12 Things to Remember Before You Vote
Since Inauguration Day, we've been dealing with a faster news cycle than we've seen before. Again and again, we see some news story and think: "This changes everything. I'll never forget about this." But in a few days there's something else, the media focus shifts, and last week's incredible story seems like ancient history. "Are you still going on about that?"
It's worth remembering how strange this is, and what a shift it marks since the Obama administration. While Fox News and its ilk never lacked for some story they could manufacture outrage over — Obama put his feet on a White House desk, he saluted while holding a latte, Michele wore a sleeveless dress — really outrageous things were rare.
And so they were remembered. President Obama's claim "If you like your health insurance you can keep it" stuck in everyone's mind, because he so seldom cut corners on the truth. (For what it's worth: I liked my health insurance and I kept it.) Benghazi conspiracy theories hung on forever, because so little else happened that Obama-haters could base a good conspiracy theory on. (A few months ago, I saw a guy wearing a "Benghazi: We will never forget" t-shirt. I had to wonder whether the things he will never forget about Benghazi actually happened.)
But as one Trump scandal after another vanishes down the memory hole, it takes some effort to remember things that at the time seemed unforgettable. (As I compiled this list, I kept having an "Oh yeah, that happened" response.) It's even harder to sort out the really important things from the overhyped distractions: NFL players kneeling, Stormy Daniels, the immigrant caravan, and so on.
But when it comes time to play our role as voters, we need to remember, and we need to make sure that other people remember.
So here's my list of the most outrageous, most objectionable things that have happened since Republicans took control of the White House and both houses of Congress. In compiling it, I have tried to avoid listing actions (like pulling out of the Paris Agreement or cutting rich people's taxes) that I simply disagreed with because I am more liberal that President Trump. I've also left out times where he did something he had promised to do in the campaign, even if I consider it reprehensible.
Instead, I'm looking for violations of what previous administrations (of both parties) would have regarded as universal American values. They happen fairly regularly, but each seems to push the previous ones out of our memories.
1. Kids in Cages.
From some time in April until late June, the administration carried out a "zero tolerance" policy at the border with Mexico. According to Wikipedia:
The policy involved prosecuting all adults who were detained at the U.S.–Mexico border, sending the parents to federal jails, and placing children and infants under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. According to government officials, the policy led to the separation of almost 3,000 children from their parents.
Many of these families had done nothing wrong: Seeking asylum is legally protected under both international law and US law. (Trump refers to these laws as "loopholes".) Many who came to legal entry points trying to turn themselves in and claim asylum were turned away, forcing them to turn themselves in to border agents after crossing illegally. Texas Monthly discussed the problem with Anne Chandler of the Children's Border Project:
TM: So if you cross any other way besides the bridge, we're prosecuting you. But . . . you can't cross the bridge.
AC: That's right. I've talked to tons of people. There are organizations like Al Otro Lado that document border turn-backs. And there's an effort to accompany asylum seekers so that Customs and Border Patrol can't say, "We're closed." Everybody we've talked to who's been prosecuted or separated has crossed the river without a visa.
By June, public outrage had forced the administration to stop routinely separating families. But HHS and the Justice Department never acknowledged that they had done anything wrong or had created a problem they needed to fix. Whatever corrective action HHS has taken has always been carried out under court order and with a lot of foot-dragging.
On July 26, responding to an ACLU class action lawsuit, a federal judge ordered all separated children, except where not appropriate, be reunited with their parent within 30 days.[19][20] On July 26, the Trump administration said that 1,442 children had been reunited with their parents while 711 remained in government shelters. Officials said they will work with the court to return the remaining children, including 431 parents of those children who have already been deported without their children.[21] As of August 20, 528 of the children — about a fifth — have still not been reunited with their parents.
A number of the children the government regards as "discharged" have been released to a sponsor in the US, rather than reunited with the families they were stolen from.
As Adam Serwer observed in The Atlantic, the cruelty of this policy is the point. Jeff Sessions may call it "deterrence" that will prevent other people from trying to come here, but that's just a fancy language for describing cruelty: Don't come here, because if you do we'll take your children away.
Recently, Trump has discussed implementing a new family-separation policy:
One option weighed by the administration, as reported by the Post: Migrant families seeking asylum can be detained for up to 20 days, at which point they must decide whether to stay together in detention waiting for their cases to proceed or choose separation. This would involve children being transferred to a government shelter so other family members could claim custody.
Federal officials believe this can be done legally.
The ACLU disagrees:
"The government need not, and legally may not, indiscriminately detain families who present no flight risk or danger," ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in an email to the Post. "It is deeply troubling that this Administration continues to look for ways to cause harm to small children."
2. Putting Russia first in Helsinki.
In July, the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki was a huge propaganda triumph for the Russian president. Trump appeared to balance the unanimous conclusion of the US intelligence agencies (that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections to help Trump) against Putin's word, and came down in favor of Putin.
My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be. … I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.
It wasn't just that Trump has a blind spot about his own election. In what CNN's John King called "the surrender summit", Trump also failed to confront Putin about his interference in European elections (including Brexit) or with any of Russia's other bad behavior: the annexation of Crimea, fomenting a proxy war in eastern Ukraine, assassinating critics in the UK, or propping up the brutal Assad regime in Syria, just to name a few.
Instead of calling out Putin for his violations of international laws and standards, Trump said US/Russia relations are in a bad place because "we've all been foolish". Trump described a Putin proposal that would have let Russian intelligence interrogate US officials (like former ambassador Mike McFaul) as "an incredible offer". (The Senate rejected it 98-0.) In an interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Trump worried about the "aggressive people" of tiny Montenegro, a NATO ally, provoking Russia into war.
Writing in The Washington Post, Julia Ioffe put her finger on the root problem: Trump has let Putin shape his picture of reality.
It's possible to argue about why the American president has become a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda: Does Putin have kompromat on him? Is it because his real estate empire depends on Russian money? Is he still angling to build Trump Tower Moscow?
But the reason barely matters compared to the result: When the President of the United States speaks about issues Russia cares about, more often than not what comes out of his mouth is Russian propaganda. "America First" has turned into "Russia First".
3. The Very Fine Nazis in Charlottesville.
Trump has told reporters he is "the least racist person you have ever interviewed". But his denials have never convinced one very important group of people: white supremacists, who are quite sure that the president is on their side. That's why he was endorsed by former KKK grand wizard David Duke, and why Richard Spencer led a Nazi-saluting crowd in a chant of "Hail Trump! Hail victory!" after the 2016 election. It's wrong to claim that all Trump supporters are white racists, but just about all white racists are Trump supporters.
Emboldened by Trump's 2016 victory, a coalition of Nazis, white supremacists, Neo-Confederates, and other alt-right groups formerly considered to be on the fringes of conservative politics decided to make a big public splash in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017.
In classic storm-trooper style, they held a torchlight parade Friday evening, where they chanted slogans like "Jews will not replace us", "blood and soil", and "Hail Trump!". Men with AR-15s ominously hung around outside a synagogue.
The violence of Friday night culminated Saturday afternoon, when a rally participant rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer (the only fatality of the weekend) and injuring 19 others.
Trump responded to this spectacle by pushing the organizers' cover story: that the rally was really about a Robert E. Lee statue that Charlottesville wants to move to a less prominent spot. (The parallel with #2, where he uncritically repeated Putin's propaganda, is worth noting.) After looking at the pre-rally posters and the line-up of speakers, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist begs to differ:
this was a Nazi march from the beginning, planned by Nazis, for Nazis. As to whether any hapless moderates strolled in there thinking this was just about the statue—well, I live in this area and used to be active in the local Tea Party group. I know people who are not white nationalists who oppose the removal of the statues based on high-minded ideas about preserving history. None of them were there, and if they had been, they would have bolted the moment they saw a bunch of guys with torches chanting "Blood and soil."
"Very fine people", Trump assured the country, were on "both sides". And "both sides" were responsible for the violence, even though only one side had somebody wind up dead.
4. Alternative facts.
The Trump administration started with a bang. In his first meeting with the White House press corps, Press Secretary Sean Spicer berated reporters for stating correctly what anyone with eyes could see: Trump's inauguration didn't draw nearly as many people as Obama's. But Spicer angrily insisted: "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period."
The next Sunday, NBC's Chuck Todd asked Kellyanne Conway about this incident, which at the time seemed bizarre, though we've since gotten used to such performances.
"You're saying it's a falsehood. And they're giving — Sean Spicer, our press secretary — gave alternative facts," she said. Todd responded: "Alternative facts aren't facts, they are falsehoods."
At the time we didn't know that Conway's "alternative facts" was the opening salvo in an all-out assault on truth that has become increasingly shameless with time.
"All presidents lie," Trump apologists say, and point to Obama's "If you like your health plan you can keep it", Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" or Bush the First's "Read my lips: no new taxes." What makes those statements stand out years later, though, is how rare such lies have been for previous presidents of either party.
All presidents have presented facts selectively, emphasizing the ones that fit their narrative while skipping over the ones that didn't. All presidents have shaded the truth and obfuscated inconvenient facts, particularly when they have been directly accused of something. But we have never seen anything like the thousands of liesTrump has let fly on every conceivable subject.
Just this week, for example, he made up riots in California that never happened, talked about a tax cut that hasn't even been proposed in Congress, and made a baseless claim about "unknown Middle Easterners" in the current migrant caravan. Even while admitting he had no evidence of the Middle Easterners (who he presumably meant to imply were terrorists), he repeated that "they very well could be" in the caravan — as if he were justified in claiming anything not already proven false.
When things he says are proven to be false, he keeps saying them. This also is completely new in American politics. Previous presidents could be shamed into changing their misleading rhetoric. (Clinton, for example, stopped saying that he never had sex with that woman.) But Trump is shamelessly dishonest.
Some observers tend to write this off as a quirk, like your crazy uncle who tells tall tales about the good old days. But constant lying has a corrosive effect on democracy. It's impossible to have any kind of reasonable discussion of the issues that face our country when the President can claim anything or deny anything, and (as long as Congress is OK with it) no one can hold him accountable.
5. Puerto Rico.
The Bush administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina was such a turning point that conservative media spent the entirety of Obama's two terms looking for "Obama's Katrina". At least two dozen unfortunate events got labeled that way, though none of the labels stuck. In the end, Obama's Katrina was the GOP's white whale; they chased it for eight years, but it got away.
In just its eighth month, though, the Trump administration had an honest-to-God direct Katrina parallel: Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. In just about every way, the Trump administration and the Republican Congress sent the message that — while Puerto Ricans may technically be American citizens under the law — they don't really count.
Stories of the botched response are mostly anecdotal, because the administration is sticking to its line that it did "a fantastic job", and Congress has never investigated.
In the year since Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, killing nearly 70 percent more people than Katrina, the GOP-led House has yet to create a select committee to oversee the Trump administration's recovery efforts. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which oversees FEMA, has held just two hearings related to the storm. Neither the House nor the Senate have issued any major reports, and none appear to be in the works.
Here are some of the things we do know: Rather than the two weeks required to restore electric power after Hurricane Irma (which blew through Florida only two weeks later), restoring power to Puerto Rico took eight months. Granted, the shakiness of Puerto Rico's power grid before the hurricane made the job harder, but ordinarily in America a harder problem inspires a greater effort. Not so this time.
Much of the aid that did make it to the island got stuck in the port of San Juan. 20,000 pallets of bottled water got left on an airport runway, where they were discovered nearly a year later. While Puerto Ricans were dying in hospitals without electric power, or from the inability to get their prescriptions filled, a Navy hospital ship was treating only six patients a day.
Ten months after the storm, the official death toll stood at 64, a number everyone knew was absurd. (Only a month after landfall, CNN had talked to about half of the island's funeral homes and found 499 storm-related deaths.) The current estimate is just below 3,000 deaths, with some estimates as high as 4,600.
The scene that sums up the Trump administration's go-through-the-motions response was the President's own visit to the island, where he casually flipped rolls of paper towels into a crowd the way interns throw compressed t-shirts into the stands at minor-league baseball games.
The challenge posed by Puerto Rico combined Trump's character flaws and unfitness for office into a perfect storm of dysfunction.
- He has below-normal levels of compassion in any case. This has been obvious in other disasters as well. Last month, during a photo op where he was handing out food to victims of Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, he told a box-lunch recipient to "have a good time", a line he had also used at an emergency shelter in Houston after Hurricane Harvey.
- He particularly doesn't care about brown people who speak Spanish."America First" has always meant "White English-speaking Americans First". Puerto Ricans are not "Real Americans" to Trump or to Trumpists, so the fact that they were suffering — and many of them were dying — rang no alarm bells.
- He neither understands nor takes responsibility for how government works. Part of the challenge of Hurricane Maria was the dysfunctionality of the island government. (Similar problems arose after Katrina because of inefficiencies at the Louisiana and New Orleans levels.) But a president who understood government — picture, just for the sake of argument, President Hillary Clinton — would have grasped this from the outset and planned around it. Likewise, the bureaucratic gaps between FEMA, the Pentagon, and other relevant agencies should have been taken into account, but weren't.
- He can't correct his mistakes because he can't admit them. When it became clear that the death toll was much higher than the early estimates, and that his administration hadn't been doing "a fantastic job" at all, Trump treated that objective information as a partisan attack against himself. Rather than try to fix anything, he lashed out at the Mayor of San Juan, at Democrats, at the media, and at the Puerto Ricans themselves, who "want everything done for them".
6. Don't believe women.
The Kavanaugh controversy is recent enough to still be on the public radar, but it's far from the only time when the administration has shrugged off the testimony of multiple women. Remember creepy Roy Moore? I'll let Wikipedia sum up:
In November 2017, nine women accused Roy Moore — a United States Senate candidate and a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama — of sexual misconduct. Three of the women alleged that he had sexually assaulted them, two during their adolescence (one who was 16 at the time of the alleged incident, when Moore was 31, and one who was 14 at the time of the alleged incident, when Moore was 32).[1] Six other women recalled Moore pursuing romantic relationships, or engaging in inappropriate or unwanted behavior with them, while they were between the ages of 16 and 22.
Trump was unfazed in his endorsement of Moore. "He totally denies it," the President said. And that, apparently, was all it took to convince him. After all, the accusers were just women.
Two White House staffers, Rob Porter and David Sorensen resigned after allegations of physical violence against their wives. Rob Porter was accused by both of his ex-wives, including one who offered a black-eye photo as evidence. Even though he was aware of what the FBI had found during its background investigation, Chief of Staff John Kelly praised and defended Porter:
Rob Porter is a man of true integrity and honor, and I can't say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.
White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders called Porter "someone of the highest integrity and exemplary character". The White House learned of the accusations in November, 2017, but did nothing about them until they became public in February, 2018.
After Porter's resignation, Trump's sympathy was entirely with him rather than his victims: "We certainly wish him well. It's obviously a very tough time for him. He did a very good job while he was in the White House."
And of course I have to mention what happened before the election: After a video of Trump bragging about his sexual assaults became public, he claimed it was merely "locker room talk" between guys, and not anything he had actually done. Subsequently, more than a dozen women came forward to say that he had sexually assaulted them, while several others alleged lesser forms of misconduct.
Trump responded to more than one of the accusations by claiming that the women were not attractive enough to assault. He said that they were all lying and promised to sue them after the election, which he never did.
7. Repeal, but don't replace.
As a candidate, Trump railed against ObamaCare almost as much as against immigration. He wasn't just going to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, he was going to replace it with something much, much better.
Donald Trump: I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now.
Scott Pelley: The uninsured person is going to be taken care of how?
Donald Trump: They're going to be taken care of. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. And, you know what, if this is probably–
Scott Pelley: Make a deal? Who pays for it?
Donald Trump: –the government's gonna pay for it.
But by the time John McCain cast his famous thumbs-down vote against it, the Republican "repeal and replace" slogan had turned into just "repeal". Every repeal-ObamaCare plan the CBO analyzed (some plans Republicans pushed to a vote before the CBO could analyze them) would have resulted in the number of uninsured Americans going up by 10-20 million.
In the tax bill, they managed to repeal the insurance mandate; we'll see if that change starts a death spiral (more and more heathier-than-average people opting out of the system as premiums increase) when it takes effect next year. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has filed a brief supporting a lawsuit that would declare unconstitutional ObamaCare's protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
And there is still no TrumpCare plan, not even on paper. "Everybody's going to be taken care of" was just a lot of blather.
8. Insulting a military widow (and lying about her congresswoman).
Already during the campaign, we saw that Trump has only conditional respect for gold-star families. If they play their assigned roles in his personal narrative, he loves them. But if they criticize him — particularly if they are not white or not Christian — he'll come at them with both barrels.
On October 4, 2017, four American soldiers died in Niger, a land-locked Africa country that I (like most Americans, I suspect) didn't know we had troops in, and probably couldn't have found on a map. The White House staff drafted a public statement about the incident, but (for some unknown reason), it was never released. For weeks, Trump said nothing to the American public about these soldiers or their mission.
Eventually, a reporter shouted a question to Trump, who responded by telling a very odd lie: He made condolence calls to the families of soldiers who died in the line of duty, he claimed, but Obama and some other previous presidents hadn't. The ensuing controversy got reporters asking questions about presidential condolence calls, and somebody eventually talked to Rep. Fredica Wilson of Florida, who is a friend of the family of one of the four dead soldiers, Sgt. LaDavid Johnson. Wilson said she had been in a car with the widow, Myeshia Johnson, and overheard Trump's call when Myeshia put it on speakerphone.
Trump, Wilson claimed, told the widow that her husband "knew what he signed up for", a statement she and the family found insensitive. Trump labeled this account a "total lie", and stuck by that claim even after Wilson's story was supported by Sgt. Johnson's mother. When the widow gave her own interview, saying that Trump's call "made me cry cause I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said he couldn't remember my husband's name", Trump couldn't let that stand either, insisting that he "spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!"
Take that, you military widow! How dare you remember something the Commander in Chief doesn't want remembered.
Not to be outdone, Chief of Staff John Kelly also had to get into the fiasco: He slammed Rep. Wilson by telling a false story about her. Kelly said that he had heard Wilson speak at the dedication of a new FBI field office in Miami. He described her ignoring the two dead agents the building was dedicated to and instead focusing entirely on her own role in getting funding for the building. He claimed he had been "stunned" by this, and summarized her character with "Empty barrels make the most noise."
Unfortunately for him, the Sun Sentinel had a video of the event, which bore no resemblance to Kelly's story. He had lied. He has never acknowledged the lie or apologized for it.
9. The swampiest administration ever.
Other than The Wall That Mexico Will Pay For and locking up Hillary Clinton, the campaign promise Trump repeated most often was that he would "Drain the swamp."
It's a good thing to promise, because there really is a Swamp, and it really does need to be drained: Members of Congress (from both parties) rely on contributions from special interests to fund their campaigns, and the people who work in the government's administrative agencies (in both Republican and Democratic administrations) know that they can have lucrative second careers working for the interests they're supposed to be regulating — but only if they play ball with the special interests rather than enforce regulations that are supposed to protect the public.
The result is a government that only works for the American people part-time. The rest of the time it works for big corporations, rich individuals, and whatever single-issue groups can afford to hire good lobbyists. (If you want a more detailed discussion of the problem, read Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig.)
But just as the Wall is not getting built, Mexico will never pay for it, and Hillary Clinton is still free, the Swamp is not being drained. Quite the opposite, in fact: This is the swampiest administration in my lifetime, and maybe ever.
It starts at the top: A big part of draining the swamp is enforcing transparency about the money special interests spend to gain influence and where it goes. But Trump has never liked transparency, at least not when it applies to himself.
Since Nixon, all presidents and nearly all presidential candidates have revealed their tax returns, usually going back many years. (Whenever someone on social media raises the question of how the Clintons have made so much money over the years, I point out that we know exactly how, because we have all their tax returnssince Bill first ran for president in 1992.) After repeatedly promising that he would release his returns at some point in the future, Trump has settled on the position that his election win (with 46% of the vote) showed that the American people don't care about his taxes.
As a result, we can't say for sure whether the tax plan that he signed in December was primarily for the country's benefit, or for his own. (We can make some guessesthough: The plan looks designed specifically to cut the taxes of people like him. How big a tax cut you'll get largely depends on how much you resemble Donald Trump.)
He also broke a longstanding tradition of American presidents insulating themselves against financial conflicts of interest by either putting their assets into a blind trust or moving all their investments to Treasury bonds. Trump turned management of The Trump Organization over to his sons, though of course he knows what they're doing and where his investment interests lie.
He also has directly profited from his presidency. His election led to Mar-a-Lago doubling its membership fee to $200,000. Since Trump spends so much of his time there, it is a unique opportunity to pay money directly into the President's pocket in exchange for access, leading Chris Hayes to dub Mar-a-Lago "the de facto bribery palace". Three Mar-a-Lago members have been named ambassadors, while three others are "the shadow rulers of the Veterans Administration". They got influence in the US government by paying Trump money. Every golfing trip also generates money for the President, as the entire presidential entourage has to be accommodated at the taxpayers' expense.
Foreign governments pay Trump money as well. The Industrial & Commercial Bank of China pays him $2 million a year to rent the 20th floor of Trump Tower. Qatar bought a $6.5 million apartment at Trump World Tower. Saudi Arabia paid Trump's D.C. hotel $270,000 to house veterans groups who lobbied for a Saudi interest. It would be trivial for a foreign government to pour huge amounts of money into Trump's pocket: Just set up shell corporations to buy Trump Organization condos at inflated prices. Is that happening? How would we know?
With that example, it's little wonder that so many cabinet heads misused public funds. Disgraced EPA head Scott Pruitt is the most famous offender (and Trump accepted his misbehavior until the publicity got to be too much; without a free press, Pruitt would still be in office). But he's far from the only one: Wilbur Ross, Ryan Zinke, Steve Mnuchin, and Ben Carson all have scandals that would have gotten them ejected from the Obama administration. But Trump's standards are lower.
10. Politicizing justice.
The campaign chant of "Lock her up!" (which Trump has continued to encourage in his rallies as president) was unique in American political history. I know of no previous example where an American presidential candidate threatened to put his opponent in jail, though this often happens in third-world dictatorships.
Since taking office, he has frequently put forward the idea that the Justice Department should protect him and his allies from investigations while harassing his opponents. Just last month he tweeted:
Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff
I assume he's talking about Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins, who appear to have broken some serious laws. Hunter used campaign money to upgrade his lifestyle, and filed false reports with the FEC to cover his tracks. Collins used his insider knowledge to tip off his family members to sell stock in a drug company before its bad test results became public. Pretty swampy behavior in each case. But apparently Trump believes Attorney General Sessions should have suppressed those investigations, at least until after the fall elections.
Together with allies in Congress (like Devin Nunes), Trump has run a disinformation campaign against the FBI in an attempt to discredit the Mueller investigation into his campaign's collusion with Russia. Just about everyone involved in starting that investigation has been drummed out of the FBI, all without any evidence that the investigation is tainted. The Economist observes:
Mr Trump's attacks on the [Department of Justice] do not help. He seems to think of the agency as part of his operation, as though he has been elected chief executive of America and the DoJ is the company's legal department. It follows that, in failing to protect him from Mr Mueller, the department is not doing its job. He has never forgiven Mr Sessions for recusing himself from Mr Mueller's investigation, and believes he has "the absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department".
This contravenes long-standing norms, under which a president appoints an attorney-general and other top officials, then sets general policy direction, but otherwise respects the department's independence—and certainly does not intervene in investigations. Susan Hennessey, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and former lawyer for the National Security Agency, believes the president "has no reference to the DoJ as an institution that has to be defended—it's entirely personal for him". The DoJ's independence, and the rule of law that independence protects, are not features of the American system to Mr Trump; they are pesky inconveniences.
11. Shithole countries.
During a closed-door discussion of immigration last January, Trump revolted at the idea of taking more people from countries like Haiti and various African nations: "Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?" he asked, and wondered why we couldn't get more immigrants from Norway.
Just about all American families (other than native Americans) originate from places that (at the time) could have been described in similar terms, and probably were: Ireland during the famine, for example, or the Jewish Pale in Russia during the pogroms. In general, people who are doing well stay where they are. (We don't get more Norwegians now because — largely thanks to socialism — Norway is nice place to live, in many ways nicer than the US.)
But Trump's outlandish statement is all of a piece with the worldview that makes him so popular with the white supremacists we talked about in #3: America is for white Christian people. At every possible turn, he has tried to keep other kinds of people from coming here, and to throw out those who were already here, even if they came legally.
That simple rule of thumb explains a wide variety of Trump administration policies and rhetoric: the Muslim ban, the Wall, the mythical immigrant crime wave, and a host of others. White Christian people are good, and we want them. Any other kind of people are bad, and we want them gone.
12. Enemies of the American people.
Every administration feuds with the press, and none gets the coverage it thinks it deserves. (Nixon VP Spiro Agnew famously called the press "nattering nabobs of negativism".) Hindsight resolves most of these disputes in the press' favor. For example, both Presidents Johnson and Bush II criticized the media for not telling the public the "good news" about the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, respectively. But in fact those wars just weren't going well, as the media accurately reported.
But no previous president has ratcheted up his anti-media rhetoric to Trump's level of vitriol, not just against specific stories or reporters, but against the very idea of a free press itself. Just this morning, only days after a Trump supporter mailed a bomb to CNN, he denounced "The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People". In his rallies, he points to the area reserved for reporters and says things like "these people back there, these horrible, horrendous people". Independent observers are worried about what this abuse portends for American democracy.
"His attacks are strategic, designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts," said David Kaye and Edison Lanza, the Special Rapporteurs on freedom of expression for the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, respectively.
The President has labelled the media as being the "enemy of the American people" "very dishonest" or "fake news," and accused the press of "distorting democracy" or spreading "conspiracy theories and blind hatred".
"These attacks run counter to the country's obligations to respect press freedom and international human rights law," the experts said. "We are especially concerned that these attacks increase the risk of journalists being targeted with violence." …
"Each time the President calls the media 'the enemy of the people' or fails to allow questions from reporters from disfavored outlets," the experts added, "he suggests nefarious motivations or animus. But he has failed to show even once that specific reporting has been driven by any untoward motivations.
Before the election, the term fake news actually meant something important: It referred to entirely made-up stories packaged to look like news reports and distributed over social media, like "FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide" which got noticed by more than half a million Facebook users a few days before the election.
We know this is fake because The Denver Guardian, which supposedly published it, does not exist. Fake news like this was rampant before the election. Most of it favored Trump, and some of it came from Russia.
Since the election, Trump has perverted fake news to mean any report he doesn't like, particularly those where White House staffers leak something anonymously. Quite often, an article he labels "fake news" turns out to be true.
His statements after the capture of the MAGA bomber have ominous historical echoes: He blames the press for raising public anger against itself, and takes no responsibility for his own rhetoric.
There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame of Anger and Outrage and we will then be able to bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony. Fake News Must End!
In other words: Unless the press stops criticizing him and pointing out his lies, he will continue to unleash his brownshirts on them. Only when no one criticizes the Great Leader will he be able to "bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony".
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