Tag Archives: Donald Trump

How “The Big Lie” Could Lead to the End of Democracy in the U.S.

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Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 7, 2024
This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts.

Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true.

Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States… encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,… [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.”

But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates.

In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation.

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted.

Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie.

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.

Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.

Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk.

They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.

But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.

Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster.

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/06/politics/fact-check-trump-helene-response-north-carolina/index.html

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/gleb-pavlovsky/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world#.nbJrrXK8gx

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/02/08/514102356/steve-bannon-aligns-with-vatican-hardliners-who-oppose-pope-francis

John B. Dunlop, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics,” paper available at https://stanford.io/3wTNlEx.

Quoted from “Joseph Goebbels: On the ‘Big Lie,’” Jewish Virtual Library, https://bit.ly/2PlQmdI.

Office of Strategic Services, A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend, Walter C. Langer, CIA-RPDP78-02646R000600240001-5, Washington, D.C., August 24, 1999, p. 38. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf

​​https://www.yahoo.com/news/vance-says-trump-won-2020-192218871.html

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/10/01/vance-walz-vp-debate-tonight/moderators-fact-check-00182066

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/gop-disinformation-trump-vance-20241006.html#loaded

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html

https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/10/gov.uscourts.dcd_.258148.252.0.pdf

https://gazette.com/news/wex/helene-makes-unlikely-friends-of-republican-swing-state-governors-and-biden/article_b2814791-6ca3-5d89-9a3f-35ab3c135c4a.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4870818-barack-obama-donald-trump-new-kamala-harris-campaign-ad/

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/10/harris-trump-crowd-size-debate-00178116

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/06/mike-johnson-donald-trump-election/

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Hurricane Helene Relief Information and Misinformation

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While Biden is doing everything possible to aid with Hurricane Relief, Trump is using misinformation to aid in his campaign. Please read the facts below in excerpts from Heather Cox Richardson”s, Sept. 30, 2024 letter:

“. . . the destruction from Hurricane Helene continues to mount. At least 128 people have died in six states, and many more remain unaccounted for. Roads remain closed, and power is still off for more than 2 million people. In remarks to reporters today, President Joe Biden called the damage “stunning” and explained that the federal government is providing all the support it can. He noted that federal help was on the ground before the storm and when asked if there were more the government could be doing, answered no and explained that the administration had “preplanned a significant amount of it, even though they…hadn’t asked for it yet.” 

Biden said this morning he will not tour the damaged areas until his presence will not disrupt emergency response operations. This afternoon, he said he would travel to North Carolina on Wednesday for a briefing and an aerial tour of Asheville, after ensuring the travel “will not disrupt the ongoing response.” He has also said he may have to ask Congress to come back into session before its mid-November return date to pass a supplemental spending bill. Punchbowl News political reporter Melanie Zanona noted that Congress left disaster aid out of the short-term continuing resolution to fund the government it passed before leaving town.

And yet, the hurricane has become the latest topic of disinformation for MAGA Republicans. Social media today is full of accounts claiming that the federal government is not responding to the crisis in western North Carolina because it prefers to spend money in Ukraine and on undocumented immigrants. Newsmax host Todd Starnes claimed that FEMA’s “top priority is not disaster relief” but to push diversity, equity and inclusion. “So, unless you’ve got your preferred pronouns spraypainted on the side of your submerged house—you won’t get a penny from Uncle Sam. Western North Carolina is just too Conservative and too Caucasian for FEMA to care.” The House Judiciary Committee posted that “Joe Biden was at the beach.”

These posts echo Russian disinformation, and Trump was on board with it. Touring Valdosta, Georgia, today, as a private citizen where people are still without power amidst the devastation, Trump said he had spoken to Elon Musk to get his Starlink satellites into North Carolina; FEMA has already provided 40 of the systems to North Carolina. He claimed that Georgia governor Brian Kemp is “having a hard time getting the president on the phone. They’re being very non-responsive.”

Kemp himself told reporters that Biden had called yesterday. “And he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’” Kemp told him, “We got what we need, we’ll work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s other things that we need just to call him directly, which I appreciate that.” South Carolina governor Henry McMaster, a Republican, called it “a great team effort…the federal government is helping us well, they’re embedded with us. There is no asset out there that we haven’t already accessed.”

Republican governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin told reporters that he was “incredibly appreciative of the rapid response and cooperation from the federal team at FEMA.” Asheville, North Carolina, mayor Esther Manheimer told CNBC “We have support from outside organizations, other fire departments sending us resources, the federal government as well. So it’s all-hands-on-deck, and it is a well-coordinated effort, but it is so enormous….”

FEMA spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg responded to a post claiming that FEMA was refusing to help certain Americans, saying: “This is a lie. We help all people regardless of background as fast as possible before, during and after disasters. That is our mission and that is our focus.” 

In contrast, numerous posters today noted that Trump repeatedly withheld federal aid from Democratic governors—including that of North Carolina—after disasters in their states. After the Trump campaign organized a fundraiser for victims of the hurricane, David Frum of The Atlantic reminded readers that in 2019, Trump was fined $2 million and three of his children were ordered to take classes as a penalty for taking for their own use funds from charities they ran.

When a reporter asked President Biden and Democratic North Carolina governor Roy Cooper to respond to Trump’s accusation that they are ignoring the disaster, Biden responded: “He’s lying. And the governor told him he was lying…. I’ve spoken to the governor, spent time with him…. I don’t know why he does this. And the reason I get so angry about it, I don’t care about what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are…. I assume you heard the Republican Governor of Georgia talk about that he was on the phone with me more than once. So that’s simply not true. And it’s irresponsible.”

Economist Paul Krugman noted: “We’ve all become desensitized, but it’s amazing how at this point the Trump campaign rests entirely on denouncing things that aren’t happening—[an] imaginary bad economy, imaginary runaway crime and now an imaginary failure of Biden and Harris to respond to natural disaster.”

In Florida, though, Governor Ron DeSantis says his state does not need more federal help. “We have it handled,” he said. DeSantis might be eager to downplay the damage to the state in part because in May he joined other Republican leaders in an attack on Biden’s actions to address climate change.

DeSantis signed into law a new Florida measure that erased any references to climate change in state law, where they had been included in a 2008 climate change and renewable energy package then backed by the state’s Republicans. The new law prohibited cities and counties from approving restrictions on energy policy, relaxed regulations on natural gas pipelines, and state and local governments from taking environmental concerns into consideration in their investing policies. DeSantis also rejected more than $350 million in federal funding for initiatives to promote energy efficiency, and $320 million for reducing vehicle emissions.

Like DeSantis, the authors of Project 2025 claim that those working to address climate change are part of “the climate change alarm industry,” which is “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

In fact, the U.S. economy is booming in part thanks to the climate change initiatives begun under the Inflation Reduction Act, which have prompted both domestic and foreign investment in alternative technologies. Biden approached the need to address climate change as an opportunity to create good jobs, including union jobs, in the United States.

With those investments, economist Mark Zandi wrote yesterday that the U.S. economy is one of the best performing economies in the past 35 years. “Economic growth is rip-roaring, with real GDP up 3% over the past year. Unemployment is low at near 4%, consistent with full employment. Inflation is fast closing in on Fed’s 2% target—grocery prices, rents and gas prices are flat to down over the past more than a year. Households’ financial obligations are light, and set to get lighter with the Fed cutting rates. House prices have never been higher, and most homeowners have more equity in their homes than ever. Corporate profits are robust, and the stock market is hitting a record high on a seemingly daily basis.”

Speaking German in Texas

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Can’t resist reposting this post from 4 years ago.

SPEAKING GERMAN IN TEXAS

In Texas there is a town called New Braunfels, where there is a large German-speaking population.

One day, a local rancher driving down a country road noticed a man using his hand to drink water from the rancher’s stock pond.

The rancher rolled down the window and shouted: “Sehr angenehm! Trink das Wasser nicht. Die kuehe haben darein geschissen.”

(This means: “Glad to meet you! Don’t drink the water. The cows have shat in it.”)

The man shouted back: “I’m from New York and just down here campaigning for Trump’s Presidential run. I can’t understand you. Please speak in English.”

The rancher replied: “Use both hands.”

On Eating Dogs and Cats (Excerpts from Heather Cox Richardson), Sept 19, 2024

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Today, at a White House reception in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, President Joe Biden said: “We don’t demonize immigrants. We don’t single them out for attacks. We don’t believe they’re poisoning the blood of the country. We’re a nation of immigrants, and that’s why we’re so damn strong.”. . . .

. . . .(The)impulse to focus on regaining power rather than serving the country was at least part of what was behind Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. That story has gotten even darker as it turns out Vance and Trump received definitive assurances on September 9 that the rumor was false, but Trump ran with it in the presidential debate of September 10 anyway. Now, although it has been made very clear—including by Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine—that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally,  Vance told a reporter today that he personally considers the programs under which they came illegal, so he is still “going to call [a Haitian migrant] an illegal alien.”

How Many Innocents Are They Willing to Kill to Win an Election?

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Image by Morgan Sessions on Unsplash

The headline above is my own, prompted by today’s “Letters from an American” by  Heather Cox Richardson. Below are excerpts. To see her entire letter, go HERE.

A Letter to Americans: Heather Cox Richardson, Sept 13, 2024

After bomb threats today, officials had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, and move the students to a different location. They had to close a middle school altogether. This is the second day bomb threats have closed schools and public buildings after MAGA Republicans have spread the lie that Haitian immigrants there have been eating white people’s pets.  Haitian immigrants, who were welcomed to Springfield by officials eager to revitalize the city and who are there legally, say they are afraid.

Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo today explained where the lie had come from and how it had spread. More than two months ago, they wrote, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is Trump’s vice presidential running mate, began to speak about Springfield at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, trying to tie rising housing prices to immigrants. The next day, at the National Conservatism conference, Vance accused “illegals” of overwhelming the city. 

On August 10, about a dozen neo-Nazis of the “Blood Tribe” organization showed up in Springfield, where one of their leaders said the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders” and blamed the Jews for the influx of migrants. The neo-Nazis stayed and, on August 27, showed up at a meeting of the city council, where their leader threatened council members. On September 1, another white supremacist group, Patriot Front, held its own “protest to the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants” in the city. Right-wing social media posters pushed the story, usually with “witnesses” to events in the city coming from elsewhere.

In late August, posting in a private Facebook group, a resident said they had heard that Haitian immigrants had butchered a neighbor’s cat for food. Vance reposted that rumor to attack Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, on whom he is trying to hang undocumented immigration although it was Trump who convinced Republicans to kill a strong bipartisan border bill this spring. Springfield police and the city manager told news outlets there was no truth to the rumors.  

Nonetheless, on September 10, Vance told his people to “keep the cat memes flowing,” even though—or perhaps because—the rumors were putting people in his own state in danger.

Trump repeated the lie at the presidential debate that night, claiming, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Today, President Joe Biden demanded Trump stop his attacks on Haitian-Americans, but Trump doubled down, promising to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield if he is elected, although they are here legally. 

The widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown, who has held his seat since 2007. Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both Democrats in states that supported Trump in 2020, are key to controlling the Senate.

Two Republican super PACs, one of which is linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have booked more than $82 million of ad space in Ohio between Labor Day and the election and are focusing on immigration.

Taking control of the Senate would enable Republicans not only to block all popular Democratic legislation, as they did with gun reform after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, but to continue to establish control of America’s judicial system. So long as their judges are in place to make law from the bench, what the majority of Americans want doesn’t matter.

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate.

McConnell became Senate majority leader in 2015 when voters gave Republicans control of the Senate, and when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused even to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. McConnell’s justification for this unprecedented obstruction was that Obama’s March nomination was too close to an election, but the underlying reason for the 2016 delay was at least in part his recognition that hopes of pushing the Supreme Court to the right, especially on the issue of abortion, were likely to get evangelical voters to the polls.

Trump won in 2016, and Republicans got control of the Senate. In 2017, when Democrats tried to filibuster Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s long-empty seat, then–majority leader McConnell killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. The end of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees meant that McConnell could push through Trump’s nominees Brett Kavanaugh, with just 50 votes, and Amy Coney Barrett, with just 52 (in late October 2020, with voting for the next president already underway).

Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion.

Controlling the country through the courts was the plan behind stacking the courts with Republican nominees and weaponizing the filibuster to stop Democrats from passing legislation. In March 2024, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that McConnell “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”

When he took office, President Joe Biden went to work putting his own mark on the federal judiciary. Almost two thirds of his appointees are women, and 62% are people of color. He appointed the first Black female justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court. But now, Republicans are hoping to retake the Senate to make sure that those appointments will stop, along with any more legislation. Their right-wing appointees to the courts will take the business of lawmaking out of the hands of American majorities.

Republican leaders are throwing everything they’ve got at the Senate races in Montana and Ohio, where they hope they can pick up the seat they need to take control of the Senate.

Attacks on immigrants in Ohio might move that needle.

In 1890, Republicans faced a similar problem. They had lost the popular vote in 1888, although they installed Republican president Benjamin Harrison in office through the Electoral College, and knew the Democrats would soon far outnumber their own voters. So they set out to guarantee that they could never lose the Senate, which should enable them to kill popular Democratic legislation.

But they misjudged the electorate, and in the 1890 midterm election, voters gave control of the House to the Democrats by a margin of two to one, and control of the Senate came down to a single seat, that of a senator from South Dakota. In those days, state legislatures chose their state’s senators, and shortly after it became clear that control of the Senate was going to depend on that South Dakota seat, U.S. Army troops went to South Dakota to rally voters by putting down an “Indian uprising” in which no people had died and no property had been damaged.

Fueled on false stories of “savages” who were attacking white settlers, the inexperienced soldiers were the ones who pulled the triggers to kill more than 250 Lakotas on December 29, but the Wounded Knee Massacre started in Washington, D.C.

Excerpts from Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American, Sept 12, 2024

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In a speech to about 550 people in Tucson, Arizona, Trump insisted he had scored a “monumental victory” in the debate, referred to Minnesota governor Tim Walz as the vice president, slurred his words, and appeared to be having trouble reading off the teleprompters. CNN tonight compared one of Trump’s 2016 debates with Hillary Clinton to his performance on Tuesday, and the difference was stark.

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic today that Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline. His tangents and inability to get to a point suggest “a fundamental problem with an underlying cognitive process.” “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” he wrote.

Trump continues to try to dominate the political debate by refusing to back off any of his assertions, doubling down on the lies about immigrants eating pets and teachers giving students sex change operations. He called Harris a “Marxist communist fascist socialist,” clearly just stringing words together.

Meanwhile, he is giving off vibes of desperation. This afternoon he announced he would launch his crypto platform “World Liberty Financial” on X Spaces on September 16, hardly the sign of a presidential candidate convinced he’s about to regain his position as the leader of the free world.

It has been notable for a while that Trump’s wife, Melania, is nowhere to be seen, and Trump has begun to cling to provocateur Laura Loomer, who has vowed utter loyalty to Trump and is evidently quite happy to be seen with him. This is a problem for the Republican Party because of her history of conspiracy theories and open racism. As Joe Perticone and Marc Caputo of The Bulwark note, Loomer has referred to Vice President Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” for example, and suggested she has not given birth to children because “she’s had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus.”

Loomer’s extremism has made other Trump supporters urge him to keep her at a distance, sparking an embarrassing public fight. Two of those trying to get Trump to isolate Loomer are Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Their chilliness prompted Loomer to fight back on social media, questioning Graham’s sexual identity and calling attention to Greene’s extramarital affair and comparing her to a “hooker.”

 

 

Point by Point #2: 42 Reasons why you might want to reconsider if you are considering voting for Trump

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Click on photos to enlarge and read.

Point by Point #1: Reasons why you might want to reconsider if you are voting for Trump

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Opinion Today

September 12, 2024
Author Headshot By Eliza Barclay

Climate Editor, Opinion

It may be a subtle point in a wild election cycle, but in fact, the contributing writer Robinson Meyer argued in a guest essay published Wednesday, Trump bears significant responsibility for China’s ascension in hybrid and electric vehicles (as well as other industries including solar, wind and battery production) and for G.M. and Ford’s struggles to keep up. “America has fallen behind China in large part because Trump killed our climate policies,” Meyer writes.

And it’s not just automakers that are lagging China. We are now facing, as Meyer puts it, “chronic trade and security concerns” because we don’t yet have a viable battery industry to support our military in future crises. The way America can create that industry is first by developing a viable electric vehicle sector. Harris seems to understand that, but Trump appears poised to weaken or suspend all of the policies and subsidies that are currently helping American-made electric vehicles along. “With him once again in the Oval Office, America would be at risk of falling even further behind,” Meyer writes.

Read the guest essay:

Think!!!

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The above is from the timeline of Mark Hagland:

This is one of the pieces I posted on Facebook and asked you to read, but those not subscribed could not read it. The other was too long to take a screenshot of. Sorry. 

Heather Cox Richardson, Sept. 7, 2024

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Many of you may get her daily letters, but just in case, this is another one I feel it is so important for everyone to see.