Tag: Trump authoritarian tendencies

John Brennan: CIA Would Call U.S. ‘Very Corrupt’ If It Were Another Country

“It’s no longer a democracy if an autocrat has it in his hands,” the former CIA director warned.

Former CIA Director John Brennan said on Sunday that if the political turmoil plaguing the White House were happening in another nation, the American intelligence community would offer a grim assessment.

“We would look at it as a very corrupt government that is under the sway right now of this powerful individual who has been able to just corrupt the institutions and the laws of that country,” he told NBC News’ Chuck Todd during a “Meet the Press” appearance.

Brennan, who is now a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC, raised alarm over Republicans’ refusal to speak out against President Donald Trump, who allegedly sought foreign interference in the 2020 election, according to a whistleblower complaint filed in August by an anonymous member of the intelligence community.

View the complete October 6 article by Amy Russo on the Huffington Post website here.

Trump demands Schiff resign over account of Ukraine call

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Friday demanded House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “immediately” resign from Congress for reading what the congressman described as a parody of the president’s phone call with Ukraine’s leader that is at the center of a whistleblower complaint.

In a series of tweets early Friday, Trump accused Schiff of lying to Congress and “fraudulently” reciting a version of the call that made it “sound horrible” and made the president appear “guilty.”

He was supposedly reading the exact transcribed version of the call, but he completely changed the words to make it sound horrible, and me sound guilty,” Trump tweeted.

View the complete September 27 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

How the tyrant in the White House just took our government to a new depth of depravity

AlterNet logoTo me, it feels ice-tinglingly creepy that the U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu in Washington wants to bring criminal charges against former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

The charge, basically that McCabe lied about a leak to a reporter, seems to come nowhere near close to supporting a criminal charge after 18 months of investigation, an expired grand jury and public humiliation for McCabe in firing him two days short of his professional resignation, killing off his pension. It seems that even a grand jury has decided not to react to the prosecution’s call for indictment.

But that’s not what’s wrong here. It is the White House squeezing the Justice Department to do its political bidding.

View the complete September 20 article by Terry H. Schwadron of Raw Story and DC Report on the AlterNet website here.

Reporter reveals how Trump managed to get ‘the presidency he has always wanted’

AlterNet logoWhen the media reported last week that former National Security Advisor John Bolton was leaving the Trump Administration — either because he quit or because President Donald Trump fired him — it was obvious that Bolton had grown increasingly frustrated with the president. But Bolton was hardly the only member of Trump’s administration who became fed up: everyone from former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to former Defense Secretary James Mattis has complained that Trump couldn’t stand it when someone disagreed with him. And journalist Nancy Cook, in a report for Politico, asserts that Trump now has the type of administration he wants: an administration of loyalists and sycophants.

“After four national security advisers, three chiefs of staff, three directors of oval office operations and five communications directors, the president is now finding the White House finally functions in a way that fits his personality,” Cook reports. “Trump doubters have largely been ousted, leaving supporters to cheer him on and execute his directives with fewer constraints than ever before.”

Some previous presidents have been criticized by their supporters for being too quick to take the word of key advisers. President George W. Bush, for example, was sometimes criticized for being too quick to go along with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on foreign policy; President Barack Obama was criticized by some of his supporters for being overly reliant on former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on economic policy. But with Trump, a common complaint is that he could care less what advisers have to say.

View the complete September 19 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

As Trump prepares big push on homelessness, White House floats new role for police

Washington Post logoWhite House economists said Monday that police officers could be used as part of an intensifying effort to address a recent spike in homelessness, but they declined to offer more specifics as to what role law enforcement might play.

The comments were part of a White House report that formalized and escalated the administration’s push to address the spike in homelessness, particularly in California, which the Trump administration has largely blamed on Democrats.

The report was written by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and comes a day before President Trump is expected to visit California. A number of senior White House advisers visited California last week to study the increase in homelessness there, and they have spent months discussing what role the federal government could play to intervene. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is also expected to visit the state this week as part of the push.

View the complete September 16 article by Jeff Stein on The Washington Post website here.

From ‘my generals’ to ‘my Kevin,’ Trump’s preferred possessive can be a sign of affection or control

Washington Post logoThe Debrief: An occasional series offering a reporter’s insights

President Trump has used it with groups and individuals. He has used it for family members and employees. And he has bestowed it on Washington politicians and middle-of-the-country farmers.

For Trump, the possessive pronoun “my” is a term of endearment — one he dispenses with freely, from “my generals” to “my Peter” Navarro, one of the president’s senior economic advisers, to “my little Melania,” his wife.

Trump uses the pronoun affectionately, part of an almost subconscious effort to shine warmth on someone in his orbit, say current and former aides, who describe the linguistic tic as a doting gesture. But others say the habit can also seem belittling and, for Trump, that it may be as much about dominance and control as familiarity.

View the complete September 16 article by Ashley Parker on The Washington Post website here.

The Trump depression: Experts see a serious psychological depression taking hold in America. Here’s how to fight it

AlterNet logoReviewing “Trump’s Wacky, Angry, and Extreme August” on Twitter, the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser said the experience “was exhausting, a dark journey to a nasty and contentious place.” But that’s hardly news: it’s a place we live in every day. We try to turn the volume down and ignore it, and that may work for a while. But it won’t last. It can’t. It’s getting worse, and we can all see where we’re headed.

We know who Donald Trump admires, who he wants to be like — “president for life” as he keeps on telling us — and the countries they rule. Even as Trump insulted Americans and allies with abandon, Glasser noted, he found time to praise North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Americais nowhere near as bad as Brazil or China, much less North Korea. But our democracy is eroding significantly. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) tracks hundreds of attributes of democracy for 202 countries, spanning more than two centuries. Its 2019 report found that “24 countries are now severely affected by what is established as a ‘third wave of autocratization,’” an erosion of democratic rights “that has slowly gained momentum since the mid 1990s. … Among them are populous countries such as Brazil, India and the United States.”

View the complete September 15 article by Paul Rosenberg from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

The ‘divine right’ presidency: Trump has identified the USA with himself and claimed unprecedented powers to do whatever he wants

AlterNet logoTrump’s latest use of our government to cover up his mistakes, this time about weather forecasting, is revealing about the nature of his Presidency.

No government weather maps showed Hurricane Dorian threatening Alabama. On Thursday, August 29, Trump was briefed in the Oval Office on the Hurricane by the head of FEMA, which released a photo of him looking at a map of where Dorian had been and where it was headed. A white curved line showed the areas that Dorian might possibly hit. Not Alabama.

Early Saturday morning, August 31, the National Hurricane Center realized that Dorian was not going to hit Florida directly, and threat projections were shifted further east. The next morning, Sunday, at 7:51 AM Trump tweeted the following: “In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

View the complete September 15 article from the History News Network on the AlterNet website here.

‘Where’s my favorite dictator?’: Trump reportedly stunned a room with a deeply revealing joke

AlterNet logoA new report from the Wall Street Journal revealed Friday that President Donald Trump is just as indifferent to democracy and tactless behind closed doors as he seems in public.

Reporters Nancy Youssef, Vivian Salama, and Michael Bender found that ahead of a meeting last month in France with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, Trump loudly boomed: “Where’s my favorite dictator?”

The Journal explained:

“The witnesses said they believed the president made the comment jokily, but said his question was met by a stunned silence.

It couldn’t be determined whether Mr. Sisi was present or hear the remark.”

View the complete September 13 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Federal appeals court reinstates Trump emoluments case

Axios logoThe Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Friday a lawsuit that accused President Trump of violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, per Bloomberg.

Why it matters: The decision dredges up one of the president’s most persistent ongoing legal threats. It’s a high-level ruling for such a case and could force the president to defend himself in court because only an expanded version of the Second Circuit or the Supreme Court could overturn the decision.

  • The case was originally brought by Trump’s business rivals in New York, but was dismissed by a lower-level federal judge in December 2017.

The big picture: This isn’t the only emoluments-linked case that the president has faced.

View the complete September 13 article on the Axios website here.