Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Donald Trump Wants Judges to Throw the Election to Him. Buckle Up.

Trump is supercharging a vote-suppression strategy pioneered by Roger Stone decades ago. His legal stunts won’t work if Joe Biden resoundingly defeats him. But if the election is close, expect litigation until the bitter end.

Long before Roger Stone was convicted, sentenced, and spared from prison for his many lies to Congress on behalf of Donald Trump, he built a name helping Republicans suppress the votes of their opponents by claiming, without evidence, that they were cheaters. In 1981, Stone led an effort in New Jersey to have armed vigilantesmonitor polling locations in Black and Latino communities, all in the name of so-called ballot security and voter-fraud prevention. What was prevented instead was actual voting: The operation was so egregious, the Republican National Committee ended up getting sued in federal court and slapped with a consent decree that, for nearly 40 years, prohibited similar dirty tricks to intimidate voters.

The old is new again. No longer bound by judicial orders after a judge lifted the consent decree in 2018, Republicans are now free to resume poll-watching and much more, this time led by a ringmaster with a megaphone far louder than Stone’s: a president who’s loudly claiming that the election will be rigged against him, and that the only way to unrig it is if he wins—or refuses to lose—no matter the cost to the nation. One advocate with Fair Fight, the voting-rights group formed by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams, has called this the “burn-it-down strategy.”

In Trump’s mind, burning it all down means many things. It means delegitimizing mail-in voting, which many states have expanded out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic. It means making baseless claims of widespread fraud, which undermines confidence in the process and may lead to people staying home. And it means signaling to goon squads that support Trump to watch the polls “very carefully” on November 3, as Trump suggested during his first debate with Joe Biden. Independent of the election results, the president has also raised doubts about the peaceful transfer of power and telegraphed that he’d declare himself the winner prematurely, which election officials are warning against but Trump allies are encouraging. Continue reading.

Ex-State Dept. official who leaked Pentagon Papers: Trump is an ‘enemy of the Constitution’

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A former U.S. Defense and State Department official is speaking out and urging progressives to vote for Democratic presidential Joe Biden due to President Donald Trump’s threat to the Constitution.

Daniel Ellsberg published an op-ed in the Detroit Metro Times asking the American public to back Biden in the upcoming presidential election. Ellsberg, who identifies as a progressive voter who initially supported Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) presidential campaign, admitted that Biden was not his first candidate of choice.

While Ellsberg expressed concern about Trump’s repeated dismissals of climate change warnings, he also stressed how important it is to combat the growing threat to the United States’ democracy.

“More urgently, we’re facing an authoritarian threat to our democratic system of a kind we’ve never seen before,” Ellsberg said. “Right now he is even casting unwarranted doubt on the validity of mail-in ballots, and in other ways as well putting in question for the first time in our history whether he would peacefully leave office after a full-accounting of votes cast by Election Day gave the majority in the Electoral College to his opponent.” Continue reading.

Trump takes one more step toward becoming an autocrat — and it hardly makes a ripple

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While the Republican Party, now stripped of everything but con men and fascist sycophants, drones on about What The Constitution Means To Them in virus-infected Senate hearings, they have closed their ears and pretended, to a person, not to notice Donald Trump going full authoritarian by flat-out demanding the arrest of his political enemies. You know, on Twitter. As one does.

The New York Times has taken notice, at least, providing an assortment of historians and past officials to warn in very polite terms that this is absolutely batshit crazy, that Trump is absolutely performing as an authoritarian, and that we absolutely are going down a dangerous road. No, it is not normal that Trump is getting visibly impatient with his allied attorney general, William Barr, for not producing the evidence necessary to prosecute his Democratic enemy. No, it is not normal for ex-House Republican and lifelong cretin Mike Pompeo to use his State Department perch (granted, it’s not like he’s using it for anything else) to push out “more” Hillary Clinton emails in the three weeks before the election.

(That Trump still considers “Hillary Clinton emails” to be an election-bending move, as an aside, is beside the point. Yes, he’s an idiot. Yes, he’s hopelessly obsessed with his own pet grievances, and is reliant on the whole rest of his party to be obsessed with those same grievances, and on conservative media to make them obsessed again whenever it’s becoming clear that the base is getting bored.) Continue reading.

Alarm grows over Trump team’s efforts to monitor polls

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Concern over voter intimidation is growing among Democrats and some observers as the Trump campaign calls for poll watchers to be dispatched across the country.

President Trump‘s reelection campaign argues that poll watchers are essential in combating voter fraud, despite a number of studies failing to find widespread evidence of voter fraud at polling sites or by mail.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden over the weekend suggested that voter intimidation could result in him losing the election. Continue reading.

Top general did not give his consent to be used in Trump political ad

The photo featuring Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley was used without the officer’s “knowledge or consent,” according to a defense official.

President Donald Trump’s campaign is running an online political ad that uses an image of his vice president, his Pentagon chief and his most senior military adviser watching the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the Situation Room on Oct. 29, 2019.

“President Trump wants you to request your ballot,” the ad says. Clicking on the ad, which includes the tagline “Paid for by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc,” leads to the Trump campaign’s voter sign-up page.

But the campaign didn’t seek approval from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley to use his image in the ad, a defense official said. “This photo, like many others, was not used with [Milley’s] knowledge or consent,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak about a sensitive topic. Continue reading.

New report details how Trump uses presidency to hand out favors to those that support his businesses

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The New York Times continues its reports on Donald Trump’s taxes, this time with (more) clear proof that Trump has been making money off the U.S. presidency.

The shortest possible summary of the Times‘ latest story is that Donald Trump Is A Crook. Not only have “customers” of Trump, in the form of lobbyists, interest groups, and foreign governments funneled roughly $12 million into Trump’s pockets by booking events at Trump’s properties, buying memberships into Mar-a-Lago and his other properties, and just generally hanging out at Trump’s for-profit establishments with the expectation of meeting either Trump, his sons, his toadies, or his allies, but Trump has responded in kind by doing his paying customers favors that can only be fulfilled using the office of the presidency.

If you pay for a Mar-a-Lago membership, you get to meet Trump during one of his many Florida weekends and bring up ways the government could do your company or group significant favors. If you do make those requests, it’s very possible that Trump will respond, reports the Times, by calling over one of his associates and telling them to get it done. Continue reading.

Mental health professionals: ‘Donald Trump suffers from a dangerous incurable narcissistic disorder’

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President Donald Trump’s mental fitness to hold office was the focus of a new op-ed published in the The Sydney Morning Herald by two mental health professionals.

The column was written by Ian Hughes, a senior research fellow at the MaREI Centre at University College Cork in Ireland and Alan D. Blotcky, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Birmingham, Alabama.

“For almost four years, there has hardly been a day that Donald Trump has not made front-page news,” they wrote. “Of all the thousands of headlines, there is one headline that has not been printed but that makes the most sense of all: ‘Donald Trump suffers from a dangerous incurable narcissistic disorder which makes him incapable of empathy or reason. He is a grave danger to the US and the world.'” Continue reading.

‘A Dear Leader approach’: Trump’s critics compare his shows of strength around coronavirus to authoritarian tactics

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President Trump was boarding Marine One at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a televised flight back to the White House on Monday when CNN analyst Brian Stelter called the dramatic images a “performative show of strength” from a president sickened by the coronavirus.

“This is the kind of thing you see from strongmen who want to appear to be leading — it’s a ‘Dear Leader’ sort of approach,” Stelter said, referring to the moniker of the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

Stelter wasn’t the only one to make the comparison in recent days. The actor and political activist George Takei questioned a lack of transparency from Trump’s physicians and joked on Twitter that his care was being handled by the “Dear Leader Cleanup Squad.” Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) ridiculed Trump’s appearance on Fox News with a doctor who vouched for his health: “What’s next? Is President Trump going to ask the press to refer to him as our ‘Dear ­Leader?’ ” Continue reading.

Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals

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President Trump took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.

President Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.

Mr. Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.

He took a step even Richard M. Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct, immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign. Continue reading.

Volunteer lawyers will advise military personnel who question the legality of orders during protests, election disputes

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A group of lawyers is offering advice to military and National Guard members who worry they may be given unlawful orders if deployed during protests or disputes over next month’s elections.

The Orders Project was formed in response to the use of force against protesters this summer in Lafayette Square, two of the founders said in an interview Friday.

The protests, which followed the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, prompted confusion among law enforcement and National Guard leaders. Some officials said they had no warning that the U.S. Park Police, which commanded the operation, planned to move against protesters and that the crowd could have been moved out of the area without the use of force. Continue reading.