Trumpism
PART II
December 14, 2018
Escape From The Trump Cult
Millions of Americans are blindly devoted to their
Dear Leader. What will it take for them to snap out of it?
By Alexander Hurst
On December 20, 1954, some 62 years before Donald Trump would be sworn in as president of the United States, Dorothy Martin and dozens of her followers crowded into her home in Chicago to await the apocalypse. The group believed that Martin, a housewife, had received a message from a planet named Clarion that the world would end in a great flood beginning at midnight, and that they, the faithful, would be rescued by an alien spacecraft.
Unbeknownst to the other âSeekers,â three of their groupâLeon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachterâwere not there to be saved, but to observe. Psychologists from elite institutions, they had infiltrated the pseudo-cult to study Festingerâs recently elaborated theory of âcognitive dissonance.â The theory predicted that when people with strongly held beliefs were presented with contrary evidence, rather than change their minds they would seek comfort and âcognitive consonanceâ by convincing others to support their erroneous views.
Festingerâs prediction was right. When neither the apocalypse nor the UFO arrived, the group began proselytizing about how God had rewarded the Earth with salvation because of their vigil. His subsequent book, When Prophecy Fails, became a standard sociology reference for examining cognitive dissonance, religious prophecy, and cult-like behavior. What the three researchers probably never predicted, though, was that over half a century later Festingerâs theory would be applicable to roughly 25 percent of the population of the United States and one of its two major political parties. Nor could they have foreseen that the countryâs salvation might well depend on its ability to deprogram the Trump cultâs acolytesâan effort that would require a level of sympathetic engagement on the part of nonbelievers that they have yet to display.
Personality cults are a hallmark of populist-autocratic politics. The names of the various leaders are practically synonymous with their movements: Le Pen, Farage, Duterte, OrbĂĄn, Erdogan, ChĂĄvez, Bolsonaro, Putin. Or if we were to dip farther back into history: Castro, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin. Like religious cult leaders, demagogues understand the importance of setting up an in-group/out-group dynamic as a means of establishing their followersâ identity as members of a besieged collective.
Trump, like the populist authoritarians before and around him, has also understood (or, at least, instinctually grasped) how indispensable his own individual persona is to his ultimate goal of grasping and maintaining power. Amidst his string of business failures, Trumpâs singular talent has been that of any con man: the incredible ability to cultivate a public image. Of course, Trump did not build his cult of followersâhis in-groupâex nihilo; in many ways, the stage was set for his entrance. America had already split into two political identities by the time he announced his campaign for president in 2015, not just in terms of the information we consume, but down to the brands we prefer and the stores we frequent. And so with particularly American bombast and a reality TV starâs penchant for manipulating the media, Trump tore pages from the us-against-them playbook of the European far right and presented them to a segment of the American public already primed to receive it with religious fervor.
[ Escape From The Trump Cult pdf ]
January 28, 2019
âWhereâs My Roy Cohn?â: Film Explores How Joseph
McCarthyâs Ex-Aide Mentored Trump & Roger Stone
Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, who was arrested on Friday, and Donald Trump share a unique history: Both were heavily influenced by the infamous attorney Roy Cohn, who served as a chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare in the 1950s and would later become a leading mob attorney. Cohn represented Trump for years and once claimed he considered Trump to be his best friend. Cohn is the subject of a new documentary at the Sundance Film Festival titled âWhere’s My Roy Cohn?â We speak to the filmâs director, Matt Tyrnauer.
Feb. 22, 2019
Yale psych prof: If Trump werenât president
he would be âcontained and evaluated.â
Psychiatrist and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump says “a lot worse will happen” if Trump is not removed.
By Chauncey DeVega
At the center of the chaotic maelstrom that is the Trump presidency is the question of Donald Trumpâs mental health. His public behavior (and, by most accounts, his private behavior as well) is that of a man who is a compulsive liar and malignant narcissist, is paranoid, lacks in impulse control and lives in an alternate reality of his own creation.
Donald Trump has recently declared a ânational emergencyâ in order to further expand his power and gut American democracy and the Constitution in the service of his radically destructive right-wing agenda. But in reality it is Donald Trump who is the actual national emergency, an obvious threat to this country and the entire world.
Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe recently revealed that officials in the Justice Department discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from power. Yet it also may be true that Trumpâs apparent mental health problems are actually helping him to remain in power and to control his supporters.
How are mentally unwell leaders more dangerous than leaders who are âmerelyâ criminals? How have the American people become so numb to Trump and the Republican Partyâs assault on American democracy and the common good? How is dangerous behavior normalized in an unhealthy society â such as ours? How are Trump and his movement affecting negatively the mental and physical health of the American people?
In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Dr. Bandy Lee. She is a psychiatrist at Yale University and a leading voice among the growing number of mental health and other medical professionals who have been trying to raise public awareness about Donald Trumpâs mental health.
March 4, 2020
Who is Jared Kushner?
Narrated by Anna Akana
We know him as Ivanka Trumpâs husband, senior advisor to President Trump, and heir to a $1.8 billion dollar real estate empire that was tarnished with tax evasion scandal. Here’s what you should know about Trumpâs one percent-er son-in-law.
Channel 4 News
March 19, 2019
Jared Kushner: power hungry
and intent on enriching himself?
They were once considered a moderating influence on Donald Trump’s Presidency. A new book, though, portrays Mr Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, as a power-hungry couple, concerned primarily with enriching themselves.
The White House has dismissed it as “fiction”. But there are long-standing concerns in the US over Mr Kushner’s business dealings and the level of influence he has over foreign policy. Kushner has been caught up in investigations by the Mueller Inquiry and Congress. We report from Baltimore.
DEMOCRACY NOW!
March 22, 2019
Vicky Ward on “Kushner, Inc.”
Web-only extended interview and conversation with investigative journalist Vicky Ward, author of Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
March 22, 2019
The Mueller Investigation
With the Mueller report complete, FRONTLINEâs âThe Mueller Investigation,â tells the inside story of how we arrived at this moment. The film goes inside President Trump’s confrontations with the Department of Justice and the FBI in the early days of the Russia investigation, and explores the presidentâs attempt to undermine authorities as Muellerâs investigation heated up.
To access FRONTLINEâs collected reporting on the Mueller investigation, click here: https://to.pbs.org/2IHrzdV
May 8, 2019
‘It Was Always A Scam; He Was Always Losing Money’
The New York Times obtained ten years of Donald Trump’s tax information, beginning in the mid-1980s, and the Times found Trump lost $1.17 billion from 1985 to 1994. Trump responded to the reporting Wednesday morning on Twitter.
May 13, 2019
Trump’s Trade War
As the trade war between the U.S. and China escalates, FRONTLINE and NPR take a look at what led to the rising tensions and whatâs at stake.
âTrumpâs Trade Warâ presents the inside story of President Trumpâs gamble to confront China over trade. Reporting from the U.S. and China, FRONTLINE and NPR investigate what led the worldâs two largest economies to the brink, and the billions at stake.
Politics & Society
June 24, 2019
Are We Living in 1984?
George Packer Revisits Orwellâs Dystopian Novel
for The Atlantic
1984 â George Orwellâs seminal work â has enjoyed a
cultural resurgence in the wake of Donald Trumpâs presidency.
âOrwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning,â George Packer writes in Doublethink is Stronger than Orwell Imagined, his latest article for The Atlantic. The book, originally published in 1949, envisions a dystopian future in which the world has fallen prey to ruthless totalitarianism, fueled by terror, surveillance, and political propaganda. Though there are startling similarities between the world today â the haunting phrase âfake newsâ comes to mind â and Orwellâs nightmarish dystopia, we donât live under a totalitarian regime. âWe are living with a new kind of regime that didnât exist in Orwellâs time,â Packer writes. âToday the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division â not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.â
Packer offers us a new reading of 1984; today, the heart of the issue is not the state, but the individual. Itâs not that Trump might abolish democracy, Packer argues, âbut that Americans had put him in a position to try.â Regardless of the political ideologies of the day, 1984 will remain fundamental reading because it wrestles with the enduring concept of truth. Does it exist? Who gets to decide what is and isnât true? According to Packer, the real political war is the one we wage internally.
George Packer is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His recent book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019.
July 12, 2019
ACOSTA RESIGNS AS LABOR SECRETARY
AFTER EPSTEIN CONTROVERSY
The Pedophile, The Prosecutor, And The President
Former US Attorney Joyce Vance, WaPoâs Ashley Parker, former Assistant Director at the FBI Frank Figliuzzi, Move Onâs Karine Jean-Pierre, and Bloombergâs Tim OâBrien on Secretary of Labor Alex Acostaâs resignation, despite Trump saying he had given him his full support.
July 29, 2019
The United States vs Julian Assange
In Part Two of its investigation into Julian Assange, Four Corners looks at Assangeâs activities conducted during the nearly seven years he spent sheltering in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
In the 2016 race to the White House, presidential candidate Donald Trump took a shine to the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks, led by its Australian founder Julian Assange.
Trump revelled in the damage inflicted upon his opponent, Hillary Clinton, by a series of sensational leaks published by the site. Now, as President, Donald Trump has performed a spectacular flip, presiding over an administration determined to imprison the publisher of the leaks.
For Part One, Hero or Villain: The Prosecution of Julian Assange, click here.
Read more about this story here.
The Last Word
with Lawrence OâDonnell
August 21, 2019
Psychiatrist On âThe Essential Emptiness
Of President Donald Trumpâ
Dr. Lance Dodes, one of the first mental health professionals who questioned Donald Trumpâs stability, discusses how Trump has devolved since the beginning of his presidency.
September 1, 2019
White House insiders reveal damning
allegations against Donald Trump
. . . And as Karl Stefanovic reports, one of the most embarrassing claims is that the supposed âunbreakableâ alliance between our two countries, far from being Trumped, was almost dumped.
ZERO TOLERANCE
Documentary
October 22, 2019
FRONTLINE investigates how President Trump turned immigration into a powerful political weapon that fueled division and violence. The documentary goes inside the efforts of three political insurgents to tap into populist anger, transform the Republican Party and crack down on immigration.
December 2019 Issue
HOW AMERICA ENDS
A tectonic demographic shift is under way.
Can the country hold together?
By Yoni Appelbaum
Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.
âOur radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage,â Trump told the crowd at his reelection kickoff event in Orlando in June. âThey want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.â This is the core of the presidentâs pitch to his supporters: He is all that stands between them and the abyss.
The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minorityâand its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests. If there are precedents for such a transition, they lie here in the United States, where white Englishmen initially predominated, and the boundaries of the dominant group have been under negotiation ever since. Yet those precedents are hardly comforting. Many of these renegotiations sparked political conflict or open violence, and few were as profound as the one now under way.
The Social Dilemma
“Nothing vast enters the world of mortals
without a curse.” — Sophocles
This 2020 documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.
PBS
January 2020
AMERICAâS GREAT DIVIDE
From Obama to Trump
February 7, 2020
Trumpâs Acquittal Shows The GOP Senate
Acts Like A Cult
Republican senators blocked evidence and used lies, conspiracy theories and convoluted arguments to defend their leader.
By Angelina Chapin
President Donald Trump stood in front of a microphone Thursday, gloating about his impeachment trial acquittal and showering his biggest advocates with praise. After entering the White House East Room to the tune of âHail to the Chief,â he called Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) an âincredible guy,â told Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) he did a âgreat jobâ and led a standing ovation for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Trump had good reason to dole out the back slaps. Since he was charged in December with pressuring Ukraine to help sabotage his political rivals and blocking the Houseâs attempt to investigate the issue, Republican senators have rallied around him like a fortress wall.
They blocked witnesses from testifying at the Senate trial and used lies, conspiracy theories and acrobatic logic to try to prove his innocence. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the only Republican in the Senate to vote for Trumpâs removal from office, has been skewered by the president and some members of the GOP over the past few days. On Friday, Trump dismissed two House impeachment witnesses, saying he was ânot happyâ with them.
And though this behavior might seem like dirty politics as usual, psychologists and professors say the extreme measures Republicans took to defend Trump resemble a more sinister phenomenon: the mentality of cult members.
âTheyâve just refused to entertain any ideas that go against their leader,â said Janja Lalich, a sociology professor at California State University, Chico, who studies cults and extremist groups. âThat kind of closed-mindedness is just so typical of cult members.â
WhaleRider â May 11, 2020 â Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
ââŚhe is actually testing peopleâs loyalty to the âlawsâ of his mind over the laws of nature, or even impulse for survival. The more he abuses them, the greater their devotion grows, since the psychological cost of admitting their mistake is ever higher â and so it becomes easier to dig a well of unreality than to see the obvious truth.
Mental symptoms do not discriminate between levels of intelligence. What we are seeing is what mental health experts warned would happen if we left a severely impaired person in an influential position without treatment, and what others have described as a cult.
But what I find most insidious is the contagion of symptoms: prolonged exposureâŚcauses you to âcatchâ his worldview, and even the healthiest, soundest people turn âcrazy,â as if afflicted with the same condition.
This is a known phenomenon I have encountered a great deal from working in underserved settings. It is interchangeably called âshared psychosis,â âfolie Ă plusieursâ or âinduced delusional disorder.â The cure is removal. Then, quite dramatically, an entire afflicted family, street gang or prison cell-block that seemed almost âpossessedâ returns to normal.
When experts call out abnormal signs, it is not a diagnosis but important information⌠It is not up to mental health experts to say how it is to be done, but it is our responsibility to say what must be done, based on our best assessment. Our prescription is removal.â
~ Dr Bandy X. Lee, on testing loyalty in the cult of Trump.
The coronavirus pandemic has made Trumpâs psychiatric issues clear. We should remove him for our own safety.
As the death toll from Covid-19 mounts, we have a decision to make.
Bandy X. Lee
Yale University | March 24, 2020
We knew this presidency would be deadly. We were not exaggerating when, three years ago, we put together the public-service book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. We meant in part that the president would be dangerous to civic life, to democracy, and to the nationâs mental health â but we also meant that he would endanger lives.
Politics did not concern us. We are health professionals. Everything falls secondary to life and death, including politics.
After we got together to write the book, hundreds, and later thousands, more mental health professionals gathered from all over the country and the world with their shared concerns. Together we formed first the National Coalition, and then the World Mental Health Coalition, to organize around our goal of societal safety.
Through consultation with Congress members, letters, petitions, and education of the public, we tried to emphasize that mental impairment in the office of the US presidency is a serious matter.
âDonald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were â they just couldnât get him to do anything about it,â an intelligence official recently said about the lack of mobilization around the now deadly coronavirus pandemic.
His behavior is exactly what we expect of someone who is dangerously lacking in mental capacity. Just when surveillance was needed, he was more preoccupied with âkeeping the numbers lowâ than testing and containment. And when behavioral change would decide the scale of the eventual calamity, he defiantly appeared in crowds, shaking hands and touching surfaces all the more.
As his rallies were canceled, he used daily press conferences for his emotional compulsion to create a desired, alternative reality, through delusional-level distortion and misinformation, rather than working to save lives. The pandemic makes stark the deadliness of his symptoms, and if we believe those around him will be able to contain or go around them, we are mistaken.
Here we enter the realm of pathology. What is truly dangerous is not the overt symptoms â even a psychotic patient wearing a tinfoil hat is not very dangerous â but the denial and the extent to which one would go to cover up symptoms. And this also goes for the presidentâs handlers, by extension. We call this âloss of insight.â It is the loss of ability to take care of oneself or to see that one has a problem, which diminishes all the more in those who need intervention the most.
On top of this, mental symptoms such as denial, projection (blaming others for what one is doing), and the inflation of non-realities while suppressing reality will be all the more unrelenting and non-negotiable when severe. Not only that, but where there is prolonged exposure to severe symptoms, previously sound individuals will start losing their own grounding in reality and take on similar symptoms.
Disease is unlike normal variation. It brings damage and death, which is why we treat. Just as with the viral pandemic, early signs may be difficult to detect, and warning signs may not always be visible to the untrained eye. But those who have seen similar cases in the past can recognize the signs early, know how serious will be their course, and bring greater precision to needed management, even if the circumstances are novel. In other words, expertise makes a difference. Without it, the danger of minimizing and normalizing pathology is too great.
Normal choices are flexible, adaptable, and life-affirming. Pathology is rigid, stereotypical, and follows very closely other cases of disease. No matter the immediate, accidental advantages â which the president calls his âgutâ, when they are actually symptoms â the course is destructive: whether we look at healthcare, domestic tranquility, global security, pandemic preparedness, or an artificially bloated economy, pathological decisions have one eventual trajectory. It is the definition of disease.
As the death toll from coronavirus mounts, we have a decision to make. We have learned from the pandemic that prevention is key. A leadership worse than its absence can mean the difference between a contained outbreak and a catastrophe.
There will be many more critical junctures in not just the coming months but days and even hours as the crisis deepens. A presidentâs mental incapacity, at this level of severity, is not an issue that non-experts can grasp or handle. Whether it is impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or an ultimatum on resignation is for the politicians to decide, but our prescription is removal. It is a prescription for survival.
Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine, expert on violence, and editor of âThe Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.â She represents only the views of the World Mental Health Coalition, as its president.
“Under Control” by Brian Stauffer
#UNFIT: The Psychology of Donald Trump
âAs a Narcissist, Trump can not admit heâs wrong and change course, even when American lives are at stake. We can not let him take the country down with him.â
â Hans Royal, June 2020
June 16, 2020
The Virus: What Went Wrong?
As COVID-19 spread across the globe, why was the U.S. caught so unprepared?âŻAn investigation of how Americaâs leaders failed to prepare and protect us â and who is accountable.
In this 90-minute FRONTLINE documentary special, award-winning journalists Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith trace the coronavirusâs path across the globe andâŻidentify a chain of fateful missteps â from Chinese authoritiesâ early silencing of dissent around the virus’s emergence in Wuhan, to the World Health Organizationâs failure to more quickly sound the alarm, to Italian officialsâ slow initial reaction. Then, âThe Virus: What Went Wrong?â zeroes in on key moments in the Trump administrationâs halting response â including warnings going back to January, the CDCâs inability to manufacture and mass-distribute a working COVID-19 test early on, and a string of missed opportunities to contain the virus before it was too late.
#Coronavirus #COVID19 #CoronavirusPandemic
Aug. 14, 2020
Plagued By Nonsense
Pandemics Throughout History: How Mistakes, Fakes,
and Missing Facts Make Epidemics Worse
Right now, we are all confronting one of humanityâs scariest enemies: epidemic disease. Are we brave enough to face this horror? You bet we are! Weâve done it every day during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Covid is new. Other diseases have plagued our ancestors since ancient times. Mighty civilizations have been devastated by the invisible invaders we call âgerms.â But people are not helpless! Over centuries, we learned how to fight back against disease. Our strongest weapons are science and critical thinking. However, germs have a powerful ally: misinformation! How do ignorance and bad ideas help the germs winâand what can we do about that?
Sept. 17, 2020
Inside Donald Trumpâs 18 recorded interviews
with Bob Woodward for his book ‘RAGE’
In taped conversations with a Washington Post journalist, President Trump said he wanted to downplay the severity of the coronavirus. And the recordings reveal the Presidentâs view on how close the United States came to nuclear war with North Korea. Scott Pelley reports.
RAWSTORY
Investigates
Sept. 21, 2020
Expert on cult movements: Trumpâs attempts
to falsify reality follows âpattern of the Nazisâ
By Igor Derysh, Salon
A prominent psychiatrist who spent years studying Nazi Germany has called for mental health professionals to speak out about President Trumpâs âfalsification of realityâ ahead of the election, warning that his attacks on the truth echo those of the Nazis.
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, distinguished professor emeritus at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a leading psychohistorian who has written extensively about doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, has long called for mental health experts to defy warnings from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and speak out about Trumpâs mental health. Lifton recently published a book entitled Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry and was one of the 27 mental health experts featured in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the bestseller edited by Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee in which mental health professionals assessed the president.
Lifton told Salon that the book and a Yale conference on the topic began the movement of âpsychologists and psychiatrists speaking out against Trump.â
âI spoke about what I called malignant normality that was being imposed on us, and the need to be witnessing professionals who told the truth and oppose the malignant normality,â he said in an interview last week.
Lifton said that Trumpâs supporters and enablers exhibit the same âcult-like behaviorâ that he has studied, adding that the current administration has âTrumpifiedâ every part of the federal government, in much the same way that the German government was âNazifiedâ under Adolf Hitler.
Professor Jason Stanley, in his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, observed that âThe leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.â Stanley says recent global events, including the pandemic and the protests, have substantiated his concern about how fascist rhetoric is showing up in politics and policies around the world.
Wikipedia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Hoffman: How & Why Germans Bought Hitler’s Pitch
âSay Their Namesâ by Kadir Nelson
REVISITING MENGELE’S MALIGNANT
The study of Nazis still offers moral instruction on how evil arises.
By Adam Gopnick
June 15, 2020
Have we come, at last, to the end of morally instructive Nazis? After eight decades, Nazis may seem to have retreated into a class with orcs and cable-TV sharks, fantastic creatures representing evil, rather than historical figures who actually were evil. It is fine to say we should look past the History Channel NazisââHitler and the Occultââto the real thing, but there comes a time when the iconic imagination really does overwhelm the historical imagination. No one any longer objects to jokes about the Spanish Inquisition, which burned skeptics and Jews alive, but which exists now first of all as a Monty Python sketch (âNobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!â), while Henry VIII and the Tudors, who burned men, too, and brutalized thousands, are a soap opera before they are a sermon.
Two new books suggest that we may not have come to the end, and that, on the contrary, our struggle to understand how evil happens is still best helped by understanding how evil happened. The subject of David G. Marwellâs Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death” (W. W. Norton) is one of the leading orcs: Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz, who oversaw selections on the train rampâsending some family members off to be gassed or worked to death, while conducting bizarre medical experiments on othersâand who then escaped scot-free to a secret life in South America. Mengeleâs name became synonymous with pure evil of the sinister, educated sort: the movie âMarathon Man,â with Laurence Olivier as the Dustin Hoffman-torturing dentist, making dental visits difficult for a generation, was inspired by Mengele.
Marwellâs life has much new to tell us, both about Mengele himself and, more significant, about the social and scientific milieu that allowed him to flourish. There is nothing surprising in educated people doing evil, but it is still amazing to see how fully they construct a rationale to let them do it, piling plausible reason on self-justification, until, like Mengele, they are able to look themselves in the mirror every morning with bright-eyed self-congratulation.
June 18, 2020
The Hole 285: Apprentice Staffer Noel Casler Tells All
on Working with Trump (Full Episode HD)
Comedian and former Celebrity Apprentice / Trump beauty pageant staffer Noel Casler joins us to TELL ALL about his time working for Donald Trump, his Adderall addiction, impeachment and more.
#DiaperDon #NoelCasler #TrumpCrimeFamily
June 2020 Issue
THE PROPHESIES OF Q
American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.
By Adrienne LaFrance
Illustrations by Arsh Raziuddin
This article is part of âShadowland,â a project about conspiracy thinking in America.
If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddlerâs plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you lookâwhich is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you donât care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planetâs strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.
You know all this because you believe in Q.
VII. APOCALYPSE
WATCHKEEPERS FOR THE End of Days can easily find signs of impending doomâin comets and earthquakes, in wars and pandemics. It has always been this way. In 1831, a Baptist preacher in rural New York named William Miller began to publicly share his prediction that the Second Coming of Jesus was imminent. Eventually he settled on a date: October 22, 1844. When the sun came up on October 23, his followers, known as the Millerites, were crushed. The episode would come to be known as the Great Disappointment. But they did not give up. The Millerites became the Adventists, who in turn became the Seventh-day Adventists, who now have a worldwide membership of more than 20 million. âThese people in the QAnon communityâI feel like they are as deeply delusional, as deeply invested in their beliefs, as the Millerites were,â Travis View, one of the hosts of a podcast called QAnon Anonymous, which subjects QAnon to acerbic analysis, told me. âThat makes me pretty confident that this is not something that is going to go away with the end of the Trump presidency.â
QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift. In his classic 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn examined the emergence of apocalyptic thinking over many centuries. He found one common condition: This way of thinking consistently emerged in regions where rapid social and economic change was taking placeâand at periods of time when displays of spectacular wealth were highly visible but unavailable to most people. This was true in Europe during the Crusades in the 11th century, and during the Black Death in the 14th century, and in the Rhine Valley in the 16th century, and in William Millerâs New York in the 19th century. It is true in America in the 21st century.
The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Qâs teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. Theyâll wait as long as they must for deliverance.
Trust the plan. Enjoy the show. Nothing can stop what is coming.
This article appears in the June 2020 print edition with the headline âNothing Can Stop What Is Coming.â It was published online on May 14, 2020.
Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.
July 16, 2020
Psychiatrist: Trump Became The Same ‘Sadistic,
Tyrannical And Cruel’ Person His Father Was
Dr. Lance Dodes joins Lawrence OâDonnell to react to the revelations in Mary Trumpâs tell-all book and explain why her description of Donald Trump as a sadist is âconsistent with everything we know about him.â
July 26, 2020
EXCLUSIVE: Mary Trump’s insider interview on ‘most dangerous’ President
The President of the United States is often referred to as the most powerful man in the world. But Donald Trumpâs niece, Mary Trump says the current POTUS is really the most dangerous man in the world. She is so troubled by Trumpâs abuse of his position that she says itâs her patriotic duty to take him down. And to do that she has written a brutal tell-all memoir.
As Liam Bartlett discovers in an Australian television exclusive interview, the book is the ultimate insiderâs account of a truly dysfunctional family. But it has added substance because Doctor Mary Trump is also a clinical psychologist. Her analysis of how her Uncle Don became Uncle Sam is not just a page-turner, itâs a horror story.
Mary Trump on Her Uncle,
President Trump & Why He Must Be Ousted
âIn my family, being kind was considered being weak,â says Mary Trump, President Trumpâs niece, a clinical psychologist and author of TOO MUCH and NEVER ENOUGH: How My Family Created the Worldâs Most Dangerous Man.
We spend the hour with Mary Trump, discussing her book the president doesnât want people to read, in which she describes his upbringing in a dysfunctional family that fostered his greed, cruelty and racist and sexist behaviors â which he is now inflicting on the world. Mary Trump also discusses the presidentâs mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, his long history of lies and misrepresentations, and the dangers of his reelection. âI believe that this country is on the knifeâs edge, and I donât want anybody going to cast their vote in November being able to claim that they just donât know who theyâre voting for,â she says.
August 11, 2020
Dr. Bandy X. Lee in Conversation with Dr. Mary L. Trump
Exclusive Interview: Two Mental Health Experts Assess the Worldâs Most Dangerous Man.
September 2020 Issue
How the Pandemic Defeated America
A virus has brought the worldâs most powerful country to its knees.
By Ed Yong
Updated August 4, 2020
Editorâs Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.
. . . Beginning on April 16, DiRestaâs team noticed growing online chatter about Judy Mikovits, a discredited researcher turned anti-vaccination champion. Posts and videos cast Mikovits as a whistleblower who claimed that the new coronavirus was made in a lab and described Anthony Fauci of the White Houseâs coronavirus task force as her nemesis. Ironically, this conspiracy theory was nested inside a larger conspiracyâpart of an orchestrated PR campaign by an anti-vaxxer and QAnon fan with the explicit goal to âtake down Anthony Fauci.â It culminated in a slickly produced video called Plandemic, which was released on May 4. More than 8 million people watched it in a week.
Doctors and journalists tried to debunk Plandemicâs many misleading claims, but these efforts spread less successfully than the video itself. Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become uncontrollable unless caught early. But while health organizations recognize the need to surveil for emerging diseases, they are woefully unprepared to do the same for emerging conspiracies. In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the threat of misinformation, âtheir response was: ââThatâs interesting, but thatâs just stuff that happens on the internet.âââ
[ From the June 2020 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how QAnon is more important than you think ]
Rather than countering misinformation during the pandemicâs early stages, trusted sources often made things worse. Many health experts and government officials downplayed the threat of the virus in January and February, assuring the public that it posed a low risk to the U.S. and drawing comparisons to the ostensibly greater threat of the flu. The WHO, the CDC, and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledgement of uncertainty, so when they were reversedâthe virus is worse than the flu; wear masksâthe changes seemed like befuddling flip-flops.
The media added to the confusion. Drawn to novelty, journalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incremental scientific claim, even those that hadnât been verified or peer-reviewed.
In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVIDâ19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.**
Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow. The ensuing confusion, and the many genuine unknowns about the virus, has created a vortex of fear and uncertainty, which grifters have sought to exploit. Snake-oil merchants have peddled ineffectual silver bullets (including actual silver). Armchair experts with scant or absent qualifications have found regular slots on the nightly news. And at the center of that confusion is Donald Trump.
“Natural Ability” by Barry Blitt
Sept. 2, 2020
How Holy Is Donald Trump?
Many conservative Christians feel that Trump is the holiest choice for the White House. Throwback to Jordan Klepper trying to find out why.
September 3, 2020
Whatâs the worst that could happen?
The election will likely spark violence â and a constitutional crisis
By Rosa Brooks
We wanted to know: Whatâs the worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential election? President Trump has broken countless norms and ignored countless laws during his time in office, and while my colleagues and I at the Transition Integrity Project didnât want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail, we realized that identifying the most serious risks to our democracy might be the best way to avert a November disaster. So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what theyâd do in a range of election and transition scenarios.
Sept. 4, 2020
Why Trump Supporters Canât Admit
Who He Really Is
Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common
enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.
By Peter Wehner
. . . In just the past two weeks, the president has praised supporters of the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon, which contends, as The Guardian recently summarized it, that âa cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children.â Trump touted a conspiracy theory that the national death toll from COVID-19 is about 9,000, a fraction of the official figure of nearly 185,000; promoted a program on the One America News Network accusing demonstrators of secretly plotting Trumpâs downfall; encouraged his own supporters to commit voter fraud; and claimed Biden is controlled by âpeople that are in the dark shadowsâ who are wearing âdark uniforms.â
Trump believes his own government is conspiring to delay a COVID-19 vaccine until after the election. He retweeted a message from the actor James Woods saying New York Governor Andrew Cuomo âshould be in jailâ and another from an account accusing the Portland, Oregon, mayor of âcommitting war crimes.â The president is âinciting violence,â in the words of Marylandâs Republican Governor, Larry Hogan. Trump defended 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a supporter who is charged with first-degree homicide; and stated that if he loses the election in November it would be because it was ârigged.â At the same time, the second-ranking House Republican, among other of the presidentâs supporters, has shared several manipulated videos in an effort to damage Biden.
This is just the latest installment in a four-year record of shame, indecency, incompetence, and malfeasance. And yet, for tens of millions of Trumpâs supporters, none of it matters. None of it even breaks through. At this point, it appears, Donald Trump really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters.
September 11, 2020
Why nothing matters to Trump voters
By David Lauter | Washington Bureau Chief
WASHINGTON â President Trumpâs recorded interviews with Bob Woodward, in which he admitted to deliberately downplaying the danger of the coronavirus, blasted through the presidential campaign this week. His words dominated discussion and diverted the candidates from any other topics they had planned to focus on.
What they probably did not do is change many minds.
The same goes for the previous weekâs eruption â the Atlantic magazine article quoting anonymous officials who said Trump had disparaged military service members as âlosersâ â and the one before that, and the one before that and so on.
Many Democrats find the lack of reaction baffling. Surely, they say after each new revelation, this piece of evidence will be the one to cause Trump supporters to abandon their candidate en masse.
September 11, 2020
DONALD TRUMP IS WAITING
FOR YOU IN FIRST CLASS
âI Moved on Her Very Heavilyâ: Part 3
By E. Jean Carroll
In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorfâs dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent âmoved onâ them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. âIâm automatically attracted to beautifulâI just start kissing them, itâs like a magnet ⌠And when youâre a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab âem by the pussy.â
Carrollâs lawsuit took a dramatic turn this week, when the Justice Department intervened in an attempt to take over the presidentâs defense, asserting that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he claimed not to know Carroll. Meanwhile, a White House spokesperson denied all of the womenâs allegations, calling them âdecades-old false statementsâ that had been âthoroughly litigated in the last election and rejected by the American people.â Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.
Narrated by Julianne Moore
Premiered October 28, 2020
Who is Donald J. Trump?
Donald Trump is the only presidential candidate on the ballot who has publicly agreed that his own daughter is a ‘piece of ass.’ The bronze-gilded mogul is as notable for his multiple rape allegations and history of racist renting practices as he is for putting children in cages and shamelessly funding a campaign to execute 5 innocent Black teens. So how did the man who once said heâd choose Oprah as his running mate end up with yet another campaign endorsement from former KKK grand wizard David Duke?
September 20, 2020
EXCLUSIVE: Melania Trumpâs former friend
reveals White House secrets
Just as the world has never experienced a United States President quite like Donald Trump, itâs not seen a First Lady like Melania Trump either. Despite being one of the most photographed women on the planet, she remains virtually unknown. But wealthy New York socialite Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is now controversially trying to change all that. She says she was âbestiesâ with Melania for 15 years, and because of their friendship was not only appointed a senior adviser to the First Lady, she was also asked to organise Trumpâs presidential inauguration.
But two years ago the friendship between the two women soured. Stephanie claims she was the victim of an orchestrated political hit and was bitterly disappointed when Melania abandoned her. Many are calling it a despicable act of revenge, but Stephanie has now written a tell-all book about the First Lady and her secrets, and as she explains to Liam Bartlett in an exclusive interview, there are plenty of secrets to tell about Melania and the Donald.
PBS
THE CHOICE 2020
Trump vs. Biden
In the midst of the historic coronavirus pandemic, economic hardship and a reckoning over racism, this November Americans will decide who leads the nation for the next four years: President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden. Ahead of the 2020 election, FRONTLINEâs critically acclaimed series âThe Choiceâ returns with interwoven investigative biographies of both men, focusing on how they have responded in moments of crisis.
In this 2-hour special from veteran FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk and his team, hear from friends, family, colleagues and adversaries about the challenges that shaped Trump and Bidenâs lives and could inform how they confront the crises facing the nation at this pivotal juncture.
September 24, 2020
Say it plainly: The president is a psychopath
By Alan D. Blotcky and Seth D. Norrholm
âGet rid of the ballotsâ and âthere wonât be a transfer,â said Donald Trump on Wednesday. This comment is a direct and dangerous expression of his anti-democratic intention. If unstopped, Trump may well destroy our 244-year-old democracy.
It is time to stop pulling punches. It is time to stop relying on political pundits to weigh in on Trumpâs behavior, which they often soften and even normalize.
We are psychologists, and we are convinced Donald Trump is a psychopath. His malignant behavior over the past four years is growing and escalating right before our eyes. Trumpâs psychopathy will change us forever if he is not stopped.
This is not hyperbole. This is not an expression of âa left-wing agenda.â This is a mental health opinion based on thousands of hours of documented behavior by this president.
He breaks norms, rules, and laws with impunity.
He lies, on average, 15 times a day.
He peddles fake conspiracy theories and irrational magical thinking.
He has been accused of sexually predatory behavior by at least 25 women.
He blames, scapegoats and gaslights as easily as he breathes.
He undermines the vital role of the free press because he abhors oversight and accountability.
His lies and anti-scientific advice and intentional downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic has led to countless American deaths.
He is callous and cold and unfeeling because he has no conscience.
He denigrates and humiliates anyone and everyone in his path.
He has no respect for military heroes or renowned experts.
He is racist and xenophobic.
He incites violence and culture wars.
He is obsessed with power and adoration.
He is a greedy opportunist.
Now Trump is desperate to win re-election. He does not want to lose his hold on power for a number of reasons, most notably his insatiable thirst for attention. He is afraid of facing criminal charges once he leaves office. He is already essentially an unindicted co-conspirator in a campaign finance crime. He knows he is lawless and corrupt; that is why he lies about it so frequently and fervently.
Trump will do absolutely anything â no matter how untruthful or illegal or immoral â to win this election. He has already compromised the Postal Service.
Trump will declare victory as soon as he can, even if millions of ballots have not been counted. If need be, he will challenge the election results so that the Supreme Court will ultimately choose him for a second term. In fact, he has openly admitted that he wants to immediately replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg because of the upcoming election. Trumpâs desire to sabotage our election process is the behavior of a dictator.
Trump is letting the Russians intervene on his behalf in this election. They are doing so. Before Trump, such an invitation would have been considered treasonous and criminal.
Trump is fearmongering about Joe Biden and all Democrats on a daily basis. His allegations against Biden are outrageous and even bizarre; Trump asserted that there are âpeople in dark shadowsâ who are controlling Biden.
Trumpâs falsehoods about health insurance and pre-existing illnesses and Social Security benefits and Medicare are intended to sow doubt and confusion in the American public. He says one thing but does the exact opposite. He tells us that he will protect pre-existing illnesses, but behind the scenes he is taking court action to disallow them.
Trump is the most psychiatrically disordered president in history.
Donald Trump is dishonest and destructive and evil. He has become emboldened and empowered by the complicity of his Republican sycophants. Sadly, he now believes he is destined to carry on his mission. He feels unstoppable. And he must be stopped before it is too late.
Blotcky is a clinical psychologist in Birmingham, Ala.
Norrholm, also a psychologist, is on faculty at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.
Sept. 28, 2020
The Tedium of Trump
No matter how many crazy things happen, the fundamentals are the same: The president is a greedy racist and misogynist who does not understand his job.
By Quinta Jurecic
Donald Trump has built his public persona around the central importance of grabbing attentionâwhether his actions provoke delight or fury. And yet he is, and has long been, boring.
. . . Read any of the tell-alls written by Trumpâs former close associates or family membersânot to mention journalists such as Bob Woodwardâand you will come away with basically the same understanding. As the journalist Jennifer Szalai wrote in her New York Times review of Woodwardâs latest chronicle of the Trump administration, âThe Trump that emerges in âRageâ is impetuous and self-aggrandizingâin other words, immediately recognizable to anyone paying even the minimal amount of attention.â
There is something uncanny about this. The English novelist E. M. Forster argued that the difference between a fictional character and a real person is that it is possible to know everything about a character in a novel; real people, however, see one another through a glass, darkly. And yet while it may not be possible to know every hidden detail of Trumpâs life, it is trivially easy to understand everything about his personality. If he were a character, Forster would call him flat, unrealistic: He does not, as Forster requires, have the capacity to surprise. At some point over the course of the Trump era, this became a running joke among political commentators, who, every time Trump does something appalling and yet obvious, make cracks on social media about how hackneyed the Trump presidency would seem if it were fiction.
This has created a problem for artists as well. Surveying the landscape of anti-Trump art in February 2019, the cultural critic Jillian Steinhauer argued that the work had failed to hit the mark: It was missing, she wrote, âthe critical introspection to accompany the laughter.â But such introspection is hard to achieve when the person prompting it is so lacking in depth or interiority.
Likewise, four years into this presidency, uncovering fresh insight into Trump or his administration is difficult. Activists, journalists, and commentators found those insights earlier on. Use of the phrase The cruelty is the point, coined by The Atlanticâs Adam Serwer in 2018, has become widespread in part because it continues to be uncomplicatedly true: A lot of the time, the motivations of Trump and those around him are not actually more involved than a desire to hurt others. The idea is so simple that itâs more or less become a meme, which isnât to deride its perceptiveness but rather to say that the Trump White House is fundamentally simple. Personally, I wrote a great deal in the first few years of the administration about Trumpâs understanding of law as a cudgel against the vulnerable before it dawned on me that I was writing the same article over and over again.
The Story Behind TIMEâs âPlague Electionâ
Donald Trump Cover
By D.W. Pine
August 6, 2020
D.W. Pine is the Creative Director at TIME.
For the cover of the Aug. 17, 2020 issue of TIME, longtime collaborator Tim OâBrien revisited his award-winning series depicting the mounting troubles facing President Trump. The new cover is the fourth installment and the first to depart the Oval Office, painting Trump at sea surrounded by COVID-19, as the White House recedes from view. It accompanies a cover story by TIME national correspondent Molly Ball on the ways the pandemic is transforming the 2020 election.
October 1, 2020
Trump Announces Heâs Tested Positive For The Coronavirus
Early Friday morning on the East Coast, the president announced on Twitter that he and the First Lady had tested positive with the coronavirus after his close aide Hope Hicks tested positive for the virus.
News
October 5, 2020
After Trumpâs Doctors Lied,
New COVID Conspiracy Theories Are Exploding
Conspiracy theorists think Trump is faking it but also that he was infected by Nancy Pelosi.
By David Gilbert
âJoe Bidenâs campaign team is coordinating with Russian dissident Alexei Navalny to assassinate President Donald Trump.â
âTrump has been using a body double in recent days to hide the seriousness of his symptoms.â
âTrump was seen using an oxygen tank days before he tested positive for coronavirus.â
These are just a tiny selection of the tsunami of conspiracy theories that flooded social media over the weekend, as people rushed to fill the vacuum created by a series of confusing and misleading statements from White House officials and Trumpâs own doctors at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Anthony Fauci Was ‘Absolutely Not’ Surprised
In an interview with 60 Minutes,
Fauci said he believes the president
âequates wearing a mask with weakness.â
By Paul Blest | October 19, 2020
. . . While itâs not totally clear where Trump contracted the coronavirus, several high-profile figures who attended the Barrett event and were exposed to people who attended later tested positive for COVID-19. Trump himself was hospitalized earlier this month but has since returned to the campaign trail.
The National Interest
October 6, 2020
Trump Turning Down Pelosiâs Stimulus Deal
Is the Worst Political Blunder in History
By Jonathan Chait
In May, the House of Representatives passed a $3 trillion economic relief bill. Over the next four and a half months, Republicans in the White House and Senate dithered, alternating between good-faith engagement and lethargy. The apparent final blow came in the form of a series of tweets by President Trump announcing an end to negotiations.
October 6, 2020
Anthony Scaramucci Tells All:
Trump an âUnstable Nutjobâ
October 8, 2020
Whitmer says Trump âcomplicitâ after feds
reveal thwarted plot to kidnap her
By Allan Smith
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Thursday that President Donald Trump is âcomplicitâ in fomenting extremists as she addressed a thwarted plot to kidnap her revealed earlier Thursday.
âJust last week, the president of the United States stood before the American people and refused to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups,â she said, pointing to Trumpâs comments about the âProud Boysâ group during last weekâs presidential debate. ââStand back and stand by,â he told them. Stand back and stand by.â
âHate groups heard the presidentâs words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry,â she said. âAs a call to action. When our leaders speak, their words matter. They carry weight. When our leaders meet with, encourage, or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions and they are complicit.â
Whitmer thanked law enforcement after more than a dozen men were charged with federal and state crimes in connection to the plot. Six of the men were arrested on federal charges while seven more were hit with state charges. Federal investigators had utilized informants and were tracking the individuals for months.
According to the federal criminal complaint, the men sought to take Whitmer hostage before the November election and conducted surveillance of her vacation home. They had also conducted combat training and sought this week to purchase explosives.
The president has repeatedly criticized Whitmer over her strict efforts to contain coronavirus, calling her the âlock-up queenâ in an interview just hours before news of the alleged plot broke. In an April tweet that began recirculating after the charges were announced, Trump wrote: âLIBERATE MICHIGAN.â
October 8, 2020
Trumpâs COVID Rally – Jordan Klepper
Fingers The Pulse
Jordan Klepper hits a Trump rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to finger the pulse on Trump’s COVID response, the SCOTUS pick, QAnon, and the legitimacy of the election.
Yahoo! news
Wisconsin is battling Americasâs worst
coronavirus outbreak, and the stateâs
broken politics are partly to blame
Andrew Romano – West Coast correspondent
Look at a map of daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Most of the Northeast and West Coast is yellow, indicating limited spread. The numbers across the Southeast tend to be moderate, or orange. Move into the Upper Midwest and more red hot spots start to appear.
And then thereâs one state thatâs covered in crimson: Wisconsin.
Right now Wisconsin is battling the worst coronavirus outbreak in America. The question is why. What about Wisconsin is different from, say, the neighboring states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois, where the virus isnât spreading nearly as fast?
The answer, at least in part, is politics: specifically, the brand of cavalier, it-will-go-away politics propagated by President Trump and parroted by lower-level Republicans who seem hell-bent on resisting efforts to sustain social distancing and mask wearing when the spread is still low enough to contain â and in Wisconsinâs case, who continue to resist even after infections spiral out of control.
October 13, 2020
âHe Knowsâ: Trump Fixated on âLikelyâ Loss To Biden,
Per Trump Insider
New reporting shows Trumpâs inner circle worried he failed to handle Covid hitting the White House, bungled debates over a final stimulus package before the election, and âblewâ his chance to reset the campaign â raising broader questions of whether he is self-sabotaging. âArt of the Dealâ co-author Tony Schwartz discusses Trumpâs penchant for hurting himself, how his approach has coarsened over the years, and the wider potential danger facing the U.S. if Trump loses and tries âto bring us down with himâ before leaving office, in this interview with MSNBCâs Ari Melber.
Politics
October 22, 2020
Trump’s Crackdown On Diversity Training Is Fascist.
And Terrifying.
The White House ban on anti-racism training is an authoritarian attack on free speech and already doing serious damage.
By Emily Peck
One of the presidentâs most dangerous attacks on civil rights and free speech is getting relatively little attention amid the firestorm of news as Election Day approaches.
In an executive order and a series of administrative actions issued over the past month and a half, the Trump administration effectively banned diversity and inclusion training in the federal workforce and at any company or entity that contracts with the government or receives federal funding, a huge swath of American businesses and universities, covering millions of workers and students.
As part of the administrationâs continued efforts to effectively ban anti-racism training, the Labor Department announced Wednesday it would begin collecting information on diversity training from contractors (Verizon, which owns HuffPost, is one such company) as a way of policing the way diversity is discussed within private companies.
The president ironically claims to be doing this in the name of equality. The administration says these trainings are un-American propaganda, claiming that learning about the history of race in the United States teaches the language of hate.
But diversity training is standard corporate practice, meant to encourage workers of all backgrounds to treat each other fairly. As the Me Too movement began, there was a shift to focus on sexual harassment education. These days, companies are increasingly concentrating on racism.
In the case of diversity training, the White House is basing its opinion on the findings of one conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, who has appeared on Fox News and written for the New York Post and Wall Street Journal.
The word Orwellian is thrown around quite a bit in the Donald Trump era, but the doublespeak in this order stunned the lawyers, executives, activists and academics who have pushed for diversity, inclusion and equality for decades.
October 23, 2020
Separated: Children at the Border
FRONTLINEâs 2018 documentary tells the inside story of what happened to immigrant children separated from their parents at the border under the “zero tolerance” policy.
Whatâs happened to the more than 2,000 families who were separated after crossing the U.S. border unlawfully in 2018? And how did immigration policy in America reach this point? In this special FRONTLINE report, acclaimed producer Marcela Gaviria and correspondent Martin Smith examine immigration policy under both Trump and Obama, investigate the origins of âzero toleranceâ â and reveal the journeys and voices of children who were separated from their parents.
#Immigration #Undocumented #SeparatedChildren
Associated Press
October 23, 2020
Trump and Biden clash over raging COVID-19 pandemic in final debate that showcased their vastly different visions for the nation
By Jonathan Lemire, Darlene Superville, Will Weissert and Michelle L. Price
President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden fought over how to tame the raging coronavirus during the campaignâs closing debate, largely shelving the rancor that overshadowed their previous face-off in favor of a more substantive exchange that highlighted their vastly different approaches to the major domestic and foreign challenges facing the nation.
The president declared the virus, which killed more than 1,000 Americans on Thursday alone, will âgo away.â Biden countered that the nation was heading toward âa dark winter.â
âAnyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America,â Biden said.
With less than two weeks until the election, Trump portrayed himself as the same outsider he first pitched to voters four years ago, repeatedly saying he wasnât a politician. Biden, meanwhile, argued that Trump was an incompetent leader of a country facing multiple crises and tried to connect what he saw as the presidentâs failures to the everyday lives of Americans, especially when it comes to the pandemic.
October 29, 2020
Jordan Klepper Hits One Last
Trump Rally Before the Election
. . . to hear what Trumpâs supporters think about Hunter Bidenâs laptop, nepotism and more.
“American Tumult” by Richard McGuire
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ANNALS OF THE PRESIDENCY
November 2, 2020 Issue
Exclusive excerpt from Barack Obama’s new Memoir,
A Promised Land
The story behind the Obama Administrationâs most enduringâand most contestedâlegacy: reforming American health care.
By Barack Obama
October 26, 2020
The quest for some form of universal health care in the United States dates back to 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt, who had previously served nearly eight years as a Republican President, decided to run againâthis time on a progressive ticket and with a platform that called for the establishment of a centralized national health service. At the time, few people had or felt the need for private health insurance. Most Americans paid their doctors visit by visit, but the field of medicine was quickly growing more sophisticated, and as more diagnostic tests and surgeries became available the attendant costs began to rise, tying health more obviously to wealth. Both the United Kingdom and Germany had addressed similar issues by instituting national health-insurance systems, and other European nations would eventually follow suit. Although Roosevelt ultimately lost the 1912 election, his partyâs progressive ideals planted a seed: accessible and affordable medical care might one day be viewed as a right more than a privilege. It wasnât long, however, before doctors and Southern politicians vocally opposed any type of government involvement in health care, branding it as a form of Bolshevism.
November 2020 Issue
THE ELECTION THAT COULD BREAK AMERICA
If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw
the election into chaos and subvert the result.
Who will stop him?
By Barton Gellman
This article was published online on September 23, 2020.
THERE IS A cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not. Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its path.
The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nationâs creaky electoral machinery.
Something has to give, and many things will, when the time comes for casting, canvassing, and certifying the ballots. Anything is possible, including a landslide that leaves no doubt on Election Night. But even if one side takes a commanding early lead, tabulation and litigation of the âovertime countââmillions of mail-in and provisional ballotsâcould keep the outcome unsettled for days or weeks.
If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choiceâa messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.
As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights.
âWe could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,â says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. âThe kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000âs Bush v. Gore case.â
A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have misÂconceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities âwill escort him from the White House with great dispatch.â
The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that unÂcertainty to hold on to power.
Trumpâs state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for post-election maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the presidentâs term in office âshall endâ at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.
âWe are not prepared for this at all,â Julian Zelizer, a PrinceÂton professor of history and public affairs, told me. âWe talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.â
Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by alâQaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next presidentâs swearing-in. It is a temporal no-manâs-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successorâa second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.
The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are âthe first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,â this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; âthe 3d day of January,â when the newly elected Congress is seated; and âthe sixth day of January,â when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.
âOur Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,â the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go? The Interregnum we are about to enter will be accompanied by what Douglas, who teaches at Amherst, calls a âperfect stormâ of adverse conditions. We cannot turn away from that storm. On November 3 we sail toward its center mass. If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has saved us.
Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.
October 26, 2020
President Donald Trump: 2020 Election Interview
In an interview that’s made headlines this week, Lesley Stahl presses President Trump on once-again rising coronavirus cases and what his priorities would be if re-elected. Stahl also speaks with Mr. Trump’s running mate, Vice President Mike Pence.
November 2020
Illustration by Mark Smith
THE ENEMIES BRIEFCASE
Secret powers and the presidency
By Andrew Cockburn, the author, most recently, of Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins
A few hours before the inauguration ceremony, the prospective president receives an elaborate and highly classified briefing on the means and procedures for blowing up the world with a nuclear attack, a rite of passage that a former official described as âa sobering moment.â Secret though it may be, we are at least aware that this introduction to apocalypse takes place. At some point in the first term, however, experts surmise that an even more secret briefing occurs, one that has never been publicly acknowledged. In it, the new president learns how to blow up the Constitution.
The session introduces âpresidential emergency action documents,â or PEADs, orders that authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties. In the words of a rare declassified official description, the documents outline how to âimplement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situationsââby imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives, among other repressive measures. âWe know about the nuclear briefcase that carries the launch codes,â Joel McCleary, a White House official in the Carter Administration, told me. âBut over at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department thereâs a list of all the so-called enemies of the state who would be rounded up in an emergency. Iâve heard it called the âenemies briefcase.â â
Nov. 4, 2020
A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath
America will have to contend with that fact.
By Tom Nichols
Author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
The moment every Donald Trump opponent has been waiting for is at hand: Joe Biden seems to be taking the lead. So why am I not happy?
I am certainly relieved. A Biden victory would be an infinitely better result than a Trump win. If Trump were to maintain power, our child-king would be unfettered by bothersome laws and institutions. The United States would begin its last days as a democracy, finally stepping over the ledge into authoritarianism.
A win for Biden would forestall that terrible possibility.
But no matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendorâhis infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its formsâand they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.
[ David Frum: The American system is broken ]
Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.
To be clear, I never expected a Biden landslide in a country as polarized as the United States. I was a wet blanket even among my Never Trump comrades, holding out only the modest hope that Biden would recapture the states Clinton lost in 2016, and possibly flip Arizona. But I expected the margins in all of those statesâand especially in Bidenâs birth state of Pennsylvaniaâto be higher. I suspected that Biden had no real chance in places such as Texas or Georgia or even North Carolina, all states in the Trumpist grip.
Nor was I among the progressives who believed America would repudiate Trumpâs policies. For one thing, I am a conservativeâand I know my former tribe. Trump voters donât care about policy. They didnât care about it in 2016, and they donât care about it now. The party of national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after living under the most indecent president in American history.
As Trump Loses WH, Robert De Niro Shares Relief
And The Hope For Accountability
Legendary Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro speaks out in his first interview since Pres. Trumpâs defeat, telling MSNBCâs Ari Melber that he is relieved about Trumpâs loss and concerned about how someone like Trump could get as far as he did in American government, warning that âmore people likeâ Trump may test democracy again. De Niro also reflects on Trumpâs ethics, his silence since Saturdayâs election call, why he believes Trump has âno centerâ and the appeal and role of âtough guysâ and mafia films in American life and culture.
Nov. 9, 2020
Mary Trump On How Far A Wounded Trump
Might Go To Hold Onto Power Despite Electoral Loss
Nov. 10, 2020
Unmasking QAnonâs Wall Street Evangelist
A Citigroup senior vice president was recently shown to be the man behind the biggest aggregator of posts tied to QAnon, a far-right hodgepodge of outlandish conspiracy theories. So a Bloomberg reporter rented a car and drove to his house in New Jersey to ask him a few questions.
Read William Turton and Joshua Brusteinâs full feature article in Bloomberg Businessweek: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featurâŚ
November 14, 2020
The Funniest Donald Trump Stories | Part One
We’ve had some hilarious stories about President Donald Trump, what better time to go through some of them.
Real Time with Bill Maher
November 20, 2020
New Rule: The Great Disappointment
In his final New Rule of 2020, Bill explores the striking similarities between Donald Trump and other infamous cult leaders.
Nov. 20, 2020
Trumpâs Indifference Amounts to Negligent Homicide
The presidentâs behavior may not meet the termâs legal definition, but it captures the horror a government is visting upon its people.
By James Fallows
He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the 2018 book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which was a national best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.
Negligent homicide has a specific meaning in the law books. The standards of proof and categories of offense vary from state to state. But the essence is: Someone died because someone else did not exercise reasonable care.
An adult leaves loaded weapons where children can find them. A factory owner or amusement-park operator ignores the safety standards for their equipment. A motorist in a hurry, or heading back from a bar, roars through a school-crossing zone full of children. A parent leaves an infant âjust for a few minutesâ in a car with rolled-up windows on a baking-hot day. Prosecutors and juries draw the line between cases like these and murder, based mainly on intent. Did the person who caused the death actually mean to do harm? Itâs a distinction that matters a lot to the defendant, but not to the victim. Whatever the legal outcome, a person whoâexcept for anotherâs indifference to risks that should have been foreseenâwould still be living and learning and loving, instead is dead.
Thatâs the law of negligent homicide. The ultimate legal reckoning for what we are now living (and dying) through will be a matter for legal authorities to take up, or decide to drop, when they have the evidence; I have no standing to do so. Instead, I want to consider the nonlegal, commonsense meanings of the term, and of its more gruesome-sounding cousin, manslaughter.
Many terms that have legal connotations can be useful in their plain everyday sense as well. Not everything weâd call an assault matches the state-by-state standards that define that crime. Not everything we call theftâor blackmail, or even rapeâwould count as such in an indictment or could be proved in court. Similarly, when removed from their courtroom and legal implications, terms like negligence and manslaughter and, yes, homicide are useful right now. They give us a way of assessing the horror a government is visiting upon its people.
November 20, 2020
I Grew Up Surrounded By Religious Fanatics.
Hereâs What I know About Trump Supporters
âLike Trump and his supporters working to undermine our democracy illustrate, deluded fanaticsm is always harmful, and my family was no exception.â
By Olivia Christensen â Guest Writer
During the days immediately after the election, most of which I spent doomscrolling through social media on my phone in a kind of trance, my childhood best friend sent me a clip. Her caption was simple: âWhen people ask me why I donât go to church anymore.â I gave the wry chuckle of someone who knows a joke before itâs told, and since my friend and I share a background steeped in religious fundamentalism, in a way, I did.
I clicked the link for a laugh, and there stood televangelist Kenneth Copeland with his unnaturally dark hair, his wizened, waxy face, and his fervent eyes. âThe media says Joe Bidenâs the president!â he exclaims before he begins laughing like a washed-up comedian whoâs decided the best way to get a laugh is to cue the audience with one of his own, which is an apt description, all things considered.
The clip dripped with the viral potential it would go on to fulfill in the coming days. A prominent man melting down in such a publicly awkward way was apparently the laugh so many people needed after several nail-biting days of election returns. But as I saw the familiar face twisted with delusional laughter, a chill came over me. I recognized the manic glitter in his eyes, and I couldnât laugh.
I grew up in a home tinged with religious mania, and my Christian fundamentalist home-school family ran exclusively in circles where this mania was not only tolerated but encouraged. We attended a church where people barked like dogs âin the spirit.â Others, allegedly compelled by the Holy Ghost, ran at breakneck speed around the sanctuary, and some members, filled with apparent âsupernaturalâ joy, laughed like Kenneth Copeland.
Michael Shermer with David Barash â On the Brink of Destruction
This dialogue was recorded on November 24, 2020 as part of the Science Salon Podcast series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society, in California.
In a conversation based on the book Threats: Intimidation and its Discontents, Shermer and Barash discuss:
⢠2020 as the most momentous year of the past half century,
⢠judging historical figures based on modern morals (e.g., race and slavery),
⢠whether humans are naturally gullible or skeptical,
⢠the evolutionary logic of deterrence,
⢠how animals deal with threats,
⢠how humans deal with threats,
⢠game theory of deterring threats,
⢠nuclear deterrence (Mutual Assured Destruction) as a threat strategy,
⢠the motives behind nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
⢠the U.S. arms race against the U.S.S.R.,
⢠the arms race within the U.S. between the Army, Navy, and Air Force,
⢠close calls with nuclear weapons and why this is not a sustainable strategy,
⢠how to deal with threats like Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea,
⢠Trump and what he did right with regard to North Korea.
HARPER’S
December 2020 Issue
The Silenced Majority
Can America still afford democracy?
By Rana Dasgupta
Concern about American democracy is often expressed as a parable of the Thirties: We must prevent another Hitler. The word âfascismâ has appeared frequently in denunciations of Donald Trump; many have accused him of a fĂźhrer-like contempt for the American system. But it is time to ask whether the system itself is not thereby too conveniently excused. Mass political participation has come only recently and reluctantly to America; voter suppression is the more traditional American way. And for reasons that have nothing to do with fascism, even that partial efflorescence may be coming to an end. Trumpâs baleful theatrics have distracted us, in fact, from the broader disintegration of the twentieth-century interregnum, of which he is only a symptom. That process has much further to go, and will produce dangers greater than he.
The New York Times
OPINION
December 11, 2020
The ‘Trump Won’ Farce Isn’t Funny Anymore
Republicans are now seriously arguing that
elections are legitimate only when their side wins.
By
To tell a joke to a crowd is to learn a little something about the people who laugh.
For our purposes, the âjokeâ is President Trumpâs ongoing fight to overturn the election results and hold on to power against the wishes of most Americans, including those in enough states to equal far more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the White House.
â#OVERTURN,â he said on Twitter this week, adding in a separate post that âIf somebody cheated in the Election, which the Democrats did, why wouldnât the Election be immediately overturned? How can a Country be run like this?â
Unfortunately for Trump, and fortunately for the country, he has not been able to bend reality to his desires. Key election officials and federal judges have refused his call to throw out votes, create chaos and clear a path for the autogolpe he hopes to accomplish. The military has also made clear where it stands. âWe do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual,â Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech not long after the election.
POLITICO
12/12/2020
Opinion | What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump
It turns out that your brain on grievances looks a lot like your brain on drugs. And thatâs a problem not just for the outgoing president, but for the rest of us.
By James Kimmel, Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies, and author of The Trial of Fallen Angels, a novel.
President Donald Trump has made grievance a primary feature of his life and presidency, from the thousands of lawsuits he has filed to, most recently, his repeated claims of national election fraud. His opponents, and even many of his supporters, have wondered why he canât seem to control his urges to lash out at perceived enemies.
I am a violence researcher and study the role of grievances and retaliation in violent crime. Recently, Iâve been researching the way grievances affect the brain, and it turns out that your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.
This isnât a metaphor; itâs brain biology. Scientists have found that in substance addiction, environmental cues such as being in a place where drugs are taken or meeting another person who takes drugs cause sharp surges of dopamine in crucial reward and habit regions of the brain, specifically, the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum. This triggers cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through intoxication. Recent studies show that similarly, cues such as experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice â a grievance â activate these same reward and habit regions of the brain, triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation. To be clear, the retaliation doesnât need to be physically violent â an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.
Although these are new findings and the research in this area is not yet settled, what this suggests is that similar to the way people become addicted to drugs or gambling, people may also become addicted to seeking retribution against their enemies â revenge addiction. This may help explain why some people just canât let go of their grievances long after others feel they should have moved on â and why some people resort to violence.
December 15, 2020
âWe Need Brainâ: Top 10 Funniest Politics Videos of 2020
From his wild scientific theories to his unprecedented âknowledgeâ of windmills and bleach, Trump made us laugh almost as much as he made us cry.
Dec. 22, 2020
Trump’s loss was radicalizing: His promise to
“cheat” the system has further deluded his fans
Trump got elected by promising he knew how to cheat “the system” — now his voters can’t believe he’s failing.
By Amanda Marcotte
For years, many liberals have been confused by why so many Donald Trump voters seem unperturbed by all his criming and cheating. To understand Trump’s supporters, it’s important to understand that they don’t believe he’s a good person. On the contrary, the appeal of Trump from the beginning was a belief that he’s a liar, a cheat, and a crook â but one who would implement his evil-doing skills towards goals Republican voters support, with triggering the liberals and snagging all the government goodies for their tribe at the expense of other Americans at the top of the list.
This wasn’t exactly subtle. Trump repeatedly promised his supporters during the 2016 campaign that “Nobody knows the system better than I do.” He often bragged about his supposed skills at buying off and working politicians.
“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy,” Trump crowed to an adoring crowd in early 2016. “But now I want to be greedy for the United States. I want to grab all that money. I’m going to be greedy for the United States.”
The key is realizing that the typical Trump supporter, as I explained in the Standing Room Only newsletter, sees himself as in on the con. Indeed, the easiest way to hoodwink someone is to convince them that they’re part of the conspiracy, that they’re the ones getting one over on someone else. Trump’s story for his supporters was that all of politics is a rigged game, but this time he was rigging it for them.
All of which explains why Trump supporters, like their idol, are losing their minds right now. They elected a man who assured them he knew all the tricks and could get away with breaking any rule. But despite all his efforts at stealing the election from Joe Biden â and all the money he’s raised from them to do so â Trump is failing. Trump’s voters never believed he was an honest man, yet they got snookered by the biggest lie of all: that he had almost god-like powers to cheat the system.
The result is a nationwide tantrum from Trump’s devout followers, who are raging incoherently at every opportunity, stunned and mentally wrecked by the revelation that Trump does not, in fact, have some secret plan to undo the election he lost.
On Monday, state legislators in Oregon got together to discuss proposals to mitigate the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic, a session that was closed to the public for health reasons. But outside, an armed and delusional crowd of Trump supporters â about 300 in number â gathered, screaming conspiracy theories about a “stolen” election that Trump has floated to justify his attempted coup. They also denounced restrictions on public gatherings and mask requirements that have been passed to curb the pandemic.
The protesters weren’t allowed in the capitol building so they decided to storm the place with guns. They were met with state troopers in riot gear, but the troopers were understandably spooked and hesitant at times since they were dealing with an armed mob in thrall to dangerous delusions.
To make it worse, inside the capitol building, some Republican legislators were egging the armed militants on. Republican state senator Dallas Heard, in particular, went on a rant about how it was an “illegitimate session” because of the crowd restrictions and threatened that the “adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces,” clearly intending to conflate people who believe in science and democracy with “adversaries of the Lord”.
On the same day, across the country in Georgia, the two incumbent Republicans trying to keep their Senate seats in January’s run-off election were having a bad time at what was supposed to be a campaign rally.
Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue found it was hard to be heard over throngs of Republican voters chanting “stop the steal,” which has become the rallying cry for people who support Trump’s efforts to steal the election. (Confusing, I know, for pro-steal people to declare they’re the victims of election theft, but psychological projection is the beating heart of modern conservatism.)
It’s unlikely to hurt the electoral prospects of either Senator, to be clear â conservatives may be delusional, but they still know better than to give their power away by not voting. But the situation shows that Republican voters aren’t ready to “move on”, and are still angry and confused about why the president they voted for, the man who assured them he knew all the tricks to cheat the system, the man who claimed he had an “elite strike force” at his disposal, can’t figure out how to nullify the election.
Meanwhile, a chorus of increasingly deranged voices are pushing Trump voters further and further towards the edge.
Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, keeps demanding that Trump declare martial law and threatening violence if the president fails to comply. The military coup plan is also being pushed by the Epoch Times, a far-right conspiracy theory-laden rag that has grown in popularity as irate conservative audiences reject Fox News for not being unhinged enough. The Family Research Council, which is an incredibly powerful lobbying force in the GOP, has also been putting out “prayers” (which are really press releases) asking God to “expose all election interference and voter fraud engineered by foreign enemies.”
Tuesday morning, Axios released an article detailing how Trump has gone into berserker mode, accusing “everyone around him” of being “weak, stupid or disloyal” for not supporting a plan to use military or Department of Homeland Security powers to seize voting machines. (This wouldn’t work anyway, since the votes have been tallied and the Electoral College has certified Biden’s victory.)
It’s definitely fun to imagine the suffering of Trump and all the people who have enabled him all these years, of course. One can even hope Trump will never recover and will spend the rest of his life lost in a miserable black hole of rage and paranoia. Unfortunately, however, Trump is taking his supporters with him, and that’s a problem.
We now have millions of Americans â nearly three-quarters of Republicans reject the legitimacy of the election â believing elections should only count if they win them. This is the mentality that led to the Civil War erupting in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s electoral win in 1860. But, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out in his newsletter, the different camps are no longer divided by geography, and “we are bound to each other, whether we like it or not.”
Don’t believe anyone who claims to know what will happen next, now that an entire political party â one that controls most state governments, the courts, and the Senate â has embraced an anti-democratic ideology. This is uncharted territory for the country. It may be that this is a temporary delusion and Trump voters will eventually chill out and start pretending they weren’t flirting with a fascist coup. Or they could become more hardened and violent with time. Or it could be that some go one way and others become terrorists. The scariest thing of all is that we won’t know how this Trump-induced delusion shakes out for months, or even years to come.
Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself. Follow her on Bluesky @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.
MORE FROM Amanda Marcotte
December 25, 2020
Opinion | Trump’s last-minute pardon spree shows why Joe Biden just can’t ‘move on’
By Amanda Marcotte – Commentary
No one should be surprised that Donald Trump is on a pardon spree for some of the most notorious crooks in politics. You have the men that were convicted for their role in colluding with Russia’s version of the Watergate conspiracy to hack Democratic emails during the 2016 election, such as Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trumpian gadfly Roger Stone. You have former congressional GOP scumbags Chris Collins, Duncan Hunter, and Steve Stockman, all convicted for financial crimes like insider trading stealing from campaign donors and stealing from charity. You have Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, who was sent to the clinker for tax evasion. And for good measure, Trump also sprung some outright murderers, mercenaries who worked for Blackwater, which is run by Trump’s buddy, Erik Prince. These men were convicted for their role in an outright massacre of Iraqi civilians, including a 9-year-old boy.
IT WAS ALL A LIE: How The Republican Party
Became Donald Trump, by Stuart Stevens | 2020
âIn his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses to the reader that the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies⌠This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blistering, tell-all history⌠Although this book will be a hard read for any committed conservatives, they would do well to ponder it.â Julian E. Zelizer, The New York Times
From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposĂŠ of how his party became what it is today.
Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.
This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOPâs DNA, from Goldwaterâs opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reaganâs welfare queens and statesâ rights rhetoric. He gives an insiderâs account of the rank hypocrisy of the partyâs claims to embody âfamily values,â and shows how the partyâs vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.
