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.
Feb. 22, 2019
Yale psych prof: If Trump werenât president
he would be âcontained and evaluatedâ
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.
Who is Jared Kushner?
Narrated by Anna Akana
March 4, 2020
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.
The Mueller Report â A PBS NewsHour
FRONTLINE Special
March 25, 2019
The nearly two-year investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has concluded, with Muellerâs final report delivered to Attorney General William Barr for review.
Morning Joe
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.
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.
August 21, 2019
The Last Word
with Lawrence OâDonnell
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.
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.
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.
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| The Cult of Trump. Source: GQ/Getty Images iStock |
WhaleRider â May 11, 2020 â Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
ââŠhe 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 exposureâŠcauses 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 wereâthey 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.
“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? (full film)
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.
August 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?
September 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.
November 18, 2020
Con Watch: Two COVID
Scams to Avoid
Criminals are using the coronavirus to part you from your money or your personal information. Learn how to avoid these scams.
By Steve Weisman, a lawyer, college professor, author, and one of the countryâs leading experts in cybersecurity, identity theft, and scams.âŻSee Steveâs otherâŻCon Watch articles.
Clinical Trial Scams
Many people are quite optimistic about the progress of companies such as Pfizer and Moderna in developing viable vaccines. Many other companies are also intensely working on a vaccine. Presently, there are dozens of clinical trials being conducted. Many people are interested in participating in these trials, both to be able to contribute to the battle against the coronavirus and to collect the payment that participants in such clinical trials receive, which is generally between several hundred and several thousand dollars. Unfortunately, scammers are all too willing to lure you into participating in a phony clinical trial. These sham clinical trials are offered through legitimate-appearing websites, emails, and other promotional material.
RAWSTORY
Investigates
September 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
REVISISTING 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 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.
How Evangelicals became Republicans
J. J. McCullough | July 19, 2020
A history of the religious right and the role played by Evangelical Christians in the Republican Party, 1979 to present.
Democracy Now!
August 7, 2020
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.
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
September 2020 Issue
How the Pandemic Defeated America
A virus has brought the worldâs most powerful country to its knees.
By Ed Yong
Updated at 1:12 p.m. ET on 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
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.
September 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
Story 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
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.
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 “a left-wing agenda.â This is a mental health opinion based on thousands of hours of documented behavior by this president.
Trump is the most psychiatrically disordered president in history.
September 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.
VICE 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
Trump Got Covid
In an interview with 60 Minutes, Fauci said he believes
the president âequates wearing a mask with weakness.â
By Paul Blest | Oct 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
Yahoo! news
Wisconsin is battling Americasâs worst
coronavirus outbreak, and the stateâs
broken politics are partly to blame
Andrew Romano West Coast correspondent âą
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.
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.
“American Tumult” by Richard McGuire
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ANNALS OF THE PRESIDENCY
November 2, 2020 Issue
Exclusive excerpt from Barack Obamaâs new Memoir,
A PRESIDENT LOOKS BACK ON
HIS TOUGHEST FIGHT
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
Editorâs Note: This story appears in the November issue of The Atlantic; weâve published it early on our website because of its urgency. Subscribers to the print magazine can expect to receive the issue in mid-October.
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 postelection 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.
President Donald Trump: The 60 Minutes Election Interview
October 26, 2020
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
November 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.
November 9, 2020
Mary Trump On How Far A Wounded Trump
Might Go To Hold Onto Power Despite Electoral Loss
HBO
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.
November 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
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.
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:
âą 2020 as the most momentous year of the past half century,
âą judging historical figures based on modern morals (e.g., race and slavery),
âą whether humans are naturally gullible or skeptical,
âą the evolutionary logic of deterrence,
âą how animals deal with threats,
âą how humans deal with threats,
âą game theory of deterring threats,
âą nuclear deterrence (Mutual Assured Destruction) as a threat strategy,
âą the motives behind nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
âą the U.S. arms race against the U.S.S.R.,
âą the arms race within the U.S. between the Army, Navy, and Air Force,
âą close calls with nuclear weapons and why this is not a sustainable strategy,
âą how to deal with threats like Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea,
âą Trump and what he did right with regard to North Korea.
HARPERâS
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 fĂŒhrer-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.
Hitlerâs moment differed vastly from our own: with total industrialization, the Western working masses manufactured the worldâs most valuable products, and were essential to global economic growth. The defeat of Great Power fascism established democracy as the dominant political technology in the capitalist world and relegated totalitarian economic organization to the other side of the Iron Curtain. Western democracy then flourished during the postwar era of fast-growing national economies, when Western populations were much wealthier than those of other countries. But these conditions have changed. One of the most significant processes of our own moment is the re-exclusion of the Western masses from the center of world affairsâa position they occupied for less than two centuries. And while the economic aspects of this development are much discussed (the demise, not only of public subsidies, but, most importantly for the Western psyche, of salaries greatly inflated compared with those of the rest of the world), the resultant political unwinding will be even more traumatic.
Democracyâin its twentieth-century Western guiseâis not compatible with just any economic arrangement. Eighteenth-century Europe could neither afford nor tolerate it, and democratic talk was sternly forbidden. A delicate and unusual set of circumstances brought democratic change. But those circumstances did not occur much outside the West. And now they are disappearing here too.
Instead of seeking lessons from twentieth-century Germany, we should look back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the Anglo-American complex. That will remind us that most of the phenomena we label fascistânationalist fictions of ethnic supremacy, mass disenfranchisement, censorshipâare fully compatible with free-market capitalism.
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 violentâan 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 enemiesârevenge addiction. This may help explain why some people just canât let go of their grievances long after others feel they should have moved onâand why some people resort to violence.
Dec. 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. 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 exposé 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.
“In With The New” by Harry Bliss
January 2, 2021
A photo op, World War III, and bleach injections:
The wildest politcal moments in the US in 2020
So much has happened in 2020 that people often forget
Donald Trump was impeached.
Griffin Connolly and John T. Bennet
The final year of the Trump administration has been full of tumult â from the third presidential impeachment in US history, to the presidentâs combative response to a reinvigorated racial justice movement, to his governing and personal trials with the coronavirus pandemic.
Few Americans who survived 2020 will forget the names George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, whose deaths from encounters with police reignited the conversation surrounding law enforcement and the treatment of Black Americans in this country. Millions will remember the more than 330,000 spouses, parents, children, siblings, and friends who died from the coronavirus pandemic.
These historic events unfolded in the middle of a presidential election year with a White House incumbent, Donald Trump, whose flair for the dramatic produced some of the most iconically absurd moments this country has witnessed.
January 2021
The Gate of Heaven Is Everywhere
Among the
contemplatives
By Fred Bahnson
All happy religious families are alike; each unhappy religious family is unhappy in its own way.
The family of American Christianity has been unhappy for quite some time, so much so that itâs hard for many of us to imagine that it could be otherwise. The past four years have brought these feuds into the open. For Catholics, there is the glaring pedophilia scandal. For evangelicals, there is disagreement over church leadersâ alliance with power, their unwavering fealty, since 2016, to the crotch-grabbing Caligula of Mar-a-Lago, whose every abuse of office made them double down on their support.
For mainline Protestants like me, the discontent has been less visible. Denominational squabbles over human sexuality have made headlines, but across every denomination a certain lassitude pervades, a general lukewarmness that makes it feel as though Protestantism has run its course. When the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation rolled around in 2017, a few academics published monographs on Luther, and a commemorative study Bible appeared, but with church membership declining in every mainline denomination, Protestant circles shrugged. We knew there wasnât much to crow about. What was it, exactly, we were still protesting?
January 5, 2021
Former defense secretary
urges top brass to resign or
resist questionable Trump orders
All 10 living former secretaries of defense signed a column published in The Washington Post on Sunday that urged the Trump administration to allow a peaceful transition of power and to keep the Pentagon out of it. One of the signatories was William Cohen, a former Republican senator who served as secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton. He joins Judy Woodruff to discuss.
January 3, 2021
All 10 living former defense secretaries:
Involving the military in election disputes
would cross into dangerous territory
Jan. 4, 2021
Nationâs capital braces for violence as extremist groups converge to protest Trumpâs election loss
By Will Carless
Protests planned for Washington, D.C., this week are likely to attract large numbers of President Donald Trumpâs supporters, including conspiracy theorists, militia groups and members of the extremist group the Proud Boys, raising concerns of violent confrontations.
The rallies are planned to coincide with the official congressional vote to certify the Electoral College votes from the November presidential election and declare President-elect Joe Biden the winner. Far-right groups from around the country have vowed to descend on the capital to protest the vote and attempt to pressure lawmakers into voting against certifying the results, an outcome that even the leaders of the effort admit is extraordinarily unlikely to happen.
Trump himself has amplified conspiracy theories about the election and encouraged his supporters to show up at the protests. âStatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!â he tweeted on December 18. On Sunday, the president again promoted the protests, writing on Twitter, âI will be there. Historic day!â
Jan. 7, 2021
World leaders react to siege on the Capitol
International headlines offered reactions to the thousands of Trump supporters storming the Capitol building.
Investigates
Extremists intensify calls for violence ahead of
Inauguration Day
By
Updated 9:28 PM ET, Friday, January 8, 2021
“Trump or war. Today. That simple.”
WELCOME TO THE DONALD!
Welcome to the forum of choice for The President
of The United States, Donald Trump!
Be advised this forum is for serious supporters of
President Trump. We have discussions, memes,
AMAs, and more. We are not politically correct.
Jan. 8, 2021
Republican lawmakers caught helping
pro-Trump mobs at U.S. Capitol
By Jon Skolnik
“We’re in! Let’s go, keep it moving, baby!” shouted Derrick Evans, a newly elected Republican member of West Virginia’s House of Delegates, as he is seen pushing his way through the rotunda at the U.S. Capitol with a throng of violent Trump supporters in a video live-streamed on Facebook.
“Trump, Trump, Trump!” he chanted as attackers rushed the doors.
The video, deleted by Evans after circulating Twitter, shows him donning a helmet and military gear, shouting, “Derrick Evans is in the Capitol […] Patriots inside, baby!”
Evans, 34, won his first term as a state lawmaker in November and was charged by the Department of Justice on Friday for illegally entering the Capitol. He is one of several elected Republican lawmakers across the country who have been identified as either participating in or aiding violent pro-Trump attacks on legislative bodies this week.
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
January 8, 2021
Jonah Goldberg, author of Suicide of the West, argues that the rise of both liberal and conservative populism threatens to undermine America’s fundamental ideals.
Ways To Change The World
January 8, 2021
Has the threat of Trump really gone?
Timothy Snyder is an American author and historian. He is a professor of history at Yale University and a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He talks to Krishnan about the future of Trump and âTrumpismâ, the rising influence of Russia and Britainâs next move.
Jan. 8, 2021
U.S. Capitol siege emboldens motley crew of extremists
By Ted Hesson, Ned Parker, Kristina Cooke, Julia Harte
WASHINGTON, Jan 8 (Reuters) – As the nation recoiled in horror at scenes of rioting and chaos in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, some right-wing and anti-government extremists saw the violence as the fulfillment of a patriotic duty or opportunity to advance their agenda.
Among the inspired was Mike Dunn, a 20-year-old follower of the âboogalooâ anti-government movement, whose adherents anticipate a revolution toppling the federal government or a second U.S. civil war.
January 9, 2021
Michael Moore: The Terrorist Attack Is NOT Over.
Many of the attackers are still in D.C. They were aided and abetted by certain members of the police, military and Republican party. And Wednesdayâs terror attack was just a dry run for what they are planning next. Michael Moore shares his latest, urgent thoughts on the terror attack that occurred this week and the one we must prepare for.
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
January 9, 2021
Eight Questions For Former President Barack Obama
1. How and why should young leaders remain optimistic amid setbacks?
2. Do you maintain relationships with other world leaders?
3. How do you define âa leaderâ?
4. Is it time for America to relinquish its role as a global police power?
5. How do you grapple with Americaâs controversial history of foreign intervention?
6. How do you feel about the slogan âdefund the policeâ?
7. Does the current political landscape favor Republicans with radical views?
8. What has the transition to civilian life been like?
NewsHour Weekend Full Episode
January 10, 2021
On this edition for Sunday, January 10, lawmakers weigh impeachment in the aftermath of the Capitol riot, Americans continue to get vaccinated as the virus rages across the nation, and author and former CBS news anchor Dan Rather shares his perspective on this inflection point in American politics. Hari Sreenivasan anchors from New York.
January 10, 2021
The Savior, the Devil, and Donald Trump
Pt. 1. How archetypal images of Devil or Savior appear in the same person
By Stephen A. Diamond Ph.D.
This week Americans face a bizarre phenomenon: We have an outgoing incumbent President in the White House who is seen by some as a savior, and by others as the proverbial Devil incarnate. The Antichrist.
Can both sides be correct? What could possibly account for this incredibly polarized, and therefore divisive and antagonistic, perception of the very same person? Why do half of us see the negative side of Donald Trump, while the other half for some reason see only the positive, to the point of not only uncivil verbal hostility, but now of violent insurrection and the possibility of bloody civil war?
CNN politics
Jan. 12, 2021
READ: Military Joint chiefs statement condemning ‘sediton and insurrection’ at US Capitol
America’s most senior general Mark Milley and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is comprised of the heads of each military branch, issued a statement Tuesday condemning the violent invasion of the US Capitol last week and reminding service members of their obligation to support and defend the Constitution and reject extremism.
January 12, 2021
Former Cult Follower Describes
How President Trump Has Created a Cult Following.
This week, Katie Couric spoke to Dr. Stephen Hassan, who is an expert on Undue Influence, brainwashing, and cults. He writes and speaks out about the importance of viewing terrorist groups as destructive cults, and has authored numerous books on the subject, including one called The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control. They discussed the events of the Capitol insurrection, and how the mob of violent Trump supporters displayed cult-like behavior.
Golden Veil â January 22, 2021 â Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
This just in:
âSo Many Great, Educated, Functional People were Brainwashedâ: Can Trumpâs Cult of Followers be Deprogrammed?
Steve Hassan chimes in.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
January 15, 2021
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was on the Senate floor when members were notified of the terrorist attack, describes the anger he and his colleagues feel towards those who incited this mob by pushing the lie that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.
âThe Essence Of This Crisis Is The Perpetuation Of This Huge Lieâ
On America’s Way Forward: âCongress Is Going To Have To Rise Up And Be Extremely Boldâ
A Message Of Unity To Republican Voters: âLet Us Work Togetherâ
THE TRANSFER OF POWER
A Reporterâs Footage
From Inside
The Capitol Siege
By The New Yorker | January 17, 2021
When Luke Mogelson attended President Donald Trumpâs speech on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., on January 6th, he was prepared for the possibility that violence might erupt that day. Mogelson, a veteran war correspondent and a contributing writer at The New Yorker, had spent the previous ten months reporting on the radical fringe of Trump supporters, from anti-lockdown militias to fascist groups such as the Proud Boys. After Election Day, he interviewed Trump supporters who showed up at ballot-tabulation sites, and who believed the Presidentâs lies that the results had been âriggedâ and his victory âstolen.â At one post-election pro-Trump rally in D.C., Mogelson witnessed racist violence against Black residents of the nationâs capital. At another event, he watched the host of the white-supremacist Web program âAmerica Firstâ declare, âOur Founding Fathers would get in the streets, and they would take this country back by force if necessary. And that is what we must be prepared to do.â
After Trumpâs incendiary speech, Mogelson followed the Presidentâs supporters as they forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, using his phoneâs camera as a reporterâs notebook. What follows is a video that includes some of that raw footage. Mogelson harnessed this material while writing his panoramic, definitive report, âAmong the Insurrectionists,â which the magazine posted online on Friday. (It appears in print in the January 25th issue.) His prose vividly captures how the raging anger and violence of the initial breach of the Capitol was followed by an eerily quiet and surreal interlude inside the Senate chamber, where Mogelson watched people rummaging through desks and posing for photographs. Although the footage was not originally intended for publication, it documents a historic event and serves as a visceral complement to Mogelsonâs probing, illuminating report.
January 20, 2021
After Joe Biden was sworn in as the nationâs 46th president, Amanda Gorman read âThe Hill We Climb,â building on a tradition of poets â including Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco â who have read for incoming Democratic presidents. Gorman is the youngest of these inaugural poets to offer her verse.
January 20, 2021
QAnon followers struggle to explain Biden inauguration
By Chris Mills Rodrigo
President Biden’s swearing-in as the nation’s 46th president has punctured the hopes of some QAnon followers who pushed the conspiracy theory that claimed former President Trump would remain in office and arrest top Democrats on Wednesday.
Reading Room
QAnon Is Just a Warmed Over Witch Panic
â and Itâs Also Very Dangerous
By Daniel Loxton
In this cover story article (written in October 2020) for Skeptic magazine 25.4 (December 2020), Daniel Loxton considers the unsavory origins and rising threat of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Written prior to the deadly QAnon-led occupation of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, this analysis exposes the conspiracy theory as baseless, unoriginal, and harmful for believers and society at large.
As 2020 nears its end and the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a rapidly growing far right conspiracy theory increasingly dominates headlines. QAnon is a crowd-sourced online mythology inspired by cryptic anonymous internet posts appearing since 2017 from an unknown figure (or group) known as âQâ or âQ Clearance Patriot.â It is an expanded successor to the debunked 2016 âPizzagateâ conspiracy theory, which claimed that Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats operated a child sex trafficking ring under a Washington, DC pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. QAnon is also rooted in much older mythologies about sinister secret societies of Satan worshippers, witches, or Jews.
November 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/featurâŠ
Feb. 8, 2021
Former QAnon believer Melissa Rein Lively speaks to CNN’s Alisyn Camerota about how she fell into the conspiracy theories, her darkest moment, coming to see the light and helping others find their way out as well.
Jan. 12, 2021
Trump’s phone call with Georgia’s top election official
Last weekend, President Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, imploring him with veiled threats and lies to change the outcome of the November election. Raffensperger talks to Scott Pelley about why he didn’t give in. https://cbsn.ws/38uuFjo
January 20, 2021
OBITUARY FOR A FAILED PRESIDENCY
One final dispatch from Trumpâs Washington.
By Susan B. Glasser
Precisely at noon on Wednesday, Donald Trumpâs disastrous Presidency will end, two weeks to the day after he unleashed a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election results, and one week to the day after he was impeached for so doing. He leaves behind a city and a country reeling from four hundred thousand Americans dead, as of Tuesday, from a pandemic whose gravity he downplayed and denied; an economic crisis; and an internal political rift so great that it invites comparisons to the Civil War.
In the end, Trump was everything his haters fearedâa chaos candidate, in the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos President. An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord, railed against a âdeep stateâ within his own government, praised autocrats and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets. He leaves office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval ratings in the history of the modern Presidency. Defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election by seven million votes, Trump became the first incumbent seeking reĂ«lection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives since Herbert Hoover, in 1932. A liar on an unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post, culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election that he decisively lost.
Yet Republicansâthe vast majority, that is, of those who still identify themselves as Republicansâcontinue to embrace Trump and the conspiracy theories about his defeat that the departing President has spread to explain his loss. This, more than anything, might have been the most surprising thing about Trumpâs tenure: his ability to turn one of Americaâs two political parties into a cult of personality organized around a repeatedly bankrupt New York real-estate developer. And so we are ending these four years having learned not that Donald Trump is a bad manâthe evidence of that was already voluminous and incontrovertible before he entered politicsâbut that there are millions of Americans who were willing to overthrow our constitutional system in order to keep him in power, who would follow Trumpâs dark lies rather than acknowledge unwelcome truths.
“A Weight Lifted” by Barry Blitt
By Francoise Mouly
January 18, 2021
On January 20th, if all goes according to plan, Donald Trump will depart the office of the Presidency. Barry Blitt, who has spent much of the past four years studying, drawing, and riffing on Trumpâs antics and demagoguery, recently spoke with us about his latest cover, and about the pace and density of the news.
What visual metaphors for Americaâother than the eagleâcome to mind? Do you have a list you turn to when searching for ideas?
Visual metaphors for America: well, youâve got your Statue of Liberty, your Uncle Sam. Also, anything with stars and stripes on it. Babe Ruth, apple pie. And maybe, now, a fur-wearing QAnon shaman. I confess that I do actually keep a folder of potentially useful metaphors on my desktop, but itâs mostly crazy, obscure stuff: photos of bowling-alley accidents, drinking bird toys, police lineups, etc.
Political cartoons often comment on fleeting news events, so they can have a short shelf life. Are there images you did a while back that now puzzle you?
The density of ephemeral news events in the last few yearsâhell, in the last few weeksâhas left me with piles of drawings I can barely recall or understand today. I just came across a drawing of a distinguished, impeccable Robert Mueller, seated at a kitchen tableâthatâs incomprehensible to me. He looks familiar, but Iâm drawing a blank. Was he a TV chef? A game-show host?
Youâre from Canada. Could a figure like Trump emerge there?
I guess anything is possible. Italy had Berlusconi; Brazil, Bolsonaro. Maybe thereâs an up-and-coming Canadian politician who is a narcissistic, closed-minded, intolerant bully, but perfectly polite enough to get elected there.
For more of Blittâs recent covers, see below:
“Belly Flop”
“Whack Job”
Find Barry Blittâs covers, cartoons, and more at the CondĂ© Nast Store.
January 25, 2021
25 âProphetsâ who said Trump would win
Hereâs the ultimate Trump Prophecy Compilation! Featuring Pat Robertson, Paula White-Cain, Sid Roth, Chris Yoon, Robby Dawkins, Kris Vallotton, Mark Taylor, Kat Kerr, Marcus Rogers, Kevin Zadai, Greg Locke, Taribo West, Denise Goulet, Curt Landry, Jeremiah Johnson, Mark Burns, Sadhu Sundar Selvaraj, Jeff Jansen, Emily Rose Lewis, David Ramirez, Hank Kunneman, Kenneth Copeland, Evans Abban, Shawn Bolz and Loren Sandford.
Out of these 25, only four have so far apologized (Vallotton, Sandford, Johnson and Bolz) while one of them has admitted that Biden won without apologizing (Robertson). Those who have apologized have received thousands of hate mails and in some cases even death threats from Christian Trump supporters.
âI am against those who prophesy false dreams and retell them to lead My people astray with their reckless lies. It was not I who sent them or commanded them, and they are of no benefit at all to these people, declares the LORD.â â Jeremiah 23:32
Jan. 26, 2021
TRUMPâS AMERICAN CARNAGE
From his first days as president to his last, how Trump stoked division, violence and insurrection. FRONTLINE investigates Trumpâs siege on his enemies, the media and even the leaders of his own party, who for years ignored the warning signs of what was to come.
Jan. 26, 2021
Trump’s Presidency Recap: The Most Defining Stories
TRUMP ERA DEFINED: In just 4 years, Trump gave us the Russia investigation; emboldened white supremacists; separated 5,000+ children from their families; changed the Supreme Court makeup for decades to come; and sprinkled in 30,000 false statements throughout it all.
Real Time with Bill Maher
February 5, 2021
New Rule: America’s Mass Delusion
It’s fun to laugh at QAnon, but if you accord religious faith the kind of exalted respect we do here in America, youâve already lost the argument that mass delusion is bad.
WhaleRider – February 6, 2021 – Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
“Politics isnât about the worship of one weird dude.â
~ Republican Congressman Ben Sasse of Nebraska taking a stand publicly against the insanity and abject denial in the cult of Trump.
I can relate.
Message to Nebraska GOP State Central Committee
Sasse for Nebraska | Feb 4, 2021
“Political addicts don’t represent most Nebraskans . . .”
February 7, 2021
Michael Cohen: Does Donald Trump have a âsecretâ pardon?
He may no longer be President, but Donald Trump canât stop making headlines. In the next few days he goes on trial in the US Senate charged with inciting his supportersâ rampage on the Capitol building last month. But while the world was shocked by the shameful attack on democracy, Trumpâs former attorney, Michael Cohen, wasnât surprised at all. In fact two years ago he predicted it. Cohen used to be The Donaldâs closest ally but ended up an enemy, and in prison, when he took the fall for covering up Trumpâs affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. And now, in an extraordinary interview with Tara Brown, filmed while he serves the remainder of his sentence under house arrest in New York, Cohen is happy to spill all of his old bossâs dirty secrets.
PBS
Amanpour & Co.
Feb. 12, 2021
Did This 2 Min. Video Help Incite the Jan. 6 Rioters?
As former president Donald Trumpâs second impeachment trial enters its third day, the question remains whether his words or actions incited the January 6 assault on the Capitol. But little attention has been paid to a video that was shown that same day, at the January 6 âMarch to Save Americaâ rally in Washington, D.C.
Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascist propaganda, claims that this short video â shown immediately after Rudy Giuliani left the stage, prior to the attack on the Capitol â was full of themes and tactics that threaten liberal democracy. Stanley breaks the video down with Hari Sreenivasan and elaborates on its role in the violence that took place on that infamous day.
PBS NewsHour
Feb. 13, 2021
WATCH: Failure to convict Trump is âvote of infamy,â Senator Schumer says
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., delivers remarks Feb. 13 following Trumpâs acquittal in his second impeachment trial. The 57-43 vote was the most bipartisan in history, with seven Republicans voting to convict but 10 votes shy of reaching the needed two-thirds majority needed.
Schumer said the trial was not about choosing country over party, but rather choosing country over Trump, and â43 Republican members chose Trump. They chose Trump. It should be a weight on their conscience today and it will be a weight on their conscience forever.â He said the seven Republicans who voted to convict were patriots, and the others lacked morality and courage.
Golden Veil â February 14, 2021 â Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog
Interview
Congresswoman and Jonestown survivor Jackie Speier: âTrump is a political cult leaderâ by Ed Pilkington, February 11, 2021, The Guardian.
After the congresswoman survived an ambush by Jim Jonesâs cult members in 1978, she became determined to devote herself to public service and to strengthen safeguards against cults.
February 17, 2021
Republicans Back Trump Because
of the Insurrection, Not Despite It
The former presidentâs ruthlessness
remains central to his appeal.
By David A. Graham
America as a whole has had enough of Donald Trump. Voters hold him responsible for the January 6 insurrection, they believe the Senate should have convicted him for his role, and they want him to leave national politics. But the Republican Party is another country, and they do things differently there. Its rank-and-file members didnât support impeachment, donât want Trump punished, and prefer him over any other potential candidate for president in 2024.
How can it be that Democrats and Republicans see the former president in such divergent ways? One common answer is that, thanks to information bubbles, theyâre looking at different sets of facts; conservative outlets buried the impeachment hearings compared with other outletsâ coverage. Democrats and independents are still outraged, while Republicans have forgiven and forgotten.
But maybe thatâs wrong, and Republicans are backing Trump not in spite of the insurrection but because of it. Many Republican voters supported Trump in 2016 and 2020 not out of particular policy affinities but because they saw him as someone who would actually fight for their vision of American culture, doing whatever it took to win. Trumpâs frantic attempt to overturn the election didnât work, but it was just the sort of furious effort his supporters wanted. Why would they object now?
Hypocrisy is a deceitful tactic used most often by those in power, who say “you must do this” or “you cannot do that” or “this is wrong,” while purporting that they themselves do not do said thing when, in fact, they do.
A hypocrite (from the Greek, “actor”) is someone who espouses a view, perspective, or philosophy without adhering in any meaningful way to it themselves, especially if they claim that their philosophy applies to all people. The ultimate snarkology of the hypocrite is “do as I say, not as I do.” Generally, “hypocrite” is a pejorative term; there are practically no cases where hypocrisy is considered a good thing unless you’re a politician like Donald Trump.
February 25, 2021
The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages
The GOP has become, in form if not in content,
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s
By Tom Nichols
Author of the forthcoming book, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy
We are living in a time of bad metaphors. Everything is fascism, or socialism; Hitlerâs Germany, or Stalinâs Soviet Union. Republicans, especially, want their followers to believe that America is on the verge of a dramatic time, a moment of great conflict such as 1968âor perhaps, even worse, 1860. (The drama is the point, of course. No one ever says, âWeâre living through 1955.â)
Ironically, the GOP is indeed replicating another political party in another time, but not as the heroes they imagine themselves to be. The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.
I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes.
April 5, 2021
An Epic Debate on Trump and True Evangelicalism
In which journalist Matt Labash (a Never Trumper) and radio host Eric Metaxas (a Trump supporter) agree to disagree
Through the many upheavals of the Trump era, one trend has remained strikingly stable: the mobilization of the white evangelical community as diehard supporters of the forty-fifth president. Itâs a convergence of interests that, on paper at least, appears unlikely in the extreme. Trumpâs acquaintance with the Bible and its dictates might generously be described as âpassing,â and his personal conduct, both in his business dealings and his elective affinities, falls a good deal short of Christian ideals. How do sincere Protestant believers work through the many seeming tensions and contradictions that assail Trumpism as a de facto religious movement? To get to the bottom of things, The New Republic asked conservative journalist Matt Labash, a lifelong evangelical and ardent Never Trumper, to conduct an online dialogue on the vagaries of the Trump-evangelical relationship with bestselling author and radio show host Eric Metaxas, a no-less-ardent Trump supporter. The following exchange has been lightly edited for flow, style, and length.
____________________________________
Matt Labash, formerly a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Fly Fishing With Darth Vader.
Eric Metaxas hosts the Eric Metaxas Show and is author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.
______________________________________
MATT LABASH:
Eric,
Many years ago, I profiled a Christian professional wrestler named George South. He fought as a âheel,â or a bad guy. But not wishing to do his Christian testimony any harm, he would sport JOHN 3:16 on the seat of his banana hammockâthe very same britches that he might fish a pair of brass knuckles out of to coldcock a referee while he wasnât looking. I asked George how he accounted for the mixed messaging. He essentially said that sometimes you just have to climb into the squared circle, face the darkness, and hit someone over the head with a chair for Jesus.
On the surface, you and I have much in common. Youâve written biographies of Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I went to a Lutheran elementary school, and like Bonhoeffer, am no fan of Hitlerâs. We have both spent much of our lives in evangelical circles. (I grew up Southern Baptist in Texas throughout the â80s, and still go to a nondenominational evangelical church, or did, before Covid-19 turned us into a viral petri dish. Now, we worship in our sweats, remotely.) We both, without apology, pledge allegiance to our Lord and Savior, J.H. Christ.
That said, even though you are a Christian brother and coequal partner in the search for truth, a part of me wants to go George South on you, and hit you in the head with a chair for Jesus. (Figuratively, of course.)
Why? Iâll tell you why: Donald J. Trump. Yes, I understand heâs not president anymore, even if he seems to be having trouble grasping that fact. But for all the disk space he takes up in the consciousness of Republicans and evangelicals, the intersection of which is around 82 percent, he might as well be. While Trump had the lowest approval rating of any president since Gallup started keeping track in the 1930s, he scored 97 percent approval with the adoring crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). This, after two impeachments and him headlining an insurrection. That alone is hardly surprising. When you run a cult, the cultists tend to see things your way.
But itâs broader than that. Comb through recent survey results, and a disturbing picture emerges. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll in Februaryâafter Trumpâs coup attemptâhad Republicans stating by a double-digit margin (46 percent to 27 percent) that they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if he created one. After months of Trump stoking conspiracy theories and all manner of delusional fever dreamsâeven though he was beaten in the election like a rented mule (both in the popular vote and the Electoral College)âa Lifeway Research poll found 49 percent of U.S. Protestant pastors claiming that they frequently hear their congregation members parroting current-event conspiracy theories. A January American Enterprise Institute poll reported 29 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of white evangelicals believing QAnon conspiracy theories. (Spoiler alert, Q-ball nutters: The Democratic Party has many faults, but being a Satanist-cannibal-pedophile ring is not one of them.)
Renowned pastor and Covid-truther John MacArthur has said that âany real, true believerâ had to vote for Trump. Franklin Graham, the moral runt of Billyâs litter, compared the 10 lonely House Republicans who voted for Trumpâs impeachment to Judas Iscariot, taking 30 pieces of silver in exchange for their immortal souls. (Really, Franklin? Try getting a Fox contract these days without being a Trumpbot.)
And while I generally consider it bad manners to lunge for the jugular of a dinner guest before the salad plates have even been cleared, I have to say, youâve been no slouch in the shamelessly shilling-for-Trump department, Eric. Like Trump, you spent months peddling his massiveâelection-fraud fantasy. You wrote childrenâs books with titles like Donald Drains the Swamp. (Never mind his five or so Cabinet secretaries who resigned under ethical clouds; or his personal lawyer and campaign manager, both of whom went to prison; or the other former campaign manager who was merely indicted before collecting his presidential pardon.) You actually told Trump himself, âIâd be happy to die in this fight. This is a fight for everything. God is with us.â
I guess the question is: why? Why is he worth all this trouble? And how do we know God didnât vote for Biden, or maybe go third party?
Iâm well aware of Paulâs admonition that âGod hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.â (If thatâs the case here, God would have really scored, because itâd be hard to pick a bigger fool than DJT.) But though I donât have my doctorate of divinity or anything, I have read the Bible a couple thousand timesâeven Trumpâs favorite parts, like âTwoâ Corinthians. And nowhere do the Scriptures tell us: âBlessed are the mean-Tweeters, the sociopathic narcissists, the conspiracy-mongers, and seditionists, for they shall inherit the earth.â Itâs just not in any translation Iâve picked up. (Maybe I should check The Message?)
I donât get it. Itâs dispiriting. I always thought we worshipped our Triune God. But somewhere along the way, say, around 2015, it seems like the Holy Trinity became a quaternity, with Trump batting cleanup for the Holy Ghost. (Trump did once admit that J.C. was more famous than him, though the latter never got canceled by Twitter.)
One gets the feeling that these days, if the Son of Man went walking on water across Floridaâs Intracoastal Waterway instead of the Sea of Galilee, he might be plowed under by a Trump boat parade, and possibly impaled on Franklin Grahamâs water ski. Iâm not sure anyone would mourn. Theyâd likely be too busy anticipating the resurrection of their new-and-improved Orange Jesus.
May 5, 2021
Our Friend, the Trump Propagandist
We knew David Horowitz when he was a radical leftist. Then he became a conservative. Then he joined the MAGA cult.
By Ronald Roddosh and Sol Stern
According to our old friend David Horowitzâthe radical leftist turned thoughtful conservative turned Trump propagandist whom weâve been acquainted with, in his various political guises, for more than 60 yearsâAmerica is on the brink of destruction by way of a communist takeover that only the patriots of the MAGA movement can prevent. Thatâs the main message in Horowitzâs new book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America. On the bookâs cover are portraits of the seven Democrats allegedly plotting the revolution: Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar.
This third book Horowitz has published about Trump since 2017, The Enemy Within, is even more of a jihad against liberals and progressives than his previous two (both bestsellers). Horowitzâs justification for writing yet another Trumpist screed is that, in the aftermath of the Democrats stealing the 2020 election, an event he describes (in lip sync with the former president) as âthe greatest political crime in the history of the country,â the âtotalitarianâ threat the party poses is now imminent.
The book begins with a lamentation: âAmericans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War.â The trouble is that almost everything Horowitz has recently written has been calculated to fan the flames of division. Yet he canât make up his mind whether the tyranny the Democrats are about to install would be more like twentieth-century communism or fascism. He asserts, for example, that the diversity training programs favored by Democrats are akin to the surveillance system of âpeopleâs commissarsâ created by the Bolsheviks. In practically the same breath, he announces that the Biden administration âhas clearly defined itself and its party as a fascist vanguard.â
August 23, 2021
How Rupert Murdochâs Fox News promoted Donald Trumpâs propaganda and helped destabilise democracy in the United States: the first of our two-part special.
August 12, 2021
Donaldâs Plot Against America
Now, he and his GOP enablers are peddling the Second Big Lie: That January 6 was just legitimate protest. Itâs the crucial ingredient in convincing America to return themâand himâto power.
By Mary L. Trump
I felt as though I had stumbled across a crime scene so violent that I couldnât process it, let alone synthesize the images in front of me. The parts remained stubbornly separate, and there was no way to grasp the meaning of the whole.
October 31, 2021
RED FLAGS
As Trump propelled his supporters to
Washington, law enforcement agencies failed
to heed mounting warnings about violence on Jan. 6.
The head of intelligence at D.C.âs homeland security office was growing desperate. For days, Donell Harvin and his team had spotted increasing signs that supporters of President Donald Trump were planning violence when Congress met to formalize the electoral college vote, but federal law enforcement agencies did not seem to share his sense of urgency. On Saturday, Jan. 2, he picked up the phone and called his counterpart in San Francisco, waking Mike Sena before dawn.
Sena listened with alarm. The Northern California intelligence office he commanded had also been inundated with political threats flagged by social media companies, several involving plans to disrupt the joint session or hurt lawmakers on Jan. 6.
July 12, 2021
The LAST THING before WE GO tonight is a new appreciation of
A MAN AHEAD OF HIS TIME
Carl Sagan Predicted The Mess 2021 Would Be
25 Years Ago
Astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan managed to predict a lot of things and challenges America faces in the year 2021 all the way back in 1995 when he was writing a book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, published just before his death in 1996. MSNBC’s Brian Williams shares the details.
April 30, 2022
Trumpâs latest hate rally: A master class
in cult mind control
By Chauncy Devega, Salon â Commentary
Donald Trumpâs political circus and freak show is continuing its American tour. Everywhere it stops, Donald Trump unleashes a torrent of lies, hatred, ignorance, bigotry, racism, narcissism, authoritarianism, threats of violence and other antisocial and evil values.
Trumpâs political rallies resemble George Orwellâs âtwo minutes of hateâ from 1984, expanded to two hours or so.
World History Documentaries
May 21, 2022
The Seedy Underbelly Of The American Presidency
This doc probes the presidential campaigns that have changed America through the eyes of former campaigners, journalists and researchers. Find out how financing, crime and corruption, and TV debates play a major role in swaying political opinion on the way to the White House.
August 20, 2022
Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo spoke at a âMooniesâ-affiliated event, despite Japan controversy
By Alia Shoaib
The Unification Church, formed in South Korea in the 1950s by self-declared messiah Sun Myung Moon, is known to have deep-rooted ties with conservative politicians worldwide. Its followers are often colloquially referred to as âMoonies.â
Former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich spoke in person at a conference affiliated with the church in Seoul on August 12 to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the death of Sun Myung Moon.
Pompeo and Gingrichâs speeches spoke about the value of religious freedom and the dangers of communism â a view they share with the church.
The controversial religious organization â formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification â has been in the spotlight following the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The assassin told police that he was motivated by anger towards Abe and his links to the church. It is widely described as a cult by former members.
Former President Donald Trump recorded a video message played during the meeting, per Japanese outlet NTV News 24. During his speech, Trump said that Abe was a âgood friend and a great manâ and praised Reverend Moonâs widow Hak Ja Han, who now heads up the church.
Other billed speakers included former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and former US ambassadors and generals.
According to Dr. Steven Hassan, an expert on cults and a former Moonie, the ties between right-wing politicians and the church are due to a shared hatred of communism and the groupâs vast wealth and influence.
The Moon empire has been estimated to be worth billions of dollars and includes ownership of the conservative newspaper The Washington Times.
âIt doesnât shock me that Pompeo, the former head of the CIA and the State Department, spoke for them. Iâm sure he got a lot of money. Iâm sure Trump got a lot of money,â Hassan told Insider, speculating about their speakerâs fees. âIâm sure they donât believe Moon was the Messiah.â
PBS
September 6, 2022
LIES, POLITICS AND DEMOCRACY
FRONTLINEâs season premiere investigates American political leaders and choices theyâve made that have undermined and threatened democracy in the U.S.
In a two-hour documentary special premiering ahead of the 2022 midterms, FRONTLINE examines how officials fed the public lies about the 2020 presidential election and embraced rhetoric that led to political violence.
TVO Today | The Agenda | Steve Paikin
January 31, 2023
Truth and Trump: An Evening with Bob Woodward
The disruptive impacts of Donald Trumpâs presidency continue to wreak havoc in America and influence politics abroad. Two years after losing the presidency, is his influence behind him or is his MAGA movement still a force to be reckoned with?
May 5, 2023
The E. Jean Carroll witness decision that
could haunt Donald Trump
Should the jury be entitled to hear from any of Trump’s other accusers? That was the weighty question Judge Lewis A. Kaplan had to decide.
By Carol C. Lam, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California
On Thursday, E. Jean Carroll officially rested her case. This means a jury in New York City will soon be asked to decide whether Donald Trump raped, and then later defamed, the former magazine columnist and media personality. The general public will draw its own conclusions about the civil lawsuit, a remarkable event not only because Trump is the former president of the United States, but also because he is a presidential candidate once again. But because jurors are instructed to reach their decision only on the evidence they see or hear in the trial, the decisions U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan makes about what evidence comes in â and what does not â are of enormous importance.
This week, the jury heard from four key witnesses likely to be top of mind for the jurors when they begin their deliberations. Two women â Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin â testified that Carroll talked to them shortly after the attack in 1996 and that her account back then was consistent with her testimony at trial. This evidence is important corroboration of Carrollâs testimony â that is, it was introduced to show that the rape allegation was not a recent fabrication. (Trump has denied Carrollâs claims, calling them a âscam.â)
May 5, 2023
Trump deposition in E. Jean Carroll rape trial
The full video of a deposition given by former president Donald Trump as part of his civil rape trial has been released. In the video, Trump calls his accuser, writer E. Jean Carroll a ânut jobâ and âmentally sick.â At one point, he also mistakes Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples in a photo.
July 11, 2023
Trump ‘failed’ U.S.: Icon Bob Woodward
talks ‘Trump Tapes’ with Ari Melber
Pulitzer-Prize winner Bob Woodward says he had ânever seen such a failure to protect the peopleâ until his reporting on President Trumpâs handling of Covid. The Washington Post journalist did 20 interviews with Trump as President, and in this special edition of âThe Beat,â he talks to Ari Melber about what came through in those candid conversations as the pandemic first hit. Melber also breaks down a key period of the pandemic, playing excerpts of Woodwardâs tapes and other source material to offer a broader look at Trumpâs handling of the crisis, which is newly relevant as Trump runs to return to the White House.
July 17, 2023
Trump is campaigning to establish
‘a presidential dictatorship’ historian Beschloss says
The Republican partyâs presidential frontrunner, Donald Trump, is openly running a campaign based on turning America into an autocracy. Joy Reid’s panel of experts discuss this move many consider to be unprecedented.
August 23, 2023
Here Are The Mug Shots Of Everyone
Indicted In The Georgia Election Case
Look no further for the harshly-lit booking photos of the named defendants, as each one turns themselves in to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office.
September 17, 2023
Full Trump Interview: ‘I don’t consider us to
have much of a democracy right now’
In this full, unedited interview with Meet the Press, former President Trump discusses his views on the 2020 election, abortion rights, foreign policy and more.
November 9, 2023
Mary Trump and Adam Kinzinger
On The Way Back
from Our Divided Political Moment
Adam Kinzinger and Mary Trump donât have a lot in common on the surface: but in a moment where politics are dividing more people than ever before, Kinzinger and Trump find they have more and more in common. January 6th was a watershed moment for them both: Kinzingerâs departure from the current GOP was basically assured with his participation in the Congressional hearings on the matter, and a worst-fears-realized anguish after the discord crystalized a drive for activism in Mary Trump.
As Katieâs plus one, Mary Trump digs deep with Kinzinger on their shared fight for the future of democracy and how the country may find a path forward. Plus, Kinzinger is full of insider, behind-the-scenes explainers from his time in Congress, from what exactly is meant by âmilitary aidâ to the impact on history of Kevin McCarthyâs visits to Mar-a-Lago.
August 26, 2023
Unfit (2020) | Donald Trump Documentary
Full Movie
Is Donald Trump fit to hold the office of President of the United States? An eye-opening analysis of Trump by leading US mental health professionals and Republican strategists, on the record for the record. Science. Truth. Duty to Warn.
Cast: Malcolm Nance, George Conway, Anthony Scaramucci, John Gartner, Lance Dodes, Justin Frank, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Ramani Durvasula
Director: Dan Partland
#unfit #donaldtrump #trump #documentary
A Science on the Nature of Evil
Adjusted for Political Purposes
PART I II
