White House scraps fair housing rule as Trump bids for suburban voters

Administration officials briefed select GOP congressional staff on Wednesday on the new proposal.
President Donald Trump has hinted at the plan in recent weeks, casting the Obama rule as “devastating” for the suburbs. | Scott Olson/Getty Images


By KATY O'DONNELL and DANIEL LIPPMAN POLITICO
07/23/2020 

The White House eliminated a sweeping Obama-era fair housing regulation on Thursday and replaced it with a much weaker rule amid an effort by President Donald Trump to paint rival Joe Biden as a danger to the suburbs.

A handful of White House officials led the effort to craft the new rule over objections from both within the White House and at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to a person familiar with the matter. HUD had already released its own 84-page proposal in January to overhaul the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, the culmination of more than a year of work.

Trump has hinted at the plan in recent weeks, casting the Obama rule as “devastating” for the suburbs. “The suburb destruction will end with us,” he said in a speech last week. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has pledged to restore the original version of the 2015 rule, which HUD suspended in 2018 when it drafted the revision.

Administration officials briefed select congressional staff on Wednesday on the new proposal, which will replace a rule requiring local governments to proactively track patterns of poverty and segregation with a checklist of 92 questions in order to gain access to federal housing funds. Critics decried the plan as costly and overly complicated.

The new rule has a much lower bar, essentially allowing local governments to self-certify that they are meeting their obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing” under the 1968 Fair Housing Act. HUD will rely on a “general commitment that grantees will use the funds to take active steps to promote fair housing,” according to the text of the rule. Fair housing is defined as “affordable, safe, decent, free of unlawful discrimination, and accessible.”

HUD Secretary Ben Carson on Thursday said the comments on the revisions HUD proposed in January led the agency to change course.

“After reviewing thousands of comments on the proposed changes to the [AFFH] regulation, we found it to be unworkable and ultimately a waste of time for localities to comply with, too often resulting in funds being steered away from communities that need them most,” he said in an email.

The public will not have a chance to weigh in on the new rule, which is considered final. HUD and the Office of Management and Budget decided to use a waiver under a provision of the Administrative Procedure Act that exempts rules related to grants from notice-and-comment requirements.

“This is terrible," said Jesse Van Tol, CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. "The administration just gutted the rule that enforces fairness in housing, which was and still is the whole point of the Fair Housing Act. All of us have an interest in living in fair and desegregated communities.”

He added: “It’s hard to even call it a policy. It doesn’t enforce anything. Instead, it hands off any action to local governments. They can do nothing but talk, take no action and claim they are furthering fair housing. This approach won’t affirmatively further anything other than discrimination.”

The White House declined to comment, though Trump tweeted about the rule late last month.

“At the request of many great Americans who live in the Suburbs, and others, I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas,” he tweeted June 30. “Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!”

Pompeo aide: Giuliani's outreach to secretary was 'deeply disturbing'

Kenna told lawmakers that in hindsight, she is bothered by what she now knows Giuliani was doing.


Rudy Giuliani speaks to reporters as he leaves Trump Tower. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images


By KYLE CHENEY

07/23/2020

A top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday described the 2019 contacts between Pompeo and President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — which ultimately led to the ouster of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch — as "deeply disturbing."

Lisa Kenna, Pompeo's executive secretary — a gatekeeper of sorts to his office — told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she was unaware of the substance of Giuliani's outreach at the time, but now knows it was an effort to discredit Yovanovitch. Giuliani made calls and delivered documents to Pompeo that came from Ukrainian figures viewed as corrupt by the State Department.

"At the time, I did not know what the documents were about. It's deeply disturbing," said Kenna, who is being vetted by the committee for the ambassadorship to Peru.

Kenna's name was invoked repeatedly during the House's impeachment proceedings as a conduit for Giuliani's outreach to the State Department. Her emails were occasionally displayed during the proceedings. Democrats alleged that Giuliani's efforts to smear Yovanovitch were part of a campaign to discredit an official who stood in the way of Trump's effort to pressure Ukraine's government to investigate his Democratic rivals on false charges.

Trump repeatedly urged his advisers to defer to Giuliani on Ukraine policy and mentioned him in a call with Ukraine's president on July 25, 2019.

Kenna told lawmakers that she did not review materials that Giuliani passed along, even though she often looked at papers sent to Pompeo. " I was aware that he delivered a package," Kenna said. "I was not aware of the contents nor did I review that package."

But Kenna said in hindsight, she is bothered by what she now knows Giuliani was doing — and that the ouster of Yovanovitch was unfortunate.

"It was a very painful and difficult time," Kenna said. "I absolutely respect Ambassador Yovanovitch. She's one of our strongest career ambassadors ... the consummate career professional."

"It was very difficult to see what she went through at that time," Kenna said.

Kenna said that despite the uproar over Ukraine, she always endeavored to "run a professional operation that is based on integrity and respect for processes."

"I am not a policy advisor to the secretary of state, and I was not included in discussions regarding the recall of Ambassador Yovanovitch or our general policy," she said.

Kenna also said, in response to questions from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) that although she often reviewed Pompeo's decision documents and letters he would be signing, she also often passed along materials marked "personal" or "eyes only" for the secretary without reviewing them.

Under questioning by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Kenna also committed to appearing for an Aug. 7 interview with the House Foreign Affairs Committee and other lawmakers about the abrupt firing of State Department inspector general Steve Linick by Trump.

Trump to cities: You made me do this

Published on July 22, 2020 By John Stoehr, The Editorial Board- Commentary


The president’s secret police were at it again last night. Federal agents deployed to Portland—unidentified, unaccountable, and unwanted by local elected and law enforcement officials in Oregon—spent the night gassing, arresting and otherwise terrorizing demonstrators under the guise of “protecting facilities.” Protests began by demanding justice for the murder of George Floyd, but have since evolved into protests against a president sticking his nose in local affairs where it doesn’t belong.

While that was happening, Chad Wolf appeared on Fox. The acting secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security seemed to suggest during the segment that thought itself could be a potential crime. “Because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals, and we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable,” Chad Wolf said.

Though the idea of the thought police is frightening enough, Wolf did do something useful with his remarks. He connected points of causation, obliquely but still, between official acts of the past and official acts of the present, illustrating the creep of authoritarianism from the margins of our society to its center, and that without broader awareness—without public acts of witness—the end can come quickly.

Recall, first, that Donald Trump ran for president promising to purge “illegal” immigrants. (His real goal was all immigration, including legal, and according to a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy, his efforts have been wildly successful; since 2017, legal immigration has fallen by almost 50 percent.) For this reason, so-called sanctuary cities were a target of his rhetoric and, later, his policies.

The thing about federal immigration law is that to enforce it, you need the help of local law enforcement, but local law enforcement is under no legal obligation to help, because immigration isn’t its job. Cities and states don’t need to help if they don’t want to, and given most major cities are run by Democrats, most of them don’t.

This is maddening for a president promising to purge “illegals.” One solution is to sue in a bid to force local cops to play along. The courts have been unfriendly, though, and they are certain to get more unfriendly. The US Supreme Court refused last month to hear a case seeking to overturn a California law transforming the state in a legal haven for immigrants. The high court had previously ruled that the president can’t target states and their cities for “defunding” on account of their being uncooperative with immigration authorities. That leaves the administration with a couple of options.

Option No. 1 came naturally to a demagogue like Trump. Demonize cities as cancers of crime, violence, filth, looting, rioting and other terrible social ills that justify any kind of federal intervention. Characterize them as corrupt, maladministered, and undeserving of tax dollars for being captive to special-interests (that is, public-sector unions and Black people). Characterize them as lawless for not cooperating with ICE and Border Patrol (even though municipalities are following the letter of the law). Give the impression that sanctuary cities are leaving you with no choice but to use force.

Remember what Chad Wolf said: “Because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals.” He won’t stop from happening what must happen because you forced it to happen.

Then, Option No. 2, use force. The Trump administration dispatched 100 Border Patrol officers in February to sanctuary cities around the country for the stated purpose of boosting deportations by 35 percent. I think it’s safe to say at this point the real goal was intimating not only local cops but residents, too—anyone merely thinking it’s OK to deny the president. According to a Times report, they came armed with “stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification.” The officers, moreover, “typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.”

Meanwhile, DHS continued its policy of “family separation,” which means the confiscation of children, including babies, from parents seeking political asylum. The objective was deterrence, but the result was kids living in cages or in “internment camps” where they suffered from malnutrition, disease, death or even sexual crimes at the hands of Border Patrol agents. The explicit policy was making life so miserable no one would dare think of entering illegally. And such sadism was justified because the president said a misdemeanor (that’s what illegal entry is) menaced “our way of life.”

What we are seeing in Portland is part of an ongoing effort to push the envelope of acceptable behavior on the part of the Trump administration. At each stage, he has identified new enemies and found new means of crushing them. The process is ad hoc but inexorable—as long as most people, most white people, believe they are immune to an ever-expanding scope of conflict seeking to subordinate everything to a totalized state. To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, first they came for the “illegals.” Then they came for the legal immigrants. Then they came for Americans who got in their way.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of the Editorial Board, a newsletter about politics in plain English for normal people and the common good. He’s a visiting assistant professor of public policy at Wesleyan University, a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative, a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly, and a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches.

Is Trump on track for an October vaccine surprise?

Researchers say a proven vaccine is highly unlikely before the election, but there may yet be positive news for the president to tout.

President Donald Trump holds up his face mask during a press conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House July 21, 2020. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By ADAM CANCRYN

07/22/2020 

President Donald Trump’s bet that a proven-effective coronavirus vaccine will be the October surprise to catapult him into a second term is facing increasingly long odds.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t find just enough reason to declare victory anyway.

While the race to find an effective vaccine for Covid-19 has crucial implications for nations around the world, it also carries political ramifications in the United States — with Trump banking heavily on finding a vaccine to quell both the pandemic and mounting unhappiness over his handling of the coronavirus response.

Buoyed by a series of encouraging early trial results, the administration is laying the groundwork for a high-profile rollout of initial coronavirus vaccines in as little as three months. It’s a best-case timetable that also tracks with the final weeks before the Nov. 3 election. The White House’s Operation Warp Speed has poured billions of dollars into developing a vaccine in record time, funding several efforts in parallel and buying up doses of the experimental shots in a wager that one will ultimately pay off.

“We’ll end up with a cure,” Trump asserted on Tuesday. “We’re very close to the vaccine — I think we’re going to have some very good results.”

It’s a hope that the president has fixated on amid months of grim news — and one that’s unnerved many researchers across the country, who worry the White House will turn delicate scientific process into yet another political flash point.

There is virtually no chance that the U.S. will have a proven vaccine by Election Day, several top vaccine experts told POLITICO. It could also take well into 2021 to produce and distribute the hundreds of millions of shots needed to inoculate the entire country.

Yet at the same time, drugmakers’ sprint through early clinical trials means leading vaccine candidates could begin to show indications of their effectiveness by late October, offering Trump the opportunity to seize on them as a potential game-changer.

“I think that is perfectly possible,” Paul Offit, director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s vaccine education center, said of the odds the White House heralds a vaccine as a success based solely on its earliest results. “But I think that would be a mistake.”

Two groups — one led by biotech firm Moderna and the other a collaboration between Pfizer and German drugmaker BioNTech — are planning to start phase 3 trials for their prospective vaccines by the end of the month, marking the final step toward determining whether their candidates will be both safe and effective.

A third candidate from the University of Oxford and drug company AstraZeneca, which has received more than $1 billion from the federal government to preemptively secure 300 million doses, will begin a final trial next month. China’s CanSino Biologics is already in phase 3, but the U.S. doesn’t have any agreement with the company.

It’s a critical stage with no fixed timeline, as the companies are seeking 30,000 healthy volunteers to participate in each trial and then need to hit specific markers for determining how and whether it effectively fights the disease. That could take months to complete, experts cautioned, without any guarantee a vaccine will pan out. Under Food and Drug Administration guidelines issued in June, a vaccine will need to be at least 50 percent effective to win approval.

But while the Trump administration has insisted that it won’t cut corners on safety — a vow the vaccine developers have taken as well — it’s left the door open to short-circuiting the process before those trials are complete. The FDA guidelines indicate the administration could issue emergency authorizations as soon as it’s convinced a vaccine is safe and effective, clearing it for distribution to the public.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Judd Deere stressed that any vaccine “must be thoroughly tested to ensure it is safe and effective,” calling it Trump’s highest priority. But he also touted the administration’s engineering of the “fastest-ever launch of a trial,” and did not address a question on whether the White House harbored any concerns about distributing a vaccine before it’s officially approved.

The result could be a major milestone in the pandemic’s trajectory, days before an election that’s evolved into a referendum on Trump’s management of the spiraling crisis. It could also jump the gun on the scientific process, undermining public confidence in any eventual vaccine and raising the risk that the initial round of shots won’t work — or worse, will lead to unpredictable side effects.

“That’s the concern, not that Trump might boost his poll ratings by a couple percent but that we could make a catastrophic mistake,” said John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College. “Anything in October is going to be politicized. And the last thing this pandemic needs is more politicization.”

Keeping a focus on science, not politics, could be especially critical for a coronavirus vaccine, amid a search effort that’s drawn intense public interest and progressed at world-record speed. The fastest that scientists have developed a new vaccine to date is four years; if successful, a viable coronavirus shot could be found in less than one.


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It’s a tribute to the unprecedented amount of companies and resources dedicated to the issue, vaccine experts said. But they also worried that the pace threatens to raise public skepticism of an eventual vaccine — a challenge that the administration has already contributed to by spending months promising a breakthrough by winter.

“I think the government was right to do Warp Speed — I just wish they called it something else,” Offit said, warning that the emphasis on producing a vaccine quickly risks casting doubt on its scientific underpinnings.

Offit — a member of a National Institutes of Health vaccine group that met recently with Warp Speed official and Army Lt. Gen. Paul Ostrowski — also described the government as treating Warp Speed like a “secret weapon,” and opting to shield much of its activities from the public.







The world is waiting on a coronavirus vaccine. We're tracking the global competition, the research and development, the rollout plan and how effective the vaccine will be.
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Others stressed that the first round of coronavirus vaccines may not even end up being the most effective, leaving the U.S. still far from the all-encompassing “cure” that Trump has long promised.

“An amazing amount has been done in that short space of time, and so far, not much has gone wrong,” Moore said of the first six months of work toward a vaccine. “The hardest steps are probably still to come, all the timelines are rosy, and in the real world, very few things go quicker than planned.”


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Scientists won’t know for months after distribution of an approved vaccine has begun whether it will prove effective over the long term, or if there are variations in how well it protects different people. Children, for example, won’t be included in any of the upcoming phase 3 trials. Older people have weaker immune systems, and they’re among the most vulnerable to the virus. A partially effective vaccine might not work for them.

All those uncertainties are at odds with the political incentive to declare victory over the virus.

“There is clearly a political goal for the president to say, ‘I’ve delivered a vaccine,’” said Barry Bloom, an infectious disease expert and public health professor at Harvard. “But we will not know in three months, or six months — by January — how long the antibodies last.”

Advisers to Trump in recent weeks have stressed those low odds that a vaccine will arrive in time to boost his candidacy, urging the president to refocus on more immediate steps and take a more active role in leading the pandemic fight.

“We’ve counseled him on that, and it’s not like he’s got his head in the sand on it,” said one campaign adviser, who nevertheless lamented Trump's relative disinterest in the day-to-day response effort. “He looks at it like, Mike Pence has got it — Pence is handling it.”

Another Republican close to the administration chalked up the focus on a vaccine to internal divisions over how to manage the more pressing aspects of the response, making it easier to unite behind the idea that a shot will end the pandemic once and for all.


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Trump has since returned to the White House briefing room after weeks of sliding poll numbers and rising caseloads, looking to seize back control of the administration’s response messaging. Still, as he took the podium on Wednesday, Trump returned to the prospect of a quick solution to the crisis.

“That would be great if we could go into the hospital and just cure people,” he said. “We think in a very short period of time we’ll be able to do that.”

Trump has inadvertently punched himself in the face with his politically-driven war on cities

Published July 23, 2020 By Amanda Marcotte, Salon- Commentary


On June 1, Donald Trump, the failed businessman who became president by pretending to be a successful businessman on reality TV, decided to tear-gas peaceful protesters in search of a photo op. With no apparent provocation, federal police assaulted a crowd of people staging a nonviolent protest in Lafayette Park, adjacent to the White House, unleashing tear gas on the crowd and laying into them with batons and rubber bullets. Soon it became clear why this was happening: Trump wanted his picture taken in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, and wanted a clear path to walk across the park.

But it was more than that: Trump also wanted images of people fleeing from paramilitary cops to air directly opposite the speech he gave just before his stroll, one in which the president claimed that “our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs or arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa and others” and that he was “mobilizing all federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting.”

In other words, Trump and his aides apparently believed that chaotic images of cops crushing a peaceful protest would look, at least on TV, like proof of Trump’s characterization of the largely peaceful protests as “riots” being run by dangerous “anarchists.”

This gambit grossly backfired. Reporters on the scene saw with their own eyes that the protest had been peaceful, and the only people who could legitimately said to be “rioting” were the cops. Trump wanted to look tough but wound up looking weak and cowardly, a man so afraid of being heckled he hides behind a phalanx of RoboCops. Even the photo-op went sideways: Trump looked especially awkward with a Bible perched precipitously on his stubby fingers, in a manner suggesting he’d never seen or held a book before.

But Trump, never one to admit a mistake, has not given up on his belief that unleashing military-style assaults on peaceful protesters is just the thing needed to reinvigorate his campaign. He’s sent federal police — armed to the hilt and clad in camo, to maximize the appearance of being in invading army — into Portland, Oregon, to terrorize and assault people gathered peacefully in the streets. (Even the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, got tear-gassed while doing nothing more sinister than standing in a peaceful crowd, chatting with protesters.) Now Trump has said he’ll send more federal goons to Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, all against the express wishes of local and state leaders, who point out that federal police, not protesters, are staging confrontations that become violent. He has suggested he may expand this domestic invasion to other cities across the country.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Trump tried to justify all this by claiming we’re witnessing “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.”

Like most things Trump says, this is an outright lie. FBI crime statistics show that overall crime is down by 5.3% since last year. It’s true that murder rates have ticked upward in many places from the historic lows of the last few years. Experts interviewed by the New York Times suggest that the protests have nothing to do with it, and that it’s a result of the enormous disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which has heightened stress, leading both to increased domestic violence and more heated disputes within the illegal drug trade.

As usual, Trump is lying about more than just the statistics. He’s also lying about his intentions. He isn’t doing any of this to keep people safe. If he cared one whit about the safety of Americans, he would focus his energy on fighting the coronavirus, not on staging violent confrontations with largely peaceful protesters. If he cared about reducing violence, he wouldn’t be causing more of it by sending cops to attack demonstrators. If he really cared about “law and order,” he wouldn’t be deliberately inducing chaos in the streets.

No, all this is about one thing and one thing only: The reality-TV president wants to create a spectacle for the cameras, one he thinks will get him re-elected.

That’s why Trump went to Tulsa to hold a rally near the site of one of worst racial pogroms in American history, on a weekend usually known for celebrating Black people’s emancipation from slavery: He hoped the provocation would lead to a violent clash between protesters and police. (It didn’t.)

Trump is playing the role of the world’s worst TV director, one who is using taxpayer money to inflict real pain and suffering on people who didn’t consent to play a part in his BDSM-themed cable drama aimed at viewers with a tear-gas kink. All for the purpose of generating B-roll footage of flash-bangs and clouds of gas and armored police and black-clad protesters to be featured in heavy rotation on Fox News and in campaign ads.

As Oregon Gov. Kate Brown explained on MSNBC, when Chad Wolf, the acting Homeland Security secretary, visited Portland recently, “he brought a Fox News team with him for a photo opportunity.” Unsurprisingly, that network is playing the role of Trump’s eager editor, presenting the Portland footage in misleading ways, and amplifying his lies about the protesters.

The one sticky problem for Trump’s artistic vision is that everyone outside the Fox News bubble can see that the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and that the president who’s sending in poorly trained, amped-up federal cops is the one stoking violence and chaos. Trump is doing all this to get images of “violent” protests, but what he’s mostly getting is images of cops attacking a row of middle-aged women who are singing lullabies (that’s no exaggeration). As with the Lafayette Park incident back in early June, it’s obvious who the real instigator of violence is.

Trump’s campaign is so desperate for images of street violence that it literally borrowed a photo of protesters attacking a uniformed soldier — a photo taken in Ukraine in 2014 — and tried to pass it off as an image from recent American protests.

Trump’s gut-level certainty that (white) Americans yearn for more images of cops beating or attacking protesters is, like most things Trump feels sure about, entirely wrong. The most recent polling data from earlier this month shows that 62% of Americans believe that Trump’s handling of the protests has made the situation worse. When it comes to non-Republicans, that figure rises to 8 in 10 Americans. Trump is wasting taxpayer money and unleashing harm on U.S. citizens solely for the purpose of activating the worst impulses of the most racist and paranoid members of his base — people who were already going to vote for him, no matter.

Of course, Fox News — whose hysterical coverage no doubt inspired Trump to ramp up his autocratic crackdown in the first place — is backing him to the hilt, as are many of the Republicans running for election down-ballot from this historically unpopular president. That seems like a dumb move, likely to alienate any voters who weren’t already on board, but then again, what else do they have? With the coronavirus pandemic raging out of control and the economy in the toilet, Republicans certainly can’t claim they’ve done a competent job and deserve to keep on doing it. Violence and racism may not be a winning message in this year of historic turmoil and change, but at this point, it’s all Trump and his party have left.

Trump has inadvertently punched himself in the face with his politically-driven war on cities

Published on July 23, 2020 By Amanda Marcotte, Salon- Commentary


On June 1, Donald Trump, the failed businessman who became president by pretending to be a successful businessman on reality TV, decided to tear-gas peaceful protesters in search of a photo op. With no apparent provocation, federal police assaulted a crowd of people staging a nonviolent protest in Lafayette Park, adjacent to the White House, unleashing tear gas on the crowd and laying into them with batons and rubber bullets. Soon it became clear why this was happening: Trump wanted his picture taken in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, and wanted a clear path to walk across the park.

But it was more than that: Trump also wanted images of people fleeing from paramilitary cops to air directly opposite the speech he gave just before his stroll, one in which the president claimed that “our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs or arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa and others” and that he was “mobilizing all federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting.”

In other words, Trump and his aides apparently believed that chaotic images of cops crushing a peaceful protest would look, at least on TV, like proof of Trump’s characterization of the largely peaceful protests as “riots” being run by dangerous “anarchists.”

This gambit grossly backfired. Reporters on the scene saw with their own eyes that the protest had been peaceful, and the only people who could legitimately said to be “rioting” were the cops. Trump wanted to look tough but wound up looking weak and cowardly, a man so afraid of being heckled he hides behind a phalanx of RoboCops. Even the photo-op went sideways: Trump looked especially awkward with a Bible perched precipitously on his stubby fingers, in a manner suggesting he’d never seen or held a book before.

But Trump, never one to admit a mistake, has not given up on his belief that unleashing military-style assaults on peaceful protesters is just the thing needed to reinvigorate his campaign. He’s sent federal police — armed to the hilt and clad in camo, to maximize the appearance of being in invading army — into Portland, Oregon, to terrorize and assault people gathered peacefully in the streets. (Even the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, got tear-gassed while doing nothing more sinister than standing in a peaceful crowd, chatting with protesters.) Now Trump has said he’ll send more federal goons to Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, all against the express wishes of local and state leaders, who point out that federal police, not protesters, are staging confrontations that become violent. He has suggested he may expand this domestic invasion to other cities across the country.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Trump tried to justify all this by claiming we’re witnessing “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.”

Like most things Trump says, this is an outright lie. FBI crime statistics show that overall crime is down by 5.3% since last year. It’s true that murder rates have ticked upward in many places from the historic lows of the last few years. Experts interviewed by the New York Times suggest that the protests have nothing to do with it, and that it’s a result of the enormous disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which has heightened stress, leading both to increased domestic violence and more heated disputes within the illegal drug trade.

As usual, Trump is lying about more than just the statistics. He’s also lying about his intentions. He isn’t doing any of this to keep people safe. If he cared one whit about the safety of Americans, he would focus his energy on fighting the coronavirus, not on staging violent confrontations with largely peaceful protesters. If he cared about reducing violence, he wouldn’t be causing more of it by sending cops to attack demonstrators. If he really cared about “law and order,” he wouldn’t be deliberately inducing chaos in the streets.

No, all this is about one thing and one thing only: The reality-TV president wants to create a spectacle for the cameras, one he thinks will get him re-elected.

That’s why Trump went to Tulsa to hold a rally near the site of one of worst racial pogroms in American history, on a weekend usually known for celebrating Black people’s emancipation from slavery: He hoped the provocation would lead to a violent clash between protesters and police. (It didn’t.)

Trump is playing the role of the world’s worst TV director, one who is using taxpayer money to inflict real pain and suffering on people who didn’t consent to play a part in his BDSM-themed cable drama aimed at viewers with a tear-gas kink. All for the purpose of generating B-roll footage of flash-bangs and clouds of gas and armored police and black-clad protesters to be featured in heavy rotation on Fox News and in campaign ads.

As Oregon Gov. Kate Brown explained on MSNBC, when Chad Wolf, the acting Homeland Security secretary, visited Portland recently, “he brought a Fox News team with him for a photo opportunity.” Unsurprisingly, that network is playing the role of Trump’s eager editor, presenting the Portland footage in misleading ways, and amplifying his lies about the protesters.

The one sticky problem for Trump’s artistic vision is that everyone outside the Fox News bubble can see that the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and that the president who’s sending in poorly trained, amped-up federal cops is the one stoking violence and chaos. Trump is doing all this to get images of “violent” protests, but what he’s mostly getting is images of cops attacking a row of middle-aged women who are singing lullabies (that’s no exaggeration). As with the Lafayette Park incident back in early June, it’s obvious who the real instigator of violence is.

Trump’s campaign is so desperate for images of street violence that it literally borrowed a photo of protesters attacking a uniformed soldier — a photo taken in Ukraine in 2014 — and tried to pass it off as an image from recent American protests.

Trump’s gut-level certainty that (white) Americans yearn for more images of cops beating or attacking protesters is, like most things Trump feels sure about, entirely wrong. The most recent polling data from earlier this month shows that 62% of Americans believe that Trump’s handling of the protests has made the situation worse. When it comes to non-Republicans, that figure rises to 8 in 10 Americans. Trump is wasting taxpayer money and unleashing harm on U.S. citizens solely for the purpose of activating the worst impulses of the most racist and paranoid members of his base — people who were already going to vote for him, no matter.

Of course, Fox News — whose hysterical coverage no doubt inspired Trump to ramp up his autocratic crackdown in the first place — is backing him to the hilt, as are many of the Republicans running for election down-ballot from this historically unpopular president. That seems like a dumb move, likely to alienate any voters who weren’t already on board, but then again, what else do they have? With the coronavirus pandemic raging out of control and the economy in the toilet, Republicans certainly can’t claim they’ve done a competent job and deserve to keep on doing it. Violence and racism may not be a winning message in this year of historic turmoil and change, but at this point, it’s all Trump and his party have left.

America at a tipping point as Trump and his suicide cult signal they will not accept a defeat at the polls

Published July 23, 2020 By The Conversation Commentary

U.S. President Donald Trump is deploying irregularly uniformed armed federal agents in unmarked government vehicles to cities like Portland, Ore., and Chicago to seize unarmed protesters off the street without legal reason.

Historian Timothy Snyder’s wise warning at the opening of the Trump era was prescient:


“When men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and the picture of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”

From the riots in Charlottesville, Va., three summers ago to right now, Snyder has described Trump’s America. The authoritarian threshold has now been decisively crossed. Democracy and the rule of law, to the extent they were ever more than noble aspirations, are now receding into the rear-view mirror

Read more:
Charlottesville and the politics of fear

Think that is alarmist? Then why are millions of Americans, and probably billions of people worldwide, dreading a second Trump term?

We can all intuit that the cult of the personality surrounding Trump is powerful and will be difficult to dislodge, whatever the outcome of the election in November.
Suicide cult?

Steven Hasan, a leading U.S. expert on cult formation and mind control, has made the compelling, book-length case that Trump’s base behaves and acts more like a suicide cult than a traditional political partisan group. The recent politicization of masking during the COVID-19 pandemic by Trump supporters suggests that Hasan may be on to something.

With his references to good people on both sides in Charlottesville and his insistence in a recent interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News that whites are the victims of more police violence than Blacks, Trump remains the gaslighter-in-chief.

His abuse of the presidential bully pulpit has unabashedly unleashed the demons of hate and conspiracy into America’s public spaces.

No one should be surprised. This dark vision was presented to the world in all its dystopic horror in Trump’s inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2017.

Civil rights declining in the U.S.

Now, Trumpism has spread globally, including into some the world’s leading democratic states with the most long-standing commitments to the rule of law. It is no coincidence that international human rights watchdog Freedom House described 2017, the year Trump took office, as the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom as measured by net declines in political rights and civil liberties in 71 states, with only 35 registering gains.

The pace of decline has continued in subsequent years. The 2020 Human Rights Watch World Report delves into rights violations in the United States in areas that include racial inequality in the criminal justice system, rising poverty and inequality in health-care outcomes.

All of this was documented before COVID-19 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matters movement following the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis in May.

Read more:
Black Lives Matter movement finds new urgency and allies because of COVID-19

As the U.S. heads into its statutorily scheduled election on “the first Tuesday after Nov. 1” (and in case you are curious, it is almost impossible for Trump to actually cancel the election), the depth of the president’s disdain for democracy and the rule of law is on full display.

False claims

In the Wallace interview, Trump — with his habit of proudly revealing his inner authoritarian dialogue — offered a racist and patently false riff on how more whites are killed by police than Blacks, contrary to the evidence.

Trump also falsely claimed that Joe Biden’s campaign was promising to abolish or defund police. And he offered another unprovoked outburst against the New York Times 1619 project that tells the story of America from the arrival of the first European slave ship in the British colony of Virginia rather that starting at the country’s founding in 1776.

Trump also revealed hostility to the removal of the Confederate flag, Confederate statues or any other symbolic move to acknowledge the obvious current cultural and historical watershed moment in America.

And after three and a half years in office, Trump still shocks. This time, the moment came when Wallace asked the president whether he would accept defeat in an election. His response: “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, OK?”




From there, Trump went on to explain how Hillary Clinton never accepted her loss to him in 2016, which is also false.

Wallace, to his credit, was dogged and pushed Trump, asking again. Trump responded, just as he had to a similar question in 2016 from Wallace: “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.”

The difference last time, however, was that Trump was not the White House incumbent. This is why he’s raised serious concerns about overstaying his welcome and difficulties around the peaceful handover of power.



Read more:
Would Trump concede in 2020? A lesson from 1800





Term in office ends on Jan. 20

The 20th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution specifies that a president’s term in office “shall end at noon on the 20th day of January” after an election.

This peaceful transfer of power in accordance with the 20th Amendment has, from 1787 to 2017, permitted the American experiment to continue bound by democratic principles and rule of law.

Granted, it’s not always been easy and there have been blips. In the 1876 election at the end of the Reconstruction era, the outcome between Democrat Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was so close that Congress appointed a special Electoral Commission to resolve the matter.

Every historical blip in the peaceful transition of power between presidents in American history has revolved around divergent Electoral College and popular vote counts. Many of the most recent elections have had this type of divergence, including 2016.More recently in the Bush vs. Gore case, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped into the breach and tipped the scale for Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.

In 2000, Gore stepped aside and obeyed the ruling of the Supreme Court despite the misgivings of some of his supporters.




If Trump loses the electoral college in the fall, which is by no means certain or even likely, he may refuse to concede. Were this to happen, either a military or civilian response or a co-ordinated military and civilian response to remove him from office might be required.

To decisively end the Trump presidency, a large mandate with clear margins in key swing states will be necessary. Of course, if he wins re-election or there is electoral interference again, the next few years could be much worse. In the meantime, buckle up.

Jeffrey B. Meyers, Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Thompson Rivers University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Columnist thinks Trump knows he’s going to lose in November — and he and the GOP are burning everything on the way out


IS WASHINGTON BURNING?

July 23, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


President Donald Trump has been struggling to regain whatever lackluster approval ratings he had left after years of failing to deliver on the policies he campaigned on in 2016. In fact, Trump has stopped using the slogan “promises made, promises kept,” when he speaks.

In a Washington Post column, Catherine Rampell noted that it appears Trump has given up on the idea that he could win the November election. With that, he’s been burning everything behind him and “salting the earth.”

“And his fellow Republicans are helping by sabotaging key institutions that the next (presumably Democratic) president will inherit,” she explained, citing the GOP Senate Banking Committee approving Trump’s picks for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. This as the country entered a recession and is facing a nationwide housing crisis.

“One of these nominees, Christopher Waller, would be a competent, reasonable, totally qualified addition to the most powerful economic body in the world,” she explained.

The other nominee, Judy Shelton, Rampell called “a professional crank,” with a history of advocating the Fed shouldn’t exist.

“She has repeatedly likened the Fed to a ‘Soviet State Planning Committee’ because the central bank, rather than the quantity of gold, controls the money supply,” Rampell reported. “Shelton has spent her career trying to bring back the gold standard, a monetary system abandoned worldwide and roundly rejected by economists.”

Trump has also tried to destroy U.S. Attorneys’ offices in key districts where he would be charged after leaving office, including the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of New York and Washington, D.C. district. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called it a “decapitation” of key U.S. attorneys in a pre-emptive strike against litigation. It likely won’t work, but it’s one of few options available to Trump.

“Republicans have indulged Trump’s choice to install charlatans elsewhere in the executive branch,” noted Rampell, explaining that the Federal Reserve is hardly the first example. “But GOP senators had previously drawn the line at unqualified picks for the Fed. The central bank was too powerful, too important, to leave in the hands of buffoons and yes men.”

Even Republicans agreed that Shelton was on the fringe of the GOP.

“In fact, she was previously considered too outlandish to merely testify before the committee that just approved her for a Fed seat,’ she said.

“The idea of even calling her as a witness for something was beyond the pale,” a former Republican Senate Banking Committee aide said before Shelton’s confirmation hearing.

The thing that changed was Trump’s poll numbers and his chances of winning a second term. Even Republicans confess privately that Shelton would garner nothing for the economy as it struggles amid the pandemic shutdown.

“That’s their best-case scenario: that Shelton has no influence whatsoever,” said Rampell. “The worst: She could cause some chaos, including by making discussion among (understandably paranoid) Fed officials less candid. But perhaps a less functional Fed is desirable, if you’re expecting Joe Biden to be president come January.”

She noted that it isn’t outside of the realm of possibility that Republicans would try and kill the economy so that a Democratic president would fail trying to bring it back. They’ve done it before, she recalled citing former President Barack Obama’s term in officer after the financial crisis. Republicans sent letters and “crabby op-eds” trying to fearmonger about Obama’s tactics lowering interest rates. Even Shelton bashed him, saying “Keynesian stimulus would stoke ‘ruinous inflation.'”

She recalled the former Clinton administration staff who removed all of the “W” keys from computer keyboards in the West Wing as a means of bothering the new incoming administration. But this isn’t a practical joke or even a mean jab, it’s hurting the country in an attempt at a Republican power play.




“This landmine in the Fed. A hollowed-out State Department. Brain-drained statistical and scientific agencies. A shredded social safety net. A gutted immigration system, so financially mismanaged that about 75 percent of its employees are slated for furlough in two weeks. A hobbled higher-education system, once the envy of the world, now struggling to attract global talent because the administration has made it so difficult for that talent to study here. Perhaps a permanently lost tax-revenue stream from the past several decades of unrealized capital gains,” Rampell listed off the problems.

Nothing is going to change before November, the only thing that is possible is if Trump wins, he’s scorched his own earth.

“Perhaps he hasn’t thought that far ahead,” Rampell closed. “Or maybe he’d revel in the ‘Mad Max’-style landscape he’s now cultivating. William Tecumseh Sherman left flames in his wake; Trump appears to prefer everything on fire, at all times, around him.”

Read the full editorial at the Washington Post.



IS PARIS BURNING

Israeli army sued for ‘dangerous’ levels of radiation

Israeli soldiers walk past an Israeli Iron Dome defence system on 25 February, 2016 [AFP/Gil Cohen-Magen/Getty]

July 22, 2020 at 5:06 pm

The Israeli occupation army is being sued for exposing residents of a kibbutz to high levels of radiation in a lawsuit that serves to highlight the Zionist state’s discrimination against Palestinians. Farmers in the northern Negev who are said to have been unknowingly exposed to very strong radiation for six years and had their livelihood disrupted, are seeking approximately $1.3 million in compensation.

The lawsuit states that the Israeli army installed the Iron Dome system, funded by the US government, on fields belonging to an unnamed kibbutz in 2012 without informing residents of the danger it posed to their health. Five years later, reported Ynet News, they were told that they could not approach the fields near the area, a site at which they had worked freely until then, due to the very strong radiation that the system emits.

“The defendant [Israeli army] only recently remembered to update the kibbutz about the very strong radiation the systems emits, and that it is therefore strictly forbidden to engage in any agriculture work in the surrounding area,” the lawsuit states. “It will become clear that danger of radiation in the field was unknown until the defendant’s notice.”

It’s also claimed that the farmers were never compensated for damage to their territory and from being barred from cultivating in the area in which the system was installed. The Defence Ministry is thought to have promised compensation for such damage, which the lawsuit claims has yet to be paid eight years later.

READ: Israel soldiers kills Palestinian man ‘as he walked in West Bank’

Highlighting the damage to the land, the lawsuit states that, “As of 2012, the defendant took over an area of approximately 10 dunams [2.5 acres] for the purpose of installing missile defence systems to protect from ballistics coming from the Gaza Strip.”

The Israeli army and Defence Ministry told Ynet that, “The lawsuit has not yet been received by the defence establishment. When it is, it will be examined and answered as usual in court.”

Concerns over the Iron Dome were raised last year. Around 30 Israeli soldiers, the majority of whom operated the system, were said to be battling cancer.

For Palestinian farmers, this case will further highlight the structural racism under which they have suffered for decades. The theft of their land in order to build Jewish settler-only roads and illegal settlements, for example, is carried out without any compensation or recourse to any form of legal redress.

Palestinian cyclists attacked by Israeli settlers
A group of Palestinian cyclists were attacked Saturday by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank after a trail app landed them on a remote path dotted with Jewish settlements

July 23, 2020

A group of Palestinian cyclists were attacked Saturday by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank after a trail app landed them on a remote path dotted with Jewish settlements, Reuters reported.

Avid cyclist Amer Kurdi and four others set out on what was supposed to be an 80-km ride, using the hiking app Komoot to chart a path north from the Palestinian village of Birzeit.

Over an hour into their ride, Kurdi said Komoot led them east towards a rocky path near the Israeli settlement of Shilo, where a group of Israeli settlers approached them and asked where they were from. Kurdi, 30, replied that they were from the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

Soon after, the men started throwing stones at them, using T-shirts to hide their faces, Kurdi and his brother, Samer, said.

“The others managed to run away, but I tripped and fell,” Samer, 28, said.

“When I got up, a settler was behind me, and he started beating me with a metal rod.”

Photos the cyclists took after the incident, which they reported to Israel’s police, show Samer’s legs and arms bruised and bloodied.

The occupied West Bank is dotted with illegal Jewish-only settlements which Palestinans are not allowed to approach.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said they are investigating.

Palestinians complain that navigation apps fail to grasp the West Bank’s complexity.

Asked for comment, Komoot said it regretted the incident but that its service is not specifically optimised for route planning “through areas of political unrest”.