"Resistance" in Donald Trump's inept administration- documentation echos

Several credible books whereby evidence is provided about Donald Trump's incompetence. Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff and A Higher Loyalty by James Comey and Fear by Bob Woodward.

Burlington Free Press opinion excerpts

Vermont echos:

"...harrowing life inside Donald Trump’s inept White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Bob Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources..." Goodreads review.

Washington has been rocked by evidence of the White House in disarray.

Specifically, members of Donald Trump's staff appear to be working to contain the irresponsible worst Trumpzi impulses, even going behind his back in the name of what staff members see as the national interest.

"Fear: Trump in the White House," is the behind-the-scenes book by Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The Washington Post most famous for his coverage of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein.

Growing evidence has disclosed Trump’s dangerous disregard for the democratic norms of our country, and stunning revelations about his erratic, and misguided policy decisions and his pathological lying. We live in dangerous and unprecedented times. 

Our job now is to energize people, revitalize American democracy and fight for a government that will work for all of us, and not the wealthy few. 

"For the good of our country, Republicans in Congress must summon the courage to call out the president for the damage he is inflicting on the institution of the presidency, our nation, and our standing in the world.”

Kirstjen Nielsen has joined the White House exit list

Kirstjen Nielsen was ‘no doubt’ forced out as Homeland Security secretary  Reported by Nikki Schwab in the New York Post

Maine Writer- reality fear is that the incompetent Donald Trump will be appointing another ghoul to his "acting" administration. Scary. 

https://nypost.com/2019/04/07/dhs-secretary-kirstjen-nielsen-expected-to-resign-during-meeting-with-trump/

WASHINGTON – Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned Sunday.

Bill Kristol @BillKristol posted on Twitter - "Two words you won't find in Kirstjen Nielsen's resignation letter: Donald Trump. Nielsen writes, 'It has been my great honor to lead the men and women of the Department as its sixth Secretary'. She does not say it was an honor to have served President Trump"
WASHINGTON – Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out of the position, according to multiple news reports.

Bloomberg reported that the president met with Nielsen early Sunday evening and asked her to resign.

One former White House official told The Post that she was “no doubt” pushed out of the job, which she’s held since December 2017.

The president has become increasingly angry over the number of migrants from central American countries coming over the US’s southern border, with many of them trying to apply for asylum in the United States.

Trump’s frustrations were placed on Nielsen’s head, the Washington Post reported.

Trump had already indicated that he was looking for “tougher” individuals to handle immigration. Last week, the president abruptly yanked the nomination of Ronald Vitiello, who was to lead Immigration and Custom Enforcement. “We want to go in a tougher direction,” Trump said.

#Scary

Nielsen hadn’t been told of the president’s decision, nor did she agree with it.

Knowing she was on thin ice Sunday, Nielsen went into the White House meeting thinking she might be fired, the Associated Press reported.

On Sunday night, after tweeting that Nielsen “will be leaving her position” Trump again went on (another evil!) Twitter rant over the migrant flows.

“Mexico must apprehend all illegals and not let them make the long march up to the United States, or we will have no other choice than to Close the Border and/or institute Tariffs,” Trump wrote. “Our Country is FULL!”

Stockholm Syndrome in the Donald Trump administration

Donald Trump's behavior
Echo opinion letter from Missouri published in the Southeast Missourian

The recently published anonymous Op-Ed letter published in the New York Times coupled with Bob Woodward’s book, “Fear,” subtitled “Trump in the White House,” further adds to the “Red lights are blinking”, warning, issued by Dan Coats, director of National Intelligence. 

As Woodward noted, the real threat to America’s security comes not just from Russia, but also from Donald Trump himself.

During the course of the presidential campaign, we witnessed Trump’s erratic and impulsive behaviors; his “volcanic eruptions” and “verbal whacking” of his adversaries. 

Since becoming president, we have witnessed his reckless decisions based on monumental ignorance and his total lack of humanity in his decision to separate innocent little children from immigrant parents.

However, what is even more dangerous is the cowardly behavior of Trump’s cabinet secretaries as well as Republican lawmakers. Every one of them seems to be terrorized by his “verbal whacking.” Sen. McConnell has been compromised by virtue of his wife being a cabinet member. Fearful of being “whacked,” Speaker Paul Ryan simply decided to run away from the political arena.

Trump’s steadfast refusal to criticize Vladimir Putin, and his blatantly obsequious behavior toward him in Helsinki make us suspicious that Putin is blackmailing him. The fact that he convinced a handful of Republican lawmakers to go to Moscow as his surrogates to pay homage to Putin, further supports this suspicion.

It appears as though both Trump and his Republican minions suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological state of mind in which terrorized victims collude with terrorists.

K.P.S. KAMATH, Cape Girardeau

Donald Trump's paranoia

Trump’s World- Donald Trump believes there's a coup. He's freaked by The New York Times, "anonymous" opinion and he's seeing "enemies everywhere", reports Gabriel Sherman* in Vanity Fair.

With "Anonymous" still on the loose and the “administrative state” unchecked, the last person Trump trusts is Stephen Miller (OMG - that's Joseph Goebbels reincarnated or Bela Lagosse's ghost).

As Hurricane Florence (September 2018) bears down on the Carolinas, Donald Trump’s West Wing is still struggling to recover from yet another deluge of horrible news.

On September 11, Bob Woodward’s publisher Simon & Schuster announced that Woodward’s new book, Fear, has sold more than 750,000 copies and is on its way to a ninth printing. A CNN poll released this week showed Trump’s approval rating plummeting to 36 percent. 

With the midterm elections less than two months away, the West Wing is girding for Republicans to lose the House and even the Senate, sources said. 

Ivanka Trump is even worried about impeachment, a source close to her told me. “It’s just horrible,” a former White House official said.

As the parade of former allies and employees who’ve turned on him gets longer, Trump is increasingly embittered. 

According to sources, Trump has been furious at former economic adviser Gary Cohn and staff secretary Rob Porter, for their apparent cooperation with Woodward’s book. 

“Trump thinks he took Gary in and gave him a job when he was going nowhere at Goldman,” a Trump adviser told me. According to the adviser, Trump let it be known to Cohn and Porter that he would attack them publicly if they didn’t disavow the book. (On Tuesday, they both did.) “The president has had it,” a former West Wing official said. “When books like this come out, he tends to shut down and calls up people he sees on TV saying good things about him.”

But Trump’s anger over Woodward’s book is dwarfed by his continuing fixation on the anonymous New York Times op-ed. 

Sources told Gabriel Sherman that Trump is “obsessed,” “lathered,” and “freaked out” that the leaker is still in his midst. 

His son Don Jr. has told people he’s worried Trump isn’t sleeping because of it, a source said. 

Meetings have been derailed by Trump’s suspicion. “If you look at him the wrong way, he’ll spend the next hour thinking you wrote it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Much of what’s fueling Trump’s paranoia is that he has no clear way to identify the author. One adviser said Trump has instructed aides to call the anonymous author a “coward” in public to shame him or her. “He’s going to continue to shame this person,” a person close to Trump said. “The author will break under pressure or will eventually say, ‘fuck it, it’s me.’” Plans to administer polygraph tests to staff have seemingly died. “Nobody knows who it is,” a former official said.

Besides family, one of the only people Trump continues to trust is Stephen Miller. “The op-ed has validated Miller’s view, which was also Steve Bannon’s, that there’s an ‘administrative state’ out to get Trump,” a Republican close to the White House said. “There is a coup, and it’s not slow-rolling or concealed,” Bannon told me. “Trump believes there’s a coup,” a person familiar with his thinking said. Trump’s relationship with Secretary of Defense James Mattis, which was already strained, has become almost nonexistent, a former official said.

The West Wing is bracing for the climate to worsen. The increasing likelihood that Democrats will make big gains in the midterms is frustrating the White House’s efforts to get nominations confirmed in the Senate. 

According to a source, Johnny DeStefano,who’s in charge of personnel, has complained that Mitch McConnell’s staff will only focus on confirming judges before the midterms, leaving many important appointments, such as ones in the Export-Import Bank, unfilled. 

Ivanka and Jared Kushner, meanwhile, continue to agitate for Trump to replace Chief of Staff John Kelly with a more pliable manager. 

Ivanka recently asked a friend about Republican political adviser and former lobbyist Wayne Berman, a source briefed on the conversation said. 

Another name Ivanka has discussed is former federal prosecutor Matt Whitaker, who’s serving as Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff (Axios reported Whitaker is also a candidate to replace White House counsel Don McGahn).

Donald Trump pandering to the Religious Right

An interesting perspective published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Trump manipulates his right wing base’s fear of Black men

http://www.phillytrib.com/commentary/how-trump-manipulates-his-base-s-fear-of-black-men/article_55bac494-7866-5c79-b095-b4ed4ce59033.html

Surely, there can be no confusion as to why President Donald Trump so regularly winds up and takes swings at Black Athletes from the safety of his (cowardly) Twitter feed: he feeds on fear.

A full year after his 2016 election, and it is clear that Trump is only capable of (and only interested in) communicating with a base that is the unquestioned safe place for white supremacists, such as David Duke, Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, Matthew Heimbach and others who are his vocal supporters. 

These are Omega-level racists, figure heads of large “organizations” that today view Blacks, Jews and anyone else not of European origin as inferior and deserving of less. 

As flawed as the Democratic Party may be, nowhere in its ranks can a roster of similarly vile human beings be identified.

Right wing groups that are cloistered in Trump’s base won’t say it, but they have bought into the wrong minded stereotypes of Black male physical superiority, that were conceived in the minds of wealthy (slave owner) plantations owners, of centuries ago and still exist today, in "white supremacy" rallies.

But, four hundred years ago it was the belief that superior sexual potency, an ability to work from sun up to sun down, and a certainty of a higher threshold for pain — something wealthy southerners in the New World convinced themselves that they lacked but existed in abundance in the people of the Ivory Coast — was just a boat ride away.

Science has never proven these false “attributes.”

Fast forward to April 30th, 2014, when unarmed Dontre Hamilton was shot 14 times and killed by a white cop in Milwaukee. 

The officer testified that Hamilton had a “muscular build” and “most definitely would have overpowered me or pretty much any officer I can think of, to tell you the truth. He was just muscular.”

Hamilton was autopsied by the medical examiner at 5’7” and 169 pounds.

Hamilton was the case lead in research published earlier this year by the American Psychology Associated that found that people have a tendency to perceive Black men as larger and more threatening than similarly sized white men. This speaks to a fear — masked by his faux blustering — that Trump certainly shares with many of his supporters who are publicly hateful but privately petrified of Black men.

This explains why over this past weekend Trump knew he needed to tweet brashly and defiantly about the Black basketball players at UCLA whom he helped get out of China – kudos to him – after they were accused of shoplifting. For a man who who is under investigation by the Justice Department for what he might know about Russian meddling in our elections, has ramped up tensions between the United States and a mad dictator in North Korea looking to nuke us, and as a president who supports a suspected pedophile running for the Senate in Alabama, one might think Trump would have handled this low-level international incident and moved on to more pressing matters.

But the fragile psyche that makes up much of his base sporadically needs the red meat that is their leader lording over people of color, so Trump made sure to unashamedly on question on Twitter if the student-athletes would thank him, which they did.

With his dark skin, hardcore Oakland, California accent, locked-up hair and bruising running style, I’m pretty sure that Marshawn Lynch probably reminds many Trump supporters of Mighty Joe Young unchained. Lynch’s Raiders played in Mexico City over the weekend, and after standing for the Mexican anthem, Lynch, who has sat for the U.S. anthem this entire season, did so again on Sunday. Oakland’s Democratic Mayor Libby Schaaf, recognizing Lynch’s freedom of speech, tweeted her support for him

Not to miss out on this dog-whistle opportunity, Trump, knowing exactly what it takes to get basket “basket of deplorables” frothing at the mouth, tweeted that Lynch should be suspended for the rest of the season for standing for the Mexican anthem while sitting through the Star-Spangled Banner.

If you think you’ve seen this in some form before it’s because if you are of a certain age you have. 

Think of it as an update on Willie Horton, the Black criminal who while out on furlough from a Massachusetts jail raped a woman and pistol-whipped her fiancée.

George H. W. Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater masterfully attached the story to Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts at the time of the crime, convincing voters by playing on their unwarranted fears that a Dukakis’ victory would turn lose legions of marauding Mandingos across the country, and it is one of the primary reasons Bush captured the White House in 1988.

Trump has taken this horrible strategy to Twitter, and he even weaponized it. 

Get used to it; you will see it again, and Donald Trump will be ceratin that we see it often.

John N. Mitchell has worked as a journalist for more than a quarter century. He can be reached at jmitchell@phillytrib.com and Tweet at @freejohnmitchel.