The Trump regime defends racism: At least they’re being honest for once

Trumpism is built upon lies. This is a common feature of authoritarianism and fascism.

These lies includes tales of national greatness, the idea of “populism” and the “silent majority,” the “will of the people,” an appeal to a mythic past and dire threats from invisible enemies.

The lies are part of a larger war on reality and truth. The lies are told about matters both great and obvious as well as small and petty.

The authoritarian regime’s lies help to create and sustain a cult of personality around the leader, a man who is depicted as perfect if not also immortal, an extension of the followers and their collective will to power and greatness.

Donald Trump may rank as one of history’s greatest liars. Social theorist Hannah Arendt described such people in her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Trump’s lies have been deadly: Considering the official count and those uncounted, at least 200,000 people have now died from the pandemic in the United States. There are projections that more than 400,000 people in America may die before the coronavirus runs its course. As documented in reporter Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage,” Trump’s lies and deliberate sabotage of pandemic relief efforts are largely responsible for that tragedy.

The Trump regime’s assault on the truth is more than just bending the truth in service to a fascist vision: It is an effort to replace reality with a nightmare dreamworld.

This is precisely what George Orwell described in “1984”: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

There is one area where Donald Trump and his regime have been remarkably honest. They want to create a country where nonwhite people are silenced and their interests ignored, and where white people — specifically, white Christian conservative men — remain in control of every area of public life in perpetuity.

The TrumpWorld vision of America is bizarre, a form of apartheid where there is racism without racists, colorblindness in service to white supremacy, and neoliberalism and Christian nationalism are unopposed.

In an interview last Wednesday with NBC News, Attorney General William Barr provided an example of the Trump regime’s “honest” racism when he said that there must be an explanation besides racism for why Black people are treated differently by police, as compared to white people.

With his absurd argument, Barr offered an almost textbook example of racism, in which the dominant group in a given society (in this instance, white people) is treated in a preferential way by the law, which is supposed to be neutral, as compared to another group of people (Black people) who have been oppressed in the same society.

Barr and the Trump regime see no problems with that logic. Why? They are committed to a set of values and beliefs in which nonwhite people are to be disadvantaged as a group because that is “normal.” Likewise, white privilege is viewed as a natural birthright. In TrumpWorld, racism only exists to the degree that nonwhite people somehow “oppress” or otherwise hurt white people — even though white people control every area of American public life.

Barr’s comments are part of a larger pattern of overt white supremacy by the Trump regime which includes banning Muslims from the United States; encouraging vigilantism and other violence by right-wing paramilitaries against the Trump regime’s “enemies”; characterizing Hispanics and Latinos as a natural-born group of rapists and murderers; overturning civil rights laws and protections for black people and other nonwhites; imprisoning nonwhites, especially Hispanic and Latino refugees and migrants in concentration camps; criminalizing dissent and deeming supporters of Black Lives Matter to be “thugs,” “terrorists” and members of a “hate group”; unleashing federal enforcers from ICE and Homeland Security to terrorize nonwhite communities; attempting to stop black and brown people from voting; respond sluggishly to the pandemic because nonwhite people in urban areas were dying in disproportionate numbers, compared to rural whites; and abandoning the people of Puerto Rico to the deadly ravages of Hurricane Maria.

Trump himself is a white supremacist (consciously or otherwise) who built his political career on the claim that Barack Obama was somehow not eligible to be president of the United States because he was supposedly born in another country. Trump has more recently told his followers that there is something inherently shameful and wrong about Sen. Kamala Harris, a black woman, potentially serving as vice president of the United States. Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s new book includes many examples of Trump’s pathological racism and hostility towards black people and other nonwhites.

The American people clearly hear and understand Donald Trump and his regime’s invocations of white supremacy and racism. A recent story in the New York Times reports:

Public views of Mr. Trump flow through a racial prism. A poll by CBS News last week found that 66 percent of registered voters believed Mr. Trump favored white people, versus 4 percent who said he worked against their interests. By contrast, 20 percent thought he favored Black people and 50 percent said he worked against Black people. Among Black voters, 81 percent said he worked against their interests.

Americans of conscience find the Trump regime’s racism and white supremacy repulsive. By comparison, Trump’s followers are drawn to him precisely because of those values.

Trump’s racial authoritarianism is also heard and understood abroad as well — for example, by German neo-Nazis as well as other fascists and members of the global far right.

Donald Trump and his regime’s “honest” white supremacy is obvious and bold. But there are more subtle and comparatively quiet examples of it as well. These are the shadows and colors which help to fill out and complement the outline of the Trump movement’s dream of American apartheid.

In one of the most recent examples of the Trump’s regime’s (comparatively) silent war against multiracial democracy, it was announced last week that “anti-racism” training will no longer be permitted within the federal government. The Trump regime is particularly focused on “critical race theory,” which its mouthpieces have fantastically (and dangerously) described as an ideology somehow being “weaponized” against white people.

As part of this new racist attack, the Trump administration also announced that schools which use the New York Times’ 1619 Project, relating to slavery and the founding of the United States, as part of their curricula will risk having federal funds withdrawn.

How should this new front in Trump’s war on the truth, reality, and multiracial democracy be best understood? We should begin with the facts.

Critical race theory — the target of this new attack — is a set of theories, empirical frameworks and methods for understanding and demonstrating how institutional racism and other forms of social inequality are central to American law, justice and society more generally.

Some of critical race theory’s core tenets include the following:

Race is a social construct that overdetermines life chances and life outcomes for individuals and groups.
Intersectionality: individuals have multiple personal and societal identities. These multiple identities overlap with one another and by doing so create opportunities for alliances, shared struggle and other social change work.
Positive social change can occur because of interest convergence between elites, social movements and other actors.
Whiteness and white people do in fact have a history and identity in the West and around the world. This identity reflects how power grants unearned privileges and advantages to white people as a group while denying it to nonwhite people.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project intervenes against America’s myth-making about the founding by making the color line, democracy, white-on-black chattel slavery, settler colonialism and capitalism central to the origins of the United States, rather than peripheral issues.

In TrumpWorld, as in the right-wing political imagination more broadly, none of these facts about critical race theory and the 1619 Project matter. As distorted through the white gaze, these things become bugaboos or empty signifiers, interpreted however the white right chooses to.

For example, critical race theory is being distorted as some type of conspiracy against white America in which “political correctness” brainwashes and programs “real Americans,” almost as in the famous Cold War-era film “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Republicans and other conservatives have a special obsession with the New York Times’ 1619 Project because it shatters their immature understanding of the origins of a country which they claim to love — despite their loyalty to Donald Trump and his treasonous, fascist movement.

Writing at Al Jazeera, Yannick Giovanni Marshall diagnoses the white right’s rage toward the 1619 Project:

As a result, the society built upon a gulag continues to be called a great experiment in democracy. Atrocities committed against non-white people are trivialised and reduced to “the imperfections” of an “imperfect nation”. The tonnage of blood and flesh peeled from whipping posts, Black town burnings, and “Indian Wars” are but flecks of dust floating against a harmonious, pioneering white settlement destined to civilise the world.

More a Merkers Mine than a state, the slave colony where Black life was waterboarded between the threshing wheel of slave production and the thin air of “race riots” is, even in 2020, seen by many as the birthplace of modern liberty. This is because embedded in both the colony’s structure — and in the minds of its admirers — is the fact that Black people do not count. If Black lives mattered, the lights shining from the shining city on the hill would be known to be concentration camp searchlights. If Black lives mattered, globally, America would be a pariah state.

The Trump regime’s condemnation of critical race theory and the 1619 Project is another example of the power wielded by White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.

As detailed in journalist Jean Guerrero’s new book “Hatemonger,” Stephen Miller is fluent in the language, signs, codes, logic, literature, stories and symbols of neo-Nazism and other forms of white supremacy. It is no coincidence that the language used in the Trump regime’s condemnation of critical race theory mirrors the white supremacist slogan that “anti-racism is anti-white.” Such language reveals a supposition by white supremacists that to be white means to be inherently racist.

In reality, anti-racism is not a form oppression. If anything, it signifies liberation from racism and from the way racist values limit a person’s and group’s ability to be full members of the human family, working together with other people across the color line to make a better world.

The Trump regime’s attacks on critical race theory and the 1619 Project show how today’s conservative movement has mated racism and white supremacy with conspiracism. Such a relationship is not new.

As Paul Mason, a New Statesman columnist and former BBC news editor and commentator, told me in a recent phone conversation, the conspiratorial thinking of Trumpism and the white right (which now includes the QAnon cult) has deep connections with centuries of anti-Semitism and the legendary fabrication “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Because the Trump regime is racist, white supremacist and authoritarian, it ultimately views anti-racism as a mortal enemy.

So the Trump regime’s attacks on critical race theory and the 1619 Project are but another example of how, in TrumpWorld, critical thinking is not allowed, dissent is to be suppressed and thought-crimes that challenge its new orthodoxy are to be punished.

Fourth world: American carnage from a pandemic president

The year was 1991 and the United States was suddenly the globe’s lone superpower, its ultimate hyperpower, the last and greatest of its kind, the soon-to-be-indispensable nation. The only one left — alone, utterly alone and triumphant atop the world.

Who could have asked for more? Or better? It had been a Cold War fantasy of the first order — until that other superpower, the Soviet Union, imploded. In fact, even that doesn’t catch the true shock of the moment, since Washington’s leaders simply hadn’t imagined a world in which the Cold War could ever truly end.

Now, go ahead, blame me. In this pandemic moment that should perhaps be considered a sign of a burning, sickening future to come, I’m stoking your nostalgia for better times. Admittedly, even that past was, in truth, a fantasy of the first (or perhaps last) order. After all, in retrospect, that mighty, resplendent, lone superpower, victorious beyond the wildest dreams of its political elite, was already about to embark on its own path of decline. Enwreathed in triumph, it, too, would be heading for the exits, even if so much more slowly than the Soviet Union.

It’s clear enough now that, in 1991, with Ronald Reagan’s former vice president George H.W. Bush in the White House and his son, George W., waiting in the wings of history (while Iraqi autocrat and former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein was still perched in his palace in Baghdad, Iraq), the United States was already launching itself on the path to Donald Trump’s America. No, he didn’t know it. How could he? Who could have possibly imagined him as the president of the United States? He was still a tabloid phenomenon then (masquerading that year as his own publicist “John Miller” in phone interviews with reporters to laud the attractions and sexual conquests of one “Donald Trump”). He was also on the road to bankruptcy court since his five Atlantic City casinos would soon go down in flames. Him as a future candidate to head an America where life for so many would be in decline and its very greatness in need of being “made” great again… well, who coulda dreamt it? Not me, that’s for sure.

Welcome to American carnage

Let me apologize one more time. Yes, I was playing on your sense of nostalgia in this besieged American moment of ours. Mission accomplished, I assume.

So much, I’m afraid, for such Auld Lang Syne moments, since that one took place in a previous century, even if, remarkably enough, that wasn’t actually so long ago. Only 29 years passed from that singular moment of triumph in Washington (a period that would then be fancied as “the end of history“) to Donald Trump’s America-not-First-but-Last world — to, that is, genuine “American carnage” (and I’m not just thinking about the almost 190,000 Americans who have already died from Covid-19 with no end in sight). Less than a quarter of a century took us from the president who asked God to continue to “bless the United States of America” in the wake of a historic victory to the man who campaigned for president on the declinist slogan of making America great again.

And don’t think Donald Trump was wrong in that 2017 inaugural address of his. A certain level of American carnage (particularly in the form of staggering economic inequality, not to speak of the “forever wars” still being fought so brainlessly by a military on which this country was spending its money rather than on health, education, and infrastructure) had helped bring him to power and he knew it. He even promised to solve just such problems, including ending those forever wars, as he essentially did again in his recent White House acceptance speech, even as he promised to keep “rebuilding” that very military.

Here was the key passage from that long-gone inaugural address of his:

“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Of course, more than 3½ years later, in that seemingly eternal “now” of his, the carnage seemed eternal — whether in the form of those wars he swore he would get us out of; the spending on the military and the rest of what’s still known as the national security state, which only increased; the economic inequality, which just grew, thanks in part to a humongous 2017 tax cut, a bonanza for the wealthiest Americans (and no one else), leaving the government and so the rest of us owing far more money than previously imaginable; and above all, the urge of his administration, from top to bottom, not just to deny that climate change exists but to burn this planet down by “unleashing” a program of “American energy dominance” and taking every imaginable restraint off the exploitation of fossil-fuels and opening up yet more areas for those industries to exploit. In other words, Donald J. Trump has given American carnage new meaning and, in his singular way, lent a remarkable hand to the transformation of this country.

A simple math problem

When The Donald descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 to declare himself a candidate for president, he made a promise to the disgruntled citizens of the American heartland. He would build what he hailed as a “great wall” (that the Mexican government would pay for) to seal us off from the lesser breeds on this planet (Mexican rapists!). Until that moment, of course, there had been just one “great” wall on planet Earth and it had been constructed by various Chinese dynasties over untold centuries to keep out nomadic invaders, the armed “caravans” of that moment.

As Americans would soon learn, however, being second best to or only as good as just about anything wasn’t, to put it mildly, Donald Trump’s signature style. So in that first speech of his, he instantly doubled the “greats” in his wall. He would create nothing less than a “great, great” one.

In the years that followed, it’s also become clear that neither spelling, nor pronouncing words is among his special skills or, put another way, that he’s a great, great misspeller and mispronouncer. Given that he managed to produce only 300 miles of wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in almost four years in office, almost all of it replacing already existing barriers (at the expense of the American taxpayer and a set of private donors-cum-suckers), we have to assume that the candidate on that first day either misspelled or mispronounced one word in that phrase of his.

Given what’s happened to this country since, it’s hard not to imagine that what he meant was not a great, great wall, but a great, great fall. And in this pandemic hell of a country, with its economy in the kind of tatters that no one has yet faintly come to grips with, its health (and mental health) in crisis mode, parts of it burnt to a crisp and others flooded and clobbered by intensifying storms, if that’s what he meant to say, his leadership of what remains the world’s lone superpower (despite a rising China) has indeed been a great, great success. For such a triumph, however, this country needs some new term, something to replace that old “indispensable nation” (and, for my money, “dispensable nation” doesn’t quite do the trick).

And I have a suggestion. Once upon a time when I was much, much younger, we spoke of three worlds on planet Earth. There was the first world (also known as “the free world”), which included the developed countries of North America, Europe, and Japan (and you could throw in South Korea and Australia, if you wanted); there was the second world, also known as the communist bloc, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China; and, of course, there was the third world, which included all the other poor and underdeveloped countries, many former European colonies, scattered around the globe’s south and often in terrible shape.

So many years later, with the first billionaire in the Oval Office presiding over an era of American carnage at home rather than in distant lands like Vietnam, I suspect we need a new “world” to capture the nature and state of this country at this moment. So how about fourth world? After all, the U.S. remains the richest, most powerful nation on the planet (first world!), but is also afloat in a sea of autocratic, climate-changing, economic, military, and police carnage that should qualify it as distinctly third world as well.

So, it’s really just a simple math problem: What’s 1 plus 3? Four, of course, making this country once again a leader on this ever less equal planet of ours; the United States, that is, is the first official fourth-world country in history. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Or if you prefer, you could simply think of us as potentially the most powerful, wealthiest failed state on the planet.

A hell on Earth?

Humanity has so far (and I use that phrase advisedly) managed to create just two ways of destroying human life on this planet. In doing so, it has, of course, taken over tasks that it once left to the gods (Armageddon! Apocalypse!). On both counts, Donald Trump is proving himself a master of destruction.

The first way, of course, would be by nuclear weapons, so far, despite close calls, used only twice, 75 years ago. However, the president and his crew have focused with striking intensity on tearing up nuclear arms pacts signed with the Soviet Union in the final years of the Cold War, backing out of the Iranian nuclear deal, pumping up the “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and threatening other countries with the actual use of such weaponry. (Who could forget, for instance, The Donald’s threat to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea?)

In the process, the Trump administration has loosed what increasingly looks like a new global nuclear arms race, even as tensions grow, especially between China and the United States. In other words, while promising to end America’s “forever wars” (he didn’t), President Trump has actually pumped up the relatively dim possibility since the Cold War ended of using nuclear weapons, which obviously threatens a flash-bang end to human life as we know it.

And keep in mind that, when it comes to world-ending possibilities, that’s the lesser of his two apocalyptic efforts in these years.

While we’re still on the first of those ways of destroying this planet, however, let’s not forget to include not just the increased funding devoted to “modernizing” those nukes, but more generally the ever greater funding of the Pentagon and what’s still called “the national security state.” It hardly matters how little of that money goes to true national security in a twenty-first-century moment when we’re experiencing a pandemic that could be but the beginning of a new Black Plague-style era and the heating up of the atmosphere, oceans, and seas of this world in ways that are already making life increasingly unbearable via ever fiercer storms, ever more frequent wildfires, the ever greater melting of ice sheets, ever more violent flooding, ever greater drought — I mean, you name it, and if it’s somewhere between deeply unpleasant and life (and property) endangering, it’s getting worse in the Trumpian moment.

In that second category when it comes to destroying human life as we’ve known it via the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the president and his men (and they are basically men) have shown a particular flair. I’m still alone in doing so, but I continue to refer to the whole lot of them as pyromaniacs, because their simple denial of the reality of global warming is the least of it. Trump and crew are clearly determined to burn, burn, burn.

And lest you think any of this will ever bother the president or his top officials, think again. After all, having had an essentially mask-less, cheek-by-jowl election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which spread the coronavirus and may have killed one of the president’s well-known supporters, he then doubled down in his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination. He gave it in front of the White House before the kind of crowd he glories in: 1,500 enthusiastic followers, almost all mask-less, untested for Covid-19, and jammed together cheering him for an hour. That should tell you all you need to know about his concern for the lives of others (even those who adore him) or anyone’s future other than his own.

Perhaps we need a new chant for this election season, something like: “Four more years and this planet will be a hell on earth!”

It was the worst of times, it was… no, wait, in Trumpian terms, it was the worstest of times since no one should ever be able to outdo him. And as CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite would have said in my youth, you (and I and the rest of humanity) were there. We truly were and are. For shame.

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American bloodlands: In a deeply polarized nation, mass violence is not far away

The tinder that could soon ignite widespread violent conflagrations throughout the United States lies ominously stacked around us. Millions of disenfranchised white Americans, who see no way out of their economic and social misery, struggling with an emotional void, are seething with rage against a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberal elite that presides over political stagnation and grotesque, mounting social inequality. Millions more alienated young men and women, also locked out of the economy and with no realistic prospect for advancement or integration, gripped by the same emotional void, have harnessed their fury in the name of tearing down the governing structures and anti-fascism. The enraged, polarized segments of the population are rapidly consolidating as the political center disintegrates. They stand poised to tear apart the United States, awash in military-grade weapons, unable to cope with the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, cursed with militarized police forces that function as internal armies of occupation and de facto allies of the neofascists.

The spark that usually sets such tinder ablaze is martyrdom. Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a supporter of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was wearing a loaded Glock pistol in a holster and had bear spray and an expandable metal baton when he was shot dead on Aug. 29, allegedly by Michael Forest Reinoehl, a supporter of antifa, in the streets of Portland, Oregon. A woman in the crowd can be heard shouting after the shooting: “I am not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight.” On Thursday, Reinoehl, allegedly armed with a handgun, was shot and killed by federal agents in Washington state.

Once people start being sacrificed for the cause, it takes little for demagogues of the radical left and the radical right to insist that self-preservation necessitates violence and is a prerequisite for victory.

Violence is a narcotic. It fills the emotional void. It imparts a feeling of godlike omnipotence to the powerless. It instills feelings of comradeship and belonging to the alienated. It gives to social outcasts, crippled by humiliation and rejection, a sense of meaning and higher purpose. It obliterates the despair that once defined their lives and replaces it with feelings of ecstatic self-importance and self-adulation, a state of being outside the self. The world suddenly becomes a Manichaean battleground between them and us, the forces of dark and the forces of light.

When I wrote “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” a reflection on the culture of war after two decades as a correspondent in Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I meant it. I have seen this dark elixir at work in other disintegrating societies. I know too intimately the rush that violence engenders, the overpowering lusts that seize a mob or armed unit when it destroys, even human beings, and the heady attraction of suspending all personal morality and individual responsibility for the wild intoxication of violence. It is the absence of empathy, perhaps the best definition of evil.

The words left and right, once violence becomes the primary form of communication, are meaningless. These are death cults. They venerate and worship death. The martyrs justify the murder of the enemy, including the detested voices that call for understanding, reconciliation and nonviolence. To suggest anything other than the total annihilation of the enemy — and the enemy includes all who do not fully and uncritically support the cause — is apostasy. It is the dead who rule. Their voices cry out from beyond the grave demanding vengeance and new heroes and martyrs to take their place. There are constant and repeated acts of remembrance for the fallen.

This cult of the dead is integral to combat units in the military. Those who attend the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, an eight-week course held at Fort Benning, Georgia, to become an Army Ranger must select a “Ranger in the sky” who was killed in action. Recruits, who are warned not to pick former NFL player Pat Tillman, are required to know the details of the dead Ranger’s personal life before enlistment and his military career. They must carry this information on a piece of paper with them at all times. It is an inspectable item. Idealists, seeking to lift themselves up from the depths of social obscurity and be fêted as heroes, become, whether as Army Rangers or members of violent militias, willing sacrificial victims. But as deaths accumulate, these martyrs, once so important and precious, disappear into faceless, nameless piles of corpses.

The Nazi Party in 1930 found its primary martyr in the 19-year-old Brownshirt Horst Wessel, who led a branch of the Nazi paramilitaries that attacked Communists, especially those who made up the rival Communist militia called the Red Front-Fighters’ League (RFB). Wessel was shot dead by Albrecht “Ali” Höhler, a Communist militant and petty criminal — later assassinated by the Nazis — after a complaint was made to the party about Wessel by his Communist landlady. Wessel instantly became a “martyr for the Third Reich.” The “Horst Wessel Song” became the official anthem of the Nazi Party. Fascist and Communist violence, with deaths on both sides, exploded in the streets of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. The mayhem, much of it instigated by the fascists, eventually exhausted the German public and made it susceptible to the right-wing and fascist promises to impose law and order.

Martyrdom also played a central role in the eruption of the war in the former Yugoslavia. On March 1, 1992, a wedding procession of Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo was attacked by Ramiz Delalić, a career criminal and a Muslim known by his nickname, Ćelo. The father of the groom, Nikola Gardović, was killed. A Serbian Orthodox priest was wounded. The shooting of Gardović, like that of Wessel, was used by Serb nationalists to whip up a blood fury. It saw Serbs erect armed barricades and roadblocks throughout the city, and led not long afterwards to a war in which most of Bosnia was destroyed, 2.2 million people were displaced from their homes and at least 100,000 died.

I watched many funerals in Gaza for Palestinian martyrs. They were little more than recruiting ceremonies for militants and suicide bombers. A truck with a generator in the back and huge loudspeakers on the cab would be at the head of the funeral procession. The speakers would blast out verses from the Quran, along with slogans calling on heroes to fight and die for Palestine and become a shaheed, or martyr. Young boys would run alongside or behind the truck. The funeral processions made their way slowly down the dusty, narrow streets of the refugee camps, past the concrete hovels, the walls decorated with pictures of the newest martyr or murals that depicted past attacks, such as a bus with the Israeli Star of David on it being consumed in a fiery explosion. “Don’t be merciful to those inside,” the Arabic script read below the picture of the bus. “Blow it up! Hit it!”

“It is the first death which infects everyone with the feeling of being threatened,” wrote Elias Canetti, a Bulgarian refugee from Nazi persecution, in “Crowds and Power“:

It is impossible to overrate the part played by the first dead man in the kindling of wars. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. It need not be anyone of particular importance, and can even be someone quite unknown. Nothing matters except his death; and it must be believed that the enemy is responsible for this. Every possible cause of his death is suppressed except one: his membership of the group to which one belongs oneself.

The flashing red lights are all around us. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party will do little to restore the social bonds or address the social inequality and disenfranchisement of tens of millions of Americans, now facing evictions and bankruptcy, which is fueling the social collapse. Donald Trump and the Republican Party, along with media outlets such as Fox News, in a bid to retain power, are fanning the flames of violence, seeing in the incitement of far-right mobs a route to a ruthless police state.

In armed conflicts, facts and truth no longer matter. Lies, if used to further the cause, become righteous. Truth, if it hurts the cause, is blasphemy. If your side commits an atrocity, it’s justified by an atrocity, real or invented, carried out by the enemy. The ends always justify the means. The moral universe is banished, replaced by a self-serving pseudo-morality.

“In the beginning war looks and feels like love,” I wrote in “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning”:

But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war’s grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb. The world outside becomes, as Freud wrote, “uncanny.” The familiar becomes strangely unfamiliar — many who have been to war find this when they return home. The world we once understood and longed to return to stands before us as alien, strange, and beyond our grasp.

How Trump screwed up with Bob Woodward: It fits the president’s well-documented personality disorder

In a Wednesday interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, former Donald Trump lawyer, Michael Cohen, addressed the recent revelations included in the book by veteran reporter Bob Woodward.

Lemon addressed the allegations by the White House that Cohen is a liar, but Cohen explained that nothing he has said has been disproven by other sources. He noted that Trump’s niece, his sister, his friends, Woodward, and others who have interviewed Trump essentially confirmed everything that Cohen has alleged.

“I spent quite a bit of time with [Jared Kushner] over the years,” Cohen continued. “Yes, Jared is pompous. Once he decided to become a special adviser, I remember sitting with Jared and Ivanka and Mr. Trump in the office. I said I don’t think the two of you should go in. You have issues with nepotism. And you should go to Washington if that’s what you want to do and spend time with dad and make sure he’s okay. At the end of the day, you shouldn’t work in the White House. There are reasons that there are rules.”

“For the Trumps, there are no rules,” he continued. “They live by their own rules. Including thinking he can get the better of Bob Woodward sitting down with a tape recorder and in front of his mouth. And sitting there and spewing lies that he knows are lies. And again, I talked about this. It’s very Stalinistic. If you say something enough times, people believe it. That’s something he manages to do. And he’s managed to do that to 38 percent of the country. His base. They listen to what he says. They accept what he says and go and promote it as if it’s legitimate.”

He also explained how much the Trump Org. is like a cult.

“Unfortunately, the Trump Organization is — I have described it — is very much like a cult,” Cohen began. “And it’s interesting he used in the Woodward tape today the word cool-aid, which is from the Jonestown Massacre. Which I thought was somewhat interesting. Not only is the Trump Organization like a cult, but so is the White House.”

He went on to say that if people speak out against Trump or do something wrong, then they’re fired immediately, and that’s why Trump has gone through so many staffers.

See the interview below:

7 bombshell allegations from damning new Trump administration whistleblower report

A new whistleblower complaint from U.S. Department of Homeland Security employee Brian Murphy released Wednesday provided a slew of provocative and disturbing allegations of criminal behavior and abuse of authority within the Trump administration.

The document was released by the House Intelligence Committee, and it actually summarizes numerous previous complaints that Murphy, the principal deputy under secretary for the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, has previously filed with the inspector general. The complaint alleged that he has since faced professional retaliation from his superiors because of his previous allegations, despite the fact that he is protected from such actions by federal law.

While the retaliation is condemnable on its own, most striking are the series of allegations the complaint described. It paints a picture of a department completely warped by the president’s distorted priorities and determined to cater to his whims and prejudices, regardless of the facts — sometimes putting the country in danger.

Here are seven key details:

1. Murphy said he was illegally directed to manipulate intelligence assessments to support aggressive border policies.

On or about October 29, 2018, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that instructions from Mr. Taylor and Ms. Marquadt had been issued for Mr. Murphy to ensure the intelligence assessments he produced for Secretary Nielsen’s review supported the policy argument that large numbers of KSTs were entering the United States through the southwest border. Mr. Murphy declined to censor or manipulate the intelligence information, viewing it as an improper administration of an intelligence program, and stated to Mr. Glawe that doing what was being requested would constitute a felony.

2. The complaint makes a compelling case that former DHS Secretary Kirtjen Nielsen repeatedly and deliberately lied to Congress to exaggerate the threat at the border.

Murphy said that the secretary purposely tried to blur the distinction between “Known or Suspected Terrorists” (KSTs) and other categories of migrants, thereby misleadingly suggesting the border posed a greater threat of terrorism than it actually does. Even after he explained these distinctions to Nielsen, Murphy said, she consistently misled Congress about the matter:

Prior to Secretary Nielsen’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 20, 2018, Mr. Murphy attended a preparation session that went over the information within the proposed testimony. During that session, Mr. Murphy sought to clarify for Secretary Nielsen the distinction between a KST and a Special Interest Alien (“SIA”). An SIA is a term of art created by U.S. Customs and Border Protection meant to describe a category of migrants who come from countries where there is a significant terrorism threat but regarding whom there is no individualized basis for suspecting the person is themselves a terrorist. An SIA does not constitute a KST.

Notwithstanding the clarification provided by Mr. Murphy, he has a good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen subsequently provided on December 20, 2018, regarding KSTs constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. This assessment formed the basis of the anonymous OIG complaint Mr. Murphy submitted on November 2, 2018. On January 9, 2019, without consulting with Messrs. Glawe or Murphy, DHS issued a document – apparently crafted by Messrs. Wolf and Taylor, and Ms. Marquadt – entitled “Myth/Fact: Known and Suspected Terrorists/Special Interest Aliens”. The document contained erroneous information regarding the number of KSTs and SIAs encountered along the southwest border.

On March 5, 2019, Mr. Murphy participated in another preparation session with Secretary Nielsen, this time in advance of her testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Messrs. Wolf and Taylor were also present. During the session, Mr. Murphy provided Secretary Nielsen with documentation reflecting that the number of documented KSTs crossing the southwest border only consisted of no more than three individuals, not 3,755 individuals as she had previously attested to in her testimony on December 20, 2018. 3 Mr. Wolf and Mr. Taylor responded by saying Secretary Nielsen should claim the details were classified, state any KST crossing was one too many and deflect away from addressing the significant discrepancy in the data. Mr. Murphy advised Secretary Nielsen that he did not believe that was appropriate, and noted that the few “known” KSTs who were apprehended were derivative contacts, in so much as they merely had a name or phone number of a person who was known to be in contact with a terrorist. At that point, Mr. Murphy was removed from the meeting by Mr. Wolf. He then informed Messrs. Glawe and Hanna what transpired that evening.

It is Mr. Murphy’s good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen delivered on March 6, 2019, regarding KSTs again constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. Mr. Murphy outlined that assessment in his anonymous May 13, 2019, OIG complaint.

3. Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli illegally tried to distort intelligence reports he viewed as too favorable to asylum seekers, claiming they were concocted by the “Deep State,” the complaint said.

In December 2019, Mr. Murphy attended a meeting with Messrs. Cuccinelli and Glawe to discuss intelligence reports regarding conditions in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The intelligence reports were designed to help asylum officers render better determinations regarding their legal standards. Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed the intelligence reports and he presented them to Mr. Cuccinelli in the meeting. Mr. Murphy defended the work in the reports, but Mr. Cuccinelli stated he wanted changes to the information outlining high levels of corruption, violence, and poor economic conditions in the three respective countries. Mr. Cuccinelli expressed frustration with the intelligence reports, and he accused unknown “deep state intelligence analysts” of compiling the intelligence information to undermine President Donald J. Trump’s (“President Trump”) policy objectives with respect to asylum. Notwithstanding Mr. Murphy’s response that the intelligence reports’ assessments were consistent with past assessments made for several years, Mr. Cuccinelli ordered Messrs. Murphy and Glawe to identify the names of the “deep state” individuals who compiled the intelligence reports and to either fire or reassign them immediately.

After the meeting, Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Glawe that Mr. Cuccinelli’s instructions were illegal, as well as constituted an abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program.

4. Under Secretary David Glawe was reportedly almost fired by Trump after he testified about the threat posed by Russian election interference.

In approximately September 2018, Mr. Glawe testified in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Mr. Murphy was not present during the testimony. Immediately following that hearing, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that he had been “challenged” by Republican members of the Committee regarding Mr. Glawe’s confirmation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Mr. Glawe was subsequently summoned to the White House a few days after his testimony. Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that Secretary Nielsen had warned him that President Trump had demanded Mr. Glawe be fired. However, Secretary Nielsen and White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, had convinced President Trump to “give Glawe another chance”. After that meeting at the White House, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that while he (Mr. Glawe) would continue to support him on most matters he (Mr. Murphy) was on his own when it came to election interference assessments.

5. Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told Murphy to stop reporting on Russian interference and to focus on China and Iran, which Murphy believed “would put the country in substantial and specific danger,” the complaint said.

In mid-May 2020, Mr. Wolf instructed Mr. Murphy to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran. Mr. Wolf stated that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Wolf he would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger.

6. Officials were concerned that discussing the threats posed by white supremacists and Russian intelligence operations would reflect badly on Trump, and they preferred that Murphy’s team work on “violent ‘left-wing’ groups” like “antifa.”

These changes would clearly better match Trump’s preferred rhetoric, though not reality.

In March 2020, Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed a Homeland [Threat] Assessment (“HTA”). Completion of the HTA was a requirement set forth by Acting Secretary Kevin McCleenan prior to his departure from DHS. Mr. Murphy was intimately involved in the editing and crafting of the HTA. Following its completion, the HTA was distributed by Mr. Glawe to Messrs. Wolf, Cuccinelli, and Gountanis. Shortly after the distribution, Mr. Glawe was informed that further distribution of the HTA was prohibited due to concerns raised by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding how the HTA would reflect upon President Trump. Two sections were specifically labeled as concerns: White Supremacy and Russian influence in the United States. Mr. Murphy stated to Mr. Glawe that this constituted an abuse of authority by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli, and Mr. Glawe concurred with that assessment.

In May 2020, Mr. Glawe retired, and Mr. Murphy assumed the role of Acting Under Secretary. In May 2020 and June 2020, Mr. Murphy had several meetings with Mr. Cuccinelli regarding the status of the HTA. Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent “left-wing” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to make the requested modifications, and informed Mr. Cuccinelli that it would constitute censorship of analysis and the improper administration of an intelligence program.

…

During multiple meetings between the end of May 2020 and July 31, 2020, Mr. Murphy made protected disclosures to Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program with respect to intelligence information on ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups operating throughout the United States. On each occasion, Mr. Murphy was instructed by Mr. Wolf and/or Mr. Cuccinelli to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to modify any of the intelligence assessments based upon political rhetoric, and advised both officials he would only report accurate intelligence information as collected by DHS I&A.

7. Classified material

Much of what is concerning about the complaint is what it doesn’t mention. At several points, the complaint makes clear it can’t repeat the substance of allegations regarding DHS officials because the material involved is classified. This is particularly concerning because other parts of the complaint indicate that officials abused the classification system to cover up embarrassing or inconvenient facts.

Additional point: One interesting point to note is that Murphy tried to push back on some reporting that was critical of DHS because it supposedly implied falsely that DHS was collecting intelligence information on journalists and reporters.

Murphy claims this didn’t happen. Putting aside the particulars, this detail in the report may be seen as bolstering Murphy’s credibility. Defenders of the administration will likely argue he’s a disgruntled employee trying to hurt Trump and DHS, but it’s notable that he seems to be willing to defend the department when he thinks the facts have been unfairly reported. This suggests Murphy is someone who cares about getting to the truth, rather someone who is trying to hurt the president and the administration no matter the cost:

To be unequivocally clear, the press reporting was significantly flawed and, in many instances, contained completely erroneous assertions. For example, DHS I&A never knowingly or deliberately collected information on journalists, at least as far as Mr. Murphy is aware or ever authorized. There were, to be sure, efforts to track publicly available media reporting that included information that had been leaked from the U.S. Government, including publicly-accessible posts by journalists on social media, but DHS I&A did not seek authorization to and was not engaging in surveillance of journalists’ private data.

Democrats to spend $6.2 million in effort to flip the Texas House

A national Democratic super PAC is pumping over $6 million in to the fight for the Texas House majority.

The group, Forward Majority, plans to spend $6.2 million across 18 races that will likely determine who controls the lower chamber in January, according to an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune. The money will go toward TV ads, digital ads and mail in each district.

“We have a once in a generation opportunity to establish a Democratic majority ahead of redistricting and cement Texas’ status as the biggest battleground state in the country,” Forward Majority spokesperson Ben Wexler-Waite said in a statement.

Democrats are currently nine seats away from the House majority — and growing confident in their chances of capturing the chamber. They have a released a slew of internal polls in recent weeks showing close races in many of their targeted districts, with the Democratic nominees clearly ahead in some.

The 18 districts are a familiar battlefield to those following the majority battle. They are all open or GOP-held seats, largely in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston areas, where the incumbent won by less than 10 percentage points in 2018.

Forward Majority has already been a significant player in Texas House races. It made a late push in the 2018 election, injecting $2.2 million into 32 lower-tier contests as Democrats went on to flip 12 seats. Forward Majority was also among the groups that went all in on the January special election for House District 28, which ended in disappointment for Democrats when Republican Gary Gates won by 16 points.

But many state and national Democratic groups were undeterred and still see a ripe opportunity this fall in Texas, especially with poll after poll auguring a tight presidential race at the top of the ticket. The GOP is on alert: The Republican State Leadership Committee has called Texas a “top priority” and promised to spend “several million dollars” to keep the state House red.

Here are the 18 districts that Forward Majority is targeting with its $6.2 million investment:

HD-26 (open): retiring Rep. Rick Miller, R-Sugar Land
HD-28: Gates
HD-29: Rep. Ed Thompson, R-Pearland
HD-54: Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen
HD-64: Rep. Lynn Stucky, R-Denton
HD-66: Rep. Matt Shaheen, R-Plano
HD-67: Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano
HD-92 (open): retiring Rep. Jonathan Stickland, R-Bedford
HD-93: Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth
HD-94: Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington
HD-96 (open): retiring Rep. Bill Zedler, R-Arlington
HD-97: Rep. Craig Goldman, R-Fort Worth
HD-108: Rep. Morgan Meyer, R-Dallas
HD-112: Rep. Angie Chen Button, R-Richardson
HD-121: Rep. Steve Allison, R-San Antonio
HD-126: Rep. Sam Harless, R-Spring
HD-134: Rep. Sarah Davis, R-West University Place
HD-138 (open): retiring Rep. Dwayne Bohac, R-Houston

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Labor Day 2020: The power has shifted

On Labor Day, just eight weeks before one of the most consequential elections in American history, it’s useful to consider the economic reality that fueled Donald Trump’s victory four years ago.

No other developed nation has nearly the inequalities of income and wealth found in the U.S., even though all have been exposed to the same forces of globalization and technological change. The three richest people in America have as much wealth as the bottom half of all Americans combined, even as 30 million Americans reported their households didn’t have enough food.

American capitalism is off the rails.

The main reason is that large corporations, Wall Street banks and a relative handful of exceedingly rich individuals have gained enough political power to game the system.

Chief executives have done everything possible to prevent the wages of most workers rising in tandem with productivity gains, so most gains go instead into the pockets of top executives and major investors.

They’ve outsourced abroad, installed labor-replacing technologies and switched to part-time and contract work. They’ve busted unions, whose membership shrank from 35% of the private-sector workforce 40 years ago to 6.2% today. They’ve defanged antitrust enforcement, allowing their monopolies free rein.

The so-called free market has been taken over by crony capitalism, corporate bailouts and corporate welfare.

This massive power shift laid the groundwork for Trump. In 1964, almost two thirds of Americans believed government was run for the benefit of all the people. By 2013 almost 80%believed government was run by a few big interests.

Much of the political establishment wants to attribute Trump’s rise solely to racism. Racism did play a part, to be sure, but racism’s sordid history in American politics long predates Trump.

What has given Trump’s racism — as well as his hateful xenophobia and misogyny — particular virulence has been his capacity to channel the intensifying anger of the white working class. It is hardly the first time a demagogue has used scapegoats to deflect public attention from the real causes of its distress.

Trump speaks the language of authoritarian populism but acts in the interests of America’s emerging oligarchy. His deal with the moneyed interests was simple: he’d stoke divisiveness so Americans wouldn’t see how the oligarchy has taken over the reins, twisted government to its benefit, and siphoned off the economic rewards.

He’d make Americans so angry at each other that they wouldn’t pay attention to CEOs getting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, won’t notice the giant tax cut that went to big corporations and the wealthy, and won’t be outraged by a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.

This way, the moneyed interests can rig the system while Trump complains that the system is rigged by a “deep state.”

Notwithstanding all this, Trump’s inexcusable failure to contain the coronavirus is having a larger impact on swing voters than the divisiveness he foments. Death has a way of concentrating the mind.

But if Joe Biden is elected, he would be well advised to remember the forces Trump exploited to gain power, and begin the task of remedying them. The solution is not found in mere redistribution of income. It is found in redistributing power.

If wealth continues to concentrate at the top, no one will be able to contain the corrupting influence of big money on the American system and the anger it unleashes. As Justice Louis D Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Pro-Trump Black nonprofit quietly shuttered following sketchy cash giveaways

The Urban Revitalization Coalition (URC), a controversial nonprofit organization run by two of President Trump’s most prominent Black surrogates, appears to have been effectively closed down this spring after reports that its cash giveaways to Black voters may have violated IRS rules governing nonprofits.

The shutdown happened before the IRS automatically revoked the group’s tax status on May 15 for “not filing a Form 990-series return or notice for three consecutive years.” The URC was eventually placed on the IRS “Automatic Revocation List” on Aug. 11, and, according to co-founder Darrell Scott — a Cleveland pastor closely allied to the Trump campaign — was first notified of this by CNN.

But by that time the group’s corporate status had already been suspended as delinquent for five months, beginning in March, for its failure to submit an annual report or pay taxes, business filings show.

Scott, a Trump campaign adviser who has visited the White House and traveled on Air Force One, told CNN in August that URC were unaware that the IRS had pulled their status until the network contacted them.

The URC, which advocated for Trump’s policies to Black audiences and claimed to seek investment opportunities in disadvantaged communities, appears never to have filed a tax return, IRS records show.

The group’s other co-founder, businessman Kareem Lanier, told CNN that the URC did not receive an IRS letter because its offices had been closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and that the status change came to the group’s attention only recently. Lanier told the outlet that the URC would submit the required forms to have the status reinstated in the next few weeks.

“Our offices were closed (& still are) due to the government shutdown/quarantine because of the coronavirus therefore we did not receive the letter they sent us in May until it was brought to our attention a few days back,” Lanier said.

It appears that the group would need to do more than that, however: Its Delaware business registration expired on March 2. The state declared the group delinquent due to failure to file its annual report and failure to pay taxes, and the URC will have its corporate status rendered inactive if it does not make good on those requirements.

Until then, the URC is closed for business in the eyes of the law, and has been for months.

Scott has since ramped up his work with the Trump campaign as the president’s leading Black surrogate and co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, an official arm of the campaign formerly helmed by the late Herman Cain.

Last week Salon published a two-part investigative report on the URC and its secretive activities regarding Turkish business representatives, which experts tell Salon likely amount to violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) — a federal crime.

In 2018, Scott and Lanier appear to have used the URC as a channel for an off-the-books foreign influence campaign, lobbying the White House on U.S. trade policy with Turkey and in the interest of opening domestic markets in economically disadvantaged communities to foreign manufacturing and real estate investment.

As part of the effort, the group solicited what it construed as “donations,” including from foreign nationals, according to multiple sources and communications reviewed by Salon. Those donations would, if received, appear to have effectively functioned as lobbying fees in exchange for access and promotion in the U.S. government, experts say.

Scott and Lanier boasted on social media about introducing a Turkish trade representative named Ali Akat to influential people in the government, which Akat echoed in his own posts and in interviews in Turkish press.

“[We] began our plans to build the Turkish lobby in America. We are striving to create it in the American market with manufacturers, which will go to the new America from Turkey,” Akat said in one interview published in Turkey, following his collaborations with the URC.

The URC operates a largely broken website: It can’t be accessed directly, only through backlinks, and the “donations” button does not work: It lists a fake phone number also tied to a cemetery in suburban Cleveland, and the email address bounces messages back to the sender.

The site does have a page that purportedly allows applicants to become URC “partners.” Interested parties are supposed to submit a form saying how much capital they want to invest in the nonprofit, and must also upload “proof of funds.”

But the site does not provide instructions for filling out the form, and does not clarify what is meant by “proof of funds.”

Brett Kappel, a top national authority on tax and lobbying law, told Salon he had never seen a donor form like this.

“That’s just bizarre. People can contribute securities to charities and avoid capital gains, but it isn’t done this way,” Kappel said. “It screams ‘scam.'”

The URC set itself two tasks: Facilitating investment in Opportunity Zones and getting Trump re-elected. The more legitimate of those two projects was the investment program, given that as a charity the URC was barred from political activity. Ostensibly Opportunity Zones offer tax incentives to businesses that invest in designated communities, in the form of breaks on capital gains taxes, including on real estate.

Scott and Lanier created the URC on July 10, 2017, Delaware records show. According to multiple people familiar with the group’s activities, the URC was created chiefly as a way to monetize another pro-Trump group with which they’d previously been involved, the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, or NDCTrump.

NDCTrump, where Scott and Lanier also serve as officers, was the brainchild of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. He conceived of the group during the 2016 campaign as a way for Trump to appeal to minority voters, who were clearly not a major focus of the president’s campaign.

Cohen and Trump later turned on each other after the former pled guilty to various offenses and testified before Congress. Cohen has repeatedly called the president “racist,” including in detailed passages from his new book, “Disloyal.” NDCTrump members also turned on Cohen — specifically, following the federal raids that seized electronic devices from his offices and residences — as Salon’s earlier reporting details.

NDCTrump was barred from accepting money, but the URC, structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity, could take contributions — including from foreign sources, without having to publicly disclose its donors.

Since the URC has not filed any tax returns, however, the government and the public can’t see how much money the group raised or how that money was spent. The one definite fundraising data point was a $238,000 grant in 2018 from America First Policies, the dark-money affiliate of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action. America First Policies does not have to disclose its donors.

There is also a spending data point. Politico first reported in January that the URC was holding giveaways in underserved communities, where it would raffle off cash prizes allegedly at random. The giveaways raised concern among watchdog groups that the URC was in violation of the terms of its nonprofit status, and Democrats in Ohio asked the state to open a criminal investigation at the end of February.

On Feb. 29 the URC postponed indefinitely a $50,000 cash giveaway it had scheduled in Cleveland, and it slipped into delinquency in Delaware two days after that. The IRS revoked the group’s charity status two months later.

Fox hosts attack network’s own reporting confirming Trump’s troop insults

After Fox News confirmed key parts of a bombshell exposé in which advisers close to President Donald Trump revealed to The Atlantic that he had called U.S. military heroes killed in combat “losers” and “suckers,” hosts Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham on Tuesday attacked the reporting of their own corporation.

Dobbs, of Fox Business, and Ingraham, of Fox News, assailed the “phony” report, with Dobbs calling it a “coordinated attack,” “media hit job” and “smear,” and both falsely claiming that it had been “debunked,” even though Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin — citing two anonymous former senior administration officials — also independently confirmed a number of the story’s pillars.

Trump later called for Fox News to fire Griffin, tweeting out a Breitbart article indicating that she had not confirmed the “most salacious” part of The Atlantic report.

“All refuted by many witnesses. Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting. Never even called us for comment. @FoxNews is gone!” the president wrote.

Jennifer Griffin of Fox News Did Not Confirm ‘Most Salacious‘ Part of Atlantic Story https://t.co/rUpbSWhHac via @BreitbartNews All refuted by many witnesses. Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting. Never even called us for comment. @FoxNews is gone!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2020

“Perhaps more intriguing than the phony details of the story is the level of coordination displayed among the left-wing national media, big tech, Republican RINOs, radical dems and the Biden campaign,” Dobbs claimed as he dubbed the reports a “media hit job.”

The Fox Business host went on to claim that the story “falls apart under the most elemental fact-checks and is easily refuted by documented evidence and with more than a dozen public sources in the administration” before he criticized Facebook and Twitter for not applying a fact-check label to the report.

Dobbs then called out his own corporation for joining the plenary outlets who also independently confirmed major claims in The Atlantic report.

“The Associated Press claims to have corroborated the story in its entirety, but then didn’t have any evidence to corroborate — not a single, single named source. And the Washington Post, CNN, even Fox News claimed to have corroborated parts of the report despite every news organization having not a single named source nor any evidence whatsoever,” Dobbs said. “What those unnamed sources did claim doesn’t stand up against the 21 Trump administration officials who are now on the record refuting The Atlantic’s horrible, horrible lies.”

Some on-air Fox News personalities initially pushed back against The Atlantic for leaning entirely on anonymous sources. John Roberts, the network’s chief White House correspondent, cast doubt on some of the claims by citing his own anonymous sources in a mixed report co-written with Griffin.

After Trump called for Griffin’s firing, multiple journalists on the corporation’s “news” side came to her side, while hosts on the “opinion” side, such as Dobbs and Ingraham continued to bash the story. Without offering evidence, Dobbs went so far as to allege that the accusations were a “lie” to support the Biden campaign.

“By pushing the lie that President Trump said something disparaging of our military, the left-wing national media has given the Biden campaign a chance to gloss over the fact that Biden enthusiastically supported the Iraq War — something President Trump outright opposed and that most Americans now see as a terrible mistake,” Dobbs said, falsely characterizing Trump’s position on Iraq, for which he at one point expressed support.

Later that night, Ingraham echoed his analysis as she also falsely claimed that the story had been “debunked.”

“But this is why Biden has sought to capitalize on the now-debunked Atlantic magazine smear against the president despite the fact that the most incendiary claims in that piece have been disavowed by at least 21 current or former administration sources — on the record, by the way,” she said.

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at the Atlantic as well as the initial reporter on the story, laid out to MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Monday a number of reasons officials may seek to keep their names off of incendiary reports about Trump.

“I share that view that it’s not good enough. But, you know, like other reporters, I’m always balancing out the moral ambiguities and complications after anonymous sourcing with the public’s right to know,” Goldberg said.

“On the other hand, you are talking about a president who is unlike anything they have ever experienced,” he added. “I think there is also fear. I think — and we see this across the board in Donald Trump’s Washington — there is a fear on a kind of a superficial level of a Twitter mob. There is also real fear of personal safety, fear for your family, fear for what you put everybody around you through if you started talking about this sort of thing.”

Goldberg said that it was “reasonable” for readers to wonder about the strength of anonymous sourcing. At the same time, he seemed to issue a challenge to those sources.

It is understandable to “ask why people who have had direct exposure to Donald Trump, who know what Donald Trump has said, who know what Donald Trump has done, but won’t simply come out and say it,” he said.

While no officials have gone on the record to confirm the report, some of those who have put their names behind denials have either only come forward as character witnesses with no direct knowledge, or — such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders — have phrased those denials carefully and narrowly.

Asked on The View about Trump’s alleged remarks to former chief of staff John Kelly — whom Trump reportedly told, standing over the grave of Kelly’s son in Arlington National Cemetery, that he did not understand “what’s in it for them” — Sanders only said that she was not nearby.

“I was not standing next to the president for that, no,” Trump’s former press secretary said. (She also dodged a question on the alleged denigrating comments about the late John McCain from the former senator’s daughter, Meghan.)

Like Sanders, who praised what she characterized as Trump’s “respect and admiration” for the troops, Dobbs, who has been called an outside adviser to the president, went on to flip the script.

“President Trump’s actions and demonstration of respect for the military speak for themselves,” he said. “Shame on the left. Shame on the radical Dems. And shame on the fake news and fake journalists who manufacture it.”

The US is experiencing a “K-shaped” economic recovery. Here’s what that means

During a Sunday appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Symone Sanders, a senior campaign adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, lamented how recent economic gains were distributed unequally. “It is going well for folks at the top, but for folks who are middle class or below, it’s going down,” Sanders told host Bret Baier. “The question really is, is this [economy] working for working families, and the answer is no.”

The economic pickle Sanders described is sometimes called a “K-shaped” recovery — meaning one in which the wealthy benefit from the recovery while everyone else continues to suffer. Regardless of one’s feelings about the Biden campaign, Sanders’ analysis is echoed by economists — who say that the nascent K-shaped recovery has troubling implications for the future of America’s economy.

“I do think the USA is seeing a K-shaped recovery,” Dr. Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist at American University, told Salon by email. “The working class has to continue working, and the government transfers and additional unemployment insurance payments are falling. They must work outside the home, exposing themselves to the virus, and with schools opening they must find childcare. Richer groups have seen their stock portfolios rise and they are working from home, doing okay.”

Indeed, as CNBC recently reported, the wealthiest Americans are prospering as the stock market rallies but millions of Americans face the prospect of long-term unemployment. If the current trends continue, it is entirely possible that Wall Street banks and large retail outlet chains will flourish while small business owners, restaurants and service profession workers suffer. Likewise, billionaires have seen tremendous gains during the pandemic: SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk saw his net worth rise to $82.3 billion, a 27.5 billion rise since the beginning of 2020. Jeff Bezos’ fortune rose $71.1 billion, and he is now worth $186 billion; he started the year at $115 billion.

In other words, the recession is over for the richest among us — or, in some cases, they never experienced a recession at all.

Dr. Karl Widerquist, an American political philosopher and economist at Georgetown University in their Qatar campus, echoed Mathy’s perspective.

“Although employment has come back unusually fast, it has not come back nearly as fast as the stock market, which has completely recovered, and the real estate market, which doesn’t even seem to have slowed down,” Widerquist wrote to Salon. “People used to tell a joke: ‘The stock market has predicted nine of the past five recessions’ (usually attributed to Paul Samuelson). They won’t be telling that joke again any time soon. This rise in asset prices is coming as poverty is unusually high, food insecurity is rising, and perhaps in most stark contrast to rising real estate prices, a very large number of Americans are unable to pay their rent or their mortgages.”

Dr. Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote to Salon that the K-shaped recovery shouldn’t come as a surprise. If anything, America’s economic system was designed decades ago to guarantee unequal wealth redistribution.

“The whole system is set up to achieve this end, which is why the last 40 years have seen widening gap of rich and poor,” Wolff explained. “The rich and corporations use their wealth to shape politics, so it does not undo the results of an economy geared to inequality. In a political world of universal suffrage where capitalism pits an employer minority against an employee majority, such political corruption by money follows.”

Wolff noted that sometimes the poor and working classes revolt and force systemic changes that temporarily reduce income inequality — the most prominent instance being during Roosevelt’s presidency in the 1930s, which is no doubt why Biden is promising to emulate that administration — but Wolff pointed out that “once the crisis is past, the resumption of ‘normal capitalism’ likewise resumes the deepening of economic inequalities.”

Economists say if America wishes to halt the unequal recovery and create an economy that benefits all Americans, drastic reforms are needed — starting with a continuation of the temporary stimuli implemented in the immediate aftermath of the economic shutdown, but which have subsequently been allowed to expire.

“I think continuation of unemployment insurance benefits at the 600 dollar level is essential,” Dr. Mouhcine Guettabi, an associate professor of economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage, wrote to Salon. “This should be accompanied with aid to states and local governments so that we don’t see a second wave of layoffs due to budgetary pressures. Additionally, there should be extensions on the eviction moratoriums to ensure that the jobs crisis does not turn into a housing/homelessness crisis.”

Mathy expressed a similar thought to Salon, writing that “reauthorizing the pandemic assistance is important, and having additional transfers to households would help too. The CARES Act should have never expired, and additional help should be focused on struggling small businesses and poorer households.”

Widerquist told Salon that wealth redistribution on a large scale will also be necessary.

“The solution to increasing economic inequality is simple: taxation and redistribution,” Widerquist explained. “We need taxes on people who own assets — on the people who own all the things we make out of our land and natural resources — to support redistribution to everyone. With that in place, we all pay for resources we use and we all get paid for the resources everyone else owns or uses. As it is now, the people who own stuff get paid almost no matter what happens.”

One major obstacle to doing this, Widerquist observed, is that the current economy is “increasingly controlled by super-dominant corporations.” As one example, he drew attention to how almost all social media platforms depend on content provided by its users, even though those same people rarely have any ownership over what they produce.

“It might be necessary to transform them into users’ cooperatives, or into partnerships between users and the administration,” Widerquist argued. “Similarly online sales, streaming, and download services like Amazon, Netflix, Audible, Spotify, and Hulu should perhaps be partnerships between four stakeholders: users, content creates, the administration, and the workers. This may become essential to overcoming an enormous power imbalance developing in America.”

Wolff offered a different possibility when speaking to Salon — namely, that alternatives like worker cooperatives (where workers own a business and reap rewards for its financial success based on the extent of their contributions) should be considered, and that the types of reforms implemented by Roosevelt in the 1930s are not enough.

“Without basic system change, policies of reform either fail or else achieve victories,” Wolff explained, citing the New Deal as an example of something that worked well to reduce inequality but was slowly undone over the next half-century. Wolff advocated for a “basic system change” — specifically, “transition to a worker-coop based economic system whose democratic decision-making in each enterprise would never distribute income as unequally as capitalism normally does. That would the obviate the need for socially divisive redistributions.”

Trump’s opponent, Biden, is not advocating for such a systemic change, but rather a modest Keynesian stimulus akin to a smaller version of the New Deal. Specifically, Biden has advocated for stimulus legislation “a hell of a lot bigger” than the $2 trillion Congress initially spent in response to the recession, investing in a Pandemic Testing Board, creating a 100,000-plus worker Public Health Jobs Corps, passing new regulations on banks and the financial sector, requiring businesses to provide paid emergency sick leave, increasing Social Security checks by up to $200 a month and likewise increasing the size of the relief checks sent to families.

Yet politicians rarely follow through on all their promises, whether due to congressional pushback or a lack of political will. In any case, as America’s K-shaped recovery shows no signs of slowing, the gulf between rich and poor will continue to widen. The only question is how long Americans will stomach it.

Why west coast wildfires are turning the skies red

OAKLAND, CALIF. — Residents in the San Francisco Bay Area woke up disoriented this morning; literally and metaphorically cloaked in a reddish haze. In some parts of the region, ash rained from the sky. The street lights stayed on past noon in some neighborhoods because it was so dark outside. Farmers reported that their chickens were confused if it was day or night.

The Bay Area has seen smoke waves before, but nothing as eerie and apocalyptic as today. After six months of a pandemic and weeks of record-breaking heat waves and wildfires, it’s no surprise that Californians turned to dark humor to cope.

Some Twitter users posted dismal shots of the sepia sky with variations on this caption: “Greetings from hell.”

Greetings from the hellscape formerly known as Lower Pacific Heights. pic.twitter.com/6VQtKl5mKE

— jjinsf (@jjinsf) September 9, 2020

Videos and photos from Oregon, where wildfires are raging, show similar hellscapes.

This is nuts. Downtown Stayton at 12:22pm. Be safe, everyone. #KGW #Oregon #Fire #Smoke #LionsheadFire @KGWNews pic.twitter.com/ff4MKKU4qm

— Christine Pitawanich (@CPitawanichKGW) September 8, 2020

Those who live in wildfire-prone regions may be familiar with how smoke can blot out the sky, or tint sunlight slightly orange. But the severe blood-red skies are a new sight for many, and those around the country watching from afar may be taken aback at such an alien scene.

So, what exactly is going on? The answer lies in the physics of the atmosphere.

“The mysterious glowing red skies often accompany nearby wildfires, as small particulates from the burning affect the way that light travels through the atmosphere,” Paul Ullrich, an associate professor of regional and global climate modeling at University of California-Davis, told Salon.

The light that enters the atmosphere is “scattered” by the gases and particles in the atmosphere, Ullrich said.

“Namely, when light passes near a gas molecule it tends to bounce in a random direction giving the whole sky an ambient glow,” Ullrich said. “The shorter wavelength of blue light is preferentially scattered by the gases that make up the atmosphere; smoke particulates are much larger than the gas molecules that make up the air, and so interact differently with light.”

Ullrich added: “They tend to absorb blue light and scatter red light, leading to the sky taking on a reddish glow when they’re in the atmosphere.”

Interestingly, the air quality in the Bay Area at the moment isn’t as bad as it looks. In fact, the air quality index (AQI) has been at mostly moderate levels. However, the sky tells a different story, and the red sky phenomenon is strange enough that even the Bay Area’s branch of the National Weather Service said that this goes “beyond the scope” of their models for predicting air quality or smoke haze movements.

So why is there a discrepancy between what’s happening in the sky and on the surface?

“That is because high winds and turbulence are keeping the smoke high up in the atmosphere, above 2500 feet altitude,” Ullrich said. “So while it can affect incoming light, there isn’t as much smoke on the near surface.”

Adele Igel, an assistant professor who teaches an atmospheric radiation class at the University of California-Davis, told Salon technically what the Bay Area is experiencing is a “kind of haze.” Specifically, Igel says, the smoke is coming from California’s wildfires as the smoke from the Oregon wildfires is blowing out toward the coast.

“Fire of course produces smoke but also a lot of heat,” Igel told Salon. “The hot smoky air rises from the surface fairly easily; how high it goes depends on a lot of factors.”

The smoke today seems to have been able to rise higher than on recent days. A pilot tweeted that flying out of San Francisco international airport today at 6,000-11,000 feet, there was “a very thick layer of ash.”

“It was uncomfortable to breath [sic], like being very close to a fire,” the pilot tweeted.

Igel says with as much smoke as there is in California, a red sky is normal. “Is so much smoke normal?” Igels said. “That’s hard for me to say.”

As far as how the sky might “clear up,” Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University told Salon via email that could happen a “couple different ways.”

“Either the wind changes direction (a strong onshore wind would clear things out for San Francisco) or the fires inland that are creating the smoke subside,” Mann said. Mann added that the photos he’s seen of the Bay Area remind him of what he saw in Sydney, Australia, which was gripped by wildfires in December during the Australian summer.

Several California leaders have used the wildfires to draw the link to climate change. As Salon has previously reported, California’s wildfires are becoming more extreme for a couple of different reasons; climate change is one.

“Climate change is making conditions hotter and drier in places like Australia and California,” Mann said. “That creates the conditions for epic wildfires; our own research suggests an additional factor—climate change is making the jet stream both slower and waiver, so big high pressure systems (associated with hot, dry conditions) are more likely to stay parked over a particular region, like California, for an extended period of time.”

“Homicidal negligence”: Trump admits on tape that he hid “deadly” threat of coronavirus from public

President Donald Trump privately acknowledged the “deadly” threat posed by the new coronavirus even as he downplayed the dangers of the pandemic to the American public in a series of interviews recorded earlier this year with the veteran journalist Bob Woodward.

Trump made the remarks across a series of 18 taped interviews with Woodward, whose reporting on the Watergate scandal hastened the resignation of former President Richard Nixon. Woodward interviewed Trump for “Rage,” his second book on the current sitting president, which is set to be published on Sept. 15.

In a recording of a Feb. 7 interview obtained by CNN, Trump acknowledged he knew that the coronavirus was airborne, highly contagious and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

“This is more deadly. This is 5 per— you know, this is 5% versus 1% and less than 1%. You know? So this is deadly stuff,” the president, who also called those facts “pretty amazing,” said on the recordings.

That interview took place 19 days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first case of community spread in the U.S. Nearly 200,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19.

Between Feb. 10 and March 2, Trump held five campaign rallies, each drawing thousands of people together. At a Feb. 28 rally, Trump put COVID-19 on par with the flu, telling supporters that warnings to the contrary were a Democratic “hoax.”

“This is their new hoax,” Trump said, adding that Democratic criticism of the administration’s response to the disease was the party’s “single talking point.”

“Thirty-five thousand on average each year die from the flu. That’s a lot of people,” the president said. “So far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus,” he added as he blamed the increasingly urgent alarms around the world on the media being in a “hysteria mode.”

COVID-19 has now proved more than five times as deadly as that average number.

In a March 19 tape, two days after Trump and White House task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx told reporters that they had been evaluating models which projected as many as 2.2 million deaths, the president told Woodward that he was intentionally playing down the gravity of the situation.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump, who had just declared a national emergency, said. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany falsely claimed to reporters Wednesday that “the president never downplayed the virus,” even though Trump’s own words were recorded.

After reports of the tapes first broke, a source close to the Trump campaign told CNN that many staffers were shocked by the president’s comments about the early warning signs of the pandemic, the outlet reported. Trump concealed that information from his own team, the source source claimed.

McEnany was a campaign official at the time of the remarks.

Carl Bernstein, Woodward’s partner in breakthrough reporting on the Nixon administration, told CNN that he considered Trump’s behavior to be “homicidal negligence.”

“We listen to him cover up this grave national emergency,” Bernstein said. “This is one of the great presidential felonies of all time — maybe the greatest presidential felony, and we have the smoking gun tape of the president committing the felony.”

“This is a kind of homicidal negligence,” he added. “Thousands and thousands and thousands of people have lost their lives because the president put his own re-election interest.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top federal infectious disease expert, is quoted in Woodward’s book as telling associates that Trump was a “rudderless” leader whose “attention span is like a minus number.”

“His sole purpose is to get reelected,” Fauci said, according to the book.

In response to the reports that Trump “willingly lied,” Democratic opponent Joe Biden said Wednesday that the president’s handling of the pandemic was “a life-and-death betrayal of the American people.”

“He had the information,” Biden said. “He knew how dangerous it was, and while this deadly disease ripped through our nation, he failed to do his job on purpose.”

Lamorne Morris shines in “Woke,” which pokes at one man’s dawning realization of systemic racism

Hulu’s “Woke” introduces Keef Knight (played by Lamorne Morris) on the verge of his launch to fame. His comic strip, heretofore a cult favorite that has only run in a few newspapers, is about to be nationally syndicated. He’s scored a panel at a local fan convention. By all accounts he’s on top of the world as he’s stapling up a flyer to publicize his moment in the sun, which is precisely when he’s surrounded by cops with guns drawn. One of them tackles him, pinning him to the sidewalk and yanking his wrists behind his back.

By now this part of the story should be familiar, because some version of it happens to Black folks all the time. The cops eventually realize they have the wrong guy and withdraw with nary an apology. Keef stands up and tries to walk it off – impossible. He heads to a local convenience store to buy a bottle of water . . . and that’s when inanimate objects start talking to him.

Relatively underrepresented in the wider culture’s developing conversations concerning systemic racism are series that effectively place the audience in the headspace of the Keefs of the world, a man who has bought into the dream of the world as it should be. Keef lives in San Francisco, a liberal mecca and a haven for the artistic.

He’s also the kind of Black guy that white collar, college-educated white people think they know: that dude who has attained enough success and visibility to circulate in their social settings, who exudes enough affability for them to drop their shoulders a little around him and say thoughtless comments in stride. Because he knows what they’re getting at, right? He’s, you know, OK by them.

There’s a lot about “Woke” that works because of the people in it, and the man who makes it, and not entirely due its execution, which begins a lot of conversations but doesn’t pause or conclude them in ways that give the premise of the series its meaning.

The title itself is both provocative and ironic, particularly given that the series is inspired by the work of its co-creator Keith Knight, the artist behind “The Knight Life” and “The K Chronicles,” the latter being the original home of his recurring series “Life’s Little Victories” (and published weekly on this site until 2010). “The K Chronicles” in particular is the sort of strip tailored to tease out smiles or relate to the geeks in the audience; it’s the kind of work that makes the outsider feel understood.

While Knight never shied away from delving into police brutality in his comics, Keef rises to success by committing to “keeping it light,” as he puts it. (Even the title and subject of his work is the very definition of milquetoast.) The hard reality of being a Black man in a large American city crashes that outlook to the pavement and as one of the talking objects around him puts it, blasts open his third eye. Now he can’t help but see the injustice around him and all the ways large and small that he willingly participates in its proliferation.

The very title of “Woke” is both a provocation and something of a punchline. People either claim it or hate it, and in some circles it’s used pejoratively as an unseen metric of Blackness. The fact that the series goes there at all speaks to its willingness to spark conversation among those watching it.

Helpfully Morris infuses Keef with the same easy energy that served him so well in “New Girl,” only here his addition of plausible, slow-simmering anger and confusion grants his portrayal the proper amount of weight as Keef struggles to keep it light . . . enough. My surest takeaway from “Woke” is that it proves Morris deserves to carry more series than he has until now. (He proved that long before this, in fact, with his electric, furiously upbeat performance in NatGeo’s event series “Valley of the Boom.”) As Keef’s roommates Clovis and Gunther T. Murphy and Blake Anderson frame Morris’ performance in being the standard issue likable, go-along-to-get-along schlubs, alternately encouraging Keef’s version of budding militancy and reeling him in.

Maurice Marable’s direction beautifully captures San Francisco as Keef sees it, both as a colorful idyll and at times, as claustrophobic, sweaty and blithely clueless. Keef’s struggles to contend with the new surreality of his existence play well against the bright murals and urban glamour; further helping is the fact that some of the funniest comedy forces voice those objects, including JB Smoove as Keef’s righteous pen, Nicole Byer as a 40-oz. bottle of malt liquor, and Cedric the Entertainer as a ticked-off trashcan.

Where “Woke” falls short is in showrunner Jay Dyer inadequately developing the ideas that constitute the titular concept. “Woke” is at its best when it poses questions about artistic integrity and whether Black artists, or creatives who identify as a member of any marginalized population, are obligated to inject social message or commentary into their art. There comes a point in the season when Keef simply can’t underplay the traumatic impact of local law enforcement’s assault on his consciousness, and that’s where the show unbuttons its shirt to reveal the metaphorical “S” on its chest . . . but that happens in the seventh episode out of the eight-episode season.

Prior to this, Keef finds himself grappling with all of the irritants Black folks in white cities, particularly liberal ones, deal with on a regular basis – the smiling face of gentrification, the chilling nature of the gig economy, the quiet demands among his own people to be “woke” without truly getting any definition of what that is. Sasheer Zamata plays an interesting part in that respect as a journalist at a local alternatively weekly, eventually becoming the third Jiminy Cricket along with Clovis and Gunther.

Less explored, but dropped into this season nevertheless, is Keef’s sudden rebound relationship with a white woman (played by Rose McIver) after breaking things off with his long-term Black girlfriend, and with little to no exploration of how that choice comes into play when it comes to the character’s wokeness.

Perhaps the intent is for these definitions to be firmed up in the second season that “Woke” is angling for in the last scene of the finale. At the same time, how frustrating it is that the writers didn’t take the opportunities presented by the episodes in front of them to effectively tease out these conversation pieces. Of course, as “Woke” announces at its start, Keef’s story is merely “inspired by one experience [and] shared by many.” That’s exactly what makes it so relatable . . . and what leaves me wishing the creative forces behind it spent more time digging into the essential confusion and discomfort behind those questions. Instead, we get a brisk comedy that’s alive with solid performances but stays too light in its opening season to make a truly indelible mark.

All eight episodes of “Woke” are currently streaming on Hulu.

“Dune” trailer: Denis Villeneuve dazzles with Timothée Chalamet, sandworms, and more

The first trailer for Denis Villeneuve‘s highly anticipated “Dune” has arrived and it’s full of eye-popping set design, breathtaking action, and one jaw-dropping last-minute look at Frank Herbert’s infamous sandworms. Villeneuve has been wanting to make a film adaptation of Hebert’s science-fiction novel since he was a teenager, and Warner Bros. and Legendary have allowed him to do so on a grand cinematic canvas. The first footage below feels like what might happen if David Lean got the chance to make a science-fiction epic.

“Dune” stars Timothée Chalamet in his first leading blockbuster role as Paul Atreides, whose family gets ownership of the dangerous desert planet Arrakis. The planet is the home of the world’s most valuable resource, a drug called spice that extends human life and gives its users super-human abilities. By taking ownership of Arrakis, the Atreides family becomes an enemy of the rival Harkonnen empire and the planet’s natives, known as the Fremen. The supporting cast includes Oscar Isaac, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Momoa, Charlotte Rampling, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, and Javier Bardem, among others.

For Villeneuve, “Dune” marks his latest foray into the science-fiction genre after modern classics like “Arrival” and “Blade Runner 2049.” Both of these projects earned critical raves and Oscar nominations, with “Blade Runner 2049″ winning the prizes for Best Visual Effects and Best Cinematography.” Villeneuve was nominated for Best Director with “Arrival.”

While “Dune” is similar to “Blade Runner 2049” in that it finds Villeneuve tackling one of the most beloved science-fiction properties of all time, the films could not look more different. Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner” was defined by Roger Deakins’ eye-popping, neon-infused color palette that made the Hollywood tentpole feel more like an art film than a traditional studio release. “Dune” appears far more grounded thanks to Villeneuve’s first-time collaboration with “Lion” Oscar-nominated cinematographer Greig Fraser. The two have brought a tangibility to Frank Herbert’s world that should make “Dune” a visceral experience for moviegoers.

As for how Villeneuve’s “Dune” will compare to David Lynch’s “Dune,” an infamous critical and commercial misfire in 1984, the trailer alone makes it clear how different Villeneuve’s vision is from Lynch’s. The director said as much earlier this month when he explained, “I’m a big David Lynch fan, he’s the master. When I saw [Lynch]’s ‘Dune’ I remember being excited, but his take… there are parts that I love and other elements that I am less comfortable with. So it’s like, I remember being half-satisfied. That’s why I was thinking to myself, ‘There’s still a movie that needs to be made about that book, just a different sensibility.'”

Watch the first trailer for “Dune” below. Warner Bros. and Legendary are set to open the film in theaters nationwide Dec. 18.

Daisy Ridley confirms Rey was almost a Kenobi, then her parentage got retconned

Of all the mysteries strung through the most recent “Star Wars” trilogy, none caused as much fervor as Rey’s parentage. “The Force Awakens” never revealed the identity of Rey’s parents, which ignited fan theories about whether or not the character could be a Skywalker, a Kenobi, or another offspring of a famous “Star Wars” character. “The Last Jedi” threw those theories out the window by revealing Rey’s parents were nobodies, only for “The Rise of Skywalker” to confirm Rey is actually Palpatine’s granddaughter. Was Rey Palpatine the plan since the beginning? Daisy Ridley says not at all.

During an interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” with her friend and “Murder on the Orient Express” co-star Josh Gad, Ridley walked viewers through the history of changes that were made to Rey’s parentage throughout the production of her “Star Wars” trilogy. It turns out the earliest iteration of Rey had her being the offspring of Obi-Wan Kenobi, which was one of the more popular fan theories floating around after the release of “The Force Awakens.”

“No. At the beginning there was toying with like an Obi-Wan connection,” Ridley said when asked if she had known Rey’s origins were in the Palpatine family. “There were like different versions, and then it really went to that she was no one. Then it came to Episode IX and J.J. pitched me the film and was like, ‘Oh yeah, Palpatine’s grandaughter.” I was like, ‘Awesome!’ Then two weeks later he was like, ‘Oh, we’re not sure.’ So it kept changing. Even as we were filming I wasn’t sure what the answer was going to be.”

From the way Ridley tells it, the decision to make Rey a Palpatine wasn’t finalized until the middle of filming “The Rise of Skywalker.” “The Last Jedi” writer-director Rian Johnson earned backlash from fans for making Rey’s parents nobodies after “The Force Awakens” implied her parents could be important to the “Star Wars” mythology. Turning Rey into a Palpatine was viewed by many as J.J. Abrams retconning Johnson’s controversial decision, which Ridley’s answer here seems to validate.

With the “Star Wars” franchise now behind her, Ridley next moves on to Doug Liman’s action film “Chaos Walking” opposite Tom Holland. Watch the actress’ full interview with Gad on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in the video below.

Kevin Spacey sued for alleged sexual assault on 14-year-old boys in 1980s

Two men sued actor Kevin Spacey on Wednesday, alleging that he committed sexual battery against them when they were 14 years old in the 1980s.

One of the plaintiffs is Anthony Rapp, the actor who was the first to come forward with allegations against Spacey in October 2017.

Rapp alleges that Spacey invited him to a party at Spacey’s apartment in 1986. While there, Rapp alleges that Spacey grabbed his buttocks, led him onto a bed, and laid on top of him. Rapp states that he was able to flee to a bathroom, and later got out the apartment.

The second plaintiff is identified only as C.D. The complaint alleges that Spacey met C.D. in 1981, as a student in Spacey’s acting class. C.D. was 12 years old at the time.

According to the complaint, Spacey met C.D. again when the latter was 14, and Spacey invited the boy to his apartment. There, C.D. alleges that he performed anal sex on Spacey and oral sex.

The two engaged in sex acts on several other occasions, according to the suit. On their final encounter, according to the complaint, Spacey attempted to perform anal sex on the boy. The boy said “No” several times, and was ultimately able to free himself and flee the apartment, according to the suit.

The suit claims that both accusers have suffered psychological damage because of Spacey’s abuse.

Spacey has faced criminal and civil cases in Nantucket, Mass., and Los Angeles, though he has not been held liable in any proceedings thus far. The Nantucket case was dropped after the accuser invoked the Fifth Amendment right not to testify in pre-trial proceedings. The Los Angeles case — in which he was accused of sexually assaulting a massage therapist — was dismissed after the accuser died of natural causes.

Spacey has also faced multiple investigations in London.

Four stunning revelations Bob Woodward reveals about Donald Trump in his devastating new book “Rage”

Veteran journalist Bob Woodward conducted a series of interviews with President Donald Trump for his new book, “Rage,” which is due out on Sep. 15 — but the details are already coming out.

Between December 2019 and July 2020, Woodward conducted 18 on-the-record interviews with the president — and “Rage” is based in part on those interviews. And the revelations are nothing short of explosive.

Here are four of the most stunning details:

1. Trump rages about the generals

Woodward quotes Woodward as saying, “My fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”

2. Mattis and Coats recognized Trump’s unfitness

“Rage,” according to Washington Post reporters Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, contains “brutal assessments of Trump’s conduct from Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others:

Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation’s fate under Trump’s command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

3. He knowingly misled about COVID-19

Another damning thing in Woodward’s book, the Post and CNN are reporting, is that Trump acknowledged that the coronavirus was “deadly” even when he was still claiming that it didn’t pose a major threat to the United States.

During a February 7 interview, according to CNN, Trump told Woodward, “This is deadly stuff.” Trump told Woodward it was “pretty amazing” how deadly COVID-19 was and acknowledged that it was perhaps five times “more deadly” than the flu.

“You just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump told Woodward that day. “And so, that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

At that point, coronavirus was spreading rapidly in Mainland China. But Trump was still insisting that it wouldn’t imperil the United States. The COVID-19 death count, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has since killed more than 189,900 people in the U.S. and over 898,700 people worldwide (as of Sept. 9).

Trump has said that back in January and February, he had no way of knowing how deadly COVID-19 could become in the U.S. But Robert Costa and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post report that on January 28 — according to Woodward’s book — National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien warned Trump, “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency. This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger agreed with O’Brien that day, telling Trump that based on what he was hearing from contacts in China, COVID-19 was shaping up to be the worst health crisis since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/1919 — which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

In March, after the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic, Trump began to publicly acknowledge how dangerous it was. And during a March 19 conversation, according to Costa and Rucker, Trump admitted to Woodward that he had deliberately downplayed the danger.

“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic,” Trump told the journalist/author — who is famous for his Washington Post reporting, with Carl Bernstein, on the Watergate scandal back in the 1970s.

4. Fauci reportedly lambasted the president in private

According to “Rage,” expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci — who has been part of Trump’s coronavirus task force — expressed frustration over Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis, describing Trump’s leadership as “rudderless” and complaining to others that his “attention span is like a minus number.” Fauci, Woodward says in the book, told an associate, “His sole purpose is to get reelected.”

“There are tapes”: Kayleigh McEnany criticized for claiming that Trump “never downplayed the virus”

On Wednesday, more details emerged about veteran/author Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” which is based in part on a series of interviews with President Donald Trump from December 2019-July 2020 and is due out on September 15 — and one of the most damning revelations is that Trump, in February, acknowledged to Woodward how deadly COVID-19 was even when he was publicly claiming that it didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. On February 7, according to the book, Trump told Woodward, “This is deadly stuff.” And during a March 19 conversation, Trump told Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Regardless, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany is defending Trump vigorously and insisting that he “never downplayed the virus.” And an abundance of Twitter users are reminding her that in fact, Trump did exactly that.

Democratic consultant Tim Hogan posted actual recordings of Trump that contradicted McEnany’s claim:

An 8 second lesson in why you can’t lie when it’s on tape. pic.twitter.com/DWQigbBrZf

— Tim Hogan (@timjhogan) September 9, 2020

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins weighed in as well:

"The president has always been clear-eyed with the American people," Kayleigh McEnany says, after audio was published of the president privately acknowledging how deadly coronavirus was while he was publicly downplaying it. "No one is lying to the American people."

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 9, 2020

Here are some of the many other tweets responding to McEnany’s ludicrous defense of the president:

We’ve come a long way from @PressSec @kayleighmcenany saying she’d never lie

— Josh Schwerin (@JoshSchwerin) September 9, 2020

If someone lies about someone else's lies, do the lies negate themselves and become true?

🤯 https://t.co/E56eZiLclJ

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) September 9, 2020

You CAN'T LIE your way out of this ONE @PressSec

We CAN HEAR @realDonaldTrump with our OWN EARS@realDonaldTrump Should STEP DOWN TODAY.

He is UNFIT for the Office he Holds.

RESIGN.

— The Resistor Sister®️♥️🇺🇸 (@the_resistor) September 9, 2020

I do not know why the press does not stand up now and walk out en masse.

— The Dose of Reality (@TheDoseTweets) September 9, 2020

Her job is literally to lie to the American public and tell us the lies are not lies

— Dorit Murciano (@doritnyc) September 9, 2020

I get what the job is, but @PressSec is simply lying. At some point you have to examine your personal moral compass.

— Gary Bonfante 🇺🇦 (@garybonfante) September 9, 2020

Who else hates Kayleigh McEnany?

— Chip Franklin.com (@chipfranklin) September 9, 2020

“I will never lie to you. You have my word on that.”— KayLie McLiar, proven professional liar.@PressSec is paid $180,000/year on the US taxpayers dime to spread blatant propaganda, debunked conspiracy theories, and bald faced lies by Tr卐mp.#TrumpKnew https://t.co/3Z9ibPhYQz

— Trinity 🌊 (@TrinityResists) September 9, 2020

“Hard to stomach”: “Buoyancy” director on the horrors of enslaved labor in the Thai fishing industry

At the end of “Buoyancy,” writer/director Rodd Rathjen’s astonishing feature film debut, there is a staggering statistic: “An estimated 200,000 men and boys are thought to be in slavery and forced labor in the fishing industry in South East Asia. It is an industry worth over $6 billion that supplies fish products to the world.”

Rathjen’s film puts a face on one of those boys. Chakra (Sarm Heng) is a 14-year-old Cambodian who is tired of working for his family of rice farmers. He learns of an opportunity to work in a factory in Thailand and that he can repay the broker with a month’s work.

Of course, this too-good-to-be-true situation is, and Chakra soon finds himself trapped on a fishing trawler doing backbreaking work for a sadistic captain Rom Ran (Thanawut Kasro). “Buoyancy” captures this grim existence — sparse meals, sleeping in a cramped space, and fearing punishment at every turn.

Rathjen shoots his film with minimal dialogue and in intense close-ups to give viewers the uncomfortable feeling of being on board the trawler. One can smell the stink of the fish and feel the unrelenting sun. When additional crew members come onboard (to replace the men who were murdered) jealousies and rivalries prompt Chakra to fight to survive this enslavement and escape — if that is even possible.

The filmmaker did considerable research into this world, interviewing more than 50 survivors over 2-3 years. He cast his film with non-professional actors, including men who survived such enslavement for verisimilitude. Rathjen recently spoke with Salon via Zoom about “Buoyancy.”

What were the risks in telling this story?

A lot of risks. As an Australian, this isn’t my cultural background. We wanted to make a really authentic piece. It started with research and talking to the survivors exposed to this world. The actor who played the Captain worked on a trawler from age 11-13. We tried to make it as informed and authentic as possible. I [feared] being someone coming from the outside making this. The stories from survivors and the world they told me about — if you made a film about their experiences, it would not be watchable. It would be so horrific, and hard to stomach.

The film creates a very “you are there” feeling, from the work and the exhaustion to the relentless fear. Can you talk about how you created the environment on the trawler? I was impressed by the details of the work as well as the conditions that were shown.

We wanted that kind of immense and intense experience of being on the trawler and taking time away from the audience — days bleeding into one another, the monotony of being out there and doing this laborious task, and the conditions on the boat — not getting fed, drinking boiled sea water, and getting a little bit of rice each day. The daily life was informed by the survivors. It’s also claustrophobic. You can’t escape or hide. There’s no personal space. It was a challenging world to survive. People lose their mind, like one character does in the film. These conditions, and not knowing when, if ever, you were going home. Chakra is trying to survive and hold onto hope, surrounded by men and at an impressionable age. If he doesn’t do something, will he become like the captain?

The film has a crisp look; this isn’t a gritty, documentary-style poverty porn exposé. What decision did you make in how you told this story?

It was never my intention. I wanted the film to have tone. Out on a boat, you can use the time of day, and I wanted the audience to feel the childlike wonder of Chakra being out on a boat at sea. Despite the harsh conditions, it still evoked the feeling of hope.

There is a real power struggle on the trawler — not just between the captain and the enslaved men, but between the workers as well. Can you talk about those experiences and the research and testimonies of the men you interviewed in your research?

From all the survivors I talked with, they spoke of battling the captain as well as the guys on boat who were in charge with enforcing and torturing. They were also battling other enslaved guys for personal space. On top of that, these guys are not all from the same village or country or speak the same language, so it creates tension on the boat. There are hierarchies as well among the enslaved workers, which creates friction under those condition and in that environment. Survivors said that guys committed suicide, tried mutinies, or battled among the enslaved over food and water.

What observations do you have about depicting the violence that is seen in the film? It is brutal but mostly off-screen, though that doesn’t make it any less brutal!

I did not want to be too explicit; you don’t want people to turn away from it. It’s more effective for the audience to use their imagination, which is almost more confronting in a weird way. It’s a challenging balance to get what the audience can watch and how explicit you want to be.

You show Chakra’s coming of age and how he is valuable to the captain. What considerations did you have regarding his storyline?

The process of dehumanization is something all the survivors I talked to experienced. Chakra is a young boy and he’s still at an age that there is hope for him despite his exposure to these people and experiences. It’s about how you retain your humanity.

Likewise, what can you say about the morality and mentality of Ron Ram?

Some critique that the bad guys are caricature-ish. For me it was important to suggest Ron Ram was in Chakra’s position once upon a time, and he experienced that dehumanization and has not been able to get out of it, and he’s what Chakra will become if he can’t retain his humanity. He’s sadistic. The survivors who told me about these captains said they were the harshest humans you can imagine. They had no empathy for the slaves. They were the worst possible kind of people. Human life didn’t mean anything to them. They broke people down to a monetary value. It was important to capture that and give insight through the relationship Ron Ram has with Chakra; to show him through Chakra — this is the result, what you will become, if you don’t escape this world.

I understand some of the men you cast in the film had this lived experience. Was it painful or liberating to have them reenact their trauma?

We wanted to make a film to give these guys a voice. The issue has been going on for decades in South East Asia and the Gulf of Thailand. The weird thing was they all just wanted to tell this story because a film hasn’t been made on this subject before. A lot of them enjoyed telling their story. It’s different when you are surrounded by people on set interested in hearing your experience. Yes, it was hard, but on the film set there was camaraderie; there was a warm environment making the film. It was harder to interview them one on one — that was incredibly emotional for them. But making the film it wasn’t that emotional. We created a safe environment to the guys exposed to the real life trauma. It was incredibly hard [for some] to go to the dark emotional places with their character(s), but we had to go all the way for it to feel real. It was an emotional challenge to get there.

If you found yourself in this situation, how would you react? It is the question you seem to be asking the audience to consider.

It’s hard to know what you would do. On one hand you hold on to hope that things get better, that you pay off your debt and get back home. But when does that breaking point come for you? I’m not really sure what I would do. [Laughs] It’s tricky question to ask. Until you are in that situation you don’t know what you are capable of, or how long it would go on for before you would snap or break.

“Buoyancy” opens virtually on Friday, Sept. 11 at New York’s Film Forum and nationwide.

Deutsche Bank taps long-time ally of William Barr for legal representation in Washington: report

One of Deutsche Bank’s most famous customers has been President Donald Trump, and Deutsche’s activities —including its dealings with Trump — have been the subject of investigations by prosecutors as well as members of Congress. The German bank, Bloomberg News is reporting, has hired attorney Robert Kimmitt — whose relationship with Attorney General William Barr goes back to the late 1980s — to represent it in Washington, D.C.

The 72-year-old Kimmitt is a former U.S. ambassador to Germany. According to Bloomberg, Kimmitt’s “precise role” in Deutsche “isn’t clear even to many executives within the bank.”

Bloomberg journalists Greg Farrell, Steven Arons, Christian Berthelsen and Tom Schoenberg explain, “When Kimmitt was hired, many top executives in the U.S. weren’t immediately informed of his role, according to other people familiar with the matter. Lawyers representing the bank in U.S. Justice Department investigations have been dealing directly with line prosecutors in several long-running investigations. In at least one of those investigations, the Department has relayed almost no information in years, these people said.”

The reporters note that according to Bloomberg’s sources, some of Deutsche’s senior executives in Frankfurt, Germany are hoping that Kimmitt’s relationship with Barr “could help clear up a logjam of Justice Department investigations.” Kimmit, Bloomberg notes, “has close connections to both Deutsche Bank and the Justice Department.”

Kimmitt’s relationship with Barr goes back to the presidential election of 1988, when Vice President George H.W. Bush received the Republican nomination and went up against the Democratic presidential nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. That year, Bloomberg explains, Kimmitt and Barr “were responsible for vetting potential running mates for the vice president.”

After evaluating various possibilities, the GOP chose Dan Quayle as Bush’s running mate. Bush defeated Dukakis in the general election, and Barr served as Bush’s attorney general in the early 1990s before becoming attorney general for the Trump Administration in 2019.

Mike Pence plans to attend fundraiser hosted by QAnon adherents: report

According to a exclusive report from the Associated Press, Vice President Mike Pence and other top officials from the Trump campaign are scheduled to attend a Montana fundraiser hosted by a couple who has pushed QAnon-related content.

“The hosts of the fundraiser, Caryn and Michael Borland, have shared QAnon memes and retweeted posts from QAnon accounts, their social media activity shows,” the AP reports. “The baseless conspiracy theory posits that Trump is fighting entrenched enemies in the government and also involves satanism and child sex trafficking.”

Other influential pro-Trump figures will reportedly be in attendance, such as Kimberly Guilfoyle, GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Republican National Committee finance chairman Todd Ricketts, and RNC co-chairman Tommy Hicks Jr.

Read the full report over at The Associated Press.

“Some animals are parasitic”: Lincoln Project targets “parasite” Lindsay Graham over fealty to Trump

The Lincoln Project took aim at Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in a new ad comparing him to a parasite.

The ad uses graphic imagery of infestation and decay to castigate the South Carolina Republican for setting aside his grave misgivings about the president to serve his political needs — at the risk of his own Senate seat.

“Some animals are parasitic,” the ad says, showing close-up images of parasitic infections. “They drink the lifeblood of their host, infect whatever they touch and spread like a virus. They’re often right under our noses, camouflaged, convincing their hosts they’re not harmful at all.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Trump rejects traditional preparations as first debate against Biden approaches: report

President Donald Trump is apparently planning to wing it for his first debate with Joe Biden.

The president has eschewed traditional debate preparations, including a formal practice round, and has instead been telling aides that he’s been preparing to fire back at Biden since he was born, reported NBC News.

“It’s not the traditional, ‘we need Chris Christie to fill in and play Hillary Clinton,’ like we did four years ago,” said one of the president’s allies.

The president’s team has heavily emphasized the debates and even pushed for more than the scheduled three, but some of his associates have urged Trump to do more than in preparation than informally discuss them with key allies and get briefings from administration officials on topics that will likely come up.

Trump met last month with Christie at his golf club in New Jersey to discuss strategy, along with son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, and he’s discussed the debates with chief of staff Mark Meadows and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.

But his team has expressed confidence that Trump has been preparing for the debates just by being president.

“I think if you ask the president, he would say that he is preparing for debates by running the country, as president,” said campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. “I think the way that he sets himself apart from Joe Biden is to talk about his record.”

Exclusive: Susan Collins’ plight gets worse with new corruption allegation, possible ethics probe

The American Democracy Legal Fund (ADLF) sent a letter Wednesday to the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee asking to open an investigation into allegations that Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — a Republican who faces a tight re-election battle this fall — used her office to financially benefit her husband and, subsequently, herself.

The charges, laid out in the letter and exclusively obtained by Salon, are informed by a recent HuffPost article reporting that Collins — who now trails Democrat Sara Gideon in most polls, in one of the most closely-watched races in the country — has advocated and voted for policies that benefited her husband’s consulting and lobbying business.

“This is a clear pattern of unethical and corrupt behavior by Sen. Susan Collins and the Senate Ethics Committee must begin an immediate investigation into her abuse of office,” ADLF’s Brad Woodhouse told Salon in a statement. “We are in the middle of a pandemic that has cost more than 180,000 Americans their lives, and instead of focusing on helping her constituents, Sen. Collins is using her office to enrich herself and her husband. This blatant corruption must be thoroughly investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee.”

Salon can also report that, according to Collins’ latest financial disclosures, her husband’s investments in eight companies as much as doubled following Collins’ vote in favor of the GOP’s 2017 tax bill — increasing in value by perhaps $340,000 to $600,000 as those companies took in billions of dollars in corporate tax benefits and stock buybacks.

In 2012, Collins married Thomas Daffron, a longtime adviser who first met her in 1974 when she was an intern in the office of Rep. William Cohen, a Maine Republican who later served 18 years in the Senate. Daffron consulted on Collins’ 1996, 2002 and 2008 Senate campaigns and was COO for a company called Jefferson Consulting from 2006 to 2016.

The complaint alleges that Daffron received $54.95 million in government contracts and $3.5 million in lobbying revenue during his years at Jefferson Consulting, or approximately $58.4 million combined. As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Collins exercised oversight over agencies that granted Jefferson Consulting $10 million in government contracts in that time, according to the complaint.

While Collins served on the Appropriations subcommittees on defense and on military construction and veterans affairs, as well as on the Homeland Security contracting oversight subcommittee and the Senate Special Committee on Aging, her husband’s company made $6 million from the Department of Veterans Affairs, $850,000 from Washington Headquarters Services, $370,000 from the Pension Benefit Guaranty and $300,000 from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Procurement Operations.

Of that $10 million, $767,000, or 7.5%, came from non-compete contracts.

In 2011, the year before she married Daffron, Collins took two actions that his business could have benefited from directly, HuffPost reported: Her vote to repeal a 3% withholding tax on government contractors, and a letter to then-President Barack Obama urging him not to sign an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose political contributions exceeding $5,000.

(Jefferson Consulting gave $443,000 in political contributions from 2006 to 2016 when Daffron led the company, including $5,000 to Collins, the complaint says.)

In fairness, both moves were bipartisan: The Senate voted 95-0 on the contractor tax repeal, and Collins’ 2011 letter to Obama was also signed by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio. Obama ultimately did not sign the order.

In 2012, the complaint says, Collins voted against legislation requiring political intelligence consultants to register just as lobbyists do, as well as against ethics restrictions that included banning gifts and meals from lobbyists and restricting paid travel.

At the same time, the letter alleges, Collins appeared to use her office to financially benefit her husband’s business — which also led to a significant increase in her own personal net worth.

In 2011, the year before Collins and Daffron married, she reported more liabilities than assets, including a negative net between minus-$165,000 and minus-$689,000. Between 2011 and 2018, Collins’ personal net worth rose between $2.4 million and $5.8 million.

According to Salon’s review of Collins’ financial disclosures, her husband holds stock worth up to $2.26 million in companies that reported billions in gains from the 2017 Republican tax bill, and billions more from subsequent buybacks that capitalized on the breaks in that bill. Eight companies account for as much as $600,000 of those holdings, the disclosures show.

Proponents of the tax bill faced backlash for the record-setting run of stock buybacks — which were illegal until 1982 — with critics alleging that the corporate breaks largely went toward the enrichment of stockholders and not toward economic growth, capital investment or employee wages.

In 2018, companies in the S&P 500 spent $806 billion on buybacks, smashing the previous record of nearly $590 billion, which had been set in 2007, the year before the Great Recession. When share prices dropped in the fourth quarter of 2018, companies spent even more, setting a fourth consecutive quarterly record for buybacks.

Amid concerns this spring that coronavirus relief packages might set off another string of buybacks, President Trump slammed companies that used the 2017 tax benefits to purchase their own stock.

“I never liked stock buybacks from their standpoint. When we did a big tax cut, and when they took the money and did buybacks, that’s not building a hangar, that’s not buying aircraft, that is not doing the kind of things that I want them to do,” Trump said in March.

He said that the bill had not placed restrictions on companies because “we thought they would have known better but they didn’t know better,” and that he now favored limits.

“I am fine with restricting buybacks,” Trump said. “In fact, I would demand that there be no stock buybacks. I don’t want them taking hundreds of millions of dollars and buying back their stock because that does nothing.”

Collins claimed that her vote for the tax bill would help lower- and middle-income families, in an open letter to constituents published in December of 2017 in the Portland Press-Herald.

“I supported this legislation because it will help lower-income and middle-income families keep more of their hard-earned money, boost the economy and encourage businesses, both small and large, to grow and create jobs here in Maine and around the country,” Collins wrote.

Collins’ office did not immediately reply to Salon’s request for comment.