#the guy who counseled joseph mccarthy?

[bassproshopspyramid]

bestie can you explain why ray cohn's panel said that please i'm so curious

of course! warnings for 1950s–1980s period typical homophobia, and also: you’ll fucking hate this guy.

roy cohn was an american lawyer, and he first became famous for two things: the rosenberg trial, and mccarthyism (also known as the second red scare).

julius and ethel rosenberg were an american couple who were both executed for espionage after providing military secrets to the ussr. i’m not super familiar with the case, but as i understand it: the consensus today is that julius was guilty, ethel probably wasn’t, but the trial was so full of garbage that, legally, they never should have been executed. "guilty but framed" is a phrase i’ve heard about it a couple times.

roy cohn was super proud about the rosenberg trial, claiming that he was responsible for getting the judge and the assistant u.s. attorney appointed to the case, and that the judge gave them the death penalty based on cohn’s personal recommendation.

because of cohn’s prominence in the rosenberg trial, senator joseph mccarthy chose cohn as his chief counsel. cohn worked for the "permanent subcommittee on investigations" (which mccarthy was the head of), and was known for his "aggressive" questioning of suspected communists in american government — basically, they interrogated hundreds of people working for the military and other parts of the government, and drummed up as much anti-communist sentiment as america as possible (that sentiment is why everyone in america is so Like That about unions).

one of the tactics that mccarthy and cohn used was weaponizing americans’ homophobia. they said that communists were convincing closeted gay people in the government to share top secret information in return for not being outed. this is the start of the lavender scare. homosexuals, they said, were a danger to national security. this eventually made then-president eisenhower sign an executive order to ban homosexuals from working for the federal government. we’ll come back to this.

eventually, mccarthy’s claiming that the department of defence was full of communists and also threatening the army when they drafted one of his consultants, g. david schine, led to senate hearings in 1954 that ruined mccarthy’s public image, and cohn was asked to resign.

he went into private practice in new york, where his clients included a bunch of mafia dudes and the star of home alone 2: donald trump. (other famous assholes that were cohn’s clients/friends include alan dershowitz, rupert murdoch, and roger stone. none of those dudes are dead but they all really should be.) he also befriended archbishop francis spellman of new york city, and represented the archdiocese of new york in court. during the debate over the passage of new york’s first gay rights bill, he shared the archdiocese’s opinion and said "homosexual teachers are a grave threat to our children"

cohn was known for being fiercely loyal, and also being accused of a ton of crimes himself (his section on his wikipedia page lists theft, obstruction, extortion, tax evasion, bribery, blackmail, fraud, perjury, and witness tampering. none of which are particularly cool crimes, because he’s a coward.)

he eventually wormed his ass back into politics, becoming an informal advisor to presidents tricky dick nixon and ronald reagan, two guys who are currently burning in hell, competing to figure out which of them is more racist. he was a very good friend to first lady nancy reagan and former cia director william casey, as well as a ton of lobbyists and some morally corrupt "journalists", but he said his very best friend was donald trump. cohn got charged with a few crimes on account of him committing a metric fuckton of crimes, and he ended up being disbarred shortly before his death.

(speaking of those crimes that got him disbarred, one of the things that is mentioned a couple times is that cohn entered the hospital room of one of his clients, a dude who was in a coma and dying, and attempted to make himself a beneficiary of the man’s will. to quote wikipedia, "the resulting marks were determined in court to be indecipherable and in no way a valid signature.")

now, the thing i have done my best to not mention in this post? is that roy cohn himself was infamously gay. he denied it until his dying breath, of course, but he was really bad at hiding it. it was one of those things that everybody knew and nobody spoke about.

we know some of the men he dated and slept with — his assistant russell eldridge, who died from aids in 1984, was one of his boyfriends. the chauffeur of that mccarthy consultant that got drafted, g. david schine, said that schine and cohn did the dirty in the back of his limo, which is just really rude to the chauffeur no matter what your sexuality is. this came up during hearings, and cohn said he and schine were not "closer than to the ordinary friend". that archbishop i mentioned, francis spellman, was rumoured to be gay, which was a big controversy in the church at the time. and cohn’s partner for the last two years of his life was a man named peter fraser.

again, cohn’s sexuality was the kind of thing that was known, you just couldn’t say in public. the lawyer for the army in the hearings asked if a photograph "came from a pixie", and then he defined "pixie" as "a close relative of a fairy". ("pixie" was a type of camera, and "fairy" is a somewhat outdated insult for gay men). cohn’s associate roger stone said of him: "roy was not gay. he was a man who liked having sex with men."

in 1984, roy cohn was diagnosed with aids. he kept the condition a secret and received experimental treatment — he was part of clinical trials for azt, the first anti-hiv drug. he died of complications from aids on august 2, 1986, insisting to his dying day that the cause was liver cancer. when he died, the irs (internal revenue service/basically the tax cops) seized nearly everything he owned. one of the things they didn’t take was a pair of diamond cufflinks, which were a gift from donald trump. roger stone said that cohn’s "absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the irs. he succeeded in that."

michael kruse wrote for politico: "he was preening and combative, look-at-me lavish and loud. it was an act. the truth was he hated what he was—a lawyer who hated lawyers, a jewish person who hated jewish people, and a gay person, fiercely closeted if haphazardly hidden, who hated gay people".

cohn is a character in a couple of tony kushner’s plays — most famously angels in america, where he is "a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite haunted by the ghost of ethel rosenberg as he denies dying of aids.", but he also appears in g. david schine in hell (where, from a brief look at the show’s wikipedia page, i think he might be in drag?). kushner actually said that seeing his description on the aids quilt is what inspired him to look into cohn.

roy cohn:

lawyer and patriot

vs

bully, coward, victim.

[bountyofbeads]

Stone-Cold Loser https://nyti.ms/2S85c83

Roger Stone, who was arrested in a dawn raid at his home in Fort Lauderdale, has long been fond of the Somerset Maugham line that Florida is a "sunny place for shady people."

"Just as Nixon went down in history as a disgrace to the office of the president, so now will Stone go down as an accomplice to enemies of the republic," writes Eric Caine from Modesto in a comment on @MaureenDowd's column, "Stone-Cold Loser."

"Stone-Cold Loser"

By Maureen Dowd | New York Times Opinion | Published Jan. 26, 2019 |

Posted January 27, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — Roger Stone has always lived in a dog-eat-dog world.

So it was apt that he was charged with skulduggery in part for threatening to kidnap a therapy dog, a fluffy, sweet-faced Coton de Tuléar, belonging to Randy Credico, a New York radio host.

Robert Mueller believes that Credico, a pal of Julian Assange, served as an intermediary with WikiLeaks for Stone. Mueller’s indictment charges that Stone called Credico “a rat” and “a stoolie” because he believed that the radio host was not going to back up what the special counsel says is Stone’s false story about contacts with WikiLeaks, which disseminated Russia’s hacked emails from the D.N.C. and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

Stone emailed Credico that he would “take that dog away from you,” the indictment says, later adding: “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die (expletive).”

As the owner of two Yorkies, Stone clearly knows how scary it is when a beloved dog is in harm’s way. When he emerged from court on Friday, he immediately complained that F.B.I. agents had “terrorized” his dogs when they came to arrest him at dawn at his home in Fort Lauderdale.

The last thing Stone posted on Instagram before his arrest was a video of a terrier, with a high-pitched voice-over, protesting, “Roger Stone did nothing wrong.”

Always bespoke and natty, living by the mantra that it’s better to be infamous than never famous, Stone looked strangely unadorned as he came out of court to meet the press in a navy polo shirt and bluejeans.

As the master of darkness who had been captured in darkness stepped into the bright light of Fort Lauderdale, he was his usual flamboyant, unapologetically meretricious self. He proclaimed his innocence, flashed the Nixon victory sign and reiterated the old saw from his mentor, Roy Cohn, that any attention is good attention.

But it fell flat. Being Roger Stone had finally caught up with him.

He has always said Florida suited him because “it was a sunny place for shady people,” borrowing a Somerset Maugham line. But now the cat’s cradle of lies and dirty tricks had tripped up the putative dognapper. And it went down on the very same day that Paul Manafort — his former associate in a seamy lobbying firm with rancid dictators as clients, and then later his pal in the seamy campaign of Donald Trump — was also in federal court on charges related to the Mueller probe. Manafort’s hair is now almost completely white.

One of Stone’s rules — along with soaking his martini olives in vermouth and never wearing a double-breasted suit with a button-down collar — is “Deny, deny, deny.” But his arrest for lying, obstructing and witness tampering raised the inevitable question about his on-and-off friend in the White House, the man who is the last jigsaw-puzzle piece in the investigation of Trumpworld’s alleged coordination with Russia: Is being Donald Trump finally about to catch up with Donald Trump?

Stone, who famously has Nixon’s face tattooed on his back, is the agent provocateur who is the through line from Nixon, and his impeachment, to Trump, and his possible impeachment.

As Manafort said in the 2017 documentary “Get Me Roger Stone,” Trump and Stone “see the world in a very similar way.” And that way is theatrical and cynical. Do whatever you have to do to get what you want; playing by the rules is for suckers.

In 1999, when I went on a trip to Miami to watch Trump test the presidential waters, Stone orchestrated Trump’s Castro-bashing speech to Cuban-Americans. The bodybuilding, swinging strategist, christened “the state-of-the-art sleazeball” by The New Republic in the 80s, said he was “a jockey looking for a horse.”

Stone, who was mixed up in Watergate at the tender age of 19, “made the transition from the Stone Age of dirty tricks to today,” as David Axelrod puts it.

He watched Nixon rally the silent majority with a law-and-order message and racial dog whistling. He helped Ronald Reagan create Reagan Democrats.

For decades, believing “past is prologue,” Stone urged Trump to be the successor to those pols, revving up angry, white working-class voters who felt belittled or scared of “the other.” It would be so easy to divide and stoke resentment, as Stone and Trump proved when they inflamed the birther controversy against Barack Obama.

“Hate is a stronger motivator than love,” Stone told the documentarians. “Human nature has never changed.”

The tribal tensions in America made Stone’s favorite tricks easier than ever; he didn’t have to operate in the shadows. He wore a T-shirt with Bill Clinton and the word “Rape” at 2016 campaign rallies. As Stone boasted in the documentary, his “slash-and-burn” tactics “are now in vogue.”

Trump has had periods of estrangement with Stone. In 2008, in an interview with The New Yorker, he called the strategist “a stone-cold loser,” a state Trump himself has been relegated to this past week, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi.

Stone will not go gently. When he is asked about the tattoo of Nixon, he says he got it to remind himself, “A man is not finished when he is defeated; he is only finished when he quits.”

At the moment, though, dogged by Mueller, Stone and Manafort are the dog’s breakfast. The pair has given practicing the dark arts a bad name.

"There's one piece of history about Roger Stone that never gets enough press, Ms. Dowd. That is, Roger Stone was involved in the "recount" in Florida and swinging it to George W. Bush. Specifically, he was behind a political group attacking three Democratic state Supreme Court justices threatening Bush's possible victory: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/07/11/fla-may-fine-gop-figure-for-2000-recount-actions/af72ec6a-082e-4292-913c-f8ed14c2fc62/?utm_term=.9e4d3fc6c5f3 These sleazy political operatives, from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove to Paul Manafort to Roger Stone on the Right have been getting away with this disgusting behavior for decades. Trump is a direct result of this cancer. Lock them all up." V of LA

"The ghost of Nixon past still haunts us. Just when you thought it was safe to trust our democracy, we get the Nixon salute and see his face on Stone’s back, just not quite low enough, in my opinion. The president was bad enough, but now it looks as though he’s merely the apex of a vast pyramid scheme so vile and full of duplicity that only Betsy DeVos could fully appreciate it. But it’s clear that the president didn’t accomplish his takeover on his own. He was socially promoted to a position higher than he could have ever reached without dirty tricks, lies and conspiracies galore. If today’s events aren’t disgusting enough, we’re even picking up echoes of Roy Cohen. There’s even a faint whiff of Joseph McCarthy that you can just make out while watching the nightly news. It recalls a time when powerful people weaponized fear and ignorance, and nearly turned us into animals at each others throats. We can only hope that people who voted for the president were among those fearful of going broke during the government shutdown. You can talk to people all day about why an unread, crotch-groping narcissistic moron is not a good candidate for president of the United States, but until they feel it in their guts, and their wallets, they’ll never fully understand. Do we have your attention now? Have you taken note of the sleazy, lying manipulators who manufactured this presidency with your help? Mueller might undo some of the damage, but it's up us not to let it happen again." gemli of Boston

"Imagine assembling a clown show of Trump, Junior, Jared, Manafort, Bannon, Stone, Flynn, KA Conway and some sideshow characters like Carter Page and Papadopoulus. Deliver some memorable campaign promises for America's future like "Lock her up" and "Build the Wall", while encouraging mobs to beat up reporters. Toss in a few surprise tapes about assaulting young women. Then openly conspire with Russian intelligence to interfere in the US election while being watched by the FBI, CIA and 6 European country intelligence services. And make plain as day efforts to relieve sanctions on Russia, support the pro-Russian cause in Ukraine, make over 100 contacts with Russian government officials during the campaign and transition and attempt to set up a secret communication channel through the Russian Embassy that US intelligence cannot monitor. Even after all of this, the chaos and the soaring deficits of the first two years of the Trump Administration, around 40% of Americans still think he is doing a great job. Based on personal experience working in all 50 states, I don't believe that part of the population is going to change much. But we need to take back the government on behalf of future generations and do it soon." Look Ahead of Washington

"Like Trump, Roger Stone is a man with no redeeming qualities and no morals at all. Cohen and Manafort as well. They admire and emulate the tough guys of organized crime without actually BEING those tough guys. But the Russians working for former KGB agent Putin are those tough guys, and that's who the phonies chose to do business with. Stone is blustering but he's counting on a Trump pardon, not realizing 3 things: 1) Trump WILL throw him under the bus. A pardon is unlikely. 2) A Trump pardon means he cannot use the 5th Amendment to keep from testifying--meaning he must tell the truth or face contempt or perjury charges. 3) He will still be liable to state charges, and the new NY AG would love get him in her cross-hairs. Stone is finished and doesn't even know it!"Dad of 2 /NJ

"Roger Stone is a truly mean-spirited figure. No wonder he, like Trump, his soul mate if you will, were proteges of Roy Cohn. One thing is certain, nobody is going to feel sorry for Stone, Manafort or any of Donald Trump's merry band of mean, vindictive misfits. Once our national nightmare is over, it will take a long time to heal, if we ever can. Because Stone and Trump poked the racist beast of a certain segment of the nation, unleashing virulent emotions, conservative-fed conspiracy theories, and disdain for truth, fact checking, and critical thinking. The president, a man who doesn't read, aligned himself with a man who did but used his reading to polish his dark arts, and tries to make ignorance seem cool. As a result, they got an entire political party to totally overhaul its thinking on foreign policy goals, belief in climate science (indeed, belief in any science) and even, I venture to say, the biggie: immigration. Trump, egged on by Stone, has done more damage to our politics, rule of law, and views of government than any foreign invader could have. Stone, more than Trump, grasped an essential truth: the worst damage a country can undergo is from within."Christine McM of Boston

"If Stone and The Donald have used "revving up angry white working-class voters" as a tactic to win elections, one wonders whether they are themselves authentic racists or whether they believe in nothing but power for its own sake. Are they "merely" impersonating bigots or are they true believers? Either way they represent a pestilence that needs to be driven out of the body politic, and yet if they're being disingenuous with respect to their own feelings about white supremacy (a disease that normally infects only the feeble-minded) one wonders how they manage to live with themselves. Can one ever attain enough wealth and power to compensate for the loss of one's soul? Perhaps it's a moot point but I somehow can't get past it."

Stu Freeman of Brooklyn

"No Stone left unturned, no creatures hiding under rocks. Spring IS coming, the flowers will bloom, the stench will dissipate, the gloom will dissolve. Thank you, Mr. Mueller." Stu Freeman of Brooklyn

Phyllis Dalmatian of Kansas

"Stone is Johnny two-face: he threatens to harm a security dog then uses his own two dogs' reaction to his early-morning arrest as proof of the FBI's perceived heavy-handed tactics. He trumpets his dedication to "the truth" while lying (all his life) and throughout the Mueller investigation--threatening former criminal associates if they cooperate with--i.e. tell the truth to--the feds. He professes patriotism while working in league with his country's greatest adversary to undermine an American presidential election. It is no wonder anyone this duplicitous should be an acolyte of Richard Nixon and a life-long driving force in the Republican Party. That's the way the GOP grows its alleged leaders--by rewarding them for wrecking American values without demonstrating any consciousness of guilt. "CMary of Chicago

"Concerning stones method of arrest, he merely found out how it is to be treated by law enforcement in many zip codes in this county, no sympathy whatsoever."No Party of FLA

"Why is it so many Americans believe whatever they are told? People like Trump and Stone commit crimes and lie in plain sight and many of our countrymen lap it up like duck soup. Was it growing up in the era of Disney and Spielberg that has made so much of the public susceptible to political special effects? "Of course President Obama is a Muslim, my TV said so." You can't fool all of the people, but you certainly will have no trouble fooling half of them. These remain dangerous times."Socrates of NJ

" Looking back....as you do in this piece....there is really only one question “Was your desperate focus on stopping Hilary from being elected worth it?”

David Martin of Paris

"Meanwhile, Trump can't stop telling us about women in vans with duct tape on their mouths. Perhaps his past is catching up with him involuntarily." Jerry Summer of NC

Another day, another Trump associate is arrested... What was that you were saying about HRC's emails again, Ms Dowd? Nick Adam of Mississippi

[keywestlou]

NERO'S THROAT SLIT

Most believe Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Historically incorrect. Most historians claim it was not possible. At the time Rome was burning, Nero was 35 miles away at his country villa. And, not fiddling. In fact if my memory proves correct, the fiddle was not invented till years later.

Nero’s life nevertheless was strange.

On this day in 68 AD, Nero committed suicide. He implored his secretary Epaphroditos to slit his throat. The Senate had imposed the death penalty upon Nero. Death by flogging. Nero considered the flogging too painful a way to go. Ergo, he had Epaphroditos slit his throat.

His first heinous act was having his mother killed. He blamed the Christians for Rome’s great fire. Christians the scapegoats. He had them burned alive.

Nero was motivated at all times not by justice, but by personal cruelty.

He was the first persecutor of Christians. Among them the apostles Paul and Peter. He had Paul beheaded. Peter crucified upside down.

A sicky.

One of Key West’s most popular tourist attractions is Fort Zachary Taylor. Construction of the fort began this day in 1845.

Still standing next to Key West’s best beach named of course the Fort Zachary Taylor Beach.

Today is one to remember our Arab friends. Especially Saudi Arabia.

It was on this day in 2008 that retail gas prices rose above $4 a gallon.

Our “friends” do nothing for us. I shall never forget the hike in gas prices, 9/11, and other things the Saudis did for us.

I am still in self-quarantine. Today the 90th day. Still ok. It will be a while yet for me.

Florida’s Governor De Santis is Trump’s lapdog. Trump says jump and De Santis jumps.

Florida was one the States that began reopening early.

New coronavirus cases in Florida have increased an average of 46 percent over the past week. One week!

The rise is attributed to “increased testing.” Don’t know if the numbers support the theory.

In the one week, Florida experienced 1,000 new cases per day. The increase came as Florida entered the second stage of reopening last friday.

The reopening did not include Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties where the numbers are still off the wall.

The weekend was Key West’s first on a reopened basis.

I have spoken via phone to several friends who were out and about.

Friday and saturday nights busy. Sunday night dead. Makes sense. Most of the tourists came in from Miami and Fort Lauderdale attracted by reduced hotel and restaurant rates. They would have left for home late sunday.

The Pier House is open. The Beach Bar by day only. The Chart Room not yet open.

The bars were busy in the evenings. No social distancing. People didn’t seem to care.

The mix friday and saturday nights were locals and tourists.

Tuesday Talk with Key West Lou tonight at 9. Join me. I have tons to talk about re Trump, the police, etc.  Guaranteed I will be ranting  and raving about Trump and the protests. www.blogtalkradio.com/key-west-lou.

Today a big one in the history of horse racing.

On this day in 1973, Secretariat won the Triple Crown. The first horse to do so since Citation in 1948.

Secretariat ran 6 more races. Then put out to pasture.

He fell ill in 1989. He had to be euthanized. An autopsy was performed. It was discovered Secretariat’s heart was 2 1/2 times the size of a normal horse heart. Many believe the size of his heart contributed to his extraordinary racing abilities.

In the 1950’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was a nut. Not the best of people. Lied about many. Persecuted many.

McCarthy said there were hundreds of Communists in government and in important outside businesses like the movie industry. Spreading Communist poison.

Most of the names on the lists were not Communists, had never been. However McCarthy added their names for publicity purposes.

McCarthy claimed there were many Communists in the U.S. Army.

A young officer was being questioned by McCarthy. The Army’s counsel was Joseph Welch. A tiny old crafty attorney from the Boston area.

McCarthy was beating up on the young officer. Brutally. Welch interjected: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Like an inquiry from on high.

The question was the beginning of the end of the McCarthy hearings and McCarthy himself.

A little Trump today.

Trump is trying a new election message. He is now the candidate of Law and Order. As Richard Nixon was. Birds of a feather.

Trump applying the Law and Order slogan to himself is merely a rattling of old America. He is appealing to his base again. It will not carry him to victory.

Words describe the Washington activities of the past few weeks. First protesters, then demonstrators. Perhaps the other way around. First demonstrators, then protesters.

Whatever, the label that comes next significant. “Uprising.”

The line to an uprising not yet crossed. The country is close, however. Trump is not calming the situation. Rather he is pouring fuel on the fire. It will be a new world if the protesters/demonstrators take down the black steel fencing and march over the lawn to the White House.

Never say never. Did you think the situation would have developed to this point 3 weeks ago?

Disband the police! Wow! Strong language. A major intent.

It has happened already in a handful of communities. Not this week or year. Several years ago.

Camden, New Jersey the largest community.

The police department was disbanded in 2012. The city was out of control. Public corruption rampant. Drugs big time. One hundred seventy open air drug markets. The area known as Heroin Highway. Police falsely placing “evidence” on a person to be arrested.

The slate was swept clean. Everyone on the force went.

The “new” police department operates in a different fashion.

Violent crimes are down 42 percent in 7 years. New police officers go door to door in the neighborhood they are working when first assigned to the area. They introduce themselves.

The police frequently  have a “pop-up- barbecue on a street corner. Hot dogs for the neighborhood. Occasionally a Mr. Softee truck operated by a police officer drives through. The police also sponsor drive-in movies.

Blacks the majority in Camden. Ergo, the police force is composed of more blacks than whites.

Some say the new procedure is working. Others, complain.

Then there is the tiny hamlet of Deposit in New York State. The police department was costing $200,000 a year to operate. The town could not afford it any longer.

The police department was disbanded. One hundred percent. Deposit is now watched over by one deputy Sheriff.

Trump is “military crazy.” National Guard units are returning home. Many other departments were represented in the force opposing protesters. Especially in Washington.

Among others still remaining in Washington are the Border Patrol and ICE. Not many. Enough to make one uncomfortable, however. Four hundred Border Patrol members and 160 ICE agents.

My concern a simple one.

Trump loves the military. Loves force. Enjoys being seen as a tough guy.

I have written and said for the past 2 years that the country needed to beware of Ice and later added the Border Patrol. I see these 2 groups as Trump’s Gestapo.

Don’t say no. Keep in mind Trump wanted U.S. Army troops sent into cities all over the U.S. last week “to control” the protesters. Were it not for 1 or 2 four star generals, it would have happened. Humvees, helicopters and troops coming down the streets of America. Freedom no more.

Jared Kushner has not proven himself to be a leader of anything. If he were not Trump’s son in law he would not have the many governmental positions he convinced Trump to place him in.

Kushner holds several titles at the present time. He is one of the heads of Trump’s reelection committee.

Trump is not doing well.

The word is he is “malignantly crazy” about his reelection poll numbers. He blames Kushner.

Kushner may not be in charge of Trump’s reelection much longer.

Enjoy your day!

  NERO’S THROAT SLIT was originally published on Key West Lou

[topworldhistory]

Though silent in public, President Dwight D. Eisenhower worked behind the scenes to discredit Senator Joseph McCarthy and his red-baiting tactics.

Though they were both Republicans and briefly campaigned together in 1952, President Dwight D. Eisenhower “loathed [Senator Joseph] McCarthy as much as any human being could possibly loathe another,” according to the president’s brother. Yet Eisenhower refused to criticize McCarthy to the press, telling aides he would “not get into the gutter with that guy.” Instead, Eisenhower opted for a clandestine campaign to stamp out the senator’s influence.

Far from appeasing McCarthy, as his critics asserted at the time, Eisenhower played a major role in effecting his fellow Republican’s downfall.

Joseph McCarthy Rides Red Scare Wave

The Red Scare Started Before the McCarthy Era (TV-PG; 1:46)

WATCH: The Red Scare Started Before the McCarthy Era

Not long after World War II, anti-Communist paranoia swept through the United States, prompted by such events as the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the Communist takeover of China, the outbreak of the Korean War and the trial of the Rosenbergs.

In February 1950, at the height of the so-called Red Scare, McCarthy rose to prominence by falsely claiming to have a list of 205 known Communists working at the U.S. State Department. (When pressed for details, he later changed the number to 57.) The Wisconsin senator’s anti-Communist crusade only intensified from there, as he railed against allegedly subversive activity within various government entities.

“There were spies, and it was a real issue,” says David A. Nichols, author of Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Secret Campaign Against Joseph McCarthy. “But there’s no evidence I found that McCarthy ever caught one. It was all political bluster.”

McCarthy’s sway further increased in 1953, when he became chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a position he used to subpoena witnesses, hold hearings, and make wild accusations against those he perceived as disloyal, many of whom lost their jobs and reputations.

McCarthy even attacked George C. Marshall, the architect of the Marshall Plan, not to mention Eisenhower’s former boss and mentor, essentially accusing him of treason. He also held up key Eisenhower appointees, most notably the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, for allegedly being soft on Communism.

Eisenhower's Silence Mistaken for Approval of McCarthyism

President Eisenhower (right) initially maintained silence over McCarthy (left) and his red scare tactics. 

In public, Eisenhower wouldn’t even mention McCarthy’s name, thereby depriving him of the newspaper headlines he craved. When reporters asked about McCarthy, the president would answer, “I never talk personalities.”

“[Eisenhower] believed that if he gave McCarthy presidential attention, it would only encourage him, it would only elevate his prestige even more,” Nichols says, pointing out that Eisenhower’s predecessor, Harry Truman, constantly lambasted the Wisconsin senator to no ill effect.

Eisenhower’s opponents initially regarded his silence as tacit approval of McCarthyism’s excesses. In actuality, however, Eisenhower was biding his time to bring down McCarthy, whom he deemed a polarizing threat to both his presidency and the nation as a whole.

The president, a five-star general who led the D-Day invasion of Europe during World War II, became especially incensed in late 1953, when McCarthy accused the U.S. Army of harboring Communists. By January 1954, Eisenhower decided to fight back.

Meeting in the attorney general’s office on January 21, 1954, trusted Eisenhower aides learned of sensitive information they felt could be weaponized: Roy Cohn, chief counsel to McCarthy’s investigative subcommittee and a leading proponent of his boss’s anti-Communist actions, had with McCarthy’s help secured special Army privileges for G. David Schine, an unpaid consultant to the subcommittee. (Nichols believes that Schine and Cohn were lovers.)

With Eisenhower’s backing, aides started preparing a report on what would become a major scandal. Meanwhile, on March 9, Ralph Flanders, a Republican senator from Vermont, denounced McCarthy—assuredly, Nichols says, having received White House encouragement to do so. “To what party does he belong?” Flanders declared on the floor of the Senate. “One must conclude that his is a one-man party, and that its name is McCarthyism.”

That same evening, broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow launched his own legendary anti-McCarthy diatribe, saying “the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly.” “We will not walk in fear, one of another,” Murrow added. “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.”

Schine Report Ensures McCarthy's Downfall

Sen. Joseph McCarthy (center) seated beside Roy Cohn (right), chief counsel to McCarthy’s investigative subcommittee.

With Democrats ramping up their attacks as well and McCarthy now on his heels, Eisenhower stuck the knife in further. On March 11, he surreptitiously greenlighted the release of the Schine report, which documented how Cohn (who later served as Donald Trump’s personal attorney) repeatedly threatened to “wreck the Army” if his and McCarthy’s requests regarding the recently drafted Schine were not approved.

“It was pretty brutal politics,” Nichols says, referring to Cohn and McCarthy, as well as the White House response. “We think our politics is brutal now, but it was in those days too.”

As a result of the scandal, 36 days of televised hearings were held, running from April to June, during which McCarthy continued raging against his perceived enemies. As Nichols points out, though, “TV was not kind to him. It showed him to be a bully and hurt him a great deal politically.” In one particularly poignant moment, a lawyer for the Army asked him, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Just weeks after the hearings concluded, Senator Flanders introduced a resolution to censure McCarthy for conduct unbecoming to a senator. That December—with Eisenhower’s behind-the-scenes support—the Senate condemned him by a vote of 67 to 22, after which “Ike” praised the chair of the censure committee for doing a “very splendid job.”

A few days later, McCarthy publicly repudiated Eisenhower. But by then, McCarthy, who just a year earlier had been one of the most powerful and popular politicians in America, had lost nearly all of his influence. According to Nichols, his fellow lawmakers wouldn’t even sit with him in the Senate dining room or listen to him on the Senate floor.

To the end of his life, Nichols says, “Eisenhower never admitted that the White House was behind this.” Yet he couldn’t help but gloat a bit in private. On at least one occasion, he reportedly repeated a joke that “it’s no longer McCarthyism, it’s McCarthywasm.” 

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/38kLbzm March 04, 2020 at 09:05PM

[thisdaynews]

The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned from Roy Cohn

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-final-lesson-donald-trump-never-learned-from-roy-cohn/

The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned from Roy Cohn

One of Donald Trump’s most important mentors, one of the most reviled men in American political history, is about to have another moment.

Roy Cohn, who has been described by people who knew him as “a snake,” “a scoundrel” and “a new strain of son of a bitch,” is the subject of a new documentary out this week from producer and director Matt Tyrnauer. It’s an occasion to once again look at Cohn and ask how much of him and his “savage,” “abrasive” and “amoral” behavior is visible in the behavior of the current president. Trump, as has been well-established, learned so much from the truculent, unrepentant Cohn about how to get what he wants, and he pines for Cohn and his notorious capabilities still. Trump, after all, reportedly has said so himself, and it’s now the name of this film: “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”

Story Continued Below

What Cohn could, and did, get away with was the very engine of his existence. The infamous chief counsel for the red-baiting, Joseph McCarthy-chaired Senate subcommittee in the 1950s, Cohn was indicted four times from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s—for stock-swindling and obstructing justice and perjury and bribery and conspiracy and extortion and blackmail and filing false reports. And three times he was acquitted—the fourth ended in a mistrial—giving him a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability. Cohn, Tyrnauer’s work reaffirms, took his sanction-skirting capers and twisted them into a sort of suit of armor.

It’s the past quarter or so, though, of Tyrnauer’s film that is perhaps most salient at this stage of Trump’s first term. It deals with the less discussed but arguably much more trenchant lesson of Cohn’s life—not his decades of dark-arts untouchability but his brutal comeuppance. Cohn did not, in the end, elude the consequences of his actions. He could not, it turned out, get away with everything forever. He was a braggart of a tax cheat, and the Internal Revenue Service closed in; he was an incorrigibly unethical attorney, and he finally was disbarred; and only six weeks after that professional disgrace, six months shy of 60 years old, Cohn was dead of AIDS.

Now, less than 14 months out from next year’s election, with Trump facing historic legal and political peril, it’s getting harder and harder not to wonder what he might or might not have gleaned from watching Cohn’s wretched unraveling. Trump is beset by 29 federal, state, local and congressional investigations. Poll after poll shows he’s broadly disliked. He could win reelection, obviously, but it’s true, too, that he’s an unusually endangered incumbent. Trump, to be sure, is not weakened by physical sickness, and he has not been pursued by prosecutors and other committed antagonists for nearly as long as Cohn was. And as powerful as Cohn was perceived to be at his peak, he was never, it almost goes without saying, the most powerful man in the world. Even so, the question looms: Will Cohn’s most accomplished and attentive mentee ultimately suffer a similar fate?

“The maddening thing about Cohn and Trump,” Tyrnauer told me recently, “is that they have this sort of Road Runner-versus-Wile E. Coyote knack, where you think the boulder is going to fall on them and crush them and they escape just in the nick of time.”

“There’s a certain American romance to getting away with it. We all secretly admire the guy that can,” said Jim Zirin, a former federal prosecutor who is a regular interviewee in the film and also has a book coming out next week,Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits, in which Cohn plays an unavoidably prominent role.

“But I, as a lawyer, particularly,” Zirin added, “believe in justice, and I believe that at the end of the day, sooner or later, everyone has to pay for it.”

Just look at Cohn.

“We had him. He wasn’t getting out of this,” Martin London, one of the lawyers who led Cohn’s disbarment, tells Tyrnauer. “He was a pinned moth.”

***

The government long had tried to take him down, “a vendetta,” Cohn thought, for his role with McCarthy—and he had not fallen, or so much as flinched, and it had granted him, as a New York politician put it inNewsweek, a certain “jugular mystique.” Many came to view his checkered record as not noxious but enticing.

“He was a prototypical Teflon man,” Zirin writes in his book. “The more unscrupulous he became, the more his law practice grew. He was the man to see if you wanted to beat the system.”

“He did whatever he wanted, and he felt he was good enough at everything to get away with it,” Robert Cohen, who worked with Cohn at his firm, says in the film, “and he did for a very, very long time.”

“Roy,” according to an attorney in his office, “couldn’t have given less of a shit about rules.”

“I decided long ago,” Cohn once toldPenthouse, “to make my own rules.”

He was acquitted in ’64, and he was acquitted in ’69, and he was acquitted in ’71, all the while thumbing his nose at the feds, but Cohn’s screw-you stance was a lifelong philosophy, entitlement plus boldness.

He was “an incredibly spoiled princeling of an only child,” Cohn cousin David Lloyd Marcus told me. “He always got his way,” recalled his favorite aunt. As an adult, the resting expression on his face, which was marred by a scar that ran like a scrape down the middle of his nose, was a mixture of “arrogant disdain” and a “whipped-dog look,” people observed, “caught somewhere between a pout and a challenging glare.”

He didn’t pay his bills, all but daring his creditors to sue him for what he owed—tailors, locksmiths, mechanics, travel agencies, storage companies, credit card companies, stationery stores, office supply stores. He didn’t pay people back, “friend or foe,” wrote his biographer, Nicholas von Hoffman, who reported that a captain of his yacht calledDefiance“had a mental map” of “ports we couldn’t go into because we owed thousands of dollars.”

He didn’t pay his taxes, either, racking up millions of dollars in liens. Taxes, he believed, went to “welfare recipients” and “political hacks” and “bloated bureaucrats” and “countries whose people hate our guts.” He ceaselessly taunted the IRS, calling it “the closest thing we have in this country to a Nazi or Soviet-type agency”—subpoenas from which, he said, went straight into “the wastebasket.”

He drank champagne spiked with Sweet’n Low and habitually picked food off other people’s plates, thinking that manners for some reason did not apply to him. He told his chauffeurs, the drivers of his Bentley and his Cadillac and his money-green Rolls-Royce, to run red lights. “Just go!” he would yell, reaching over to the steering wheel and pounding on the horn.

He was preening and combative, look-at-me lavish and loud. It was an act. The truth was he hated what he was—a lawyer who hated lawyers, a Jewish person who hated Jewish people, and a gay person, fiercely closeted if haphazardly hidden, who hated gay people, calling them “fags” and expressing his conviction that “homosexual teachers are a grave threat to our children,” according to both his biography and autobiography. In his book, Zirin calls Cohn “a quintessential hypocrite, a classic Tartuffe.” He wanted the world to see only the person he “shaped and invented,” in von Hoffman’s words, “a secret man living a public life.”

And as a litigator, Cohn had earned a reputation as “an intimidator and a bluffer,” attorney Arthur Liman would write, “famous among lawyers for winning cases by delays, evasions, and lies.” He was unorganized and largely disinterested in specifics, relying less on preparation and more on his belligerence and his vast, nonpareil network of social and political connections that spanned parties and stretched from New York pay-to-play clubhouses to the backrooms of Washington as well as the Oval Office.

“People came to me,” Cohn explained inPenthouse, “because my public image was that I was unlike most other lawyers. Not the typical bill-by-the-hour, do-nothing, cover-up shyster but someone who won’t be pushed around.” His clients called him a “pit bull” and “a shield” and included mob bosses who met in his office to use attorney-client privilege to dodge potential wiretaps. “He’ll bend the rules to the limit,” a New York law professor once toldNewsweek. “He will stop at nothing,” a law school classmate once toldEsquire.

His biographer likened him to Houdini.

Cohn, however, preferred a different comparison. “If you can get Machiavelli as a lawyer,” he once said, “you’re certainly no fool of a client.”

He was roundly, practically fetishistically unapologetic, remorseless, shameless, “totally impervious to being insulted,” said gossip columnist Liz Smith, living by a code of blunt, come-at-me audacity, accessible only to those unhampered by morality.

“He made his legal and political career,” in the estimation of the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, “in a milieu where money and power override rules and law—indeed where the ability to get, and get away with, what lesser citizens cannot, is what proves membership of an elite.”

“Cohn,” Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Murray Kempton wrote, “brought an aura perfectly calculated to attract rich men who are not quite respectable.”

Trump found him irresistible.

***

“Trump,” the late Wayne Barrett wrotein 1979, “is a user of other users”—a keen, foundational insight, true then and true now. And with the exception of his father, whose fortune made possible the life he’s lived, Trump used Cohn more than he used anybody.

From 1973, when Cohn started representing the Trumps after the Department of Justice sued them for racist rental practices at the thousands of apartments they owned, through the rest of the ’70s and into the ’80s, when he served as an indispensablemacherfor Trump’s career-launching maneuvers, Cohn became for Trump something much more than simply his attorney. At a most formative moment for Trump, there was no more formative figure than Cohn.

Tyrnauer and Zirin remind viewers and readers that Cohn imparted an M.O. that’s been on searing display throughout Trump’s ascent, his divisive, captivating campaign, and his fraught, unprecedented presidency. Deflect and distract, never give in, never admit fault, lie and attack, lie and attack, publicity no matter what, win no matter what, all underpinned by a deep, prove-me-wrong belief in the power of chaos and fear.

Trump was Cohn’s most insatiable student and beneficiary. “He didn’t just educate Trump, he didn’t just teach Trump, he put Trump in with people who wouldmake Trump,” Marcus, his cousin, told me. “Roy gave him the tools. All the tools.”

“He loved him,” early Trump Organization executive Louise Sunshine told me.

Why?

“He was ruthless.”

So, though, was Trump.

Cohn was diagnosed as HIV-positive in October 1984. He insisted his illness was liver cancer. “Even at the end, he refused to admit that he was gay,” Wallace Adams, one of his boyfriends, tells Tyrnauer, “and he refused to admit that he had AIDS.” But everybody who knew him knew. And when Cohn’s feared, famed capacities started to sag, as he grew more and more weak and less and less useful, Trump began to transfer work to other attorneys. He called Cohn on occasion to express encouragement. He invited him to Mar-a-Lago for a dinner with others. But these gestures failed to paper over what some close to Cohn considered Trump’s effective abandonment. “Dropped him like a hot potato,” Cohn’s secretary, Susan Bell, told me. “He really did.”

By the end of 1985, Cohn was pale, frail and gaunt. His right eye was a maze of red lines. His mind wandered often, and his voice wavered to the point of a whisper. He would use one hand to stop the other from shaking. At his annual New Year’s Eve party, limos double-parked outside his Upper East Side townhouse, the A-list guests ran the gamut as usual, from onetime Tammany Hall heavy Carmine DeSapio to gossip columnist Cindy Adams to celebrity artist Andy Warhol. Cohn bucked up enough to don a white dinner jacket with a red bow tie with sequins but fooled nobody. “God,” thought Warhol, according to his diary, “he looked so sick.”

His physical diminishment ran parallel to his legal jeopardy, gutting him of the wherewithal to mount the kind of fight for which he had been so vaunted. The IRS mobilized to seize the townhouse and his cottage in Greenwich, Connecticut, filing for $7 million in back taxes. Circling, too, was the New York State Bar, bringing to a head its three-year-plus disbarment proceedings based on accusations of “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation,” stemming from four separate cases over the course of three decades—that he didn’t pay back a loan from a client until disbarment was underway, that he misappropriated escrowed property of a client, that he forged a signature on a client’s will, and that he lied on his application to the Washington, D.C., bar.

Trump, along with New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, TV personality Barbara Walters, attorney Alan Dershowitz, conservative columnists William Safire and William F. Buckley and others, testified on Cohn’s behalf as a character witness. But in late June, Cohn was disbarred. His conduct, according to the top appellate court in the state, was “unethical,” “unprofessional” and “particularly reprehensible.” In public, he remained tough-front defiant. He called those who had made the decision a “bunch of cheap politicians,” a “bunch of yo-yos,” a “bunch of nobodies.” He said he “couldn’t care less.” He said it “doesn’t bother me in the least.” But he cared a great deal. And it bothered him a lot. He talked to law partner Thomas Bolan and cried. He knew what was coming. He wrote a will and tried to “finish it” but fumbled pitifully with a bottle of pills.

Early that July, his secretary saw him just once. “I had come in the front door, and he was just descending the stairs,” Bell told me. “And he was just coming down, and he had a man on either side of him helping him walk, and he was very, very thin. You could see every bone in his ugly face, and he had thrush all around his lips. And as I walked by him—I had to go by him to get to the elevator—he looked up at me, and he said, ‘Hello, Sue.’ And I said, ‘Oh, hi, Mr. Cohn.’ And I got on the elevator, and I cried. And I didn’t like him, but I’ve never seen anybody so devastated.”

A month later, Cohn was dead.

A crowd, his crowd, of some 400 people assembled for his memorial service at Town Hall, the landmark New York venue. Bolan and DeSapio and former mayors and borough bigwigs and businessman Bill Fugazy and Republican Senator Chic Hecht of Nevada and Rupert Murdoch and Roger Stone. And Trump. They remembered him as loyal and funny and smart. They remembered him as an anticommunist patriot with an “almost insatiable interest in gossip.” Bolan eulogized Cohn as a victim of “the liberal establishment,” of “foes in the media,” of “political enemies” who “tried to shoot him down.” Fugazy said his longtime friend had “hopped the tables” until he finally was felled. He said Cohn had “lived life at the edge of danger.” Trump did not speak. He wasn’t asked. He stood instead in the rear of the room, contemplating, perhaps, all that Cohn had done for him, and who might be able to replace him, who could build on what Cohn had bequeathed. But there was just one Roy Cohn, and Trump, even at 40, maybe more than anybody, had to know it.

Cohn’s cousin doesn’t believe in karma, but he can’t help but think there is a final reckoning. “You can only outrun that fortune, and your own mistakes, and your own ego, and your own nastiness,” Marcus told me, “for so long.”

“The open question,” Tyrnauer said when we talked, “is whether Trump’s luck will hold up or whether—like Cohn—he’ll run out of road and face a tsunami of legal difficulties that will diminish him or put an end to the game that he’s played so effectively.”

“We were all brought up to believe, whether it’s an eye for an eye, it’s religion, it’s Greek tragedy, it’s whatever, that justice is going to catch up with everybody,” Zirin added. “The jury’s still out on Donald Trump. We don’t know whether he’ll get his comeuppance.”

But Tyrnauer reiterated the last lesson of Cohn.

“He got away with it,” he said, “until he didn’t.”

Read More

[deniscollins]

Trump vs. Cohen: The Breakup of a New York Relationship

What would you do if you were President Donald Trump’s long time personal lawyer involved in negotiations for a Trump hotel in Moscow, and in 2017, you were asked by a congressional panel investigating Russian connections to his presidential campaign the status of hotel negotiations: (1) lie and say that hotel negotiations ended in January 2016, before the first presidential primaries, or (2) admit that they continued for months after the start of the presidential primaries to protect your client? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

He has spent months inside his Park Avenue apartment glued to cable news, his legal bills growing and federal prosecutors amassing evidence against him they would use as leverage.

He watched his onetime friend and former boss, now the president of the United States, smear him on Twitter and make vague, public threats about his family.

His work for Donald J. Trump, and the lies he told about it, are sending him to prison for years.

On Tuesday, his law license was revoked.

On Wednesday, Michael D. Cohen exacted his revenge.

It was a nasty, public breakup of a New York relationship forged over a decade that was a mix of the bond between a father and son, the professional distance of a lawyer and client, and — as Mr. Cohen and associates have described it — the blind devotion of a henchman to a crime boss.

“People that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering,” he told a packed hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform — a blunt warning to congressional Republicans he said have assumed the same role as Mr. Trump’s protectors that he played for years.

During hours of lurid testimony, the president’s once-loyal lawyer and fixer recalled shady business deals and racist comments, and spoke in devastating, uncomfortable detail about his private conversations with the man he had idolized and still refers to only as “Mr. Trump.”

Such deference did not keep him from painting a damning portrait of the president, including Mr. Trump’s attempts to dodge Vietnam War service and his efforts to strong-arm academic institutions from making his grades public. There were the routine indignities, like when the president put Mr. Cohen on the phone with the first lady to lie to her about a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the pornographic film star with whom Mr. Trump is alleged to have had an affair.

Mr. Cohen described Mr. Trump as a “con man” and a “cheat,” and estimated there might have been 500 occasions on which he directly threatened someone at the behest of his boss. He was Mr. Trump’s enforcer, a role he once seemed to relish.

“If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” he told an interviewer in 2011. “If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck, and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”

More recently, after Mr. Cohen agreed to tell prosecutors about hush-money payments before the 2016 election, it was the president’s turn to use a Mafioso’s description of his formerly loyal aide. He called him a “rat.”

Such was the vernacular the two men honed over years spent navigating gritty but potentially lucrative New York industries — construction, real estate and taxicabs. At the hearing, Mr. Cohen gave the House panel a tutorial of sorts on the folkways of a New York ecosystem in which he and Mr. Trump had thrived.

On the day that Mr. Cohen was the star witness in a congressional hearing devised to exhume the president’s past, Mr. Trump was thousands of miles away — preparing for a summit meeting with North Korea’s leader he was hoping would lend gravitas to his embattled presidency, and distract from what was taking place back home.

For Mr. Cohen, a man who once walked the hallways of the Trump Organization with a pistol strapped to his ankle and seemed to bask in Mr. Trump’s reflected glory, Wednesday was a moment to absorb the light.

“Michael would describe it as being something akin to a cult,” said Donny Deutsch, the advertising executive and friend of Mr. Cohen. “Michael got sucked into it. And his life is in shambles because of it. And he’s the first one to say that.”

The Beginnings

The relationship between the two men began in the way that many of Mr. Trump’s relationships do: with an act of fealty.

In 2006, residents of Trump World Tower — a gleaming glass tower near the United Nations — were pushing to strip Mr. Trump’s name from the building and take control of the building’s management.

Mr. Cohen, a former personal injury lawyer who had made millions in the New York City taxicab business, intervened after Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. asked for help. Mr. Cohen had already bought several condominiums in Trump buildings, persuaded family and friends to do the same, and had twice read Mr. Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal.” He helped Mr. Trump put down the East Side rebellion, orchestrating a coup that removed the revolting tenants from the condominium board. Mr. Trump took notice.

In some ways, it was an unequal relationship between two men of different ages, different upbringings and vastly different financial circumstances. Mr. Cohen, the son of a Holocaust survivor, was just 40 years old when he began working for Mr. Trump — 20 years his elder and the son of a real estate magnate who would inherit millions of dollars of his father’s money.

But Mr. Cohen had a comfortable upbringing in Lawrence, on Long Island, a dozen or so miles from the house in Queens where Mr. Trump had been raised. And like his future boss, Mr. Cohen combined raw business savvy with help from a family member — in his case, his father-in-law — to make a mark in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

Mr. Cohen was soon a Trump Organization employee, put in charge of disparate elements of Mr. Trump’s business empire. In 2008, he became chief operating officer of Affliction Entertainment, a venture started by Mr. Trump to bring mixed martial arts fights to a pay-per-view audience.

“I’m nearly speechless knowing Mr. Trump and Affliction have the trust in me for an event that features the greatest assembly of M.M.A. fighters for one show in M.M.A. history,” Mr. Cohen said in a news release announcing his new position, adding that the coming event was “like having Ali, Frazier, Tyson, Holyfield and other top heavyweights all on the same boxing card.”

Working for Mr. Trump, he told lawmakers on Wednesday, was “intoxicating.”

“When you were in his presence,” he said, “you felt like you were involved in something greater than yourself — that you were somehow changing the world.”

He tried to appeal to his boss by embodying the qualities that Mr. Trump had once admired in his own mentor, Roy Cohn. A Bronx-born lawyer, Mr. Cohn rose to prominence working for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade and then spent years as Mr. Trump’s lawyer. Like Mr. Cohen, he was disbarred for unethical conduct.

“Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Mr. Trump once told a biographer. “He brutalized for you.”

Over time, Mr. Cohen learned how Mr. Trump liked to do business.

“He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders,” he said on Wednesday. “He speaks in code, and I understand the code because I’ve been around him for a decade.”

Shunted to the Sidelines

In 2011 Mr. Cohen began scouting prospects for another brawl, a possible presidential run by Mr. Trump in 2012. He traveled to Iowa and accompanied Mr. Trump to a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he acted like a bar bouncer keeping reporters away from his celebrity boss. Mr. Cohen set up a website called ShouldTrumpRun.org.

He did not. But almost immediately after the presidential race was over, Mr. Cohen began compiling information for his boss for the next time. He kept a thick binder on his desk at Trump Tower packed with information about filing deadlines in different states for the 2016 election and other campaign minutiae.

But he was shunted to the sidelines when the campaign began, prohibited by Mr. Trump’s children and other political operatives from making day-to-day campaign decisions. He pursued other business ventures for Mr. Trump, including the ambitious idea of building the tallest skyscraper in Moscow emblazoned with the Trump name.

Trying to gain access to influential figures in Moscow, Mr. Cohen turned to Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant, felon and F.B.I. informant who had helped Mr. Trump with other development deals and had explored various ventures in Russia.

This effort became a central focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, who is examining Russia’s attempts to sabotage the 2016 election and any role Mr. Trump’s advisers played in coordinating with Moscow. And the lies Mr. Cohen told about the negotiations put him in even more legal jeopardy.

On Wednesday, he apologized to lawmakers for lying to a different congressional panel in 2017, when he said that the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations ended in January 2016, before the first presidential primaries. In fact, they continued for months longer.

“To be clear,” he said, “Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.”

“And so I lied about it, too,” he added.

After he won the election, Mr. Trump brought many of his longtime confidants to the White House, but Mr. Cohen was left behind. He was disappointed but remained a loyal backbencher, raising money for Mr. Trump’s re-election fund and publicly attacking celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Johnny Depp for their anti-Trump comments.

Republicans at Wednesday’s hearing tried to cast Mr. Cohen as an embittered former aide trying to get payback for being excluded from a White House job. On Twitter, Mr. Trump’s son Eric said that Mr. Cohen was known within the campaign to be seeking a job.

Mr. Cohen has insisted over the past two years — and did again on Wednesday — that he never had any interest in moving to Washington, uprooting his family and giving up his job as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. He said that Mr. Trump had wanted him for a White House job, and was upset when it did not work out.

Regardless of the actual circumstances, Mr. Cohen’s absence from the administration created a distance between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump that would become a chasm.

Implicating the Boss

When F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office and apartment last April, carting off years of business records, emails and other documents, Mr. Cohen relied on his first instinct — he would not flip.

He took at least one call from Mr. Trump, who urged him to stay strong. His lawyers strategized with the president’s, and Mr. Trump praised him and insisted his former fixer and lawyer would never cooperate with prosecutors.

That would change by July, as his legal problems mounted and his friends urged him not to take the fall for Mr. Trump. He changed his Twitter bio page, removing any mention of being Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, a move people close to him said was a deliberate signal of his independence.

Around that time, officials at Mr. Trump’s company began to balk at paying some of Mr. Cohen’s legal fees.

He pleaded guilty in August to financial crimes, and in his guilty plea he implicated his former boss in a scheme to pay hush money to two women before the 2016 election.

It was an extraordinary turn for a once-devoted soldier — a decision that Mr. Cohen on Wednesday described as a catharsis.

“I have lied, but I am not a liar. I have done bad things, but I am not a bad man,” he said before a hushed room.

“I have fixed things. But I am no longer your fixer, Mr. Trump.”

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Let's start calling the Russian 'troll' attack what it really is

It's Troll Week on Mashable. Join us as we explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of internet trolling.

Fellow citizens of the internet, it's time to face facts: We are at war. 

An authoritarian nation state invaded our beloved platform with a shady shape-shifting army of paid writers, and did its best to populate it with highly divisive, truth-obscuring garbage. Now other authoritarian nation states are attempting to do the same. 

And because not enough of us are truly aware of this fact — hey, who can blame us, it's really bizarre! — we are losing the war. We aren't even using the right terminology to describe the problem, so how can we ever hope to fight back? 

Here's the issue in a nutshell: We seem to have collectively decided to call members of this shape-shifting army "trolls." That's exactly how they want us to think of them. The internet knows trolls: They annoy, they harass, they attack targets in swarms. They've always been with us, and always will be. 

What trolls don't do is systematically assume hundreds of fake identities or work toward a geopolitical goal on behalf of a foreign adversary. It would be more accurate to call these invaders undercover intelligence operatives. Or in a word, spies.  

Cold War Redux

Because the nation state that started all this is Russia, we carry a set of historical assumptions that work against a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. We remember the Joseph McCarthy-led "Red Scare" of the 1950s as a shameful moment in American history, and rightly so. The bullying and blacklisting should never be forgotten. 

We also hear "Russian spies" and our minds go to James Bond, you know, campy undercover agents in tuxes and slinky dresses. Didn't we leave that all behind in the 1980s?

Well, yes, we did. And then in 2000, a former East Berlin KGB agent named Vladimir Putin won a presidential election after a series of so-called terrorist bombings, about which intelligence experts remain dubious. Putin then made common cause with Russia's oil-rich oligarchs — and thus began nearly two decades of murders, or assassination attempts, on opposition leaders and investigative journalists.

The internet-based information warfare can be traced back to 2013. That's when the St. Petersburg Times first alerted the world to an entity in that city calling itself the Internet Research Agency, which was paying employees to flood the comments sections of stories about opposition leaders and Russia's rollback of rights for LGBT citizens.

The IRA operatives "react to certain news with torrents of mud and abuse," an activist named Vladimir Volokhonsky told the St. Petersburg Times. "This makes it meaningless for a reasonable person to comment on anything there."

IRA activity ramped up in 2014, and crossed to U.S. shores for the first time that year — where it made its first foray into fake news. This just so happened to coincide with the 2014 midterm elections for Congress.

Via YouTube videos, tweets, and phone texts, the IRA convinced much of a Louisiana town that there had been an explosion in a nearby chemical factory. Seeing similar media three months later during the Ebola panic, Georgia voters believed that the flesh-eating virus had arrived in Atlanta. On the same day, a different fake video told of a black woman being gunned down by police. 

The IRA found every fresh wound in American society, stuck its finger in, and tugged. Via a fake account called Blacktivist, it encouraged a demonstration at the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia. It created a Facebook group of "2nd Amendment patriots" and one called "LGBT United;" their Facebook ads received millions of impressions. The IRA designed hundreds of Twitter accounts to look like heartland newspapers, such as @KansasDailyNews, @JacksonCityPost, @MilwaukeeVoice and @StLouisOnline. 

To the IRA, the politics of these accounts didn't matter. All that mattered was the potential for havoc.

SEE ALSO: An ad industry group nominated Russia's election hack for all the awards

In 2015, the IRA faked a video of a U.S. soldier shooting a Qu'ran, likely hoping to cause an uproar in the Muslim world. It didn't even seem to matter that the video was disprovable when you looked closely — the soldier's helmet was something you could buy online for $25, not Army issue. By the time viewers disproved it, the shape-shifting army of info-spies had moved on to its next issue.

If you haven't heard of any of these greatest hits, it's because they have been drowned out by the controversy over the IRA's involvement in the 2016 presidential election. But the facts of each case are surprisingly clear. 

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia's role in the 2016 election, is famously silent on most things. But he has told us exactly what the IRA did next, in a damningly methodical indictment that named 12 major players — his first and only Russia-related charges to date. 

(Separately, on Friday, the Justice Department indicted another IRA figure on information warfare charges related to the 2018 midterm elections — showing clearly that the threat is not over yet.)

Trolls provide cover

While those first IRA forays were happening in the U.S., a parallel development was unwittingly helping to provide cover. Swarms of actual trolls (read: people, mostly men, with a grudge and too much time on their hands) emerged from sites such as 4Chan and Reddit. 

Spurred on by rising alt-right figures such as Milo Yiannopolous and Mike Cernovich, who were reportedly working to a playbook called Trust Me I'm Lying, these troll swarms saw diversity and feminism as the enemy. They brought us concentrated harassment campaigns such as GamerGate, ComicsGate, and the backlash against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot. 

The scale of the trolling was unprecedented, and it took some time for the internet to fully figure out what was going on. As the various hate-gates are studied and reassessed, there is a legitimate argument for defining their collective trolling as what Wired recently called "domestic information terrorism."

But the Internet Research Agency activity is a different order of magnitude. We're talking international information terrorism: tens of thousands of accounts operated by paid individuals on every major web platform, each one given a quota of a hundred posts a day. We're talking hundreds of millions of users who saw these posts, thinking they were genuine. 

The full scale of the attack is still emerging, and the numbers keep going up. Last week alone, Twitter released a dataset with 10 million tweets and 2 million images from Russian-linked accounts going back to 2009. "It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease," the company wrote. 

With an oligarch-funded budget of $1.25 million per month on one influence project alone, the thousand-strong IRA aimed "to conduct what it called 'information warfare against the United States of America' through fictitious U.S. personas on social media platforms and other Internet-based media," the Mueller indictment says. 

Enter the Jedi

Another reason to call this a spy campaign is the way that those fictitious personas tried to blend in. Last month, a study of a thousand Twitter accounts that attacked Star Wars director Rian Johnson concluded that 16 of them were IRA members. 

In January and February 2018, the accounts latched on to an early wave of criticism of Johnson's movie The Last Jedi, then ceded the stage to disgruntled fans.  

Those who noted that it was a small number of accounts, or claimed this was a way to smear everyone who disliked The Last Jedi as Russian operatives, missed the point. Which is that the shape-shifting army did not miss a single opportunity to jump into any debate that divided American society, even a debate about a movie. 

"They're method acting," says Morton Bay, the Ph.D behind the Last Jedi study, who has been tracking what he calls "Russian influence operatives" since 2015. "If the Grammys are on, these accounts will be commenting on it to give themselves a sense of legitimacy ... they latch on to every cultural division, however small." 

Such tactics, Bay concluded, were similar to those used by the infamous spy service where Putin cut his teeth. "Their methods are very close to what the KGB was doing during the Cold War," Bay says. "The only difference is the KGB was pushing a specific ideology, and these guys aren't." 

Instead of ideology, the IRA aimed to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It consistently aimed to flood the zone with shit, to echo the infamous words of Steve Bannon. Fill the comments section of honest stories and harass their writers, and soon there'll be fewer honest stories. The same holds true for social media as a whole. They want to exhaust us to death.

In a recent study, Hungarian security researcher Anatoly Reshetnikov described this process as "neutrollization" — or "creating conditions where political mobilization becomes absurd, so any risk to the regime is neutralized."

One of the few employees interviewed since leaving the IRA directly compared himself with Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Working there felt like "you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line." 

Doesn't sound an awful lot like trolling, does it? Sounds like something worse. 

Sounds like information war. 

The internet strikes back

Understandably, there is reluctance in the U.S. to describe any of these activities as acts of war. For one thing, many of us are employing a Cold War perspective: Don't antagonize the Russians! They're armed to the teeth! Do we really want to return to those dark decades of superpower conflict? 

To answer that question, we have to change our definition of what conflict actually is. And here we're dealing with another 20th century mindset: Aren't wars fought over physical territory? Aren't they won with tanks and bombs?  

Not since 9/11, no. As America learned painfully in Iraq, nation states are won and lost in the hearts and minds of the people. These days, the only wars that matter are in those minds, on the plain of ideas. Propaganda's younger, hipper cousin, information terrorism, is now the most important weapon of war on the planet. 

SEE ALSO: Twitter shuts down spambots spreading pro-Saudi hashtags related to Khashoggi disappearance

We saw that clearly in the past week, as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia fought a desperate rear-guard action against reports that it had killed Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Turkish consulate. Twitter had to step in again to shut down bots that were flooding the online discussion with pro-Saudi hashtags.   

But it isn't just Russia and Saudi Arabia. Syria, Iran, China, North Korea: Everyone's getting into the info-war game. 

Of course, we shouldn't use the word "war" lightly. And thanks to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the phrase "info war" is tainted — but we also shouldn't shrink from using it. Allowing a state of war to exist in the shadows is exactly how Putin approached his invasion of Ukraine in 2014. 

The eastern half of the country came under assault from "little green men" — Russian special forces that Russia denied belonged to them. The last thing he wanted was global economic sanctions, so that's exactly what we gave him. 

In the case of the IRA, no one is suggesting we ramp up tensions or rattle any nuclear sabers. This isn't a matter for the Pentagon. If this information war is being fought on the internet, then the internet is where we must fight back. If the object is to wear us down with lies, then we must not be worn down. If truth is under attack, then the truth is what we must protect.  

That means calling out bullshit whenever you see it, even if you see it all the time. It means maintaining skepticism about no-name news sources and oddly-named social media accounts. It means staying in touch with that crazy Trump-loving uncle who forwards the conspiracy theory emails; it means repeatedly speaking calmly and clearly about a Russian influence operation that is both ridiculous and demonstrably true. 

And it means that we stop using a cutesy word like "trolling" to describe a massive, coordinated, ongoing military-style affair. "Don't feed the trolls" is a piece of advice as old as the internet; to that truism we should add, "Don't confuse the spies with trolls." 

WATCH: Google's new Home Hub won't spy on you ... maybe — Technically Speaking

[newssplashy]

World: With a vocabulary from 'Goodfellas,' Trump evokes his native New York

Now, as Trump faces his own mushrooming legal troubles, he has taken to using a vocabulary that sounds uncannily like that of Gotti and his fellow mobsters in the waning days of organized crime.

WASHINGTON — For much of the 1980s and 1990s, “the Dapper Don” and “the Donald” vied for supremacy on the front pages of New York’s tabloids. The don, John J. Gotti, died in a federal prison in 2002, while Donald Trump went on to be president of the United States.

Now, as Trump faces his own mushrooming legal troubles, he has taken to using a vocabulary that sounds uncannily like that of Gotti and his fellow mobsters in the waning days of organized crime, when ambitious prosecutors like Rudy Giuliani tried to turn witnesses against their bosses to win racketeering convictions.

“I know all about flipping,” Trump told Fox News this week. “For 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go.”

Trump was referring to the decision by his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to take a plea deal on fraud charges and admit to prosecutors that he paid off two women to clam up about the sexual affairs that they claimed to have had with Trump.

But the president was also evoking a bygone world — the outer boroughs of New York City, where he grew up — a place of leafy neighborhoods and working-class families, as well as its share of shady businessmen and mob-linked politicians. From an early age, Trump encountered these raffish types with their unscrupulous methods, unsavory connections and uncertain loyalties.

Trump is comfortable with the wiseguys-argot of that time and place, and he defaults to it whether he is describing his faithless lawyer or his fruitless efforts to discourage the FBI director, James B. Comey, from investigating one of his senior advisers, Michael T. Flynn, over his connections to Russia.

“When I first heard that Trump said to Comey, ‘Let this go,’ it just rang such a bell with me,” said Nicholas Pileggi, an author who has chronicled the Mafia in books and films like “Goodfellas” and “Casino.” “Trump was surrounded by these people. Being raised in that environment, it was normalized to him.”

Pileggi traced the president’s language to the Madison Club, a Democratic Party machine in Brooklyn that helped his father, Fred Trump, win his first real estate deals in the 1930s. In those smoke-filled circles, favors were traded like cases of whiskey and loyalty mattered above all.

Trump honed his vocabulary over decades through his association with lawyer Roy Cohn, who besides working for Sen. Joseph McCarthy also represented Mafia bosses like Gotti, Tony Salerno and Carmine Galante. He also gravitated to colorful characters like Roger J. Stone Jr., the pinkie-ring-wearing political consultant, and Stone’s onetime partner, Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was convicted Tuesday of eight counts of tax and bank fraud.

“It’s the kind of subculture that most people avoid,” said Michael D’Antonio, one of Trump’s biographers. “You cross the street to get away from people like that. Donald brings them close. He’s most comfortable with them.”

Trump’s current lawyer, Giuliani, said that as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he listened to 4,000 hours of taped conversations of Mafia suspects — a discipline that he claims makes him an expert in deciphering Trump’s intent in recorded exchanges with Cohen about paying off women. It has also steeped him in the language and folkways of the mob.

Giuliani was an enthusiastic fan of “The Sopranos,” once joking that HBO set its celebrated series about an everyday mob family in New Jersey because he had done such a good job driving the Mafia out of New York.

During Giuliani’s days as a U.S. attorney, his office was labeled the “House of Pancakes” for the parade of suspects who “flipped” to try to reduce their prison sentences.

In his Fox interview, Trump expressed a fleeting moment of sympathy for Cohen’s desire to do likewise.

“If somebody defrauded a bank and he’s going to get 10 years in jail or 20 years in jail, but if you can say something bad about Donald Trump and you’ll go down to two years or three years, which is the deal he made,” the president said. “In all fairness to him, most people are going to do that.”

Still, Trump added, “it almost ought to be illegal.”

At other times, he has made clear that he views disloyalty pretty much the way Gotti would have viewed the decision of his underboss, Sammy Gravano, to cooperate with the government in 1991 and testify against him in the trial that sent him away for life.

Defending the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, after a report in The New York Times that he had spent 30 hours speaking to the special counsel, Robert Mueller, Trump wrote on Twitter that McGahn would never sell out his boss like a “John Dean type ‘RAT.'”

Dean, whose testimony as White House counsel about Watergate helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon, fired back. Trump, he tweeted, “thinks, acts and sounds like a mob boss.”

“There is nothing presidential about him or his actions,” Dean added.

Sometimes Trump’s gangland references can be baffling. This month, he defended Manafort by comparing him to Al Capone. Manafort, he suggested, was getting rougher treatment than Capone, whom the president called a “legendary mob boss, killer and ‘Public Enemy Number One.'”

His references are also unlikely to impress prosecutors like Mueller, for whom the mob is old hat. But they, too, have been struck by the parallels. Comey, in his recent book, “A Higher Loyalty,” likened his first meeting with the future president at Trump Tower in Manhattan to paying a call to a Mafia don.

“I thought of the New York Mafia social clubs, an image from my days as a Manhattan federal prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s,” Comey said. “The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Café Giardino. I couldn’t shake the picture. And looking back, it wasn’t as odd or dramatic as I thought at the time.”

Trump, he wrote, seemed to be trying to make Comey and his colleagues from the intelligence agencies “part of the same family.”

To D’Antonio, the president’s tough-guy language mostly sounds quaint — the vocabulary of a man who grew up with a comic-book view that real men wore fedoras and carried .38-caliber revolvers.

“He thinks other people understand the ‘Guys and Dolls’ dialogue the way he does,” said D’Antonio, whose next book is about Vice President Mike Pence. “He doesn’t realize in 2018 that it sounds ridiculous to talk about rats.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Mark Landler © 2018 The New York Times

source http://www.newssplashy.com/2018/08/world-with-vocabulary-from-goodfellas.html

[lewepstein]

Why Decency Matters

It was June 9, 1954 during the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.  The dark episode in domestic politics known as the McCarthy Hearings were being televised, and John Welch, the chief counsel for the U.S. army was on the witness stand being grilled about the alleged “un-American activities” of a colleague of his.  If he disclosed information about the man in question he would be a collaborator in a political witch-hunt that had already placed people on blacklists, destroyed careers and damaged lives.  If he refused to cooperate he could be held in contempt of congress.

At one point in his testimony Welch went off script. Instead of going along with Senator McCarthy’s interrogation he bowed his head and sighed.  His body language was the prelude for what he was about to say.  He then implored:

        “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?          Have you left no sense of decency?                           After Welch spoke these words something seemed to shift emotionally in the congressional hearing room and his interrogator was temporarily thrown off balance.  Compassion had found its voice and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s terrible tribunal was publicly exposed for what it really was - an indecent, cruel and ugly trial - something that occurs when a society allows its fears to override its freedoms.  The House Un-American Activities Committee would soon be disbanded and censured.   But the word “McCarthyism,” would live on as a term that describes a political evil, a reminder of what our society must never allow to happen again.

If we scroll forward about sixty years we find ourselves in an era in which the forces of intolerance and repression are again on the march.  Roughly half of the country remains in shock over the other half’s willingness to vote for and elect a president whose words and behaviors trample on our most basic values - those of civility and compassion - the attributes that most of us try to embody in our daily lives.  They are also the qualities that our parents, schools and houses of worship tried to imbue in us from our earliest years.

If we are to retain our clarity and humanity during this strange and dangerous sideshow called the Trump presidency, it is probably best to stay focused on its core indecency.  This is especially important for those of us who would like to protest what is going on and sustain our resistance over time.  Otherwise, we will easily become distracted and burnt out - lost in the blur of Trump’s  three ring circus of “alternate facts”, hurled insults, outrageous political appointments, reactionary  executive orders, and narcissistic meltdowns that are coming at us at dizzying speed.  

If we were to simply examine Trump’s executive orders and policies objectively and try to measure their impact on people in the manner of  CNN or The New York Times we would be focused on the facts, but missing the essence of what is occurring.  We can tabulate the number of immigrants who will be rounded up and deported, and estimate the health effects of his environmental deregulations, but this, by itself, would only still serve to categorize and normalize what is going on, supporting the  “business as usual” attitude that has been adopted by many legislators and some journalists.  We must all come to terms with the fact that this is no ordinary time.  It is one of those periods in history when focusing on the parts only serves to obscure the larger whole.  And the larger whole needs to be seen for what it really is.

Many of the people watching the Trump phenomenon roll out are beginning to understand that its evil isn’t either in his outrageous, crass behaviors or in its destructive, cruel policies.  It is present in both.  And in order to formulate strategies to deal with what we are witnessing - strategies that will help us to process what is going on and find meaningful ways to resist - we may need a deeper understanding and perspective on what we are  witnessing.  

Understanding  the psychology of Donald Trump is not simply about assigning him a diagnosis from afar.  His extreme narcissism and his vulnerability to narcissistic injury is on display for all to see - just observe him at a news conference or read any of his prolific tweets.  Trump’s sociopathy is also right out there.  His  lack of core principles or a moral filter through which to view the world and deal with people  is what he boasts about.  It is hardly disguised.  I believe that Trump’s core indecency has to do with gender - the type of masculinity that he subscribes to and the implications of his particular brand of machismo for our society.            

It was clear to many from the beginnings of his campaign that Trump was a misogynist.  This was on display as he bragged about “grabbing pussy” and rated women as sexual objects.  This alone should have done him in politically - particularly with women.  The fact that women voted for him in significant numbers is a sad reminder of how women have tolerated and even made excuses for abusive men.  When questioned further they will often say, “He really loves me and is a nice guy underneath.”  When  pressed for evidence about his underlying goodness they have little to present.  If we observe Trump from this perspective he is the embodiment of the most extreme and  grotesque distortions of masculinity - a belligerent bully and a geyser of barely disguised anger, contempt and grandiosity that is continuously spiraling out of control.

From the perspective of a psychotherapist, the Donald Trumps that I have seen in my office have all been what I call “wife-mandated” referrals - selfish, arrogant men who are also extremely controlling.  They have little regard or respect for women and tend to objectify them. The maternal influence in their lives - the early bond that sometimes teaches men how to be relational - was either lacking or over-ridden by an extreme patriarch. They hate being questioned or challenged, and that is when they can become abusive, either physically or emotionally.  The Trumps of the world almost always have a low frustration threshold.  Their  facade of toughness is just that, a facade.  Underneath they are mostly spoiled, whiny little boys who rage when they do not get their way.

One significant quality these Trump-like men have in common is that normal appeals to do something different or change something about their behaviors do not work.  Since problems are always seen as external to  themselves  and  perceived as having to do with others, there is no reason for self-change.  The only time I have ever witnessed change in these men was when they thought they were about to lose something that they wanted -  a threat to what they saw as their self-interest.  This may be important to keep in mind in our collective resistance to Donald Trump and his dark regime.

The underlying problem that Trump-men (and the people affected by them) suffer from is a grandiosity that has never been challenged - not as boys growing up, and certainly not as adults when they have assumed positions of power.  Often they choose partners who will accept their dominance and control, and that is the tragic flaw in their adult development.  It is sometimes a strong and equal partner who can temper a man’s arrogance and help him to develop some healthy humility.   Without this kind of  growth and challenge they will never learn how to truly negotiate with an equal partner, and there will certainly be no mastery in the emotional  “art of the deal.”  If we magnify these qualities that I’ve described in my male clients many times, add billions of dollars in wealth, stir in the total control of a real estate empire, sprinkle with celebrity TV status and make him the president of the most powerful country in the world, we have the recipe for  the man-child who now occupies the White House.

Looking at the network of connections that make up the Trump  regime from the perspective of a couple’s  counsellor, I would say that a dangerous marriage has been forged between two men - Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.  Bannon is the ideologue committed to bringing down our democracy - what he calls “the administrative state,” along with its elites and its international ties.  Trump is the crass and brash pretend- populist who sows chaos and defies even the most basic codes of ethics, propriety and dignity.  It is a marriage made in hell designed to elevate indecency and make it something that we eventually become inured to.  If we add a radically right Republican party that can find a way of working with this dangerous duo to advance its own agenda - that of dismantling the social safety net and  funneling the proceeds to the wealthiest one per cent -  we now have a menage-a-trois in which we as a society move toward autocracy and possibly even an American- style police state.

That which is standing between us and the dark vision of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump is our basic decency as a people and our willingness to stand up for what we know is right  - the same collective conscience that eventually brought down  Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror in the 1950s.

Basic decency demands that we tell the truth and not bear false witness against our neighbors. It impels us to protect the most vulnerable among us. It teaches us not to ridicule someone with a disability. It tells us never to be a bully. It tells us to honor the stranger among us and treat him as a guest. It makes it imperative for us to value knowledge and facts  as a means to eliminating suffering  and cure disease. It implores us to listen to criticism and admit to our mistakes. It exhorts us to honor the sacrifices of others and the heroism that they have displayed. It teaches us never to boast, but instead to be humble, no matter the position of power that we hold. It reminds us to never impugn the character of others, even if we disagree with their ideas. It  knows that the negative actions of a few individuals should never lead us to pre-judge the larger group of which they are a part. It asks us to defend the rights of the people with whom we disagree. It demands that we encourage discussion and never use intimidation to stifle dissent. It insists that we never encourage or exploit the hatred of others for our own gain, or remain silent in its presence.

Regimes that violate the basic values of its citizens do not survive the test of time.  Demagogues may temporarily capture the imaginations of those desperately searching for a fabled past, and they can also make false promises about their nationalist vision - some glorious future that will never come to pass, eventually leading to disillusion in all but their most ardent followers.

The pernicious Trump regime that we are currently living under is being investigated by our intelligence agencies and challenged by our courts. But we as a people should also not be silent or become overwhelmed or disillusioned in the face of something that is  indecent and un-American at its core.  For our own emotional health and for the health of our society we need to resist.  And our rallying cry should probably be, No Decency-No Peace.  

[bountyofbeads]

A SECOND TERM FOR TRUMP SEEMS MORE POSSIBLE THAN EVER. But what would it look like? DEAR GOD NO!!! #VoteBlueNoMatterWho

"The signal victory of Trump’s first term, ratified by his impeachment acquittal, was his triumph over the rule of law. In a second term, he will help himself to all the spoils he can." https://t.co/HYUJs6TrFI

"Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch often said the Department of Justice is the only Cabinet agency named for an ideal. If Trump wins a second term, it is not clear whether that ideal can hold." https://t.co/HYUJs6TrFI

"In a second Trump term, we'll see the death of global climate efforts." https://t.co/HYUJs6TrFI

"When you look at the budget cuts he’s proposing for 2021, they’re going to disproportionately impact the black community and low-income people and the most vulnerable," says Representative Barbara Lee https://t.co/HYUJs6TrFI

"In a second term of Trump, there’ll be even less cultural bandwidth for dire self-reflection." https://t.co/HYUJs6TrFI

"It increasingly looks as if a second Trump term would see Iran restart its program full speed." https://t.co/HYUJs6TrFI

"Newly empowered by his father’s victory in 2020, Don Jr.’s online presence will only get louder." https://t.co/HYUJs6TrFI

THE SECOND TERM 

11 Months From Today🤢😭

A second term for Trump seems more possible than ever. But what would it look like?

By The Editors With interviews by Brian Feldman, Ben Jacobs, Sarah Jones, Anna Silman, and Matt Stieb | Published FEB. 17, 2020 | New York Magazine | Posted February 18, 2020 |

Here is one starting point for contemplating a second Trump term: The Ukraine scandal only became a Trump scandal because Ukraine refused to submit to a pair of presidential demands that would have been fairly easy to satisfy. If Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky had merely announced that he was looking into a mysterious missing Democratic server and corruption by the Bidens, then the whole affair probably wouldn’t have become a Trump scandal at all. It would have become, to the American news-consuming public, a Biden scandal. Ukraine held off, though, for a very sensible reason. Ukrainians, analyzing American politics, calculated that Trump may not stay in office much beyond this year. It was a hedge against forever Trumpism.

Trump’s favorable rating fell faster than any other president-elect’s in the history of polling, dropping below 50 percent even before his inauguration, a fact that made him look to most civilians as well as politicians like a probable one-termer from the get-go. The assumption that his election was a terrible mistake that would be corrected in four years has been an invisible force propping up the resistance both domestic and international to his agenda. The Iran nuclear deal has primarily kept its head above water because Europe is still respecting the deal rather than joining in Trump’s saber-rattling. When Trump gutted the Obama administration’s fuel-mileage standards, auto companies steered clear, no doubt because it wouldn’t pay for them to invest in gas-guzzlers if a Democrat was to come in and force them to change again.

Only in the past few months has Trump’s reelection started to appear as likely as not. If he wins, a basic calculation about how to deal with him will tip for a whole range of players. Trump has leaned on social-media companies and the owners of such important organs as CNN and the Washington Post to suppress criticism and scrutiny of his administration and to dial up the praise. He has openly promised pardons to anybody who violates the law in the effort to deport migrants or complete his border fence, and as of yet, nobody has taken him up on the offer.

The natural assumption among those rooting for his failure is that four more years will be as unbearable as the first four. But they could in fact be significantly worse than that if a chunk of the resistance to Trump’s power suddenly gives way, revealing something enduring, even permanent, about America. Who else — in the bureaucracy, in business, in governments overseas — is holding off full collaboration with Trump on the premise that he’s just a passing fever? Here are 19 visions of this possible near future.

—Jonathan Chait

IMPEACHMENT REDUX

If he wins again, he’ll be impeached again; I guarantee that with 100 percent certainty. Pelosi cannot stop that freight train, and it’ll be Democrats’ only outlet, since we’ll keep the Senate. And if it’s for the same nothingburger they impeached him on this time, it’ll end the same way. I just don’t think Pelosi can control her caucus.

We’ll see Trump unleashed. Frankly, some of the stuff in the week since he’s been acquitted — even Hope Hicks coming back and Johnny McEntee, his former body guy, becoming head of the Office of Presidential Personnel — show that the guardrails that keep him in the boat have come completely off. So if anyone tells you what that means, policywise, they’re guessing. Nobody knows. There are signals from the conservatives in the administration that the second term is when deficit reduction starts, but that’s complete and utter b.s. I don’t think the president has ever campaigned on deficits or cared about deficits. Look at his budgets: Conservatives at the Office of Management and Budget have cut programs only for the president to try to walk back their decision days later. There may be another run at health care — not Obamacare repeal, but another run at some sort of health-care overhaul. Like the USMCA trade deal, a mushed-up version of reforms that nobody’s excited about.

It will be interesting to see politically, if he’s not on the ballot, if he still has the hold on the party that he does now. Half of the GOP senators are queasy every morning over tweets. Do they start to distance themselves or is it still MAGA town, where you have to stick with him or you will get your ass beat in the primary? Personally, I think the president makes life harder on himself and Republicans at times, but you cannot call yourself a Republican and not be happy about the last four years. All in for four more.

—Anonymous GOP Hill Staffer

A POLITICS OF PURE REVENGE

The signal victory of Trump’s first term, ratified by his impeachment acquittal, was his triumph over the rule of law. In a second term, he will help himself to all the spoils he can.

Trump doesn’t believe in the old axiom “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even” — he gets mad and even. The purge of the Vindmans and Gordon Sondland, closely followed by an induced exodus at the Justice Department and the attempted intimidation of a judge on behalf of Roger Stone, will just have been a warm-up act if Election Day empowers his mob enterprise even further.

Rudy Giuliani continues to travel to Ukraine in search of smears, in lieu of actual dirt, that can soil the Bidens. But surely that is not his entire brief. What “evidence” is now being manufactured by Giuliani and passed to William Barr to wreak vengeance on former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and other diplomats who testified before the House? Meanwhile, Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department, having followed up Trump’s acquittal by handing over Hunter Biden’s financial documents to a tarring-and-feathering committee of the Republican Senate, can be counted on to find pretexts to burrow into the finances of the Clintons, Mike Bloomberg, and their respective foundations, as well as the tax returns of Nancy Pelosi’s wealthy husband.

Perhaps highest on the White House enemies list is Mitt Romney, who has already been warned by a key Trump flunky, Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, that he might face physical violence were he to show up at CPAC’s annual conclave. If that line of revenge fails, one can imagine Trump finding a way to go after tax breaks and other federal benefits bestowed on Romney’s beloved Mormon church, which the president mocked as his nemesis’s “crutch” after his lonely vote to convict. Mormons, however conservative and Republican, have not signed on fully to Trump, and he has been less popular in Utah than in any other solid-red state. Trump does not need them, and one of his most powerful Christian supporters, the Dallas Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, has labeled Mormonism “a heresy from the pit of hell” besides. The president’s servile Evangelical base will delight in whatever pain he inflicts on Romney and his co-religionists.

When Trump claimed “America First” as a mantra, he called it “a brand-new, modern term,” oblivious of its historical provenance as a movement that attracted Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in America in the years before World War II. It’s a rare time when he probably was telling the truth. Such is his illiteracy that he probably hasn’t heard of the Night of the Long Knives either. But the evidence suggests that, if nothing else, he has mastered the fundamentals of Godfather 2.

—Frank Rich

THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT BROUGHT TO HEEL

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch often said the Department of Justice is the only Cabinet agency named for an ideal. If Trump wins a second term, it is not clear whether that ideal can hold.

Any concerns about criminal activity by Trump or his campaign in winning the 2020 election? Those will die a quiet death under Attorney General William Barr’s new policy that he must approve any investigation into presidential campaigns before it may be opened. The Office of Legal Counsel will continue to issue opinions protecting Trump, such as those that the president cannot be criminally charged or investigated and that his aides need not respond to congressional subpoenas. The late Roy Cohn will become known as Joseph McCarthy’s William Barr.

On the civil side, DOJ could be used as a sword in the name of religious liberty by filing lawsuits challenging reproductive and LGBTQ rights.

Barr could starve for resources the divisions of DOJ that protect civil rights, voting rights, and the environment and use the Antitrust Division to promote the business interests of Trump’s political supporters while fighting mergers of companies he opposes. DOJ will fail to prioritize threats to national security by using a zero-tolerance approach to immigration enforcement, charging every undocumented grandmother they encounter instead of focusing resources on suspected terrorists.

Lawyers of integrity will continue to leave DOJ, replaced by Trump cronies who disrespect the rule of law and support authoritarian rule. Another four years of Trump, and the Department of Justice will no longer deserve its revered name.

—Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade

A BIG TECH DÉTENTE

Trump understands that what TV was to John F. Kennedy, what radio was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Twitter is to him. These companies have done nothing but help him. And he loves the stock market, and the first trillion-dollar companies are all tech stocks. It’s going to be hard for him to punish them.

At the same time, he has a huge antipathy for people richer than himself and with more accomplishments than him. He will continue to go after Jeff Bezos, because it’s a personal, weird obsession he has with conflating Amazon and the Washington Post. As long as the Washington Post keeps pressing on the Trump administration, Bezos will be linked to that and he will suffer for that. There’s also the contention that the right has been misrepresented on these platforms and that they’re trying to quiet conservative voices. The question is: Will he seek to intervene in how they’re governed, even though it’s in his best interest to let them be?

And the companies will keep their heads in the sand. Don’t expect them to be brave on immigration or anything else. They’re not showing up at a rally in a MAGA hat, that’s for sure, but they certainly are not going to be doing anything to oppose him. Why should they? It’s been great for them.

—Kara Swisher

THE DEATH OF GLOBAL CLIMATE EFFORTS

Let’s start with a conservative estimate. Trump’s deregulatory environmental rampage completely stalls — rolling back no more protections against small-particulate pollutants or toxic carcinogens and nuking no more policies like the Clean Power Plan or parts of the Clean Water Act, but merely locking in the sadistic legacy of his first term — there will be as many as 80,000 additional American deaths over the course of the next decade. That’s roughly ten times as many as on D-Day, more than 20 times as many as on September 11, and almost 40 times the number of Japanese citizens who have died in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. One million more Americans, The Journal of the American Medical Association reports, will suffer from respiratory illness.

Most presidents spend second terms trying to leave a lasting mark on foreign policy, and it is abroad where Trump’s environmental cruelty is likely to be felt most intensely. This is not just about the 2016 Paris accords, which technically Trump can only pull out of on November 5, the day after he’s reelected. In the meantime, he’s already fatally undermined them, along with like-minded sadists Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia and  President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil — a trio of world leaders who may come to be seen much more clearly, in a second term for Trump, as a climate axis of evil. In the latest round of post-Paris climate negotiations, the three countries spiked nearly every possibility of meaningful progress. If you add to the axis Vladimir Putin and his petrostate and Xi Jinping and his have-it-both-ways approach (building renewable farms alongside new coal fleets), the loose alliance of climate inaction accounts for more than half of all global emissions. That’s a very powerful veto.

It may sound glib and vacuously patriotic to say that the world needs American leadership, but the path of the last few years suggests, on climate at least, it is also distressingly true. That’s not because action within the U.S. is so important — the country is the second-biggest emitter, but responsible for only about 15 percent of the global total. It’s because, without American support, prospects for any coordinated international program seem distressingly dim. In Trump’s first term, the U.S. has dithered and, in part as a result, the rest of the world has, too — breaking emissions records in 2017, 2018, and 2019. This is not just because of Trump — or Morrison and Bolsonaro, Putin and Xi. It’s because even many self-styled global leaders on climate (Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron) have merely paid lip service to climate action (while approving new oil pipelines and failing to pass carbon taxes, for instance). It is not just “ecofascists” peddling delay anymore, but climate hypocrites.

These leaders don’t look or talk like Trump, but they share a concerning, nationalistic climate logic: that leaders should emphasize the material benefits to their people first, with the understanding that, at least for the time being, calculations about climate policy made by nations individually may turn them away from the path that would benefit the world as a whole. If the next years are presided over by Trump, they will likely spell the further breakdown of the international alliances on which any truly global solution to this global problem would, theoretically, depend. Which means they may also break the hope, sustained now through decades of frustration, that global cooperation must be the path forward, and initiate instead a terrifying new go-it-alone era of climate suffering and disaster. Policymakers the world over may start to deemphasize the project of reducing emissions and instead begin preparing nation-by-nation assessments of how to live with climate change and all its terrible brutality. And we may find ourselves, on the ground, asking less and less often what global actors are on the side of angels, and more often simply who is on our side.

—David Wallace-Wells

MORE HUNGER

Trump doesn’t need Congress in order to cut benefits. As president, he controls federal agencies. Three proposed rule changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture may ultimately take food stamps away from 3.7 million people. And SNAP isn’t the only welfare program on the line. Through the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare, the White House has already approved changes to state Medicaid programs that cost thousands of people their health care. That’s why West Virginia teacher Sam Yurick is disturbed by the prospect of Trump’s reelection. Many of Yurick’s students live in poverty and often miss school because of their living conditions. “When they do make it in, they have headaches from not eating or aren’t completely recovered,” he said. Trump boasts of his support in West Virginia, but if he gets four more years to slash welfare, Yurick’s students might get sicker. “The amount and quality of instruction will get eaten into more and more,” he said, “as we put more and more of our energies into making up for ways the world outside our classrooms has failed the kids we serve.”

—Sarah Jones

MAGA BUDGETS

When you look at the budget cuts he’s proposing for 2021, they’re going to disproportionately impact the black community and low-income people and the most vulnerable. His white-supremacy agenda is reflected in his new budget proposal, his birther attitude toward African-Americans especially. So do his cuts in foreign aid, for example, and on the development front. Those accounts specifically are there to provide development assistance to what he calls the “s—hole countries.” Those are countries where you have majority people of color. It’s almost Make America White Again in terms of his budget cuts. I worry that people of color, African-Americans, the most vulnerable, will unfortunately be forced to pay the price for his outlandish policies.

—Representative Barbara Lee

SILLY TELEVISION

No one wants to watch excruciating, serious dramas when everything seems terrible. The TV we talk about the most in 2020 already reflects a shift from the bleak prestige projects of the Obama era toward trashy, middlebrow escapism like You, The Witcher, and 90 Day Fiancé, or the Middlebrow-in- prestige-drag tentpole The Morning Show on Apple TV+. Or they’re shows like Evil or  Dickinson, which package niche weirdness inside fluffy-looking, silly exteriors. Even a show like  Succession  — with pitch-black terrifying nihilism at its center — is palatable because it’s so magnetically fun. Already, only a few hyper­serious shows a year crest into mainstream awareness (When They See Us, Chernobyl). In a second term of Trump, there’ll be even less cultural bandwidth for dire self-reflection. We’ll see more social-experiment reality shows in which people do ridiculous things for love, more shows with bards and elves, and somehow even more superheroes. As the world swings toward catastrophe, TV will be doing its best to be a countervailing force, desperately swinging the pendulum back toward light, undemanding delights.

—Kathryn VanArendonk

A DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN REVOLT

Analyses suggest Trump could lose the popular vote by as many as 5 million, or potentially even more, and still win the Electoral College. (The Electoral College doesn’t care that you almost won Texas; it only cares that you lost Wisconsin.) Just to think about this for a second, if Trump wins the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, that would mean that, since Bush’s very contested, strange Electoral College win in 2000, fully half of presidential elections will have gone to the loser of the popular vote and the winner of the Electoral College, and, in each case, to a Republican. If this happens, if a younger, more urban, more diverse majority keeps growing but finds itself locked out of political power, there will be a backlash on the left against the legitimacy of a system that it feels, correctly, does not represent it and does not give it a fair shake. The scary thing is not just that the electoral geography is not reflecting the popular vote but that the party that is winning despite losing the popular vote realizes its only path to sustaining power is disenfranchisement. And that party begins passing more rules — from voter-ID laws to gerrymandering efforts to things like Citizens United — that build the power it fears it would lose and make it harder for the emergent popular-vote majority to express itself.

—Ezra Klein

A MORE VULNERABLE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

Recognizing that getting approval of a constitutional amendment to switch to the popular vote would be an extremely difficult and lengthy process, the National Popular Vote Initiative, begun in 2006, aims to circumvent the Electoral College by getting enough states to collectively carry the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency to agree to cast them all for the national-popular-vote winner. What once looked quixotic is beginning to seem possible and may only become more so. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia, with a total of 196 electoral votes, have already joined the initiative, and another Trump win despite a loss in the popular vote could give it the momentum to get over the hump.

“Every year,” says National Popular Vote chair John Koza, “we add a state or two, and that’s what we plan to keep doing from now until it becomes law.” If not 2021, then 2023, after a likely strong second-midterm backlash against a Trump presidency, could be the year: All it would take is for Texas, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Minnesota to sign on.

—Ed Kilgore

NUCLEAR BRINKMANSHIP

Trump seems poised to allow the last of the deals limiting U.S. and Russian arsenals, the New START Treaty, to expire in 2021. Meanwhile, his defense team is eager to build several types of new nuclear weapons on top of the estimated 6,185 we already have (second only to Russia’s total). The just unveiled federal budget would bring spending for maintaining and developing nuclear warheads 50 percent above its level when Trump took office. Trump has spoken eagerly about resuming nuclear testing, which the U.S. has not done since George H.W. Bush, though we are still contending with the health and environmental consequences. That might well open a rush of other nations following suit.

North Korea, meanwhile, is very likely to achieve a missile that can reliably deliver a nuclear warhead to the East Coast during a second Trump term — even as it grows its arsenal. It increasingly looks as if a second Trump term would also see Iran restart its program full speed. Those two events, plus Trump’s threats to withdraw U.S. nuclear deterrence from our allies, has voices in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — among others — saying their countries should get their own weapons. Those who believe a world with more nuclear powers is more stable would get a chance to see their theory play out. So would the rest of us.

—Heather Hurlburt

EXTRAORDINARY STRESS

In the past four years, I saw people in my clinical practice experiencing a level of anxiety specific to the political climate that we really hadn’t seen before. It’s why I started writing about “Trump anxiety disorder.” The American Psychological Association does a “Stress in America” survey, and the 2019 one had 62 percent of American adults citing the current political climate as a source of stress, which has gone up since Trump took office. It’s not unlike a child living in a home that’s chaotic; we don’t have faith in the leaders we have historically put trust in, and that’s creating a lot of trauma. If Trump does get reelected, we’ll see a spike in this feeling of fear like we haven’t seen before. People will have to come to terms with the prospect of another four years of trying to keep up the fight. We can feel anxious for only so long, because anxiety is exhausting, and eventually that fatigue could transform into depression and leave us feeling really helpless. All of that could lead to more civil unrest or unhealthy behaviors such as drinking and emotional eating — people trying to deal with the stress in any way they can.

—Dr. Jennifer Panning

RED-STATE ENTERTAINMENT

Expect more fumbling studio attempts to reach a red-state demographic. The trouble is that no one on either side of the political spectrum seems able to agree on what a conservative movie looks like. Consider the box-office failure of Richard Jewell, which looked from afar like a surefire appeal to the resentful quadrant: a movie in which cackling media hordes descend upon and destroy the life of an innocent white man, made by a seeming stalwart like Clint Eastwood. It has proved easier to stir up right-wing outrage against a release, as demonstrated by the baffling furor that bumped the thriller The Hunt, sneering liberal villains and all, from the schedule last year. Look for studios to steer into tried-and-true territory, investing more in faith-based films like Breakthrough (the reason Chrissy Metz sang that song at the Oscars) and rah-rah war movies (because who could get mad at 1917?). But also be ready for more ex–Trump staffers to be anointed with normalization by way of reality-competition shows, along with the second coming of Mel Gibson, who has basically been welcomed back into the fold with his already-in-the-works follow-up to The Passion of the Christ.

—Alison Willmore

ESCALATING TRADE WARS

Trump will get more out of the box on economic policy, and 2021 will be his big chance to take the fight to China. This year’s “Phase One” trade agreement was a pause in hostilities to avoid preelection economic damage, but after he has won, he’ll be free to impose more tariffs and further impede global trade without fear of immediate electoral consequences from the economic drag those actions will cause.

If Trump cranks up the trade war, he will need more help from the Federal Reserve, cutting interest rates to offset the economic damage it causes. So you can expect Trump to replace Fed chairman Jay Powell — whom he has called naïve and a “bonehead” who is “like a golfer who can’t putt” and whom he “maybe” regrets appointing to the job in the first place — with a more loyal leader who is more likely to cut interest rates when Trump wants them cut.

In Trump’s second term, maybe a financial crisis or an energy crisis or a geopolitical crisis will drag down the U.S. economy. Or maybe fundamentals will shift so that his favorite economic tools don’t work anymore — maybe big deficits will slow the economy or low interest rates will push up inflation. But if I had to guess, I’d say economic performance in Trump’s second term would probably be similar to the first. The pattern since Trump’s election is his pursuit of output-boosting policy in two key areas: fiscal (cutting taxes while growing spending) and monetary (pushing for lower interest rates). Expansionary policy in these areas can cover up a lot of sins, such as an expanded trade war.

—Josh Barro

AND ESCALATING SELF-DEALINGS

A month after Trump’s inauguration, his sons Don Jr. and Eric laid out an ambitious plan for the future of their father’s real-estate and branding empire. In a front-page article in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of the two posed authoritatively at a shiny boardroom table, they touted developments under way in Vancouver and Dubai and a new domestic hotel chain called Scion, which Eric said would be focused on “trendy” cities like Austin.

The Scion chain never went anywhere after its first reported location attracted resistance-led street protests. A second expansion plan, for a heartland-based budget chain called American Idea, also imploded, and the Trumps’ partner in the project was charged last year with stealing luggage from an airport baggage turnstile. Many of the family’s overseas partners have been revealed to have unsavory pasts, and Trump’s own behavior as president has turned his brand toxic.

But Trump’s reelection could serve as an adrenaline shot to his moribund company. “I think Trump unleashed in a second term,” says Andrea Bernstein, author of a book about the Trump family business, American Oligarchs,  “means he continues to find ways to get people to pay him, and that becomes turbocharged.” Bernstein points out that, so far, the financial bright spot in the Trump Organization’s portfolio has been the place that most baldly trades in influence: the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. (With an uncertain election on the horizon, the company is reportedly trying to cash in by selling the hotel for as much as $500 million.) Trump has also sought to capitalize by selling access to his private club in Mar-a-Lago — which doubled the joining fee to $200,000 after he was elected — and only fierce criticism from key Republicans kept him from staging the next G7 summit at his ailing golf resort in Doral, Florida. Look for that brand of audacity to be deployed more creatively after 2020.

The most obvious direction for the Trump Organization to expand would be overseas. In a raucous press conference before he was inaugurated, Trump promised he would do “no new foreign deals,” but the pledge was purely voluntary. For now, it may be that the Trump family has discovered a more lucrative line of business. Hundreds of millions of dollars in donations flow through political campaigns, creating an immense opportunity for consultants and fund-raisers — not to mention hoteliers and caterers. “The business of Trump in the next year is the business of getting Trump reelected,” Bernstein says. “It is an incredible money machine.”

-Andrew Rice

A GENERATION OF JUDGES

In just three years, Trump has already filled 51 vacancies on U.S. Courts of Appeals, the “circuits” that provide much of the guidance federal trial judges utilize. His appointees now represent more than one-fourth of appeals-court judges, and he has succeeded in “flipping” three of the 13 circuits from Democratic-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. This administration has installed 135 district-court judges and is on pace to significantly exceed Obama’s 268 in much less time — if Trump is reelected and Republicans hold on to the Senate (which they are likely to do in most “Trump wins” scenarios).

Trump’s judicial counterrevolution could happen most decisively in the Supreme Court. He quickly exploited two openings on SCOTUS, and, in a second Trump term, the odds of court liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who will turn 87 this year and was recently treated for pancreatic cancer) and Stephen Breyer (who will be 82 this summer) hanging on until the next Democratic administration will go down significantly. One more flip of a liberal seat on the Court could produce a landmark conservative era in constitutional law, almost certainly including the reversal or significant modification of Roe v. Wade and other key precedents, not to mention a decisive new era of sympathy for corporations, reactionary state governments, nativists, vote suppressors, and foes of civil liberties. Names reportedly on Trump’s short list include Kavanaugh runner-up and Seventh Circuit judge Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite of hard-core cultural conservatives; Sixth Circuit judge Joan Larsen, who is viewed as hostile to LGBTQ rights; another Sixth Circuit judge, Amul Thapar, a Kentuckian who is close to Mitch McConnell; and Tenth Circuit judge Allison Eid, a former Clarence Thomas clerk. The relatively diverse nature of this group reflects the feeling that three white men in a row might be a bit much.

—Ed Kilgore

A CRISIS OF FAITH

“The fact is, no President has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself!,” Donald Trump tweeted last year. A dubious claim, but it could come true — just not in the way he thinks. His alliance with white born-again Christians helped make him president. It may also help end American Evangelicalism as we know it.

Trump is unpopular with America’s youngest adults in a moment when Evangelical Christianity is desperate for young members. Last May, Christianity Today — the same publication whose  editor called for Trump’s impeachment  and inspired that defensive presidential tweet — reported that merely half of all children raised Southern Baptist stay Southern Baptist as adults. The politically conservative, mostly white denomination isn’t winning enough souls to make up its losses, either. Overall membership in the Southern Baptist Convention hit a 30-year low in 2018.

Southern Baptists aren’t the only Protestants with shrinking churches; liberal traditions are losing young members too. But the values held by young adults are at odds with those behind the political goals of white Evangelicalism. According to one Associated Press poll, young adults are more likely than members of any other age group to say they disapprove of Trump. For white Evangelicals, Trump may prove a Moloch, an idol who devours the young in exchange for his favors.

—Sarah Jones

THE WALL, ABANDONED

By the time he exits the office, the president has said he wants a 1,000-mile structure along the border, an ambitious goal considering that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has only completed 100 miles in the past three years — around 90 miles of which serve as replacement for run-down barriers already in the ground. Though Trump has permanently altered legal immigration to the U.S. through his travel ban and nativist policies like restricting immigrant access to safety-net programs, a finished wall along the 1,954-mile southern border will not be an enduring piece of the administration’s legacy for a simple reason: It will not get done. According to construction-cost estimator Ed Zarenski, it’s just unfeasible to build such a substantial structure in such harsh, remote territory. At his low-end estimate of $22 billion, it would take 10,000 workers 11 years to build 1,000 miles of steel-slat barrier. “But you might not be able to get concrete trucks to deliver to such faraway sites,” he explains, “meaning the contractors would have to build plants along the way. That is unlikely to happen. Another practical concern: “Where do these men stay overnight? That cost isn’t built into any estimates, and there aren’t hotels along this 1,000-mile corridor for people to stay in.” These infrastructural problems don’t address the apparent quality of the barrier. Despite Trump’s claim that “this wall is not something that can be really knocked down,” in January a strong gust of wind toppled newly settled panels in Southern California. “I can’t believe that an engineer designed what photos show them using for foundations on that wall,” Zarenski says. “They’ve taken a lot of liberties in how things are getting built to get it done as cheaply as they can.” The current taxpayer cost for the wall sits at $18.4 billion.

—Matt Stieb

'DON JR. 2024'

If social media seems particularly vitriolic, deceptive, and stupid in 2020, wait until 2024. The top executives at platforms like Facebook and Twitter have already demonstrated a willingness to bend backward to satisfy baseless Republican accusations of suppression; just as the news media found itself bullied into false equivalencies by charges of bias at the end of the 20th century, social media will feel obligated to give conservatives more leeway in what they post. One particular beneficiary of this will be Donald Trump Jr., who already has an Instagram account with 2.4 million followers and a Twitter account with 4.4 million followers — both larger than any current Democratic presidential candidate besides Bernie Sanders — to which he posts unbelievably popular jokes, memes, and complaints. Newly empowered by his father’s victory in 2020, Don Jr.’s online presence will only get louder.

But Don Jr. isn’t just shitposting on Instagram. He’s building a political base for himself. President Trump will not run for a third term in 2024, less for any particular legal reasons (by then, his party would have an inescapable Supreme Court majority), than because he’ll be turning 78 and will be exhausted from another four years of security briefings and Cabinet meetings that take him away from his true vocation: watching and tweeting about cable news programs. What reason would he have to continue in a job he hates, especially if he could garner nearly all the benefits of the presidency — the graft, the platform, the attention — by handing the job off to someone tied closely to him? Like, say, his son?

Don Jr., among his father’s most energetic and devoted surrogates, is already highly popular in the Republican Party. He has openly speculated about running for governor of New York, but more recently he’s said to be considering a run in a more Trump-friendly state in the Mountain West. (Some allies have reportedly pushed Don Jr. for chairmanship of the RNC.) An Axios–Survey Monkey poll from December found that 29 percent of Republicans already would consider voting for Donald Trump Jr. in the 2024 election. That’s nearly double the support for his more polished sister, Ivanka, and behind only Vice-President Pence. Assuming enough of Trumpism’s senior-citizen base is still alive, Don Jr. could sail to the presidency or at least face off in a fiery run against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump Senior, meanwhile, could keep tweeting about politics to his heart’s content.

—Max Read

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*This article appears in the February 17, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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