President Drumpf intiates a Fascist Dictadorship

rahu

Banned
Experts warn Trump call for a two-year extension of his term should not be ignored — even if it’s idiotic


default.gif






trump-afp-800x430.jpg



Amid growing fears that Democratic political leaders are not taking seriously the possibility that President Donald Trump could refuse to yield power if he loses in the 2020 election, progressive critics are voicing concern over Trump’s retweet over the weekend of a post calling for two years to be added to his first term as “pay back for time stolen” by the Mueller investigation.
by right-wing Liberty University head Jerry Falwell, Jr. and boosted by the president Sunday evening, the tweet stated Trump “should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term” as “reparations” for the recently completed Mueller probe.


“It may seem nuts,” Adolph Reed, Jr., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said of Falwell’s tweet in an email to Common Dreams, “but I do think this is worth paying attention to.”

“The Trump administration,” said Reed, “obviously is contemptuous of procedural democracy, as are Republicans in Congress and elsewhere.”
From Reed’s perspective, “the Republicans’ decades-long campaign to demonize and undermine popular and democratic institutions, suppress voting, forge a political alliance based on the most dangerously reactionary and irrationalist elements of the society and committed to eliminating all restraint to capitalist class power is particularly chilling.”
“The confrontation between the House Democrats and the Trump administration over access to his tax returns and the executive branch’s requirement to honor congressional subpoenas,” said Reed, could prove far more consequential in the long run than “the daily theater of palace politics.”
#In a column on Monday, Esquire‘s Jack Holmes echoed Reed’s alarm at the president’s apparent endorsement of a two-year term extension:
Even if this is just another absurd trial balloon, it is the latest sign that the president may have little intention of leaving office no matter the circumstances. He has already been named—albeit as “Individual-1″—in one federal indictment, which led to his longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, going to prison this Monday morning. The evidence he abused his power and obstructed justice is damning…
#
Democratic leaders in particular must come to grips with the fact that he probably won’t leave willingly. He can’t afford to—it could land him in jail.
Trump’s retweet came as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned that Trump would refuse to give up power if Democrats don’t win resoundingly in 2020. In order to to achieve such a victory, Pelosi said, the party should not run too far to the left.
“We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” Pelosi told the New York Times. “Own the center left, own the mainstream.”
#Progressives were quick to reject and denounce Pelosi’s suggestion that running on bold left-wing policies would be electorally harmful for Democrats.
And as historian Kevin Kruse pointed out, Trump could contest unfavorable election results regardless of the Democratic Party’s approach or policy platform.

In a column published by Common Dreams on Tuesday, Jeffrey Isaac, political science professor at Indiana University, expressed concern that Pelosi herself is not sufficiently worried about the possibility that Trump could refuse to leave office.
#Responding to Pelosi’s remark that Trump may not “respect the election,” Isaac wrote: “I don’t believe that commentators have treated this comment with the seriousness that it deserves. And yet, alas, I fear that neither has Pelosi herself taken the full measure of the comment.”
“What cannot be right is to claim that Trump is a danger to the republic, and to orchestrate House investigations in a politically serious way that focuses attention on this, and at the same time to meet with Trump in the White House and even feign to do deals with him,” Isaac wrote, citing Pelosi’s negotiations with Trump on infrastructure. “This president must be opposed, consistently and unambiguously. Period.”
#
;
 
Last edited:

rahu

Banned
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/05/tr...-make-himself-the-featured-attraction-report/
2380
Trump plans to hijack the annual 4th of July fireworks on the Mall celebration and make himself the featured attraction: report


President-Donald-Trump-hugs-flag-afp-800x430.jpg
President Donald Trump hugged the US flag as he arrived to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor,




President Donald Trump plans to hijack the traditional 4th of July celebration at the National Mall and transform it into a Trump-influenced event, according to a report from The Washington Post.
The event “A Salute to America,” will break the tradition of having a “nonpartisan celebration” and might serve more as “Trump campaign rally.”

“President Trump has effectively taken charge of the nation’s premier Fourth of July celebration in Washington, moving the gargantuan fireworks display from its usual spot on the Mall to be closer to the Potomac River and making tentative plans to address the nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, according to top administration officials,” the report said.
It went onto to detail Trump’s failed attempts in the past to have a celebratory event centered around him.
This includes “failed efforts to mount a military parade modeled on the Bastille Day celebration in France. The new event has become a top priority for new Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who Trump tasked with the job three months ago, officials said,” the report explained.


“The president has shown interest in the event that he often does not exhibit for other administration priorities,” an aide said.
#
Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) warned against Trump making the 4th of July all about him.
“It’s not about any one president. It’s about how our nation came to be, because of a hardy band of brave men and women. It’s not about any one person, it’s about ‘We, the people.’ And if the president moves to make this about him, I think he will find the America public disappointed and angered by it,” McCollum said.
Trump has had his eyes set on this event for a couple of months, and tweeted about it in February.
 
Last edited:

rahu

Banned
Ending the Senate as we know it’: Democratic leaders blast McConnell for destroying Senate rules to rush Trump’s nominees




default.gif

Matthew Chapman
03 Apr 2019 at 18:13 ET



Report Advertisement


Screen-Shot-2019-02-26-at-11.08.05-AM-800x430.png
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (C-SPAN2)
AddThis Sharing Buttons Share to FlipboardFlipboardShare to FacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterShare to LinkedInLinkedInShare to MoreMore51





Don't miss stories. Follow Raw Story!










On Wednesday, at the behest of Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Senate GOP unilaterally changed the rules of debate, cutting the hours of debate from 30 to 2 for many executive and judicial nominees.

The change, which comes after Republicans themselves spent years using the original rules to deny President Barack Obama judicial confirmations, is meant to help President Donald Trump confirm a steady stream of partisan judges, possibly even filling every single vacancy on the federal courts ahead of the next presidential election.




Numerous Senate Democrats howled with outrage, laying bare the hypocrisy of the move and warning that it will have dire consequences both for Senate tradition and for the integrity of the federal courts:
 

rahu

Banned
2443
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/05/tr...-blown-embrace-of-authoritarianism-columnist/
Trump’s latest unhinged rally provides a ‘terrifying look’ into his full-blown embrace of authoritarianism: columnist



Tana Ganeva
21 May 2019 at 11:32 ET



Donald-Trump-800x430.jpg
President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Montoursville, Pennsylvania (screengrab)

For years, President Donald Trump has denounced Hillary Clinton and riled up his followers at rallies with chants to “lock her up!”
The idea that Trump would want to imprison his political opponents has seemed more like an empty political stunt than potential reality.


But on Monday night at a rally in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, the president hinted that he would jail staffers at the Department of Justice for investigating him — and that Attorney General William Barr would do his bidding.
“Trump accuses the FBI and Democrats of treason. He then has to pause as his fans chant, ‘lock them up!’ Tweeted reporter Aaron Rupar from the rally. ‘We have a great new attorney general who will give it a very fair look,’ Trump says.”


Writing in Rolling Stone, columnist Ryan Bort observed that this was not the only sign of authoritarianism evident at the rally. Trump also suggested he’d exceed his lawful terms in office, in some kind of vengeance against the officials who investigated his campaign’s ties to Russia and obstruction of justice.

“We’re going to have a second [term], and then we’re going to have another one,” Trump said Monday night. “We’ll drive them crazy. And maybe if we really like it a lot, and if things keep going like they are going, we’ll go and we’ll do what we have to do, and a three [terms] and a four, and a five.”

“Beautiful evening for a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN rally tonight in Pennsylvania. Thank you, I love you! #MAGA” the President Tweeted at the conclusion of the event.


Bort said the rally provided “the latest, terrifying look into the president’s tendency toward authoritarianism, which is becoming less of a tendency and more of a full-throated embrace as he continues to bend the government to his will.

.Tell Nancy Pelosi Enough is Enough!

Donald Trump has obstructed justice, lied repeatedly to the American people and has been forced to shut down his charity after engaging in illegal activity. Democrats are debating impeachment. If Democrats fault Republicans for standing by as Trump disgraces the office, Democrats must stand up. Sign your name to tell Nancy Pelosi enough is enough.



reuters-615x331.jpg
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., November 30, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
 
Last edited:

rahu

Banned
2494
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/we...utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=290



Raw Story

<B>


Trump-phone-Air-Force-One.jpg



Donald Trump is not an ideologue or a person who possesses a coherent or sophisticated understanding of political theory, history or philosophy. He is all impulse and id, a man gifted in manipulating the fears of ignorant and insecure white people in the service of expanding his power and his fortune. Trump’s enforcers, including Attorney General William Barr, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and the right-wing media machine, are then tasked with transforming the president’s most base impulses into public policy.
As we have seen throughout Trump’s presidency — and as we see now in Robert Mueller’s report, with its extensive litany of borderline corruption and its numerous instances of blatant obstruction of justice — the president and his allies disregard the law whenever it is inconvenient, and enforce it with callous cruelty when it serves their goals.




This strategic arbitrariness weakens and delegitimizes the rule of law until, at some point, it can be totally rejected and dispensed with. The Trump administration’s ultimate goal is a “permanent state of exception” in the service of racial authoritarianism.
This administration’s collective assault on nonwhites — in particular refugees, migrants and immigrants from Latin America — as well as Muslims and other groups deemed to be “un-American” is one of the principal areas where its contempt for the law and democracy is most apparent.
Last week Trump fired Kirstjen Nielsen from her position as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security because she was not cruel enough to immigrants, refugees and migrants — apparently breaking up families and putting people in concentration camps was insufficient for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. Even more troubling, Trump fired Nielsen because she was not willing to violate the law at his command.
Trump also reportedly told Kevin McAleenan, who was then head of the Border Patrol and is now acting DHS secretary, to break the law by denying asylum seekers entry to the United States. It has also been reported that Trump promised McAleenan a pardon if he find himself in legal trouble for following Trump’s orders.

Trump also told U.S. soldiers at the Mexican border that they should brutalize immigrants, refugees, and migrants. This too is a violation of civilian law, international law, as well as the U.S. Code of Military Justice.
Donald Trump’s handpicked attorney general, William Barr, has decided that refugees can be held in detention indefinitely. This appears to be a violation of federal law and constitutionally protected rights to due process.
Trump has also suggested using human beings as political weapons by transporting migrants, refugees and immigrants from Latin America — a group of people Trump has slurred as a “race” of rapists and murderers and a human infestation — to “sanctuary cities” as a way (as he sees it) to punish Democrats.
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University and an expert on fascism, authoritarianism and propaganda, explained the danger of Trump’s recent actions to me in a recent email:

This latest threat, and asking officials not to obey the law, and assuring them of a pardon, is just a new threshold of the contempt for law and democratic norms Trump has always shown, and an escalation of his white nationalist ideology and governing-by-vendetta leadership style. He wants to put mayors on the defensive, and create “crises” about immigration on city peripheries — migrants will pay the price.
Historian Richard Frankel, an expert on modern Germany and the rise of the Nazis, provided additional context for Trump’s new initiative, also by email:
When Trump thinks of migrants he thinks of criminals, rapists, drug dealers, thugs, carriers of disease, people so fundamentally alien that they could never assimilate into American society and, in fact, threaten to destroy the country. And when you add his anti-Semitism to the mix, then the problem is not just that they’re coming to destroy America, but that they’re actually being sent by Soros, the “International Jew,” to destroy it.
When the history of Trump’s presidency is chronicled by some future scholar, these events over the last few weeks — including Barr’s partisan whitewashing of the Mueller report — will likely be described as some of the most ominous and important in America’s surrender to authoritarianism and fascism.


Unfortunately, said events have already been thrown down the memory hole, both by the public and the corporate media, who have been trained and conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs by the orchestrated chaos and confusion of Trump’s regime. As cultural critic Gore Vidal observed back in 2004 about the George W. Bush presidency, “the ‘United States of Amnesia’ will be worse than an amnesiac; it will be — have suffered a lobotomy. There will be no functioning historical memory of our history.” What has transpired under Donald Trump is far worse.
This behavior feels new to most Americans. But in reality, such an assault on the rule of law, and the elevation of a man and a movement above the normal political process, are common around the world in failing democracies. Moreover, Trump’s regime is echoing one of the most grotesque examples of a failed democracy in modern history: the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich and the Nazis.
There is overwhelming evidence to support such a claim.
In addition to the examples of lawlessness and cruelty detailed above, the Trump administration has conducted a campaign of “soft” ethnic cleansing against nonwhite immigrants, refugees and migrants. In a ruling last Friday, a federal judge in New York described the administration’s efforts to deport Haitian refugees as evidencing “a discriminatory purpose of removing non-white immigrants to the country.”


Trump’s regime has threatened to remove judges who will not follow his orders.
Trump has not appointed permanent replacements for key cabinet positions in order to subvert the congressional approval process. This allows Trump to undermine checks and balances on his power by putting his hand-picked minions in control of federal departments and agencies on a temporary, rotating basis. Trump has also chosen to leave senior positions unstaffed as a way of extending his ability to rule by fiat.
Trump and his supporters in the news media routinely use eliminationist and genocidal language to describe nonwhites and others whom they view as a type of enemy Other in America.
Much of Trump and his allies’ rhetoric directly channels that of the Nazis and the Third Reich, used to describe Jewish people and others who would be annihilated during the Holocaust.


The Trump administration is ordering the United States military to build more concentration camps for nonwhite immigrants, migrants, and refugees.
In their fundraising emails and other materials, Trump describes his supporters as constituting a “movement” that will somehow “restore” and “protect” America against liberals, progressives, Democrats, nonwhite people, and others who are a threat to his American Apartheid “renewal” project. Absolute devotion and loyalty to Donald Trump is required for this plan to be successful. Trump is now offering membership cards to his supporters to cement their cult-like devotion to him.
Because they see it as their natural home, neo-Nazis and members of other right-wing hate organizations are running for public office as Republicans.
There has been a documented increase in right-wing political violence–some of it lethal –both during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and now through to his third year in office.


Investigative journalist Andrea Pitzer, who is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, told me via email how the Trump administration’s new plans to abuse nonwhite immigrants, migrants, and refugees are a violation of international law that will likely end in violence and death.
She explained how, “This idea that there have been discussions of setting up dedicated trains for migrants whose humanity the government disputes and shipping them to designated cities they’re not allowed to leave–especially as some kind of political stunt–is beyond disturbing. And talk of the military running detention camps for migrants on American soil is also horrific. Even the shameful detention program for Japanese Americans during WWII was run by a civilian agency.”
Pitzer warns that:
The current administration seems bent on finding a way to use old and discredited forms of civilian detention against vulnerable groups–the kind of detention we’ve seen degenerate into atrocities again and again worldwide. The schemes emerging from the White House are a threat to our democracy as a whole and can’t be squared with either the Constitution or our obligations under international law.


As new public opinion research by PRRI and Pew shows, the American people are extremely divided between those who understand the value of a more cosmopolitan, forward-thinking, “racially” diverse, and inclusive society and those others (mostly white Republicans and other Trump supporters) who want America to be a white conservative Christian country where other people are subordinated to second-class citizenship, and thus considered peripheral to and therefore outside of the national community.
Donald Trump and his allies are warping and breaking the law to advance this grotesque vision of the American democratic project by mining white rage and white backlash identity politics for personal financial and political gain.
In that same email conversation, professor Frankel describes what Trump’s version of America, when fully realized, will look like:
Trump clearly sees the law as an impediment to achieving his goals. He believes he knows what’s best for the country (at least for those people he considers to be members of the real national community) and so anything he does in the service of the nation is (or should be), by definition, legal. The promise of pardons for those who work toward his goal indicates the extent to which he’d go to undermine the current legal system in favor of one that is in tune with his will. As Goering put it, “The law and the will of the Fuehrer are one.” Trump’s vision of America is a white Christian male-dominated Herrenvolk democracy. How to make that vision real is up to those below him, and no law should stand in the way.


Once the law is transformed into the expression of the leader’s will, there’s not much we can do to stop him.
The myth of American Exceptionalism will not save American democracy or its citizens from Trump’s machinations and the global dystopia his agents are so feverishly working to create. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote his famous novel “It Can’t Happen Here” about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in the United States. His warning was eight decades prescient about the Age of Trump. But unfortunately Lewis’s question is being asked too late, the tragedy is already unfolding and the answer is a plain and clear “yes”. William Barr’s distorted version of the Mueller Report is all just scribbling on the epithet of America’s democracy and empire. The American people decided to be bystanders to their own history and destiny. This is very pathetic. It is also the truth and a tragedy.

Report typos and corrections to corrections@rawstory.com.





















</B>
 

rahu

Banned

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/we...utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=290









<B>Could be a rally in Nuremberg’: Video of Trump accusing FBI and Democrats of treason goes viral</H1>
David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement



Donald-Trump-Screen-Capture-2.jpg


‘Name One Country Where This Happened and It Ended Well’
The only appointment that appeared on President Donald Trump’s official schedule Monday was a “Make America Great Again” campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Now chilling and disturbing video of a portion of the rally is going viral.

In the video, posted by Vox’s Aaron Rupar, President Trump, with Air Force One as a prop in the background, accuses the FBI and the Democrats of treason. The crowd chants, “lock them up!”
The President then brags about his “great new attorney general who will give it a very fair look,” meaning, who will investigate the FBI and the president’s political enemies for treason.
The former head of the federal government’s Office of Government Ethics called it “Shades of 1937,” which seems to be an apparent reference to the rise of Hitler and his Gestapo.​
A former Obama administration official offered this warning:



Scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders:

Former foreign correspondent, columnist, and editorial writer at The New York Times:

Economist:

Author:

Pennsylvania Senator:

Writer:​
If you know the history of past revolutions, it’s not hard to see where this is going. He will end up going after Republicans too. Just wait. https://t.co/uythj5mLbw



</B>
 

rahu

Banned
2513
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/law-...ating-the-law/

Law professor explains how Trump is destroying democracy with appointments and by manipulating the law

Aziz Huq is the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Huq literally wrote the book on Assessing Constitutional Performance.
“President Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey prompted two immediate questions: Is the firing legal, and is this a constitutional crisis?” Professor Huq questioned. “But are these even the right questions to pose?”
“Since assuming office in January, Donald Trump has been called a fascist, an authoritarian and a would-be autocrat, but what are the precise dangers his presidency poses?” Alexandra Rosenmann at Alternet wondered.


Military coups aren’t the most likely model for destroying democratic institutions.
“One lesson is that the road away from democracy is rarely characterized by overt violations of the formal rule of law. To the contrary, the contemporary path away from democracy under the rule of law typically relies on actions within the law. Central among these legal measures is the early disabling of internal monitors of governmental illegality by the aggressive exercise of (legal) personnel powers. Often, there are related changes to the designs of institutions, which might be brought about through legislation,” Professor Huq explained. “Ironically, the law is deployed to undermine legality and the rule of law more generally


http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/that...angerous-path/

resident Donald Trump’s inability to check his own impulses — whether it’s baselessly accusing former President Barack Obama of illegally wiretapping his phones or publicly attacking his own deputy attorney general for appointing a special prosecutor to investigate him — has frequently come back to bite him.
However, Russian journalist Masha Gessen tells Slate that Trump’s seeming incompetence shouldn’t blind us to the damage that he is already doing to our democracy.
Specifically, she notes that such supposedly “incompetent” governing is actually a staple feature of many autocratic regimes.
“I think that incompetence is actually an integral part of autocracy taking hold,” she explained. “Basically, what we mean when we say that he is incompetent, in large part, is that he doesn’t understand the way American government functions. But because he’s wielding power, he’s reshaping government very quickly to fit his idea of how government should function, and that is autocracy.
His incompetence is actually an integral part of the damage that he’s doing by turning something like a democracy into something like an autocracy.”
 
Last edited:

rahu

Banned
2521
https://www.veteransnewsreport.com/2019/06/07/psychological-evaluation-trump/


Duty to Warn: A Historical and Psychological Evaluation of a Wannabe Dictator who was also a Sociopath, Narcissist, Egomaniac, Xenophobe and Demagogue

Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political campaign does indeed rhyme with the campaigns of many other wannabe dictators throughout history
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
Once upon a time, there was an sociopathic, egomaniacal, narcissistic and xenophobic national leader who was attempting to rise to political power in his politically divided, militaristic, post-war nation.
This deeply flawed demagogue, who was worshipped by millions of rabble-rousing, beer-swilling, racist, sexist, gun-toting, anti-Semitic, flag-waving, uber-nationalist, xenophobic, and white/male supremacists, professed that his goal in running for national office was to make his supposedly weak, supposedly under-militarized nation great again.
This charismatic leader distrusted democratic ideals, and he was campaigning to become the sole ruler of his once-democratic nation. He was one of the richest men in the nation partly because of the sales of a block-buster book that he had written with the help of a number of his supporters years before he became politically active.
Definitions (of terms used in this column):

      • A sociopath is a person whose behavior is antisocial, often criminally greedy and lacks a sense of moral responsibility, empathy or social conscience. Sociopaths never sincerely apologize nor are they capable of exhibiting remorse for wrongs that they have committed.
      • A narcissist is a person who has an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration, sexual gratification, applause and a lack of empathy for others.
      • An egomaniac is a pathological egotist, someone with a psychological disorder who exhibits symptoms like delusions of grandeur and an obsession with greatness, power or wealth.
      • A xenophobe is a person who is fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or of people from different countries or cultures.
      • A demagogue is a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational arguments.
trump-hitler.gif

This politician was widely despised by majorities of voting age people and was often made fun of by some of the comedians of his era. Despite being an occasional object of ridicule, he was still popular with those that attended his frequent campaign rallies that were sometimes held at airports where he arrived on his private airplane.
This leader often used inflammatory and hate-filled language in his speeches which often incited violence against minority groups from his most rabid followers. He was widely covered by the press because of the perception that he was a newsworthy aberration in the struggling, once-civilized nation that many distressed people thought was in need of new leadership.
/* custom css */ .td_uid_8_5cfcbf381cf68_rand.td-a-rec-img { text-align: left; } .td_uid_8_5cfcbf381cf68_rand.td-a-rec-img img { margin: 0 auto 0 0; }
/* dynamic basic css */ .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container {margin:0;padding:0;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container .ob-clearfix {display:block;width:100%;float:none;clear:both;height:0px;line-height:0px;font-size:0px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container.ob-multi-row {padding-top: 2%;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container {position:relative;margin:0;padding;0;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link, .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-link:hover {text-decoration:none;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon-container {position:absolute;left:0;height:30%;width:100%;text-align:center;top:35%;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon {display:inline-block;height:100%;float:none;opacity:0.7;transition: opacity 500ms;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-video-icon:hover {opacity:1;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_what{direction:ltr;clear:both;padding:5px 10px 0px;} .GS_8 .ob_what a:after {content: "";;;background-image: url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/achoice.svg');background-size:75% 75%;width:12px;height:12px;padding-left:4px;display:inline-block;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:right center;border-left:1px solid #999;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_what a{color:#999;font-size:11px;font-family:arial;text-decoration: none;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_what.ob-hover:hover a{text-decoration: underline;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_amelia, .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_logo, .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo, .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo, .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{vertical-align:baseline !important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 5px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_67x12.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:12px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_text_logo_67x22.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:22px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_feed_logo.png') no-repeat center top;width:86px;height:23px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_smartFeedLogo.min.svg') no-repeat center top;width:140px;height:21px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_sphere_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_sphere.svg') no-repeat center top;width:93px;height:27px;vertical-align:baseline!important;display:inline-block;vertical-align:text-bottom;padding:0px 0px;box-sizing:content-box;-moz-box-sizing:content-box;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box;} @media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(min-resolution: 192dpi) { .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_amelia{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_16x16@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:16px;height:16px;margin-bottom:-2px; background-size:16px 32px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_logo_67x12@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:12px; background-size:67px 24px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_text_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_text_logo_67x22@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:67px;height:20px; background-size:67px 40px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_feed_logo{background:url('https://widgets.outbrain.com/images/widgetIcons/ob_feed_logo@2x.png') no-repeat center top;width:86px;height:23px;background-size: 86px 23px;} } @media only screen and (max-width: 600px) { .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_sfeed_logo{width:90px;height:20px;background-size:90px 20px;} } .GS_8.ob-widget:hover .ob_amelia, .GS_8.ob-widget:hover .ob_logo, .GS_8.ob-widget:hover .ob_text_logo{background-position:center bottom;} .GS_8.ob-widget {position:relative;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_what{position:absolute;top:5px;right:0px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_what{text-align:right;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob_what.ob_what_resp{position: static;float: right;padding: 0px;font-weight: normal;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-image {display:block;} /* dynamic text on image css */ .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container {position:relative;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-image-ratio {height:0px;line-height:0px;padding-top:71.42857142857143%;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container img.ob-rec-image {width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;bottom:0;left:0;right:0;opacity:0;transition:all 750ms;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container img.ob-show {opacity:1;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-label {position:absolute;bottom:0px;left:0px;padding:0px 3px;background-color:#666;color:white;font-size:10px;line-height:15px;} .GS_8.ob-widget {width:px;min-width:0px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container {display:inline-block;vertical-align:top;min-width:50px;width:31.8%;box-sizing:border-box;-moz-box-sizing:border-box;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-unit.ob-rec-brandName, .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-unit.ob-rec-brandLogo-container, .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-brandLogoAndName {display:inline-block;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-brandLogo {width:20px;height:20px;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-brandName {vertical-align:bottom;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-unit.ob-rec-brandName {vertical-align:super;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-widget-items-container {direction: ltr;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container {margin-left:0;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container ~ .ob-dynamic-rec-container {margin:0 0 0 2.3%; } .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-widget-header {direction:ltr; font-weight:bold;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-unit {display:block;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-text {max-height:80.0px;overflow:hidden;font-weight:bold;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-source {} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-rec-date {font-weight:bold;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container .ob-rec-text {height:80.0px;position:absolute; bottom: 0.0px;width:88%; box-sizing: content-box;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container .ob-rec-source {position:absolute;bottom: 83.0px; width:88%; box-sizing: content-box;} .GS_8.ob-widget .ob-dynamic-rec-container .ob-rec-date {position:absolute;bottom: 0px; width:88%; box-sizing: content-box;} /* dynamic customized css */ .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-widget-header {font-family:inherit;font-size:18px;color:black;padding-bottom:15px;padding-top:0px;} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-dynamic-rec-container {max-width:420px;position:relative;} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-rec-text {max-width:420px;font-family:Gotham;color:#f8f8f8;padding:0px 6% 0px;text-align:center;line-height:1.25;font-size:16px;background-color:#000;background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);border-bottom-style: solid;border-bottom-color:#000;border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);border-bottom-width:3px;} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-rec-text:hover {color:#fff;} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-rec-source {font-family:proxima-nova;color:white;padding:0px 6% 0px;text-align:center;font-size:14px;background-color:#000;background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);text-decoration: underline;} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-rec-date {font-family:inherit;color:white;padding:0px 6% 5px;text-align:left;font-size:10px;line-height:10px;background-color:#000;background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-rec-author {font-family:inherit;color:white;padding:0px 6% 5px;text-align:left;font-size:10px;line-height:10px;background-color:#000;background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-rec-description {font-family:inherit;color:white;padding:0px 6% 5px;text-align:left;font-size:10px;line-height:10px;background-color:#000;background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob-rec-image-container .ob-rec-label {top:0px;bottom:auto;} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob_what {background-color:#DDDDDD;margin-top:10px;padding: 1px 10px 4px 10px;} .GS_8.ob-text-on-image-layout .ob_what .ob_amelia{margin-bottom:-4px;} .GS_8.ob-top-box-pager-layout .ob-rec-brandName {font-family:Gotham;padding:0px 0 0px;line-height:1.25;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;} .GS_8.ob-top-box-pager-layout .ob-rec-brandLogo {width:20px;height:20px;}



This wannabe leader was popular with a coalition of angry, under-employed, xenophobic white supremacists, many of whom were military veterans who had been so physically and psychologically wounded in the last war that they couldn’t find employers who were willing to hire them.
Some of his ex-military followers were eager street fighters who pledged allegiance to the nation’s flag, which was revered by many of them as sacred symbols of a once-great nation.
This leader’s nation had lost its last war, which had morally and financially bankrupted the nation. That lost war had been stupidly started by out-of-touch, over-privileged, uber-wealthy, right-wing, pro-corporate, militaristic, male-dominated leaders who were controlled by the nation’s even-wealthier ruling elites (including war-profiteering bankers, industrialists and politicians). Each of those entities knew that war could have huge economic benefits from interest-paying bank loans, the sale of highly profitable weapons systems and the prospect of pillaging the oil, mineral and labor resources of “enemy” nations.
The competitor nations that had been targeted by the nation’s predatory banks and corporations in the last war were technically not military adversaries. Therefore, in order to start the potentially profitable war, the political, military and business leaders of the nation had to secretly conspire to orchestrate a false flag operation that would falsely alarm the nation into a patriotic war-hysteria and the willingness to kill those on the other side of the battle line – including innocent civilians.
The ruling elites of this leader’s nation knew that most wars are started by false flag operations. The ruling elite’s had control of the major media in the nation, so most editors and journalists could be relied upon to not question any of the deceptions that could lead to war or “regime change”.
And so any targeted nation that had resource wealth that the aggressor coveted (such as oil), could be accused of actually provoking the desired conflict; and the brain-washed, misinformed, distracted, historically-illiterate, easily duped electorate could be counted upon to go along with the illegal invasion, even if it meant existential disaster for the armed combatants and the unarmed non-combatants.
This particular egomaniacal political leader secretly intended to eventually purge most of the old establishment types from his adopted right-wing, Big Business-controlled political party as soon as he achieved power. He had seemingly come out of nowhere – gaining political notoriety partly because of the fame he gained from his best-selling book and the frequent coverage from a compliant press.
Ultimately this leader’s political aspirations had been given a boost after a world-wide economic collapse and recession which had actually been created by greedy financial institutions and investors that came to support the candidate’s campaign to make their nation (and their stock market) great again. If the candidate gained power, the backers knew his election would benefit them financially.
The leader of course refused to accuse the nation’s economic problems on the guilty 1% because some of them were backing his election bid.
Instead, he falsely blamed the economic problems on the leftists, the liberals, the democratic socialists and the democracy-embracing political party members who had taken on the impossible task of trying to solve the economic issues that they had not been responsible for in the first place.
trump-loser.jpg

An economic crash had tanked the world economy and led to planetary chaos. But the crash had actually been ignited by the reckless and greedy actions of criminally wealthy, manipulative multimillionaires from Big Corporations that escaped the punishment that they so richly deserved because they were too big to fail, too big to criticize and too important to have their reputations besmirched in public.
Many of the cult followers of this egomaniacal leader (who was about as areligious as any politician in the history of the world) were citizens of one of the most advanced, cultured, literate and highly Christianized nations that the world had ever known.
Tragically, the reigning religious leaders of the candidate’s nation, totally contrary to the religious beliefs of Jesus of Nazareth and the original form of Christianity, professed a belief in a punitive, vengeful, violent and angry god rather than in the merciful, all-loving, forgiving and nonviolent God as was the clear belief of Jesus and his apostles.
The candidate’s Christian nation was highly militarized, whereas participation in the nation’s military was actually grounds for excommunication in the early church that knew the pacifist theology of Jesus best.
The nation’s military was universally feared (as opposed to being universally “respected”) by other nations but somehow it was revered by most sectors of the candidate’s nation, even though the officers and soldiers were frequently and blatantly guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This nation’s police and military possessed the best military intelligence, the best spies and the most lethal weapons systems that the world had ever known – all at crippling economic costs to the tax-paying population that never showed any positive return on investment (unless the wars had been won and systematic post-war pillaging had been efficiently accomplished).
The personal child-rearing tactics that the candidate had suffered in his childhood were well-known to have been punitive. His absent, authoritarian, but quite successful-in-business father had thoroughly embraced the disastrous spare the rod/spoil the child tactic that has ruined so many militarized nations, which in the case of the candidate, resulted in fear, hatred and resentment of – but often obedience to – the authoritarian parent.
The punitive child-rearing of boys was the norm in the candidate’s nation. That pattern predictably caused many soldiers to reflexively obey – and give – illegal orders in times of crisis and war, and that pattern has resulted in the frequent abuse and even torture of enemy non-combatants, as just one example. Thus, the nation’s soldiers quite easily became willing executioners in times of war.
The many followers of this demagogue were led to believe that their nation had been weakened by traitorous domestic and foreign enemies but would soon, if the leader was elected, be made great again. Many of the followers truly believed that their punitive Christian “god” would bless the blatantly areligious leader’s mission and thus somehow enable the religion to have dominion over all the other nations of the world, even if the methods used in the effort were anti-Christian in the extreme.
Because the “christian” followers thought that the candidate’s efforts would be blessed by their punitive god, they naturally thought that punishing any dissenters among them was justified, even to the point of banishment, imprisonment, impoverishment, starvation, deportation, torture or even execution.
In other words, the followers of this obviously sociopathic demagogue – who had a history of being a serial liar with a desire to increase his already significant wealth and power – abandoned all logic and truly believed that the leader could actually make their country and their religion great again.
mueller-meme-crime.jpg

In order to convince a plurality of people to vote for him, the candidate fostered a paranoia among his followers that was intended to cause irrational fears (and therefore hatred) of non-citizens, the poor, the non-white, the non-Christian, the refugee, the asylum-seeker or the immigrant yearning to be free.
Many legitimate refugees that were threatening the candidate’s nation’s borders were fleeing from the consequences of wars, exploitation and the economic chaos that the nation’s own giant financial institutions, multinational corporations, national security apparatus and economic hitmen had been responsible for in the first place.
The egomaniacal, sociopathic, narcissistic and xenophobic national leader/fuehrer described above was Adolf Hitler, but it could have been any wannabe fascist dictator in the history of the world. The militarized and economically distressed Christian nation was Germany, and the war that had financially and morally bankrupted Germany was the First World War.
I have constructed the story to be essentially identical with what is known about Donald Trump and his idea of America.
The revered flag mentioned above was the swastika, and the right-wing political party that hated liberals, progressives, socialists and foreigners was the Nazi Party, but it is quite understandable why anyone would think “Stars & Stripes” and the “Trumpian Republican Party” as they read the story.
And, of course, the targeted minorities were Jews, aboriginal Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, non-Aryans, emancipated German women, gays, lesbians and people of color, all of whom happen to be nearly identical to the targets that Americans are currently being primed to discriminate against.
The false flag operations that gave Hitler a plausible reasons to start World War II were the Reichstag Fire and Operation Himmler, not 9/11 or the fake claims of “weapons of mass destruction”, which were the false flag operations that were used to justify America’s global military exploits and perpetual war agenda. (Google “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth” and watch an hour’s worth of their videos for the unassailable proof of the assertion that 9/11 was a false flag op.)
But the historical similarities between what I call Friendly American Fascism and the distinctly less friendly Hitlerian variety do indeed exist, and it is not just the fault of Donald Trump.
trump-arrest.jpg

Indeed, Donald Trump probably has never taken the time to study ANY history books, much less writings about the root causes and conduct of what led up to World War II or the Middle East Wars so one cannot claim that he is actually following the historical playbook of fascist dictators of the past.
History, as they say, doesn’t replicate itself exactly, but it often does rhyme.
(One caveat about Trump’s never reading historical books: Ivana Trump, one of Trump’s ex-wives, reported that he kept a copy of Adolf Hitler’s speeches at his bedside. His staff also said that Trump had “plenty of copies of Mein Kampf”.)
Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political campaign does indeed rhyme with the campaigns of many other wannabe dictators throughout history. Napoleon Made France Great Again, Leopold Made Belgium Great Again, Mussolini Made Italy Great Again, Hitler Made Germany Great Again, Franco Made Spain Great Again, Salazar Made Portugal Great Again, Mao Made China Great Again, Pinochet Made Chile Great Again, but each wannabe empire-builder ultimately failed in disgrace after the unintended consequences caused millions to suffer and die in the process.
Each demagogue mentioned in the paragraph above was a sociopathic, narcissistic, egomaniacal, xenophobic and demagogic leader that was willing to say and do anything to gain and secure power and wealth.
And the historical similarities between the psychological aberrancies of the fascist/fuehrer Hitler and far too many political and economic leaders in the world today do exist. Please go to DuluthReader.com for a number of other articles about American Friendly Fascism.
Recall that neither sociopaths, narcissists, egomaniacs, xenophobes or fascists are to be trusted with political, economic or military power. Sociopaths consistently lie and deceive but usually never admit to the fact that they are lying or deceiving.
It is important for voters to understand that, for all intents and purposes, sociopaths and fascists (including their inanimate corporate counterparts) are incurable and need to be isolated from society.
ABOUT AUTHOR: Dr Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN, USA. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice he has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, northeast Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which are re-published around the world, deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarization, racism, xenophobia, malnutrition, sea level rise, global warming, geo-engineering, solar radiation management, Big Copper Mining’s conscienceless exploitation of northeast Minnesota’s water-rich environment, Big Medicine’s over-screening, over-diagnosing, over-treating, Big Pharma’s over-drugging and Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas (particularly of tiny infants), as well as other movements that threaten human health, the environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of life on earth. Many of his columns have been archived at a number of websites, including these four:
 

rahu

Banned




Raw Story

1 day ago on
June 13, 2019
By
Travis Gettys


pjimage-2019-06-13T124525.844.jpg




Whoopi Goldberg sent a chill down Meghan McCain’s spine with a dark warning that President Donald Trump could be engaged in a coup against American democracy.
Trump admitted he would accept the type of foreign campaign assistance he has repeatedly denied getting during the 2016 election, and Goldberg said his words should serve as a wakeup call.







“It makes me nervous,” she said. “This, to me, is a prelude to a coup, this is how coups happen. People say, we’re going to let this go. No, that’s how this happens — you’re in a new country that you don’t recognize but you’re stuck in, and so I think that someone needs to be really, really clear about what it is to break the law.”
“If, in fact, he doesn’t win in 2020, this to me is — this is at least a trial,” Goldberg added. “This is at least a trial, you know.”
McCain sounded alarmed by her warnings.

“I just, I mean, when you’re talking about coups and things like that, I mean, it’s a really, like, dystopian idea, and it’s really petrifying,” McCain said. “That’s why the checks and balances should be in place right now.”

“We’re living it,” Goldberg said.


 
Last edited:

rahu

Banned







Trump moves to take unchecked power: Article II of the Constitution ‘allows me to do whatever I want’

This-Week-on-Twitter.jpg





  • President Donald Trump insisted in a recent interview that he chose not to “go around firing everybody” during the Russia investigation because it did not “work out too well” for President Richard Nixon, who resigned from office. He also said that the U.S. Constitution allows him to do “whatever I want.”
    In an interview on ABC, host George Stephanopoulos noted that the special counsel’s report said that Trump had ordered his White House counsel to fire Robert Mueller.

    “Number one, I was never going to fire Mueller,” Trump insisted. “I never suggested firing Mueller.”
    “That’s not what [the special counsel] says,” the ABC host interrupted.
    “I don’t care what he says,” Trump snapped.
    https://www.instagram.com/rawstorymedia/

    “Why would [the White House counsel] lie under oath?” Stephanopoulos wondered.

    “Because he wanted to make himself look like a good person,” Trump argued. “Number one, I didn’t. He wasn’t fired. But more importantly, Article II [of the Constitution] allows me to do whatever I want. Article II would have allowed me to fire him.”
    “I wasn’t going to fire him,” the president added. “You know why? Because I watched Richard Nixon go around firing people and that didn’t work out too well.”
    Watch the video below from ABC.
    Continue Reading
 
Last edited:

rahu

Banned
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/trump-loves-may-not-leave-204424489.html

Trump Loves to Say He May Not Leave Office After Two Terms, and It’s Dangerous

Peter Wade,Rolling Stone Sun, Jun 16 1:44 PM PDT


8fca22b37686e2629b55d22346be3626
Donald Trump thinks his supporters will want him to serve a third term, despite not yet winning a second. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Pentagon and intelligence officials kept certain details from the president regarding a new U.S. military program that included cyber warfare attacks on Russia because of “the possibility that [Trump] might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials.”
On Sunday morning, President Donald Trump, angered by the story, took to Twitter to blast both the New York Times and the Washington Post, calling both “the Enemy of the People.” Included in his dangerous tweet, the president also floated the idea of staying in office longer that what is constitutionally allowable because his supporters might “demand that I stay longer.”
Related stories
Please Stop Thinking This Will Be a Fair Election
John Oliver: Impeaching President Trump Is Risky, But Necessary
Secretary of State Makes Light of Foreign Interference, Calling it 'Washington Silliness'


As laughable or terrifying as that may sound, the notion that Trump would try to stay in office should not be scoffed at. We are living in a time where the unbelievable has become believable. As the Washington Post reminded us after the Mueller report was released, Trump shared a tweet from Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. that called for extending his first term by two years “as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.”
Back in April, Trump seemingly joked about changing term limits and just last month House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke about Democrats having to win back the White House by a “big” margin, as to hold off charges from Trump and his supporters who may question the legitimacy of the 2020 elections. “We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” Pelosi told the New York Times.
No matter what happens this election cycle or the next, the one thing we can be assured of, is that Donald Trump will not go quietly. And his repeated talk about not respecting the rule of law—let’s not forget he recently said to George Stephanopoulos that he would accept information on an opponent from a foreign country—should be a red flag to the Democratically-controlled House that still refuses to pursue impeachment.

Sign up for Rolling Stone’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
p
 

rahu

Banned
2602
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/tr...ail&utm_campaign=373&recip_id=14749&list_id=1




<B>Two years ago I compared Trump to Hitler’ — nobody listened</H1>

rendered-copy.jpg




On Tuesday, Donald Trump held his 2020 re-election campaign kickoff rally in Orlando. It was nothing new: Trump has held dozens of such events since becoming president. His “speech” was repetitive and monotonous. That was precisely its appeal: For Trump’s supporters and other members of his political cult, white rage, violence, bigotry, nativism and lies are entertaining, cathartic and even life-affirming.
Throughout the rally Donald Trump engaged in scripted violence and stochastic terrorism, telling his followers that the Democrats were going to hurt them and only he can protect them:







Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage and want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.
Trump wallowed in racist lies about threatening and dangerous “illegal aliens” and how the Democrats want to let them run amok, raping, killing and otherwise preying upon “real Americans” — primarily meaning white women. Trump played his goon card, bragging that his ICE shock-troops would round up millions of “illegal” (black and brown) immigrants across the country in the upcoming weeks. Trump’s people howled in delight. Eros, desire and violent lust are central to fascism. This is the libidinous aspect of political devotion between and among the followers and the leader in a cult of personality. Trumpism is no different.
Trump’s political carnival featured the usual attractions. Men pranced around shirtless in charismatic ecstasy at the thought of seeing Donald Trump in person. Women paraded about as deranged versions of Lady Liberty, apparently as teleported to Orlando out of a dark mirror universe. Trump’s masses were of course festooned in his MAGA regalia.

Overt white supremacists, or a close approximation thereof, marched in the streets outside the rally. There were plenty of right-wing extremists inside the Amway Center as well. This includes both honest, overt and unapologetic members of the White Right as well as those white conservatives who largely agree with the tenets of white supremacy, but choose to translate their hate into vaguely more palatable terms, such as “Make America Great Again” — or, as in Trump’s new version,”Keep America Great.” Evidently inspired by the Great Leader, one Trump fan assaulted a local news reporter.
ADVERTISEMENT

Report Advertisement

One cannot be a good person and continue to support Donald Trump. This is especially true of Trump’s most devoted acolytes.
Tuesday’s rally, and the Trump presidency more generally, are teachable moments about history in real time, especially for those who wonder how millions of people in Germany and elsewhere were beguiled to their own mass destruction by the rise of a charismatic authoritarian leader. It can happen here; In the form of Trumpism it is happening now.
Where is the mass resistance to Trump’s movement and his assault on American democracy and freedom? Why have some Americans chosen to surrender? How can psychology help to explain Trump’s assault on reality? How has the Mueller Report fueled Donald Trump’s apparent mental illness and other abhorrent and dangerous behavior? Can Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives be compelled to impeach Donald Trump? Will there be violence from Trump’s supporters if he is forced to leave office?
In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Dr. John Gartner, a former professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Gartner is also the founder of the Duty to Warn PAC, an organization working to raise awareness about the danger to the United States and the world posed by Donald Trump. Gartner was a contributor to the 2017 bestseller book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” Along with two other expert mental health professionals, he wrote the recent USA Today op-ed “President Donald Trump’s poor mental health is grounds for impeachment.”
ADVERTISEMENT


Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. My conversation with Michael Wolff can also be listened to through the player below.
Where is the mass resistance to Donald Trump and his regime’s cruelty and assault on the rule of law? Have the American people been cowed into a state of learned helplessness and submission?
I am sure you have had many conversations with people who simply can’t take this situation anymore with Donald Trump and what is happening in this country. They have to turn off the TV. I understand that feeling. Stress at a certain point actually becomes physically and mentally destructive. There is only so much stress that a person can endure before they actually start having a physical or mental breakdown. Part of this lack of activity against Trump is a function of simple self-protection — it is a like a circuit breaker, where at a certain point it stops the electricity because there will be a fire. All human beings have a mental circuit breaker.
This impulse to self-protection is normal. People feel helpless. They do not know what else they can do in this moment. They feel like they do not have control over what is happening and they can’t let it kill them.
ADVERTISEMENT


I had the pleasure of speaking with novelist Jonathan Lethem recently, and he made a powerful and profound observation. He said there is a whole industry around Donald Trump that’s committed to keeping him in his dream, meaning Fox News and the right-wing news media echo chamber. Donald Trump is dreaming and the American people are all stuck in it.
That is related to a concept known as “malignant normality.” The noted psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton introduced it to describe how in a country like Nazi Germany the dangerous and crazy views of the leader can eventually become the normal reality of a whole society.
In psychiatry there is a condition known as folie à deux, which describes how two people share a psychosis. This almost never happens. It is very rare. But on a massive societal level this is when there is a delusion that millions of people share. This delusion becomes its own reality. The people imbibe it and then reinforce this alternate reality among each other. In Rwanda, how did genocide suddenly occur among people who the other day had been previously living in peace? A shared mass delusion. In the United States we are discovering that reality is more fungible and easy to manipulate than most of us realized. With Fox News and Donald Trump, it is possible to create a nightmare fantasy and make it real.
Donald Trump routinely uses scripted violence and eliminationist rhetoric to encourage his supporters to target his enemies. Trump’s presidency has been associated with a large increase in political violence by his supporters — some of it lethal. There has been an increase in the number of hate crimes and white right-wing extremist groups that is directly correlated with the rise of Trumpism.
ADVERTISEMENT


If Trump is removed from office — either through impeachment or the 2020 election — I have no doubt he will cause mayhem in this country. If Donald Trump orders his followers to “fight back,” there will be a wave of domestic terrorism in the United States. Many of these plans are likely already in motion.
I agree. Under Donald Trump America is heading towards greater violence. I have no doubt about it.
Two years ago I was comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. People didn’t believe me. They thought I was being hyperbolic, exaggerating. They couldn’t believe that Trump would build concentration camps. Well, he is doing it now. They’re not death camps, but the definition of a concentration camp is where you are concentrating one element of the population that you consider to be undesirable and therefore need to be segregated and imprisoned. In this case it is undocumented immigrants, primarily from Latin America, who are being put in these concentration camps. The original plan was for Donald Trump to put hundreds of thousands of people in these camps. Trump’s administration is still pursuing that policy.
Part of Trump’s plan is that we will soon, in the United States, going to start having experiences where you are eating dinner in a restaurant, and then Trump’s ICE enforcers will come into the restaurant and pull someone out of the kitchen and most people will just continue eating like nothing happened that is wrong or aberrant. It will be, “Oh yeah, it’s the ICE police, they’re just dragging people off and putting them in buses and driving them to camps.” America under Trump is not far from that situation. It is what Donald Trump wants to do.
ADVERTISEMENT


If Donald Trump wins re-election in 2020, which is very possible, you are going to see people being dragged off the street and put in camps.
Donald Trump’s regime is planning to use the Insurrection Act to allow the U.S. military to operate across this country, particularly in major Democratic-controlled cities, to arrest and imprison black and brown “illegal aliens.” This should be a major story but it has been overlooked by most American mainstream media outlets. Trump has also publicly bragged to his supporters that there will be mass arrests across the United States where millions of “illegal aliens” will be put in his concentration camps. ICE enforcers are also doing this, grabbing people from courts, schools, weddings, churches, and waiting for people to walk out of their jobs to arrest them. What can good Americans do about this? Where is the outrage?
People of conscience need to go to Democratic representatives’ offices and chain ourselves there. We need to basically say, “You can arrest us, but we’re not leaving until you vote to open an impeachment inquiry.”
We elected this Democratic Congress to save us from this monster. Instead, they have allowed themselves to be stymied, neutered and cowed. Each day they don’t open an impeachment inquiry Trump becomes more normalized, more powerful and emboldened to do even worse. They worry about backlash if they impeach. Wait till those who knocked on doors for them come back to occupy their offices in protest and rage, and they will learn what a real backlash feels like.
ADVERTISEMENT


The Republicans keep winning elections by inflaming their base. A vast majority of Democrats want impeachment. People are experiencing extreme stress because they can’t stand another day of this corrupt lunatic Donald Trump running amok. And what happens? The Democrats are doing nothing. They’re being weak.
Somehow they think by being weak and ineffectual it is some clever political strategy. It isn’t. No one will respect the Democrats if they follow such a weak strategy.
History is watching. In a crisis some individuals and groups rise to the challenge and others do nothing. I am very worried about how the Democratic Party under Trump will be remembered by history. “Political convenience” and what is “practical” or “expedient” is just another way of describing cowardice.
The Democrats are hiding. They are cowards. They do not seem to know how to fight or when to fight. If these Democrats are so weak that they are not willing to stand up and defend the Constitution, why would anyone believe in them? Do they think anyone’s going to believe in them? It’s appalling.
ADVERTISEMENT


History will indeed judge the Democrats for this. And why are they behaving this way? Because they’re looking at polls which say a majority of people don’t want impeachment? Guess what? The majority of Americans didn’t want to impeach Nixon when that impeachment inquiry began. Then support doubled. Why? Because they had the courage to start an impeachment investigation and then, as the evidence came out, more people turned against Nixon. The Democrats should not wait for the polls to tell them what to do. It is time to defend the Constitution.
The Mueller report should have ended Trump’s presidency. Instead Trump is standing tall. Based on his public behavior, what is Trump thinking right now?
Donald Trump is thinking that he can get away with anything. When Trump first heard about Mueller being named special counsel, he said, “This is the end of my presidency.” Trump thought it was curtains. Every day that his presidency is not ended Trump is realizing, “Oh my God, I actually can get away with this!” It emboldens him.
The Democrats do not understand that Donald Trump is running out the clock. The Democrats can go to court to fight Trump’s policies and assaults on the rule of law, but that takes too long. Every day that goes by where Donald Trump does not have to face consequences or be held accountable for his criminal, anti-constitutional behavior is another day when he says, “Hey, guess what? I got away with it! Let’s try going a little further.”
ADVERTISEMENT


America is not in a static situation. Donald Trump’s presidency is a coup in process. It’s happening right now.
Trump’s Republican enablers are becoming more corrupt and also becoming more emboldened to do things that support his cause. Not only do Trump and the Republicans want to use the Department of Justice as a shield, they want to use it as a sword. Trump and the Republicans are going to go after their political enemies using the criminal justice system.
What prompted your recent USA Today editorial — which was one of the most read pieces on their site for a week or so — about Donald Trump’s mental health and impeachment?
For some time mental health professionals have publicly been trying to sound the alarm about Donald Trump and how he should be removed from the presidency under the 25th Amendment. What prompted the recent USA Today editorial, which I wrote along with my colleagues Dr. David Reiss and Dr. Steven Buser, was the bizarre meeting between Pelosi, Schumer and Trump, where Trump had a temper tantrum. According to witnesses, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, literally bangs the table and walks out without having a conversation. Trump then goes out to the Rose Garden, spews lies, and basically says, “I’m not going to do my job unless they stop the investigation.”
ADVERTISEMENT

Nancy Pelosi described Trump as exhibiting mentally disturbed behavior. Trump was basically acting in a way that was crazy. Pelosi suggested that Donald Trump could perhaps take a leave of absence or someone should do an intervention. So at this point the Democrats are overtly saying that Donald Trump is psychologically impaired and so sick and disturbed that he is actually incapable of doing his job. That is a reason to consider impeachment. Donald Trump is crazy, dangerous and disordered. This is an urgent situation, an emergency.
What will happen next if Donald Trump continues with his behavior and the United States stays this course?
I think what the American people and the world need to understand is that Donald Trump’s coup is almost complete. Congress is the last line of defense. Instead of fighting back the Democrats are going to let him proceed. The Democrats are saying, “We’re not going to fight Donald Trump. We’re going to wait until the next game. The next election is almost here. We’ll win that one.”
The reality is that the United States may be getting to a point where there will not be another free and fair election because of Russian hacking and Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s unwillingness to protect the country. Not only did Donald Trump collude with Russia and its agents for the first attack on the American electoral system in 2016, he is now using his power as president to open the door even wider for the next attack in 2020.




















</B>
 

rahu

Banned



https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/tr...utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=413


Trump tweets bizarre graphic showing himself as the leader for over 50,000 years<

trump-open-mouth-afp.jpg






President Donald Trump appeared to try to turn the attention back to him in a series of bizarre Wednesday night tweets.
In one, he promoted a fake TIME magazine graphic showing himself running for office for the next 1,000 years. Trump, who has a history of creating fake TIME magazine covers, didn’t comment on it, but it showed the campaign yard sign saying, “Trump 2020, Trump 2024, 2028,” well into the year 3,000 to 40,000 and beyond.


Report Advertisement


It then says “Trump 4Eva.”
Trump has made casual “jokes” about being jealous at the Chinese president, who he refers to as a “king.”

“He said, ‘But I am not king, I am president.’ I said ‘No, you’re president for life, and therefore you’re king’,” Trump told a fundraising audience in April.







‘We are in a mess’: Karl Rove admits the GOP is only Trump’s personality cult right now




FNC_04-23-2018_10.15.40.jpg

Karl Rove, best known for his work as former President George W. Bush's top political strategist, made a surprising admission this week about the state of the Republican Party.
The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf reports that Rove and National Review editor Rich Lowry recently had a panel discussion about the future of the Republican Party in which Rove acknowledged that President Donald Trump has taken total hold of the party's identity.
"He has an enormously strong hold on the rank and file of the Republican Party," he said. "It’s very high and it's durable... He's our leader now, and if people attack him, we rally to him. The average Republican says that he's my guy."

Continue Reading



Paul Krugman busts GOP as much closer to fascism than Democrats are to socialism




trump_benito.jpg

According to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the Republican Party is going to stake their 2020 elections on accusing Democrats of being "socialists" in the hopes it will fire up the portion of the conservative base that still remembers when socialism was a red-meat devastating attack in American elections.
In his column, the Nobel Prize-winning economist ridiculed the notion and -- using how the GOP has acted since Donald Trump was ensconced in the Oval Office -- suggested that the GOP is a lot closer to becoming a fascist party than the Democrats are of full-fledged socialism.

Continue Reading





 
Last edited:

rahu

Banned
a cultural period of law and morality is ending. With the dragon’s tail moving across the pluto/Saturn conjunction, the greed and perversion of the Black Magicians are now on the ascent.
the Saturn/pluto midpoint will be conjunct to the transiting south node on 4/16/19 PDLT then the south node will be conjunct Saturn on13:23 PDLT on april 30.then on july 3rd Saturn will be conjunct the south node again.
look for more assassinations of those who are trying to shed light on this epochal evil surrounding us. in this period with the south node transiting Pluto and Saturn in april, I think that assassination and murders ill be used to silence.I think trump is finally realizing his lies will no longer fly.
so I expect trump to make a very dramatic move when Saturn is conjunct the south node on july 3.it seems like something very forceful... he might begin to take on actually dictatorial powers by executive proclamation.expect the death of many who oppose him and Netanyahu/Rothschild's.

,









Trump moves to take unchecked power: Article II of the Constitution ‘allows me to do whatever I want’

This-Week-on-Twitter.jpg




  • President Donald Trump insisted in a recent interview that he chose not to “go around firing everybody” during the Russia investigation because it did not “work out too well” for President Richard Nixon, who resigned from office. He also said that the U.S. Constitution allows him to do “whatever I want.”
    In an interview on ABC, host George Stephanopoulos noted that the special counsel’s report said that Trump had ordered his White House counsel to fire Robert Mueller.

    “Number one, I was never going to fire Mueller,” Trump insisted. “I never suggested firing Mueller.”
    “That’s not what [the special counsel] says,” the ABC host interrupted.
    “I don’t care what he says,” Trump snapped.


    “Why would [the White House counsel] lie under oath?” Stephanopoulos wondered.

    “Because he wanted to make himself look like a good person,” Trump argued. “Number one, I didn’t. He wasn’t fired. But more importantly, Article II [of the Constitution] allows me to do whatever I want. Article II would have allowed me to fire him.”
    “I wasn’t going to fire him,” the president added. “You know why? Because I watched Richard Nixon go around firing people and that didn’t work out too well.”
    Watch the video below from ABC.
    Continue Reading
 
Top