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Faced with the ‘greatest scandal’ in US history, what will the American people do?

  

Category:  Op/Ed

Via:  johnrussell  •  5 years ago  •  8 comments

Faced with the ‘greatest scandal’ in US history, what will the American people do?
What of the American people? This is my greatest concern. To this point they have shown a remarkably high level of tolerance for Donald Trump’s betrayals of his oath of office as president and his obligation to serve the common good and protect the general welfare. For example, Donald Trump publicly colludes with a foreign power to help steal the 2016 presidential election for him and in response the American people are largely mute and passive. By all reasonable criteria, Trump has shown...

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T



Chauncey Devega, Salon - COMMENTARY

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Donald Trump is not a Manchurian candidate.


Unlike Frank Sinatra’s character in the 1962 film, Donald Trump has not been captured, tortured and in the process “brainwashed” by a foreign government. Instead, President Donald Trump has repeatedly chosen to advance the interests and goals of Russia and Vladimir Putin over those of the United States and the American people.


On Friday, the New York Times revealed that in 2017 the FBI began its own counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump to determine if he was acting as a foreign asset after he fired FBI Director James Comey in an apparent effort to stop the Russia investigation.


This is unprecedented. But for many reasons, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump should not be a surprise.


As documented by David Cay Johnston, Craig Unger, Seth Abramson and other investigative journalists, political analysts and reporters, Donald Trump has maintained questionable relationships with Russia’s criminal underworld (who often operate in conjunction with Russia’s spy agencies) for several decades. He publicly colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign and requested that Putin’s agents steal Hillary Clinton’s emails. He has praised the murderous dictator Vladimir Putin as a “strong leader” while insulting and demeaning U.S. national security professionals by dismissing their findings about Russia’s interference in America’s elections and democracy. He continues to side with Putin against NATO and the Western alliance at almost every opportunity, and has even shared highly classified information with Russian diplomats.


These examples are separate from the fact special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has indicted or convicted various members of Trump’s inner circle for espionage, financial fraud, perjury and other crimes. More damaging information about Donald Trump has become publicly known since last Friday.


On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that Donald Trump has tried to conceal and confiscate notes and other information  that would reveal what he discussed with Putin during their Helsinki meeting and on other occasions.


On Sunday, Carl Bernstein, the legendary reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, told CNN that a draft copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report already exists,  and that its preliminary conclusions are that Donald Trump helped Russia to “destabilize the United States.”


Occam’s razor — the simplest explanation given the available evidence and competing hypotheses — suggests that Donald Trump is likely a Russian asset.


What will the Republican Party do in response? It will continue to support Donald Trump. He remains overwhelmingly popular with Republican voters. Many political observers claims that Donald Trump is a “failure.” In fact, he has advanced most of the goals of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Ultimately, for today’s Republican Party and conservative movement, aiding and abetting treasonous and traitorous behavior is just a practical tool used to advance their destructive political revolution.


What will the Democratic Party’s leadership do? Through public hearings, legislation and perhaps even impeachment, they will try to rein in some of Trump’s greatest abuses and threats to civil and human rights, democracy and the U.S. Constitution.


What of the American people? This is my greatest concern.


To this point they have shown a remarkably high level of tolerance for Donald Trump’s betrayals of his oath of office as president and his obligation to serve the common good and protect the general welfare.


For example, Donald Trump publicly colludes with a foreign power to help steal the 2016 presidential election for him and in response the American people are largely mute and passive. By all reasonable criteria, Trump has shown himself to be an illegitimate president. Yet again, there are no sustained large-scale protests, no general strike, and no mass mobilization, boycotts or other efforts to hobble Trump and the Republican Party — at least, not beyond the punctuated moment of restrained anger of the 2018 midterm elections.


Why is this? There are some obvious explanations. Unlike in Europe and other parts of the world, the United States does not have a political culture that encourages mass mobilization and other types of sustained and disruptive protest behavior.


Political polarization and the power of the right-wing media echo chamber has created a situation where many millions of Americans do not live in the same shared reality — this is especially true of Trump’s supporters and other conservatives.


Most Americans do not follow politics closely. They are politically unsophisticated. There is a crisis in civic literacy and a lack of respect for the country’s political , social and other cultural institutions.


And perhaps the simplest explanation is that tens of millions of white Americans agree with Donald Trump and the Republican Party — and by implication or association, also Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.


There are deeper and less obvious explanations for the American people timidity in the face of Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s betrayal as well. Consumerism and capitalism are too often confused with democracy and freedom. They are not the same things.


Substantive politics and social change work requires risk, work and a commitment of time, energy and resources. Identifying with brands and corporations as some type of authentic version of the self is easier than doing the emotional and cognitive labor necessary to become active and engaged citizens dedicated to protecting democracy across all levels of society.


For a variety of reasons including economic precariousness, an unresponsive political system, a fear of violence and punishment from and by the state, and a culture of distraction and entertainment, the American people are stuck in a state of learned helplessness .


What social scientist and futurist John Feffer has described as “participatory totalitarianism” conditions the American people (and others in the West and elsewhere) to desire and approve of constant surveillance. It has become normalized and incentivized by social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. People who are co-opted by “participatory totalitarianism” are increasingly incapable of being responsible and engaged democratic citizens because narcissistic, attention-seeking behavior has robbed them of core parts of their shared humanity.


During a Saturday interview on MSNBC, former naval intelligence officer Malcolm Nance described the likelihood that Donald Trump is either an active or passive agent of Vladimir Putin and Russia as being the “single greatest scandal in the history of the United States.” Nance is correct.


But it is not the elites who will save the American people from this disaster. It is up to them — that is, to us — to be the human guardrails of their own democracy, as well as civil rights and human rights. Unfortunately, as we enter the third year of Trump’s regime, the vast majority of Americans have shown themselves not to be up to the challenge.


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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1  seeder  JohnRussell    5 years ago

Trump is the greatest political scandal in US history, bigger than Watergate , Teapot Dome, and the U.S. Grant administration financial scandals. Bigger even than JFK sneaking bimbos through the White House and Bill Clinton's oval office DNA emissions. s.

Where are America's moderates and independents? When will they speak up? Or do they want to go down in their own personal histories as having approved of the atrocity we know as the Trump presidency?

Our national law enforcement agency found cause to effectively investigate the sitting president as a virtual traitor.  The president lies daily , multiple times daily, and often behaves irrationally and irresponsibly.  He is a known crook. He has encouraged racism and white nationalism. He is a profound embarrassment to our country.

As the writer says, where are the American people? 

 
 
 
Greg Jones
Professor Participates
1.1  Greg Jones  replied to  JohnRussell @1    5 years ago

Oh please, John. [deleted] Have you ever entertained the thought that perhaps you are wrong. Millions of normal, rational, and educated people don't agree with you.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1.1.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Greg Jones @1.1    5 years ago

You are wasting my time Greg. All you do is waste people's time here.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2  seeder  JohnRussell    5 years ago

What Should Scare Us, America?

Jamil Smith January 14, 2019

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President Trump talks with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House

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Eight-hundred-thousand federal workers weren’t paid on Friday because President Trump says he needs a wall to protect us. His case for continuing the partial government shutdown, repeated once more in his Oval Office fundraising speech last week , is that migrants from Mexico and Central America are poisoning our country with their terrorism, drugs and propensity for rape. It is actually a more anodyne version of the argument that Pat Buchanan made in a syndicated column Sunday, one that Trump celebrated on Twitter for its citation of phony White House statistics about immigrant crime. The former presidential candidate and Nixon aide argued for Trump to take actions other presidents have resorted to in wartime because “the Democratic Party is hostile to white men.”

Trump’s entire presidency has embodied that sentiment. The wall may have started as a pneumonic device to remind him to demonize Hispanic migrants, but it morphed into the euphemism “border security.” Trump wants to make this shutdown about our safety, yours and mine. But especially yours, if you are reading this and happen to be white. He is here to protect us against a threat that he invented to get elected.

No matter what color you are, though, it is difficult to square Trump’s supposed obsession with public safety with how servile he has been toward the nation and leader whose tangible interference in the United States is a sustained threat to national security.

On Friday night, as many furloughed government employees wondered how they will pay rent, tuition or medical bills, the New York Times reported that in addition to the previously revealed FBI criminal probe into Trump’s ties to Russia , the bureau had also opened up a counterintelligence investigation into the president after his suspicious behavior following the firing of former FBI Director James Comey. One day later, the Washington Post wrote that Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations” with Vladimir Putin , the authoritarian president with whom he has met at least five times since the 2016 election.

The White House spit out a childish statement, all but calling the Times and the Post doody-heads. When asked directly on his favorite cable network Saturday night whether he has ever worked for Russia, Trump filibustered for two minutes, insisting that it’s good to be friends with a nation that attacked us and saying just about every word in creation but “no.” His consciousness of guilt was palpable.

This is an unsustainable presidency. Knowing the FBI’s history with black Americans, I hesitate to lionize the agency’s every deed. That being said, we should be having real, adult conversations about Trump’s impeachment. Today. Call that a political gift to him if you wish. News cycles and Republican talking points are less a concern to me than whether or not we have a foreign agent running the country.

We are where Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger supposedly felt he’d arrived in 1974, when he ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore any White House military initiatives lacking his signature , undercutting Richard Nixon’s authority at a time when it was feared he might use war powers to escape the stink of Watergate.

Many considered that treasonous, so I am not here to get into a debate about whether or not Trump is a traitor. What can be demonstrated, without semantics or legal definitions, is that the president has made this country more unsafe. Even worse, he has done so to advance his own personal and political interests. He has used the fear of fictional mobs of violent migrants while taking his eye off very real threats, including Russia and white extremist terrorism. He has compounded that betrayal by engineering this shutdown, which on Saturday became the nation’s longest ever .

The shutdown has belied Trump’s promise to protect poor to middle-class white voters. This is not a “vacation,” as White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett idiotically termed it. All throughout the country, local stations have captured stories of furloughed employees not merely struggling to pay rent or make their electric bills, but to choose between doing so and fulfilling their most urgent medical needs . One diabetic woman who works for the Department of the Interior is now rationing her insulin . A Maryland group handed out meals on Friday to affected families, much as one might see charities doing for the homeless at the holidays. How is a wall keeping them safe, or even fed? And while the panic over the lack of Food and Drug Administration inspectors may have been overblown, the increasing number of TSA officers calling in sick is increasingly worrisome .

People of color and most other marginalized groups could see how Trump was weakening the United States because they were experiencing it first hand from the moment he announced his candidacy almost four years ago. Now, everyone is in on it. Much like the notion that America under Trump is like a nation without adult supervision, the shutdown shows that our conjecture about his presidency weakening us is no longer a theoretical exercise. Trump chose to elevate both Russia and racism, and the revelations from this past weekend reminded us of the consequences of those decisions.

We are being offered a choice: not merely as far as what we are willing to tolerate from a president, but what we choose to fear. Trump needs us be frightened of these migrant families to a point that is actually fictional, all to justify both his immoral mission of white supremacy and the cruelty he shows his targets. He does this all while prostrating himself before a strongman who actually attacked our country. Now he unplugs our government and lets it atrophy. If we didn’t know before, we surely can recognize now what, and who, is terrorizing us.

 
 
 
Greg Jones
Professor Participates
3  Greg Jones    5 years ago

In a few weeks Mueller will release a report that the left will not be happy about. I can't wait to the shock set in on this forum. jrSmiley_18_smiley_image.gif

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Greg Jones @3    5 years ago

Greg, Donald Trump is no more qualified to be president of the United States than you are.

It doesn't matter what Mueller says. He can't make Trump into a decent, intelligent, thoughtful human being. Nothing can.  Mueller can't prevent Trump from being what he is, the worst president in the 240 year history of this country.

 
 
 
321steve - realistically thinkin or Duu
Sophomore Guide
4  321steve - realistically thinkin or Duu     5 years ago

What of the American people? To this point they have shown a remarkably high level of tolerance for Donald Trump’s betrayals.

As long as I get what I want I dont care.

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I think that is what many americans reaction is to this president. I also think that is so damn sad. 

I also know I can't change it but I won't be joining them ether I doubt I ever accept this man as acceptable. 

My own personal standards don't allow for it. 

 
 

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