Tag Archives: Trump

The Whistleblower Conflict

Okay–I take back every qualm/criticism I’ve ever had about the U.S. Intelligence community. (I might resurrect them at some future date.) It may end up saving America.

A number of media outlets have reported on the Whistleblower complaint filed by an Intelligence officer who was evidently appointed by Trump. This story was originally from the Washington Monthly.

The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed.

The communication in question evidently came in the form of a phone call. Reporters tracked down the president’s phone conversations with foreign leaders around that time;  the three that occurred in the two months before the complaint was filed were Chinese President Xi Jinping, French President Macron, and Vladimir Putin.

Also around the same time, Dan Coates, Director of National Intelligence, resigned. And shortly after that, the U.S. pulled out of the INF treaty with Russia.

Inspector General Atkinson (the Trump appointee) identified the whistleblower complaint as a matter of “urgent concern.” That triggered a requirement that the complaint be reported to Congress. But according to the Washington Post, Maguire–the acting head of DNI (this whole bloody Administration is “acting”) asked Bill Barr’s Justice Department for legal guidance and–surprise!– was told to withhold the information.

At that point, Atkinson informed Congress that a complaint had been made, but Maguire continued his refusal to share the information with the House Intelligence Committee.

While it’s tempting to speculate based on the timeline of events, what we actually know is that someone in the intelligence community was so concerned about what transpired on that phone call that he or she filed a whistleblower complaint. The inspector general found the complaint to be not only credible, but of “urgent concern.” When the new acting DNI refused to inform Congress, he took the extraordinary step of telling them that the complaint existed. In other words, to use Joe Biden’s vernacular, this is a Big Fuckin’ Deal.

Since this article was written, Atkinson has testified behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee, and several media outlets have suggested that more than one “impropriety” is involved. This might finally be enough to move Democrats off their reluctance to impeach….

Stay tuned….

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Spitting On The Environment

The Trump Administration’s effort to reverse environmental rules–in effect, to accelerate climate change rather than working to retard it–continues to frustrate and astound rational observers.

The administration has rolled back regulations on light bulb efficiency–regulations that dramatically cut energy use and saved consumers money.

It has declared war on California’s automobile regulations–despite the fact that all major automakers have communicated their strong disapproval of Trump’s rollback of fuel standards passed under Obama. The New York Times reports that the Justice Department, which William Barr is turning into a lapdog for Trump, is threatening to sue the automakers who entered into an agreement with California to meet the state’s higher standards.

And now–Trump’s EPA is rolling back regulations on methane, a move that threatens to worsen climate change, and is opposed by many fossil fuel companies. Not by all fossil fuel companies, however, as an August 29th Time Magazine report explains.

The Trump Administration announced Thursday the rollbackof an important environmental regulation on methane emissions that even some of the world’s biggest oil-and-gas companies support. The fact that Big Oil backed a regulation designed to stem emissions of a potent greenhouse gas was immediately wielded by Trump’s critics as evidence of how backward the move must be.

But that reaction missed an important takeaway. The oil-and-gas industry was split on the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) methane rules, with some prominent companies supporting them and many smaller producers pushing for their elimination. The EPA’s decision to side with a group of smaller fossil-fuel firms shows the influence these obscure companies retain within the Trump Administration—and the power they have to slow climate legislation as addressing the issue grows more urgent.

The larger firms are almost all in the business of producing natural gas; they argue natural gas is a better option for the environment than coal.  Methane emissions, a byproduct of natural gas production, undercut that argument unless leaks are vigilantly policed. It is thus in the interests of those producers to comply with the stricter regulations.

Whatever the motive, methane is clearly bad for the environment.

Methane is more than 20 times as potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide on a pound-per-pound basis in the long term, and leaks of the gas could erase many of the gains the U.S. has made in reducing emissions.

But the EPA rollback wasn’t aimed at helping the big multi-national firms. Instead, the agency said it will help smaller oil-and-gas companies, many of which are drowning in debt and vulnerable to anything that increases their compliance costs. The EPA estimated that the rollback would save companies a total of up to $19 million annually—a small sum for oil majors, but a significant expense for some other firms.

This solicitude for the finances of small oil-and-gas companies comes at a substantial cost to the environment the agency is supposed to safeguard. The EPA was not established to coddle marginal businesses; it was established to ensure that Americans had clean air to breathe, potable water to drink, and–not so incidentally–a habitable planet to occupy.

This isn’t the first time Trump has irked big business with regulatory cuts that industry leaders did not want. Earlier this year, the Administration softened vehicle-efficiency standards even though auto companies said it would hurt their business. And the Administration has sought to intervene in energy markets to prop up coal, to the outrage of many energy companies.

The rollback of methane regulations now joins the 80+ environmental rules that Trump’s EPA has either voided or relaxed. There is no evidence that those regulations were ineffective or counterproductive; no data upon which this constant de-regulation is based–in most cases, quite the contrary. What evidence there is supports the efficacy and reasonableness of the prior regulatory approach.

There is, of course, one consistent thread that runs through every insane move made by this administration: if Obama did it, reverse it. If reversal is bad for the country, or the planet, so be it.

Our mentally-ill President’s obsession with his predecessor–his determination to erase Obama’s legacy–threatens the health and well-being of us all.

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About All Those “Best People”…Again

Talk about pots and kettles…take a look at the resume of Trump’s new press secretary–you know, the person charged with repeating the Administration’s unending accusations of sleaze and improprieties by journalists.

As Juanita Jean reports in her inimitable style:

If you’re wondering why Trump’s new press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, is not talking to the press or holding press conferences it’s because she’s … well… probably drunk or stealing something.

She was arrested for driving under the influence, speeding, and driving with an invalid license in 2013, according to the report, and the charges were later reduced to reckless driving. Grisham was also arrested for driving under the influence in December 2015, ultimately pleading guilty. She paid a fine and was ordered by the court into a treatment program.

One of the DUIs took place while she was a press aid to Trump’s campaign.

There’s more. Juanita notes that Grisham’s performance at previous jobs was–well, let’s just say substandard. She reportedly left AAA under a cloud for filing false travel and expense claims. She lost a job at something called Mindspace for plagiarism. She worked for an Arizona Attorney General who was fined for campaign finance violations, and on his behalf, responded to reporters’ inquiries by accusing the press of “overreaching, an invasion of privacy and abusive use of your role in the media.”

I’ve seen her picture, though, and she is attractive. When it comes to women, Trump’s definition of “best people’ usually revolves around physical appearance. (Big boobs are a plus.)

With men, of course, “best people” means one thing only: loyalty. Which brings us to the despicable William Barr. As both Talking Points Memo and the Washington Post have reported,

Attorney General Bill Barr has booked a $30,000 Gaelic-themed holiday party at the Trump D.C. hotel, the Washington Post reports.

The event is slated to occur Dec. 8 and will feature a four-hour open bar.

Again, there’s much more. (If Barr’s only ethical violation was improper enrichment of his boss, that would be a real improvement.)

Barr has yet to respond to multiple calls to recuse himself from the Jeffrey Epstein case–a case that could easily ensnare Epstein’s former good friend, Donald Trump.

He joined Wilbur Ross in refusing to comply with subpoenas issued as part of the Congressional probe of the Administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census–a refusal that led to a symbolic House vote of criminal contempt. (Symbolic, because the Department of Justice, which Barr heads, would have to enforce it.)

His pandering to Trump included a highly controversial and obviously partisan decision to launch an inquiry into the origins of the FBI’s 2016 Russia investigation–a decision that  fueled understandable concerns about the politicization of the Justice department.

And of course, there was his utterly dishonest 4-page “summary” of the Mueller Report.–a summary so inaccurate it received a reprimand from the famously taciturn Mueller himself.

A quote from Adam Schiff in Newsweek was focused upon Barr and Rosenstein, but it really applies to any of the “best people” who work for Trump for any length of time.

Congressman Adam Schiff harshly criticized Attorney General William Barr as well as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, suggesting they acquiesced to pressure from President Donald Trump to act unethically.

“What we are seeing is anyone that gets close to Donald Trump becomes tainted by that experience,” the California Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee said in an interview with CNN’s New Dayon Wednesday morning. “And the fundamental conundrum is, How do you ethically serve a deeply unethical president?” Schiff said. “And as we are seeing with Bill Barr, and as I think as we saw with Rod Rosenstein, you can’t.”

 In all fairness, it’s not a problem for most of the President’s “best people.” They can’t even spell ethics, let alone define the term.

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Trump’s Base

There is a recurring conversation among reasonable people–a category that includes long-time Republicans who now feel disenfranchised, as well as Democrats and the diminishing   number of genuine Independents–that revolves around a single question: how can anyone continue to support Donald Trump? Who are the people in his (evidently fervent) base? And what in the world is wrong with them?

What prompts that question is a recognition that rejection of Trump isn’t political. It’s moral.

Most Americans who were raised to be polite to other people, who were taught to value modesty and integrity, who honored George Washington by insisting that he “never told a lie,” who were raised to pay their debts and own their mistakes, see Donald Trump as the polar opposite of these virtues. People who value knowledge and education see a man who is not only utterly devoid of intellect, but proud of it.

Above all, for those of us who were raised to believe that racism and associated bigotries are not only wrong, but unAmerican, Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of those bigotries reveals him to be an altogether repulsive figure.

I have significant political and policy disagreements with Republican friends who are “never Trumpers” (and with plenty of my Democratic friends as well). What we all have in common, however, is a belief that immorality and ignorance are flaws, not virtues, and dread about the immense harm this administration is doing every day.

That brings me to the question with which I introduced this meditation: who are the people who can look at Trump’s daily, egomaniacal, misspelled tweet-rants, his word-salad harangues, his documented whoppers and corruption, and the overwhelming evidence that he is seriously mentally ill–and still support him?

Thomas Edsell tried to answer that question in a recent New York Times column. He concluded that Trump’s coalition is dependent upon better-off white people who did not graduate from college.

On Feb. 24, 2016, after winning the Nevada caucuses, Donald Trump told supporters in Las Vegas, “I love the poorly educated.”

Technically, he should have said “I love poorly educated white people,” but his point was well taken.

We have been talking about this since Trump came down that escalator four years ago, but we haven’t quite reckoned with the depth of the changes in the electorate or the way they have reshaped both parties.

Edsell shares data showing that college-educated white voters have been leaving the Republican Party, with the biggest shift occurring between 2016 to 2018.

Political scientists at Duke and Ohio State make the argument that the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy has produced “tectonic shifts” leading to an “education-income partisan realignment” — a profound realignment of voting patterns that has effectively turned the political allegiances of the white sector of the New Deal coalition that dominated the middle decades of the last century upside down.

Driven by what the authors call “first dimension” issues of economic redistribution, on the one hand, and by the newer “second dimension issues of citizenship, race and social governance,” the traditional alliances of New Deal era politics — low-income white voters without college degrees on the Democratic Party side, high-income white voters with degrees on the Republican side — have switched places. According to this analysis, these two constituencies are primarily motivated by “second dimension” issues, often configured around racial attitudes, which frequently correlate with level of education.

According to this analysis, it isn’t white working-class voters who form the base upon which Trump depends–it’s relatively well-off, low-education whites.

Edsell also notes the obvious: the support of Evangelical Christians:

The key bloc for both Trump and the Republican Party is made up of white Christian evangelicals. Eight out of ten of these voters cast ballots for Trump, and intensely religious voters make up 40 percent of the Republican electorate.

The column is lengthy, and the analysis is interesting–especially the discussion about the true values (as opposed to the professed values) of that Evangelical bloc–but it’s impossible to avoid the obvious conclusion: Trump’s base (which is today’s GOP) is composed of people who fear cultural displacement by those “others.” They are willing to overlook the ignorance, the nastiness, the corruption and dishonesty, and all the harm being done, because they share the bigotry.

For Trump’s base, hate isn’t a bug. It’s the feature that overwhelms all else.

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The Voices In His Head….

Let’s be candid: anyone running for President of the United States by definition has an enormous ego. Believing that you can discharge the enormous responsibilities of that office requires that you think pretty highly of yourself.

And let’s also acknowledge that past Presidents have had mental and emotional problems–think Nixon’s paranoia, Reagan’s Alzheimers, Clinton’s sexual issues….

But.

What Americans are facing now, in the third year of Trump’s Presidency, is absolutely unprecedented. Previously, damaged occupants of the Oval Office at least had offsetting talents. They also knew the Constitution constrained the executive branch, and when they tried to circumvent those constraints, they acted strategically. Trump is far and away the most ignorant and intellectually limited person to hold the office, and even worse, too ignorant to know he’s ignorant–a walking, talking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Ignorance and stupidity aside, there is ample evidence of severe mental illness, as Sarah Burris explains in an article for Raw Story. 

Dr. Lance Dodes warned that things were going to get worse under President Donald Trump in 2017. That’s precisely what happened….

“Donald Trump, because he has a fundamental need to be all-powerful and all loved, can’t stand challenges,” Dr. Dodes said. “And the nature of democracy is that it challenges people. We have more than one opinion. So the more — it was predictable once he got into a position where people would challenge him, there are two parties, he would become more unhinged.

Wednesday’s press availability on the White House South Lawn showed exactly that, he explained.

“As you watched him respond to people, the more they challenged him, the more he ranted,” Dr. Dodes continued. “He stopped responding to the questions, and instead, he started to talk about how people were agents of fake news. He said that they would go out of business soon. They would die…This is the same kind of thing that he did when he was a candidate when he suggested someone protesting at his campaign rally be taken out and beaten up.”

According to the psychiatrist, Trump simply cannot handle situations where people disagree with him. And of course, there has never been a Presidency–or any political campaign–without disagreement. Elections are intended to be a forum for disputes, with voters choosing which side of the dispute “wins.”

 “The more he is challenged, the more he can’t stand anything that disagrees with him, and the more you challenge him, the more unhinged he becomes, the more paranoid, and the more violent, potentially,” he said.

In the interview, Dr. Dodes was asked about Trump’s look heavenward and his statement  that he was “the chosen one. ” Dodes explained it was just another example of Trump’s excessive grandiosity. As he noted, many people in public life have a grandiose sense of self, but Trump’s is on a far bigger scale.

 “There is a fundamental way in which he’s empty. There’s something fundamentally different about him from normal people. It’s a psychotic-like state. The more you press him, the more you see how disorganized and empty he is. The more he flies into a disorganized rage. So yeah, and by the way, in terms of being God, he also made several what you might call Freudian slips during the interview today. He kept mixing up who he was and who the country was. He said, ‘I have the best economy.’ I, not the country. ‘I defeated the caliphate.’ It’s not just a slip of the tongue; he really doesn’t get it. He thinks of himself as a dictator, and it’s all him and no one else really matters.”

Dodes is far from the only mental health professional to warn about Trump’s delusions. (For that matter, you needn’t be a psychiatrist to recognize that he occupies an alternate reality.) The question is: how much damage will he inflict before he is ejected from the Oval Office?

This Presidency has one redeeming element (if we survive it)–it has illuminated several major problems America faces: the lack of a realistic mechanism to remove a dangerously unfit President (the 25th Amendment doesn’t operate in a highly partisan environment);  the widespread civic ignorance that enables such a person to maintain the support of a base of unhappy and angry citizens; and the civic apathy that got us to this point.

In 2020, we need to elect someone sane. Then we have a lot of cleanup work to do.

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