Fascism

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That evidence comes courtesy of ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, who has unearthed a memorandum from Johnny McEntee, Trump’s director of presidential personnel, listing 14 reasons for ousting Esper. That document was dated Oct. 19, 2020. Three weeks later Esper was fired by a Trump tweet.

The very premise of McEntee’s memo was both sinister and ludicrous — a 30-year-old of no professional or intellectual distinction, whose path to power was carrying Trump’s bags, was making the case for getting rid of a senior Cabinet officer for insufficient loyalty to the president. This revealing and chilling document deserves to be read not as a historical curiosity but as a terrible portent of what could be in store if Trump wins another term. He appears determined to turn the military into his personal goon squad.

One of McEntee’s first complaints was that Esper had “approved the promotion of Lt. Col. [Alexander] Vindman, the start [sic] witness in the sham impeachment inquiry, who told Congress that the President’s call with Ukraine ‘undermined U.S. national security.’” No one has challenged the veracity of Vindman’s testimony, which was delivered under oath. Yet Trump, acting through McEntee, seemed intent on carrying out what Vindman described in a Post op-ed as “a campaign of bullying, intimidation and retaliation” for daring to tell the truth.

The next item in the indictment of Esper: “Publicly opposed the President’s direction to utilize American force to put down riots just outside the White House.” This was a reference to Esper’s brave decision in June 2020 to resist Trump’s desires to deploy active-duty troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests...

The most damning and telling grievance against Esper was near the bottom of this pathetic document: “When he assumed his role, he vowed to be apolitical.” Normally being apolitical is a sine qua non for leading the armed forces. That’s why President Biden chose retired Gen. Lloyd Austin as defense secretary and President Barack Obama decided to keep Republican Robert M. Gates in the post. But Trump tried to destroy the professional, apolitical ethos of the armed forces — and if given the opportunity, he will almost certainly do so again.

Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker recounted in their book “I Alone Can Fix It” Milley’s well-grounded worries after the election about Trump’s mounting a coup. “They may try, but they’re not going to f---ing succeed,” the general reportedly told a friend. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”


Well, the next time around, Trump would want to ensure that the “guys with guns” are on his side. If he wins a second term, Trump’s next defense secretary (Johnny McEntee perhaps?) would almost certainly be somebody more devoted to him than to the Constitution. For anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy, that should be a cause of considerable alarm at a time when Trump and Biden are running almost neck and neck in polling matchups.

Opinion | A newly disclosed memo reveals Trump’s plot to turn the military into his personal goon squad - The Washington Post

• Esper was Trump's Defense secretary, a Trump loyalist but apparently not loyal enough..
  

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A Wisconsin jury acquitted teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse on homicide charges on Friday, and one of the far-right MAGA Republicans who is celebrating the verdict is Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The North Carolina congressman is even offering the 18-year-old Rittenhouse an internship, inspiring plenty of negative reactions on Twitter. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida has offered Rittenhouse an internship as well. Cawthorne, sounding delighted, declared, "Kyle Rittenhouse is not guilty, my friends. You have a right to defend yourself. Be armed, be dangerous, and be moral."

‘Be armed, be dangerous’: Madison Cawthorn horrifies viewers with his celebration of the Rittenhouse verdict - Alternet.org

• A 17-year-old can walk around with an AK-47, play vigilante, shoot three people, and be a hero and role model..
  

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Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, stoked outrage on Sunday by predicting members of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack will be imprisoned if Republicans retake the chamber this year.

Outrage as Newt Gingrich says Capitol attack investigators could be jailed | Republicans | The Guardian

• You read that right..
  

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Jamie Raskin says Trump has ‘essentially’ admitted to January 6 crimes Republicans on the January 6 committee are facing more resistance than ever as the panel continues to reveal how Donald Trump pursued conspiracies that his own advisers knew were bunk. Rep Adam Kinzinger has published evidence of vivid death threats he has received in recent weeks in response to the panel’s work, which he said was unprecedented in his congressional career.

Elsewhere, a top ally of Donald Trump in his bid for loyalists in the Republican US Senate caucus stoked controversy on Monday with the release of a new ad declaring “RINO”-hunting season. In a shocking video posted to Twitter and Facebook, Missouri’s Eric Greitens poses with a squad of heavily-armed men in military gear as they storm an empty house. The hard-right Republican then declares that the party needs to purge itself of so-called “RINOs”. “Order your RINO hunting permit today!” his campaign declared on Twitter. Mr Greitens is running in a crowded GOP primary for the Republican nomination to the US Senate; a GOP candidate is favoured to win in the state, but polling shows him only a few points ahead of the most likely Democratic challengers.

Jan 6 hearings – live: Kinzinger shares death threat against him and family as Facebook bans Eric Greitens ad

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Tuesday’s hearing of the House select committee probing the January 6 attack on the US Capitol ended with perhaps the single most emotional segment in the hearings to date: a mother-daughter team of former Georgia poll workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, discussing what it was like to be singled out as part of former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that the election was stolen — and that poll workers like Moss and Freeman were involved in the plot. In doing so, they highlighted a serious and ongoing threat to American democracy...

The result was a wave of harassment that ruined the two women’s lives. Moss testified that she received “a lot of threats, wishing death upon me — telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like ‘be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’” She went into hiding and said she gained 60 pounds from the stress. Trump supporters attacked her grandmother’s home, barging in and “exclaiming that they were coming in to make a citizens arrest.” Freeman, for her part, used to proudly wear T-shirts with her nickname — “Lady Ruby” — on them. “Now,” she testified in a videotaped deposition, “I won’t even introduce myself by my name anymore.” She continued: There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen, who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.

While Moss and Freeman were special targets of Trump and Giuliani, they were not the only poll workers to experience vicious harassment in the last election cycle. A 2021 survey found that 17 percent of America’s local election officials experienced threats due to their jobs during the 2020 election cycle. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told me last year that this was very far from normal prior to 2020.

Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman: January 6 testimony reveals threat to democracy - Vox

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Today Republicans are still falling over themselves to prove their loyalty to him by outdoing each other in extremism. On 19 August, a Republican candidate for Florida’s state assembly even took to Twitter to call for violence against federal law enforcement officials. “Under my plan,” Luis Miguel tweeted, “all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other [federal agents] ON SIGHT! Let freedom ring!”

Americans are starting to get it: we can’t let Trump – or Trumpism – back in office | Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut | The Guardian

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Robert Paxton described five stages of fascism in an article published in 1998 (he wrote an op-ed calling Trump a fascist in 2021). These include:

• Group primacy over individual rights.
  
• Group purity.
  
• Group victimhood justifying attacks on enemies.
  
• Fear of “cosmopolitan liberalism.”
  
• Faith in authority of “natural male leaders.”
  

Jason Stanley writes of three essential features of fascism. They include “conjuring a mythic past” that the enemy has somehow destroyed, sowing division and attacking the truth with propaganda. This propaganda is usually particularly anti-intellectual. Does any of this sound familiar??

Why do the Republicans keep proving their 'semi-fascism'? - Alternet.org

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Former President Trump is facing a new political quagmire as Senate Democrats open an investigation into allegations he pressured the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate his political opponents. Former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman wrote in a new book that the Justice Department under Trump pushed his office to pursue criminal cases against former Secretary of State John Kerry and others viewed as political opponents of Trump.

Trump faces new legal problem in DOJ pressure allegations | The Hill

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No single strategy can handle the range of problems Trump faces. With some clever forum-shopping, he managed to get the FBI investigation into the hands of a judge whom he appointed late in his term—she was confirmed after the 2020 election—and whose rulings have baffled and appalled legal experts. But this is a stalling tactic, not a solution, and not every judge draw will be so lucky. A second strategy is to cry political persecution, which is good at rallying the minority of the population who already stands behind him but unlikely to win over those who don’t, especially because the claims are so unpersuasive.

This brings us to a third gambit: threats. If the people pursuing these criminal investigations into his conduct don’t back off, he warns, someone—not him, mind you—might do something dangerous. In this heads-I-win, tails-you-lose logic, the justice system can either exempt Trump from the rule of law or risk someone destroying it by other means. Nice democracy you’ve got here. Shame if someone tried to make it great again, again. In an interview yesterday, the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, a Trump critic turned flatterer, asked whether being criminally indicted would dissuade Trump from running for president in 2024. Trump took the answer in a dark direction.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Donald Trump’s mafia mind-set

“I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it,” he said. “I think if it happened, I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”
The implication was clear enough that Hewitt felt the need to throw Trump a preemptive lifeline: “You know that the legacy media will say you’re attempting to incite violence with that statement.”

“That’s not inciting,” Trump replied. “I’m just saying what my opinion is. I don’t think the people of this country would stand for it.” But there’s no need to believe he’s merely making an analytical judgment. Anyone else can see as clearly as Hewitt what Trump is doing. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has noted, Trump commonly uses this mob-boss-derived method: He speaks in fluent innuendo and implication, making his desires clear while leaving himself just enough vagueness to be able to smirkingly deny it.

Like a Mafia don’s warnings, this Don’s warnings serve as a kind of intimidation, trying to make authorities who care a great deal about the government, civil peace, and the reputations of their agencies (as Attorney General Merrick Garland clearly does) wonder whether it’s really worth enforcing the law against this particular would-be defendant. These threats might also actually occasion violence. By now, everyone—Trump, Hewitt, you, me—has seen this happen. Sometimes, the violence comes from mentally disturbed individuals who think they’re doing what Trump wants, such as Cesar Sayoc, who sent bombs to Trump critics shortly before the 2018 midterms, or Ricky Walter Shiffer, who was killed after attempting to attack an FBI office in Cincinnati just days after the Mar-a-Lago search.

Trump's Threats of Violence

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According to a new book "The Divider" by Peter Baker and Sharron Glasser, high-ranking executives at AT&T were furious with Donald Trump for attempting to strongarm the company into selling CNN to billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch starting back in late 2016. As reported by Business Insider, the two authors report Trump asked then-AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson to meet with him at Trump Tower shortly after his upset win in the 2016 presidential election. AT&T was, at the time, working on a merger with Time-Warner and, after Trump complained about CNN head Jeff Zucker, Stephenson left the meeting feeling that the incoming Trump administration would try to block the merger. The report notes that five months later Murdoch called Stephenson and asked, "“How’s the deal going?” before offering to purchase the network if it would help get a deal done quicker.

The book states that Stephenson reportedly told Murdoch, "Rupert, I’m not interested in selling." According to the Independent which received an early copy of the book, "...the Australian-born mogul would telephone a second time three months later, on the heels of a White House dinner with Mr Trump, his son-in-law turned adviser Jared Kushner, and the then White House chief of staff John Kelly," adding, "[Authors] Baker and Glasser report that AT&T believed the calls to be 'an implicit quid pro quo' in which Mr Trump would not push the government to block the merger if AT&T would divest its news channel to the owner of a competitor whose network was closely allied with the then president. They add that executives 'viewed it as crude, almost mob-style extortion'.'"

Trump accused of 'extortion' over attempt to force CNN sale to Rupert Murdoch: new book

• An often overlooked part of fascism, making business subservient to politics