A serious financial crash is headed America’s way in 2020, and make no mistake. We have absolutely got to get ready. It is unavoidable, and it is likely to get very nasty. Our illegitimate president is not telling the truth about it, and the people of the country are not prepared. That is only to be expected. We are told daily how well everything is going, how well Trump is doing handling the economy. This lie is crueler than most he tells because it is having the effect of leading many of us right to the slaughter.
As Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Federal Finance Board, recently said, “In 2020, Wile E. Coyote is going to run off the cliff- and look down.”
The president will not help prepare us for the upcoming disaster; so be it. We expect no less. We’ll just do what we do about everything else. Raise awareness, and get ready.
A financial collapse brings many a curse along with it, but one of the worst is that it doesn’t abide by a timeline. During the #TrumpShutdown, for instance, people suffered all manner of crises. The country permanently lost five billion dollars. But while it was very destructive (and unnecessary), it was also short. Many collapses are even shorter, their duration measuring for days rather than weeks. This allows recovery efforts to commence almost immediately. Economic downturns, however, are unmeasurable in length. For most the hit they take will be felt for a minimum of a year, with the aftereffects resonating for several years as a nation recovers.
Sane people will find it impossible to repress a shiver to think what could have happened if he’d kept it up for months.
During an economic collapse, there are symptoms that affect large companies and industries, with very visible signs, felt in the family home. Symptoms of collapse are manifold and include such pleasant sides of life as high bankruptcy rates, widespread unemployment, hyperinflation, a spike in death rates (attributable to depression or other financial causes), social collapse and a high increase in crime.
This is all bad enough by itself. When you take into account that our leadership is not only unwilling and unable to provide the people any relief but actively lying to the nation’s populace so as to swindle them out of voting with self-interest in mind, it becomes very clear that many Americans are about to suffer a massive and total calamity. It’s been coming from Day One. Many specialists believe that American top income- an overwhelmingly right-wing set of half-fascist monopoly capitalists- causes crashes and downturns on purpose, so that people will sell them everything for pennies on the dollar and they can profit massively off the crisis they callously caused, although of course this is very hard to prove.
Back in 2016, many people believed the American economy would start to crash the day Donald Trump took office. Eight years of strenuous recovery work had finally righted the course, and now Trump would come along like a baboon and sling feces all over it, his preferred hostile takeover method. As expected, he did, but the economy not only survived him, it blossomed in spite of him. Immediately he began to boast and take credit for it. But that idea was ridiculous. Economists have been searching for real reasons ever since.
The first thing to understand about the effects presidential policies can have on our economy is that they are at best unclear. Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post wrote that “the $20 trillion economy is simply too big and complicated to be easily manipulated for partisan advantage.” While presidential policies do eventually have an effect, they do not manifest instantly, and while there is nothing surprising about the president boasting credit, he seems to have lucked out in the short term.
“It’s at least possible that bigger budget deficits will, if anything, strengthen the economy briefly,” said the New York Times’s Paul Krugman.
That’s how it ended up going, and while of course, it is wonderful that we’ve had such a bounce in our prosperity, we have to come to realize NOW, today, at this very minute that it’s almost over! Millennial Democrats were lucky enough to have a true expert offer us a bit of counsel and insight into the problem.
“People are bound to ask why it will collapse. Luckily, the answers are fairly simple Many economists are expecting a 2020 recession based on factors that have little to do with Donald Trump. Wage growth is not keeping up with price increases. Household debt has hit new highs, exceeding even the pre-2008 recession period, and federal debt increase has escalated dramatically. Economic bubbles like this BURST.” -Unknown Soldier.
In other words, our current economy is going to crash.
It is now time to draw our belts in a notch. We’ve got to start saving money, putting it aside and preparing to survive through what could be some very hard times with it. The president can refuse to help the people when they’re in need, and make no mistake about it. That is one promise Trump could make truthfully. He will do nothing but make matters far, far worse.
The steps needed to prepare for an economic collapse are similar to those used in a zombie apocalypse. We’ve got to embrace frugality. Our banks and wallets will become our survival tools. By investing wisely and doing basic research on money-saving methods, we’ll be digging storm shelters for ourselves, and when it’s over we will still have heads to pop out and smell the air with.
We were right up on the tip of the iceberg back then.
These days we’ve come across enough to boggle the mind.
The tangled tale of Tulsi Gabbard makes the most sense if you consider the possibility she might really be a carefully cultivated mole, used to leak data to our enemies. It would be clear that she makes for a powerful pivotal point strategically. The far right has often been able to use her voice and power to manipulate the far left.
One angry supporter of Bernie Sanders wrote the following nonsense on 7/23/17, on a thread discovered on Facebook. “No REAL progressive is gonna vote for more of the Clinton style, corporate special interest, Big Bank donor loving, false progressive garbage. Yet…here are the Democrats showing us early on that they haven’t changed. Ready for a repeat of 2016? Personally…I will work to expose and destroy the hopes of any candidate that the DNC tries to ram down our throats again by using Super Delegates and closed Primaries…and any candidate who remained silent against the DNC’s attack on our Democracy by rigging the election against Bernie Sanders. #Sanders/Gabbard2020 #Gabbard/Turner2020
This same unhappy person later went on to beg and plead for unity among the former supporters of Sanders- so that they will have greater success in attacking not Republicans but Democrats. Mentioned at the spearhead of this assault on their fellows in the left, is always one name- Tulsi Gabbard.
Stirred up radicals often end up signing off on very bad ideas.
Anytime they need their opposites to go along with some plot they’re cooking up, they give the job to Tulsi.
Her views are often much more in line with the conservative end of our spectrum, as exemplified by her admiring relationship with Republican billionaire Sheldon Adelson-who gave more money to Trump’s campaign than any other donor in 2016. She’s also a favorite of Steve Bannon of Breitbart News fame, who arranged the November meeting between the new president-elect and the Hawaiian congresswoman. “He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves her,” a source familiar with Bannon’s thinking told The Hill. “Wants to work with her on everything.”
Should this fail to convince you, try this on for size?
If only this were fake news, thought I, and quietly moved on. The place is located in the Washington, D.C.-based Catholic University of America. ReadSludge’s Alex Kotch gives us the story.
“She is one of 12 advisors of a foreign policy center at The Center for the Study of Statesmanship (CSS) was founded in 2017 with a $2.65 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation, which gives tens of millions of dollars to American colleges and universities each year, usually to fund ideological, free-market academic programs.”
#FakeLeftIsAltRight, as one friend of mine likes to say. Tulsi’s ties to radical domestic fascist forces are virtually endless, and they will be the subject of many future articles. As the need for deeper vetting arises, we will be here for you- and prepared.
At any rate, perhaps we can find a clue into the peculiar politics of this enigmatic woman by examining her political career helping her father. Even upon taking the most cursory glance at him, Hawaii state Senator, ostensible former Republican, and anti-gay activist Mike Gabbard is a man who has had to do a lot of reforming.
The elder Gabbard has made a career out of evasion. With reporters, with constituents, and with pretty much everyone except his daughter and his old cronies from the days of Chris Butler’s (Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa) perversion of Hare Krishna cult, he’s been dishonest with just about everyone.
His daughter has inherited his ways. It is a daily reality of life for people in Hawaii that the Gabbards are into bad things with cults (there is over a hundred pages dedicated to the Gabbard family’s activities on the Cult Education Forum) and that they are libertarian Republicans in disguise.
Today, however, I was thinking we might talk about her ties to foreign powers, the ones who provide her with about 99% of her support. From top to bottom, the people most interested in seeing Tulsi Gabbard do well outside of the country are Russia, Iran, Syria, and literal terrorist groups like the Lebanese Hezbollah, groups that are the declared enemies of America.
Hezbollah, no less!
Memo to @TulsiGabbard: Assad turned Damascus into way station for jihadists who killed Americans in Iraq, a haven for Hezbollah which killed Americans in Beirut, and a base for Iranian (enemy) and Russian (enemy) aggression. Oh, an he uses chemical weapons against his own people. https://t.co/ftN1f6IFio
Check this out, from the good old American Committee on Foreign Affairs, dated March 20, 2013, just over six years ago. Ironically, Tulsi Gabbard was at this meeting. She has benefited from plenty of access to the highest levels of information on the Middle East and its troubled political scene.
HEZBOLLAH’S STRATEGIC SHIFT: A GLOBAL TERRORIST THREAT HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON TERRORISM, NONPROLIFERATION, AND TRADE OF THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION MARCH 20, 2013
Recent focus on Iran has centered on Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons, but the Iranians and their proxy Hezbollah also use terrorism to threaten global stability. Hezbollah enjoys the full backing of the Iranian regime. The Supreme Leader and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps direct Hezbollah’s global terror campaign. Years ago, Hezbollah was a limited regional threat. Today, it is an international movement conducting terrorist and criminal acts in several parts of the world.
Assad and Putin are able to call them up for anything. The leader of Russia has had that power from their organization’s birth. The current world order has been where it is for quite a while, and America was just on the verge of fixing it when they managed to tip the scales on us and helping Trump the Scam into the White House. Now look where we are.
In 2017, when Assad started gassing his own people, Trump fired off a rather puny attack on them, blowing up some asphalt on the side of one of their airstrips. We covered it at the time it happened. It seemed like a put-up job; Russian planes were being kept on the other side of the hanger. But even still, good old Tulsi was right there to cry in outrage about it as if it had been Germany crossing the Polish border.
Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont referred to her response appropriately as bizarre. “I think it’s outrageous,” he said during an MSNBC interview. “There’s a long well-known history, both in our intelligence community, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. Every single one of these agencies has said that Assad is using chemical weapons. He’s a barbarian, he’s murdered half a million of his own people.”
This is more than names and T-shirt colors. These people are monstrous criminals with even more lineage and history as terrorists with Al-Qaida has! To support Tulsi Gabbard is practically to rejoice and laugh at 9/11. We are the ones who designated Hezbollah as terrorists. She is flagrantly disloyal to America and its interests.
To think of such a person being the President of the United States of America, which as my grandfather used to say is the greatest country in the world, sickens me so thoroughly that even finding words to describe it with is hard. #NeverTulsi doesn’t quite seem strident enough, but just be assured I mean it very much.
So how did we come to this conclusion? After all, when she personally met with Syrian dictator Bashar (Trump calls him Animal, rightly for once) al-Assad, who in Trump’s words is a “Gas-killing animal who gasses his own people”, it was simply on a ‘fact-finding’ trip.
Wowie, thought I, but suspended disbelief anyway, long enough to keep reading, and look what I found! The two-man escort Gabbard used on this tourist outing were both fascists!
Her statement added she and the rest of the delegation had been accompanied by two men, Elie and Bassam Khawam, who according to the Daily Beast are both officials in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a political party and paramilitary organization founded in Lebanon in 1932, and currently actively engaged in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Assad regime.
They’re members of an anti-Semitic, cult-like sect that uses female suicide bombers. This cult is also known for handing vicious beatings out to journalists, both Western and Arab, and for supporting-you guessed it!-. Hezbollah!
They even got their flag from the Nazis.
Nazi-like flag of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party
Gabbard refused to say at first who financed her trip to Syria, but after the outcry got a little louder, she did eventually hold a press release. At it, Gabbard told us her delegation had been “led and sponsored by” an outfit called the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services (AACCESS—Ohio). No one has ever heard of it. It did one other thing forever ago, sending the equally compromised Dennis Kucinich to Syria.
Leaving Syria’s complex and unhappy politics behind us, we head now to the equally chaotic area known as cyberspace for our next clues in the neverending goal to unravel the tangle of Tulsi.
If you want to know what’s up with somebody in this day and age, the first place to look is on social media. That’s what a private investigator will do; cut out the middleman. If you want to know who their friends are, and who is for or against them, above all you’ve got to go to where our illegitimate, childish president likes to give his warped Fireside Chats- Twitter.
The significance of the immensely popular micro-blogging platform cannot be overstated, because it’s where everyone goes to talk who is really influential in today’s world. You won’t find top professionals hanging around much on Facebook-actually, that’s how Russia figured out there was a hole where they could get at us through. They go to Twitter; look for the blue check marks to make sure you’re finding verified accounts.
Speaking of which, please consider following us at @MilDemsAmerica on Twitter! Help us to spread the word.
Tulsi Gabbard has more than twenty thousand fake accounts that follow her around and retweet her every word, and most of her supporters are not American. We can prove it, too, thanks to analysis tools provided to us by Twitter.
“Thousands of inauthentic Twitter accounts emerge when exploring tweets where @TulsiGabbard’s handle appears (large highlighted cluster includes ~20K accounts) cc: @yoyoel @delbius @vijaya” Thanks to @GeoffGoldberg!
There’s a story behind every one of those little dots, every one of which is a Twitter account loving up on Tulsi Gabbard. Recently our attention was brought to a rabidly pro-Assad Twitter account entity named Sarah Abdallah, and the story around her/it is rather fascinating.
@sahouraxo is the handle she goes by, and even the most cursory glance at her Twitter feed will tell you, not a single day will go by in which she doesn’t send some sort of tweet like this one.
"I’m not running for president to BE president. I’m running for president to be able to bring about this sea change in our foreign policy that is so necessary for us and for the world, and I’m most qualified to do that." #ServiceBeforeSelf#Tulsi2020pic.twitter.com/wk2M7O0CgR
Our friends, the good people, and research analysts over at MidEastAnalyst did an exceedingly thorough job putting together her background and past. Among the things they turned up was the true meaning of her handle, which language studies master and compelling journalist Joumana Gebara translated to mean something very interesting.
Sarah Abdallah: “from the heart of Resistance Camp” which means “from the Hezbollah Camp”! Clever, right? Double lol.
On the subject of Gebara, who is a truly inspiring human being, she is currently blocked by Twitter from accessing her account, because of the work she did to expose Sarah Abdallah! Please write to @TwitterSupport and tell them to give us back our hero! They’re usually a lot better about this than Facebook. Let’s give them the benefit of doubt in letting them correct their mistake; they might just do it.
The tiresome @sahouraxo aside, for she is just one among many tens of thousands, Gabbard’s a beloved figure among America’s radical left. These are not progressives, because they are too stubborn and mean and foul-mouthed to make any progress; look at what one of them said in this comment on yesterday’s article!
#AlwaysBernie Stop parading as millennials And leave it to the real millennials to continue berning your party to the ground. You are on your way out.
Not really, Crystal. Not today, and not ANY day. Our generation is NOT all a pack of Bern-crazed drooling freaks.
It just goes to show what we’re always talking about. They hate us, they want to replace us, and they will stop at no ugliness to get what they want. They’re worse than the Republican trolls, who attack the site here in maybe a one in ten ratio compared to what the neo-progressives do. And although she has about a millionth of Bernie’s name recognition, Tulsi may have more trolls even than him.
Vladimir Putin is a libertarian to the core, and that is how this all ties together. The Koch brothers love him in a sick and sycophantic kind of way; they think they are his equals. They see his wealth and power and they want it for themselves. They feel like the only thing stopping them are all the pesky regulations in the United States, and they fantasize about the day they cast them off.
That’s what libertarianism is about. Rich guys getting out of paying taxes, dumping sludge in the rivers, and stealing from everyone that’s alive. The Koch brothers and Putin are the biggest thieves there are and thick as thieves besides. The Utopian society the little anarchist guys with clothespins through their noses run around talking about will actually be one in which the rich are freely able to prey on the poor without restraint.
If they think it’s going to be egalitarian, they had better read up on what those funny guys at the Cato Institute are really talking about, and hearing where they’re speaking from.
As a wise woman once said, Putin is the head of all of this. The rest is tentacles.
Those tentacles are as international as it gets. They control vast amounts of the economies of other nations, including this one, and that means they control many of those countries’ politicians. A particularly chilling example is that half the entire economy of the banking hub nation of Cyprus has been filled with money Putin and his oligarchs have been looting from Russia and Ukraine.
They fund politicians routinely, like Marine Le Pen of France, who blatantly asked for more since French banks wouldn’t loan to her Nazi-like National Front party. Tulsi Gabbard is a softer-looking Le Pen who is in the same situation. She will lose 99% of her support the day she tries going against them, and she knows it. She is their girl head to toe. Not ours.
One of our contributors started a Facebook Page entitled Tulsi Gabbard Must Go. Great page, check it out. It’s a young page, only a month or two old, and still has less than two hundred Likes. And yet, not a day has gone by since she started it without a fake left troll coming on there and cursing and swearing and saying all types of crazy things.
They’re justifying their paychecks, but they’re also casting the silver bullets needed to destroy them. Most of them are not American. Americans hardly know who she is. She’s popular because she’s got the backing of the Russia-Iran-Syria-Hezbollah (RIAH) network.
That is the significance. This is why Tulsi Gabbard will never do or say anything remotely critical of Bashar al-Assad, or any of the rest of Putin’s toys. She also went to specifically meet with Trump just after he was elected. If she did she would instantly lose that backing because Assad is Putin’s boy. Syria is a big part of Putin’s scheme to bring about a global Russian realignment. He will stop at nothing for this.
Merriam- Webster defines the term “political operative” as a person who does secret work for a government or political organization. And no one can deny that the resume of Ms. Gabbard would be ideal for one.
Going forward, we’re going to get into this deeper and deeper. Tulsi Gabbard is so far from what a Democratic presidential candidate needs to look like that it’s ridiculous and horrifying both. It has taken on paramount importance to properly vet and expose this absolutely dishonest person. Tulsi Gabbard really must go, and we will be here to help see her off.
Here on the eve of the confirmation of the new Attorney General pick, William Barr, questions abound about the Russiagate investigation and the eventual fate of the special counsel Robert Mueller chosen to administrate it. Barr has been critical of Mueller’s investigation but has stated that he will not interfere. We’ll see. To put it mildly, serious reasons exist to doubt the sincerity of America’s abortive failure of a forty-fifth president when he says he will not fire Mueller, the man who has compiled the case that will likely destroy him. Barr seems like a rubber stamp brought in to do just that, the hatchetman of Russian assets. We hope he proves us wrong.
If Trump does fire Mueller, it will be highly reminiscent of another corrupt president who fired a special prosecutor, president Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox began the end of his presidency, and so conventional wisdom has held that Trump will not go there. Congressional Republicans have also said that the firing of the special counsel Mueller would be a crossing of the line for them, although it’s true we have no reason to believe them either. They have caved to Trump on everything and often in the most shameful imaginable ways. Devin Nunes, former chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee, was recently found to be deliberately covering up House findings in order to protect Trump.
When considered as part of the whole incident, it seems clear this could be destined to bring us into uncharted territory completely if Trump does go the Nixon route. It wouldn’t save him, and it would damn him further in the opinion of many, but he wouldn’t resign as Nixon did. His conduct during the lengthening and unnecessary #TrumpShutdown proves him once again to be utterly without scruples. It is certain he will use the country as hostages again in the process of getting the Russiagate spotlight off of him. Thus, we have no choice but to conclude that the conventional wisdom- which also did not predict the shutdown, or the fool’s errand that was the travel ban, or the Helsinki debacle, or any number of other horrible things- is probably wrong again.
Of course Trump would fire Mueller. ‘Don’t expect Trump to go quietly’, read a Washington Post article published on January 14th. He’s got the whole country held hostage at this moment, he unrepentantly lies about anything that happens to cross his mind, and he thinks he’s “winning”, whatever that even means in the context of a ruined economy and a devastated government. I guess it means getting Employee of the Month from Vladimir Putin. Firing Mueller would fit right in as the stupidest and worst for America thing he could possibly do. It’s a glaring absence in his resume as it is.
Slava.
In related news, Trump, who was in the news over the weekend for having sworn his interpreters in his three closed-door meetings with Putin to secrecy, has taken an increasingly aggressive and door-closed stance toward Mueller’s requests for an in-person interview. Gone are the days when he boasts of having done nothing and means his crimes. The Trump of yesterday always said of Mueller that “No one wants to speak more than me“. That line is yesterday’s news, although references to the “Fake News Media” that has plagued him like the Furies remain plentiful. As usual, Trump blames himself for nothing, and provides an object- and abject- example to American children of what a spoiled brat at its worst can do.
News that the special counsel has already drafted a report- a report that draws the most damning possible conclusions- joined the confiscation of notes taken during his closed-door meetings with Putin as the two top stories in the news this weekend. Trump‘s behavior toward the Russian president was the focus of Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein on Sunday, when he appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources. While there, Bernstein- whose investigative journalism helped to take down Nixon- said the special counsel investigating Trump will find he “helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the [2016] election.” Any Facebook activist can tell you this. We’ve seen it develop from the day they prepared the Wikileaks dumps.
We would also like to give a farewell salute to the former and departing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who did not have to pick someone who would look into this as hard as Mueller would, and acted with integrity throughout in spite of Republican reviles. His decency and professionalism will be missed.
In the last analysis, from the standpoint of this illegitimate infantile president, sitting back and letting this atomic report fall on him would most likely be better than trying to resist the inevitable by trying to bring this to an end. Cracks in Trump’s base are said to be forming at last, and as these people realize what they’ve been buying into, more and more of them will be looking for a new home, and a sane alternative. Our capacity to find this for them will prove to be a critical part of success for us as we move forward. Russia has been the chiefest enemy of America for nearly a hundred years now, and most Americans still know that. Reminding them is the way to go moving forward.
On Wednesday, Trump called Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, who co-wrote the piece, “sloppy” and a “degenerate fool” in response. Bernstein retorted on Twitter that he has spent his “life as a journalist bringing the truth to light, through administrations of both parties.”
That may be true, but it sure isn’t what Trump wants to hear. And it isn’t what he wants people to do. That’s why he’s always going on vile rampages and outbursts against the American press, people whose jobs are getting more dangerous by the day.
But the next day he reverted to his Stalinist slogan, “Enemy of the People“, to incite his followers to future mayhem.
Not long after, Trump held a “campaign” rally in Tampa. At it, a frenzied mob went berserk with reviles and rage toward CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta.
The scene left most of us who write about politics deeply shaken, including Acosta.
“It felt like we weren’t in America anymore,” Acosta said.
Earlier this week, a man named Robert D. Chain was arrested for allegedly threatening to murder journalists at the Boston Globe. He was said to have been mimicking Trump’s language.
Anytime in the past that we’ve had this sort of thing, we’ve always come together to insist that we won’t have it. Whoever our leader has happened to be at the time has always done what they could to help things calm down. They certainly haven’t made it their policy to make things worse by inciting it.
The fact that Trump is doing just the opposite is yet another warning, a huge flashing neon sign, that things have gone wrong and we are now all in a really bad situation.
Their survey ranked 180 countries based on factors such as pluralism, transparency, and the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of their news.
Unsurprisingly, the report specifically calls out Trump as the reason for the United States’ reduced standing.
“A media-bashing enthusiast, Trump has referred to reporters as ‘enemies of the people,’ the term once used by Josef Stalin,” the report says.
Trump has done more than anyone to appropriate and misuse the term “fake news” in retaliation for critical reporting, even though his campaign was the source of most of the garbage that brought the term into common use.
Last year Trump released a doctored pro wrestling video of his halcyon days hanging out at the Madison Square Garden, clotheslining an opponent who has the CNN logo slapped over his head. It was pretty ridiculous to think that such a man is now our president, but that is nevertheless how it went.
The first time it was merely silly, but nobody is laughing now.
This morning, on the topic, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote that whether rhetorical excesses can be blamed for violence or the threat of it is a complicated topic, with no easy answers.
I’m not sure I agree. The complexity lies only in degree; it seems pretty clear that people can whip each other up into violence if they’ve got a stage and a microphone.
You don’t have to be Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, either; there’s no wizardry of dialect needed. Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst told his fans to “get angry” at Woodstock ’99, and they did, and people rioted, and a girl got gang-raped in the middle of the mosh pit.
Is Fred Durst a man who is blessed with the same rhetorical gifts as Cicero or Demosthenes? Doubtful, but he does at least seem to be better than Trump. Was he solely at fault? No. But he certainly helped to kick things off.
Likewise, our nation’s 45th president will have helped to kick off his own fanatical followers, if any of them decide again to actually do what he’s been nudging them to do, and treat members of the press as though they really were Enemies of the People.
Here at Millennial Democrats, we want to emphasize how important a free press is, how important it is to adhere to journalistic standards. Without one we’re back in the Dark Ages. The media is the friend of the people, because they bring the people its information. It’s good to promote this point of view, going forward.
A week that started out with the news that White House counsel Don McGahn had cooperated extensively with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, sitting down for more than 30 hours of interviews, did not improve for our nation’s 45th president, although he did manage to yet again make the cover of his beloved Time Magazine- most of him, anyway.
News came out Friday that federal prosecutors in Manhattan struck a deal earlier this summer with Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. He too was granted immunity for his upcoming grand jury testimony regarding those hush payments.
Time Politics correspondent Philip Elliott spoke of hearing “fear” in the voices of Trump staffers. “They can’t even agree on what ocean they’re in,” he said.
Earlier this week, the big news was that David Pecker, the head of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, American Media Inc, was granted immunity in the federal investigation that is going on around Michael Cohen in exchange for providing information on hush money deals, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Pecker told prosecutors that Trump knew all about Cohen’s payments to the women who claimed to have had sex with Trump, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Pecker also provided investigators with details about payments Cohen made to the women, the sources said.
Prosecutors also granted immunity to A.M.I.’s chief content officer, Australian journalist Dylan Howard, so that he would describe Trump’s involvement in the matter.
All week long, it just kept rolling in. Friday night saw Trump World Tower doorman Dino Sajudin is claiming he’s got the scoop on an affair President Donald Trump had with an ex-housekeeper, one that resulted in a child born out of wedlock.
Legally speaking, he is now able to talk about a contract that he entered with AMI that had prohibited him from discussing the matter with anyone, according to his attorney.
That’s also what happened earlier this year, both with Stormy Daniels and Karen MacDougal, the latter of whom made it a point to claim she would never have sold her story to the National Enquirer in the first place, if she would have known they weren’t going to publish it. A “catch-and-kill” contract, they called it.
Earlier this year, a judge ruled that she, like Sajudin, could tell her story anyway.
Get ’em, Dino Sajudin and Karen MacDougal. I hope you take Pecker and jam him right up Donald’s assets.
Jerry George, who worked for the National Enquirer for 28 years, told CNN’s Erica Hill he thinks Pecker would turn on Trump to “save his own skin,” and that’s what they all seem to be doing. What a surprise.
Going forward, our usual task of raising awareness will not be very hard. All the world is aware that Donald Trump is a sinking ship, and we all know what sort of animals jump off them. This is a deeply corrupt and foolish man, a silly and arrogant man, one who really believed he could hide all this and still be the president. He’s getting what he deserves in Biblical proportions. Good.
Presidents in generations to come will look to him as an abject model, and his name will become a spiteful slight to cast at other despots.
Obscene jokes and references abound, and the whole development has a bizarre air of perverted humor that somehow says a lot about the state of things today. If our president wasn’t a pervert, we wouldn’t be writing this now. But for Trump they’re not funny at all. Because David Pecker knows a lot that can hurt Donald Trump.
It took him all of two seconds to flip over, which has hit Trump where it hurts, penetrating deep into the core of the network of friends and allies he’s come to rely on over the years. For Pecker to come out with all he knows will be very messy for Trump.
“They’ve got a safe full,” says Jerry George, a former senior editor at A.M.I.
We bet they do.
There is a clear moral to this story, and in it is a lesson to stand for all time. Corruption, in the end, is always its own reward. And the truth is always stronger than mere lies.
On Saturday, March 24, people from New York to Mumbai took to the streets under the banner titled “March For Our Lives” to protest for stricter gun laws.
The mass demonstrations were instigated by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, and they got big. In D.C. alone they were joined by an estimated 800,000 people.
They came to deliver a strong and eloquent message to the large crowd and they did. However, ten days prior, at the nationwide school walkout held on March 14, they were nearly overshadowed by an unexpected and uninvited guest.
The manner in which he conducted himself is astonishing. It even appears that he brought his own cheering section, as the Parkland students specifically did not invite him because of his record on gun control. They are said to be very upset that he crashed their party.
An excellent description the way he conducted himself during the event was found on Twitter by one of our contributors, and we decided it was worth including whole.
In brief: MOC come down the Capitol steps en masse to join the students “in solidarity” at the bottom of the steps. There’s a planned program they follow, alternating btw students and the MOC most closely aligned w gun regulation … Pelosi, Schumer, MOC from FL & CT, etc. 2/
As Rep Elizabeth Esty (Sandy Hook’s district) is speaking, she’s *interrupted* by BS in his bright white parka, making a spectacle, coming from *the back* of the crowd, flanked by several police officers clearing the way for him as he makes his way to the stage. 3/
BS gets up, says a few words, and then leaves, flanked by the officers, the same way he came, out through the back of the crowd. Didn’t join his fellow MOC. Didn’t listen to a single student speak. Esty picks up from where BS interrupted her and the program continues. 4/
Even aside from this revolting display, the casual observer might be tempted to scratch his head. Bernie Sanders? Doesn’t he have a really weak history on gun control legislation? Didn’t he vote against the Brady Act, to implement background checks and waiting periods for gun purchases?
BERNIE SANDERS: “Thank you to the young people throughout this country who are walking out today and who have the courage to do what the United States Congress is not doing: lead us forward to stop the slaughter that we have seen from coast to coast due to gun violence.”
There is a very specific word of caution to make in this article. Just because a cause is worthy doesn’t mean its leaders are good people. In fact, it is often just the opposite. The Parkland students are the cause of these protests and the ones that people came to hear. But they’re not the ones running the organization.
For years, Bernie Sanders has been showing up to take credit for things that aren’t his. This Millennial Democrats contributor remembers people talk endlessly about “Bernie’s dreams” and “Bernie’s ideals” during the 2016 election cycle.
But where is he when it matters? He goes down to Florida to grandstand in front of the kids, but in the past when he has had the chance to vote on a policy to stop something like this from happening again, he was nowhere to be seen.
One example that sticks with me is when the daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal who was killed during the Newtown massacre, asked Bernie to apologize to the victims for “putting the gun lobby above our families.”
Sanders dodged making any sort of apology at all, instead making a lame-duck excuse to the effect that he recognizes his constituents’ preferences, and so does not make gun control a priority.
The Brady Act mandated that everyone who wanted to buy a handgun had to wait five days while local law enforcement ran criminal background checks; Sanders voted against it numerous times.
He also voted against an amendment that would have ended state waiting periods, while still voting for an amendment giving those denied a gun the right to know why.
The final compromise version of the Brady bill was an interim five-day waiting period while installing an instant background check system; Sanders voted against it.
Bernie took a lot of heat for this during the 2016 election cycle, and he equivocated at every turn, wriggling like a worm on a hook.
But he left his proxies behind. And they were quick to announce their intent.
Linda Sarsour, for example, tweeted out late in the primary season that “Bernie had changed her life” along with a picture of her framed with the Sanders family.
There are people in this country who make a living out of protesting everything, and a number of them have shown up to co-opt the efforts of the Parkland students to seek justice and change.
We’ve met them before, of course- they’re the very same people who did this to the Women’s March.
It is the opinion of Millennial Democrats that we’ve got to Occupy those organizations before their current leaders can run the perceived legitimacy of their causes into the ground.
In June, Chris Ruddy, a close Trump friend and Mar-a-Lago member, said after a visit to the White House that he’d overheard a discussion about the president considering firing Mueller.
Ultimately he decided not to go through with it, after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit instead of carrying out the order.
That seems like a pretty thin line of defence against something of the same type actually happening in the future.
This news is very big. It means that Trump drove us up to the brink of a constitutional crisis and took a good long think about driving us right over the edge.
The pretext he’d planned to use was that Mueller had once been a member of his golf club who quit over an argument over fees.
The kind of ridiculous insanity displayed by that line of reasoning has been the hallmark of Trump’s time in office. It’s that kind of thinking that’s got him going around poking at the North Koreans. He does not seem to grasp the idea of consequences. To Trump, regard for the law or the social contract is something for poor people and losers. But while he will not be around much longer to suffer for these decisions, the rest of us will.
In America, we have always had the time to stop and take a look at what we want our futures to look like, and how we want our lives to go. We choose a path, and we stick to it as well as we are able.
If things keep on as they have been, that is going to go away forever. To millennials, who must soon adapt to the post-Trump America, this is of the utmost concern.
This is the way that democracy dies. People stop caring about it. They cease to understand why it is valuable. And by the time they wake up to the fact, it is often too late.
Plato observed that political regimes follow a predictable evolutionary course, from oligarchy to democracy to tyranny.
Oligarchies give way to democracies when the would-be elite classes become decadent and develop interests apart from those they rule.
Democracies give way to tyrannies when mob passion overwhelms political wisdom and a populist autocrat seizes the masses.
The one constant is that the tyrant never starts out looking like a tyrant. On the contrary, in a democracy, the tyrant most commonly arises in the guise of the people’s champion. To this man, every trust is given. He’s the one man who can make everything whole again.
We all know who this reminds us of.
With Trump, we have a glimpse of what this sort of evolution looks like: A vulgar right-wing populism has emerged out of a maelstrom of anti-establishment hysteria from both sides of the political spectrum. Trump has been trying to play the part of a strongman fascist, right here in America. He views Mueller as a threat and wants him gone.
He began to argue for Mueller’s firing just days after his appointment to investigate the president’s 2016 campaign for collusion, the source said.
The revelation comes right as Mueller’s investigation appears to have intensified. Members of his staff in December finished an initial round of interviews with all of Trump’s senior White House staff.
Vast numbers of Americans have already made preparations to protest if Trump’s firing of Mueller becomes reality, a reaction similar to the public response after Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre. On that infamous evening, Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox. It ultimately led to his impeachment, but not before doing much to complete the ideological cleaving of America.
“Within hours of executing this Saturday Night Massacre, a firestorm of public protest erupted that led to the appointment of a new special prosecutor, the subpoenaing of dozens of additional damning tapes, the drafting of impeachment resolutions … and the ultimate unravelling of the Nixon Presidency.”
After the Saturday Night Massacre, the percentage of Americans who believed that Nixon should resign jumped from 19% to 38%, and reached 57% within six months. These kinds of low numbers are also reminiscent of Trump; it would be interesting to see how many of us currently think Trump should resign.
There’s a very real chance that if Trump pulls this he will get away with it because people cannot possibly be more disgusted with him than they already are. His base would cheer him on.
We also can’t be lulled into believing that this Congress will have the same sort of stomach and decency as the one that prepared to oust Nixon. Democrats hold neither house. And these Republicans have acted without conscience at every vote. There is not a sound reason to trust them.
Going forward, we will need to keep the closest possible eye on this and sound the alarm every way we can. Trump will do this if he thinks it will save him.
And besides. Nothing screams out the necessity for a blood-feud like golfing fees.
#AlwaysBernie Stop parading as millennials And leave it to the real millennials to continue berning your party to the ground. You are on your way out.
Not really, Crystal. Not today, and not ANY day. Our generation is NOT all a pack of Bern-crazed drooling freaks.
It just goes to show what we’re always talking about. They hate us, they want to replace us, and they will stop at no ugliness to get what they want. They’re worse than the Republican trolls, who attack the site here in maybe a one in ten ratio compared to what the neo-progressives do. And although she has about a millionth of Bernie’s name recognition, Tulsi may have more trolls even than him.