Is it too late? Fascism expert explains the next moves from Trump’s ‘authoritarian playbook’



Published on July 23, 2020 By Chauncey Devega, Salon










At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there’s a poster which identifies “The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism.”

Here are the criteria:
Powerful and continuing nationalism
Disdain for human rights
Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
Rampant sexism
Controlled mass media
Obsession with national security
Religion and government intertwined
Corporate power protected
Labor power suppressed
Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
Obsession with crime and punishment
Rampant cronyism and corruption

This in too many ways is America in the Age of Trump.

Trump and his regime are engaged in a white supremacist counterrevolution against the civil rights movement, in which the human rights of nonwhite people are being revoked. This includes a recent effort to circumvent the Constitution by deeming that undocumented immigrants (overwhelmingly Black and brown people) should be erased from the population for purposes of congressional representation.
Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.

Trump and his regime are criminalizing dissent. He has gone so far as to explicitly state that people who disagree with him are akin to Nazis and should be imprisoned or worse.

Trump and his regime have no respect for the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or democratic norms and principles more generally. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not respect the outcome of the 2020 election if he does not win.

Trump and his regime have unleashed a secret federal police force to gas, shoot, beat and illegally detain nonviolent protesters in Portland, Oregon, and potentially elsewhere.

In a predictable escalation, Trump — through Attorney General William Barr — has ordered that the regime’s thugs be deployed to other Democrat-led cities to enforce “law and order.” It is entirely plausible that Trump’s secret police will also be used to help him steal the presidential election.

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, recently announced that the forces under his command may “proactively” arrest people for crimes they have not yet committed. Such dystopian logic mixes George Orwell’s “1984” with Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report.”

TrumpWorld also reflects the horrible surrealism of the film and novel “Children of Men” turned into a lived experience for America and the world. Writing at the New Statesman, Gavin Jacobson observes:

he way the film extrapolates from the here and now is the reason the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher thought “Children of Men” was unique. Writing in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Fisher understood the film as a true depiction of what he called “‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

“Children of Men” does not take place at the end of the world, which has already happened, but within its chilling coda, where, as Fisher writes, “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist”. There is no desire to create alternate ways of living, or to make the end of times less awful. …

The idea that we’re out of time is what makes “Children of Men” both a mirror and augur of the world, and the world to come. At the end of history, cut off from its past and pessimistic about the future, and facing slow death under rising tides, humanity has resigned itself to a somnambulant life. It is a life of finitude, routine and conformity; one without vision, spontaneity or surprise, where we no longer seek to live larger lives or even strive for our continued existence. We have become Nietzsche’s “last men”.


Facing the onslaught of neo-fascism, the American people remain stuck in a state of denial, learned helplessness and fear. Donald Trump and his movement have American democracy and civil society in a chokehold.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert in fascism and authoritarianism. She is the author of “Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945” and “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema” and other books.

Her opinion essays and other writing have been featured by CNN, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Atlantic. Ben-Ghiat’s new book is “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” to be published in November.

In this conversation she warns that Trump’s threats of violence against the American people — including against leading Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — are very real. Ben-Ghiat also explains that the American news media normalized Donald Trump because most journalists are unable to admit that the United States is a failing democracy.

Ben-Ghiat details how the American people (and America’s political elites) remain in denial about the realities of neo-fascism and autocracy, because to admit the truth would mean confronting the fact that they must take action against such forces — and have not done so.

You can also listen to my conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on my podcast “The Truth Report”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

The mainstream news media is finally using the words “fascism” and “authoritarianism” to describe Donald Trump and his regime. I have been using such language since Trump’s campaign in 2015. You and other historians, political scientists, philosophers, mental health experts and others have also been sounding the alarm about Donald Trump and what he represents. We were largely ignored and branded as being hysterical. How does it feel to see the proper language finally being used to describe Trump and the threat he represents?

I’m divided. I’m disgusted with how bad things have become in this country. I remember the first time I saw the word “authoritarian” on a chyron for CNN. It was actually because Sen. Cory Booker, who’s been very smart about this crisis, was speaking and he used the word. CNN finally displayed the word on the screen, and I thought to myself, “Oh my God, the efforts of many of us are finally getting into the system.”

Historians and others have been trying to engage in civic education, to help the public and journalists understand that yes, it can happen here. Ultimately, to see CNN and other major media outlets finally use the word “authoritarianism” to describe Donald Trump and this administration means that things are really bad in America right now.

Unfortunately, those voices in the mainstream American news media who are finally describing the Trump regime in those terms then fail to engage in a substantive discussion of the implications.

I think it’s difficult for people to digest what that would mean, for a few reasons. One is that we are still operating with an old-fashioned idea of what authoritarian countries are like. That is one of the reasons I use the word “fascistic” as opposed to “fascism” to describe Donald Trump. When we use the word “fascism” most people think of an instant shutdown of democracy and brown shirts and other political thugs in the streets.




Many people will also rebut the claim that Trump is fascist by using superficial examples such as “There’s still a free press. People can still speak out.” The reality is that today’s authoritarianism works differently than it did in previous incarnations. Today’s version of fascism does not need one-party states, for example. In discussing Trump and fascism, it is more effective to talk about how it operates at present.

What would the narrative be if the American media were covering the events which are taking place under Donald Trump, but in another country?

What is going on corresponds to what I call the authoritarian playbook. Donald Trump is not interested in governing the United States. He’s in office to enrich himself off public office, help his cronies and build his personality cult. Again, people are anchored to an old-fashioned understanding of what the presidency should be in a democratic country. It is very hard for the public to make the leap to how Trump is a fundamental break from American tradition.

Now, if we start explaining how America is in fact in an authoritarian situation with Donald Trump and his administration, then another question arises. One of the reasons so many people are scared is that to admit the truth about Trump and authoritarianism then means they have to do something about it. Many people do not want to take that leap.

Yes, there are protesters in the streets. But the American business elite also must make that leap by accepting the reality of the situation. History teaches us that it is conservatives who support authoritarians and their rise to power. The American business elites are going to have to change how they think. They are going to have to speak out against American authoritarianism and Trumpism. American business elites have to make a decision about where they stand relative to Trump and authoritarianism.




The American people are going to need to make decisions about where they stand as well. It is easier to not make a decision. It is easier to just flip the channel, shift the topic, and pretend Trump and American authoritarianism are not really happening.

There is this cadre of establishment journalists, analysts and other members of the chattering class whom I describe as “hope peddlers.” They are always trying to spin some happy story about a return to normalcy. They are also many of the same people who are stenographers of current events but not really speaking truth to power. We see this with much of the horse-race journalism regarding the 2020 election. They are operating from the wrong playbook for understanding authoritarianism and a failing democracy. One obvious example is the widespread assumption that there will even be a real election on Nov. 3.

Americans have no experience with authoritarianism and a failing democracy. America has never been invaded by a foreign power and occupied. Americans have never had a dictatorship. Of course, there is the obvious exception of black Americans and their experience with Jim Crow, slavery and oppression. But as a national lived experience for most Americans, the country has not experienced a dictatorship or anything like it.

White Americans are now discovering what people of color have long known, that we do not have a real democracy in this country. Many Americans are finding it very difficult to wake up from the stories they learned in school about this being the freest nation in the world and a successful democracy.




At what point is it too late to save a democracy that is falling into authoritarianism?

Historically, when there are people who have signed on to their roles within an authoritarian fascistic state it is very hard to dislodge such people. They cling to the status quo of the corrupt leader for dear life. This happens because of cronyism and corruption. Everyone involved with the regime is made complicit.

Of course, this is what happened in Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian states. The system is one of mutual complicity. That means not wanting to rock the boat because the whole system could come tumbling down. For example, if you think about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and how the public was waiting for them to start the impeachment against Donald Trump, there was a clear sense that they did not want to cause fundamental disruption. Why? Because the American political class is intertwined.

There was a sense earlier on with Trump that nobody wanted to rock the boat. I do think we as a country are in a different place now, given all that has happened with the Trump administration.

But the whole situation in America right now is still too upsetting and too uncertain for most people. The country’s elites and the people in their circle know they could lose their privileges. They will potentially lose their careers. They’ll have to make compromises. The hope-peddling which involves just staying the course is much more appealing. That is the reason why Nancy Pelosi recently said, “No, we’re not going to impeach Barr. We’re going to let the people speak through the election.” That is the mentality of the country’s political elites and a fear of rocking the boat too much.

Trump is very obvious. There is no subtlety in his threats of violence against the Democrats and his other “enemies,” which include any Americans who dare to disagree with him and his movement. Why is still there so much denial of this reality by the American people and political leaders?

Sometimes people simple do not know what to do. They feel powerless. They can become numb because Trump and his agents are flooding the zone with waste, as Steve Bannon said of his right-wing takeover strategy. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to react to any one single crisis.

The huge danger is that it is quite probable that Donald Trump will be elected again. Trump will in fact try to put Barack Obama on trial. Trump is obsessed with him. Trump’s obsession is not unlike that of other right-wing authoritarians with their predecessors.

Donald Trump is not kidding when he says he considers Barack Obama to be a traitor and wants to undo everything that Obama has done, to literally try to cancel Obama. Donald Trump is not kidding when he says he wants to put Obama in prison. It is important to take Trump’s threats seriously.

How do you locate Trump’s threats of violence — and the actual violence by his street thugs and other enforcers — relative to other examples in history?

This is why it’s important to have an up-to-date sense of how authoritarianism evolves. If we keep using the fascism of the Holocaust and World War II violence as the standard of judgment, then Donald Trump and leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan are always going to look good. For example, mass detention rather than mass killing is the way that many authoritarians today operate.

The conditions in some of Trump’s detention centers for migrants, refugees and other undocumented people have been labeled by outside observers as constituting torture. Many things that are happening right now in America under Trump resemble the security techniques that America used on other countries. One of the ironies of the Trump era is that all of that American military might that supported right-wing authoritarians abroad for decades is coming home to roost.

How did you interpret the rapid series of events with Trump’s response to the George Floyd protests, his retreat to the White House bunker, the military’s de facto refusal to follow Trump’s orders for martial law, and the attacks he ordered on protesters?

It is a compressed cycle of many things that happen when authoritarians start to fall from power. There is the fleeing into the bunker and the protests — which are not only about Trump, they’re about entrenched institutional racism. The protests continue because the American people know that there is an actual white supremacist in the White House. With the fleeing into the bunker there is also the retaliation, the barrage against the public from the leader. That is Trump’s order to use the military against the protesters in Washington.

There is also another dimension to this cycle, elite defections. Members of the government start to speak out. There are people who finally decide that the leader has gone too far.

There was a hint of this with Gen. James Mattis speaking out against Trump’s use of the military in the United States against the American people and his threats of martial law. Gen. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, publicly said, “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have been used for this photo-op.”

Trump’s photo-op, where he tried to look strong by walking to the church across the street from the White House after the attack on the protesters, was also right out of the authoritarian playbook. These events are very revealing as to how far Trump will go to stay in power — and the potential dissent and resistance from the highest levels of the United States military as well.

What is the role of death, masculinity and violence in a fascistic and/or authoritarian regime?

These leaders, including Trump, genuinely do not care if you live or die. They could not care less. You are just a tool to be used so they can stay in power and enrich themselves. That’s the premise. That is why they lead people into losing wars. They repress them. They do things that some people consider self-destructive — but in fact there is no greater power for the egocentric, narcissistic authoritarian than having people sacrifice themselves for him.

An example of this was Donald Trump daring people to go to his Tulsa rally with no masks on in the middle of a pandemic. This has not been stressed enough in terms of the public’s understanding of Donald Trump. Trump engages in male domination games with everyone. Trump even did it to Mike Pence when he announced that Pence would be his running mate in 2016.

What greater ego rush for Donald Trump than to have his supporters risk their lives for the joy of listening to him speak in person? Donald Trump will gladly send the American people to their deaths — his own supporters included — because they are just tools for him. Traditional understandings of what it means to be president in a democracy do not account for this. The public does not want to comprehend the behavior of Donald Trump.

Why are so many people willing to die for Donald Trump? For that matter, why are so many of his supporters willing to kill for him?

They are a death cult. During World War II, Germans killed themselves for Hitler. Trump shows how such things can happen even in a nominal democracy. The self-destruction for the leader makes it even more scary because it is voluntary. So many Republicans, Lindsey Graham for example, have prostituted themselves to Donald Trump. Of course such people have their own agendas and actually believe that they are using Donald Trump and not the other way around. No one is holding a death sentence over these people who have prostituted themselves to Donald Trump. It is not like one of the other authoritarian regimes where supporting the leader was and is a literal matter of life and death. Trump just fires people. In other countries a person who the leader was done with would be put in prison or killed.

If Putin is displeased with somebody, he finds a way to put them in prison, or sometimes poison them. The stakes in the United States with Trump are so much lower at present. What is going to happen to someone who stands up and does the right thing? They might not have as great of a career. They might not be asked to sit on boards of directors. They’ll lose out on some money. They might be shunned at their church. But overall, it is not a life and death situation. It is a very sad situation that more people from Trump’s administration and the United States government do not speak out. It is a spectacle of the cravenness of humanity that we are all seeing in the Trump era.

Let us assume that there is a presidential election in November and that Trump is defeated by Joe Biden. What happens next?

Authoritarian leaders do not experience defeat like other types of people. They are not normal people who would just give up the office and step down. Defeat is a form of psychological annihilation for a leader like Donald Trump. For men like Trump, authoritarians, their sense of self-worth is completely determined by adulation and having the power to bully people. It makes leaders such as Donald Trump feel good.

If authoritarian leaders feel that power is being taken away from them, they get very angry. They will do desperate things to prove to themselves that they are still loved. I would expect him to energize right-wing gun fanatics to create civil unrest because he wants to show the American people — his supporters — that without him being president the country will truly descend into anarchy. I would be very surprised that if Trump lost on Election Day to Joe Biden, he doesn’t do horrible things. It is the only way that he can show himself, in his own fantasy world, that he truly is the savior of the country.

What advice would you give to the American people about the next few months and how to prepare for what may happen with Trump and the election?

All of our tweeting and all the things we do digitally do not mean anything if the American people cannot vote. Volunteer to help register voters. Help people make sure they are on the eligible voter lists. If there is an overwhelming Biden victory on Election Day, it becomes much harder for Donald Trump to successfully find a way to stay in office.

BECAUSE OF COURSE HE DOES

Donald Trump Appears To Mock Portland Mayor Who Was Tear-Gassed At Protest: ‘They Knocked The Hell Out Of Him’

NATHAN HOWARD / GETTY IMAGESUS POLITICS

Nathan Francis

Donald Trump appeared to mock Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler in a live interview on Thursday night, saying that federal law enforcement officers “knocked the hell out of him” at a protest this week.

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump spoke of his decision to dispatch a number of federal security forces to secure federal buildings. The move has come under intense scrutiny, with the officers being accused of using heavy-handed tactics and critics saying that Trump is aiming to incite violence. The president has since announced plans to send what he referred to as a “surge” of security forces to other major cities, all of which are led by Democratic mayors.

Trump defended the decision, telling Hannity that unrest in the Oregon city necessitated his response. He went on to refer to the mayor being hit with tear gas dispatched by the forces during a protest on Wednesday night in a tone that appeared to mock him.

Trump said that protesters were trying to “rip down” the court house, and blamed the Portland mayor — who he initially referred to as Whalen — for taking part in the protest, insinuating that he deserved to have come under attack.

“He made a fool out of himself,” Trump said. “He wanted to be among the people, so he went into the crowd and they knocked the hell out of him — that was the end of him. It was pretty pathetic.”Video from Wednesday’s demonstration showed Wheeler physically affected by the irritant, which left his eyes watered. He was given water as he moved away to recover, and later had angry words about the decision to dispatch the forces in his city.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler says the tear gas stings. Says egregious overreaction from feds. Calls it urban warfare. pic.twitter.com/hrRICiNGHn
— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) July 23, 2020

Wheeler has been sharply critical of the federal response in his city, and after being struck by tear gas on Wednesday he said that it was an “egregious overreaction” and that there was no justification for the use of irritants like that on protesters.

What is QAnon? Why Twitter crackdown won’t stop the Donald Trump conspiracy theory sweeping across other platforms

While Twitter’s move seems like it would have wide-ranging impacts on the conspiracy theory, the reality is it has already spread across other apps including TikTok

By Ruchira Sharma

July 22, 2020 1:17 pm

Twitter is curtailing the QAnon conspiracy theory from spreading on its site, but how far-reaching is the move? (Photo: AP)

Twitter has removed 7,000 QAnon accounts, as part of a crackdown on the conspiracy theory which fuels misinformation and harassment on its platform.

Many have called Twitter’s action an unprecedented move to curb the far-right community, but bulletin site Reddit banned QAnon back in 2018 and yet the conspiracy theory and its believers have only grown and spread further on the internet since.

QAnon is present and growing on TikTok for example, highlighting how the community will likely continue to thrive on alternative platforms. It is the far-right theory that there is a supposed secret plot by an alleged “deep state” against President Donald Trump and his supporters.

Pizza Gate

Conspiracy theorist QAnon demonstrators protest during a rally to re-open California and against Stay-At-Home directives in San Diego, California (Photo: AFP)

The community, called /r/GreatAwakening on Reddit, had more than 71,000 subscribers before it was banned two years ago, and was host to countless violent threats, including calls to kill Hillary Clinton.

QAnon has proven itself to be violent and dangerous and is born from the 2016 groundless theory that Hillary Clinton and Democratic officials were running a child sex-trafficking ring from a Washington pizzeria, which gained traction online (dubbed PizzaGate), eventually culminating in an indoctrinated vigilante gunman opening fire in the restaurant later that year.

Soon after this YouTube, Twitter and Facebook took steps to clamp down on QAnon and suspended the accounts of users who had pushed PizzaGate.

This did little to stop the community growing however and in 2020, the conspiracy and its believers are still very much present. Despite no evidence behind it, QAnon support has been distilled into mainstream politics, with numerous Republican candidates for Congress openly supporting it.

What is Twitter doing?

Aside from removing accounts, Twitter is also controlling the reach of the content by no longer recommended QAnon accounts and limiting it in trends and searches. The site will also block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on Twitter.

The action is said to impact 150,000 accounts, NBC News reports.

“We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behaviour that has the potential to lead to offline harm. In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called ‘QAnon’ activity across the service,” Twitter said in a statement.

“We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension — something we’ve seen more of in recent weeks.”

Spreading further

Searches for ‘Pizza Gate’ have soared recently (Photo: Google Trends)

While Twitter’s move seems like it would have wide-ranging impacts on the conspiracy theory, the reality is it has already spread across other apps too and faced a resurgence. TikTok is now host to a growing community of QAnon believers, many of whom are younger and spreading it further globally as a result.

Last month TikTok posts with the #PizzaGate hashtag were viewed more than 82 million times, according to The New York Times. The hashtag has since been removed, but clips of far-right figures including Alex Jones, presenter of InfoWars, and QAnon users are still on the app. Moreover, the app is a breeding ground for other conspiracy theories, including ones on 5G and Covid-19, highlighting a wider issue of misinformation on the app.

In addition to this, QAnon communities continue to grow in secret Facebook groups – a powerful tool in disseminating the ideas to large audiences.

EXCLUSIVE
China, US and Hong Kong imported pangolins after international ban

Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative journalism unit, has found that the commercial trade of pangolins continued beyond 2017

By Madeleine Cuff
July 23, 2020 

A white-bellied pangolin which was rescued from local animal traffickers in Uganda (Photo: Isaac Kasamani/AFP/Getty)

The commercial trade of pangolins continued through 2017 and 2018 despite an international ban on the practice, with the US, Hong Kong and China all legally importing specimens of the highly endangered animal.

In January 2017 an international ban on the commercial trade of pangolins entered force, in a global effort to protect the animals from being trafficked to extinction.

But Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative journalism unit, has found that commercial trade of pangolins continued beyond 2017.

Imports

Data held by the international Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which regulates the global trade in wild animals including pangolins, reveals China and Hong Kong legally imported almost 13 tonnes of pangolin scales in 2017. The imports originated from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and are equivalent to more than 16,000 pangolins.

In 2017 and 2018 the US legally imported 106 specimens for commercial purposes according to the CITES database, although the weight and number of animals is not recorded.

Pangolins are thought to be one of the most trafficked animals in the world, and their scales are highly prized as an ingredient in traditional medicine. The trade in wild animals, including pangolins, has been linked to the emergence of new diseases, including Covid-19.

Pangolin scales seized from poachers (Photo: FLORENT VERGNES/AFP/Getty)

Confusion

The imports recorded for China and Hong Kong probably date back to pangolins captured and stockpiled before the 2017 ban, although data governing the trades is incomplete. Pre-2017 stockpiles could be legally sold for commercial purposes until last year, when the rules changed. Chinese authorities did not respond to a request for comment.

There is less clarity on why the US imports occurred. Speaking to Unearthed, experts suggested they could refer to illegal imports seized by the US authorities and wrongly reported as legal imports on the CITES database. The database detailing seizures of illegal imports is not publicly available.

CITES said the US imports were not “on a commercial scale”. US authorities did not respond to comment requests.

Commenting on the findings, Greenpeace UK’s chief scientists Doug Parr said: “It’s depressing to think that cracks in the very treaty meant to stop the trade of endangered pangolins has allowed it to ‘legally’ carry on. This should be a wake-up call for the agencies and governments involved to curb demand for wildlife products altogether, leading to trade bans as soon as possible.”

CITES Response

In response to the findings, CITES insisted the Convention has “solid compliance mechanisms that can address inconsistencies that are deemed significant or worrisome”.

It added it “takes time” for national regimes to transition from regulated trade of a product to a ban. “The CITES Secretariat is working hard with the range States, transit and destination countries every day to improve the legislation and strengthen controls to enforce the ban effectively,” it said.

From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers, Trump's phone calls alarm US officials
Bernstein: If officials spoke out earlier, we wouldn't be in this situation

By Carl Bernstein, CNN

(CNN)In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.
The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

Congress demands answers from Trump administration on Russia bounty intelligence
These officials' concerns about the calls, and particularly Trump's deference to Putin, take on new resonance with reports the President may have learned in March that Russia had offered the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan -- and yet took no action. CNN's sources said there were calls between Putin and Trump about Trump's desire to end the American military presence in Afghanistan but they mentioned no discussion of the supposed Taliban bounties.
By far the greatest number of Trump's telephone discussions with an individual head of state were with Erdogan, who sometimes phoned the White House at least twice a week and was put through directly to the President on standing orders from Trump, according to the sources. Meanwhile, the President regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America's principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was "stupid."
Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.
In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.


Then-national security adviser John Bolton listens to President Donald Trump during a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in April 2019.
The full, detailed picture drawn by CNN's sources of Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders is consistent with the basic tenor and some substantive elements of a limited number of calls described by former national security adviser John Bolton in his book, "The Room Where It Happened." But the calls described to CNN cover a far longer period than Bolton's tenure, are much more comprehensive — and seemingly more damning -- in their sweep.
Like Bolton, CNN's sources said that the President seemed to continually conflate his own personal interests -- especially for purposes of re-election and revenge against perceived critics and political enemies -- with the national interest.
To protect the anonymity of those describing the calls for this report, CNN will not reveal their job titles nor quote them at length directly. More than a dozen officials either listened to the President's phone calls in real time or were provided detailed summaries and rough-text recording printouts of the calls soon after their completion, CNN's sources said. The sources were interviewed by CNN repeatedly over a four-month period extending into June.
The sources did cite some instances in which they said Trump acted responsibly and in the national interest during telephone discussions with some foreign leaders. CNN reached out to Kelly, McMaster and Tillerson for comment and received no response as of Monday afternoon. Mattis did not comment.

What we learned from John Bolton's eye-popping tale of working with Trump
The White House did not respond to a request for comment before this story published. After publication, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews said, "President Trump is a world class negotiator who has consistently furthered America's interests on the world stage. From negotiating the phase one China deal and the USMCA to NATO allies contributing more and defeating ISIS, President Trump has shown his ability to advance America's strategic interests."
One person familiar with almost all the conversations with the leaders of Russia, Turkey, Canada, Australia and western Europe described the calls cumulatively as 'abominations' so grievous to US national security interests that if members of Congress heard from witnesses to the actual conversations or read the texts and contemporaneous notes, even many senior Republican members would no longer be able to retain confidence in the President.

Attacking key ally leaders -- especially women
The insidious effect of the conversations comes from Trump's tone, his raging outbursts at allies while fawning over authoritarian strongmen, his ignorance of history and lack of preparation as much as it does from the troubling substance, according to the sources. While in office, then- Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats expressed worry to subordinates that Trump's telephone discussions were undermining the coherent conduct of foreign relations and American objectives around the globe, one of CNN's sources said. And in recent weeks, former chief of staff Kelly has mentioned the damaging impact of the President's calls on US national security to several individuals in private.
Two sources compared many of the President's conversations with foreign leaders to Trump's recent press "briefings" on the coronavirus pandemic: free form, fact-deficient stream-of-consciousness ramblings, full of fantasy and off-the-wall pronouncements based on his intuitions, guesswork, the opinions of Fox News TV hosts and social media misinformation.
In addition to Merkel and May, the sources said, Trump regularly bullied and disparaged other leaders of the western alliance during his phone conversations -- including French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison -- in the same hostile and aggressive way he discussed the coronavirus with some of America's governors.


President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron at a meeting in London in December 2019.
Next to Erdogan, no foreign leader initiated more calls with Trump than Macron, the sources said, with the French President often trying to convince Trump to change course on environmental and security policy matters -- including climate change and US withdrawal from the Iranian multilateral nuclear accord.
Macron usually got "nowhere" on substantive matters, while Trump became irritated at the French President's stream of requests and subjected him to self-serving harangues and lectures that were described by one source as personalized verbal "whippings," especially about France and other countries not meeting NATO spending targets, their liberal immigration policies or their trade imbalances with the US.
But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as "near-sadistic" by one of the sources and confirmed by others. "Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians ... He's toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with."
The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump's behavior with Merkel in the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk: "It's just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic."


German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Donald Trump speak during the G-7 summit in Biarritz, France, in August 2019.
Trump's conversations with May, the UK Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019, were described as "humiliating and bullying," with Trump attacking her as "a fool" and spineless in her approach to Brexit, NATO and immigration matters.
"He'd get agitated about something with Theresa May, then he'd get nasty with her on the phone call," One source said. "It's the same interaction in every setting -- coronavirus or Brexit -- with just no filter applied."
Merkel remained calm and outwardly unruffled in the face of Trump's attacks —"like water off a duck's back," in the words of one source -- and she regularly countered his bluster with recitations of fact. The German official quoted above said that during Merkel's visit to the White House two years ago, Trump displayed "very questionable behavior" that "was quite aggressive ... [T]he Chancellor indeed stayed calm, and that's what she does on the phone."
Prime Minister May, in contrast, became "flustered and nervous" in her conversations with the President. "He clearly intimidated her and meant to," said one of CNN's sources. In response to a request for comment about Trump's behavior in calls with May, the UK's Downing Street referred CNN to its website. The site lists brief descriptions of the content of some calls and avoids any mention of tone or tension. The French embassy in Washington declined to comment, while the Russian and Turkish embassies did not respond to requests for comment.

Concerns over calls with Putin and Erdogan
The calls with Putin and Erdogan were particularly egregious in terms of Trump almost never being prepared substantively and thus leaving him susceptible to being taken advantage of in various ways, according to the sources -- in part because those conversations (as with most heads of state), were almost certainly recorded by the security services and other agencies of their countries.
In his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources reported, the President talked mostly about himself, frequently in over-the-top, self-aggrandizing terms: touting his "unprecedented" success in building the US economy; asserting in derisive language how much smarter and "stronger" he is than "the imbeciles" and "weaklings" who came before him in the presidency (especially Obama); reveling in his experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and obsequiously courting Putin's admiration and approval. Putin "just outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers. While Putin "destabilizes the West," said this source, the President of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source added.)


President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin arrive for a meeting in Helsinki in July 2018.
In numerous calls with Putin that were described to CNN, Trump left top national security aides and his chiefs of staff flabbergasted, less because of specific concessions he made than because of his manner -- inordinately solicitous of Putin's admiration and seemingly seeking his approval -- while usually ignoring substantive policy expertise and important matters on the standing bilateral agenda, including human rights; and an arms control agreement, which never got dealt with in a way that advanced shared Russian and American goals that both Putin and Trump professed to favor, CNN's sources said.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has touted the theme of "America First" as his north star in foreign policy, advancing the view that America's allies and adversaries have taken economic advantage of US goodwill in trade. And that America's closest allies need to increase their share of collective defense spending. He frequently justifies his seeming deference to Putin by arguing that Russia is a major world player and that it is in the United States' interest to have a constructive and friendly relationship -- requiring a reset with Moscow through his personal dialogue with Putin.

Putin leverages coronavirus chaos to make a direct play to Trump

In separate interviews, two high-level administration officials familiar with most of the Trump-Putin calls said the President naively elevated Russia -- a second-rate totalitarian state with less than 4% of the world's GDP -- and its authoritarian leader almost to parity with the United States and its President by undermining the tougher, more realistic view of Russia expressed by the US Congress, American intelligence agencies and the long-standing post-war policy consensus of the US and its European allies. "He [Trump] gives away the advantage that was hard won in the Cold War," said one of the officials -- in part by "giving Putin and Russia a legitimacy they never had," the official said. "He's given Russia a lifeline -- because there is no doubt that they're a declining power ... He's playing with something he doesn't understand and he's giving them power that they would use [aggressively]."
Both officials cited Trump's decision to pull US troops out of Syria -- a move that benefited Turkey as well as Russia -- as perhaps the most grievous example. "He gave away the store," one of them said.
The frequency of the calls with Erdogan -- in which the Turkish president continually pressed Trump for policy concessions and other favors -- was especially worrisome to McMaster, Bolton and Kelly, the more so because of the ease with which Erdogan bypassed normal National Security Council protocols and procedures to reach the President, said two of the sources.


President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan take part in a White House press conference in November 2019.
Erdogan became so adept at knowing when to reach the President directly that some White House aides became convinced that Turkey's security services in Washington were using Trump's schedule and whereabouts to provide Erdogan with information about when the President would be available for a call.
On some occasions Erdogan reached him on the golf course and Trump would delay play while the two spoke at length.
Two sources described the President as woefully uninformed about the history of the Syrian conflict and the Middle East generally, and said he was often caught off guard, and lacked sufficient knowledge to engage on equal terms in nuanced policy discussion with Erdogan. "Erdogan took him to the cleaners," said one of the sources.
The sources said that deleterious US policy decisions on Syria -- including the President's directive to pull US forces out of the country, which then allowed Turkey to attack Kurds who had helped the US fight ISIS and weakened NATO's role in the conflict -- were directly linked to Erdogan's ability to get his way with Trump on the phone calls.

The US is more alone than ever, just at the moment the world needs its leadership

Trump occasionally became angry at Erdogan -- sometimes because of demands that Turkey be granted preferential trade status, and because the Turkish leader would not release an imprisoned American evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson, accused of 'aiding terrorism' in the 2016 coup that attempted to overthrow Erdogan. Brunson was eventually released in October 2018.
Despite the lack of advance notice for many of Erdogan's calls, full sets of contemporaneous notes from designated notetakers at the White House exist, as well as rough voice-generated computer texts of the conversations, the sources said.
According to one high-level source, there are also existing summaries and conversation-readouts of the President's discussions with Erdogan that might reinforce Bolton's allegations against Trump in the so-called "Halkbank case," involving a major Turkish bank with suspected ties to Erdogan and his family. That source said the matter was raised in more than one telephone conversation between Erdogan and Trump.
Bolton wrote in his book that in December 2018, at Erdogan's urging, Trump offered to interfere in an investigation by then-US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman into the Turkish bank, which was accused of violating US sanctions on Iran.
"Trump then told Erdogan he would take care of things, explaining that the Southern District prosecutors were not his people, but were Obama people, a problem that would be fixed when they were replaced by his people," Bolton wrote. Berman's office eventually brought an indictment against the bank in October 2019 for fraud, money laundering and other offenses related to participation in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade the US sanctions on Iran. On June 20, Trump fired Berman -- whose office is also investigating Rudy Giuliani, the President's personal lawyer -- after the prosecutor refused to resign at Attorney General William Barr's direction.
Unlike Bolton, CNN's sources did not assert or suggest specifically that Trump's calls with Erdogan might have been grounds for impeachment because of possible evidence of unlawful conduct by the President. Rather, they characterized Trump's calls with heads of state in the aggregate as evidence of Trump's general "unfitness" for the presidency on grounds of temperament and incompetence, an assertion Bolton made as well in an interview to promote his book with ABC News last week: "I don't think he's fit for office. I don't think he has the competence to carry out the job," Bolton said.

Family feedback and grievances fuel Trump's approach
CNN spoke to sources familiar with the President's phone calls repeatedly over a four-month period. In their interviews, the sources took great care not to disclose specific national security information and classified details -- but rather described the broad contents of many of the calls, and the overall tenor and methodology of Trump's approach to his telephone discussions with foreign leaders.
In addition to rough, voice-generated software transcription, almost all of Trump's telephone conversations with Putin, Erdogan and leaders of the western alliance were supplemented and documented by extensive contemporaneous note-taking (and, often, summaries) prepared by Fiona Hill, deputy assistant to the President and senior NSC director for Europe and Russia until her resignation last year. Hill listened to most of the President's calls with Putin, Erdogan and the European leaders, according to her closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last November.

Breaking down Bolton's account of a White House in turmoil

Elements of that testimony by Hill, if re-examined by Congressional investigators, might provide a detailed road-map of the President's extensively-documented conversations, the sources said. White House and intelligence officials familiar with the voice-generated transcriptions and underlying documents agreed that their contents could be devastating to the President's standing with members of the Congress of both parties -- and the public -- if revealed in great detail. (There is little doubt that Trump would invoke executive privilege to keep the conversations private. However, some former officials with detailed knowledge of many of the conversations might be willing to testify about them, sources said.)
In one of the earliest calls between Putin and Trump, the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were in the room to listen — joining McMaster, Tillerson, Hill, and a State Department aide to Tillerson.
"The call was all over the place," said an NSC deputy who read a detailed summary of the conversation -- with Putin speaking substantively and at length, and Trump propping himself up in short autobiographical bursts of bragging, self-congratulation and flattery toward Putin. As described to CNN, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were immediately effusive in their praise of how Trump had handled the call -- while Tillerson (who knew Putin well from his years in Russia as an oil executive), Hill and McMaster were skeptical.
Hill — author of a definitive biography of Putin -- started to explain some of the nuances she perceived from the call, according to CNN's sources — offering insight into Putin's psychology, his typical "smooth-talking" and linear approach and what the Russian leader was trying to achieve in the call. Hill was cut off by Trump, and the President continued discussing the call with Jared and Ivanka, making clear he wanted to hear the congratulatory evaluation of his daughter and her husband, rather than how Hill, Tillerson or McMaster judged the conversation.
McMaster viewed that early phone call with Putin as indicative of the conduct of the whole relationship between Russia and the Trump administration, according to the sources -- a conclusion subsequent national security advisers and chiefs of staff, and numerous high-ranking intelligence officials also reached: unlike in previous administrations, there were relatively few meaningful dealings between military and diplomatic professionals, even at the highest levels, because Trump -- distrustful of the experts and dismissive of their attempts to brief him -- conducted the relationship largely ad hoc with Putin and almost totally by himself. Ultimately, Putin and the Russians learned that "nobody has the authority to do anything" -- and the Russian leader used that insight to his advantage, as one of CNN's sources said.
The Kushners were also present for other important calls with foreign leaders and made their primacy apparent, encouraged by the President even on matters of foreign policy in which his daughter and her husband had no experience. Almost never, according to CNN's sources, would Trump read the briefing materials prepared for him by the CIA and NSC staff in advance of his calls with heads of state.
"He won't consult them, he won't even get their wisdom," said one of the sources, who cited Saudi Arabia's bin Salman as near the top of a list of leaders whom Trump "picks up and calls without anybody being prepared," a scenario that frequently confronted NSC and intelligence aides. The source added that the aides' helpless reaction "would frequently be, 'Oh my God, don't make that phone call.'"
"Trump's view is that he is a better judge of character than anyone else," said one of CNN's sources. The President consistently rejected advice from US defense, intelligence and national security principals that the Russian president be approached more firmly and with less trust. CNN's sources pointed to the most notable public example as "emblematic": Trump, standing next to the Russian President at their meeting in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2018, and saying he "didn't see any reason why" Russia would have interfered in the 2016 presidential election -- despite the findings of the entire US intelligence community that Moscow had. "President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today," Trump said.
The common, overwhelming dynamic that characterizes Trump's conversations with both authoritarian dictators and leaders of the world's greatest democracies is his consistent assertion of himself as the defining subject and subtext of the calls -- almost never the United States and its historic place and leadership in the world, according to sources intimately familiar with the calls.
In numerous calls with the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Canada -- America's closest allies of the past 75 years, the whole postwar era -- Trump typically established a grievance almost as a default or leitmotif of the conversation, whatever the supposed agenda, according to those sources.
"Everything was always personalized, with everybody doing terrible things to rip us off — which meant ripping 'me' — Trump — off. He couldn't -- or wouldn't -- see or focus on the larger picture," said one US official.
The source cited a conspicuously demonstrable instance in which Trump resisted asking Angela Merkel (at the UK's urging) to publicly hold Russia accountable for the so-called 'Salisbury' poisonings of a former Russian spy and his daughter with Novichok, a nerve agent developed in what was then the Soviet Union, in which Putin had denied any Russian involvement despite voluminous evidence to the contrary.
"It took a lot of effort" to get Trump to bring up the subject, said one source. Instead of addressing Russia's responsibility for the poisonings and holding it to international account, Trump made the focus of the call -- in personally demeaning terms -- Germany's and Merkel's supposedly deadbeat approach to allied burden-sharing. Eventually, said the sources, as urged by his NSC staff, Trump at last addressed the matter of the poisonings, almost grudgingly.
"With almost every problem, all it takes [in his phone calls] is someone asking him to do something as President on behalf of the United States and he doesn't see it that way; he goes to being ripped off; he's not interested in cooperative issues or working on them together; instead he's deflecting things or pushing real issues off into a corner," said a US official.
"There was no sense of 'Team America' in the conversations," or of the United States as an historic force with certain democratic principles and leadership of the free world, said the official. "The opposite. It was like the United States had disappeared. It was always 'Just me'."
UPDATE: This story has been updated with comment from the White House.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the kind of poison used to attack a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England.

CNN's Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report.

Australia’s koalas could face extinction in 30 years, but a charity is nursing them back to health
The iconic marsupials are under increasing threat. Steven Scott meets staff at a koala hospital who are helping them following fires and drought
By Steven Scott
July 24, 2020
Baz and Sue Ashton at Port Macquarie Koala Hospital


As he lies back on the operating table, Baz is distracted by a eucalyptus leaf as a vet tends to his injuries. The young koala’s singed feet were already swaddled in bandages and he had burns to his hands, feet, chest, nose and ears.

Since being rescued from fires last summer, Baz has been nursed back to health by volunteers at the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital on Australia’s east coast.

But he is one of the lucky ones, according to those at the frontline of the battle to save the iconic Australian marsupials.

Just months after a series of wildfires destroyed large swathes of forest, a report found the koala could face extinction within 30 years.
Protecting species

The warning by a New South Wales (NSW) parliamentary inquiry is not just a sign of the devastation wrought by the summer of bushfires. It also points to the impact of shrinking habitats as agriculture, industry and housing developments encroach into bushland along large parts of Australia’s east coast. The trend has been escalating for decades – but according to conservationists in Australia’s most heavily populated state of NSW, the case for protecting the koala is now stronger than ever.


Sue Ashton, who runs the Port Macquarie koala hospital, says the recent fires have fast-tracked the decline in the species. “We were coming out of a terrible drought and we were losing a lot of koalas already to dehydration,” she said.

Read More

Australia fires latest: Rescued animals face an uncertain future with threats from predators after habitats have been destroyed

“A lot of the burn victims we got in after the fires were already in a bad way because of the drought. The fires then exacerbated that. Without doubt, loss of habitat is going to have a huge impact on the koala. If they’ve got no food they can’t survive.”

More than 600 of the animals died in the recent fires near Port Macquarie – a fraction of the estimated tens of thousands that perished across Australia last summer.

Ecologist Mark Graham told the inquiry there were “only a few areas now of significantly unburnt blocks of koala habitat” in the state. “We have lost such a massive swathe of koala habitat that I think we can say, without any doubt, there will be ongoing declines in koala populations from this point forward,” he said.
Reduced habitat

Reduced habitat can increase other threats faced by the animals, according to conservationists. Chlamydia, which is one of the most deadly diseases suffered by koalas, spreads more easily within confined populations that cannot move between regions to breed.


Koalas are also increasingly venturing into urban areas, living in parks and trees in backyards. As a result, more of them are being hit by cars or attacked by dogs.

It’s a warning familiar to conservationist Ian Morphett from Hawks Nest, about 130 miles north of Sydney. Mr Morphett says the number of koala sightings in his seaside town have fallen from 709 to 113 in the past decade.

Baz has demonstrated a resilient spirit

While urbanisation has had a dramatic impact, Mr Morphett said a rule allowing homeowners to fell trees within 10 metres of their properties – a measure designed to prevent fires – has also damaged koala habitats. “We lost 20 per cent of our trees in the town within about six months,” he said.

Those koalas that are spotted are often in precarious situations. One, known as Princess, has been rescued repeatedly in the past decade. “We saw her running down the road on New Years’ Eve,” he said. “She created a traffic jam.”


Read More

Australia floods: How heavy rainfall following devastating bush fires has put farmers’ livelihoods at risk

Mr Morphett runs a koala support group that is lobbying the local council to oppose plans for a new housing development that he says will destroy a koala corridor linking his town to a nearby forest.


Tougher restrictions on development are among the 42 recommendations by the NSW inquiry. Other proposals include farmers being paid to protect trees in areas with koala populations, funding more rescue facilities and developing sanctuaries for the animals including a mooted “Great Koala National Park”.

The inquiry chair, Greens MP Cate Faehrmann, said “urgent intervention” was needed to save the koala. The state government is yet to respond to the recommendations. NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean has defended existing state spending – but also suggested more would be done.

“Koalas are an iconic Australian animal recognised the world over and a national treasure which we will do everything we can to protect for future generations,” he said.

The international attention drawn to the plight of the koala after the summer fires has helped with recovery efforts.Baz receiving treatment

Ms Ashton’s charity received millions of dollars in donations and is now planning to breed animals that will be released into the wild.


Baz is one of those she plans to use in the breeding program. While the koala has recovered from most of his injuries, he has permanently lost claws, which were burnt to stubs. As a result, he could not survive in the wild because he is unable to climb large trees, Ms Ashton said.

‘Resilient spirit’

Instead, he wraps his limbs around small branches and tries to pull himself up. It’s a sign of a resilient spirit that Ms Ashton said was already evident when the creature was on the operating table.

“He was the only koala we didn’t have to anesthetise to change his bandages. All we had to do was have someone in there feeding him a leaf at a time,” she said. “He would just keep eating while we dressed all his wounds.”

Asked why Baz was able to withstand the pain when other animals needed medication, Ms Ashton chuckles.

“He’s just a pretty laid-back koala, I think,” she said. “As long as he gets fed, he’s happy.”

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.