This can not be said enough. Trump is at heart a coward. He'll never get his own hands dirty. A real "revolutionary" wouldn't have let his Secret Service Detail stop him from joining "his people" in overthrowing the government on Jan 6th. But Trump is infatuated with the idea of mayhem and violence committed on his behalf. The most sincere firm of flattery possible for a twisted, narcissistic, sociopath. Please keep sounding the alarm. We ignore it at our own peril.
Maya Angelou may have said that, but it was Masha Gessen, a Russian exile who said it first when *Rump ran in 2016. She had to flee Russia after exposing some of Putin’s atrocities.
What we really need to do is demand an end to the kid glove treatment Trump is receiving. Threats of violence against judges, juries, prosecutors and witnesses. Obvious theft of classified material. Passing nuclear secrets to foreigners. Any one of the multiple instances of any one of those that Trump has committed, in public, without shame or attempt to hide, would have gotten any one of us jailed pending trial. And with the body of evidence amassed to date, convicted and sent away for decades. Yet Trump continues to walk free. And continues to commit crimes in plain sight. This has to stop. And we need to demand that those with the power to do so, act. Enough is enough.
And if/when the MAGAs take to the streets, armed, treat them as police treated peaceful BLM protesters or Bull Connor met civil rights protesters - fire hoses, rubber bullets, deadly force if necessary. 99% of them are cosplaying bullies and will run home to Mommy when met with force. The rest can be rounded up and sent to prison with Trump.
This is panic mode for him. And his inflammatory rhetoric will get more heated as the pressure builds. Remember how so many hard right people lambasted liberals for being snowflakes? Trump is the ultimate snowflake. He can't stand even the slightest negative comment against him. And with all his legal troubles? He's so cornered that he's going to thrash about in some of the most incendiary ways possible.
Quote "Immigrants destroying the blood of our country…" Well, Donald Trump should know, because he is the grandchild of German immigrants who were refused repatriation to their native Bavaria because the grandfather had failed to complete his military service. And there is no doubt that the Trump (neè Drumpf) knows what he's talking about when he talks of immigrants bringing with them criminal behavior. In Trump's case, such criminality runs in the family. Trump and his children are the third and fourth generation Americans arising from immigrant stock whose propensities for criminality go back to their family's previous homeland in Bavaria. Truly, the man knows who he's talking about.
More particularly, I am greatly disturbed by yesterday evening's revelation that Trump engage in a casual conversation with a wealthy Australian businessman about the capabilities of American nuclear submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles at the outset of any armed conflict. This is the kind of stuff, have a Democratic president were to do that, what inside paroxysms of rage in Fox News and other right-wing media outlets; and it must have national security officials rolling their eyes and helpless rage over their inability to exercise any meaningful controls over the former president, whether he was in office, or afterward. The man with whom Trump was having a conversation about our nuclear submarine capabilities was a wealthy businessman who had the resources to be able to purchase access to Trump had his residence in Mar a Lago for just about any purpose whatsoever you might have, whether it was idle curiosity or in search of conversation over, say, drinks or snacks. We know about this because the information was passed on to people who notified American counterintelligence that this had occurred. For Trump, the opportunity to pass this information along was a wow factor with which he could impress his golf club guests; just a tidbit of gossip that he could pass along to let his guests know what an important fellow Trump was that he would be privy to that information!
The whole notion of Trump being able to do that, casually and mindlessly, is absolutely sickening. For my money, Donald Trump should be consigned to the deepest, darkest, and most inaccessible prison cell that we can find, and that his supporters in Congress should be automatically disqualified from holding office. They have already forfeited their right to hold office by reason of their conscious and intentional violations of the oath of office which each of them took when they became members of Congress.
My husband was a newly commissioned second lieutenant assigned to a nuclear defense battery in New York. We were newlyweds and lived on post for over a year. I knew there were nuclear missiles there but because it was Secret information, I was never told how many were there. Fort Tilden was not only decommissioned as a military installation, but into a federal park. He still maintained after 50+ years that it was classified and therefore not to be broadcast. He took his oath seriously. The Emperor of the MAGAs has only ever been faithful to one thing: himself.
Of equal concern is what a former DHS official said the other night on CNN(?) - that once a candidate has been designated in a primary election, s/he can/will begin receiving classified briefings. I don't know what law or regulation that may be based on but President Biden stopped tfg receiving classified briefings once he (Biden) was sworn in to office. Hope he can do the same for the designated Republican candidate although we all can foresee the political fallout from doing that. Should not stop Biden from doing so, however, because the security of the United States would be even more at hazard, especially with the current conflict in Israel.
I think Trump is devoid of humanity. He has not one redeeming quality and we have always been able to find at least one thing in most terrible humans that is a "deem" quality. Some little tiny anything.
He has not one and never has had even one redeeming feature. He's been running amok since the day he was born. He might as well exist in the galaxy where his empty vessel floats out there looking for something to richochet off, all the other planets, stars, dead stars and flotsam and jetsam that is out there whirling in space with the satellites to try tell himself he really has some worth and value. He is the end result of a lifetime of devolution and just nothingness that floats to bump into anything to prove to himself he exists. And he maybe be a nothingness but he's exposed a whole line of walking dead following right behind him cheering him on. We cannot let this ride, we can't ignore it, we can't put it in the back of our minds. This either stops now or there are a lot of other countries at different times and places in history that will repeat here. He's no better than any authoritarian or dictator or madman who has ever come before.
Chapter 11., Mein Kampf: “Everything we admire on this earth today—science and art, technology and inventions—is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race. ... All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning... All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the product of the Aryan..... The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew.” P1135809’s first wife claimed he kept a copy on his night table. Obviously, it is one of the very few books he has ever read.
Fact-checker: the book on Trump's side of the bed was "My New Order," (1941) a collection of Hitler's speeches published in English. See Marie Brenner's 1990 profile of Trump in Vanity Fair to learn which of Trump's business friends gave him the book, and Trump's non-denial denial to Brenner that he had read it. Another measure of Trump, the "man?" Brenner later recounted that some time after her piece was published, she was at a charity event in New York City also attended by Defendant Trump, and he poured a glass of wine down her dress.
Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler's Early Rhetoric and
Common Dreams
We're used to thinking of Hitler's Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn't take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump's bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. (Photo: photolibrarian/Flickr/cc)
The author, Burt Neuborne, is one of America’s top civil liberties lawyers, and questions whether federal government can contain Trump and GOP power grabs.
Steven Rosenfeld
Aug 09, 2019
A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s--when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019--an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority--is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies.
Neuborne doesn't make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU's national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
"Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?" he writes. "Partly it's just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it's hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln's house. But that's not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton's mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play."
A younger Trump, according to his first wife's divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler's pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches' impact on his era's press and politics. "Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation," Neuborne says.
"Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler's speeches--spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy," Neuborne says. "You see, we've seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump's rhetoric--as a candidate and in office--mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy."
Many Americans may seize or condemn Neuborne's analysis, which has more than 20 major points of comparison. The author repeatedly says his goal is not "equating" the men--as "it trivializes Hitler's obscene crimes to compare them to Trump's often pathetic foibles."
Indeed, the book has a larger frame: whether federal checks and balances--Congress, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College--can contain the havoc that Trump thrives on and the Republican Party at large has embraced. But the Trump-Hitler compilation is a stunning warning, because, as many Holocaust survivors have said, few Germans or Europeans expected what unfolded in the years after Hitler amassed power.
******* Read on for the twenty points of strong comparison Prof. Emeritus Neuborne made, all very much in the spirit of LKTIV's fine column, again raising the warnings about the threat posed by Trump and his sordid enablers and cult followers.
and let's face it...in a book of Hitler's speeches, there's gonna be a very, very high redundancy quotient (a usage pioneered by my old teacher, Allen Mandelbaum).
Yes and no, David, since it was an edited compilation with the goal of distilling the poison into the most toxic dosages, so to speak - but at the same time, hammering on a "Big Lie" and repeating it ad nauseam was definitely a hallmark of Hitler's fiendishly evil genius, as you note.
An easy mark. A Russian asset. A criminal mob boss. And I will never believe that ex "accidentally fell down her stairs." Nor that Melanoma deserved a genius visa.
When a sociopathic unhinged megalomaniac tells you something you should probably believe them.
What concerns me is just how normalized this kind of bat crap crazy speech has become so that both the right wing media but media in general report it without context and revulsion as to the corrosive effect it is having on social norms. The threat to execute a military officer who speaks his mind and redefining what he said as treasonous without pushback is only one example of how Trump is determined to brainwash as many Americans as possible to facilitate violence on his behalf.
And it is working. As many as half those who self define as Republicans are of the belief January 6 was a “political protest” and not an armed insurrection.
We are close to anarchy and none of the political leaders in either party are sounding the alarm.
Christine Blasey Ford has been the target of anonymous threats from late night telephone callers since she testified about Brent Kavanaugh. There must be thousands who suffer similarly because the former president has menaced them. Being cyber-crucified is life-changing. Why don't you write about that?
Another excellent newsletter. It gets scarier and scarier. You mentioned that Russia has something on him. I have had a theory about that for years. I'll give you a hint. It has to do with sex. Use your imagination. What could he have done that put him under Putin's control? Something he wouldn't want anyone to know about.
Here's a "deep background" link from a tradition nearly a hundred years old already before practiced against the visiting target, American real estate crook, I mean "real estate magnate," Donald J. Trump, in the 1980s.
The meaning will become clear once you've scanned even the chapter titles or the Wiki article I'll append.
^^^^^ This is the entire text, complete with espionage skullduggery from the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and South America by forerunners of the KGB, already routinely using KOMPROMAT to extort value from "the usual suspects": greedy foreign embassy staff willing to steal or temporarily purloin documents to be photographed,* incautious foreign embassy honchos willing to "dally in the valley" with Smolensk Sally, so to speak, and pay dearly for the experience by being coerced and blackmailed for years (if the victim didn't reach a breaking point and throw themselves on the mercy of their own government, or end it with a dangerous escape, suicide, even a shootout with the blackmailers), the so-called "Cambridge Five," who reached the highest echelons of British intelligence agencies, including MI6, even fooling the CIA's own counter-espionage maven James Jesus Angleton,** burrowing into the Manhattan Project, and much more.
The "Mitrokhin Archive" is a collection of handwritten notes, primary sources and official documents which were secretly made, smuggled, and hidden by the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin during the thirty years in which he served as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, he brought the archive with him, in six full trunks. His defection was not officially announced until 1999.[1]
The official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew,[2] wrote two books, The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005), based on material in the archives. The books provide details about many of the Soviet Union's clandestine intelligence operations around the world. They also provide specifics about Guy Burgess, a British diplomat with a short career in MI6, said to be frequently under the influence of alcohol; the archive indicates that he gave the KGB at least 389 top secret documents in the first six months of 1945 along with a further 168 in December 1949. [3]
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin originally started his career with the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (Foreign Espionage) in Undercover operations. After Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech, Mitrokhin became critical of the existing KGB system and was transferred from Operations to the Archives. Over the years, Mitrokhin became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, especially after the stories about the struggles of dissidents and the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which led him to conclude that the Soviet system was un-reformable.[7]
By the late 1960s, the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka Building became increasingly overcrowded, and the Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, authorized the construction of a new building outside of Moscow in Yasenevo, which was to become the new headquarters of the First Chief Directorate and all Foreign Operations. Mitrokhin, who was by that time the head of the Archives department, was assigned by the director of the First Directorate, Vladimir Kryuchkov, with the task of cataloging the documents and overseeing their orderly transfer to the new headquarters. The transfer of the massive archive eventually took over 12 years, from 1972 to 1984.[7][8][9]
Unbeknownst to Kryuchkov and the KGB, while cataloging the documents, Mitrokin secretly copied documents by hand, making immensely detailed notes, which he smuggled to his dacha and hid under the floorboards. Mitrokhin made no attempt to contact any Western intelligence service during the Soviet Era. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union (in 1992) he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the American embassy in Riga. Central Intelligence Agency officers there did not consider him to be credible, concluding that the copied documents could be faked. He then went to the British embassy and a young diplomat there saw his potential. After a further meeting one month later with representatives of MI6, operations followed to retrieve the 25,000 pages of files hidden in his house, covering operations from as far back as the 1930s.[7][8]
* Spies and spy cameras, highly suggestive evidence indeed:
Hemming Tapes
The Minox Camera
Gerry Patrick Hemming discusses the provenance of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Minox spy camera. Hemming’s sources indicate that the specific Minox camera found in Oswald’s room, following the assassination of JFK, bore the same serial number as the one Hemming had given to Eduardo Perez [aka: Bayo or Eddie Bayo]. According to Hemming, Richard Billings of Life magazine, gave Minox cameras and other equipment to him for the purpose of supplying them to “various groups” who were inserting recon teams into Cuba. This was done with the proviso that Life Magazine would have first pick of the photographs coming out of Cuba.
{ PHOTO Richard Billings of Life Magazine}
At the time that Oswald worked at Stovall Chiles, it had a section involved in making military maps of Cuba. Oswald had access to that section. Hemming speculates that Oswald may have been assigned the task of taking photographs of those maps. It should be further noted that Richard Billings was among the team who were present from Life when the film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder was purchased from him by the magazine.
"The best book ever written about the strangest CIA chief who ever lived." - Tim Weiner, National Book Award-winning author of Legacy of Ashes
A revelatory new biography of the sinister, powerful, and paranoid man at the heart of the CIA for more than three tumultuous decades.
CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton was one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States government in the mid-20th century, a ghost of American power. From World War II to the Cold War, Angleton operated beyond the view of the public, Congress, and even the president. He unwittingly shared intelligence secrets with Soviet spy Kim Philby, a member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring. He launched mass surveillance by opening the mail of hundreds of thousands of Americans. He abetted a scheme to aid Israel’s own nuclear efforts, disregarding U.S. security. He committed perjury and obstructed the JFK assassination investigation. He oversaw a massive spying operation on the antiwar and black nationalist movements and he initiated an obsessive search for communist moles that nearly destroyed the Agency.
In The Ghost, investigative reporter Jefferson Morley tells Angleton’s dramatic story, from his friendship with the poet Ezra Pound through the underground gay milieu of mid-century Washington to the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate scandal. From the agency’s MKULTRA mind-control experiments to the wars of the Mideast, Angleton wielded far more power than anyone knew. Yet during his seemingly lawless reign in the CIA, he also proved himself to be a formidable adversary to our nation’s enemies, acquiring a mythic stature w
In my sorta defense, I was for a few years in the previous century the west coast editor of Playboy, so I learned about things that Henry Miller et al never "taught" me. My hypothesis, perhaps too big a word for this subject, is that Felon Defendant Donny (FDD) did not request viewing the "procedure." I believe it was explained to him as women were so very excited by him. The other possibility depends on the Russians understanding just how ineffably stupid FDD was and is. FDD would have had to believe that the "Obama" bed on which Russian hookers were peeing was the bed on which Obama actually slept. I don't think you have to read John le Carre or Tom Clancy to assume immediately that the actual bed on which Obama slept in Russia --- all of it, bedding, linens, mattress, box spring, *AND* frame, would have been removed to labs for thorough analysis.
First, count me as one of those who ALSO read the Playboy interviews (Frank Sinatra? Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller, who ELSE was publishing interviews in arguably "mainstream American mass media outlet" with writers, philosophers, musicians, inventors, scientists, thespians, politicians, of that stature? The then current "no one reads Playboy for the articles" canard was a misleading half-truth at most; not only that, the stark contrast between the airbrushed Playmates of the Month and "real life women" was ALREADY a topic of conversation among readers in their teens and twenties before anyone needed to remind them of it - in other words, the preposterous assumption that readers/viewers/ voyeurs were constitutionally unable to discern the difference, says more about well-intentioned feminist critics of a certain stripe, than the actual effect of Playboy's photography. You'd need a different psychological model of conditioning to make the case those critics were trying to make, the goals of which I support, just not via that simplistic argument.
Secondly, take a look at this for more of the background in the "KOMPROMAT" operation on Trump, the FSB and Putin were undoubtedly primed to take every last advantage of Trump's massive vulnerabilities as a blackmail/extortion target:
The "Mitrokhin Archive" is a collection of handwritten notes, primary sources and official documents which were secretly made, smuggled, and hidden by the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin during the thirty years in which he served as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, he brought the archive with him, in six full trunks. His defection was not officially announced until 1999.[1]
***** The techniques almost certainly used against Trump were pioneered over many decades.
"For years, he claimed that his penthouse was on the 66th to 68th floors. Trump Tower has 58 stories."
In the scheme of things, this is small potatoes, because the number of floors in a building is not classified information. It is revelatory, however, of his instinct to lie -- about anything.
He is a walking collection of pathologies. His insecurities are constantly duking it out with his narcissism. No matter what he says, HE knows that old Fred did it all, and he has been, in his favorite phrase of derision, a loser. He will, however, go down in history, probably causing any Trump descendants to change their name.
This can not be said enough. Trump is at heart a coward. He'll never get his own hands dirty. A real "revolutionary" wouldn't have let his Secret Service Detail stop him from joining "his people" in overthrowing the government on Jan 6th. But Trump is infatuated with the idea of mayhem and violence committed on his behalf. The most sincere firm of flattery possible for a twisted, narcissistic, sociopath. Please keep sounding the alarm. We ignore it at our own peril.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” - Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou may have said that, but it was Masha Gessen, a Russian exile who said it first when *Rump ran in 2016. She had to flee Russia after exposing some of Putin’s atrocities.
Sorry to correct you Richard but Maya Angelou died in 2014 and that quote was attributed to her long before that.
What we really need to do is demand an end to the kid glove treatment Trump is receiving. Threats of violence against judges, juries, prosecutors and witnesses. Obvious theft of classified material. Passing nuclear secrets to foreigners. Any one of the multiple instances of any one of those that Trump has committed, in public, without shame or attempt to hide, would have gotten any one of us jailed pending trial. And with the body of evidence amassed to date, convicted and sent away for decades. Yet Trump continues to walk free. And continues to commit crimes in plain sight. This has to stop. And we need to demand that those with the power to do so, act. Enough is enough.
And if/when the MAGAs take to the streets, armed, treat them as police treated peaceful BLM protesters or Bull Connor met civil rights protesters - fire hoses, rubber bullets, deadly force if necessary. 99% of them are cosplaying bullies and will run home to Mommy when met with force. The rest can be rounded up and sent to prison with Trump.
This is panic mode for him. And his inflammatory rhetoric will get more heated as the pressure builds. Remember how so many hard right people lambasted liberals for being snowflakes? Trump is the ultimate snowflake. He can't stand even the slightest negative comment against him. And with all his legal troubles? He's so cornered that he's going to thrash about in some of the most incendiary ways possible.
It’s a reality that we all must rise up against…and defeat.
Quote "Immigrants destroying the blood of our country…" Well, Donald Trump should know, because he is the grandchild of German immigrants who were refused repatriation to their native Bavaria because the grandfather had failed to complete his military service. And there is no doubt that the Trump (neè Drumpf) knows what he's talking about when he talks of immigrants bringing with them criminal behavior. In Trump's case, such criminality runs in the family. Trump and his children are the third and fourth generation Americans arising from immigrant stock whose propensities for criminality go back to their family's previous homeland in Bavaria. Truly, the man knows who he's talking about.
More particularly, I am greatly disturbed by yesterday evening's revelation that Trump engage in a casual conversation with a wealthy Australian businessman about the capabilities of American nuclear submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles at the outset of any armed conflict. This is the kind of stuff, have a Democratic president were to do that, what inside paroxysms of rage in Fox News and other right-wing media outlets; and it must have national security officials rolling their eyes and helpless rage over their inability to exercise any meaningful controls over the former president, whether he was in office, or afterward. The man with whom Trump was having a conversation about our nuclear submarine capabilities was a wealthy businessman who had the resources to be able to purchase access to Trump had his residence in Mar a Lago for just about any purpose whatsoever you might have, whether it was idle curiosity or in search of conversation over, say, drinks or snacks. We know about this because the information was passed on to people who notified American counterintelligence that this had occurred. For Trump, the opportunity to pass this information along was a wow factor with which he could impress his golf club guests; just a tidbit of gossip that he could pass along to let his guests know what an important fellow Trump was that he would be privy to that information!
The whole notion of Trump being able to do that, casually and mindlessly, is absolutely sickening. For my money, Donald Trump should be consigned to the deepest, darkest, and most inaccessible prison cell that we can find, and that his supporters in Congress should be automatically disqualified from holding office. They have already forfeited their right to hold office by reason of their conscious and intentional violations of the oath of office which each of them took when they became members of Congress.
My husband was a newly commissioned second lieutenant assigned to a nuclear defense battery in New York. We were newlyweds and lived on post for over a year. I knew there were nuclear missiles there but because it was Secret information, I was never told how many were there. Fort Tilden was not only decommissioned as a military installation, but into a federal park. He still maintained after 50+ years that it was classified and therefore not to be broadcast. He took his oath seriously. The Emperor of the MAGAs has only ever been faithful to one thing: himself.
Just for that anyone else would get the noose.
He should be in pre-trial detention before he blabs and shows off any more classified material.
Of equal concern is what a former DHS official said the other night on CNN(?) - that once a candidate has been designated in a primary election, s/he can/will begin receiving classified briefings. I don't know what law or regulation that may be based on but President Biden stopped tfg receiving classified briefings once he (Biden) was sworn in to office. Hope he can do the same for the designated Republican candidate although we all can foresee the political fallout from doing that. Should not stop Biden from doing so, however, because the security of the United States would be even more at hazard, especially with the current conflict in Israel.
I tend to think that security briefings are a courtesy to the candidate, in which case Trump is ineligible on account of his past behavior.
Makes sense to me. Hope you're right.
I think Trump is devoid of humanity. He has not one redeeming quality and we have always been able to find at least one thing in most terrible humans that is a "deem" quality. Some little tiny anything.
He has not one and never has had even one redeeming feature. He's been running amok since the day he was born. He might as well exist in the galaxy where his empty vessel floats out there looking for something to richochet off, all the other planets, stars, dead stars and flotsam and jetsam that is out there whirling in space with the satellites to try tell himself he really has some worth and value. He is the end result of a lifetime of devolution and just nothingness that floats to bump into anything to prove to himself he exists. And he maybe be a nothingness but he's exposed a whole line of walking dead following right behind him cheering him on. We cannot let this ride, we can't ignore it, we can't put it in the back of our minds. This either stops now or there are a lot of other countries at different times and places in history that will repeat here. He's no better than any authoritarian or dictator or madman who has ever come before.
Amen!
And he wants to BE that dictator of the USA.
Chapter 11., Mein Kampf: “Everything we admire on this earth today—science and art, technology and inventions—is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race. ... All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning... All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the product of the Aryan..... The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew.” P1135809’s first wife claimed he kept a copy on his night table. Obviously, it is one of the very few books he has ever read.
Fact-checker: the book on Trump's side of the bed was "My New Order," (1941) a collection of Hitler's speeches published in English. See Marie Brenner's 1990 profile of Trump in Vanity Fair to learn which of Trump's business friends gave him the book, and Trump's non-denial denial to Brenner that he had read it. Another measure of Trump, the "man?" Brenner later recounted that some time after her piece was published, she was at a charity event in New York City also attended by Defendant Trump, and he poured a glass of wine down her dress.
Still more fact-checking on this:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/leading-civil-rights-lawyer-shows-20-ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and
Excerpt:
Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler's Early Rhetoric and
Common Dreams
We're used to thinking of Hitler's Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn't take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump's bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. (Photo: photolibrarian/Flickr/cc)
The author, Burt Neuborne, is one of America’s top civil liberties lawyers, and questions whether federal government can contain Trump and GOP power grabs.
Steven Rosenfeld
Aug 09, 2019
A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s--when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019--an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority--is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies.
Neuborne doesn't make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU's national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
"Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?" he writes. "Partly it's just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it's hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln's house. But that's not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton's mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play."
A younger Trump, according to his first wife's divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler's pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches' impact on his era's press and politics. "Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation," Neuborne says.
"Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler's speeches--spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy," Neuborne says. "You see, we've seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump's rhetoric--as a candidate and in office--mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy."
Many Americans may seize or condemn Neuborne's analysis, which has more than 20 major points of comparison. The author repeatedly says his goal is not "equating" the men--as "it trivializes Hitler's obscene crimes to compare them to Trump's often pathetic foibles."
Indeed, the book has a larger frame: whether federal checks and balances--Congress, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College--can contain the havoc that Trump thrives on and the Republican Party at large has embraced. But the Trump-Hitler compilation is a stunning warning, because, as many Holocaust survivors have said, few Germans or Europeans expected what unfolded in the years after Hitler amassed power.
******* Read on for the twenty points of strong comparison Prof. Emeritus Neuborne made, all very much in the spirit of LKTIV's fine column, again raising the warnings about the threat posed by Trump and his sordid enablers and cult followers.
I think he only meant for it to “look” as if he’d read it.
If by "read" you mean had someone read it to him then I guess.
I guarantee he didn't read the whole thing.
and let's face it...in a book of Hitler's speeches, there's gonna be a very, very high redundancy quotient (a usage pioneered by my old teacher, Allen Mandelbaum).
Yes and no, David, since it was an edited compilation with the goal of distilling the poison into the most toxic dosages, so to speak - but at the same time, hammering on a "Big Lie" and repeating it ad nauseam was definitely a hallmark of Hitler's fiendishly evil genius, as you note.
An easy mark. A Russian asset. A criminal mob boss. And I will never believe that ex "accidentally fell down her stairs." Nor that Melanoma deserved a genius visa.
When a sociopathic unhinged megalomaniac tells you something you should probably believe them.
What concerns me is just how normalized this kind of bat crap crazy speech has become so that both the right wing media but media in general report it without context and revulsion as to the corrosive effect it is having on social norms. The threat to execute a military officer who speaks his mind and redefining what he said as treasonous without pushback is only one example of how Trump is determined to brainwash as many Americans as possible to facilitate violence on his behalf.
And it is working. As many as half those who self define as Republicans are of the belief January 6 was a “political protest” and not an armed insurrection.
We are close to anarchy and none of the political leaders in either party are sounding the alarm.
I agree. The “if it bleeds it ledes” policy has gone sooooo far. TFG is the artery that is exploding. If only he bleeds out soon.
Christine Blasey Ford has been the target of anonymous threats from late night telephone callers since she testified about Brent Kavanaugh. There must be thousands who suffer similarly because the former president has menaced them. Being cyber-crucified is life-changing. Why don't you write about that?
Another excellent newsletter. It gets scarier and scarier. You mentioned that Russia has something on him. I have had a theory about that for years. I'll give you a hint. It has to do with sex. Use your imagination. What could he have done that put him under Putin's control? Something he wouldn't want anyone to know about.
Submissive? To whom?
Has everyone forgotten the early-on speculation about a "golden shower"? I think you can figure out what that refers to.
Here's a "deep background" link from a tradition nearly a hundred years old already before practiced against the visiting target, American real estate crook, I mean "real estate magnate," Donald J. Trump, in the 1980s.
The meaning will become clear once you've scanned even the chapter titles or the Wiki article I'll append.
https://ia804703.us.archive.org/19/items/TheSwordAndTheShield-TheMitrokhinArchiveAndTheSecretHistoryOfTheKGB/The%20Sword%20and%20the%20Shield%20-%20The%20Mitrokhin%20Archive%20and%20the%20Secret%20History%20of%20the%20KGB.pdf
^^^^^ This is the entire text, complete with espionage skullduggery from the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and South America by forerunners of the KGB, already routinely using KOMPROMAT to extort value from "the usual suspects": greedy foreign embassy staff willing to steal or temporarily purloin documents to be photographed,* incautious foreign embassy honchos willing to "dally in the valley" with Smolensk Sally, so to speak, and pay dearly for the experience by being coerced and blackmailed for years (if the victim didn't reach a breaking point and throw themselves on the mercy of their own government, or end it with a dangerous escape, suicide, even a shootout with the blackmailers), the so-called "Cambridge Five," who reached the highest echelons of British intelligence agencies, including MI6, even fooling the CIA's own counter-espionage maven James Jesus Angleton,** burrowing into the Manhattan Project, and much more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive
Excerpt from Wiki:
The "Mitrokhin Archive" is a collection of handwritten notes, primary sources and official documents which were secretly made, smuggled, and hidden by the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin during the thirty years in which he served as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, he brought the archive with him, in six full trunks. His defection was not officially announced until 1999.[1]
The official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew,[2] wrote two books, The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005), based on material in the archives. The books provide details about many of the Soviet Union's clandestine intelligence operations around the world. They also provide specifics about Guy Burgess, a British diplomat with a short career in MI6, said to be frequently under the influence of alcohol; the archive indicates that he gave the KGB at least 389 top secret documents in the first six months of 1945 along with a further 168 in December 1949. [3]
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin originally started his career with the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (Foreign Espionage) in Undercover operations. After Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech, Mitrokhin became critical of the existing KGB system and was transferred from Operations to the Archives. Over the years, Mitrokhin became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, especially after the stories about the struggles of dissidents and the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which led him to conclude that the Soviet system was un-reformable.[7]
By the late 1960s, the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka Building became increasingly overcrowded, and the Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, authorized the construction of a new building outside of Moscow in Yasenevo, which was to become the new headquarters of the First Chief Directorate and all Foreign Operations. Mitrokhin, who was by that time the head of the Archives department, was assigned by the director of the First Directorate, Vladimir Kryuchkov, with the task of cataloging the documents and overseeing their orderly transfer to the new headquarters. The transfer of the massive archive eventually took over 12 years, from 1972 to 1984.[7][8][9]
Unbeknownst to Kryuchkov and the KGB, while cataloging the documents, Mitrokin secretly copied documents by hand, making immensely detailed notes, which he smuggled to his dacha and hid under the floorboards. Mitrokhin made no attempt to contact any Western intelligence service during the Soviet Era. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union (in 1992) he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the American embassy in Riga. Central Intelligence Agency officers there did not consider him to be credible, concluding that the copied documents could be faked. He then went to the British embassy and a young diplomat there saw his potential. After a further meeting one month later with representatives of MI6, operations followed to retrieve the 25,000 pages of files hidden in his house, covering operations from as far back as the 1930s.[7][8]
* Spies and spy cameras, highly suggestive evidence indeed:
Hemming Tapes
The Minox Camera
Gerry Patrick Hemming discusses the provenance of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Minox spy camera. Hemming’s sources indicate that the specific Minox camera found in Oswald’s room, following the assassination of JFK, bore the same serial number as the one Hemming had given to Eduardo Perez [aka: Bayo or Eddie Bayo]. According to Hemming, Richard Billings of Life magazine, gave Minox cameras and other equipment to him for the purpose of supplying them to “various groups” who were inserting recon teams into Cuba. This was done with the proviso that Life Magazine would have first pick of the photographs coming out of Cuba.
{ PHOTO Richard Billings of Life Magazine}
At the time that Oswald worked at Stovall Chiles, it had a section involved in making military maps of Cuba. Oswald had access to that section. Hemming speculates that Oswald may have been assigned the task of taking photographs of those maps. It should be further noted that Richard Billings was among the team who were present from Life when the film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder was purchased from him by the magazine.
https://assassinationofjfk.net/the-minox-camera/
**Overview
"The best book ever written about the strangest CIA chief who ever lived." - Tim Weiner, National Book Award-winning author of Legacy of Ashes
A revelatory new biography of the sinister, powerful, and paranoid man at the heart of the CIA for more than three tumultuous decades.
CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton was one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States government in the mid-20th century, a ghost of American power. From World War II to the Cold War, Angleton operated beyond the view of the public, Congress, and even the president. He unwittingly shared intelligence secrets with Soviet spy Kim Philby, a member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring. He launched mass surveillance by opening the mail of hundreds of thousands of Americans. He abetted a scheme to aid Israel’s own nuclear efforts, disregarding U.S. security. He committed perjury and obstructed the JFK assassination investigation. He oversaw a massive spying operation on the antiwar and black nationalist movements and he initiated an obsessive search for communist moles that nearly destroyed the Agency.
In The Ghost, investigative reporter Jefferson Morley tells Angleton’s dramatic story, from his friendship with the poet Ezra Pound through the underground gay milieu of mid-century Washington to the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate scandal. From the agency’s MKULTRA mind-control experiments to the wars of the Mideast, Angleton wielded far more power than anyone knew. Yet during his seemingly lawless reign in the CIA, he also proved himself to be a formidable adversary to our nation’s enemies, acquiring a mythic stature w
Creepy pee pee tapes?
Probably not "pee." Look up "squirting" in Wikipedia. It would have excited him.
ya THINK??
if so, too bad. talk of "squirting" once upon marked one as as something of an aficionado. if TFF is onto ANYTHING, it immediately becomes uncool.
sorry about that reversion to my fifteen-year-old self.
In my sorta defense, I was for a few years in the previous century the west coast editor of Playboy, so I learned about things that Henry Miller et al never "taught" me. My hypothesis, perhaps too big a word for this subject, is that Felon Defendant Donny (FDD) did not request viewing the "procedure." I believe it was explained to him as women were so very excited by him. The other possibility depends on the Russians understanding just how ineffably stupid FDD was and is. FDD would have had to believe that the "Obama" bed on which Russian hookers were peeing was the bed on which Obama actually slept. I don't think you have to read John le Carre or Tom Clancy to assume immediately that the actual bed on which Obama slept in Russia --- all of it, bedding, linens, mattress, box spring, *AND* frame, would have been removed to labs for thorough analysis.
First, count me as one of those who ALSO read the Playboy interviews (Frank Sinatra? Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller, who ELSE was publishing interviews in arguably "mainstream American mass media outlet" with writers, philosophers, musicians, inventors, scientists, thespians, politicians, of that stature? The then current "no one reads Playboy for the articles" canard was a misleading half-truth at most; not only that, the stark contrast between the airbrushed Playmates of the Month and "real life women" was ALREADY a topic of conversation among readers in their teens and twenties before anyone needed to remind them of it - in other words, the preposterous assumption that readers/viewers/ voyeurs were constitutionally unable to discern the difference, says more about well-intentioned feminist critics of a certain stripe, than the actual effect of Playboy's photography. You'd need a different psychological model of conditioning to make the case those critics were trying to make, the goals of which I support, just not via that simplistic argument.
Secondly, take a look at this for more of the background in the "KOMPROMAT" operation on Trump, the FSB and Putin were undoubtedly primed to take every last advantage of Trump's massive vulnerabilities as a blackmail/extortion target:
https://ia804703.us.archive.org/19/items/TheSwordAndTheShield-TheMitrokhinArchiveAndTheSecretHistoryOfTheKGB/The%20Sword%20and%20the%20Shield%20-%20The%20Mitrokhin%20Archive%20and%20the%20Secret%20History%20of%20the%20KGB.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive
The "Mitrokhin Archive" is a collection of handwritten notes, primary sources and official documents which were secretly made, smuggled, and hidden by the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin during the thirty years in which he served as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, he brought the archive with him, in six full trunks. His defection was not officially announced until 1999.[1]
***** The techniques almost certainly used against Trump were pioneered over many decades.
Just looked it up. I hadn’t heard that word used in quite that way.
He’s a traitor, pure and simple 😡‼️
I'm in awe that republicans think they're the only ones gifted enough to pull a trigger . . .
Roger that!
I don't want to. Live in this reality. I will do everything I can to change peoples minds.
As we all should. I will do my very best as well.
"For years, he claimed that his penthouse was on the 66th to 68th floors. Trump Tower has 58 stories."
In the scheme of things, this is small potatoes, because the number of floors in a building is not classified information. It is revelatory, however, of his instinct to lie -- about anything.
He is a walking collection of pathologies. His insecurities are constantly duking it out with his narcissism. No matter what he says, HE knows that old Fred did it all, and he has been, in his favorite phrase of derision, a loser. He will, however, go down in history, probably causing any Trump descendants to change their name.
I suspect Barron Trump will one day more famous and successful than all of Donalds other children. He will have the full support of his mother.
An imigrant that i believe had insufficient history background due diligence prior to becoming a US citizen.
AND
Ivana was from Czechoslovak Socialist Republic with boundaries set by Soviet era boundaries?
I feel very sorry for that kid.