After Attack in Spain, Trump Invokes Myth About Execution of Muslims

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(Screen shot via Twitter)
By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams
As Barcelona, Spain, reeled from a deadly attack on Thursday that left 13 people dead and dozens more injured, President Donald Trump quickly took to Twitter to both denounce the attack and recount a "vile" myth that claims a U.S. generalthough the story has been thoroughly debunkedexecuted 49 Muslims with bullets drenched in pig's blood.

[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]
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[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]Donald J. Trump
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Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!
8:45 PM - Aug 17, 2017

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The fact that the story isn't true never stopped Trump from parading it around on the campaign trail.
But the significant point is not that the story is apocryphal, many pointed outit is that the story is "bigoted" and "vicious nonsense."
"Yes, it's false," wrote MSNBC justice and security analyst Matthew Miller. "But [it's] more important that [the president of the United States] is talking about executing Muslims without trial with bullets coated in pigs blood. Appalling."
Though Trump insisted that he needed "the facts" before speaking about the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, this concern was quickly dropped by the president in the case of Spain, where the attackers may have been motivated by Islamic extremism.
"Trump is celebrating torture and mass executions here. This isn't law and orderit's war crimes," wrote filmmaker Adam Best. "The Donald is clinging to the phrase radical Islamic terror' to avoid talking about white supremacist terrorism. So transparent."
Others reacted similarly:

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[URL="https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1"]Kyle Griffin
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Trump on Tues.: "Before I make a statement, I need the facts."

Trump on Thurs. cites 'pants on fire' unproven claim http://bit.ly/21e83LR https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/898254409511129088 …
8:56 PM - Aug 17, 2017

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22h
[URL="https://twitter.com/adamcbest"]Adam Best
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Replying to @adamcbest @realDonaldTrump
This is a sick man. Like GOP Senator Corker just said he is unable to see beyond himself. Time to start acting like a leader, not a lunatic.

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[URL="https://twitter.com/eugenegu"]Eugene Gu, MD
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He goes so far as to glorify war crimes against Muslims but calls domestic KKK terrorists "very nice people" who had a permit.
8:58 PM - Aug 17, 2017

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Trump condemns attack in #Barcelona in hours. Took days to condemn #Charlottesville attack when he said needed time to get "all the facts." pic.twitter.com/dW3P47HRnP

• Bannon is out ::bowtie::
  
  Rebecca Zisser / Axios
  
  Steve Bannon is out at the White House.
  • President Trump decided to push out Bannon: Top sources tell Axios that Bannon is telling people he resigned on August 7th to be effective on August 14th, his 1-year anniversary with Trump. (He joined the campaign in August of 2016).
    
  • Today is Bannon's last day, per the White House: "White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve's last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best."
    
  • From a senior White House official: "Steve was made aware he was going to be asked to leave... he was given the opportunity to do it on his own terms. He was told the decision had been made and that he would no longer be serving at the WH."
    
  
  
  
  
  
• Jonathan Swan
  
• 2 hrs ago
  

White House review nears end: Officials expect Bannon firing

A decision is imminent from White House chief of staff John Kelly on whether Steve Bannon will keep his job, according to administration officials with knowledge of the situation:

• Bannon, who has run afoul of Trump in the past, is now suspected by the president of leaking about his West Wing colleagues. And Trump resents the publicity Bannon has been getting as mastermind of the campaign.
  
• Many West Wing officials are now asking "when," not "if," Bannon goes.
  
• Chief of Staff General John Kelly has been reviewing Bannon's position.
  
• A recent deluge of media coverage of Bannon including Bannon's explosive conversation with the American Prospect have not escaped either the president's or Kelly's attention.
  

One White House source twists the knife: "His departure may seem turbulent in the media, but inside it will be very smooth. He has no projects or responsibilities to hand off."
Keep reading 289 words

Why Bannon might still survive:

• Trump often sends mixed signals about his personnel plans, and makes decisions both to keep and dismiss people on whim.
  
• Bannon, with his close connection to the president's base, is the one West Wing official who could do authentic damage to Trump on the outside.
  
• We're told that Bannon's friendship with the billionaire Mercer family, who has been an important Trump ally, is a factor in the president's decision and could be part of the strategist's survival package.
  

Bannon is unfazed, according to friends and confidants:

• That's readily apparent from his media appearances. He seems unburdened, giving on the record interviews to publications including the New York Times, where he's unapologetically defending Trump's controversial comments in the fallout from the racist carnage in Charlottesville.
  
• One senior White House official said it seemed like Bannon was setting himself up to be a martyr the nationalist hero fired by the "globalists."
  
• He'd return to the outside world, a leader in the populist nationalist movement worldwide, with a partner in hedge fund billionaire Bob Mercer, who has deep pockets and would make Bannon even more of a force to be reckoned with on the outside. Plus he has the killing machine of Breitbart to return to.
  

Bannon has felt freed this past week and has told friends that he is ready to go "medieval" on enemies of Trump and his populist agenda both in and out of the White House.

• A source close to Bannon: "This week is a good window into what Bannon outside the [White House] would look like: A strong defense of POTUS and 'fire and fury' for enemies of The Trump agenda."
  
• "Get ready for Bannon the barbarian."
  

Steve Bannon, Unrepentant

Robert Kuttner
August 16, 2017
Trump's embattled strategist phones me, unbidden, to opine on China, Korea, and his enemies in the administration.














(Rex Features via AP Images)


Steve Bannon on the phone, December 9, 2016





What follows is the article that likely pushed Steve Bannon, President Trump's chief strategist and architect of his white nationalist messaging, out the White House door. Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and co-editor of this magazine, never expected a phone call from Bannon; the Prospect, after all, is a proudly liberal and defiantly anti-Trump journal. Nonetheless, Bannon called him on Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday, we posted Kuttner's piecea careful report of what Bannon said and an insightful analysis of why he said it. You can read it below.
You might think from recent press accounts that Steve Bannon is on the ropes and therefore behaving prudently. In the aftermath of events in Charlottesville, he is widely blamed for his boss's continuing indulgence of white supremacists. Allies of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster hold Bannon responsible for a campaign by Breitbart News, which Bannon once led, to vilify the security chief. Trump's defense of Bannon, at his Tuesday press conference, was tepid.
But Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to discuss the politics of taking a harder line with China, and minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize his rivals at the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury. "They're wetting themselves," he said, proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and Defense.
Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon's assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me.
Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon's assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me. I'd just published a column on how China was profiting from the U.S.-North Korea nuclear brinkmanship, and it included some choice words about Bannon's boss.
"In Kim, Trump has met his match," I wrote. "The risk of two arrogant fools blundering into a nuclear exchange is more serious than at any time since October 1962." Maybe Bannon wanted to scream at me?
I told the assistant that I was on vacation, but I would be happy to speak by phone. Bannon promptly called.
Far from dressing me down for comparing Trump to Kim, he began, "It's a great honor to finally track you down. I've followed your writing for years and I think you and I are in the same boat when it comes to China. You absolutely nailed it."
"We're at economic war with China," he added. "It's in all their literature. They're not shy about saying what they're doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it's gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they're just tapping us along. It's just a sideshow."
Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.
Contrary to Trump's threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: "There's no military solution [to North Korea's nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here, they got us." Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the administration to take a harder line on China trade, and not to fall into a trap of wishful thinking in which complaints against China's trade practices now had to take a backseat to the hope that China, as honest broker, would help restrain Kim.
"To me," Bannon said, "the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover."
Bannon's plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. "We're going to run the tables on these guys. We've come to the conclusion that they're in an economic war and they're crushing us."
But what about his internal adversaries, at the departments of State and Defense, who think the United States can enlist Beijing's aid on the North Korean standoff, and at Treasury and the National Economic Council who don't want to mess with the trading system?
"Oh, they're wetting themselves," he said, explaining that the Section 301 complaint, which was put on hold when the war of threats with North Korea broke out, was shelved only temporarily, and will be revived in three weeks. As for other cabinet departments, Bannon has big plans to marginalize their influence.
"I'm changing out people at East Asian Defense; I'm getting hawks in. I'm getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out at State."
But can Bannon really win that fight internally?
"That's a fight I fight every day here," he said. "We're still fighting. There's Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying."
"We gotta do this. The president's default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy. Don't get me wrong. It's like, every day."
Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me.
There are a couple of things that are startling about this premise. First, to the extent that most of the opponents of Bannon's China trade strategy are other Trump administration officials, it's not clear how reaching out to the left helps him. If anything, it gives his adversaries ammunition to characterize Bannon as unreliable or disloyal.
More puzzling is the fact that Bannon would phone a writer and editor of a progressive publication (the cover lines on whose first two issues after Trump's election were "Resisting Trump" and "Containing Trump") and assume that a possible convergence of views on China trade might somehow paper over the political and moral chasm on white nationalism.
The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up. This is also puzzling, since Steve Bannon is not exactly Bambi when it comes to dealing with the press. He's probably the most media-savvy person in America.
I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump's reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump's base.
He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: "Ethno-nationalismit's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more."
"These guys are a collection of clowns," he added.
From his lips to Trump's ear.
"The Democrats," he said, "the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."
I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness. The waters around him are rising, but he is going about his business of infighting, and attempting to cultivate improbable outside allies, to promote his China strategy. His enemies will do what they do.
Either the reports of the threats to Bannon's job are grossly exaggerated and leaked by his rivals, or he has decided not to change his routine and to go down fighting. Given Trump's impulsivity, neither Bannon nor Trump really has any idea from day to day whether Bannon is staying or going. He has survived earlier threats. So what the hell, damn the torpedoes.
The conversation ended with Bannon inviting me to the White House after Labor Day to continue the discussion of China and trade. We'll see if he's still there.

Steve Bannon Back at Breitbart After White House Ouster

Steve Bannon in the East Room of the White House in April. (Andrew Harnik / AP)
Steve Bannon was not out of a job for long. Hours after being removed from the White House as President Trump's chief strategist on Friday, Bannon returned to Breitbart News as its executive chairman, CNN Money reports. The far-right website made the announcement in a press release. "The populist-nationalist movement got a lot stronger today," Breitbart News Editor in Chief Alex Marlow said in a written statement, according to CNN Money. "Breitbart gained an executive chairman with his finger on the pulse of the Trump agenda."
According to Breitbart, Bannon led the company's evening editorial meeting.
Bannon was let go as Trump's chief strategist earlier in the day, marking the end of a turbulent seven months. According to multiple reports, his removal had been planned, and Trump's new chief of staff, John Kelly, made it official.
CNN reports:

Sources told CNN that Bannon's ouster had been in the works for two weeks and a source said that while Bannon was given the option to resign, he was ultimately forced out. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed Bannon's departure, but claimed the decision for him to leave was mutual.
"White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve's last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best," Sanders said in a statement.

A combative presence in the White House, Bannon is the latest of several top-level aides to leave the Trump administration since July, among them press secretary Sean Spicer, chief of staff Reince Priebus and short-lived communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
The Associated Press reports:

Bannon had been on shaky ground for weeks, and his standing appeared in jeopardy when Trump's new chief of staff, John Kelly, embarked on a personnel review of West Wing staff. Kelly had indicated to aides that significant changes could be coming, according to an official familiar with Kelly's plans but not authorized to speak publicly.
The president had also repeatedly diminished Bannon's role in his campaign in recent remarks and refused to express confidence during an impromptu news conference Tuesday.
"He's a good person. He actually gets very unfair press in that regard," Trump said. "But we'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon."
The decision whether to drop Bannon was more than just a personnel matter. The media guru is viewed in some circles as Trump's connection to his base and the protector of Trump's disruptive, conservative agenda.

Bannon's departure comes in the same week that he gave a controversial interview to liberal journalist Robert Kuttner for The American Pro spect. During the interview, Bannon contradicted Trump's "fire and fury" threat against North Korea, saying, "There's no military solution [to North Korea's nuclear threats]. Forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about. There's no military solution here. They got us."
Bannon often is cited as the nationalist ideological force in the White House, but in the same American Prospect interview, he was skeptical that he played a notable role in encouraging the violent "alt-right":

He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: "Ethno-nationalismit's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more."
"These guys are a collection of clowns," he added.
From his lips to Trump's ear.
"The Democrats," he said, "the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

Before leaving Trump's administration, Bannon met with billionaire Robert Mercer, a major Trump donor and informal White House adviser, Newsweek and Axios reported. The meeting was believed to be about Bannon's plans, which will involve Mercer and, according to a source close to Breitbart, going "thermonuclear' against globalists.' "

[URL="https://twitter.com/NancyPelosi"]
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Steve Bannon's exit does not erase @realDonaldTrump's long record of lifting up racist viewpoints & advancing repulsive policies. #BannonOut
7:39 PM - Aug 18, 2017

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Bannon may no longer work in the White House, but Bannon's bigotry remains. #BannonOut
7:22 PM - Aug 18, 2017

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AUGUST 18, 2017

Why Trump Could Be Gone Before 2020

by PAUL STREET[/FONT][/FONT]

• Email
  

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Photo by Mark Taylor | CC BY 2.0

A story that appeared in the leading inside-Washington political journal The Hill last week bore a headline that ought to send a chill down the spine of anyone who believes in democracy: "Half of Republicans Would Back Postponing 2020 Election if Trump Proposed It." Read the report's opening 90 words and let them sink in: [email=?subject=TheHill.com%3A%20Poll%3A%20Half%20of%20Republicans%20would%20back%20postponing%202020%20election%20if%20Trump%20proposed%20it&body=From%20TheHill.com%3A%20%0A%0A%0A%0Ahttp%3A//thehill.com/homenews/campaign/346000-poll-about-half-of-republicans-would-back-postponing-2020-election-if-trump] [/email]

"Slightly more than half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election if President Trump proposed it to make sure only eligible American citizens can vote, according to a new survey. According to a poll conducted by two academic authors and published by The Washington Post, 52 percent of Republicans said they would back a postponement of the next election if Trump called for it. If Trump and congressional Republicans proposed postponing the election to ensure only eligible citizens could vote, support from Republicans rises to 56 percent."

Throw in a financial collapse, major civil disturbances, and/or a significant domestic terror attack (real or "false flag") and expect that number to go closer to 75 percent if not higher.
Does it all smell a little fascistic? You betchya!
Increasingly, though, one really must wonder if the arch-authoritarian racist idiot Donald Trump will make it to 2020. The supreme madness and evil of the rolling atrocity that is the Insane Clown Trump presidency has just now reached a new level of bizarre and scary-weird ruling-class dysfunction. Just last week, the demented, Twitter-addicted brute in the White House engaged in a reckless game of thermonuclear chicken with North Korea's dictator Kin Jong-un. The orange-tinted beast threatened "fire and fury like the world has never seen." Trump's aptly nicknamed war chief Jim "Mad Dog" Mattis threatened "actions that will lead to the end of the [North Korean] regime and destruction of its people."
So what if such outlandish bravado could trigger events leading to the deaths of millions on and around the Korean peninsula? Trump later told reporters that "maybe" his "fiery and fury" statement "wasn't tough enough," Herr Donald threatened "an event the likes of which nobody's ever seen." When asked what he might to do in response to North Korea's defiance, the president said "Well, you'll see, you'll see."
Statements of shock and concern over this Not Normal presidential lunacy came from both sides of the major party aisle. Speaking on CNN, the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (of whom I am of course no fan) worried (all too reasonably) that Trump's overheated rhetoric could lead the U.S. into war on its own accord. As Clapper told Don Lemon on "CNN Tonight": "I do worry that this game of rhetoric chicken is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy…It's somewhat reminiscent to me of the history of World War I and how the world kind of blundered into that." That was no joke.
Then, just as the Clockwork Orangutan seemed ready to radioactively enflame East Asia, Charlottesville happened. Without exactly saying so but saying so saying so in "dog whistle" ways clearly understood by his many white-nationalist backers Trump showed himself to be on the side of armed white-nationalists and fascists who marched with torches lit chanting "blood and soil" in defense of a statue of the top Confederate (Slave Power) military commander Robert E. Lee. Once again, top talking heads and politicos shook their heads and rolled their eyes over the Not Normal insanity of the President of the United States.
It's not just that the madness of Herr Donald has revolted millions of ordinary citizens and people at home and abroad. His bigger and more relevant problem is that he has significantly alienated a rising share of those atop the nation's unelected and interrelated "deep state" dictatorships of money and empire. Three days ago, the New York Times reported as follows on the "Widen[ing] Rift Between Trump and Business Leaders":

"The chief executive of Walmart, the world's largest retailer, criticized President Trump in front of his 1.5 million American employees, widening a rift between the White House and the business community that has been growing since the weekend's violence in Charlottesville, Va. As we watched the events and the response from President Trump over the weekend, we too felt that he missed a critical opportunity to help bring our country together by unequivocally rejecting the appalling actions of white supremacists,' Douglas McMillon, the Walmart C.E.O., wrote in a letter to employees late Monday."
"The rebuke from Mr. McMillon came as six other business leaders stepped down from presidential advisory councils including two late on Monday, the C.E.O.s of Intel and Under Armour citing their own values as the primary motivation for distancing themselves from Mr. Trump….The departures represent a rare spectacle in which prominent executives are looking for ways to pull back from an American president who campaigned, and won, partly on the strength of his pro-business stance. This has created an unusual calculus: Whether or not to stay on as advisers to a president, a role that traditionally is a coveted position with little to no attendant risk."
"The willingness of [Intel CEO Brian] Krzanich and other C.E.O.s to walk away from the advisory panels highlights an uncomfortable reality for Mr. Trump: He billed himself as the businessman-president, but some executives no longer want to work with him. This should be his strong suit: courting C.E.O.s,' said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. Instead, Trump finds himself with C.E.O.s not wanting to be in a photo op with the president. What should have been an honor has become an albatross.'"

Then there's the military elite. Two days ago, the Los Angeles Timesreported on how the heads of the nation's separate military branches were prompted by recent events to take not-so veiled online digs at the orange-tinted, nuke-wielding beast in the White House, who poses as a manly military leader but never served a day in the Armed Services:
"America's top-ranking military officers spoke out forcefully against racial bigotry and extremism, a rare public foray into domestic politics that revealed growing unease at the Pentagon with some of President Trump's policies and views. The members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the senior uniformed brass of the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Air Force all posted messages on their official Twitter accounts to denounce the far-right extremists behind Saturday's violence in Charlottesville, Va. The messages did not mention Trump, who is the commander in chief, by name. But the rebuke seemed clear in several posts given the bipartisan furor over Trump's insistence Tuesday that "both sides" were at fault for the violence…The social media posts suggest the growing discomfort at the top ranks of the Pentagon, which supports Trump's calls for a new military build-up but has not implemented his sudden call on Twitter last month to block transgender troops from the armed forces."
Trump's yet-to-be enforced transgender ban took the nation's military leaders by shocked surprise. So, one suspects, did the extent to which he chose to engage in preposterous and wild verbal one-upsmanship with North Korea's bizarre dictator Kim Jong-un.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military has one shining "Good War" in its long and criminal imperial record of intervention abroad: its belated but real engagement in the global struggle to defeat the fascist Nazi Third Reich in World War II. Much of the Pentagon elite is sufficiently history-conscious to recoil from a president who is ready to associate himself with Nazi-allied white nationalists.
The Democratic Party obviously opposes Trump for partisan and other reasons and is looking forward to the coming Mueller Report (on alleged Russian interference in the United States' purported "great democracy") and the aftermath of the 2018 mid-term elections in the hope of initiating impeachment proceedings. Democrats will need support from Republicans to pull off removal (which requires 2/3 of the U.S. Senate) and it is not entirely far-fetched to imagine them being able to pull enough Republicans over to their side to get rid of the great national embarrassment that is Trump. U.S. Senator Jeff Flake's (R-AZ) new and widely read book Conscience of a Conservative (named after Barry Goldwater's previous book of the same title) is a right-wing libertarian Republican assault on Trump as an "unprincipled" and "authoritarian" "tyrant" and "populist" committed to the politics of "hate," "destruction," "xenophobia," "racism," and "demonization." Given the serial feuding Trump has conducted on and off-line with Flake, John McCain (R-AZ), Mitch McConnell (the Senate Majority Leader from Kentucky) and numerous other Congressional Republicans, it's hard not to believe that a decent number of GOP elites will be willing to dump Herr Donald with the hope of getting the more agreeably tamed, Christian, and professional right-wing Republican Mike Pence into the Oval Office no appetizing outcome for those who believe in social justice, peace, and democracy.
The Republican deal with the Trump phenomenon has always been based on opportunism. The Trumpenstein's growingly evident status as an irreversibly deadly liability for the Republican agenda could make it easy for top GOP players to unsheathe their knives and sink them into the president's back.
With Trump having already exasperated numerous key players in the nation's corporate and financial ruling class, military command, and major party elite, it's not inconceivable that he could get flown off the White House grounds for good before January 20, 2021 through impeachment and Senate removal, resignation, or even (the last likely mode of removal) 25th Amendment removal (on grounds of incompetence). He's toxic bad for the national brand an emperor with no convincing democratic or humanitarian clothes to cloak the ugly imperial and capitalist nakedness of the American System.
Trump smells too much of neo-fascism a clownish and highly venal version, to be sure for the tastes and needs of the U.S, ruling class. He's not how the American wealth and power elite rolls. If the U.S. is "fascist," its fascism cooks on a low flame and small burner. It exhibits a distinctly "inverted" (demobilized and neoliberal, plutocratic, "market"-mediated and corporate-managed) form of the disease. To say this, however is not to praise to the contemporary U.S., with its vicious, eco-cidal ruling class and its reigning sociopathic institutions. Under the "inverted totalitarianism" (U.S. political scientist Sheldon Wolin's term) that is 21st century America's "corporate-managed democracy" (Wolin again), many of the basic objectives of fascism the defeat of unions and the working class, the degradation of democracy, the enforcement of hierarchy and savage inequality, racial subordination, the marginalization of the Left, racial divide and rule, militarization of society, and permanent arms and war economy are achieved without the discomfort and uncertainly imposed by barking dictators, and marching, torch-carrying brown-shirts. Chilling as it may sound to say, fascism would be redundant in the United States today. The U.S. ruling class doesn't need it. It doesn't need Dear Leader authoritarians even just of the dog-whistle variety. It gets the same results with a different more atomized, privatized, apathetic, consumerized, and "inverted" model of authoritarian rule, one that makes an insistent and deceptive claim to be a great force for modern Western democracy, Enlightenment values (even if U.S. presidents end every major speech with "God Bless America"), and freedom at home and abroad.
Long story short, I would not be all that surprised to see Trump successfully removed from office before 2021. I say that with no glee. A white-Christian-nationalist Mike Pence presidency would probably be more effective at pushing the right-wing Koch Brother agenda through Washington than would a second Trump administration. A President Pence would be a much better corporate-managed inverted totalitarian than his current boss.

Failing All Tests of the Presidency

Charles M. BlowAUG. 21, 2017

President Trump told reporters last Tuesday that there were some "very fine people" among the extremists marching in Charlottesville, Va. CreditAl Drago for The New York TimesWe are leaderless. America doesn't have a president. America has a man in the White House holding the spot, and wreaking havoc as he waits for the day when a real president arrives to replace him.
Donald Trump is many things most of them despicable but the leader of a nation he is not. He is not a great man. Hell, he isn't even a good man.
Donald Trump is a man of flawed character and a moral cavity. He cannot offer moral guidance because he has no moral compass. He is too small to see over his inflated ego.
Trump has personalized the presidency in unprecedented ways making every battle and every war about his personal feelings. Did the person across the street or around the world say good or bad things about him? Does the media treat him fairly? Is someone in his coterie of corruption outshining him or casting negative light on him?
His interests center on the self; country be damned.
What some have always known about Trump, others are slowly coming to realize, and with great shock and horror. The presidency is revealing the essence of the man and that essence is dark.

What America saw clearly in Trump's disastrous handling of the violence in Charlottesville was a Nazi/white nationalist apologist if not sympathizer, a reactionary rage-aholic, a liar, and a person who has absolutely no sense or understanding of history.
By claiming that there were some "very fine people" among the extremists marching in Charlottesville, the president made a profound declaration: The accommodation of racists is his creed.
As Susan Bro, whose daughter, Heather Heyer, was killed in Charlottesville, said last week, "You can't wash this one away by shaking my hand and saying, I'm sorry.' " Heather Heyer was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. used a speeding car to mow down a crowd of protesters who had gathered to rebuke the Nazis and white nationalists.
According to The Chicago Tribune, one of Fields's high school teachers said he once "wrote a three-page homework paper that extolled Nazi ideology and the prowess of the Führer's armed forces," and that even before then, the teacher said, "he had been well aware of Fields's racist and anti-Semitic beliefs from private discussions he had with Fields during his junior year."

And even worse, The Tribune reported:
"At least four times when the boy was in the eighth and ninth grades, Florence police were summoned to his home, mostly by his frantic mother, Samantha Bloom, an I.T. specialist. It was just the two of them living together, and young James, among other incidents, was reported to have spat in her face, smacked her head with a phone and frightened her with a foot-long knife, according to records of the 911 calls. Neighbors, in interviews, similarly described a troubled youth who treated his mother cruelly."
This was no fine person, and no person who walked shoulder-to-shoulder with him is a fine person. There are no good Nazis. There are no good white nationalist accommodators. There are no good people who see racists and don't want to retch.
But somehow, the person we now call "president" saw what happened in Charlottesville, saw that a car had been used to kill Heyer, and still found it appropriate to say that there were bad people on "both sides."
He cleaned that up in a teleprompter speech, but the next day returned to the defense of the indefensible, this time with even more verve and venom.
He apparently felt that the media had unfairly condemned him for his original remarks and he was going to be the counterpuncher and strike back at the media. Again, it was all about him, not us. But when he lashed out at the media, the cameras were rolling. There were no prepared remarks. There was no teleprompter. Trump stood exposed and in the raw, the deepest, truest thoughts of his soul erupting from his face, and what came out were bitterness and bile.
He was not there to heal the nation or to uplift it. He was there for personal exoneration and redemption. He wasn't there to plead the case that America could rise on the wings of its better angels. He was there to defend the demons.
But, when one attempts to do a thing that can't be done that shouldn't be done one must employ the tools of deception: obfuscation, revisionism and flat-out lying.
Trump said that he had not initially condemned both sides because he wanted to wait to get all the facts, because that's what he likes to do.
Lies.
On Saturday, when tens of thousands of protesters turned out to counter a small group of radical racists, Trump's first response was to tweet: "Looks like many anti-police agitators in Boston. Police are looking tough and smart! Thank you."

This man doesn't wait for facts. This man doesn't care about facts, or much else for that matter. He only cares about himself, his image and his positioning.
America is functioning, barely, without a functioning president. Trump is failing every test of the office. How frightening is that?

McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency

By ALEXANDER BURNS and JONATHAN MARTINAUG. 22, 2017


Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has fumed over President Trump's regular threats against fellow Republicans and criticism of Senate rules.CreditEric Thayer for The New York TimesThe relationship between President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks, and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.
What was once an uneasy governing alliance has curdled into a feud of mutual resentment and sometimes outright hostility, complicated by the position of Mr. McConnell's wife, Elaine L. Chao, in Mr. Trump's cabinet, according to more than a dozen people briefed on their imperiled partnership. Angry phone calls and private badmouthing have devolved into open conflict, with the president threatening to oppose Republican senators who cross him, and Mr. McConnell mobilizing to their defense.
The rupture between Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell comes at a highly perilous moment for Republicans, who face a number of urgent deadlines when they return to Washington next month. Congress must approve new spending measures and raise the statutory limit on government borrowing within weeks of reconvening, and Republicans are hoping to push through an elaborate rewrite of the federal tax code. There is scant room for legislative error on any front.
A protracted government shutdown or a default on sovereign debt could be disastrous for the economy and for the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Yet Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell are locked in a political cold war. Neither man would comment for this article. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, noted that the senator and the president had "shared goals," and pointed to "tax reform, infrastructure, funding the government, not defaulting on the debt, passing the defense authorization bill."

Still, the back-and-forth has been dramatic.
In a series of tweets this month, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. McConnell publicly, and berated him in a phone call that quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.
During the call, which Mr. Trump initiated on Aug. 9 from his New Jersey golf club, the president accused Mr. McConnell of bungling the health care issue. He was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader's refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Republicans briefed on the conversation.
Mr. McConnell has fumed over Mr. Trump's regular threats against fellow Republicans and criticism of Senate rules, and questioned Mr. Trump's understanding of the presidency in a public speech. Mr. McConnell has made sharper comments in private, describing Mr. Trump as entirely unwilling to learn the basics of governing.
In offhand remarks, Mr. McConnell has expressed a sense of bewilderment about where Mr. Trump's presidency may be headed, and has mused about whether Mr. Trump will be in a position to lead the Republican Party into next year's elections and beyond, according to people who have spoken to him directly.
While maintaining a pose of public reserve, Mr. McConnell expressed horror to advisers last week after Mr. Trump's comments equating white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., with protesters who rallied against them. Mr. Trump's most explosive remarks came at a news conference in Manhattan, where he stood beside Ms. Chao, the transportation secretary. (Ms. Chao, deflecting a question about the tensions between her husband and the president she serves, told reporters, "I stand by my man both of them.")
Mr. McConnell signaled to business leaders that he was deeply uncomfortable with Mr. Trump's comments: Several who resigned advisory roles in the Trump administration contacted Mr. McConnell's office after the fact, and were told that Mr. McConnell fully understood their choices, three people briefed on the conversations said.


Mr. Trump has also continued to badger and threaten Mr. McConnell's Senate colleagues, including Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose Republican primary challenger was praised by Mr. Trump last week.
"Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate," he tweeted last week. "He's toxic!"

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Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate. He's toxic!
12:56 PM - Aug 17, 2017

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At a campaign rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, Mr. Trump alluded to Mr. Flake unfavorably, referring to him as "weak on borders" and "weak on crime" without mentioning him by name. He referred to Mr. McConnell only in passing, calling on him to abolish the Senate filibuster.
Senior Republican officials said before the rally that they would stand up for Mr. Flake against any attacks. A Republican "super PAC" aligned with Mr. McConnell released a web ad on Tuesday assailing Ms. Ward as a fringe-dwelling conspiracy theorist.
"ChemtrailKelli," an attack ad released by a Republican "super PAC" aligned with Mr. McConnell. Video by Senate Leadership Fund"When it comes to the Senate, there's an Article 5 understanding: An attack against one is an attack against all," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has found himself in Mr. Trump's sights many times, invoking the NATO alliance's mutual defense doctrine.
The fury among Senate Republicans toward Mr. Trump has been building since last month, even before he lashed out at Mr. McConnell. Some of them blame the president for not being able to rally the party around any version of legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, accusing him of not knowing even the basics about the policy. Senate Republicans also say strong-arm tactics from the White House backfired, making it harder to cobble together votes and have left bad feelings in the caucus.
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When Mr. Trump addressed a Boy Scouts jamboree last month in West Virginia, White House aides told Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from the state whose support was in doubt, that she could only accompany him on Air Force Oneif she committed to voting for the health care bill. She declined the invitation, noting that she could not commit to voting for a measure she had not seen, according to a Republican briefed on the conversation.
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told colleagues that when Mr. Trump's interior secretary threatened to pull back federal funding for her state, she felt boxed in and unable to vote for the health care bill.
In a show of solidarity, albeit one planned well before Mr. Trump took aim at Mr. Flake, Mr. McConnell will host a $1,000-per-person dinner on Friday in Kentucky for the Arizona senator, as well as for Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, who is also facing a Trump-inspired primary race next year, and Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska. Mr. Flake is expected to attend the event.
Former Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican who is close to Mr. McConnell, said frustration with Mr. Trump was boiling over in the chamber. Mr. Gregg blamed the president for undermining congressional leaders, and said the House and Senate would have to govern on their own if Mr. Trump "can't participate constructively."

NEW YORK One week after Charlottesville, "the Resistance" is planning its next move. Members of a group calling itself "Refuse Fascism" met in five cities around the country on Saturday with the intent to plan and organize nationwide demonstrations later this year. Their goal, according to Eva Sahana, a 22 year-old organizer, is simply to "drive out the Trump and Pence fascist regime."
The planning is still in its early stages, but the organizers have an idea in mind. On Saturday, November 4approximately a year after President Donald Trump's electionmembers of the Resistance will descend on America's major cities. They'll march and demonstrate, as they have in the past, but this time, say organizers, they won't go home at the end of the day. Instead, the plan is to occupy city centers and parks and not leave until, and only until, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have fallen.

"Outrages that once shocked people about this regime aren't quite as shocking anymore," said Sahana. "We need to act now, before people have learned to accept the unacceptable."
The lead organizers at the New York conference are a disparate bunch. They include a Maoist activist and a leftist bookstore owner and anti-gun advocate who describe themselves as anti-fascist but differentiate themselves from the "Antifa," the black-clad protesters who have clashed violently with white supremacists and the "alt-right" at Charlottesville and the University of California, Berkeley. The organizers' disillusionment with electoral politics and radical talk of "regime change" sets them apart, too, from more moderate organizations within the so-called Resistance, such as Indivisible or Swing Left, two constituent-based activist groups that formed in the wake of Trump's election.
The New York meeting, which included around 90 people, took place at a community center only a short walk from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street got its start six years ago. The plan for November 4 resembles that 2011 protest in more ways than one. Not only does the tactic of urban occupation directly stem from Occupy Wall Street, but several "Refuse Fascism" organizers were active participants in the Zuccotti Park protestsexperience that made them sound like hardened veterans dishing out tactical advice to the new recruits."Everywhere there will be a need for a round-the-clock base of operations," said Andy Zee, a Refuse Fascism organizer who took part in Occupy Wall Street. "Starting now, we need to plan." Protesters will take shifts, they imagine, and those who are able will camp out each night.
But despite the obvious similarities, the masterminds of Refuse Fascism are taking care to not frame the upcoming protests as "Occupy 2.0," probably because the original protest has become infamous even among its participants for creating a great deal of noise but achieving few results.
"This movement is in a different moment of history than Occupy," said Sunsara Taylor, another organizer. And unlike Occupy Wall Street, whose protesters were plagued by their inability to coalesce around a specific set of demands, Taylor pointed out, this protest will have one, very specific demand: The end of Trump's presidency.

For all the talk of "regime change," these activists insist they're not looking to initiate an unconstitutional coup. The exact method of pushing Trump out of office is hazy, and they're open to different possibilities. As they described it, if Congress refuses to impeach, then advisers could declare the president unfit to serve under the 25th Amendment of the Constitution. Trump's inner circle could pressure him to resign, or maybe the president would simply quit in frustration. To naysayers, the activists point toward the Arab Spring and the resignation of South Korea's president last year as evidence of the efficacy of mass protest.



But the first question is whether Refuse Fascism can persuade anyone to show up on November 4, which was one of the goals of Saturday's meetings in New York, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles and San Francisco. At the New York meeting, activists began arriving at the community center around noon, received name tags, shuffled into the main room and found the bagels. Many of the attendees wore black; others carried yoga bags. Once the event officially got started, they watched a recording of Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer died last week in Charlottesville, give Heather's eulogy. After a few more videos, the lead organizers gave their speeches, outlining their visions for the encampments.
"We must begin in the key cities with several thousand people in each," said Zee. "We can imagine the protest site alive with serious discussions and debates over the big issues of the day, strategizing about the road forward in our struggle to drive out the regime." Zee participated in Occupy Wall Street as the spokesperson of Harlem-based Revolution Books, and at Saturday's conference he took the opportunity to set up a table of books for sale, ranging from "The New Communism" by Bob Avakian to Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry."
Told about the meeting, others on the left voiced their support for grass-roots efforts against the Trump administration but emphasized the importance of strategic diversity, or warned that protest alone probably won't push Trump out of power.
"I think that's unlikely," said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown professor and editor of Dissent Magazine. "You need events like this," said Kazin of Refuse Fascism's plans, "and you need more mainstream electoral kinds of activism." He pointed to activists pressuring their elected officials at town halls as an example of more effective tactics. "Social movements succeed when they have an inside-outside strategy."
"From traditional calls [to] going to district offices, running for office or doing sit-ins in district offices … the broader Resistance has been doing a ton," said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible. "It is healthy that people are coming up with new, nonviolent tactics for engaging in civic space."
Also complicating matters for Refuse Fascism is the rise of a young and energetic "alt-right," and the eagerness of the Antifa to physically fight them off. An urban occupation might exacerbate the opportunities for skirmishes like those that occurred at Charlottesville a week ago. And while mutual participation in violence might not deter protesters from joining on November 4, it could make it easier for politicians to ignore their demands.

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"There is always the danger of the protesters becoming the problem instead of part of the solution," said Kazin. "That happened to the anti-war protests in the late 60s and 70s, which I was involved with. Even though the war was less and less popular, the anti-war protests also became controversial and were associatedI think mostly erroneouslywith flag-burners and people who were spelling America with three k's." Once the public deems them too radical, Kazin warned, protesters might hurt their cause more than they help.
The organizers of Refuse Fascism distinguish themselves from Antifa but don't condemn their radical brethren, and even emphasize their common cause.
"I think the entire resistance is anti-fascist," said Jay Walker, one of the Refuse Fascism leaders.
"We will need firm principles of not initiating violence and opposing violence against the people and among the people," said Zee, "while recognizing the right of the people to defend themselves." But the radically different ideas on what "self-defense" means could make it difficult to maintain the big-tent protest that Refuse Fascism is planning on.
None of the lead organizers ever claimed that "regime change" would be easy. "This is harder and riskier than other solutions," acknowledged Eva Sahana. "But the truth is, it is much more realistic." A fundamental disbelief in the Democratic Party's ability to stop Trump through electoral politics appeared to underpin their preference for direct action.
"People who hate and oppose the regime are being led to look to elections, hearings, investigations and protest as usual to make their voices heard,' as if we are dealing with a normal regime," Sahana told the audience in New York. "We are not."

Great analysis of the Trump period of authoritarianism.

Trump's Neo-Nazis and the Rise of Illiberal Democracy

Why the Democratic Party Can't Save Us From Trump's Authoritarianism

Trump and the Politics of Nihilism