his reelection. But he could not manage this, because he is just a tiny bit of protoplasm attached to an ego the size of the universe…

“All that said, there is one area where Trump did not fail. Everyone has a mental map of the world inside their head. Mentally healthy people adjust their interior map when they see it doesn’t match reality. Mentally unhealthy people try to force reality to change to match what’s inside them. Trump, who is pullulating with hate and fear, has successfully devoted himself to multiplying the amount of hate and fear in the world outside of his head.” https://theintercept.com/2020/11/07/everyone-failed-during-trump-era/

“Don't underestimate the threat to American democracy at this moment,” Corey Brettschneider, theguardian.com “This grave threat comes from the president’s false declaration of victory, despite no evidence that he had won the election… He referred to any suggestion that he had lost as ‘a fraud on the American public’. In one breath, he declared that ‘we want all voting to stop’ and that ‘we don’t want any ballots to be found at four in the morning.’ This conflation of voting after election day and counting votes after election day – a standard practice in every election – is deeply misleading and deeply dangerous.

“In this respect, its damage is far worse than many of the many fibs Trump has made while in office. His suggestion is a direct lie, one that comes while millions of voters look to him to understand who our legitimate president will be. In past elections, the media – specifically TV networks – served as the main gatekeepers of results, but this president communicates directly to his base through social media, avoiding the reputable news organizations that could factcheck him in real time. This means that his unsubstantiated claims of victory – and of electoral fraud perpetrated by Democrats – are being fed directly to his base. Many will believe him, undermining confidence in the ultimate legitimate results and sowing discord and potentially violence.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/04/american-democracy-election-threat-trump

“The real reason Trump is terrified of losing the presidency: fear of prosecution,” Samer S Shehata, theguardian.com “Obviously, few autocrats are willing to relinquish the benefits that accompany political office. But there is another, more important, reason they often try to retain power at almost any cost, even after losing elections or completing their terms. After two decades of researching and writing about autocratic politics in the Middle East, I call this the autocrat’s dilemma: losing power can expose autocrats to accountability, prosecution and potential jail time. As a result, autocrats are often willing to break laws, rig elections, create chaos and even use violence to retain power.

“If Trump loses the election, there may be calls to investigate and prosecute him for possible crimes involving obstruction of justice, violating the emolument clause of the constitution, and/or tax fraud, among others. Citizen Trump would face investigation without the luxury of ‘executive privilege’ or the legal chicanery of the attorney general, William Barr, who has acted more like Trump’s personal lawyer than the nation’s top law enforcement official, to protect

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him. Accordingly, Trump has even more reason to lie, cheat and sow discord in order to retain office, because losing the White House could land him in court or even behind bars….

“Trump desperately wants to retain the presidency – not to ‘keep America Great’ but to protect himself from future prosecution. His embrace of white supremacists and his calls to supporters to monitor polling places on election day (and intimidate Biden voters in the process) is an attempt to engineer an election victory through force. And by disputing the election’s integrity he is inciting post-election violence: another tactic with the same intended goal.

“When past presidents have lost re-election, they often return to their home states to plan presidential libraries, establish philanthropic foundations and give well-compensated corporate speeches. Trump’s post-presidency could look very different. This vote is not simply about an incumbent president standing for re-election: it is about two starkly different futures for Donald Trump.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/03/donald-trump-fear-lose-election-prosecution

“The Plot Against America,” Eric Alterman, thenation.com “This column has room for about a thousand words—nowhere near long enough to list the reasons Trump belongs not in the White House but in a prison psych ward. There’s his incompetence and malevolence vis-à-vis the coronavirus; his encouragement of the unhinged, anti-Semitic, and possibly terroristic QAnon; his racism; his sexism; his history as an alleged sexual predator and likely rapist; his horrible foreign policy, especially on Israel/Palestine but, really, everywhere; his corrupt self-dealing business arrangements; his attacks on our health care system and the environment, his extremist court picks; his tax cheating; his promotion of fascist violence against peaceful protesters; his policy of child kidnapping; his paranoia; his fealty to Vladimir Putin, his nepotism; his ignorance; his vulgarity; his cruelty; his narcissism; his childishness. This list isn’t close to exhaustive. (McSweeney’s has the best catalog I’ve seen so far, enumerating 954 of ‘Trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes.’) Like all decent people, I hope for a Biden landslide, but we must also grapple, sooner rather than later, with the heart of darkness in this country that has inspired tens of millions of fellow citizens to support this evil miscreant.” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-plot-against-america/

“We’re Not a Democracy,” James Risen, theintercept.com “Four years ago, the nation tumbled down the Trump rabbit hole. We’ve now been lost in the dark so long that it is hard to figure out which way is up. Trump wants to keep us that way: a Tommy-like catatonic nation on the perpetual edge of a psychological breakdown.

“Trump’s most dangerous traits are his utter shamelessness and his pathological ability to employ the Big Lie — the autocrat’s weapon. He constantly repeats lies and conspiracy theories, leading the docile press and attention-addled public to talk about them, and thus distracting Americans from his scandalous and possibly criminal actions. He has based his entire presidency on conspiracy theories, flummoxing the mainstream press that has dutifully tried to cover him like a normal president. The most hopeless journalists in Washington are the “fact- checkers” who count Trump’s lies, when it is obvious that nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie. Margaret Sullivan, a media critic for the Washington Post, wrote this month that ‘the defining media story of this era is mainstream journalism’s refusal to deny Trump a giant megaphone whenever he holds out his hand’....

“But we don’t need to find a Dorian Gray-like portrait hidden away in a White House closet to be reminded of Trump’s viciousness and ugliness. Step away from Twitter and Instagram for a moment, and look back at a few key episodes from just the last year of his presidency, and it

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becomes obvious how he has poisoned virtually everything he has touched, in both domestic policy and national security.” https://theintercept.com/2020/10/21/trump-presidency-summary/

“In Nevada, Trump Mocks Biden for Listening to Scientists,” Jake Johnson, truthout.org “Speaking to a largely maskless crowd of supporters on Carson City, Nevada late Sunday, President Donald Trump mocked Democratic nominee Joe Biden for vowing to ‘listen to the scientists’ on the Covid-19 pandemic if elected in November and boasted about his own refusal to heed the advice of experts even as coronavirus cases and deaths continue to surge nationwide.

“‘If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression,’ Trump said, neglecting to mention that the U.S. is, in fact, currently in the midst of an unprecedented economic downturn.

“‘We’re like a rocket ship, take a look at the numbers,’ the president added, remarks that came just days after the Labor Department reported that another 1.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits during the week ending October 10. According to data from the Census Bureau, nearly 80 million U.S. adults are struggling to afford basic necessities such as food and rent.” https://truthout.org/articles/in-nevada-trump-mocks-biden-for-listening-to-scientists/

“John Kelly called Trump 'the most flawed person' he's ever met: report,” Marina Pitofsky, thehill.com "The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it's more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life," https://thehill.com/homenews/news/521507-john-kelly-called-trump-the-most-flawed-person-hes-ever- met-report

“Trump Will Never Admit Error. His Lack of Self-Accountability Is Deadly,” Joe Burbank, truthout.org “On September 9, Bob Woodward’s new book Rage revealed that Donald Trump knew back in February how lethal COVID-19 was, and deliberately chose to play down the threat. “It goes through the air,” Trump told Woodward on February 7. ‘That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed…. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.’ At the time of this revelation, the U.S. was knocking on the door of 200,000 COVID deaths.

“That bombshell barely had time to pour itself a drink before The New York Times exposed the shabby truth behind Trump’s long-concealed tax records on September 27. ‘The resulting product,” I wrote, “is a thunderclap of venality and greed astride a form of grasping self-interest unseen in the White House since the epic corruption of Warren Harding.’

“The next day, Trump defenestrated himself in a debate performance that made Godzilla look like Gene Kelly, and his already-bad poll numbers began to actively crater. For four years, most people had only heard about what Trump had said or done, choosing not to subject themselves to the raw voltage of his ghastly personality. That night, a Super Bowl-sized audience grabbed the live wire, saw it for themselves, and their hair stood on end like one of Tim Burton’s movie characters.” https://truthout.org/articles/trump-will-never-admit-error-his-lack-of-self-accountability-is-deadly/

“Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals,” David E. Sanger, nytimes.com

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“President Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan….

“Mr. Trump’s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. ‘I have an Article II,’ he told young adults last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the Constitution that deals with the president’s powers, ‘where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about that.’

“Now he is talking about it, almost daily….

“Presidential historians say there is no case in modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take political opponents off the field — or has been so eager to replicate the behavior of strongmen….

“Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Mr. Trump had ordered is ‘exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.’

“‘In dealing with Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,’ he said. ‘Now it’s our own government that’s engaging in them.’” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/10/us/politics/trump-barr-pompeo.html

“Ex-FBI Director Andrew McCabe: Trump is ‘person most responsible’ for Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, ” David Edwards, rawstory.com “During a press conference on Thursday, federal prosecutors revealed that the militia members plotted against Whitmer because of the coronavirus-related restrictions she put on the state….

“In one tweet Trump wrote, ‘Liberate Michigan!’

“McCabe said that Russia is amplifying Trump’s anti-democratic messages.

“‘We know back in 2016, one of the Russians’ objectives was to sow exactly this sort of sentiment: discord, chaos, distrust in each other and in our democratic process,’ the former FBI director explained. ‘We also know from what our intelligence folks have told us in the last few weeks that they are continuing that same campaign.’

“‘But let’s not be mistaken here,’ he continued. ‘The person most responsible for fomenting this sort of unrest, this sort of division, this sort of violence in this country right now is the president of the United States.’” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/ex-fbi-director-andrew-mccabe-trump-is-person-most-responsible- for-gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-plot/

“Donald Trump's desperation to leave hospital shows the dangers ahead,” Julian Borger, theguardian.com “It involved creating a culture in the White House in which the wearing of masks was scoffed at, and seen as a sign of disloyalty, the worst sin in the Trump court. Trump drove home the message on Monday night, staging a spectacle of his return to the White House maskless, with photographers forced to be in attendance. He has produced a toxic workplace to the point of potential lethality….

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“The bodyguards are there to take a bullet for the president, not to take one from him, but that was in effect what Trump was demanding they do for a photo-op.

“Amid the ensuing outrage over his insouciance, Trump appeared not to appreciate the point: that he had shown no heed of the safety of others, even loyal public servants. His reaction only served to prove that same point. He did not grasp that these people had significance….

“What stands out is the president’s sense that he was the victim once again – and the only other people who mattered were those who had shown their personal allegiance to him….

“Entirely absent was any acknowledgement of the more than 200,000 dead, the many more suffering serious and long lasting symptoms – and the reality that some of the ‘really great drugs’ he was given at Walter Reed hospital were experimental and way beyond the reach of ordinary patients….

“The principal victims of his lack of empathy so far have been the concentric circles of supporters around him. In the coming weeks the collateral damage from his panic is likely to spread further afield.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/05/trumps-desperation-to-leave-hospital-shows-the- dangers-ahead

“No, Trump Won’t be Getting Any ‘Prayers’ From Me,” Lauren Martinchek, medium.com “Well, there’s certainly no sympathy for him coming from me, and I won’t lose a moment of sleep over having none.

“After learning about the President’s positive test results, I stumbled across a tweet from Torraine Walker that summed up my sentiments exactly, where he wrote

“‘Praying for the speedy recovery of a fascist and demanding his victims show compassion doesn’t make you a moral person, it makes you a moral coward…’

“Over 200,000 human beings have drowned in their own fluids, dying alone in hospital beds with millions of loved ones left behind not only to mourn, but grapple with the fact that they couldn’t be there to hold the hand of their family members as they passed. As a direct result of the sociopathic, murderous indifference of not only the President but the people around him who enable him, the American people have been subjected to brutality, cruelty, stress, and trauma all in the name of the preservation of the quarterly profit margins for corporations and their CEOs. A thousand new graves a day are being dug for people who were sacrificial lambs for the stock market that the President prioritized over their lives….

“I don’t see the decency and morality in wishing for the speedy recovery of a man who would actively burn this nation to the ground, and watch 200,000 more people die if it meant he could stay in power. It doesn’t make someone a better person if they claim to find it sad that a man responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people contracts the virus he has actively subjected his constituents to on a mass scale, just so the stock market wouldn’t panic. I’m not worried about the President as he battles the virus. I’m worried about all the essential workers who he may have come in contact with and infected.” https://medium.com/discourse/no-trump-wont-be-getting-any-prayers-from-me-cdd5197cd9a0

“Taking a stroll, gun in hand, on 5th Ave,” Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com “Yes, when he was running for president, he did indeed say: ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible.’

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“Then he won -- and this November 3rd (or thereafter), whether he wins or loses, we’re likely to find out that, when it comes to his base, he was right. He may not have lost a vote. Yes, Donald Trump is indeed a murderer, but here’s where his prediction fell desperately short: as president, he's proven to be anything but a smalltime killer. It wasn’t as if he went out one day, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue or even in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot a couple of people.

“Nothing so minimalist for The Donald! Nor is it as if, say, he had ploughed ‘the Beast’ (as his presidential Cadillac is known) into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, as so many other drivers have done this year. Let’s face it: that’s for his apprentices, not the showman himself. After all, Donald J. Trump has proven to be America’s twenty-first-century maestro of death and destruction, the P.T. Barnum of, as he put it predictively enough in his Inaugural Address, ‘American carnage.’ In fact, he’s been a master of carnage in a way no one could then have imagined.

“His is indeed proving to be a murderous regime, but in quite a different form than even he might have anticipated. Still, a carnage-creator he’s been (and, for god knows how long to come, will be) and here’s the remarkable thing: he’s daily been on ‘Fifth Avenue’ killing passersby in a variety of ways. In fact, it’s worth going through his methods of murder, starting (where else?) with the pandemic that’s still ripping a path from hell across this country.” https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176758/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_taking_a_stroll%2C_gun_in_han d%2C_on_fifth_avenue/

“No one with ‘an IQ over 80’ should not see Trump as a ‘sociopath’ on the debate stage: Conservative editor,” Matthew Chapman, rawstory.com “‘Honestly: I cannot understand how anyone with an IQ over 80 could have watched this disgrace and not come away understanding that the president of the United States is a sociopath,’ wrote Last….

“But regardless, he concluded, Americans should be terrified of what they saw — from Trump refusing to condemn white supremacists to refusing to back the integrity of the election.

“‘If you take anything from Tuesday’s debate, it should be this: The president of the United States’s re-election strategy is to claw his way to victory after the fact by using the courts to throw out votes that have been cast for his opponent…’” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/09/no-one-with-an-iq-over-80-should-not-see-trump-as-a-sociopath-on- the-debate-stage-conservative-editor/

“The traumatizing terror of Trump’s debate performance: We just witnessed an assault on democracy,” Melanie McFarland, salon.com “Today’s Trump has ample experience in running roughshod over the media and distorting facts and reality itself to the point that his followers will believe his lies more than they trust science, facts and history….

“Anyway, fact checks barely matter anymore since the people who support Trump don’t believe anything that doesn’t come from his mouth….

“But to Trump, the performer with a talent for seeming unproduced when the truth is quite the opposite, this election isn’t about a motto or a good line, or persuasion. Tuesday’s debate was meant to dissuade anyone who thinks their vote might make a difference from even trying to pry him from office — the act of a man who Maddow explains is running against the election

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itself. It was to numb us into despair and inaction. That’s how abusers maintain their power over others.” https://www.salon.com/2020/09/30/the-traumatizing-terror-of-trumps-debate-performance-we-just- witnessed-an-assault-on-democracy/

“Trump has made it clear: He expects you to die to advance his narcissist agenda, ” Allan D. Blotcky, rawstory.com “Donald Trump announced Tuesday night that he wants Americans to develop herd immunity, what he called ‘herd mentality,’ in response to the coronavirus pandemic. According to the experts, that will result in millions of deaths.

“Historically, presidents of the United States are ‘beacons of light’ who guide and represent us. They are expected to be the ultimate public servant. The overarching responsibility of a president is to serve and protect the people. Donald Trump has taken a far different approach. We have been twisted into knots by his 20,000 lies, his childlike magical thinking, and his constant gaslighting of the truth. His malignant narcissism has intruded into every aspect of his presidency and our daily lives. To take it one step further, Trump is expecting Americans to die for him during this pandemic. Literally for him.” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/09/trump-has-made-it-clear-he-expects-you-to-die-to-advance-his- narcissist-agenda/

“Trump Claims “Chaos Is Coming.” Hello, It’s Already Here,” Danielle Moodie, medium.com “One would hope… that the president would say something, anything, even if it rang hollow to the Blake family. Well, you would be wrong. Instead, Donald Trump stood at a press conference and lied a tremendous lie. He told reporters that he had spoken with the Blake family pastor and that he wouldn’t be meeting with them when he visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, because they wanted to have lawyers involved.

“All of that is patently false. Jacob Blake Sr. told reporters, ‘We don’t have a family pastor. I don’t know who he talked to. I don’t care who he talked to.’

“This lie seemed extra special because it was easily fact-checked. It conjured a pastor and a conversation that simply did not exist. But what were we expecting from Trump? The truth? Empathy? A better lie? This from a man who, days before coming to Kenosha for a photo-op, sat down for an interview with Laura Ingraham and compared the shooting of Jacob Blake to a golf stroke…

“Trump’s Kenosha visit was his administration’s version of tragedy porn. Trump wanted the imagery of him walking past charred buildings and disarray as a visual to help him continue his Republican National Committee scare campaign to show the White suburban moms of America that the ‘domestic terrorism’ — as he has referred to protesters — would be coming to a city near them if Joe Biden was elected as president. What’s absurd about this statement is that this is Trump’s America.” https://zora.medium.com/america-the-final-season-f433bf197b3

“Trump’s vile tweetstorm reveals the ugly core of his ‘law and order’ campaign,” Greg Sargent, washingtonpost.com “‘Law and order’ without the rule of law is neither ‘law’ nor ‘order.’ And any news organization that uncritically describes President Trump’s reelection campaign as premised on ‘law and order’ appeals, without placing his concerted efforts to destroy the rule of law in America front and center alongside them, is helping to drain those words of all meaning.

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“Over the weekend, Trump unleashed a vile and frenzied tweetstorm about ongoing violence in Oregon and Wisconsin. His barrage of Twitter activity, which included deliberate efforts to incite civil conflict and support for vigilante activity and jailing political opponents, combined both those elements — superficial law-and-order appeals with open contempt for the rule of law….

“Let’s not flinch from this: Trump is explicitly campaigning on law and order without the rule of law, in all its terrible implications. That makes Trump not the law-and-order candidate, but rather the candidate of arbitrary violence, lawless abuses of power and civil breakdown.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/31/trumps -vile-tweetstorm-reveals-ugly-core-his- law-order-campaign/

“A second Trump term might injure the democratic experiment beyond recovery’s,” editorial board, Washington post.com “… beyond the low unemployment rate he gained and lost, history will record Mr. Trump’s presidency as a march of wanton, uninterrupted, tragic destruction. America’s standing in the world, loyalty to allies, commitment to democratic values, constitutional checks and balances, faith in reason and science, concern for Earth’s health, respect for public service, belief in civility and honest debate, beacon to refugees in need, aspirations to equality and diversity and basic decency — Mr. Trump torched them all….

“The capitulation of the Republican Party has been nauseating. Misbehavior that many people vowed never to accept as normal has become routine.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/21/second-trump-term-might-injure-democratic- experiment-beyond-recovery/?arc404=true

“The party of Trump is already a convention of ghoulish clowns,” Kathleen Parker, washingtonpost.com “When Clinton said that she wished Trump could have been presidential, I thought: I wish he could have been human.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-party-of-trump-is-already-a-convention-of-ghoulish- clowns/2020/08/21/89248e90-e3ea-11ea-8181-606e603bb1c4_story.html

“Why Trump so often says the quiet part out loud,” Max Boot, washingtonpost.com “President Trump is therefore a unique, or at least very unusual, specimen of homo politicus. He shows no sign of being aware of any interest that he should serve other than his own… The president’s picture should appear in the dictionary under the word ‘solipsism’; he is the Platonic ideal of the type….

“If there are limits to what Trump will do in service to his own ego, we have not discovered them. He will, as the Senate Intelligence Committee just confirmed, eagerly accept election help from Russia. He will try to blackmail Ukraine into helping him politically. He will urge a boycott of Goodyear — a company that employees 63,000 Americans — because a slide show counseled its employees not to sport ‘MAGA attire’ at work. He will subject millions of Americans to delayed mail deliveries — resulting in dead chicks and missing checks — to prevent anti-Trump voters from casting ballots by mail. He will even push — according to the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security — for the federal government to stop giving emergency aid to help California battle wildfires because that state did not support him.

“What makes Trump truly extraordinary is not just that he acts so unethically. It is that he is so open about it, because he can’t conceive there would be anything wrong with anything he does to help himself.

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“Thus he admitted that he is starving the Postal Service of funds because ‘that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting’...

“That makes him a uniquely dangerous president: a man with no principles — save the imperative of self-promotion — but with the awesome power of the federal government at his command.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/24/why-trump-so-often-says-quiet-part-out-loud/

“Trump Is the Worst President in U.S. History — We Need To Vote Him Out,” Paris, medium.com “Let’s stop dancing around the obvious and say it loud for the people in the back:

“Donald Trump is a bitch

“A weak and simple racist and an ignorant narcissist, he’s a xenophobic and misogynistic con man who knows nothing about history and does nothing but golf. He’s absolutely unable and unprepared to lead effectively in any regard

“He’s treasonous, a cheat, and a liar, and is no more than a gilded bully who knows nothing of how real bullies get down and who takes pleasure in tormenting those he perceives weaker than him. A collector of bankruptcies, lawsuits, and infidelities who falsely uses the bible for a photo op and courts evangelicals with a faux encouragement of family values, he is utterly devoid of morality or any redeeming qualities. He is White privilege incarnate….” https://level.medium.com/trump-is-the-worst-president-in-u-s-history-we-need-to-vote-him-out- dcfca3069537

“The party of Trump is already a convention of ghoulish clowns,” Kathleen Parker, washingtonpost.com “The Democratic National Convention, as tightly choreographed as a Broadway production, was a four-day anthem to decency, empathy and reason, framed with heartfelt stories and a seriousness of purpose. …

“Decency, empathy and reason are, of course, the opposite of what one sees or expects from the incumbent president. Trump’s indecent dog whistles to America’s underbelly, his winks at racists and misogynists (Charlottesville and grab’m); his utter lack of empathy (migrant children torn from their parents and housed in glorified cages); his rejection of reason and science regarding covid-19 (or anything else that runs counter to his singular purpose of self- aggrandizement and the satisfaction of his rapacious narcissism) — all point to a man who never should have become president of the United States in the first place….

“Republicans now get their turn at the virtual convention… I imagine an array of circus acts involving non-Hollywood performers jumping through hoops of inflammatory rhetoric. You know, regular folks such as the Pillow Man, a.k.a. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who recently surfaced to hawk the potentially toxic coronavirus “cure,” oleandrin…

“Next, I foresee QAnon candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene… The fact that QAnon is way off the grid… doesn’t bother the president because, as he said: ‘They seem to like me.’ The president also tweeted that Greene is a ‘future Republican Star’ who is ‘strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!’

“Which party keeps the best company? Biden with his protesters and climate-change dreamers? Or Trump, who embraces QAnon, white supremacists and skinheads?

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“Unless Trump pulls a covid-19 vaccine from his sleeve Thursday, I’m placing my bets on the goodness of the American people. My wager is that most would prefer a guy from Scranton, Pa., whose moral compass has been forged through suffering and humility, to a quack from Queens, whose moral compass is a wheel of fortune…” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-party-of-trump-is-already-a-convention-of-ghoulish- clowns/2020/08/21/89248e90-e3ea-11ea-8181-606e603bb1c4_story.html

“Trump is betting his future on a simple belief: White people are still deeply racist,” Amanda Marcotte, rawstory.com “Not that this should come as a surprise, but with the Republican National Convention less than a week away, Donald Trump is sending every possible signal that whatever its official themes may be the GOP gathering’s true subject will be white grievance politics. Unlike in the past, where concerns about not appearing overtly racist have forced Republicans to resort to dog whistles and coded language, Trump seems to believe to that his best bet is to serve the racism straight up, thereby vanquishing any remaining doubts about whether our president is actually a white supremacist.” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/08/trump-is-betting-his-future-on-a-simple-belief-white-people-are-still- deeply-racist/

“A Christian Response to Fascism, Part 7, Emily Swan, medium.com “Two key hallmarks of fascist regimes are rampant anti-intellectualism. In fascist regimes, people who disagree with the leader are viewed as treasonous. The leader demands total loyalty to himself and, by extension, to the state (which he views as an extension of himself) — and not to the nation as it is, but to an idealization of the nation rooted in nostolgia for a (false) glorious past….

“Authoritarian leaders detest humility — they thrive on a cultivating an image of strength and power. There are few things more powerful than creating your own reality and imposing it on others.” https://medium.com/solus-jesus/a-christian-response-to-fascism-part-7-of-16-173a8281bb9d

“Donald Trump Would Rather Burn the Whole Country Down Than Lose,” Drew Magary, medium.com “If you’ve ever divorced Donald Trump, you know that things don’t end well with him. The United States is already getting a horrifying idea of what that process looks like. Nearly 165,000 of us are dead, and there is copious evidence that this is because Trump was afraid a Covid-19 outbreak would make him look bad with voters. So he pretended the pandemic could never happen. Well, it happened, and thanks to this absolute fucking monster, it will remain happening in America for much longer than it has been in other, more worthwhile countries….

“So, naturally, rather than turn his numbers around by being, you know, a competent leader in crisis, Trump and the Republican Party have already begun dismantling the electoral system, and the country, so that his atrocious numbers won’t end up mattering at all. On Friday night, one of his stooges gutted the leadership at the U.S. Post Office, at a time when mail-in ballots, which tend to favor Democrats, will prove vital to an election taking place in the middle of a plague….

“There’s no sense in me predicting the coming election, because I have gotten such predictions hilariously wrong in the past, but also because any prediction I make would be laboring under the pretense that this election will take place in a country that works. This country doesn’t fucking work anymore, and Trump already knows that the more broken we are, the more he and the GOP can take advantage of its weaknesses. This has never been a functional marriage between a country and its president. But now that the endgame is in sight, we’re getting Trump in Full Divorced Guy Mode, pulling out every last vindictive move in his arsenal and relentlessly

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browbeating his partner — that would be us — until they don’t even know why they’re bothering to fight him anymore…

“My kids tell me this country sucks, and even though I want to reflexively defend it, I have neither the energy nor the proof to dispute them. I wish this country still mattered, but it doesn’t. If Joe Biden wins, he’s gonna need to spend the next four years just making it so I can get the mail on time. That’s how fucked we are now, and that’s just how the GOP likes it. If they can’t have America, neither can the rest of us.” https://gen.medium.com/donald-trump-would-rather-burn-the-whole-country-down-than-lose- 855fd3bdd042

“Trump says he’s blocking Postal Service funding because Democrats want to expand mail-in voting during pandemic,” Sonmez and Bogage, washingtonpost.com “President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash- strapped agency.

“‘Now, they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,’ Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: ‘Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it’...

“During the Wednesday briefing, Trump told reporters he would not approve the $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs. But he went further in remarks Thursday morning, blaming Democrats’ efforts to make it easier for Americans to vote amid the pandemic.”

“How the Pandemic Defeated America,” Ed Yong, realclearpolitics.com “A month before his inauguration, I wrote that ‘the question isn’t whether [Trump will] face a deadly outbreak during his presidency, but when.’ Based on his actions as a media personality during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and as a candidate in the 2016 election, I suggested that he would fail at diplomacy, close borders, tweet rashly, spread conspiracy theories, ignore experts, and exhibit reckless self-confidence. And so he did.

“No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant- detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a ‘natural ability’ at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, ‘I don’t take any responsibility at all.’

“Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID19 pandemic. He isn’t solely responsible for America’s fiasco, but he is central to it. A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies.

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‘In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly,’ Ron Klain said. ‘It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.’

“In the early days of Trump’s presidency, many believed that America’s institutions would check his excesses. They have, in part, but Trump has also corrupted them. The CDC is but his latest victim. On February 25, the agency’s respiratory-disease chief, Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of school closures and saying that ‘disruption to everyday life might be severe.’ Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems to have benched the entire agency.” https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2020/08/03/how_the_pandemic_defeated_america_519114.html

“The Lincoln Project understands that Trump’s enablers must pay a price,” Max Boot, washingtonpost.com “According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Trump campaign and affiliated committees have spent $22 million at Trump properties since he entered politics in 2015. Now we learn that Trump directed the U.S. ambassador to Britain to ask the British government to steer the British Open to his golf resort in Scotland.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/22/lincoln-project-is-trying-save-republican-party- itself/

“I failed my fellow Americans': the white women defecting from Trump,” Adam Gabbatt, theguardian.com “I am more angry with the people in power who have enabled Donald Trump than I am with Donald Trump,” Shively said.

“Donald Trump is clearly a flawed human being. He’s incapable of having any kind of empathy or thinking about anybody other than himself. That being said, he could not have wreaked as much damage as he has without other people enabling him to do that.

“Every single Republican senator that failed to fulfill their constitutional oath is complicit. And so in my opinion, all of them, with the possible exception of Mitt Romney, need to never hold public office again.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/29/women-who-voted-trump-who-regret-decision

“This was the week America lost the war on misinformation,” Margaret Sullivan, washingtonpost.com “You may have heard about the viral video featuring a group of fringe doctors spouting dangerous falsehoods about hydroxychloroquine as a covid-19 wonder cure….

“Trump… retweeted it more than once, and who described the group’s Stella Immanuel, also known for promoting wacky notions about demon sperm and alien DNA, as ‘very impressiv’ and even ‘spectacular.’

“Given this and a few other hideous developments, it’s time to acknowledge the painfully obvious: America has waved the white flag and surrendered.

“With nearly 150,000 dead from covid-19, we’ve not only lost the public-health war, we’ve lost the war for truth. Misinformation and lies have captured the castle….

“And the president — who knows exactly what he is doing — is making it far, far worse. His war on the nation’s traditional press is a part of the same scheme: information warfare, meant to mess with reality and sow as much confusion as possible.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/this-was-the-week-america-lost-the-war-on- misinformation/2020/07/30/d8359e2e-d257-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html

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“One question still dogs Trump: Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?” Parker and Rucker, washingtonpost.com “People close to Trump, many speaking anonymously to share candid discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic….

“Some aides and outside advisers have, in fact, tried to stress to Trump and others in his orbit that before he could move on to reopening the economy and getting the country back to work — and life — he needed to grapple with the reality of the virus.

“But until recently, the president was largely unreceptive to that message, they said, not fully grasping the magnitude of the pandemic — and overly preoccupied with his own sense of grievance, beginning many conversations casting himself as the blameless victim of the crisis….

“‘This could have been stopped. It could have been stopped quickly and easily. But for some reason, it wasn’t, and we’ll figure out what that reason was,’ Trump said Thursday, seemingly to simultaneously acknowledge his predicament while also trying to assign blame elsewhere.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-not-solve-coronavirus-crisis/2020/07/26/7fca9a92- cdb0-11ea-91f1-28aca4d833a0_story.html

“When Will the Media Stop Grading Trump on a Curve?” Jeet Heer, thenation.com “Trump had long-standing social ties with both Epstein and Maxwell. In 2002 he told New York magazine Epstein was ‘a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/media-grading-trump-curve/

“These officers used to terrorise immigrants. Now they go after US citizens,” Maeve Higgins, theguardian.com “Having worked in and studied nations governed by dictators over decades, Brotherton sees familiar patterns emerging. “You send these storm troopers in with no intention of restoring order, rather they are agent provocateurs stirring it up. With all the paraphernalia, the gas masks, the armored cars, what is the end game? Is it creating a feeling of ungovernability, creating a feeling that it’s all out of control? That is the point, so that he can say: ‘I’m coming in to save you.’”

“Again, this fascistic savior narrative of one man needing to take back control is not a new one…” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/23/trump-portland-protests-homeland-security- officers

“Trump's vow to send federal officers to US cities is election ploy, critics say,”* David Smith, theguardian.com “Donald Trump has vowed to send federal officers to several American cities led by Democrats in what critics say is an attempt to play the “law and order” card to boost his bid for re- election….

“‘He took longer than I thought he would to start emphasising law and order. But I bet he starts at the convention. It’s going to be one of the key themes of the convention. ‘These crazy liberals are causing problems again.’

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“Such a strategy is ‘certainly a candidate’ for explaining the fresh crackdown in major cities, Sabato added. ‘I’ll tell you what it really is, though. It is an unmistakeable hint of what a second Trump term will be like. There’ll be no hesitation to do any of this’...

“The Trump administration sent federal officers into Portland after weeks of protests there over police brutality and racial injustice that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Last week, videos showed unidentified federal personnel taking people off the street and driving them away in black minivans….

“The issue has laid bare the binary choice for voters in November. Democrats, warning of a threat to civil liberties, called for Chad Wolf, acting secretary of Homeland Security, to quit. Congressman Don Beyer of Virginia said Wolf was ‘overseeing authoritarian abuses that betray our bedrock principles and would horrify our nation’s Founders’.

“He added: ‘Ordering the occupation of US cities, seeking the escalation of violence, and intentionally risking American lives over peaceful protests and graffiti is unfathomable and unacceptable. Secretary Wolf must resign immediately or be fired.’” *I have included this piece even though the title is entirely mistaken. This bit of fascism is not an election ploy. It is who tRUMP is, and what our nation will be if he remains in the White Outhouse much longer. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/20/donald-trump-us-cities-federal-agents- officers

“Trump’s agents are sweeping peaceful citizens off the streets. This is not America,” Ruth Marcus, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/17/whats-happening-portland-shows-trump-is- ignoring-constitution-attacking-america/

“Why the Trump Administration Is Trying to Force Students Back to School,” Michael Austin, medium.com “…the Trump Administration is using every lever at its disposal to try to force schools to be 100% open in the fall. This is neither effective leadership nor election year politics-as-usual; it is a hostage drama with the safety of our children and the health of our communities on the line.

“In making these policies, Trump and DeVos are flatly ignoring their own public health officials, who insist that decisions about reopening should be made at the local level depending on the local conditions. Governors, mayors, and local school boards have the responsibility of assessing conditions in their areas and making the best decision that they can for the health of their students. The Administration is doing everything it can to take this power away.

“Why? Because the Trump 2020 Campaign has concluded that the only way that the president can be re-elected is for Americans to become desensitized to COVID-related deaths. As long as things are closed, and schools are out of session, and people are staying home from work, then America will have daily reminders that we are in the midst of a pandemic that has fundamentally changed our lives. Trump, who has been steadfast in pretending that COVID-19 is no big deal, needs to rest of us to play along— because, if the election becomes a referendum on Trump’s handling of the biggest crisis of his presidency, he will lose.” https://medium.com/@michaelaustin_47141/why-the-trump-administration-is-trying-to-force-students- back-to-school-ed4a8d9ec8c7

“‘Self-destruction of the president’: Trump stuns observers with off the deep end press conference,” Cody Fenwich, rawstory.com https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/self-destruction-of-the-president-trump-stuns-observers-with-off-the- deep-end-press-conference/

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“'A record of telling the truth': Fauci stands ground as Trump works to undermine him,” David Smith, theguardian.com “The rush to disown Fauci, a leading member of the White House coronavirus taskforce, and earn brownie points with Trump comes as little surprise to seasoned observers.

“Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: ‘Everybody who wants to keep their job is going to play the game the way Trump wants them to play it.’

“And the people who the president turns to to push out this narrative will do so, as they have in the past. So all of a sudden now everybody in the White House has a problem with Fauci. Why? Because the president has a problem with Fauci! You take them outside the White House, they love the guy and think: ‘Yeah, listen to Dr Fauci’”...

“Trump has a long history of resenting staff or spokespeople who come to rival him for media attention….

“Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide, said: ‘Anyone could have seen that this was a relationship was destined to fail as Dr Fauci took a pre-eminent role internationally in getting massive amounts of media.’” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/15/dr-fauci-donald-trump-attacks-covid-19

“A Christian Response to Fascism, Part 2, Emily Swan, medium.com “... scholars of tyranny agree on a number of characteristics that manifest in most fascist governments…

“To start us out, I’m going to concentrate on an early warning sign appearing in the rhetoric of all fascist leaders: nostalgia for an idilic national past that the leader views as having been ruined….

“Any fascist mythologizing harkens to a time of purity that some group of people ‘contaminated.’ With the Nazis, it was Jewish people, gay people, differently abled people — anyone who didn’t meet an Aryan ideal; with Trump, it’s immigrants, Muslims, transgender people, people of color, the press, and whomever is the scapegoat of the moment. We American white people in particular need to resist any attraction the narrative of a purer, happier time holds.

“‘Make America Great Again’ is a slogan meant to invoke just such a narrative.” https://medium.com/solus-jesus/a-christian-response-to-fascism-part-2-of-16-857f5138499a

“Lack of US consensus on Russia? Bounty report poses sharper question,” Howard Lafranchi, csmonitor.com “...Noting that in her time in government a lack of consensus across intelligence agencies ‘was never a reason to not tell the president something of this magnitude,’ she says, ‘I really wonder about what motivated people [in the White House] not to prioritize this with the president.’

“Others who have been directly involved in preparing the PDB agree, finding it unfathomable that such information involving force protection and vulnerability would not have reached the commander-in-chief.

“‘This [intelligence] reporting is so inflammatory and so egregious, it is incomprehensible to me that senior people wouldn’t bring this to the attention of the president,’ says Robert Cardillo, a

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former deputy director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration and a PDB briefer to President Obama.

“‘It’s even more incomprehensible,’ he adds, ‘that no action would have been taken in response.’” https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2020/0701/Lack-of-US-consensus-on-Russia-Bounty- report-poses-sharper-question

“Donald Trump Is the ‘Undertaker’ of American Politics,” Patricia J Williams, thenation.com “…over-the-top performativity is why many people who voted for him still insist that Trump isn’t a racist or a misogynist, that he doesn’t really mean what he says. In their estimation, he’s only doing shtick; he’s merely a great rodeo clown who seduces with humor and hyperbole. Even as recently as April, he was forgiven by many in his base for the ‘satire’ of prescribing bleach and blasts of ultraviolet light, like a demented sword swallower’s bid to cure Covid-19.

“For nearly four years, Trump has dissolved the foundations of our government in the acid of such nonsense, with even the most bizarre, ignorant, heinous, nativist, incoherent, awful behavior greeted as miraculous transmutation. From caging children to classifying journalists as ‘enemies of the people,’ he has eroded the Constitution with nary a check and has been repeatedly forgiven because supposedly he’s a businessman or he’s a performer or he’s “real.” It’s all OK as long as he’s not really a politician.” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-undertaker-performance-wwe/

“From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers, Trump's phone calls alarm US officials,” Carl Bernstein, cnn.com “In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations….

“The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN's sources of Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders is consistent with the basic tenor and some substantive elements of a limited number of calls described by former national security adviser John Bolton in his book, ‘The Room Where It Happened.’ But the calls described to CNN cover a far longer period than Bolton's tenure, are much more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning -- in their sweep.

“Like Bolton, CNN's sources said that the President seemed to continually conflate his own personal interests -- especially for purposes of re-election and revenge against perceived critics and political enemies -- with the national interest….

“One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President….

“Two sources compared many of the President's conversations with foreign leaders to Trump's recent press ‘briefings’ on the coronavirus pandemic: free form, fact-deficient stream-of-

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consciousness ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation.” https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/politics/trump-phone-calls-national-security-concerns/index.html

“5 takeaways from Trump’s Tulsa rally,” Amber Phillips, washingtonpost.com “At the rally, Trump threatened protesters again, this time with his own supporters: ‘We had a bunch of maniacs come and sort of attack our city,’ Trump said of what had been nonviolent protests outside his rally. ‘The mayor and the governor did a great job, but they were very violent people. And our people are not nearly as violent. But if they ever were, it would be a terrible, terrible day for the other side, because I know our people,’ he said to cheers. ‘I know our people. We will never submit to their threats, and we will never let them destroy our nation.’

“At the end of the rally he threw this in: ‘When you see those lunatics all over the streets, it’s damn nice to have arms.’” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/20/takeaways-tulsa-trump-rally/

“The only people dismissing the Russia bounties intel: The Taliban, Russia and Trump,” Aaron Blake, theguardian.com “For two days now, the White House and Republicans have been affirming — either tacitly or explicitly — that there was indeed intelligence that Russia may have placed bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. There is disagreement about how firm and actionable that intel has been, but pretty much everyone agrees it exists and is of concern.

“Everyone, it seems, except President Trump — along with the Taliban and Russia.

“Despite days of disclosures, Trump cannot get out of hoax mode. He claimed Sunday night that he spoke with ‘intel’ and that the information about Russia’s bounties was ‘not credible.’ Since then, we have seen overwhelming confirmation that the intel was real and is of concern even to Trump’s fellow Republicans….

“This is Trump’s M.O. Stories that are bad for him are never cast in shades of gray; they are always a hoax….

“But using that language suggests Trump is flatly denying the existence of something nearly everyone else agrees exists.

“Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Tex.), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, confirmed after a White House briefing that, ‘There was intelligence reported on the allegation that the Russians were offering a bounty to the Taliban to kill Americans.’ He added that there was a ‘massive scrub within the intelligence community to try to find out the veracity of this reporting.’ He has also suggested that it is serious enough that, if accurate, it would warrant ‘swift and serious action’ against Russia.

“That is hardly ‘this is a hoax and completely made up.’ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/01/only-people-who-are-dismissing-russia-bounties- intel-taliban-russia-trump/

“Donald Trump thinks coronavirus testing is a plot to destroy him — and no, he’s not kidding,” Amanda Marcotte, salon.com https://www.salon.com/2020/06/23/donald-trump-thinks-coronavirus-testing-is-a-plot-to-destroy-him-- and-no-hes-not-kidding/

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“The gap between Trump's world and reality is widening. It's disturbing to watch,” Francine Prose, theguardian.com “... few of us have the time, the energy or inclination to wonder what it’s like to be Donald Trump, to imagine how his mind works, what he really thinks and believes. But over the past few weeks, the increasingly strange, intentionally provocative, inappropriate and frankly delusional tweets and pronouncements issuing from the Oval Office have once again caused us to reflect on the president’s inner life. We’ve grown accustomed to his shortcomings, the regular failures of decency, common sense, and good taste. Yet the gap between what the president is saying – and the reality we observe around us – appears to be widening….

“Is it possible that a president who has spent four years lying to the American people now assumes that everyone is lying? Or can he simply no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, between conspiracy theories….

“Now, when we most need stability, when we have never felt more uncertain about the future – will school reopen in the fall? Will we get our jobs back? What will life look like after the pandemic? – we have a president who seems to enjoy destabilizing us further.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/15/the-gap-between-trumps-world-and-reality-is- widening-its-disturbing-to-watch

“What insanity did Kayleigh McEnany just suggest?” Erik Wemple, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/10/what-insanity-did-kayleigh-mcenany-just- suggest/

“The Church and the Bible are no Presidential Props,” Wallis and Taylor, sojo.net “... Donald Trump used and abused a church, and a Bible, as presidential props for a photo-op. In a violent and authoritarian act, the president of the United States took the space of a church and used a picture of a Bible to make a political move.

“This is a very dangerous moment. While governors and mayors are trying to deescalate the nation’s unrest, the president is escalating the violence….

“Standing in front of the church, and surrounded by federal forces, Trump said America is the greatest country in the world. The president’s cynical and dangerous appeals to Christian nationalism is an affront to the mission of the church and the integrity of the gospel. His inflammatory words and reckless actions only pour gasoline on his flames of anger and racial injustice.” https://sojo.net/articles/church-and-bible-are-not-presidential-props

“I’ve seen dictators rise and fall. Beware, America,” Salman Rushdie, washingtonpost.com “Extreme narcissism, detachment from reality, a fondness for sycophants and a distrust of truth-tellers, an obsession with how one is publicly portrayed, a hatred of journalists and the temperament of an out-of-control bulldozer: These are some of the characteristics.

“President Trump is, temperamentally, a tinpot despot of this type.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/03/salman-rushdie-ive-seen-dictators-rise-fall- beware-america/

“Voices grow in condemnation of Trump's military response to protests,” Ellen Mitchell, thehill.com https://thehill.com/policy/defense/501435-voices-grow-in-condemnation-of-trumps-military-response-to- protests

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“'How did we get here?': Trump has normalised mayhem and the US is paying the price,” Julian Borger, washingtonpost.com “The sheer tumult of the Trump era, the unceasing torrent of events that were unthinkable even hours before, has left a nation constantly off balance, unable to find its bearing and grasp how far it has traveled.

“The developments of the past 24 hours were a reminder of how slippery the downward slope has been.

“As 100,000 die, the virus lays bare America's brutal fault lines – race, gender, poverty and broken politics…

“More than a hundred thousand Americans are dead from a pandemic after the government’s botched response; there are armoured cars and troops outside Washington metro stations; men in combat gear carrying sniper rifles were seen perched in the open door of a helicopter flying low over the commercial district. A military chopper buzzed a crowd of demonstrators so close to the ground they were buffeted around by the wind from the rotor, a dispersal technique learned in counter-insurgencies abroad.

“On Monday, an entirely peaceful protest was driven out of a city square in front of the White House with teargas, baton charges and mounted police, so Trump could pose in front of a church with a Bible.

“A priest and a seminarian, who had been distributing water and hand sanitizer to protesters from the steps of St John’s Episcopal, were driven away by police with helmets and riot shields to create an uncluttered tableau. A Bible was procured for Trump from inside the church for him to hold aloft. Journalists asked if it was his Bible. ‘It’s a Bible,’ he replied.

“The rate of fresh affronts has often outpaced the capacity to digest – or even describe – them.

“One reason it is so hard to keep track of the descent is the near instant normalisation of every bizarre new turn, administered like a fast-acting anaesthetic. Trump is surrounded by more coherent people insisting nothing out of the ordinary is happening.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/02/donald-trump-coronavirus-george-floyd-normalized

“The FBI Finds ‘No Intel Indicating Antifa Involvement’ in Sunday’s Violence,” Ken Klippenstein, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/antifa-trump-fbi/

“‘They don’t understand what it means to be American’: Ex-Pentagon chief blasts White House,” Sarah K. Burris, rawstory.com “White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany explained Wednesday that President Donald Trump went to St. John’s Church with his Bible because it’s what former President George W. Bush did after Sept. 11 and what Winston Churchill did during World War II….

“‘Here is a thing: Churchill went up against Nazism, George Bush was confronting Jihadi terrorism,’ he said. ‘Donald Trump has a concerned nation, a nation on bended knee, a nation with a tear streaking down its cheek because of malfeasance by view symbolizing 400 years of racism and the original sin of our country. The proper response, protest, is part of the American tradition. This is not Nazism or terrorism. If Kayleigh McEnany or the president’s spokespeople don’t understand, they don’t deserve to be in office. They don’t understand what it means to be an American.’”

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https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/they-dont-understand-what-it-means-to-be-american-ex-pentagon- chief-blasts-white-house/

“The central feature of Trump’s presidency: False claims and disinformation,” Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly, washingtonpost.com “The president’s technique — refined over half a century in public life — is relentless and unforgiving: Never admit any error, constantly repeat falsehoods, and have no shame about your tactics.

There are certainly signs that Trumpism is beginning to influence politics in the United States more broadly. Trump’s aides frequently suggest there is no such thing as absolute, verifiable truth. Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, who advises Trump on policy and communications strategy, coined the phrase “alternative facts” to defend the White House’s false claims about attendance at Trump’s inauguration. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, argued that the president should avoid testifying before special counsel Robert Mueller because he could be trapped in a lie that would lead to perjury charges. “Truth isn’t truth,” Giuliani argued, explaining that everyone has their own version of the truth.

At the same time, Trump’s aides have insisted the president does not lie. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-fact-checker-book/2020/06/01/c6323b88-a435-11ea- b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html

“Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers,” George Will, washingtompost.com “Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-one-should-want-four-more-years-of-this-taste-of- ashes/2020/06/01/1a80ecf4-a425-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html

“We saw it with our own eyes: Trump wants to go to war against America,” Jennifer Rubin, washingtonpost.com “Nothing could be more representative of the dangerous narcissism of a president in over his head, resorting to threats of violence against a country he ostensibly is supposed to lead. The deliberate instigation of violence for his own photo op tells Americans how deeply twisted and deformed his character is….

“His stunt was designed to play to the most rabid white evangelicals, who inexplicably have always seen themselves — not African Americans — as the true victims. The invocation of a religious institution to justify an assault on peaceful protesters was as great an abuse of religious symbols as anything Trump has done.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/we-saw-it-with-our-own-eyes-trump-wants-go- war-against-america/

“Trump is America’s first ‘vigilante’ president who encourages ‘private violence’ against his own citizens: columnists,” Tom Boggioni, rawstory.com “In a column for the conservative Bulwark, two political science professors from Amherst surveyed the comments and tweets made by Donald Trump and concluded that there has never been an American president who has gone to such great pains to encourage their followers to physically harm their critics.

“Calling Trump the ‘vigilante president,’ Austin Sarat and Jonathan Obert began to make their case by pointing out that, ‘Twice in a 24-hour period, the president of the United States took to Twitter to endorse violence...’

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“‘The president’s recent tweets were just the latest example of his penchant for threatening, encouraging, or obliquely endorsing violence directed against individual political opponents and/or racial minorities’...

“Quoting the president telling a crowd last year, ‘I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people’...

“Explaining that, ‘President Trump has been able to tap into the vigilante tradition, drawing on both its anger and self-righteousness,’ the authors added, ‘And that is why he so often encourages or praises private, illegal violence.’” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/trump-is-americas-first-vigilante-president-who-encourages-private- violence-against-his-own-citizens-columnists/

“Trump Killed Obama’s Police Reforms. Now He’s Getting What He Asked For,” Jonathan Chait, nymag.com “The world around us, in which the streets of every major American city are filled with protesters, is the result of Trump granting the wishes of the most retrograde police officers. They are getting what they asked for….

“It probably gives Trump far too much credit to presume this is a strategy. But there is a crude logic to his actions. He has snuffed out the peaceful, democratic avenues for evolutionary change, while goading the most violent police officers and offering them unconditional support….

“What Trump and Barr cannot say to the protesters now is that they should try working through the system instead. They snuffed out every avenue of bureaucratic and social change. They sowed the wind and now reap the whirlwind.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/trumps-george-floyd-obama-protest-police-violence- kneeling.html

“Yale Psychiatrist Warns Trump will take Millions Down with him as his Mental State Disintegrates,” Bandy X. Lee, rawstory.com https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/yale-psychiatrist-warns-trump-will-take-millions-down-with-him-as- his-mental-state-disintegrates/

“’Rejecting all Oversight’: is Trump Purging Government Watchdogs?” Peter Stone, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/12/trump-inspector-general-purge-watchdogs

“Trump’s war on reality just got a lot more dangerous,” Greg Sargent, washingtonpost.com “Trump has decided he has only one real chance at reelection: to bet mostly on his magical ability to create the illusion that we’re rapidly returning to normalcy, rather than taking the difficult concrete steps that would make that more likely to happen.

“The signs of this are everywhere: in a new federal testing blueprint that largely casts responsibility on the states. In Trump’s new rage-tweets at the North Carolina governor over whether a full convention will be held under coronavirus conditions. And in demands for liability protections for companies so sickened workers can’t sue.

“All these things, in one way or another, show that Trump’s war on reality has veered into a new place. Trump is responding to our most dire public health and economic crises in modern times with a concerted, far-reaching effort to concoct the mirage that we’re racing past both….

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“The bottom line is that [Trump] attempts to create the impression that the coronavirus is largely under control — even though it isn’t — without the government undertaking the full range of steps necessary to make that actually happen….

“In so many ways, Trump is prioritizing the weaving of an illusory return to normalcy over taking steps within his power to make that actually happen. That’s actively dangerous. It could lead to substantially more lost lives.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/26/trumps -war-reality-just-got-lot-more-dangerous/

“The Malignant Cruelty of Donald Trump,” Peter Wehner, theatlantic.com “That Donald Trump would resort to conspiracy theories to attack his perceived enemies is hardly a revelation….

“Conspiracy theories have long been evidence of Trump’s twisted psychology. He has always traveled quite easily from the real world to the twilight zone, depending on which reality suits his needs at the moment. And when someone holds him accountable—when someone calls him out for his incompetence and ethical wrongdoing— conspiracy theories often become his weapon of choice. At such moments, conspiracy theories are fine, but conspiracy theories with the added element of cruelty are even better. Which brings us back to the heartbreaking letter from Timothy Klausutis.

“Donald Trump doesn’t merely want to criticize his opponents; he takes a depraved delight in inflicting pain on others, even if there’s collateral damage in the process, as is the case with the Klausutis family. There’s something quite sick about it all.

“A lot of human casualties result from the cruelty of malignant narcissists like Donald Trump— casualties, it should be said, that his supporters in the Republican Party, on various pro-Trump websites and news outlets, and on talk radio are willing to tolerate or even defend…. If putting up with Trump’s indecency is the price of maintaining power, so be it. Will Trump’s white evangelical supporters—Franklin Graham Jr., Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Mike Huckabee, Ralph Reed—defend his behavior as the perfect embodiment of the New Testament ethic, the credo of Jesus, the message from the Sermon on the Mount? ‘Blessed are the brutal, for they shall inherit the Earth’...

“But whatever the political ramifications of this current lie being promulgated by the president, the rest of us need to name it, and to make Trump supporters own it. They are his, and he is theirs.

“There is a wickedness in our president that long ago corrupted him. It’s corrupted his party. And it’s in the process of corrupting our country, too.

“He is a crimson stain on American decency. He needs to go.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/malignant-cruelty-donald-trump/612097/

“Pathetic Displays Like These are all Trump has Left,” Greg Sargent washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/16/pathetic-displays-like-these-are-all-trump-has- left/

“Wearing a Face Mask is Humbling and Generous. That’s not how Trump Defines Leadership,” Robins Givhan, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/04/14/trump-mask-briefing-mcconnell-melania/

“The Assassin-in-Chief Comes Home,” Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com

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“And it’s true as well that, in this century, our commanders-in-chief have overseen endless conflicts in distant lands from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Yemen, Somalia, Niger, and beyond, none of them congressionally declared wars. As a result, they had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of, at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians, as well as for the uprooting of millions of their compatriots from settled lives and their flight, as desperate refugees, across significant parts of the planet. It’s a grim record of death and destruction. It’s a grim record of death and destruction. Until recently, however, it remained a matter of distant deaths, not much noted here.

“However, the assassin-in-chief may now be coming home, big time, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Little did I imagine that, by 2020, an American president without a lick of empathy for other human beings, even Americans who loved him to death (so to speak), would be targeting not just civilians here in “the homeland” (as it came to become known after the 9/11 attacks), but his most fervent followers. In the age of Donald Trump, the assassin-in- chief now seems to be in the process of transforming himself into a domestic killer-in-chief….

“He is, in fact, in the process of becoming a killer-in-chief for his very own base -- anyone, that is, who listens to what he says and believes fervently in him. Set aside for a moment the deaths he’s undoubtedly responsible for because of, as Juan Cole put it recently at his Informed Comment website, “those two months he pissed away calling [Covid-19] a hoax and setting up the country for Vietnam War-level death tolls.” Put aside as well his repeated and dangerous medical advice to find and take anti-malarial drugs. Put aside as well his suggestion that perhaps people fearing they have the coronavirus should try to inject or internally take disinfectants (which, a recent study showed, do kill that virus on surfaces and in the air), an act medical experts assure us could result in death.

“Think of each of those potential death sentences for his most fervent believers as a striking combination of grotesque ignorance and narcissism. But what about an actual decision, as commander-in-chief and president, to kill off members of his base?

“Until a couple of weeks ago, that would have been harder to imagine -- until, that is, President Trump noticed the first demonstrations against state shutdowns focused on preventing the deadly Covid-19 virus from spreading.” http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176695/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_assassin-in- chief_comes_home/

“Getting Trumped by Covid-19,” Ann Jones, tomdispatch.com “Donald Trump is not a president. He can’t even play one on TV. He’s a corrupt and dangerous braggart with ill-concealed aspirations for a Crown and, with an election coming up, he’s been monopolizing prime time every day, spouting self-congratulation and misinformation. (No, don’t inject that Lysol!) His never-ending absurd performances play out as farce against the tragic background of the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the nation. If we had a real president, which is to say, almost anybody else, things would be different. We would have seen the pandemic coming…. And most of the dead might still be alive.

“The records of other countries make this clear. South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand, and Norway have all had commendable success in protecting their people. Could it be by chance that seven out of eight of the most successful nations in combating the Covid-19 pandemic are headed by women?...

“As president, [tRUMP] was also informed of a viral outbreak in Wuhan, China, in early January of this year, but he ignored the message. As has been widely reported, he wasted at least two

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months in self-serving fantasies, claiming the pandemic would disappear of its own accord, or was Fake News, or a “new hoax” of Democrats plotting his downfall. By March, his conduct had become increasingly erratic, obtuse, combative, and often just flat-out nasty. In April, he abandoned altogether his most pressing presidential duty, first claiming “total power” as president and then shifting the job of testing and protecting the people from an unrestrained pandemic onto state governors already struggling to find basic medical supplies for front-line health care personnel in their own states…

“Worse, he roused his most militant followers, some heavily armed, to defy the emergency directives of several states led by Democratic governors. In short, he first unloaded the responsibilities of his office onto state governors, then made it his mission to undermine and threaten some of them. For good measure, he cut off U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, the single U.N. agency best equipped to deal with global health emergencies. Trump already had a proud record of getting away with highly offensive, even criminal, acts in plain sight. Now, through egotism, bravado, and just plain ignorance he’s made an epidemic great again (MEGA!), for Covid-19 cases and fatalities in the United States have by now far outstripped those anywhere else on Earth.” http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176698/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_getting_trumped_by_covid-19/

“A Study in Leadership,” Anne Applebaum, theatlantic.com “One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies. One knows that he disdains facts; that he does not read briefing papers; that he has no organizational talents; that he does not know how to make use of militaries, bureaucracies, or diplomatic services; that he has no basic knowledge of history or science, let alone government.

“Americans, as a rule, rarely compare themselves with other countries, so convinced are we that our system is superior, that our politicians are better, that our democracy is the fairest and most robust in the world. But watch this video and ask yourself: Is this the kind of leadership you expect from a superpower? Does this make you feel confident in our future? Or is this man a warning signal, a blinking red light, a screaming siren telling all of us, and all of the world, that something about our political system has gone profoundly awry?” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/donald-trump-study-leadership/611719/

“A Complete List of Trump’s Attempts to Play Down Coronavirus,” David Leonhardt, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html

“Trump’s Narcissism has Never been more Dangerous,” Jennifer Rubin, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/30/trumps -narcissism-has-never-been-more- dangerous/

“Don’t be fooled by Trump’s economic happy talk — he’s willing to sell out a long-term recovery for short-term gain,” Amanda Marcotte, rawstory.com “Trump is trying to handle the the American economy much the same way he handled his many failed business ventures: By lying about the numbers to make things seem better than they are, while moving money around with accounting tricks in hopes of fooling investors — or voters, in this case — into sticking around just a little longer, buying Trump time to figure out how he can escape personal consequences when the whole thing inevitably collapses.

“In Trump’s business, that was a matter of driving his companies into bankruptcy while minimizing his personal losses. When it comes to the American economy, Trump plans to bamboozle the voters into thinking things are better, just long enough to get re-elected in November. After that, no doubt, he could care less if the entire economy completely collapses….

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“Trump doesn’t actually want a healthy economy, any more than he wants Americans to have healthy bodies. He wants to create the illusion of both, just long enough so that voters — like the suckers who invested in Trump’s businesses only to see their money go up in smoke — re- up him for another term. Then he can keep on grifting and dodging legal trouble for his myriad crimes, which are his only important goals, while the rest of us watch thousands of people die and the economy fall apart around us.” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/dont-be-fooled-by-trumps-economic-happy-talk-hes-willing-to-sell- out-a-long-term-recovery-for-short-term-gain/

“The consequences of Donald Trump’s anti-intellectualism — and how the GOP’s disdain for science has endangered us all,” James Bruno, rawstory.com “The Trump administration’s attitude toward science can only be described as contemptuous. There has been an 85 percent turnover of federal agency senior executives, and President Trump has failed to appoint anyone to nearly half of the federal scientific leadership positions. More often than not, Trump appointees are unqualified and ideologically driven.

“Trump’s disdain for science comes with grievous consequences. He was alerted by the intelligence community of an emerging pandemic in January. Still, the president squandered more than two months before treating the issue seriously….

“Perhaps reality will sink in as the body count rises. Statistics, after all, are stubborn things. No amount of bluster, bluffing, and bullshit by the president and his enablers can obfuscate or contradict them. If there was ever a moment when it should be clear to voters why the nation needs a return to policies based on facts, knowledge, and science, this is it.” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/the-consequences-of-donald-trumps-anti-intellectualism-and-how- the-gops-disdain-for-science-has-endangered-us-all/

"Used to Meeting Challenges with Bluster and Force, Trump Confronts a Crisis Unlike any Before," Baker and Baherman, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-leadership.html

“A New Poll Shows Trump’s Magical Lying Powers are Failing him,” Greg Sargent, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/17/new-poll-shows-trumps-magical-lying-powers- are-failing-him/

“Trump’s Nationalism Advances on a Predictable Trajectory to Violence. His Supporters Will Kill When They’re Told To,” Aleksandar Hemon, theintercept.com “The conflictual essence of Trumpism was made fully evident very early, in the course of the Republican primaries in 2016. While all the other GOP candidates tried to validate their garden- variety bigotry by importing fancy reactionary ideas and referring gratuitously to the Bible, the Framers, or some historical figure or another, the only thing Trump consistently offered was his pathological narcissism (exactly matching the popular belief in American exceptionalism) and his penchant for conflict and aggression. He promised, implicitly and explicitly, revenge and punishment for those who wronged white America. As we now know all too well, white America’s response to Trumpian revenge fantasies was quick and enthusiastic, and thus the GOP graduated from a routinely racist conservative party to one unquestionably committed to white nationalism, up to and including outright white supremacy. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/02/trump-nationalism-violence-yugoslavia/

“Fact Check: A List of 28 Ways Trump and his Team have been Dishonest about the Coronavirus,” Dale and Subramaniam, cnn.com

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https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/11/politics/fact-check-trump-administration-coronavirus-28- dishonest/index.html

“’He’s an idiot’” Critics Say Trump has Failed the US in this Test of Reassurance,” David Smith, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/coronavirus-outbreak-response-trump-us

“In the meantime, Trump, the chosen tool of undoing, has been carrying out his promises, with the full and passionate support of the GOP and many of its rich donors. The claims of false and foolish pundits notwithstanding, at no point was Trump going to relent, change, or metamorphose into being ‘presidential,’ for the simple reason that Trumpism is nothing without the constant perpetuation of conflict.”

“The Cloud Forming Over America’s Spies,” Douglas London, nytimes.com “... we cannot trust the judgments of a president who so often overrides the wisdom of professional intelligence analysts, prosecutors and medical authorities, even during a calamity.

“Last week, for example, on the same day that the office of the director of national intelligence (D.N.I. for short) released a public statement affirming the scientific community’s consensus that ‘the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified,’ The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was pressing intelligence officials to look for evidence to prove otherwise — perhaps that it originated in a Chinese laboratory. Not coincidentally, acting director Grenell, a prolific Twitter user, failed to sign his own intelligence community’s official position.”

“Contemplating an Unfounding Father,” Karen Greenberg, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176668/tomgram%3A_karen_greenberg%2C_contemplating_an_unfoun ding_father/#more

“Trump Seeks to Bend the Executive Branch as Part of Impeachment Vendetta,” Rucker, Costa, and Dawsey, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-seeks-to-bend-the-executive-branch-as-part-of- impeachment-vendetta/2020/02/12/8b712e18-4dc9-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html

“The President Should Resign,” Howard Forman, thebulwark.com “Since about February 20, when the stock market began its plunge, the world has understood that the coronavirus outbreak was more than a regional concern. By all accounts, Donald Trump knew this truth at least three weeks before that.

“Throughout this crisis, the president’s advisors seem to have been consistent in telling him the facts as well as which strategies could lead the nation out of catastrophe. They also seem to have conveyed to him what the future would look like if he continued to lie to the public, undermine efforts at containment and mitigation, and fail to build a testing, tracing, and isolation apparatus.

“In response, the president made inconsistent and often contradictory alterations to his rhetoric while continuing to abdicate his responsibility to carry out the federal government’s most important task: assembling a testing regime adequate to the challenge of the pandemic. https://thebulwark.com/the-president-should-resign/

“Trump Moves to Replace Watchdog Who Identified Critical Medical Shortages,” Peter Baker, nytimes.com

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“The White House waited until after business hours to announce the nomination of a new inspector general for the department who, if confirmed, would take over for Christi A. Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general who was publicly assailed by the president at a news briefing three weeks ago.

“The nomination was the latest effort by Mr. Trump against watchdog offices around his administration that have defied him….

“After learning that Ms. Grimm had worked during President Barack Obama’s administration, Mr. Trump asserted that the report was politically biased. In fact, Ms. Grimm is not a political appointee but a career official who began working in the inspector general office late in President Bill Clinton’s administration and served under President George W. Bush as well as Mr. Obama.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/politics/trump-health-department-watchdog.html

“The time has come for Republicans to climb out of the Trump hellhole or be consumed by its flames,” David Cay Johnston, rawstory.com https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/the-time-has-come-for-republicans-to-climb-out-of-the-trump- hellhole-or-be-consumed-by-its-flames/

“Trump desperately tries to gaslight America as he faces humiliation from Lysol -gate,” Amanda Marcotte, rawstory.com https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/trump-desperately-tries-to-gaslight-america-as -he-faces-humiliation- from-lysol-gate/

“Consoler-in-chief? Lacking empathy, Trump weighs the economic costs, not the human ones,” Tom McCarthy, theguardian.com “in the current crisis, Trump’s failure to grasp the scale of the American tragedy on a human level could do more than fuel emotional turmoil – it could cost more lives, according to historians, public affairs experts and political analysts interviewed by the Guardian.

“Instead of weighing the human costs attached to decisions about whether to reopen the economy or rush medical equipment to certain states, analysts said, Trump seems to be thinking about something else: his own political future and his need for the economy to rebound quickly if he is to be re-elected in November.

“… if he’s not able to have real empathy for someone who had someone die and was not be able to see them, then he’s not going to be sensitive to why scientists are saying, ‘Don’t open up too quickly,’ Zelizer said….

“‘He’s just not thinking of those kinds of costs. And so his lack of empathy is directly linked to his kind of rush to reopen the economy…’

“The coronavirus crisis is malleable, analysts said, and can be made bigger or smaller, longer or shorter, by how the White House responds, and by how the president encourages tens of millions of people to act. Epidemiological models portray how reopening the country too soon would lead to additional waves of infections, and many more deaths.

“But the message Trump delivers each day in press briefings seems to be motivated more by his quest for re-election than any fellow feeling for beleaguered Americans…

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“…when Trump discusses the economic impact of the crisis, he is, once again, mostly talking about himself – and specifically his re-election prospects, said Bannon.

“‘I think Trump’s going to keep doing everything he can to get the economy open, because that’s basically the only hope he has to be re-elected,’ he said. ‘The reality is that he was too late to recognize the crisis, and he was too early in wishing it away.’”

“Trump is insane: And it’s time for leading Democrats to say that out loud,” Dave Masciotra, Salon.com “No Democratic governor, even one with considerable power and influence like California’s Gavin Newsom or New York’s Andrew Cuomo, can afford to gamble with the health of his or her people by alienating Trump. But a prominent U.S. senator — perhaps Chris Murphy of Connecticut or Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — or even Joe Biden himself, must level with the country about what anyone outside Trump’s cult following can see with their own eyes. The president is sick. It’s time to talk about it.

“Democrats should also get over their concerns about angering Trump supporters. Anyone who continues to applaud Trump’s weird and reckless disregard for humanity at this point is beyond the limit of rational persuasion. Trump supporters live in a hallucinatory dreamscape under the authority of a maniac.”

“The Trump Administration ‘Brain Drain’ is Impeding the Coronavirus Response,” Oliver Milman, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-trump-administration-brain-drain- impeding-response

“Trump has a New Strategy for Fighting Corruption,” Elie Mystal, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/corruption-trump-warren/

“Trump is insane: And it’s time for leading Democrats to say that out loud,” Dave Masciotra, Salon.com “Psychologists warn of the deadly consequences of the ‘silent partner’ in abusive homes. When a father beats or sexually assaults a child, the family will often react by refusing to discuss the abuse, allowing silence to enable the predator and protect against confronting a reality that is too painful and frightening.

“The United States of America is now an abusive household. Donald Trump is the lunatic authority figure stalking and traumatizing the victims — the American people — while the Democratic Party, along with the mainstream media, act as the silent partner.

“It becomes increasingly evident, with Trump’s every social media post, public utterance and policy directive, that our president suffers from a severe form of mental illness. His insanity threatens millions of lives, and has become particularly dangerous during the most devastating public health crisis in the last 100 years.

“The most popular terms that Trump’s opponents use are ‘liar,’ ‘un-American,’ ‘egomaniac’ and ‘malignant narcissist.’ All of these labels are weak, which is why we watch as Trump peels them off like Band-Aids after a shower. Half the public probably doesn’t know what ‘malignant narcissist’ means, while ‘un-American’ is too vague and ideological to have any widespread resonance. ‘Liar’ quickly collapses into the ‘all politicians lie’ refrain, and ‘egomania’ is borderline meaningless, considering that almost anyone who becomes famous in our consumer society — including most high-powered CEOs, Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes — obviously have massively swollen egos.

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“The reality that is too painful and frightening for many Americans to confront is that the wealthiest and most militarily powerful country in the world, during a pandemic, is under the leadership of someone who is certifiably nuts.”

“Coronavirus Lays Bare all the Pathologies of the Trump Administration,” Max Boot, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/26/us-coronavirus-response-shows-costs-having- chaos-president/

“Post-Impeachment, Trump Declares Himself the ‘Chief Law Enforcement Officer,” Olorunnipa and Reinhard, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/post-impeachment-trump-declares-himself-the-chief-law- enforcement-officer-of-america/2020/02/18/b8ff49c0-5290-11ea-b119-4faabac6674f_story.html

“Trump is encouraging a corporate-backed astroturf ‘uprising’ against his own COVID-19 guidelines,” Joshua Holland, rawstory.com “Donald Trump threw another tantrum this week, maniacally tweeting in all caps, ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN,’ ‘LIBERATE VIRGINIA’ and so on. On their face, the tweets amounted to the Commander-in-Chief inciting rebellion, which is a felony. The regime naturally denied this interpretation, but as NBC reported, the message “pushed many online extremist communities to speculate whether the president was advocating for armed conflict, an event they’ve termed ‘the boogaloo,’ for which many far-right activists have been gearing up and advocating since last year.” What could go wrong?

“As crazy as all of that seems, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Trump was encouraging people to rebel against state governments for complying with Trump’s own stay-in-place guidelines. While he ‘has expressed confidence in recent days that some states with smaller outbreaks could begin a return to normalcy even before the April 30 expiration date for the administration’s most recent social distancing guidance,’ according to Politico, it is obviously not yet April 30. This is roughly akin to an unhinged, dimwitted Abraham Lincoln urging South Carolina to secede.

“But coherence, or lack thereof, doesn’t matter. This entire ‘uprising’ is a propaganda campaign coordinated by the Republican Party, various corporate-funded advocacy groups and ‘the Proud Boys, conservative armed militia groups, religious fundamentalists, anti-vaccination groups and other elements of the radical right,’ according to The Guardian, and promoted relentlessly by Fox News and other conservative media outlets….

“But polls show that overwhelming majorities of Republicans oppose reopening businesses and schools before we have the capacity to contain the outbreak. Overall, ‘only 10 percent of voters surveyed in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll support ending social distancing to stimulate the economy,’ and that was true of just 19 percent of Republicans.”

“Trump’s Historical Place Defined by his Amorality,” John Harwood, cnn.com https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/12/politics/amorality-presidency-donald-trump/index.html

“What does Justice Look Like for President’s Friends and Foes?” Gass and Jonsson, csmonitor.com https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2020/0212/What-does-justice-look-like-for-president-s-friends- and-foes

“The Me President: Trump uses pandemic briefing to focus on himself,” Ashley Parker, washingtonpost.com “President Trump stepped to the lectern Monday on a day when the coronavirus death toll in the United States ticked up past 23,000. He addressed the nation at a time when unemployment claims have shot past 15 million and lines at food banks stretch toward the horizon.

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“Yet in the middle of this deadly pandemic that shows no obvious signs of abating, the president made clear that the paramount concern for Trump is Trump — his self-image, his media coverage, his supplicants and his opponents, both real and imagined….

“Trump has always had a me-me-me ethos, an uncanny ability to insert himself into the center of just about any situation. But Monday’s coronavirus briefing offered a particularly stark portrait of a president seeming unable to grasp the magnitude of the crisis — and saying little to address the suffering across the country he was elected to lead.”

Wearing a face mask is humbling and generous. That’s not how Trump defines leadership,” Robin Givhan, washingtonpost.com “Perfunctory, easy patriotism is symbolized by a flag pin tacked to a suit jacket. President Trump loves his lapel flag.

“The new patriotism in these lonely and terrifying times is epitomized by a protective mask tied around one’s face. It looks odd and feels uncomfortable. It upends who we believe ourselves to be. Wearing a face mask can be a challenge both psychologically and physically. But patriotism, when it really matters, is never easy.

“The president has made it clear that he will not be wearing a mask....

“…his dismissal of masks was not so much a matter of practicality or logistics, but temperament. In his personal estimation, he is above masks....

“A mask, with all of the fear, anxiety and foreboding it conjures up, is at odds with Trump’s view of leadership — which is more a series of flexing poses and sonorous brags than verifiable actions. A mask would conflict with an image of strength and invulnerability — which, of course, is the very argument for why he should wear one. The definition of strength is, perhaps forever, altered. And denying our vulnerability will lead to our doom.

“Strength is no longer signified by a swaggering bravado, by pumped-up chest-beating. Strength is being willing to make oneself smaller for the common good.”

“Trump Fires Key Impeachment Witnesses Vindman and Sondland,” Waters, McCarthy, Singh, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/07/alexander-vindman-fired-trump-impeachment- white-house

“The Law if for Suckers,” Dahlia Lethwich, slate.com https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/trump-impeachment-acquittal-law-is-for-suckers.html

“‘I don’t know what mental illness he has’: NYT’s Tom Friedman unloads on Trump for ‘fomenting revolutions’,” Matthew Chapman, rawstory.com “‘The president is egging on people who have been protesting their state restrictions, sometimes in large, crowded groups,’ said anchor Wolf Blitzer. ‘Is he potentially putting these people’s lives in danger?’...

“‘Fomenting revolutions in blue states with Democratic governors, unhinged is the only word for it,’ added Friedman. ‘I don’t know what mental illness he has, Wolf, but it’s important that we in the press don’t catch it, it’s important that we continue to do our job.’”

“I Believe the President, and in the President,” George T. Conway, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/05/george-conway-trump-i-believe/

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“They Know Trump did it. They just don’t Care,” David Adkins, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/01/they-know-trump-did-it-they-just-dont-care/

“Trump turns against WHO to mask his own stark failings on Covid-19 crisis,” Julian Borger, theguardian.com “Donald Trump’s declared suspension of funding of the World Health Organization in the midst of a pandemic is confirmation – if any were needed – that he is in search of scapegoats for his administration’s much delayed and chaotic response to the crisis….

“‘Whatever form it takes, this is a deeply shortsighted and dangerous decision - at any time, let alone during a ... pandemic,’ said Alexandra Phelan, assistant professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University.

“‘It’s a bizarre decision that would be profoundly detrimental to global public health,’ said Gavin Yamey, the director of Duke University’s center for policy impact in global health. ‘He’s trying to distract from his own errors that have led to the worst government response to Covid-19 on Earth’...

“Trump’s turn against the WHO only gathered pace over the past week, as more and more reports emerged of the administration’s own complacent and dysfunctional response….

“How well Trump’s scapegoating of the WHO will play in the US election is impossible to predict, but on the world stage it will undoubtedly be seen as yet another step in an accelerating US abdication of global leadership.”

“John Bolton’s Bombshell Gives the GOP a Glimpse of its Nightmare Scenario,” Aaron Blake, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/27/john-boltons-bombshell-gives-gop-glimpse-its- nightmare-scenario/

“Bolton’s Testimony would be Devastating. Not even Republicans could Look Away,” George T. Conway, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/27/george-conway-oped-bolton-testimony-would- be-devastating-not-even-republicans-could-look-away/

“I warned of Trump’s attack on science. But I never predicted the horror that lay ahead,” Ariel Dorfman, theguardian “Those infamous words – ‘Down with intelligence! Long live death!’ – were pronounced in 1936 by General Millán Astray, a fascist general who was a mentor and friend of Francisco Franco, soon to be Spain’s dictator for over four decades. They were part of a ranting speech Millán delivered at the University of Salamanca

“I recalled these barbarous words with trepidation back in October of 2017 when I began tracking down the ways in which Donald Trump, in only the first 10 endless months of what was already then his endless government, was waging a disquieting war on science and the truth. In an online essay for the New York Review of Books, I warned of the ‘lethal consequences’ that this offensive would entail, the millions of lives that would be shortened.

“Observers have focused on his botched actions and confusing inactions, the Niagara of misinformation that spews daily from his mouth. It has been revealed that there were more than enough warnings, memos and red flags by January of this year to warrant urgent preparations that were never put in place….

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“These critiques of his behavior, however valid, should not let us lose sight of something more fundamental that is going on. Today’s chaotic and bumbling response to this emergency is no accident, but deeply rooted and systemic, the direct result of a pattern of callow benightedness that verges on the criminal and that goes back to the very start of Trump’s regime, embedded in the very recalcitrant anti-intellectual DNA of this president and his followers...”

Dr. Anthony Fauci Has a Target on His Back,” Jeet Heer, thenation.com “One of the world’s top immunologists and director since 1984 of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci has been a welcome presence in the crisis, a rare example of top scientific expertise in the Trump White House.

“But it is precisely Fauci’s expertise that makes his position so insecure. Trump is one of the most anti-intellectual presidents in American history, famous for scorning expert consensus on matters like climate change or the efficacy of vaccination. During the pandemic, he’s indulged in the same anti-science claptrap, suggesting that the coronavirus crisis was so over-hyped by his political enemies that it amounted to a hoax.”

“Donald Trump Murdered Qassim Suleimani,” James Risen, theintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2020/01/09/donald-trump-iran-suleimani-murder/

“International Bonhoeffer Society Calls for ‘Ending Donald Trump’s Presidency’ in Statement of Concern,” Jim Wallis, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/international-bonhoeffer-society-calls-ending-donald-trumps-presidency- statement-concern

“Trump’s narcissism has never been more dangerous,” Jennifer Rubin, wsshingtonpost.com “No one could make up a character as narcissistic and lacking in human empathy as President Trump. Trump’s own words make the point better than any analysis or commentary:

“‘President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise…’

“More than 2,400 Americans had died by Sunday. Governors around the country are screaming for more assistance from the federal government. Trump? He obsesses over ratings. It is hard to comprehend how indifferent he is to human suffering….”

“’You’re a Bunch of Dopes and Babies’: Inside Trump’s Stunning Tirade Against Generals,” Leonnig and Rucker, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/youre-a-bunch-of-dopes-and-babies-inside-trumps-stunning- tirade-against-generals/2020/01/16/d6dbb8a6-387e-11ea-bb7b- 265f4554af6d_story.html?utm_campaign=post_most&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=Newsletter&wpisrc= nl_most&wpmm=1

“This Might be Trump’s Worst Lie Ever,” Jennifer Rubin, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/13/this-might-be-trumps-worst-lie-ever/

Karen Greenberg, “Contemplating an Unfounding Father,” tomdispatch.com “Given the precedents created in the post-9/11 years, it really should be no surprise that President Trump ignores legalities and precedent, while refusing to observe restraints under the guise of security concerns, and expects not to face accountability. In the process, there is no question that the Trump presidency has already taken the template of the untethered executive

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and its anti-democratic excesses to a new level, simultaneously defying restraints while brazenly purging anyone who might disagree with him.

“As Peter Bergen pointed out in discussing his new book, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, with the resignations or firings of generals once in top cabinet positions, Trump has succeeded in surrounding himself with ‘a group of yes-men, a small amount of yes-women, and family members.’ Indeed, week by week, executive departments are rearranged and re-staffed to fill the administration with those willing to say yes, and only yes, to whatever the president wants.”

Baker and Haberman, “Used to Meeting Challenges With Bluster and Force, Trump Confronts a Crisis Unlike Any Before,” nytimes.com “Mr. Trump is no stranger to crisis. He has spent a lifetime grappling with bankruptcy, fending off creditors, evading tax collectors, defending lawsuits, deflecting regulators, spinning reporters and dueling with estranged wives, usually coming out ahead, at least as he defines it….

“Mr. Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring — the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know….

“But even as he has seemed to take the crisis more seriously, Mr. Trump has continued to make statements that conflicted with the government’s own public health experts and focused energy on blaming China, quarreling with reporters, claiming he knew that the coronavirus would be a pandemic even when he was minimizing its threat only a few weeks ago and congratulating himself for how he has managed a crisis he only recently acknowledged….

“He has repeatedly misrepresented the state of the response — promising a vaccine “soon” that will actually take at least a year to develop, insisting that tests were available while patients struggled to find any, boasting about the availability of millions of masks while health care workers took to stitching together homemade versions. And dismissing the threat for weeks may have led to complacency among some Americans who could have acted much sooner to take precautions.

“Mr. Trump’s defensiveness over the pandemic has become a central dynamic inside the White House…

“‘The typical modus operandi from him is to bluff, is to fake, is to deny,’ said Jack O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City.”

“Donald Trump’s Belligerent Threats to Iran’s Cultural Sites are Grotesque,” Simon Jenkins, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/06/donald-trump-threat-iran-cultural-sites- grotesque-war-crimes

“Trump’s Mean Streak Spares no one—Living or Dead,” Ashley Parker, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-mean-streak-spares-no-one--living-or- dead/2019/12/20/9407d436-2340-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html

Dana Milbank, “Trump’s late conversion to reality leaves out his supporters,” washingtonpost.com “Behold, the perils of the Pinocchio presidency.

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“For three years, President Trump told his supporters that the federal government perpetrates hoaxes and frauds, that the media produces fake news and that nothing is on the level except for his tweets. He did the same with the novel coronavirus, portraying it as an ordinary flu that would ‘disappear and accusing Democrats of a hoax and the media of exaggerating.

“Belatedly, Trump has begun to speak the truth about the virus...

“But Trump’s late conversion to reality has left behind one group of Americans that will be difficult to convince: his own supporters. Their alternative-facts diet has left them intolerant of anything the government and the media feed them.

“An alarming new poll from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist shows that the number of Republicans who believe the virus is a real threat has actually fallen over the past month, from 72 percent in February to just 40 percent now. A majority of Republicans now say the threat has been blown out of proportion — more than double the 23 percent who said so last month.

“Naturally, they’re not so inclined to cooperate with efforts to slow the virus’s spread. Only 30 percent of Republicans plan to avoid large gatherings (vs. 61 percent of Democrats), a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found just before Trump proposed such limits….

“And he admonished those not following social-distancing guidelines: ‘I’m not happy with those people.’

“There can be no doubt who ‘those people’ are: Fox-News viewing Trump supporters who, until this week, had been encouraged to believe Trump’s claims that the virus was well under control.”

“SEALs Recall Pardoned Edward Gallagher as ‘Evil,’” Dave Phillips, nydailynews.com https://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny-20191228-bi4oo6g74jhaddo5tohbt7vofi-story.html

“Four Tests for Impeachment,” Ramesh Ponnuru, nationalreview.com https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/31/four-tests-for-impeachment/

Greg Sargent, “A new poll shows Trump’s magical lying powers are failing him,” washingtonpost.com “It isn’t easy to find any bright spots amid our ongoing slide into failed-state status, but here’s one: Far more Americans trust the news media than trust President Trump to tell them the truth about our coronavirus crisis….

“I’d like to suggest that a great deal is at stake here. Our national response to a crisis with extraordinarily far-reaching destructive potential is more or less under the control of a megalomaniac who, with the eager backing of his media allies, vastly prioritizes protecting his reelection chances over protecting the country….

“Some important new reporting helps underscore these stakes. The Post reports that Trump propagandists like Sean Hannity have stampeded in herd-like fashion from initially attacking the media for supposedly hyping coronavirus to claiming its dire nature actually displays Trump’s heroism.

“Such attacks on the media have been central to the broader project of protecting Trump’s reelection chances at all costs. First Trump and his propagandists falsely accused the media of exaggerating the threat to protect his initial instinct to downplay it himself, all to avoid rattling the markets, to buoy his reelection hopes.

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“Then, when it became obvious the crisis was very serious indeed, Trump attacked the media to falsely discredit its aggressive reporting on his failure to respond to it competently and with urgency. And now, Trump’s propagandists are supplanting that accurate reporting with their own narrative — one in which the very same crisis they previously downplayed now showcases Trump’s decisive and ‘bold’ leadership….

“Trump and his propagandists have absolute faith in the power of their magical lies to discredit the news media and to substitute their own version of reality for the one the media is reporting. And Trump has kept up the attacks on the press for precisely this purpose.

“But, if we are to get through this with minimal damage, and if the government’s failures are to be met with any semblance of accountability, institutions like the media will have to hold strong in the face of Trump’s efforts to destroy public faith in them.”

Eric Alterman, “During a Pandemic, Trump’s ‘Bullshit’ Will Be Deadly,” thenation.com “Donald Trump has managed to cover pretty much every known form of lie. His most common category of falsehood, however, is almost certainly ‘bullshit.’ As defined by the Princeton philosophy professor emeritus Harry Frankfurt, these are statements made when the speaker ‘does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.’

“Trump’s tendency toward ‘bullshit’ can be entertaining, such as when he pretends to have expertise in toilet flushing and windmills. But the habit is a great deal more problematic when the topic is, say, an ongoing pandemic that has the potential to kill millions of people, disrupt national economies, and cause chaos across the globe.

“The latter problem has been exacerbated by our most important media institutions, which have had trouble admitting the terrifying truth. It’s not just that they won’t call a lie a lie (much less ‘bullshit’). It’s that they hide Trump’s tendencies to sputter nonsense by making him appear far more articulate and sensible than can be justified by any objective observation.”

“Newly Revealed Emails Show Why Trump Should Fear a Real Senate Trial,” Paul Waldman, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/23/newly-revealed-emails-show-why-trump-should- fear-real-senate-trial/

“Trump Should be Removed from Office,” Mark Galli, christianitytoday.com https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-should-be-removed-from- office.html

Jonathan Freedland, “Trump’s coronavirus ban on travel from the EU is backfiring already,” theguardian.com “... when he referred to the virus as a “horrible infection”, after weeks spent dismissing it as a glorified cold or flu, it fed the hope that Trump might finally be ready to acknowledge that his approach up until this moment had not worked – that this was not a problem that could be dealt with in the usual away, swatted aside with a tweet or by hanging a comic nickname around the neck of one of his enemies.

“But no sooner had that hope appeared than it faded away. For in the course of nine minutes, Trump swiftly reverted to type. He described Covid-19 as a “foreign virus”, and took pains to point out that “a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travellers from Europe”. His doctrine of “America first” – a phrase he used once again – forever pits the US against the world, with its implication that America’s purity is permanently under threat of

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contamination by alien hordes. Trump has used that imagery in the context of immigration for more than four years; it should hardly be a surprise that he uses it now in the context of disease.”

“The Greatest Trick the Trumpists Ever Pulled,” Molly Jong-Fast, dailybeast.com https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-greatest-trick-the-trumpists-ever-pulled?ref=scroll

“Trump to World: Fuck You,” Sasha Abramsky, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-navy-war-criminals/

Karen Greenberg, “Contemplating an Unfounding Father,” tomdispatch.com “...the real lesson the country should have taken home was this: in the future, it would be foolish to place the slightest hope for protecting democracy in the process that Founding Father James Monroe once described as ‘the main spring of the great machine of government.”’Today, no matter the facts, impeachment is dead in the partisan waters, an historical anomaly that’s long outlived its time.

“The failure of impeachment also brought to light the weakness of the constitutional principle of checks and balances. In theory, when it comes to presidential behavior, Congress and the courts have the power to rein in the chief executive. But in this century, both congressional and judicial restraints have proven anemic. One of the many obvious things highlighted by the recent impeachment acquittal in the Senate is Congress’s ultimate ineffectuality when it comes to presidential power….

“Some Senate Republicans, especially Maine’s Susan Collins, tried to hide behind the notion that, thanks to his impeachment, if not conviction, President Trump had “learned’ a salutary lesson ‘from this case.’ Within 24 hours, however, it was clear that the president had ‘learned’ nothing, except that he could do what he pleased. It was, it turned out, the democratic system that had learned a lesson -- and not a good one either….

“As 2020 dawns, this erosion of our democratic institutions hardly comes out of the blue. Democratic principles have been visibly eroding since the beginning of this century. As I described in my book Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, the build-up in presidential powers began with George W. Bush who, after the 9/11 attacks, claimed that a ‘unitary’ presidency was a more viable form of government than that prescribed by any separation-of-powers doctrine and its promise of checks and balances. Citing a national emergency that September, he would launch his ‘global war on terror’ through a series of secret programs, including an offshore system of torture and injustice that left Congress, the courts, and the American public largely out of the conversation.

“In the process, he removed the need for true accountability from the imperial presidency and the administration that went with it.

“There’s a Philosophy Behind Trump’s Lies,” Karen J. Greenberg, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-impeachment-lies/

“So You Want to be an Autocrat? Here’s the 10-Point Checklist,” Shelley Inglis, theconversation.com https://theconversation.com/so-you-want-to-be-an-autocrat-heres-the-10-point-checklist-125908

Darius Tahir, “Health officials shift tone on coronavirus, say elderly and sick at risk, politico.com “The Associated Press reported late Saturday that the White House overruled a CDC warning that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines. Trump administration officials denied the report.

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“Current and former administration officials have said President Donald Trump's eagerness to downplay bad news has undercut his own administration's efforts to contain the outbreak.”

“Trump Saw the Yovanovitch Hearing and Just Couldn’t Bear Being Left Out,” Kathleen Parker, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-saw-the-yovanovitch-hearing-and-just-couldnt-bear- being-left-out/2019/11/15/fa4ec342-07f9-11ea-818c-fcc65139e8c2_story.html

“Impeachment Hearing Republicans Confirm There Is No Defense for Donald Trump,” John Nichols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/impeachment-intelligence-committee-first-day/

Natanson, Cox, and Stein, “Trump’s words, bullied kids, scarred schools,” washingtonpost.com “Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered ‘Ban Muslims’ at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: ‘This is Trump country.’

“Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them….

“‘It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected,’ said Ashanty Bonilla, 17, a Mexican American high school junior in Idaho who faced so much ridicule from classmates last year that she transferred. ‘They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?’”

“The Big, Awful Truth about Trump Hovering over Today’s Hearings,” Greg Sargent, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/big-awful-truth-about-trump-hovering-over- todays-hearings/

“The United States is Being Run by a Toddler,” Dana Milbank, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/08/united-states-is-being-run-by-toddler/

Philip Bump, “In one incident, a series of realities about Trump’s presidency seem to be confirmed,” washingtonpost.com “It seems that, to Trump, anything that undermines him is, by default, something that undermines America. Les cinquante etats, c’est lui, if you will. It’s an actualization of the actual argument made by his attorney Alan Dershowitz during the impeachment trial. Dershowitz claimed that Trump might see his own reelection as essential for the defense of the country and, therefore, that actions taken to ensure that reelection were actions intended to aid the country. It was a ridiculous claim in the context of the impeachment but an insightful argument in the context of Trump’s view of the presidency.”

“President Trump is at War with the Rule of Law. This won’t End well,” Rebecca Solnit, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/09/trump-government-executive-branch-rebecca- solnit

“Kafka in Foggy Bottom: Impeachment Transcript Reveals Fear of Trump Tweets,” Julian Borger, theguardian.com

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/05/impeachment-marie-yovanovitch-ukraine- transcript-reveals-fear-and-chaos-in-the-state-department

Oliver Milman, “The Trump administration ‘brain drain’ is impeding the coronavirus response,” theguardian.com “... the efforts to address the outbreak risk being undermined by three years of a Trump administration that has seen an exodus of scientists from a variety of agencies, the scrapping and remodeling of scientific panels to favor industry interests and a president who regularly dismisses or distorts scientific facts – from the climate crisis to whether the moon is part of Mars – in public.

“‘The US is badly positioned; the federal government isn’t up to the task,’ said Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).... ‘the Trump administration doesn’t value basic science, it doesn’t understand it and it tends to reject it when it conflicts with its political narrative’....

“‘The scientific ‘truth’ about the virus may not match what the administration wants to hear, so the scientific ‘truth’ is at risk of being compromised before it is made public,’ said Wendy Wagner, a University of Texas expert in how policy-makers use science….

“‘There’s definitely been a brain drain in this administration, there has been an attack on science that doesn’t bode well for what we are seeing now,’ she said.”

Greg Sargent, “Trump’s new attack on Biden exposes his own unfitness,” washingtonpost.com “Does Trump really want to open the door to a debate over mental fitness for the presidency?....

“It’s often observed that Trump criticizes his opponents for failings that he’s taken to comical extremes himself. Trump is probably the most corrupt U.S. president ever — yet he often baselessly claims his foes are corrupt. Trump is the biggest liar and fabulist ever to occupy the Oval Office — yet he often falsely tars his critics as liars.

“Moves like these are often described with euphemisms — Trump is just flooding the zone with chaos! But in truth, they constitute the serial, destructive exploitation of a major institutional weakness built into the conventions of contemporary political reporting.

“Precisely because Trump has pushed his depredations to such monumental extremes — the relentless corruption and the celebratory flaunting of it; the uncontrollable lying about the most easily verifiable matters — any faithful rendering of them risks coming across as sharply negative….

“In this election, the institutional ability of the press to fully convey the abnormality of this presidency is in doubt. As Brian Beutler details, we’re already seeing a rerun of 2016, which was beset with the press corps’ failure to clearly demarcate Trump’s history of corruption and racism from the lesser sins of Hillary Clinton.”

“Don’t Forget what Donald Trump said *Repeatedly* about the Ukraine Call Transcript,” Chris Cillizza, cnn.com https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/30/politics/donald-trump-transcript-ukraine/index.html

“A Thorough, Revolting History of Trump’s Behavior toward Women,” Robin Givhan, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-thorough-revolting-history-of-trumps-behavior-toward- women/2019/10/23/3dea9ac4-d00d-11e9-b29b-a528dc82154a_story.html

Peter Grier, “What Trump pardons show about his idea of presidency,” csmonitor

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“... what the president sees on Fox News heavily influences his decisions. Mr. Kerik has been a regular commentator on Fox, for instance. Patti Blagojevich, Mr. Blagojevich’s wife, has appeared on Fox directly calling for sentence relief for her husband. Allies of Mr. Stone have pleaded with President Trump through the Fox screen for a Stone pardon.

Critics say that in total the way President Trump goes about pardons positions him, not as the head of a government working toward decisions, but as a quasi-king who alone makes the call. He is dispensing largesse, seemingly at random, by his own whims, rather than pursuant to any legal system, writes legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker.

“‘That’s the real lesson – a story of creeping authoritarianism – of [Tuesday’s] commutations and pardons by President Trump,’ Mr. Toobin writes.”

“An Overlooked Bill Taylor Revelation Hints at worse to come from Trump,” Greg Sargent, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/23/hidden-revelation-taylor-hints-worse-come- trump/

“Trump Believes He has a Mandate for Tyranny,” Ed Kilgore, nymag.com http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/trump-thinks-getting-in-his-way-is-subverting-democracy.html

Max Boot, “Coronavirus lays bare all the pathologies of the Trump administration,” washingtonpost.com “Diseases, far more than any human enemy, ruthlessly expose and exploit the weaknesses of their victims. Now the coronavirus outbreak is laying bare the pathologies of the Trump administration — which include compulsive lying, pandering to dictators, ideological aversion to ‘globalism,’ inveterate hostility toward experts and expertise, and (in a related development) sheer incompetence….

“These moves are emblematic of the president’s contempt for apolitical civil servants who know what they are doing. He prefers unqualified political hacks whose only loyalty is to him rather than to the country….

“Even as America mobilizes against a global epidemic — soon to be a pandemic, according to a former CDC director — two-thirds of the top jobs at DHS are devoid of Senate-approved appointees. The second acting secretary in a row, Chad Wolf, inspired incredulity from both Republicans and Democrats with his Senate testimony on Tuesday. He claimed the mortality rate for covid-19 is around 2 percent — roughly the same, he said, as the common flu. In fact, the mortality rate for influenza is around 0.1 percent….

“At a time like this, it would be a lot more reassuring to think that there were actual, you know, experts in charge of the government rather than ignorant ideologues chosen for their dedication to a supreme leader unconstrained by fact, logic or morality. Where’s the ‘deep state’ when you need it most?

“Donald Trump, Absolutely Corrupted,” Dana Milbank, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-corrupted-absolutely/2019/10/11/92b0c720- ec34-11e9-85c0-85a098e47b37_story.html

“Hamilton Pushed for Impeachment Powers: Trump is what he had in Mind,” Ron Chernow, wasingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/18/hamilton-pushed-impeachment-powers-trump-is- what-he-had-mind/?arc404=true

William McRaven, “If good men like Joe Maguire can’t speak the truth, we should be deeply afraid,” washingtonpost.com

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“But, of course, in this administration, good men and women don’t last long. Joe was dismissed for doing his job: overseeing the dissemination of intelligence to elected officials who needed that information to do their jobs.

“As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”

“Donald Trump: Xenophobe in Public, International Mobster in Private,” Robert Reich, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/13/donald-trump-ukraine-turkey-impeachment

“Odd Markings, Ellipses Fuel Doubts about the Rough Transcript of Trump’s Ukraine Call,” Leonnig, Timberg, Harwell, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/03/odd-markings-ellipses-fuel-doubts-about- rough-transcript-trumps-ukraine-call/

John Harwood, “Trump's historical place defined by his amorality,” cnn.com “Scandals, large or small, mark most American presidencies. What makes Donald Trump historically unique is something different.

“Brazenly, Trump disdains even the idea that moral or ethical norms shape his conduct or define the nation he leads. He rejects distinctions between right and wrong for an ethos of explicit self-interest that Americans have never before seen from the White House.

“At last week's National Prayer Breakfast, Trump waved off the biblical command to ‘love your enemies’ invoked by another speaker. ‘I don't know if I agree,’ the President said….

“The overt transactional reasoning behind Trump's conduct sets his presidency apart. Whatever their failings, his predecessors made the White House what Franklin Roosevelt called ‘a place of moral leadership.’

"‘We've had presidents who were more moral, or less moral,’ said Pete Wehner, who held a senior White House post under President George W. Bush. ‘We've never had a president who takes psychic delight in shattering moral norms, or discrediting morality as a concept.’”

“Trump Administration’s War on Science has Hit ‘Crisis Point,’ Experts Warn,” Oliver Milman, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/03/science-trump-administration-crisis-point-report

“’A Presidency of One’” Key Federal Agencies Increasingly Compelled to Benefit Trump,” Ricker and Costa, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-presidency-of-one-key-federal-agencies-increasingly- compelled-to-benefit-trump/2019/10/01/f80740ec-e453-11e9-a331-2df12d56a80b_story.html

Jonathan Chait, “Barr Wants to Hide Trump’s Authoritarian Plans, But Trump Keeps Confessing,” nymag.com “…this morning, Trump felt the itch to clear something up. Trump maintains the right to ask Barr to prosecute, or not prosecute, anybody for any reason. He hasn’t done it, he says, but he could…

“Obviously, if the president can direct anybody to be prosecuted or not, there is no rule of law. If there is no rule of law, there is no meaningful democracy.

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“Trump is notoriously uninterested in theory, and approaches every question from the most short-term possible perspective. Yet he is fanatical about asserting his completely untrammeled rights to turn the legal system into a personal weapon….

“Since this epiphany, Trump has proclaimed the ‘absolute right’ to pardon himself for any crimes (not that there were any!). He has also insisted that he has the ‘absolute right’ to ask any country to investigate any American for any reason he sees fit. On many occasions, Trump has gestured to Article II of the Constitution as the source of this authority. He has barely hidden his enthusiasm for this clause and the powers he believes it confers upon him. ‘It gives me all of these rights, at a level nobody has ever seen before,’ he gushed at one point.

“’Beyond Repugnant.’ GOP Congressman Slams Trump for Warning of ‘Civil War’ over Impeachment,” Shepherd and Shammas, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/09/30/trump-civil-war-tweet-jeffress-draws-backlash- critics-gop/

“Whistleblower Report Reveals how Far Trump’s Dubious Ethics have Spread,” Tom MacCarthy, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/26/whistleblower-report-reveals-how-far-trumps- ethical-rot-has-spread

Robert Reich, “In his assault on justice, Trump has out-Nixoned Nixon,” theguardian.com “Now we’re back to where we were 50 years ago. Trump seems determined to finish Nixon’s agenda of rigging elections and making the justice department a cesspool of partisanship. In Trump’s 2016 campaign, even Stone was back to his old dirty tricks of issuing lies and conspiracy theories, and seeking dirt on a Democratic opponent.

“Trump has out-Nixoned Nixon: firing FBI director James Comey after asking him to ‘let go’ of an inquiry into former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s interactions with Russian officials; repeatedly calling the Russian inquiry a politically motivated ‘witch-hunt’; urging the firing of the FBI’s No 2 official because of alleged Democratic allegiances; launching an assault on special counsel Robert Mueller’s own investigation; and appointing a lapdog attorney general, William Barr, to do whatever the president wishes.

“Barr has out-Nixoned Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell: whitewashing Mueller’s conclusions; defending Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine seeking dirt on Joe Biden; defending Trump during the House impeachment; refusing to enforce congressional subpoenas; opening an ‘intake process’ for dirt Rudy Giuliani dredges up on Trump’s political opponents; and continuing to respond to Trump’s every whim including, this week, suggesting Stone should get a milder sentence than the one career prosecutors recommended….

“Trump’s view is that he has ultimate power – an ‘absolute right’ – to control the justice department.

“That’s as wrongheaded now as it was when Nixon held the same view. If a president can punish enemies and reward friends through the administration of justice, there can be no justice. Justice requires impartial and equal treatment under the law. Partiality or inequality in deciding whom to prosecute and how to punish invites tyranny.

“But what occurred under Nixon is happening again. Trump neither understands nor cares about justice. He cares about nothing but himself. Like Nixon, he has usurped the independence of the Department of Justice for his own ends.

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Unlike Nixon, Trump won’t resign. He has too many enablers – not just a shameful attorney general but also shameless congressional Republicans – who place a lower priority on justice than on satisfying the most vindictive and paranoid occupant of the White House since Richard Milhous Nixon.”

“Trump is Seriously, Frighteningly Unstable—the World is in Danger,” Robert Reich, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/15/donald-trump-nuts-impeachment-25th- amendment-2020-election

“Trump’s War on Truth Just got a Lot More Cult-like,” Greg Sargent, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/11/trumps -war-truth-just-got-lot-more-cult-like/

Jim Wallis, “Trump Unchecked: Unprecedented Power in the Executive,” sojo.net “... it’s helpful to view President Trump’s budget proposal for FY2021, which was released on Monday… as a statement of purpose and priority — literally, a campaign document.

“... the budget would ‘cut Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program and also wring savings from Medicare despite Trump’s repeated promises to safeguard Medicare and Social Security.’ (This, in direct contradiction to a tweet he sent just last Saturday vowing, ‘We will not be touching your Social Security and Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget.’) Trump’s proposal also slashes the budgets of agencies charged with protecting creation and vulnerable people, like the Environmental Protection Agency, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. In sharp contrast, the Homeland Security and Defense budgets would remain stable or see increases, and the tax cuts for the wealthy enacted in 2017 would be made permanent. As Bob Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out, “expenditures for non-defense discretionary programs, measured as a share of the economy (GDP), would reach their lowest level since Calvin Coolidge was President in the 1920s….

“The administration’s clearest goals take the form of adding new requirements and regulations to programs that benefit vulnerable people in order to slash the number of people on them, cutting aid to families with food insecurity, reducing enrollment in and preventing the further expansion of Medicaid — the program that provides health care coverage to low-income Americans — and spreading fear among immigrants from receiving any needed public assistance even for limited periods of time….

“This is a budget that directly and deliberately ignores and attacks the very people that Jesus instructs us to protect in the 25th chapter of Matthew. The hungry will have their nutritional assistance cut, the sick will have their medical care cut, the stranger (the immigrant) will be afraid to get any help for fear of deportation, and the list goes on.

“A budget is indeed a moral document. And for us, even for Christians who might ordinarily vote very differently from each other, this is not a partisan issue but a confessional one.”

“Trump is not Well,” Peter Wehner, theatlanntic.com https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/donald-trump-not-well/597640/

“Trump and Bibi are Evil Twinsies,” Eric Alterman, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-netanyahu-illiberal-democracy-eric-alterman/

Max Boot, “Trump’s ‘Friday night massacre’ is just the beginning. I fear what’s to come,” washingtonpost.com “In case there was any doubt what the president was up to, Donald Trump Jr. explained on Twitter: ‘Allow me a moment to thank… Adam Schiff. Were it not for his crack investigation

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skills, @realDonald Trump might have had a tougher time unearthing who all needed to be fired. Thanks, Adam!’ The president himself himself tweeted Saturday that he fired ‘Lt. Col.’ Vindman — note the scare quotes — for being ‘very insubordinate’ by complying with a House subpoena to testify. Thanks, Trumps, for confessing to an apparent violation of 18 U.S. Code § 1513, the federal law protecting witnesses from retaliation — not that the president will ever be prosecuted.

“There was, predictably, no public pushback to these decisions from within the administration, because Trump is now surrounded by political invertebrates. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acquiesced to Sondland’s firing just as he acquiesced in the far more offensive campaign waged by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to recall career Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who retired in late January. If national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien made any effort to protect a war hero from a draft-dodger president, there is no indication of it. Republican senators such as Marco Rubio of Florida simply cheered Trump on.

“What happened Friday was the political equivalent of one of those mob-movie montages where the don’s enemies are gunned down to the accompaniment of an operatic score. And the Don in the White House isn’t done yet….

“Trump is unchastened, unchained and unhinged. I fear for the future of our democracy with such a vindictive bully wielding the awesome powers of the presidency with less and less restraint. He is making an example of all those who have exposed his misconduct in the past to ensure that he can get away with even greater wrongdoing in the future.”

“A Side-by-Side Comparison of Barr’s vs. Mueller’s Statements about Special Counsel Report,” Ryan Goodman, scribd.com https://www.scribd.com/document/412477974/Chart-A-Side-by-Side-Comparison-of-Bill-Barr-s-vs-Bob- Mueller-s-Statements-About-Special-Counsel-Report-on-2016-Russian-Election-Interference

“Trump Doesn’t Just Pollute the Social Environment with Hate. He is the Environment,” George F. Will, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-doesnt-just-pollute-the-social-environment-he-is-the- environment/2019/08/05/65cb525a-b7b6-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

Walters, McCarthy, Singh, “Trump fires key impeachment witnesses Vindman and Sondland,” theguardian.com “In an accelerating assault on Donald Trump’s critics in the days since his impeachment acquittal, the administration fired Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, shortly after removing Lt Col Alexander Vindman from his White House post on Friday….

“Vindman, a Ukraine expert on the national security council who had been scheduled to rotate out of his White House assignment this summer, was suddenly fired and escorted out of the building on Friday, according to a statement from his lawyer.

“The attorney, David Pressman, said: ‘He followed orders, he obeyed his oath, and he served his country. And for that, the most powerful man in the world – buoyed by the silent, the pliable, and the complicit – has decided to exact revenge.’

“‘There is no question in the mind of any American why this man’s job is over, why this country now has one less soldier serving it at the White House. LTC Vindman was asked to leave for telling the truth’....

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“The president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr, seemingly confirmed that Sondland and Vindman’s removal was in retaliation for their cooperation with the Democrats’ investigation. Were it not for the lead impeachment manager Adam Schiff’s ‘crack investigation skills’, the president ‘might have had a tougher time unearthing who all needed to be fired’, he wrote in a tweet.”

“Trump Smashed Months of FBI Work to Thwart Election Interference,” Samuelsohn and Bertrand, politico.com https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/13/fbi-election-interference-fight-donald-trump-1364597

“Incoherence could Lead to War,” Jeet Heer, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-iran-foreign-policy/

Chauncey Devega, “No, the center will not hold: After acquittal, expect Trump to push for full power,” salon.com “... psychiatrist Craig Malkin explains how Trump's apparent mental pathologies are manifesting through the impeachment process: ‘The more narcissistic someone is, the more they're likely to view people and the world as less a separate entity or being, and more like an extension of their own body, like an arm or a leg. In that mindset, What the U.S. needs and what I need are one and the same, because I am the country.'"

“After his certain acquittal in the Senate this Wednesday, Donald Trump will be fully unrestrained. His new rampage against American democracy will make the previously three years of wicked behavior look virtuous and generous by comparison.”

“Trump isn’t just Speaking Lies. He’s Inviting Loyalists to Live in his Own Political Reality,” Michael Gerson, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-isnt-just-speaking-lies-hes-inviting-loyalists-to-live-in- his-own-political-reality/2019/06/24/2be2bcc0-96c0-11e9-8d0a- 5edd7e2025b1_story.html?utm_term=.433fb059f031

“Impeach Donald Trump,” Eric Swalwell, theatlantic.com https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/eric-swalwell-impeach-donald-trump/591691/

George T. Conway, “I believe the president, and in the president,” washingtonpost.com “I believe the president is a good Christian, because TV pastors say so, and that it’s okay he doesn’t ask for God’s forgiveness, because he doesn’t need to, since he’s the Chosen One. I believe the president knows the Bible, and that two Corinthians are better than one.”

McKay Coppins, "How Mitt Romney Decided Trump Is Guilty," the Atlantic.com “The president did in fact pressure a foreign government to corrupt our election process,’ Romney said. ‘And really, corrupting an election process in a democratic republic is about as abusive and egregious an act against the Constitution—and one's oath—that I can imagine. It's what autocrats do.’”

“Americans must accept that none of these things ever happened,” Dana Wiltbank, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americans-must-accept-that-none-of-these-things-ever- happened/2019/06/03/9ed405ec-8638-11e9-a491-25df61c78dc4_story.html?utm_term=.22047fc92b06

“If Trump doesn’t Warrant Impeachment, Who does?” Eugene Robinson, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-trump-doesnt-warrant-impeachment-who- does/2019/05/30/0ae3ee8a-8311-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html?utm_term=.5bf04621f816

James Risen, “Donald Trump Murdered Qassim Suleimani,” theintercept.com

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“Donald Trump has dragged America into a moral abyss. And yet Congress, the press, and the public are unwilling to admit that we are now standing in blood. The nation is enabling a murderous demagogue, and we are all complicit.

“The president of the United States has murdered a high-ranking official of a foreign government. The assassination last week of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani was a state- sponsored murder.

“But no one in the Washington establishment seems prepared to come out and say the hard truth: Donald Trump is a murderer….

“If we had a real Congress, there would be a congressional investigation into whatever lame, paper-thin legal rationalizations have been written by government lawyers to back up this murder.”

“Trump’s Prodigious Lying Threatens our Democracy,” Eric Alterman, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-lies-eric-alterman/

“Corruption isn’t just another Scandal. It’s the Rot Beneath all of them,” Bauerlein and Jeffery, motherjones.com https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019/04/mother-jones-corruption-project/

Ashley Parker, “Trump’s mean streak spares no one — living or dead,” washingtonpost.com “Over the past dozen days or so, the president has spewed forth an advent calendar’s worth of cruelty — new barbs popping out almost daily, like so many tiny bitter chocolates — underscoring the instinctual nastiness that is central to his brand and casting doubt on claims from his aides that Trump is merely a counterpuncher….

“‘Trump is the worst within us, and he markets that worst as admirable,’ said Stuart Stevens, a Republican operative and frequent Trump critic who was a senior adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. ‘He appeals to our darkest angels, not our better angels’....

“‘My thought on this week, as it relates to Sarah, is he reveals the cruelty in those around him, or maybe it’s his cruelty rubs off among those around him to such a degree that they don’t even recognize it anymore,’ Miller said.

“Referring back to the president, he added: ‘The whole appeal of Trump was his cruelty to the weak.’”

Joel Mathis, “Trump's scandals will haunt America for years,” theweek.com “This Senate almost certainly will not oust Trump. So the best we can hope for is that history buries him under piles of ignominy and shame. That is small consolation — we live in the here and now, when we would benefit more from this president leaving office than we will from the judgment of history. But Trump's eternal loss of face in tomorrow's textbooks may have to do as consolation. The impeachment process is nearly complete, but our collective reckoning with Trump's behavior has just begun.”

“Trump Just Gave the House a Very Good Reason to Look at his Tax Returns,” Daniel Hemel, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/09/trump-just-gave-house-very-good-reason-look- his-tax-returns/?utm_term=.911ffa89a4aa

“Trump Tries to Silence another Witness,” Jennifer Reuben, washingtonpost.com

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/06/trump-tries-silence-another- witness/?utm_term=.16f2fccbfb9b

Mark Galli, “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” christianitytoday.com “But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

“The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

“Trump’s evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president. We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character….

“Unfortunately, the words that we applied to Mr. Clinton 20 years ago apply almost perfectly to our current president. Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”

“Hundreds of Former Justice Officials Assert Trump would be Facing Felony Charges if he were not President,” Watkins and Polantz, cnn.com https://www.kctv5.com/news/us_world_news/hundreds-of-former-justice-officials-assert-trump-would-be- facing/article_d9b49ea7-48a8-5a18-8da8-248e239d5e73.html

“Trump’s Other Impeachable Offense,” James Reston Jr., nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/opinion/trump-congress-subpoenas.html

Catherine Eslinger and Megan Seawright, “Commentary: ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil’,” sltrib.com “If Republicans have evidence to exonerate the president, we encourage them to release it publicly and testify under oath. Failure to do so implies that they do not believe the president to be innocent, but nonetheless wish to ensure that he retains power at any cost….

“For some, supporting Donald Trump as a Republican president may seem to enable a ‘greater cause,’ but this is a Faustian bargain that discredits the party and the values for which it once stood. Our nation deserves two ethically healthy parties who maintain the highest level of integrity as they pursue their diverse political aims.

“Trump's actions are observably wrong, beyond the scope of what the office allows, and should not be condoned by patriots. As we listen to Republicans bluster about unfairness, ‘a sham,’ and

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a president who ‘hasn't done anything wrong,’ we cannot help but hear in their voices an overwhelming cynicism. These are not the responses of integrity, honesty, or loyalty to the constitutional system.”

“‘This is Risky’: Trump’s Thirst for Mueller Revenge Could Land him in Trouble,” Samuelson, Desiderio, Cheney, politico.com https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/24/mueller-report-trump-evidence-1288798

“Trump’s Regime is Leading America in an Insurrection,” Carol Anderson, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/trump-regime-america-insurrection

“How Trump Co-ops Leaders Like Bill Barr,” James Comey, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/william-barr-testimony.html

Sasha Abramsky, “The Family That Grifts Together,” thenation.com “This week, Donald Trump paid a total of $2 million to eight charities. Not because he wanted to, but because last month—in a lawsuit brought by New York’s previous attorney general—a judge ruled that he had to pay this, as a penalty for using the Donald J. Trump Foundation as a personal piggy bank.

“Even more extraordinary, however, are the broader terms of the court settlement, which make it clear that the president and his three oldest children—who were all foundation officials—are con artists who can’t be trusted with other people’s dollars. If Trump ever wants to take part in charity work in New York State again, he will only be able to do so under special supervision….

“In normal times, a court ruling that the president is a grifter who can’t be trusted to run his own charity would have gotten rather a lot of attention. But in a time of Noise—an attorney general deliberately misstating the findings of his own inspector general’s report, the president tweeting insults at his own FBI director, yet another Nuremberg-styled Trump rally on Tuesday, and so on—the story got largely pushed to one side.”

“Voters’ Capacity for Being Appalled by Trump is Waning,” Janna Ganesh, ft.com https://www.ft.com/content/e6f47504-6668-11e9-a79d-04f350474d62

“The Surprises in the Mueller Report,” politico.com https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/19/mueller-report-analysis-legal-experts-226662

Karen Tumulty, “The most depressing thing about Trump’s attack on Greta Thunberg,” washingtonpost.com “Is there nothing too petty for this president?

“Early Thursday morning, President Trump took to Twitter (where his current follower count is 67.5 million) to attack a 16-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome and tell her to ‘work on her Anger Management problem.’

“As always with Trump, when he accuses someone else of something, we get a window into what he himself is feeling. So it’s fair to ask: What did Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg do to make the projectionist-in-chief so hopping mad?

“The answer: She was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

“Time covers are something of a fixation for this president. Back when he was a reality-TV star, he decorated the walls of at least five of his golf clubs with fake ones featuring his own face….

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“But the real question, as is so often the case where Trump is concerned, is why would the most powerful man in the world stoop to doing the things he does? One answer, at least judging by the reaction to his tweet on Thursday, is that his always-loyal base applauds him when he indulges his basest impulses. ‘Haha,’ one of his supporters responded. ‘Trump is awesome. You have to love his sense of humor.’ And that may be the most depressing thing of all.”

“The Mueller Report Shows that Bad Guys who Play Dirty, Like Trump, Always Win,” Jonathan Greenland, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/19/mueller-report-bad-guys-play-dirty-trump- democrats-duty

“Does the Mueller Report Exonerate Trump? I asked 12 Legal Experts,” Sean Illing, vox.com https://www.vox.com/2019/4/18/18484731/mueller-report-trump-barr-obstruction-legal-experts

Karen J. Greenberg, “There’s a Philosophy Behind Trump’s Lies, thenation.com” “The most blatant attack on facts comes in the form of the unabashed lying of President Donald Trump, who obfuscates and changes his many stories with impressive regularity. By this October, after almost 1,000 days in office, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker’s database, he had made 13,435 false or misleading claims….

“Still, despite the breadth of his falsehoods, the president’s behavior has actually been anything but novel at a fundamental level. After all, President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, took this country to war based on an outright lie—that there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal in Iraq—a falsehood that cost the United States more than a trillion dollars and took staggering numbers of Iraqi and American lives….

“But it’s important to note that when it comes to the Trump presidency, there is so much more to the strategy of degrading public discourse and debasing the facts than anything as simple and straightforward as mere lying....

“Today, in Donald Trump’s Washington anything goes, linguistically speaking. Sadly, words are more important than we as a nation seem to believe. They are the bedrock on which facts are built and facts are the bedrock on which nations stand in order to make decisions. The Trump administration has little respect for the integrity of words, no respect for educating the public with the facts, and every intention of clouding the space between fact and fiction, certainty and uncertainty.”

Julian Borger, “Kafka in Foggy Bottom: impeachment transcript reveals fear of Trump tweets,” theguardian.com “In less than a year, Yovanovitch’s world had been turned upside down. The state department to which she had devoted her career had been, in her eyes at least, a grand ocean liner of diplomacy. Once its course was charted, everyone knew their role in getting to the objective. Other nations could only look on in awe.

“Now, in Ukraine and elsewhere, a shadow foreign policy has emerged, whose true goals are known to the president, his family and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Through that channel, a discredited Ukrainian prosecutor and two obscure Florida businessmen who had become Giuliani’s sidekicks, wielded more influence than the entire state department. They fought to get Yovanovitch removed and they succeeded.

“For experienced diplomatic veterans like Yovanovitch, this kind of corruption and dysfunction was all too familiar. They see it every day in the world’s autocracies.

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“‘This is the sort of stuff we report on, how the president’s family and its hangers-on run everything. Now foreign diplomats are saying the same things about us,’ one US foreign service officer observed recently.

“In the space of a few weeks in spring, Yovanovitch went from sending cables back to Washington about her embassy’s uphill struggle in containing to Ukraine’s endemic corruption, to being warned by a concerned Ukrainian minister and oligarch, Arsen Avakov, to watch her back. Things were so bad, Ukraine was afraid of getting enmeshed in Washington’s venality.”

“Trump is a Cancer on the Presidency. Congress Should Remove Him,” George T. Conway III, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/george-conway-trump-is-a-cancer-on-the- presidency-congress-should-remove-him/2019/04/18/e75a13d8-6220-11e9-bfad- 36a7eb36cb60_story.html

“’Whimsical, uninformed’: French Ambassador’s Parting Verdict on Trump,” Julian Borger, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/19/whimsical-uninformed-french-ambassadors-parting- verdict-on-trump

“We All Need Sanctuary from Donald Trump,” William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org https://truthout.org/articles/we-all-need-sanctuary-from-donald-trump/

Lloyd Green, “All the President's Women review: Donald Trump, sexual predator,” theguardian.com “The book rests upon firsthand interviews, transcripts and prior reports. It also contains a detailed appendix that lays out its sources. Said differently, if you can actually believe Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim born in Kenya to a cocaine-addled Martian, then opting in to at least 50% of All the President’s Women should be a no-brainer.”

“Remember, Cable News: Trump is a Liar. Act Accordingly,” Erik Wemple, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/10/remember-cable-news-trump-is-liar-act- accordingly/?utm_term=.5505b69d27f6

“Echoes of History: Trump’s ‘Movement” now has a Uniform and Membership Cards,” Chauncey Devega, salon.com https://www.salon.com/2019/04/12/echoes-of-history-trumps-movement-now-has-a-uniform-and-a- membership-card/

Rebecca Solnit, “The Loneliness of Donald Trump,” lithub.com “Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.

“He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them, running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way a lumberjack of old walked across the logs floating on their way to the mill, but as long as he moved in his underworld of dealmakers the rules were wobbly and the enforcement was wobblier and he

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could stay afloat. But his appetite was endless, and he wanted more, and he gambled to become the most powerful man in the world, and won, careless of what he wished for….

“A man who wished to become the most powerful man in the world, and by happenstance and intervention and a series of disasters was granted his wish. Surely he must have imagined that more power meant more flattery, a grander image, a greater hall of mirrors reflecting back his magnificence. But he misunderstood power and prominence. This man had bullied friends and acquaintances, wives and servants, and he bullied facts and truths, insistent that he was more than they were, than it is, that it too must yield to his will.

“Trump will Leave a Legacy of Selfishness and Dishonesty,” Joseph Stiglit, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/10/trump-legacy-selfishness-dshonesty-attack-pillar- society

“Trump is a National Security Risk—and Still Republicans Back him,” Walter Shapiro, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/02/trump-national-security-risk-republicans

Ed Kilgore, “Trump Believes He Has a Mandate for Tyranny,” nymag.com “... the real Trump doctrine is “Get over it.”

“The administration is forcing foreign governments into quid pro quos in order to assist Trump’s political prospects? Get over it.

“It’s using the power of the presidency to financially benefit the president and his company? Get over it.

“It obstructed justice and has announced its intention to do so again? Get over it.

“It circumvented Congress’s power of the purse to begin construction of a border wall? Get over it.

“It separated children from families at the border, locking them in inhumane conditions? Get over it.

“The president is evading Senate confirmation by naming “acting” officials to top posts? Get over it.

“Russia hacked the 2016 election? Get over it….

“You get the sense that if, despite it all, Trump is reelected next year, the four ensuing years would take this administration down a long dark path of vindictive and even more reckless behavior. And why not? If the initial “mandate” from the electorate is regarded as virtually unlimited, a reconfirmation of his presidency after he has fully displayed his contempt for any curbs on his power and his corrupt cronyism must surely make him a colossus bestride a supine nation that has acknowledged his greatness. I don’t know if during the 2020 campaign Democrats can find a way to articulate this ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’ concern, or convince Americans that a vote for Trump is a vote for a much wilder and megalomanic president than they have previously seen. But if the 45th president survives both impeachment and 2020, and is in a position to enjoy fully the ‘consequences’ of not one but two elections, the norms he might then break are beyond imagining.”

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“Harvard Psychiatrist: Donald Trump’s Actions are Signs of a ‘Severe, Continuous Mental Disturbance,’” Tana Ganeva, Salon.com https://www.salon.com/2019/03/04/harvard-psychiatrist-donald-trumps-actions-are-signs-of-a-severe- continuous-mental-disturbance_partner/

“Michael Cohen and Donald Trump are Exactly the Same Person,” William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org https://truthout.org/articles/michael-cohen-and-donald-trump-are-exactly-the-same-person/

Dana Milbank, “Donald Trump, absolutely corrupted,” washingtonpost.com “Trump soon stated that ‘I have the absolute right’ to fire FBI Director James Comey. He subsequently proclaimed the ‘absolute right’ to provide Russia with an ally’s highly classified intelligence; the ‘absolute right’ to pardon himself; the ‘absolute right’ to shut down the southern border; the ‘absolute right’ to fire special counsel Robert Mueller; the ‘absolute right’ to sign an executive order removing the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship provision; the ‘absolute right’ to contrive a national emergency to deny Congress the power of the purse; the ‘absolute right’ to order U.S. businesses out of China; the ‘absolute right’ to release apparent spy-satellite imagery of Iran; and, most recently, the ‘absolute right’ to ask other countries to furnish evidence that Joe Biden is corrupt.

“Kellyanne Conway asserted Trump’s ‘absolute right’ to give his son-in-law a security clearance over security professionals’ objections. White House counsel Pat Cipollone said current and former White House officials are ‘absolutely immune’ from testifying before Congress. As others have noted, Trump has repeatedly said the Constitution’s Article II empowers him ‘to do whatever I want’ and bestows on him ‘all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.’”

“Forget the ‘Border Crisis’—It is Trump’s Shutdown that’s Made us less Safe,” Michael H. Fuchs, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/20/forget-the-border-crisis-it-is-trumps-shutdown- thats-made-us-less-safe

“The Shutdown has exposed the disaster that is Trumponomics,” Robert Reich, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/20/government-shutdown-trump-tax-cuts- trumponomics

Ron Chernow, “Hamilton pushed for impeachment powers. Trump is what he had in mind,” washingtonpost.com “There seems little doubt, given his writings on the presidency, that Hamilton would have been aghast at Trump’s behavior and appalled by his invitation to foreign actors to meddle in our elections. As a result, he would most certainly have endorsed the current impeachment inquiry. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Trump embodies Hamilton’s worst fears about the kind of person who might someday head the government….

“Unlike Thomas Jefferson, with his sunny faith in the common sense of the people, Hamilton emphasized their ‘turbulent and changing‘ nature and worried about a ‘restless’ and ‘daring usurper’ who would excite the ‘jealousies and apprehensions’ of his followers….

“From the outset, Hamilton feared an unholy trinity of traits in a future president — ambition, avarice and vanity. ‘When avarice takes the lead in a State, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall,’ he wrote as early as the Revolutionary War. He dreaded most the advent of a populist demagogue who would profess friendship for the people and pander to their prejudices while secretly betraying them. Such a false prophet would foment political frenzy and try to feed off the confusion….

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“‘History will teach us that . . . of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants’...

“‘When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ Given the way Trump has broadcast suspicions about the CIA, the FBI, the diplomatic corps, senior civil servants and the ‘deep state,’ Hamilton’s warning about those who would seek to discredit the government as prelude to a possible autocracy seems prophetic.”

“Donald Trump and his Team of Morons,” Paul Krugman, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/government-shutdown-trump.html

“’It Violates the Law:’ Tillerson Vents about having to Repeatedly Push Back against Trump,” Caitlyn Oprysko, politico.com https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/07/tillerson-spills-on-trump-1048884

Robert Reich, “Donald Trump: xenophobe in public, international mobster in private,” theguardian.com “Trump never divested from his real estate business, and the Trump Towers Istanbul is the Trump Organization’s first and only office and residential building in Europe. Businesses linked to the Turkish government are also major patrons of the Trump Organization….

“...even as Trump spews conspiracy theories about the Biden family, his own children are openly profiting from foreign deals. Eric and Don Jr have projects in the works in Ireland, India, Indonesia, Uruguay, Turkey and the Philippines.”

“Trump must be a Russian Agent. The Alternative is too Awful,” Garrett M. Graffiti, wired.com https://www.wired.com/story/president-trump-mueller-russia-agent-putin/

“A Twenty-first Century Incredibility Chasm: Life in the United States of Trump,” Rebecca Gordon, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176514/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_confronting_%22alternativ e_facts%22/#more

Oliver Milman, “Trump administration's war on science has hit 'crisis point', experts warn,” theguardian.com “The treatment of science by the Trump administration has hit a ‘crisis point’ where research findings are manipulated for political gain, special interests are given improper influence and scientists are targeted for ideological reasons, a nonpartisan taskforce of former government officials has warned.

“Safeguards meant to ensure that government research is objective and fully available to the public have been ‘steadily weakening’ under recent administrations and are now at a nadir under Trump, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Task Force on Rule of Law and Democracy.

“There are now ‘almost weekly violations’ of previously cherished norms, the report states, with the current administration attempting “not only to politicize scientific and technical

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research on a range of topics, but also, at times, to undermine the value of objective facts themselves”....

“‘Right now, any finding that seems to be restricting business, especially the energy industry, appears to be destined for elimination…’”

“All Signs Point the Same Way: Vladimir Putin has Compromising Information on Donald Trump Tom Nichols, usatoday.com https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/01/13/mounting-evidence-trump-fears-putin- compromising-information-column/2564892002/

“Trump got Rich by Screwing over Workers—Of course He’s Doing it again as President,” John Nichols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-government-shutdown-screwing-workers/

Phillip Rucker and Robert Costa, “‘A presidency of one’: Key federal agencies increasingly compelled to benefit Trump,” washingtonpost.com “As the impeachment drama has unfolded over the past week, a series of disclosures has illuminated President Trump’s command over key federal agencies, revealing how he has compelled them to pursue his personal and political goals, investigate his enemies and lend legitimacy to his theories about the 2016 election.

“The Justice Department has prioritized a probe that the president hopes will discredit a finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win….

“But taken together, they illustrate the sweeping reach of Trump’s power and the culture he has spawned inside the government. The president’s personal concerns have become priorities of departments that traditionally have operated with some degree of political independence from the White House — and their leaders are engaging their boss’s obsessions….

“‘I’m not sure there are many, if any, left who view as their responsibility trying to help educate, moderate, enlighten and persuade — or even advise in many cases,’ the former senior official said. ‘There’s a new ethos: This is a presidency of one.’

“‘It’s Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged,’ this official added. ‘He continues to go further and further and further, and now I don’t think there’s anybody telling him, ‘No.’”

“Trump’s moves represent a fundamental reorientation of American democracy, said Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of ‘On Tyranny,’ a resistance guide to what he describes as America’s turn toward authoritarianism.

“‘Rather than having the boring system we take for granted, where you have laws based on facts, instead you have a personality who makes up his own reality,’ Snyder said. ‘At first, that reality is just confusing and seems to gum up the works, but after a while, the leader starts to draw people into that reality by making them defend it or making them prove it. This is what’s happening here.’”

Tom MacCarthy, “Whistleblower report reveals how far Trump’s dubious ethics have spread,” theguardian.com “What appears to have so alarmed career government ethics and oversight officials, however, is the extent to which the now released complaint reveals that Trump’s ethical rot, as they perceive it, has spread beyond the Oval Office, beyond the White House, beyond the cabinet and through the government….

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“Trump used to have a safe for hush money deals he made with women that was kept by a friend who published the National Enquirer. The complaint indicates that that same arrangement is still in effect, only now the deals have to do with Trump’s political enemies, and the safe is the one they usually use to keep records for things like flying five helicopters into Pakistan at midnight.

“The overriding sense is there were a lot of people involved in a scheme by the president to both tamper in an upcoming election and to prosecute political opponents, with the help of a foreign government, secured in part by holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in aid previously appropriated by Congress….

“The complaint indicates knowledge of guilt on the part of officials involved, describing a ‘discussion ongoing’ with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain’.

“That knowledge of guilt appears to have endured for months.”

“Mike Pence Struggles to Defend Trump’s Lie that Past Presidents Support his Border Wall,” Marina Fang, huffingtonpost.com https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mike-pence-trump-border-wall- lie_us_5c34972de4b05d4e96bc6926

“A Crisis of Trump’s Own Making,” Jim Wallis, sojo.com https://sojo.net/articles/crisis-trumps-own-making

Frank Bruno, "Why a Trump Impeachment Should Terrify You," nytimes.com “President Trump deserves to be impeached. But the prospect terrifies me, and it should terrify you, too.

“That’s not to say that it’s the wrong move. Arguably, it’s the only move, at least in terms of fidelity to the Constitution and to basic decency. From the moment that Trump stepped into the office of the presidency, he has degraded it — with words that a president has no business speaking (or tweeting); with ceaseless lies; with infantile and often unhinged behavior; with raging conflicts of interest; with managerial ineptitude; with a rapacious ego that’s never sated; and with foreign dealings that compromise America’s values, independence and interests. How can principled lawmakers not tell him, in the most emphatic manner available, that enough is enough?...

“Impeachment should terrify you because it would mean a continued, relentless, overwhelming focus on Trump’s lawlessness, antics, fictions and inane tweets. He would win in the short term — and all Americans would lose — because as long as most of the oxygen in Washington is consumed by the ghastly carnival of this barker, there’s too little left for the nation’s very real problems and for scrutiny of his substantive inadequacy in addressing them….

“Meanwhile, Trump. How vulnerable will drawn-out impeachment proceedings make him feel? How impotent? How desperate? To flex his power, vent his fury or distract the audience, what would he do? He’s untethered by scruple. He’s capable of anything. Maybe it’s not just a culture war that he’d whip up. Maybe it’s the real thing.”

Jonathan Chait, “The Ukraine Scandal Is Not One Phone Call. It’s a Massive Plot,” nymag.com “On July 25, President Trump held a phone call in which he repeatedly leaned on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and Paul Manafort’s prosecutors. The

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episode is so blatantly inappropriate even Trump’s most fervent apologists are, with a few exceptions, having trouble defending it. What they are trying to do, instead, is define this phone call as the entire scandal. Trump emphasizes that he ‘didn’t specifically mention the explicit quid pro quo’ of military aid in return for the investigation.

“That is true, as far as it goes. The quid pro quo in the call, though perfectly apparent, is mostly implicit. But the real trick in Trump’s defense is framing the call as the entire scandal. The scandal is much more than that. The call is a snapshot, a moment in time in a months-long campaign that put American policy toward Ukraine at the disposal of Trump’s personal interests and reelection campaign.”

“Border Wall Speech: Trump is Losing the Macho Game of Staring Himself Down in the Mirror,” Richard Wolffe, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/09/border-wall-speech-trump-is-losing-the- macho-game-of-staring-himself-down-in-the-mirror

“It's Going to Get Worse in America Before It Gets Better. But 2019 Is an Opportunity,” Jim Wallis, sojo.com https://sojo.net/articles/its-going-get-worse-america-it-gets-better-2019-opportunity

E. J. Dionne, “Why Trump gets away with everything,” washingtonpost.com “Here we have a whistleblower from the intelligence community who, as The Post reported, found a ‘promise’ that President Trump made to a foreign leader ‘so alarming’ that the ‘official who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community.’

“If what Trump did is entirely innocent, you’d assume the White House would want everything to become public so the president could be cleared of suspicion....

“So why not share all the information available with the House Intelligence Committee? If Trump’s accuser is some kind of ‘partisan,’ why wouldn’t the president want the world — or at least Congress — to know his basis for saying so?

“Instead, the White House and Justice Department are stonewalling, thus ripping apart systems of accountability that were put in place to prevent the abuse of the substantial powers we have given our intelligence services. This is part of a larger undertaking by Trump and his minions to block Congress from receiving information or hearing from witnesses, which is part of Congress’s normal and constitutionally sanctioned work of keeping an eye on the executive branch….

“Now, the GOP is going along with a president whose lawyers — in a court filing trying to block the Manhattan district attorney from getting Trump’s tax returns — are asserting that ‘a sitting President of the United States is not ‘subject to the criminal process’ while he is in office.’ It is a sweeping and astonishing assertion that a president is above the law as long as he sits in the White House, no matter which level of government might be investigating him.”

“Trump Lies to Troops’ Faces about Pay Raise He Gave them,” Kevin Drum, motherjones.com https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/12/trump-lies-to-troops-faces-about-pay-raise-he-gave- them/

“Creeping Fascism no Problem for Trump’s Durable Base,” Paul Street, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/creeping-fascism-isnt-a-problem-for-trumps-durable-base/

Greg Sargent, “As whistleblower scandal deepens, Trump bets on the coverup working,” washingtonpost.com

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“Trump just lashed out on Twitter against Rep. Adam Schiff, ridiculing him for trying to determine the facts of the whistleblower’s complaint, and scoffing at the idea that there was anything wrong with his conversation with the foreign leader.

“In so doing, Trump brashly flaunted his ability to act with total impunity. That’s because the effort by Trump’s Justice Department and Director of National Intelligence to keep the whistleblower’s complaint buried makes it impossible for Congress to actually evaluate whether there was anything wrong with the conversation or not.

“Convenient, isn’t it?

“Trump is openly advertising his contempt for the very notion that Congress might want to carry out its role in holding the executive accountable — secure in the knowledge that his top officials will corruptly keep all the facts of the situation away from Congress, making actual evaluation of his conduct impossible. In sum, Trump is basically giving our political system the middle finger.”

“In Trump’s America, It’s Important to Remember: This Isn’t Normal,” Michael H. Fuchs, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/30/trump-america-this-isnt-normal

“Keep Your Eye on the Narcissist: Donald Trump’s Latest Antics are Driven by Fear of Robert Mueller,” James Risen, theintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2018/12/22/keep-your-eyes-on-the-narcissist-donald-trumps-latest-antics-are- driven-by-fear-of-robert-mueller/

Jennifer Rubin, “It was chaos, and then a real lawyer showed up, washingpost.com “Corey Lewandowski sneered and dodged and raised phony privileges when questioned by members of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. He did, however, make a fatal error (fatal to President Trump, that is) when he repeatedly said the White House had instructed him not to answer questions.

“After the hearing, Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told CNN: ‘Article 3 of Nixon’s impeachment was obstruction of Congress, refusing to obey defined congressional subpoenas, pleading imaginary privileges. And obviously that’s what the president has been doing.’ In short, Lewandowski’s own conduct provided evidence of obstruction.

“’It Violates the Law’: Tillerson Vents about having to Repeatedly Push Back against Trump,” Caitlynn Oprysko, politico.com https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/07/tillerson-spills-on-trump-1048884

“Lies, Damn Lies, and Post-truth,” Lee McIntyre, theconversation.com https://theconversation.com/lies-damn-lies-and-post-truth-106049

Greg Sargent, “Trump’s war on truth just got a lot more cult-like,” washingtonpost.com “I’ve already documented numerous examples in which government officials wheeled into action to make Trump’s lies and obsessions into truths, in some cases putting out ‘official’ information explicitly shaped to do so.

“What’s more, they have regularly disregarded or suppressed info generated within the government when it undermined the stated rationales of preconceived policy decisions, such as slashing refugee flows and banning people from majority-Muslim nations.

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“We keep discussing these things as the latest examples of Trump’s ‘post-truth presidency.’ But what also deserves mention here is the kind of deep, seething contempt all this shows for the voters, and really for democracy and governing — indeed, for the very notions of good-faith voter deliberation and official decision-making on which those things rely.

“Everything must always be pressed into service — even, it appears, to the detriment of the political needs of down-ballot candidates in Trump’s own party — for the single highest good of propping up the Cult of Trump.”

“Trump Says Prince Role in Khashoggi Death may Never be Known,” Jennifer Jacobs, Bloomberg.com https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-18/trump-says-u-s-may-never-know-prince-s-role-in- khashoggi-death?srnd=premium

“Trump’s Attack on Mueller is about one thing: Fear,” Timothy L. O’Brian, Bloomberg.com https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-15/trump-tweets-against-mueller-he-s-running- scared

Peter Wagner, Trump Is Not Well, theatlantic.com “But if a clinical diagnosis is beyond my own expertise, Trump’s psychological impairments are obvious to all who are not willfully blind. On a daily basis we see the president’s chaotic, unstable mind on display. Are we supposed to ignore that?

“An analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car….

“Even now, almost a thousand days into his presidency, the latest Trump outrage elicits shock and disbelief in people. The reaction is, ‘Can you believe he said that and did this?’

“To which my response is, ‘Why are you surprised?’ It’s a shock only if the assumption is that we’re dealing with a psychologically normal human being. We’re not. Trump is profoundly compromised, acting just as you would imagine a person with a disordered personality would. Many Americans haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that we elected as president a man who is deeply damaged, an emotional misfit….

“The office is too powerful, and the consequences are too dangerous, to allow a person to become president who views morality only through the prism of whether an action advances his own narrow interests, his own distorted desires, his own twisted impulses. When an individual comes to believe his interests and those of the nation he leads are one and the same, it opens the door to all sorts of moral and constitutional devilry.”

“In Pardoning Saudi Arabia, Trump Gives Guidance to Autocrats,” Mazzetti and Hubbard, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/us/politics/trump-khashoggi-statement.html

“Trump Defends Saudi Arabia’s Denial about the Planning of Khashoggi’s Death,” Dawsey, Harris, and DeYoung, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-defends-saudia-arabias-denial-about-the-planning-of- khashoggis-death/2018/11/20/b64d2cc6-eceb-11e8-9236- bb94154151d2_story.html?utm_term=.15973ceeb3e4

Greg Sargent, “Behind Trump’s craziness, there’s always corruption. Here’s the latest,” washingtonpost.com “The border wall that President Trump has long dreamed of building has become a symbol of many things about his presidency: his megalomania; his demagoguery about desperate

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migrants; his contempt for empirical, reality-based governing; his prioritizing of the base’s prejudices and fantasies above all else.

“Soon enough, Trump’s wall might become an overarching symbol of his presidency’s seemingly bottomless corruption, too….

“Now that we see how urgent Trump is about getting his wall built in time for reelection, the fact that he’s pressuring an agency to grant this contract shows he’s trying to hook up a politically connected crony while also perverting the governing process to stick to a political timetable — all to give his crowds something to chant about at his reelection rallies….

“Trump has responded by aggressively pushing this company to officials with the Army Corps and Homeland Security Department. As The Post reports, this has alarmed officials who rightly see it as grossly improper.

“Add to this the fact that Trump is dangling pardons to officials to get the wall built faster — joke or not — and behind the facade of craziness, you once again find astonishing levels of corruption and contempt for normal governing practices.”

“I Went on a Fast from Trump. Felt Great. I Get it Now. He’s a Loser,” Bradley Burston, haaretz.com https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-i-went-on-a-fast-from-trump-felt-great-i-get-it-now-he-s-a- loser-1.6652901

“Say Goodbye to the Guardrails of Governance,” John Feffer, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176471/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_say_goodbye_to_the_guardrails_ of_governance/#more

“Poll: Countries Trust Xi and Putin More than Trump,” Dave Lawler, axios.com https://www.axios.com/trump-approval-around-world-putin-xi-merkel-acda7364-a28f-4f8d-b05d- a94f81757255.html

Greg Sargent, “Behind Trump’s craziness, there’s always corruption. Here’s the latest,” washingtonpost.com “The border wall that President Trump has long dreamed of building has become a symbol of many things about his presidency: his megalomania; his demagoguery about desperate migrants; his contempt for empirical, reality-based governing; his prioritizing of the base’s prejudices and fantasies above all else.

“Soon enough, Trump’s wall might become an overarching symbol of his presidency’s seemingly bottomless corruption, too.”

“The American Civil War Didn’t End. And Trump is a Confederate President,” Rebecca Solnit, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/04/the-american-civil-war-didnt-end-and-trump- is-a-confederate-president

“Donald Trump Borrows from the Old Tricks of Fascism,” Timothy Snyder, thenation.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/30/trump-borrows-tricks-of-fascism-pittsburgh

David Smith, “'A simple pattern': how Trump claims victory when facts suggest otherwise,” theguardian.com “The strange saga of the US-Mexico trade war that never was serves up the latest example of Trump’s reality-television presidency. Time and again he has manufactured crises, set deadlines, made threats, pulled back from the brink and claimed victory while keeping the details notoriously vague.

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“The cycle of razzle-dazzle enables Trump to galvanise his support base, selling himself as a man of action, and keeps the media mesmerised while his government pushes reforms or slashes regulations on the quiet. When the smoke clears, however, not much of substance has really changed.

“‘It’s a pretty simple pattern,’ the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, told the Senate on Monday. ‘The president stakes out a maximalist position but never clearly defines his objectives. That way, after he backs himself into a corner, he can use a deal of any kind, even if it’s merely a fig leaf, to justify retreating from whatever misguided policy he’s threatened. Then he declares victory, having done little to nothing to solve the underlying problem.’”

“AP Fact Check: Did Trump Think Mail Bombs were Liberal Plot?” Yen and Woodward, apnews.com https://apnews.com/735015d1b9494e7cb123c69948a5aa8a

“Trump’s Strategy of Fear,” Jim Wallis, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/trumps-strategy-fear

Jonathan Freedland, “Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. It’s not enough just to laugh at him,” theguardian.com “Maybe we’re too busy laughing to see it. Perhaps it’s the jokes and memes that Donald Trump generates in abundance, the gift that keeps on giving, that blinds us to a chilling fact that we’d rather not face. Put simply, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation is behaving like an authoritarian dictator, one who threatens democracy in his own country and far beyond….

“Draw up a checklist of the semiotics of dictatorship and Trump ticks every one….

“...children, separated from their parents, who are caged in detention camps on America’s southern border. Accounts by lawyers and doctors who were allowed brief visits to these hellish places are almost unbearable to read: children deprived of sleep, denied access to blankets or mattresses, not allowed to wash their hands or brush their teeth; toddlers left alone on cold, hard floors, so traumatised they sit in stunned, tearless silence. I’m especially haunted by the report of ‘a suicidal four-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches’.

“This too is what dictators do: demonising a group – in this case, migrants – as an alien threat, an army of invaders, so intensely and for so long that eventually any fate, no matter how brutal or inhumane, seems deserved, even when it is inflicted on that group’s youngest and most vulnerable members. Breaking up families, caging children in hot, fetid, disease-ridden camps – this is what dictators do.”

“’In the Service of Whim:’ Officials Scramble to Make Trump’s False Assertions Real,” Rucker and Parker, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-the-service-of-whim-officials-scramble-to-make-trumps-false- assertions-real/2018/10/23/0c271586-d6de-11e8-83a2- d1c3da28d6b6_story.html?utm_term=.cd5db4392054

“As Trump Cozies up to Saudi Arabia, the Rule of Law Collapses Further,” Richard Wolffe, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/oct/18/as-trump-cozies-up-to-saudi-arabia- the-rule-of-law-collapses-further

Paul Wideman, “No institution of government is safe from Trump’s corrupting influence,” theguardian.com

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“Throughout his career, Donald Trump gathered around himself an extraordinary number of grifters and crooks, who plainly saw in him both a kindred spirit and a vehicle for their own corrupt ambitions. Some of them are in jail right now.

“But there’s another kind of corruption Trump has brought to Washington, one that extends even to those who are not simply trying to use their association with government to get rich. It’s a moral and institutional corruption, stretching its tentacles through every agency Trump can enlist to protect himself from accountability and public scrutiny.

“In many agencies, Trump has sought to drive nonpartisan public servants out of government so that only cronies and hacks will remain. In other cases, the political leadership of the agency makes clear to everyone in it that whatever they used to think their mission was, now they have one priority above all others: Protect Trump.”

“How Trump Bobs and Weaves to Avoid the Truth,” Glenn Kessler, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/16/how-trump-bobs-weaves-avoid- truth/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.32357e1f63a4

“The Crisis in the White House is Heading for Denouement,” Pat Perriello, rsronline.org https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/ncr-today/crisis-white-house-heading-denouement

Darren Samuelsohn and Natasha Bertrand, “Trump smashed months of FBI work to thwart election interference,” politico.com “President Trump has publicly invited foreign powers to interfere in the 2020 election without fear of being exposed. This denigrates, if not directly countermands, the FBI director’s direction to report such contacts and confirmed the gravamen of the informal accusation of ‘collusion’— working with a foreign power. (Step one is the invitation.) This is a statement of intent, what he will do if allowed to remain in office.

“On this alone, one could bring an article of impeachment, and perhaps at some point the House will feel emboldened to do so.”

“Donald Trump’s Global Insignificance is about to be Exposed,” Brett Bruen, cnn.com https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/21/opinions/trump-global-insignificance-unga-opinion-intl/index.html

“Donald Trump is Actively Obstructing Justice,” John Nichols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-is-actively-obstructing-justice/

“If Collusion is in the Eye of the Beholder…” Tom Tomorrow, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/if-collusion-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/

Joan Walsh, “We are no Longer a Nation of Laws,” thenation.com “I don’t give a damn about the plight of outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. I don’t believe in hell, but if there is one, there must be a special section reserved for those who implement cruel policies…

“… spare me her attempts to depict herself as some kind of whistle-blower, now calling the president ‘unhinged’—as though he’d ever been ‘hinged,’ especially in the four years since he began his racist run for president. Reportedly, she also thought Santa Monica storm trooper Stephen Miller ‘was an egomaniacal lunatic who hated brown people.’ Tell us something we didn’t know, Kirstjen….

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“The most important piece of news in Monday’s onslaught was not Nielsen’s departure, or that of Secret Service director Randolph Alles (whom Trump reportedly calls “Dumbo,” as he has large ears). Yes, reports of a coming purge of Homeland Security, driven by Miller, are terrifying. But even more alarming, CNN revealed yesterday that on his border visit last Friday, Trump told Border Patrol agents to ignore the law.

“This is a terrifying new low, for the president and the country. Yet we seem to have lost our capacity for appropriate outrage. The commander in chief instructed law-enforcement officers to break the law. Let that sink in a moment….

“Republicans won’t do anything about Trump’s lawlessness, but House Democrats must…. the president’s attempts to flout immigration law deserve more outrage and scrutiny….

“They also need to summon Nielsen and other DHS officials, past and present, to find out how the president is breaking other laws. Our self-styled ‘law and order’ president, who campaigned promising to enforce immigration laws, has turned lawless. If Congress does nothing, we are no longer be a nation of laws.”

“Can Donald Trump Unite the Word (against him)?” Dilip Hero, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176461/

“The Day that Blew Giant Cannon Holes through Trump’s Already Listing Ship,” Martin Longman, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/08/21/today-blew-giant-cannon-holes-through-trumps-already- listing-ship/

Jonathan Greenberg, “Saving face: How Donald Trump silenced the people who could expose his business failures,” washingtonpost.com “I turned up three never-before-published letters from Trump to Forbes from 1989, in which he claimed to be worth $3.7 billion. We now know that he reported losses of about $100 million that year and that he was treading near insolvency. Then I started to contact other people who had collided with Trump in those years. Journalists told me how he’d tried to block their reporting on his empire — by making up ethical scandals about them, furnishing fake documents and, in one case, threatening to expose the private life of a closeted media executive. Wall Street analysts witnessed a campaign of intimidation that began when Trump got one of them fired for (correctly) doubting his casinos’ ability to pay off their debts.

“Even while he was suffering tremendous financial setbacks — and precisely because he was suffering those setbacks — these efforts show Trump in the desperate act of spinning a mythology about himself (rich) that would sweep aside the facts (broke). And he did it by imperiling the livelihood of his doubters, silencing them and inducing a chilling effect both in the press and among the very people who are supposed to protect investors from terrible gambles like Trump’s businesses.”

“Michael Cohen, Paul Manifort, and the Idiotic Corruption of Trump Inc,” Joel Mathis, theweek.com http://theweek.com/articles/791527/michael-cohen-paul-manafort-idiotic-corruption-trump

“‘Why Can’t the U.S. just simply Invade?’ Officials Say Trump Pushed U.S. Military Overthrow in Venezuela,” Jon Queally, truthout.org https://truthout.org/articles/why-cant-the-us-just-simply-invade-officials-say-trump-pushed-us-military- overthrow-in-venezuela/

“How Putin Courted the Groups that Became Trump’s Base,” Nancy Letourneau, washingtonmonthly.com

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https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/12/how-putin-courted-the-groups-that-became-trumps-base/

Jeet Heer, “Incoherence Could Lead to War,” thenation.com “... the real key to Trump’s foreign policy is neither neo-isolationism nor subservience to Vladimir Putin but rather belligerent incoherence. As befits the man who styles himself the master of ‘the art of the deal,’ Trump has an excessive faith in his own ability to glad-hand his way through thorny disputes with other power players. But Pompeo and Bolton have their own agenda, which boils down to shoring up American global hegemony by maximum aggression. The combination of Trump’s desire to be a wheeler-dealer on the world stage and the Pompeo/Bolton penchant for throwing America’s weight around has produced a foreign policy that is singularly confused, with a constant sending of mixed signals that could easily provoke conflict….

“But if Trump hoped to use Bolton and Pompeo as pit bulls to scare other nations to the negotiation table, he quickly discovered that he doesn’t seem to have any way of controlling these wild animals. With his own tendency towards reckless rhetoric and painfully evident lack of policy knowledge, Trump lacks the skill to convincingly present himself as the reasonable alternative to anything.

“Does it even make sense to look for a devious design underwriting Trump’s foreign policy? Isn’t it more likely that the chaos we see on the surface is all there is? That in fact Trump is no mastermind, but a man of inchoate and barely articulate impulses?”

“This Mafia Style of Government Makes Trump a Role Model for all Autocrats,” Jonathan Freedland, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/18/mafia-style-government-trump-role-autocrats

“U.S. Officials Scrambled Behind the Scenes to Shield NATO Deal from Trump,” Cooper and Barnes, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/us/politics/nato-summit-trump.html

Richard Wolfe, “Trump's toadyism to Saudi Arabia: a new moral low,” theguardian.com “And then there was the interview with NBC News, where he readily admitted that he puts a higher value on arms deals with Saudi Arabia than on American values like democracy and human rights. Totally making America great again….

“To be fair, the Trump administration is hardly the first to overlook every human rights abuse by the Saudi regime in the single-minded pursuit of oil, money and power. Previous presidents and prime ministers were also surprisingly capable of ignoring the kingdom’s oppression of women and its love of state-sanctioned death by beheading.

“In fact, the Saudis decapitated 37 men just a few weeks ago, most of them minority Shia Muslims who were denied a fair trial. Some of them were children at the time of their sentencing.”

“The Useful Idiocy of Donald Trump,” Chris Hedges, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-useful-idiocy-of-donald-trump/

“Trump has Built a Pyramid Scheme of Public Fraud. It’s a Tax-payer Backed Cash Grab,” Mindy Finn, usatoday.com https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/08/03/donald-trump-taxpayer-cash-grab-unprecedented- corruption-column/871902002/

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“Trump Approvingly Tweets Video of his Rally Crowd Harassing a Journalist,” Zach Beauchamp, vox.com https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/1/17639110/trump-tampa-rally-cnn-jim-acosta

Michael Gerson, “Trump isn’t just speaking lies. He’s inviting loyalists to live in his own political reality, washingtonpost.com “Sometimes Trump’s self-serving deceptions are hard for followers to keep straight. The Mueller report, for example, was both dismissed as the illegitimate work of Democratic agents and embraced as complete vindication on matters of collusion and obstruction. Even though the explanations are inconsistent, they are unified by Trump’s broader purpose: the bending of reality to serve his self-perception.

“Some kind of personal pathology seems to be at work. Trump’s epistemology is not so much relativistic as solipsistic. He has a bottomless need to project himself as wealthier, stronger, smarter and better than he actually is. This is a sign, not of strength, but of psychological fragility. Desperation for the illusion of mastery is the evidence of deep brokenness. It indicates a hunger for affirmation that reality will never fill. This encourages both self-delusion and the spinning of elaborate, self-serving lies.

“Why should these attributes bother us in a president? Because narcissism is not merely a stronger form of personal ambition. It is a different and distorted way of perceiving the world. Part of psychological wholeness — and of responsible political leadership — is the ability to consider reality from someone else’s perspective. But Trump seems incapable of escaping the small, dark cell of his own immediate needs and desires….

“And Trump appears to accept no moral standards external to his interests. Every principle or truth is judged in relation to the welfare of his person. There is apparently nothing he won’t say to maintain the mythology that he is the winningest winner there ever was or will be.”

“What my Escape from Hitler’s Germany Taught me about Trump’s America,” Henry siegman, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/escape-hitlers-germany-taught-trumps-america/

“The Startling Revelation from Pompeo Hearing,” Errol Louis, cnn.com https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/26/opinions/the-shocking-revelation-from-pompeo-hearing-errol- louis/index.html

Michael Gerson, “Trump isn’t just speaking lies. He’s inviting loyalists to live in his own political reality, washingtonpost.com “Trump is not only speaking a series of lies. He is inviting millions of loyalists to live in a political reality conjured by his deceptions. Any news critical of him is ‘fake.’ Any agitprop that supports him — even by the purveyors of conspiracy theories — is to be believed. And any election he might lose is fraudulent.

“Not long ago, I sat on a plane next to a knowledgeable and articulate Trump supporter. The talk turned to the Mueller report, and I mentioned that Robert Mueller was awarded the Bronze Star for his bravery in Vietnam. ‘How do you know that?’ snapped my conversation partner. I sputtered something about reading it in multiple, reliable sources. She remained unconvinced.

“How is any political conversation or policy discussion possible when citizens inhabit separate universes of truth and meaning? This is Trump’s most dangerous innovation: epistemology as cult of personality.”

“As a Conservative, I Despair at Republicans Support for Trump. His Vision is not Conservatism,” Charles J. Sykes, theguardian.com

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/22/conservative-despair-republicans-trump

“Russiagate is Far Wider than Trump and his Inner Circle,” David Kleon, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-far-wider-trump-inner-circle/

Paul Widman, “Trump has another moment right out of ‘1984’, washingtonpost.com “‘In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,’ said one immigration attorney.

“This is what’s happening in Trump’s government. But he is now claiming that it was all a dream, something you imagined but never actually occurred…

“This is Trump’s worst kind of lie, worse than the numbers he makes up, or the idiotic hyperbole, or the insistence that any information he doesn’t like is ‘fake news.’ In the Trump presidency’s catalogue of horrors, this kind of attempt to convince all of us not to believe what has been in front of our eyes for months or years will rank high….

“It brings to mind George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, is forced to say that his torturer, O’Brien, is holding up five fingers when in fact he’s holding up only four. What the regime demands of Smith is not only that he say there are five fingers but also that he believe it, despite what his eyes tell him. And with enough torture, it begins to work:

“But there had been a moment — he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps — of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed.

“That moment is what Trump is trying to force us into, when we finally say to him, “Yes, there were five fingers.”

“Trump Doubles Down on Russia. The Spies Shake their Heads in Disbelief,” Barnes, Schmidt, Benner, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/us/politics/trump-national-security-russia.html

“Americans Must Deal with Donald Trump: The First Rogue President,” Simon Tisdall, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/17/donald-trump-rogue-president-vladimir-putin- us-peace

“From the Start Trump has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered,” Sanger and Rosenberg, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/world/europe/trump-intelligence-russian-election-meddling-.html

Yoi Appelbaum, “Impeach Donald Trump, theatlantic.com “The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency….

“The electorate passes judgment on its presidents and their shortcomings every four years. But the Framers were concerned that a president could abuse his authority in ways that would undermine the democratic process and that could not wait to be addressed. So they created a mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic. This mechanism is impeachment.

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“Trump’s actions during his first two years in office clearly meet, and exceed, the criteria to trigger this fail-safe….

“It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses.”

“Helsinki was… Clarifying,” Jim Wallis, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/helsinki-was-clarifying

“Surrender Summit: Roundup,” Kevin Drum, motherjones.com https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/07/surrender-summit-roundup/

“’How Bad was that?’ Even Trump’s Aids Question Damage Done,” Liptak, Zeleny, and Collins, cnn.com https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/16/politics/donald-trump-helsinki-how-bad-was-that/index.html

Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Caligula “It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.”

Ellie Mystal, “How Does Donald Trump Keep Getting Away With It?” thenation.com “Trump, his family, and his sycophants get help from the Russians (whether willfully or not) to influence our elections; obstruct justice; engage in corrupt practices; violate constitutional principles; intimidate witnesses; ignore Congress; and lie as if ‘Falsehood’ was their native tongue. And yet they seem to get away with all of it.

“Nobody stops them. Yes, the Republican Party has shown itself to be a collection of craven hypocrites, so utterly debased from wallowing around in Trump’s filth that they can’t even remember what decency smells like. But if you’ve been paying attention, Republicans have always been like this….

“When confronted with clear evidence that President Trump used every tool in his arsenal to try to obstruct justice, Mueller decided that the normal thing to do was: to not charge or recommend charges against the president, and instead submit his report to Trump’s handpicked guard dog masquerading as an attorney general. What did Mueller think was going to happen? Justice? These people are criminals—how many times do we have to be shocked by their willingness to take lawless action?”

“Rod Rosenstein for President,” Ruth Markus, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/07/14/rod-rosenstein-for- president/?utm_term=.9d88de57f42f

“Let’s Drop the Euphemisms: Donald Trump is a Racist President,” Richard Wolffe, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/13/donald-trump-immigration-racism-uk-visit

Eugene Robinson, “If Trump doesn’t warrant impeachment, who does?” washingtonpost.com “What would a president have to do, hypothetically, to get this Congress to impeach him?

“Obstruct a Justice Department investigation, perhaps? No, apparently that’s not enough. What about playing footsie with a hostile foreign power? Abusing his office to settle personal grievances? Using instruments of the state, including the justice system, to attack his perceived political opponents? Aligning the nation with murderous foreign dictators while forsaking democracy and human rights? Violating campaign-finance laws with disguised hush-money

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payments to alleged paramours? Giving aid and comfort to neo-Nazis and white supremacists? Defying requests and subpoenas from congressional committees charged with oversight? Refusing to protect our electoral system from malign foreign interference? Cruelly ripping young children away from their asylum-seeking parents? Lying constantly and shamelessly to the American people, to the point where not a single word he says or writes can be believed?

“President Trump has done all of this and more. If he doesn’t warrant the opening of an impeachment inquiry, what president ever would?

“….there’s one question that nags me: If the impeachment clause of the Constitution wasn’t written for a president like Trump, then why is it there?”

Paul Rosenzweig, “Trump Fails the Betty Currie Test, theatlantic.com “...some, such as Barr, have argued that the obstruction case against Trump is weak because there was no underlying criminal behavior. If, they argue, there was no criminal conspiracy in the contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians, then there is no obstruction in covering up the noncrime.

“While it is true that the absence of an underlying crime makes proving a corrupt motive harder for a prosecutor, it is absolutely clear under the law that one can obstruct justice out of other motives, such as fear of embarrassment or political condemnation.

“And that’s exactly what happened with Clinton—his underlying actions involved a sexual relationship with an intern that was, by itself, exceedingly unsavory, but it wasn’t criminal. I was of the view then, and remain of the view now, that this should not matter. Quite the contrary: Respect for the rule of law means respect for, and adherence to, the processes of law. It means not lying and not suborning others to lie for you. And that obligation falls, in my judgment, even more strongly on the president, who takes an oath to uphold the law….

“I could go on. In the end, though, the comparison to Clinton’s investigation and impeachment does Trump no favors. If you continue to think that Clinton was derelict in his actions, violative of his oath of office, and deserving of condemnation for his criminal activity, as I do, you can say no less about Trump.”

“We are in a Linguistic Emergency when it Comes to Trump,” Lili Loufbourrow, slate.com https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/trump-wants-to-be-called-tough.html

“Trump and Truth: Why the Media are Losing the Battle,” Linda Feldmann, csmonitor.com https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/0625/Trump-and-truth-Why-the-media-are-losing-the- battle

“Dear Europe, If you Want to Stop Trump, Sanction his Companies,” Keith Ellison, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/22/europe-trump-sanction-companies

Linda Feldmann, “‘He will eat a half-truth teller alive’: Marianne Williamson takes on Trump,” csmonitor.com “‘He will eat a half-truth teller alive in this election. And the Democrats have been telling half- truths for decades now, ever since they too started playing footsie under the table with the same corporate forces that are the problem.’”

“Trump Uses Language of Exterminators in Attack on ‘Illegal Immigrants,” Ed. Kilgore, nymag.com http://nymag.com.mevn.net/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/trump-uses-language-of-exterminators-about- immigrants.html

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“The Dystopia is Here,” Daniel A. Olivas, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/opinion/children-separated-from-parents-border-immigrant- dystopia.html

Eric Alterman, “Trump’s Prodigious Lying Threatens Our Democracy,” thenation.com “It turns out, thankfully, that most Americans don’t believe Trump. Fewer than three in 10, according to a Post ‘Fact Checker’ poll conducted late last year, believe his most common lies, and barely one in six believe anything close to all of them. Sixty-five percent of Americans don’t think that Trump is being honest with the country. What worries me, however, is that people don’t realize how much more dishonest Trump is than any of his predecessors. Only about 50 percent of Americans said they think he is “less honest” than any previous president. This illusion is fed by the media’s blasé coverage of Trump’s prodigious lying, and it contributes to a cynicism that only invites further dishonesty.

“In her 1967 essay ’Truth and Politics,’ Hannah Arendt noted the importance of ‘the consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth’ as a means of undermining not merely democracy but also ‘the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world,’ thereby laying the groundwork for the replacement of a democratic system with a totalitarian one. It’s hard not to conclude that we are well on our way.”

“Donald Trump is an Ignorant, Weak, Coward,” Nancy LaTourneau, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/06/15/donald-trump-is-an-ignorant-weak-coward/

“Trump is Making us all Live in his Delusional Reality Show,” Andrew Sullivan, nymag.com http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/trump-is-making-us-all-live-in-his-delusional-reality- show.html

Paul Walkman, “President Trump’s lies come in a hundred varieties, from the trivial to the juvenile to the slanderous to the gruesome,” washingtonpost.com “President Trump’s lies come in a hundred varieties, from the trivial to the juvenile to the slanderous to the gruesome.”

Ellie Mystal, “How Does Donald Trump Keep Getting Away With It?” thenation.com “Trump attacks the rule of law at Twitter speed; courts rebuff him on a preindustrial timescale. It’s like trying to swat a maniacal wasp with a musket ball….

“In the same way a cancer takes advantage of the cell’s own reproductive machinery to infect the system, Trump is using the courts’ respect for the rule of law to destroy the rule of law.”

“The Rule of Law is Crumbling Further Each Day Under Trump,” Jonathan Chait, nymag.com http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/donald-trump-and-the-crumbling-rule-of-law.html

“The Constitutional Crisis is Already Underway,” Jonathan Chait, nymag.com http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/the-constitutional-crisis-is-already-underway.html

“Donald Trump is a Living Embodiment of Unpreparedness,” Adam Peck, thinkprogress.org https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trump-is-unprepared-cf139fd6884f/

Sean Illini, “How golf explains Trump. Seriously.,” vox.com “Have you ever won a tournament you never competed in? Have you ever stolen the ball from a child to gain a competitive advantage?

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“If the answer to either or both of those questions is no, then you’re not cheating at the highest level. Which is to say, you’re not cheating like President Donald Trump….

“Trump’s cheating at golf might seem trivial compared to his political shenanigans, but there’s another way to think about it: Golf is a game built on self-governance, Reilly says, and in that way, it’s like a ‘Rorschach test for your morality.’ And some of the stories about Trump are truly absurd. ‘In a weird way,’ Reilly told me, they “say as much about Trump as almost anything else we know about him, because it cuts to the core of his character.”

“White House Lawyers Say Trump Wrote Misleading Response to Trump Tower Meeting,” Betsy Woodruff, dailybeast.com https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-own-lawyers-say-trump-wrote-white-house-response-to-trump- tower-meeting

“Donald Trump Sounds just like the Monarch the Constitution was Written to Thwart,” John Nichols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-sounds-just-like-monarch-constitution-written-thwart/

Daniel Hemel, “Trump just gave the House a very good reason to look at his tax returns, washingtonpost.com “The disclosure this week that Donald Trump accumulated a staggering $1.17 billion in losses from 1985 to 1994 was not, in itself, terribly surprising to anyone who has followed Trump’s financial travails. That’s because the same New York Times reporters who broke this week’s story — and who won a Pulitzer Prize for their investigations into the president’s personal finances — had previously unearthed state tax returns from 1995 showing that Trump claimed tax losses of close to $1 billion. What’s truly stunning, however, is how Trump responded to the news.

“Rather than attributing the losses to business troubles from which he ultimately bounced back, President Trump insisted instead that the losses were conjured up to avoid taxes. ‘Real estate developers in the 1980’s & 1990’s, more than 30 years ago, were entitled to massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases,’ Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. ‘Much was non monetary. Sometimes considered ‘tax shelter,’ he continued, adding that for real estate developers like him, tax ploys were ‘sport.’

“Never mind that the 1990s were not by anyone’s count ‘more than 30 years ago’ — math has never been our commander in chief’s strong suit. What’s mind-blowing about Trump’s morning tweetstorm is that the president of the United States — who has a constitutional responsibility to take care that the laws, including the tax laws, are faithfully executed — is gloating about his own efforts to skirt the tax code. And he is doing this in full view of his 60.1 million Twitter followers, only some of whom are Russian bots. The man who sits two rungs above the IRS commissioner in the executive branch’s organizational chart is bragging that tax dodging is one of his pastimes.”

“Trump is Openly Looting the Country, and there’s no one to Stop him,” David Adkins, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/05/26/trump-is-openly-looting-the-country-and-theres-no-one-to- stop-him/

“Trump Claims Aide who Gave Official White House Briefing does not Exist,” Chas Danner, dailyintelligencer.com http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/trump-claims-aide-who-briefed-press-corps-doesnt- exist.html

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“President Trump’s Fog of ‘Scandal’ and Outrages about the Mueller Investigation,” Kesler and Kelly, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/25/president-trumps-fog-of-scandals-and- outrages-about-the-mueller-investigation/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.873a6f70fe17

Haldevang and Timmons, “One of the US’s Greatest Gifts to the Global Economy is Under Threat from Trump,” qz.com “The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is the jewel in the crown of America’s fight against international business bribes and corporate favors. Intended to promote American business and foreign-policy ideals around the world, and give US companies a tool to battle corruption abroad, it has also helped other countries crack down on bribery, and has extracted billions of dollars in fines.

“But under US president Donald Trump, it may lose its bite, according to anti-corruption activists, Democrat lawmakers, and legal experts. At worst, some worry, he could try to repeal it altogether….

“As president, he has killed a rule to crack down on foreign bribery by US energy companies, refused to release his tax returns, and canceled ethics training for White House staff.

“Trump’s business has also come under public scrutiny regarding the FCPA. The New Yorker reported on March 6 that the Trump Organization had helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan owned by the family of a cabinet minister with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the US government has accused of money-laundering and terrorism. Though it’s not clear if the deal itself violated the FCPA, in order to avoid breaking the law, US companies usually extensively investigate potential partners for corruption. One lawyer told the New Yorker, “I’ve had very few clients do so little due diligence” as the Trump Organization did….

“The FCPA makes it illegal for US companies and people working abroad to engage in corrupt acts such as bribing officials. It bans foreign firms and people from doing the same in the US. American companies with listed securities must keep accurate, transparent records and not hide payments in “off-the-books” accounts.”

William Rivers Pitt, “Donald Trump Is a Dangerous Human Version of 1980s Muzak,” truthout.org “More than anything else, Donald Trump represents American-style capitalism which fully came into its own during the 1980s. Like Trump himself, he whose bank balance doesn’t have nine zeroes to the left of the decimal. Virtually none of it is real, and yet it squats over the landscape like some noisome toad, seemingly inescapable, all the while creating profitable strife and lucrative disorder. Sounds like Trump to me….

“As I have said previously in this space, people can teach you two things: How to be, and how not to be. Donald Trump, like the decade that first made him a household name, teaches us how not to be. Despite this, both remain a persistent drain on our culture, politics and economic standing. American capitalism, cemented in the ‘80s like Trump himself, is a plague upon the land.”

“We are truly Living through the Amateur Hour Presidency,” Michael Tomasky, thedailybeast.com https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-are-truly-living-through-the-amateur-hour-presidency

“Our Leader is a Fool,” Stephen Mattson, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/our-leader-fool

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“Trump Returns to Original Racist Attacks on Mexican Immigrants at NRA Convention,” James Caravello, thinkprogress.org https://thinkprogress.org/trump-immigration-racist-attack-395e916f00bd/

Michael Gerson, “The real threat to religious freedom is Trump,” washingtonpost.com “When the president of the United States goes after an American Muslim — in this case Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who came to the United States as a Somali refugee — using images of the 9/11 attacks, it is cruel, frightening and dangerous in new ways.

“It is cruel because Trump essentially delivered his political rant while standing on desecrated graves. The images he employed not only included burning buildings but burning human beings, drafted into a sad and sordid political ploy. Is nothing sacred to Trump? When said aloud, the question sounds like an absurdity. Trump has never given the slightest indication of propriety, respect or reverence. His narcissism leaves no room to honor other people or to honor other gods. Both the living and the dead matter only as servants to the cause of Trump himself….

“This has led to a frightening state of affairs. By all the evidence, Trump is an anti-Muslim bigot. At one campaign event in 2015, a member of the audience stated, ‘We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims.’ And he went on to ask, ‘When can we get rid of them?’ Trump responded: ‘We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.’ Imagine a normal politician on the left or right being asked about the possibility of getting rid of all the Christians, or getting rid of all the Jews.”

Watkins and Polantz, “Hundreds of former Justice officials assert Trump would be facing felony charges if he were not President, cnn.com “Hundreds of former Justice Department officials said in an open letter released Monday that President Donald Trump would be facing multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice stemming from the Russia investigation if he were not President….

"‘We believe strongly that, but for the OLC memo, the overwhelming weight of professional judgment would come down in favor of prosecution for the conduct outlined in the Mueller Report,’ the letter read….

“The letter was signed by officials from a wide-range of backgrounds, and included former US attorneys and other top officials from both parties. Almost 50 said they had served in the Justice Department for three decades or more. More than 30 signers said they had worked there during Trump's presidency, including two US attorneys who left their leadership posts shortly after Trump became president. In all, more than 20 former US attorneys -- who typically make prosecutorial decisions for their districts -- have signed the letter.”

“Another Week of Lies and still Trump, the Hucksters, Keeps his Tawdry Show Going,” Sarah Churchwell, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/06/another-week-of-lies-trump-cheap-huckster- keeps-tawdry-show-going

“Springtime for Despots,” John Feffer, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176402/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_springtime_for_despots/

“Trump’s Governing Strategy: Overpromise, Underdeliver,” Matthew Nussbaum, politico.com https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/23/url-donald-trump-governing-strategy-482342

James Reston Jr., “Trump’s Other Impeachable Offense,” nytimes.com

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“On July 30, 1974, nine days before President Richard Nixon resigned, the House Judiciary Committee added a third article to its impeachment charges against the president. The first two had dealt with obstruction of justice and abuse of power; Article III charged that Nixon had failed to comply with eight congressional subpoenas related to the Watergate investigation.

“Now, with President Trump and William Barr, his attorney general, refusing to cooperate with congressional investigations, the Democrats in the House should take yet another lesson from Watergate. They are reportedly already preparing impeachment articles on obstruction of justice; they should add failure to comply with Congress to the list….

“Mr. Trump’s defiance can, in and of itself, form the basis for an additional impeachment article — a fact that Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, recognized on Thursday. ‘Ignoring subpoenas of Congress, not honoring subpoenas of Congress — that was Article III of the Nixon impeachment,’ she said.

“President Trump’s assertion that there is nothing left to learn from congressional hearings — which, unlike the Mueller investigation, would be televised — may be correct. But that is beside the point; it is up to Congress, not him, to decide….

“If nothing else, televised hearings would demonstrate that Mr. Trump not only lacks respect for the rule of law, but for Congress and the separation of powers — a fact that, in and of itself, is an impeachable offense.”

“The Wrong People are Criticizing Donald Trump,” Editorial Board, newyorktimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/trump-mccabe-republicans.html

“Donald Trump is a Simple-minded Bully who only Knows one Tactic,” David Atkin, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/03/17/donald-trump-is-a-simple-minded-bully-who-only-knows- one-tactic/

“James Comey: How Trump Co-ops Leaders like Bill Barr,” nytimes.com “Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them….

“Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

“It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what ‘everyone thinks’ and what is ‘obviously true’ wash over you, unchallenged,...

“Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room….

“The web building never stops….

“And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.”

“Stormy Daniels is just one Reason Donald Trump could not Work in his own White House,” Painter and Eisen, usatoday.com

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/03/07/trump-couldnt-get-ethics-security-clearances- white-house-job-if-not-president-painter-eisen-column/399892002/

“Nepotism and Corruption: The Handmaidens of Trump’s Presidency,” Jill Abramson, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/06/nepotism-corruption-handmaiden-trump- presidency

Robert Reich, “In fighting all oversight, Trump has made his most dictatorial move,” theguardian.com “The man whose aides cooperated, shall we say, with Russia – the man who still refuses to do anything at all about Russia’s continued interference in the American political system – refuses to cooperate with a branch of the United States government that the Constitution requires him to cooperate with in order that the government function.”

“Go Donald! Inside the Russian Shadow Campaign to Elect Trump,” Parker and Wagner, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/go-donald-inside-the-russian-shadow-campaign-to-elect- trump/2018/02/16/dea562c2-134a-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html?utm_term=.2306054f2d34

“Indictment Makes Trump’s Hoax Claim Harder to Sell,” Landler and Shear, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/a-hoax-indictments-make-trumps-claim-even-harder- to-maintain.html

“Intelligence Chiefs to Senate: Nope, Trump doesn’t care about Russia,” Heather Digby Parton, salon.com https://www.salon.com/2018/02/14/intelligence-chiefs-to-senate-nope-trump-doesnt-care-about-russia/

Julian Borger, “Whimsical, uninformed': French ambassador's parting verdict on Trump, theguardian.com “He portrayed the current situation as the opposite extreme of the meticulous though sometimes ponderous decision-making process pursued by the previous administration.

“‘Obama was the ultimate bureaucrat: you know every night he was going to bed with 60 pages and in the morning they were coming back all annotated by the president,’ he said. For decisions such as the troop surge in Afghanistan, there were months of meetings between the relevant government departments.

“Now that inter-agency process is largely dead, killed off and replaced by John Bolton, the ultra- hawkish national security adviser, while other centres of power in the state department and Pentagon are withering, weakened by multiple unfilled senior positions, and top officials serving in acting capacity only, without Senate confirmation.

“‘Actually, we don’t have interlocutors,’ Araud said. ‘[When] we have people to talk to, they are acting, so they don’t have real authority or access. Basically, the consequence is that there is only one centre of power: the White House.’”

“The Memo to Mislead,” Jim Wallis, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/memo-mislead

“Commander in Thief,” Nichole Narea, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january-february-march-2018/commander-in-thief/

“A Year Later, Trump has Made his own American Carnage,” Editorial Board, usatoday.com https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/18/year-later-trump-has-made-his-own-american- carnage-editorials-debates/1038286001/

“The Surprises in the Mueller Report,” politico.com

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“‘The report did not exonerate the president’ Marisa Maleck is a senior associate with King & Spalding, and a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I found the most surprising part of the report to be twofold: One, that special counsel Mueller went out of his way multiple times to dispel the notion that there is any concept called ‘collusion,’ and that what he investigated was instead coordination and conspiracy; and two, that the report did not exonerate the president even with respect to conspiracy and coordination.

“Although the report stated that there was ‘no evidence’ of conspiracy or coordination, it left open the possibility that there may be evidence out there that the president’s associates suppressed. Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Some information was screened even from the special counsel and his team. Several people affiliated with the Trump campaign (including Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort) lied or provided incomplete information to the special counsel about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals. Still others deleted communications or used encryption that did not provide for the long-term retention of data. And with respect to redactions within the report, the ones concerning the Trump campaign’s interest in WikiLeaks’ releases of hacked material are particularly concerning.

“The special counsel declined to make a recommendation on obstruction mostly because the Office of Legal Counsel has concluded, most recently in 2000, that a sitting president is immune from indictment. The report made clear that it is up to Congress to decide whether to use impeachment as a remedy. So what will matter most for the remainder of the Trump presidency is whether the House of Representatives will file articles of impeachment based on the substantial allegations that the president may have obstructed justice.”

Deb Richmann and Susannah George, “Trump called on spy chiefs for help as Mueller probe began,” apnews.com “Two months before special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed in the spring of 2017, President Donald Trump picked up the phone and called the head of the largest U.S. intelligence agency. Trump told Mike Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, that news stories alleging that Trump’s 2016 “White House campaign had ties to Russia were false and the president asked whether Rogers could do anything to counter them.

“Rogers and his deputy Richard Ledgett, who was present for the call, were taken aback.

“Afterward, Ledgett wrote a memo about the conversation and Trump’s request. He and Rogers signed it and stashed it in a safe. Ledgett said it was the ‘most unusual thing he had experienced in 40 years of government service.’”

“World’s Confidence in U.S. Leadership under Trump at New Low, Poll Shows,” Julien Borger, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/18/us-leadership-world-confidence-poll

“Want to Know how low Trump to Go?” Lucian K. Truscott IV, salon.com https://www.salon.com/2018/01/13/want-to-know-how-low-trump-can-go/

Peter Baker, “‘I Do Not Remember’: Trump Gave a Familiar Reply to the Special Counsel’s Queries,” nytimes.com “President Trump has boasted at various points that he has ‘one of the great memories of all time’ or even ‘the world’s greatest memory.’

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“But the world’s greatest memory failed him repeatedly when prosecutors asked him those classic questions from decades of presidential scandals — what did he know and when did he know it?

“Mr. Trump refused for more than a year to be interviewed by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and in the end agreed to respond to questions only in writing. Even then, with the help of his lawyers, the president found it difficult to summon details from his presidential campaign in 2016 that might shed light on what happened.

“More than 30 times, he told the prosecutors that he had no memory of what they were asking about, employing several formulations to make the same point.”

Julian Borger, “Whimsical, uninformed': French ambassador's parting verdict on Trump, theguardian.com “The outgoing French ambassador to the US has compared the Trump administration to the court of King Louis XIV, filled with courtiers trying to interpret the caprices of a ‘whimsical, unpredictable, uninformed’ leader.

Gérard Araud, who retires on Friday after a 37-year career that included some of the top jobs in French diplomacy, said Donald Trump’s unpredictability and his single-minded transactional interpretation of US interests was leaving the administration isolated on the world stage.

“‘When they say ‘America first’, it’s America alone,’ Araud said in an interview with the Guardian. ‘Basically, this president and this administration don’t have allies, don’t have friends. It’s really [about] bilateral relationships on the basis of the balance of power and the defence of narrow American interest.’”

“Robert Mueller is Closing in on Trump. Congress must Protect his Investigation,” Max Bergman, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/12/robert-mueller-trump-congress-protect- investigation

“Incoherent, Authoritarian, Uninformed: New York Times Interview is a Scary Read,” Ezra Klein, vox.com https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/29/16829806/trump-interview-new-york-times

Dan Balz, “Mueller’s report paints a damning portrait of Trump’s presidency,” washingtonpost.com “The Trump presidency long has been an exercise in normalizing extraordinary behavior, with President Trump repeatedly stretching the limits of what is considered appropriate conduct by the nation’s chief executive. The report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III puts into high relief the degree to which Trump has violated the norms.

“The principal focus of the special counsel’s investigation was on questions of criminality. But there is more than the issue of what rises to the level of criminal conspiracy or criminal obstruction when judging a president and his administration. These are questions that go to the heart of what is acceptable or normal or advisable in a democracy. On that basis, the Mueller report provides a damning portrait of the president and those around him for actions taken during the 2016 campaign and while in office.”

Baker and Haberman, “A Portrait of the White House and Its Culture of Chaos,” nytimes.com “The White House that emerges from more than 400 pages of Mr. Mueller’s report is a hotbed of conflict infused by a culture of dishonesty — defined by a president who lies to the public and his own staff, then tries to get his aides to lie for him.”

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“Congress Asks if Donald Trump Really can Blow the World up Without Restraints,” Aida Chevez, theintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2017/11/14/nuclear-war-donald-trump-nuclear-authority

“Trump is now Openly Supporting Fascists,” Sasha Abramsky, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-is-now-openly-supporting-fascists/

George T. Conway III, “George Conway: Trump is a cancer on the presidency. Congress should remove him,” washingtonpost.com “Still, the special counsel’s report is damning. Mueller couldn’t say, with any ‘confidence,’ that the president of the United States is not a criminal. He said, stunningly, that ‘if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.’ Mueller did not so state.

“That’s especially damning because the ultimate issue shouldn’t be — and isn’t — whether the president committed a criminal act. As I wrote not long ago, Americans should expect far more than merely that their president not be provably a criminal. In fact, the Constitution demands it….

“Trump tried to ‘limit the scope of the investigation.’ He tried to discourage witnesses from cooperating with the government through ‘suggestions of possible future pardons.’ He engaged in ‘direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.’ A fair reading of the special counsel’s narrative is that ‘the likely effect’ of these acts was ‘to intimidate witnesses or to alter their testimony,’ with the result that ‘the justice system’s integrity [was] threatened.’ Page after page, act after act, Mueller’s report describes a relentless torrent of such obstructive activity by Trump.”

“Trump Makes the most Flagrant Bigot Proud. They see him as their Leader. Why wouldn’t they?” Shawn King, theintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2017/11/29/donald-trump-anti-muslim-tweets-britain-first/

“Why is Donald Trump Launchingn a Withering Attack on Non-profits,” David Callahan, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/20/trumps-tax-proposals-philanthropy- nonprofit-sector-civil-society

“U.S. Nuclear General Says would Resist Illegal Trump Strike Order,” Staff, reuters.com https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-commander/u-s-nuclear-general-says-would-resist-illegal- trump-strike-order-idUSKBN1DI0QV

Susan Glasser, “The Mueller Report Won’t End Trump’s Presidency, But It Sure Makes Him Look Bad,” newyorker.com “What the report portrays, in numbing legalese and revealing footnotes, is a breathtaking culture of lying and impunity, distrust and double-dealing. Trump is its architect, its chief practitioner, and its greatest beneficiary. Of course, much has been said and written in the past two and a half years about the toxic nature of the Trump White House, about its epic levels of staff turnover and its vicious climate of suspicion and backstabbing. All that and more seem to be true, according to the account that emerges from the Mueller report, and there is a value to having this recorded for posterity. It is not just another best-selling book based on anonymous sources; it is based on sworn testimony and on contemporaneous notes, e-mails, and phone records that only a prosecutor could have had access to.”

William Rivers Pitt, “We All Need Sanctuary From Donald Trump,” truthout.org

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“Cruelty is the coin of the realm, racism the language spoken to his devout base, and the rule of law broken and forged again in the fires of white nationalism is the final goal.”

“The Trump Administration is Making War on Diplomacy,” Editorial Board, newyorktimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/opinion/sunday/the-trump-administration-is-making-war-on- diplomacy.html?_r=0

“Truth and Lies in the Trump Era,” Charles Lewis, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/truth-and-lies-in-the-trump-era/

Andrew J. Bacevich, “Can We Stop Pretending Now?” tomdispatch.com “… the 45th president of the United States is a shameless liar. On the other hand, his presidency offers an open invitation to Americans to confront myths about the way their country actually works. Donald Trump is a bullshit artist of the first order. Yet all art reflects the time in which it’s produced and Trump’s art is no exception. Within all the excrement lie nuggets of truth.”

Chauncey Devega, “Echoes of History: Trump’s “Movement” Now Has a Uniform and Membership Cards,” truthout.org “Donald Trump is not the president of all Americans. He only cares about himself, his voters and other sycophants. Public service is anathema to him. Patriotism is inconceivable to him as well. Democracy and the common good are antithetical to his personal values, morals and beliefs. In total, Donald Trump believes he is above the rule of law and, like a king or queen, is the literal embodiment of the state.”

“We Knew what we were doing: Gushee on Trump 2015-2016,” David Gushee, religionnewsservice.com https://religionnews.com/2017/08/07/gushee-on-trump-character-2016/

“On Ethics, Trump is Leading America in the Wrong Direction,” Jeffrey Sacks, cnn.com http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/26/opinions/trump-wrong-direction-opinion-sachs/index.html

Erik Wemple, “Remember, cable news: Trump is a liar. Act accordingly.,” washingtonpost.com “Cable news producers know what happens when President Trump speaks to the media: He lies. Supporting documentation for that expectation has been piling up over his more than two years in office. The topic doesn’t matter — immigration, the Mueller investigation, health care, his family, security clearances, Russia. If he’s asked about it, he’ll lie about it.”

Joseph Stiglit, “Trump will leave a legacy of selfishness and dishonesty,” theguardian.com “Trump is a disrupting personality, and after he’s gone, we may well reflect on how such a deranged and morally challenged person could have been elected president of the world’s most powerful country in the first place.

“But what concerns me most is Trump’s disruption of the institutions that are necessary for the functioning of society. Trump’s ‘Maga’ (Make America Great Again) agenda is, of course, not about restoring the moral leadership of the United States. It embodies and celebrates unbridled selfishness and self-absorption. Maga is about economics. But that forces us to ask: what is the basis of America’s wealth?

“… The attack by Trump and his administration on every one of the pillars of American society, and his especially aggressive vilification of the country’s truth-seeking institutions, jeopardises its continued prosperity and very ability to function as a democracy. Nor do there appear to be checks on corporate giants’ efforts to capture the institutions – the courts, legislatures, regulatory agencies, and major media outlets – that are supposed to prevent them from

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exploiting workers and consumers. A dystopia previously imagined only by science fiction writers is emerging before our eyes.”

Richard Wolffe, “Why did Trump say his dad was German? He lies so much he doesn’t know the truth,” theguardian.com “Trump thinks that the asylum seekers escaping horrific violence from Central America are making up their family stories. ‘It’s a big fat con job,’ he told a rally of supporters in Michigan last week. As it happens, he is something of an expert in big fat con jobs.

“It is curious how many big fat con jobs find their way to Trump’s front door. He claimed that his supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was the victim of a big fat con job about sexual assault. And he said that Stormy Daniels, the porn star he illegally paid off before the 2016 election, was peddling ‘a total con job’. Of course, his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who actually paid out the hush money, testified that Trump himself was ‘a con man’.”

“A Definitive Guide to the GOP Insiders Enabling Donald Trump,” Sarah Ellison, vanityfair.com http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-enablers

“President Trump Cares more about Himself than his Country,” Karen J. Greenberg, washingtonepost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/06/09/president-trump-cares-more-about- himself-than-his-country/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card- a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.1d78b1b0f1b3

Richard Wolffe, “Why did Trump say his dad was German? He lies so much he doesn’t know the truth,” theguardian.com “The world can be a confusing place for Donald Trump….

“This is, after all, a president who struggles to locate his own father’s place of birth: the Bronx, New York City. On Tuesday, Trump declared in the presence of the Nato secretary general that this was just one more alternative fact in a universe of unknowable infinities.

Richard Wolffe, “Why did Trump say his dad was German? He lies so much he doesn’t know the truth,” theguardian.com “The world can be a confusing place for Donald Trump….

“This is, after all, a president who struggles to locate his own father’s place of birth: the Bronx, New York City. On Tuesday, Trump declared in the presence of the Nato secretary general that this was just one more alternative fact in a universe of unknowable infinities.”

Greg Grandin, “Donald Trump, Pornographer-in-Chief,” tomdispatch.com “A few years before Trump’s election, as Robin Reineke of the Colibri Center for Human Rights has reported, the sort of men who would later become Trump’s followers began showing up at Tea Party conventions with binders full of photographs of migrant corpses, gruesome images of the desiccated remains of those who had died in the desert trying to enter the United States. The anti-migrant activists who displayed such books of the dead claimed they were humanitarians, trying to raise support to build a wall to stop poor migrants from crossing over and so dying. But really they, like the president today, were necromancers, a kind of American priesthood of the lost frontier, offering a new litany of hate and using the fetish pornography of death to reassure racists that their cruelty was actually kindness.”

“The Most Terrifying thing about Trumps Alleged Leak to Russia is That he was Probably just Showing off,” Andrew Buncombe, theindepenent.com

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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-leak-russia-classified-information-sources-method-denial- white-house-isis-intelligence-a7737791.html

“Analysis: Can President Trump Handle the Truth?” Michael Scherer, time.com http://time.com/4710614/donald-trump-fbi-surveillance-house-intelligence-committee/?xid=homepage

Wes Granbert-Michaelson, “'No Collusion,'” sojo.net “President’s Trump attacks on our democratic institutions, and on the fragile fabric of public trust essential to undergirding a viable government, go far behind the bantering over collusion. Beyond any reasonable doubt, he has been guilty of obstruction of justice. It’s very likely he has committed a felony in violating campaign finances laws to influence the course of the election through hush money payments to a porn star. His brazen violation of ethical norms regarding his personal businesses and financial interests, in the judgment of many, place him in violation of the Constitution. Beyond this is his compulsive addiction to lying, his demeaning of political discourse, and his flaunting of minimal expectations for public and personal morality. No president in our lifetime has acted in this manner, even though one resigned, and another was impeached….

“President Donald Trump has nurtured a culture of contempt in our land while brazenly assaulting the guardrails of democracy in his protection of personal gain and power. Let us allow the disciplines of Lent to nurture the capacity for political judgment based on values and truth, rather than slogans and prevarications. ‘No collision’ is no answer.”

“Mormon Leader Dallin Oaks Points to ‘Aggressive’ Trump, Climate Change as ‘Big Worries,” David Noyce, saltlaketribune.com http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=5021251&itype=CMSID

“Fox News’s ‘Swedish Defense Advisor’ Unknown to Country’s Military Officials,” theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/26/fox-news-nils-bildt-swedish-defence-advisor-unknown- to-countrys-military-officials

“5 Spiritual Survival Strategies in the Trump Era,” Wes Grandberg-Michaelson, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/5-spiritual-survival-strategies-trump-era

Tana Ganeva, “Harvard psychiatrist: Donald Trump's actions are signs of a “severe, continuous, mental disturbance’” Salon.com “To understand his actions, it is essential to keep in mind that sociopaths have only one goal: to enhance themselves, and that in pursuing their self-interest, they lack both normal human empathy for others and a normal human conscience. Cheating, conning, lying, stealing, threatening are all done with no remorse.

“When stressed with facts that would require them to admit failure, or even that others know more or are more capable than them, sociopaths lose track of reality, becoming delusional with insistence on the truth of what they psychologically need to maintain their superior view of themselves. Indeed, nobody matters except to the degree they can serve the sociopath’s personal needs.

“Mr. Trump has a long history that proves his diagnosis. If you consider the 7 traits that define Antisocial Personality Disorder in the DSM-5, he meets every one of them:

1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors. 2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying … or conning others for personal profit or pleasure

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3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead 4. Irritability and aggressiveness 5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others. 6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations 7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

Williams Rivers Pitt, “Michael Cohen and Donald Trump Are Exactly the Same Person,” truthout.org “We also learned something important about Trump himself, something we already knew in theory but needed to see in the flesh. Yes, Cohen is a lifelong scumbag with a long train of lies and double-dealing dragging behind him. Many of the questions from committee Republicans boiled down to, ‘If Trump was so bad, why did you work for him for 10 years?’ Pivot the question — ‘If you are so bad, Mr. Cohen, why did Trump keep you around for 10 years?’ — and a real measure of clarity is achieved.

“Trump kept a serial liar and duplicitous fixer like Cohen around for 10 years because they are the same person. Trump only truly values those people who are a reflection of himself and his own grotesque morality. Even sullied characters like Reince Priebus and John Kelly don’t last long in his orbit because they are too clean by comparison. That cleanliness, dingy though it may be, reflects poorly on the moral and ethical filth that is Trump’s personal baggage.

“Like the strange fish who swim in the deepest depths of the ocean and explode when they are hauled into the light, Trump is only comfortable down in the darkness with his own kind. Cohen was one of his closest confidants, his personal attorney and problem-solver. He was hauled into the light, and exploded, and went before Congress on Wednesday to tell us about it. It was exactly what we needed to see.”

Tom Engelhardt, “Veni, Vidi, Tweeti (I Came, I Saw, I Tweeted) An Obituary for the Republic, tomdispatch.com “The Donald’s victory in the 2016 election was always a sign of a deep disturbance at the heart of an increasingly unequal and unfair system of wealth and power. But it was those trillions of dollars -- The Donald claims seven trillion of them -- that the neocons began sinking into America’s ‘infinite’ wars, which cost Americans big time in ways they hardly tracked or noticed. Those trillions didn’t go into shoring up American infrastructure or health care or education or job-training programs or anything else that might have mattered to most people here, even as untold tax dollars -- one estimate: $15,000 per middle-class family per year -- went into the pockets of the rich. And some of those dollars, in turn, poured back into the American political system (with a helping hand from the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision) and, in the end, helped put the first billionaire in the Oval Office….

“All of this not only gave Americans a visibly unhinged president -- think of him, in axis-of-evil terms, as a rogue state of one -- but an increasingly unhinged country.

David A. Bell, “An Equal Say,” thenation.com “One of the stranger rituals performed by the media in the Trump era has been to keep an obsessive count of the president’s lies since he took office. By September 2018, The Washington Post reported, he had already passed the 5,000 mark, including a new one-day record of 125 on September 7. The Poynter Institute’s nonpartisan fact-checking project PolitiFact keeps a running list, and The New York Times did likewise throughout 2017.

“There is a certain pointlessness to these exercises. Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to Donald Trump should recognize that, since long before his presidential campaign,

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he lies as easily as he breathes. He says whatever he thinks will get him what he wants, and whatever he thinks he can get away with.”

Jill, Filipovic, “Nancy Pelosi is an alien species to Trump – and he has no idea what to do,” theguardian “Donald Trump might be the worst president in American history, but with his incompetence, belligerence and intellectual deficits come a perverse advantage: it’s tough to shame someone who has no shame; it’s hard to hold a man accountable for a lie when he doesn’t care if he’s a liar; you can’t chasten someone for breaking the rules when he never believed the rules applied to him.

“But while Trump has snaked and slithered his way in and out of scandal, corruption and self- dealing his entire life, there’s one force that seems to truly destabilize him: a competent woman. Which is why, in the Trump era, there’s no better speaker of the House than Nancy Pelosi.”

Garrett M. Graffiti, Trump Must Be a Russian Agent. The Alternative Is Too Awful, wired.com “The pattern of his pro-Putin, pro-Russia, anti-FBI, anti-intelligence community actions are so one-sided and the lies and obfuscation surrounding every single Russian meeting and conversation so consistent that if Donald Trump isn’t actually hiding a massive conspiracy then the alternative is almost worse: The United States elected a president so oblivious to geopolitics, so self-centered and personally insecure, so naturally predisposed to undermine democratic institutions and coddle authoritarians, and so terrible a manager and leader that he cluelessly surrounded himself with crooks, grifters, and agents of foreign powers that he’s compromised the national security of the United States government and undermined 75 years of critical foreign alliances merely to satiate his own ego.

“In short, we’ve reached a point in the Russia probe where there are only two scenarios left: Either the president is actively compromised by the Russian government and has been working covertly to cooperate with Vladimir Putin after Putin helped win him the 2016 election—or Donald Trump will go down in history as the world’s most famous ‘useless idiot,’ as Communists used to call those who could be co-opted to the cause without realizing it.”

Rebecca Solnit, “The Trump era won't last for ever. But we must do our part to end it,” theguardian.com “We have talked about resistance a great deal these past 18 months or so, but I want to talk about opposition for a moment. You oppose a regime by standing up to it, but also by being its opposite. For this regime that means being compassionate and inclusive where they are vicious and exclusionary. It means being committed to precision and accuracy when they are sloppy with the truth and the facts or at war with them. It means preserving memory, both of how things are changing in the present, and the longterm memory of how many people before us have opposed and resisted and won, of this country’s histories of both heroes and of racism from the anti-Chinese riots of the nineteenth century to the mobs of Klansmen in the twentieth. The United States has an abundance of those heroes in the past and some in the present. John Lewis, who is one of those heroes, said recently ‘Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.’

“The Trump era will not last forever. How it will end we do not know, because how and when it ends is in part in our hands. Waiting for it to end is not a strategy. Working for it to end is….”

Caitlyn Oprysko, “'It violates the law': Tillerson vents about having to repeatedly push back against Trump,” politico.com

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“Nearly nine months after his unceremonious firing by tweet, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is breaking his silence on his time in the Trump administration, venting that he had to repeatedly tell President Donald Trump that what he wanted to do would violate the law….

“‘It was challenging for me coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented ExxonMobil Corporation to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn't — doesn't like to read, doesn't read briefing reports, doesn't — doesn't like to get into the details of a lot of things but rather just kind of says, look, this is what I believe and you can try to convince me otherwise, but most of the time you're not going to do that.’”

Rebecca Gordon, “A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility Chasm: Life in the United States of Trump,” tomdispatch.com “Despite the fact that media outlets now almost routinely tote up Trump’s ‘untruths’ -- his misstatements, false statements, and lies -- by the thousands, his administration has managed to call into question the very existence of any ‘facts on the ground’ whatsoever….

“In the epistemological universe of the president and his base, a credibility gap is inconceivable, because there are no facts on the ground to begin with. Or rather, we are invited to choose from a range of ‘alternative facts,’ as Trump aide Kellyanne Conway so unforgettably put it….

“Eroding the very ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy has been, however instinctively, the mode of the Trumpian moment as well, both the presidential one and that of so many right-wing conspiracy theorists now populating the online world….

“In a world in which people sense that truth no longer matters, it doesn’t make a difference whether what that voice says is true. What matters is that the voice is strong and confident. What matters is that it is authoritative even in its falsehoods. And if that reminds you of Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines or Brazil’s newly inaugurated hard-right president Jair Bolsonaro, or Donald Trump, it should.”

Tom Engelhardt, “Confronting "Alternative Facts," tomdispatch.com “They are unending. There’s no way to keep up, much less respond effectively, and it almost goes without saying that they are never to be taken back, corrected, or amended in any way. Call them false claims, lies, untruths, misstatements, whatever you want, but they are what comes out of his mouth just about anytime he opens it….

“For any half-normal president that would have been the trifecta: three outlandish falsehoods in a single try, but for Donald Trump it was just the modest, everyday demonstration of his remarkable ability to adjust reality to his needs, desires, and fantasies…. After all, for the man who, according to Washington Post fact-checkers, managed to make almost 6,000 “false and misleading claims” in 2018 alone, more than 15 a day and almost triple his record-setting pace of the previous year, that was nothing. Land him at al-Asad again in the middle of the night and don’t for a second think he couldn’t do better.”

Carol Anderson, “What is America going to do about its Trump problem in 2019?” theguardian.com “Meanwhile the horrific policies that have continued to stagnate the industrial and agricultural heartland, treat non-white immigrants like Hitlerian Untermenschen, militarize the police in African American communities, flatline wages while corporate profits soar, ignore the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, regard women as no more than a uterus, and abandon millions of Americans to bankruptcy or worse if a major illness or accident happens, portends disaster. As does the anti-environmental, head-in-the-sand climate change positions that have overdosed on fossil fuels and ignored the necessity of solar and wind energy….

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“Also, the regime’s cruel policies must also be jettisoned and replaced by those that embed dignity, the rule of law, and democracy into the operating code of the United States. There are proposals for immigration reform, a Green New Deal, restoring the Voting Rights Act, non- partisan redistricting commissions, nationwide automatic voter registration, increasing the minimum wage, eliminating dark money from campaigns, protecting the special counsel’s investigation, electoral college reform, and restoring ethics as foundational for public service.

“This, of course, looks like a herculean task. But it’s gut-check time. Whether the nation decides in 2019 that this work is too hard and simply accepts the fate of stagnating in years of political and economic filth or whether it embraces the challenge and takes the mighty rivers of democracy and justice to clean out the stables will ultimately determine the future of the United States.”

Rebecca Solnit, “The Trump era won't last for ever. But we must do our part to end it,” theguardian.com “I know a lot of us have rage fatigue and moral exhaustion from a little over a year and a half of the hell of Donald Trump’s ascendancy. I know that seeing the vulnerable crushed, and the sabotage of the things that we fought for from reproductive rights to climate policies, and in particular the recent efforts to destroy small children weighs on most of us. I see and hear the dismay all around me at what is happening to this country, but dismay and devastation are emotions, and painful emotions can coexist with active strategies. Active strategies may be the best response to those emotions, not to take care of oneself but to forget oneself in responding to the larger crises. Slaves were devastated by slavery; Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were not felled by that devastation but driven to act by it, and they did not confuse their devastation for despair….

“Some among us are losing their rights—ICE is going after naturalized citizens and the atmosphere of intolerance is encouraging a terrible rise in hate crimes and harrassment nationwide. At this point each week seems bleaker than the ones before, and a great many people worry that we are gradually adjusting to a loss of rights and rule of law. But there are two forces at work now. There’s that of Trump, who won a minority victory in a corrupted election and works to represent the wishes and feed the rages of a minority of Americans, the authoritarians, racists, and misogynists….”

John Nichols, “Trump Got Rich by Screwing Over Workers—Of Course He’s Doing It Again as President,” thenation.com “‘Cheating, scamming, and ripping off workers is a Donald Trump tradition that goes back decades. Federal workers are just Trump’s latest victims,’ says Public Citizen president Robert Weissman. ‘For decades, Trump repeatedly didn’t pay those who worked for him, and now that he’s in the White House, little has changed. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers and employees of federal contractors are suffering the same fate because of the Trump shutdown.’”

Paul Krugman, “Donald trump and his team of morons,” nytimes.com “To be a modern conservative is to spend your life inside what amounts to a cult, barely exposed to outside ideas or even ways of speaking. Inside that cult, contempt for ordinary working Americans is widespread — remember Eric Cantor, the then-House majority leader, celebrating Labor Day by praising business owners. So is worship of wealth. And it can be hard for cult members to remember that you don’t talk that way to outsiders.

“Then there’s the Trump effect. Normally working for the president of the United States is a career booster, something that looks good on your résumé. Trump’s presidency, however, is so chaotic, corrupt and potentially compromised by his foreign entanglements that anyone

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associated with him gets tainted — which is why after only two years he has already left a trail of broken men and wrecked reputations in his wake.

“So who is willing to serve him at this point? Only those with no reputation to lose, generally because they’re pretty bad at what they do. There are, no doubt, conservatives smart and self- controlled enough to lie plausibly, or at least preserve some deniability, and defend Trump’s policies without making fools of themselves. But those people have gone into hiding.” “A year ago I pointed out that the Trump administration was turning into government by the worst and the dumbest. Since then, however, things have gotten even worse and even dumber.”

Jim Wallis, “It's Going to Get Worse in America Before It Gets Better. But 2019 Is an Opportunity,” sojo.com “Donald Trump appeals to the worst of America. His promotion of fear, division, hate, racism, xenophobia, rallying of white nationalism, mistreatment of women, purposeful denial of truth, and consummate love of money, power, and fame are, of course, nothing new in America. Neither are his desire to destroy democracy, love for authoritarian rulers or desire to be one. Indeed, there is nothing new about Donald Trump, but he almost perfectly exemplifies the worst of America — the ugliest things in our history and the greatest dangers to our future.

“Now let’s move from the political and moral to the theological and spiritual: These traits and actions also represent the worst of humanity. To seek money and power over all else, to consistently put yourself over all others, to make private self-interest the only the goal of life and overturn any sense of the common good, to create conflict to win and make all others into losers, to constantly lie and try to kill the truth, to make exploitation and abuse the definition of sexuality, to be as violent in word and deed as you can get away with, to never answer to God or seek forgiveness — there are examples of these sins throughout the Bible and human history. They are also, unfortunately, what our country’s leader seems to stand for, what he promotes in our culture, and what he models for our children.

“Given all of this, we are in great danger in 2019.”

Lee McIntyre, “Lies, damn lies and post-truth,” theconversation.com “The point of a lie is to convince someone that a falsehood is true. But the point of post-truth is domination. In my analysis, post-truth is an assertion of power.

“As journalist Masha Gessen and others have argued, when Trump lies he does so not to get someone to accept what he’s saying as true, but to show that he is powerful enough to say it.

“He has asserted, ‘I’m the President and you’re not,’ as if such high political office comes with the prerogative of creating his own reality. This would explain why Trump doesn’t seem to care much if there is videotape or other evidence that contradicts him. When you’re the boss, what does that matter? ….

“Even if all politicians lie, I believe that post-truth foreshadows something more sinister. In his powerful book ‘On Tyranny’” historian Timothy Snyder writes that ‘post-truth is pre-fascism.’ It is a tactic seen in ‘electoral dictatorships’ – where a society retains the facade of voting without the institutions or trust to ensure that it is an actual democracy, like those in Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey.

“In this, Trump is following the authoritarian playbook, characterized by leaders lying, the erosion of public institutions and the consolidation of power. You do not need to convince someone that you are telling the truth when you can simply assert your will over them and dominate their reality.”

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Oliver Milman, “Video Shows Trump’s Next Chief of Staff Calling him ‘terrible human beng,’” theguardian.com “One of Mick Mulvaney’s first tasks as acting chief of staff to Donald Trump will perhaps be explaining why he previously publicly called his boss ‘a terrible human being.’

“Video has emerged of Mulvaney, previously a Republican congressman, admitting his disdain for Trump shortly before the presidential election in November 2016.

“‘Yes, I’m supporting Donald Trump; I’m doing so as enthusiastically as I can given the fact I think he’s a terrible human being….’”

James Risen, “Keep Your Eyes on the Narcissist: Donald Trump’s Latest Antics Are Driven by Fear of Robert Mueller,” theintercept.com “A malicious loner paralyzed one of the world’s great cities this week. Meanwhile, a drone operator shut down a major international airport.

“Donald Trump and the drone enthusiast who halted flights out of London’s Gatwick Airport apparently have a lot in common. Both have been willing to wreak havoc with a callous disregard for the public.

“The motivation behind Trump’s pre-holiday assault on Washington — sowing chaos, breaking promises, shutting down the federal government, changing his policies from one minute to the next, forcing out one top official after another, spooking the stock market – is easily explained. Trump is a psychopathic criminal who feels cornered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, so he is lashing out in every direction.

“After two years in office, at least one thing about Trump has become predictable: He reacts violently whenever Mueller appears to be making progress in his investigation. When he hears Mueller’s footsteps, Trump has one go-to move that he cynically uses time and again: He returns to the issues and slogans that energize his base, no matter what the cost. He embraces his base because he believes it will provide him political protection from the fearful Mueller….

“Bottom line: Anyone who thinks that Trump’s frenzied troop pullouts and government closure this week have anything to do with substantive policy issues hasn’t been paying attention for the last two years. Anyone who thinks that Trump actually cares about immigration, border security, the well-being of American troops, or U.S. involvement in Syria or Afghanistan will be deeply disappointed when he suddenly reverses himself again a few days or weeks from now, if and when he believes such a reversal will help him survive Robert Mueller.

“Never forget that everything Trump does is about saving his own skin.”

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