But Her Emails: How Trump Trained the GOP to Hate Rule of Law 1
Note: I haven’t quite finished spinning my Ball of Thread out of which I will explain how Trump trained the GOP to hate rule of law. But for a number of reasons — this great Heather Cox Richardson piece marking the Maidan anniversary and Paul Manafort’s role in it, the arrest of Alexander Smirnov in conjunction with a 2020 attempt, assisted by Bill Barr, to frame Joe Biden, and the heightened urgency of the fate of Ukraine — I thought I’d publish this now.
In an alternate reality, the final report laying out how Trump knowingly requested and accepted help — help he may have denied, but which did come from Russia — to win the 2016 election might have started with a nod to these exhibits, submitted in conjunction with Paul Manafort’s guilty plea on September 14, 2018.
The criminal information and exhibits describe Manafort’s efforts to help Viktor Yanukovych neutralize his pro-Western female opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, first by prosecuting her for corruption, then by launching an increasingly complex transnational influence operation to “plant some stink on Tymo” to justify the prosecution. The exhibits describe how Manafort tried to spin a Skadden Arps report finding that Tymoshenko’s criminal intent “is almost non-existent,” and then how Manafort criminally covered up that effort at spin. There’s even a passage describing how Manafort manufactured a claim that Tymoshenko was antisemitic by getting an Israeli to make a statement to the NYPost.
“Bada bing bada boom,” Manafort bragged about his success in manufacturing a fake election scandal.
It was all an effort, Manafort described, to claim Ukraine was building a “‘rule of law’ democracy” so the EU and US would ignore Yanukovich’s human rights violations.
In that same alternate reality, Manafort would have honored his plea deal, and in the days following Manafort’s September 14 plea, he would have elaborated on the things he told prosecutors in the days leading up to it and some others they likely wanted to know. He might have explained how his Ukrainian backers and probably Konstantin Kilimnik — who a number of people, but not Manafort, admitted might be a Russian spy — seemed to know by December 2015 that Manafort would run Donald Trump’s campaign. Manafort might have revealed more about his meeting with Kilimnik on August 2, 2016, at which he reviewed polling that showed the key to winning was driving up Hillary’s negatives; Manafort might also have explained the relationship between that election discussion and two other topics discussed that night: how he would get paid millions and Kilimnik’s plan to carve up Ukraine for Russia’s benefit. If Manafort had fulfilled his plea deal, he might have explained what his long-time friend Roger Stone pitched to him on August 3, the day after that secret cigar bar meeting, as a way to “save Trump’s ass.”
He might have said more than he otherwise did about how Stone learned, within a few weeks after that August 3 conversation, that WikiLeaks would be dropping emails stolen from John Podesta that would show, Stone hoped, that Hillary’s campaign manager had the same kind of Russian exposures that Manafort did.
Manafort would be vindicated because he had to leave the campaign for being too pro-Russian, and this would show that Podesta also had links to Russia and would have to leave.
None of that happened.
Manafort seems to have decided — perhaps after a conversation his attorney had with Rudy Giuliani around the same day he flipped — to string out Mueller’s prosecutors until after the midterms. After the election Trump fired Jeff Sessions and ultimately replaced him with someone who would shut down the investigation and see to it that Manafort’s imprisonment remained comfortable, and not just comfortable, but amenable to further collusion with Rudy on schemes that would frame Hunter Biden for tax and influence peddling crimes in Ukraine, until such time as Trump could pardon his former campaign manager for tax and influence peddling crimes in Ukraine.
In this alternate reality, then, the story of how Trump taught Republicans to hate rule of law might start with a story of how his campaign manager had spun corruption as rule of law in the past, in Ukraine, and how the 2016 election did something similar in the US.
But then, Republicans didn’t need Paul Manafort’s help to demonize Hillary Clinton. That had been a core focus of the Republican party since her spouse’s presidency. That unrelenting focus on criminalizing the Clintons (and via that narrative, dehumanizing Democrats, thereby heightening polarization) had been nourished over three decades in an increasingly airtight Fox News bubble, one newly challenged by even sloppier, more radical propaganda outlets.
In the years before the election contest with Trump, the right wing propaganda machine manufactured two criminal investigations into Hillary to “plant some stink” on her.
In January 2016 — fifteen years after DOJ first investigated the Clinton Foundation — three different FBI offices opened investigations into the Clinton Foundation based entirely or substantially on Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. Notably. At least one of the FBI agents handling an informant on that investigation was affirmatively pro-Trump. “I saw a lot of scared MFers on … [my way to work] this morning,” one gloated the day after the election. “Start looking for new jobs fellas. Haha.” As NYT first reported, that investigation remained open until after Trump left office.
And by the time Manafort joined Trump’s campaign in March 2016, House Republicans were three years into their endless Benghazi investigations. After years of pushing, that had morphed into the investigation into Hillary’s private server, which would merge right into the public and private pursuit of Hillary’s deleted emails. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump begged a hostile country to find those deleted emails for him, even as his ascendant National Security Advisor worked with a Senate staffer to find out of hostile powers had gotten copies.
Details of both investigations into Hillary leaked, with a slew of stories (one, two, three) fed through Devlin Barrett (then still at WSJ) in the days before the election.
Of course it was Jim Comey who did the real damage, first by usurping DOJ’s authority to issue a prosecutorial decision and then planting some stink on Hillary while doing so. That led to a series of congressional hearings, and ultimately to the reopening of the investigation, predictably leaking days before the election.
Among the many but-fors that decided that election, Comey’s actions were easily the most important. Comey did this — made repeated attempts to stave off claims of partisanship — in a naive bid he could convince the hoards chanting “Lock her up!” of the legitimacy of the decision not to charge.
We’ll never know, but that effort, the orchestrated campaign to criminalize Hillary followed by a ham-handed effort to convince right wingers of the legitimacy of a considered prosecutorial decision, by itself, may have been enough to carry Trump to victory.
This, then, was the raw material Russia exploited in 2016 — stoking both sides of a deep partisan divide fueled by two decades of a propaganda focused on criminalizing Hillary Clinton.
The Republicans proved in that election (or reconfirmed the Whitewater test) that if only they repeated allegations often enough, loudly enough, preferably over and over again in Congress, eventually some criminal investigation would result, a criminal investigation that Republicans could then amplify.
The Republicans came to that election with an unshakeable belief that Hillary was a criminal and if DOJ said she wasn’t, there must be something wrong with DOJ, not any shortcomings in the evidentiary case.
And then Russia dropped a match on that already flaming bonfire.
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We Hold These Shoes To Be Self-Evident.
there once was a man named joe biden
the GOP is trilling
he s guilty of hiding
a grift so sumptuous
it belittles the trumptuos-ness
of the golden sneakers
the former guy is shilling
Speaking of sneakers, his shell company for the NFTs/sneakers is registered at his golf course lol: 3505 SUMMIT BLVD.
WEST PALM BEACH, FL 33406
http://search.sunbiz. org/Inquiry/corporationsearch/SearchResultDetail?inquirytype=EntityName&directionType=Initial&searchNameOrder=CICVENTURES%20M210000044030&aggregateId=forl-m21000004403-3a3d1546-28ce-4220-adee-cbeb943dd850&searchTerm=CIC%20VENTURES%20LLC&listNameOrder=CICVENTURES%20M210000044030
Hope the monitor noticed that bit.
Don-dash.con LLC…
I wonder where the shoes are made?
Stupid question, I know.
You could ask that question about most athletic and other shoes these days.
Yeah. That’s why I said “stupid question, I know.” 🤣
https://x.com/bobbygvegas/status/1759266214520443093
on issue of how/who made the sneakers…
Any products liability lawyers out there able to opine on whether the metal stars that make up the flag portion of the golden man’s golden shoe are a choking hazard and should force a recall? I find it unlikely Trump or his minions would have researched, prior to production, any regs related to ‘cap’ sizes or prior ‘button’ recalls.
Shoes were sold out within hours. Would hate to see any unsuspecting buyer, Trump fan or not, unwittingly harm a toddler in his company….more likely through perforation, than outright airway-blocking-suffocation, but injury is still injury, nonetheless.
Some people are saying a Chinese labor-camp. Why? It’s like Trump cares about the Uyghurs.
Should be: It’s NOT like Trump cares about the Uyghurs.
Jesus Christ, earthworm, lol, that is a crazy limerick. You know there are rules? Limerick is a game like Soduku, though you’d need a 4 foot starting line because Paul Manafort is two feet. The more idiotic and forced the rhyme the better.
3 feet A
3 feet A
2 feet B
2 feet B
3 feet A
The feet are always rising meter with a limerick, so iambs ( – ! ) and anapests ( – – ! ) or maybe a spondee is okay ( ! ! ) . I don’t care about being pedantic because this is truly unimportant.
wetzel: consider me just another wingnut beating down the walls of the limerick
@CharlesPPierce
“He’s one step from selling counterfeit CDs from a card table on 2d Avenue.”
At this point, I think he’d have to sell those counterfeit CDs in another jurisdiction.
Ne’er Jordans
The Emperor’s New Shoes
Gilt Pfft
Those wearing tfg’s clown shoes shall be known as the golden fleeced.
At the bottom of the ad it reads “The images shown are for illustration purposes only and may not be an exact representation of the product.”
In other words, you may be buying half a pair of used imitation Crocs.
Bad Hair Jordans
And then there’s the Trump fake $2 bill with his mugshot on it, for the low price of $19.95, one of a series of Trump fake tender. In dupes he trusts.
I keep thinking of the campaign poster of Trump sitting on his golden toilet wearing those trumpy shoes.
Outstanding article! You are far along in untangling the web weaved by the Putin, Mogilevich and Abramovich Russia organized crime syndicate. Keep working in it!
“how Trump taught Republicans to hate rule of law”
This assumes that Republicans–the party of pardoning Nixon and the Iran-contra conspirators, among other things–ever actually believed in the rule of law, rather than just using it as a conjure word and bludgeon against their opponents.
Maybe so, it does however seem they are more open about it. Trump may have shown them they can do whatever they want with no consequences.
Before Nixon, they were better people.
There are still republicans who claim all is fair in the GOP way of politics because mayor Daily threw the 1960 election to Kennedy.
Nixon was bad long before that. My mother remembered his campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, about 1948. That’s how he got into Congress, by lying about a woman.
Nixon said Gahagan Douglas was “pink right down to her underwear.”
Yeah, while the Republicans were stealing votes downstate.
Mayor Daley not Mayor Daily. Or Hizzoner.
“Hizzoner” was a book by Ed Koch, one-time Mayor of NYC.
Also routinely used to refer to Richard J. Daley, and the title of a play “Hizzoner,” about which the NYT wrote in 2006: “From the moment Neil Giuntoli sets foot onstage at the tiny Prop Thtr on the Northwest Side of Chicago, it is as if the former mayor has come back to life.”
Except when they weren’t: think Joe McCarthy.
McCarthy is a good illustration of the old dynamic. The GOP let him run free for a while, because a ton of them were empty hacks who didn’t care about his anti-pinko and anti-gay crusades.
But when he started getting too radical in attacking regular order, Eisenhower threw his weight over to the liberal side to shut him down.
The current GOP sees no value in the rule of law, which is a difference withthe past. It’s a compounding threat to their policy disasters.
McCarthy was, in many ways, a front man. Finance and manufacturing businesses, for example, allowed McCarthy to set the tone because he lowered costs. His crusade made workers and unions reluctant to push for more of the income and rights they had been promised, in exchange for not demanding those things during WWII. Hollywood moguls made a mint that way.
Right, and what led to his later downfall was the series of Army McCarthy hearings.
McCarthy was finally seen by Eisenhower as a threat to the larger establishment he backed, and tellingly TV networks cancelled regular broadcasts to cover the hearings.
The GOP and media establishment understood back then that there were limits to demogoguery before it bit them back. Today’s GOP and media execs, beginning in 2016 and continuing to now, think there is no harm to the status quo from backing a guy who will destroy it.
Welcome to the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party.
And not even always better morally, but vastly more aware of how the rule of law helps them.
There will be huge purges within the GOP if Trump wins in November, purges which will make the death threats during the House speaker’s race look like nothing.
The current GOP is too dumb to see what the old GOP could understand – if you don’t want unauthorized police forces knocking down your door without a warrant, make sure you don’t trash the rule of law.
They see it as authorized police forces – authorized by the Republican party leadership – knocking down other people’s doors, bad people who don’t agree with the Republican party and might be working to get it out of power.
Things like the 1/6 attack and the death threats swarming around the recent speaker votes have made it awfully clear to most of them that it’s not enemies of the party who are at risk, it’s anyone Trump wants to get out of the way, and that includes his rank and file.
He’s broken the basic logic of “reward your friends and punish your enemies” and gone to simply “punish everyone.” And in addition to training the GOP to attack the rule of law, he’s trained them to stop standing up for their own survival.
Oh, you mean like Nazi informants ? And later Soviet informants ? And now Putin informants ?
My father won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for exposing a GOP McCarthy committee in the Washington State legislature that was destroying the careers of progressives in the state. Years later, the disgraced chair of that committee was the oldest delegate at the 1984 GOP convention.
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I’d say Reagan, but ‘To-may-to/to-mah-to.’ They’ve been against the rule of law for a long time.
As far as Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, it’s always worth remembering that Carolyn Ryan, top political editor for the NY Times, personally negotiated for the rights to publish parts of it.
And as news for page A1, not even for the Opinion section.
And there’s a huge reason why Schweizer wanted Carolyn Ryan’s help far more than Murdoch’s. Ryan’s deal pushed the nonsense narrative about Uranium One into the mainstream in a way that Fox News could not.
Fox viewers already thought Clinton was the devil.There was not much more help Murdoch could give. But in 2015 Clinton had far more goodwill among Democrats and independents, and there was no better outlet for driving up her negatives than Ryan’s political coverage.
Ahh yes, Uranium One, the subject of the last hearing republicans held as lame ducks in 2018 after they lost control of the House in the midterms. Grassley even had a page on his website describing all the illegal activity that is now http404. These pols never learn.
During that time, Carolyn Ryan’s political desk was still treating the Clinton Foundation as a political liability without mentioning Ryan’s role in making it an issue in the first place.
John Solomon was connected with that last hearing, and was putting out a great deal of propaganda at The Hill, so she was not alone. There is/was a multi-million dollar cottage industry based solely on smearing the Clintons that began in the late 80’s. They’re trying to do the same thing with the Bidens.
Oh sure, Solomon was pushing it, it’s just that by that time he was known as Jimmy Finkelstein’s messenger boy for the niche publication The Hill.
What Ryan did in 2015 and beyond was move the garbage out of the bubble of voters who didn’t need convincing and infected the much broader media landscape. It’s a critical distinction.
The question is; what is the Democratic Party and its supporters going to do about this? We’ve known this for years; the phony allegations and investigations, the BS accusations and faux media outrage, endless hearings based on all of the above…where are the legitimate hearings in the Senate, I don’t know, like Douchner and his Saudi millions, Thomas, Leo, Thomases sugar daddy, emoluments, violence against election officials…I mean mon dieu, that’s all low hanging fruit…
Not much at this point, certainly not in an election year. One should remember that the controlling party of the House that impeached (or began the official process) a sitting President lost seats in the next election. Now there is not enough data to link the two, but it is clear that the impeachment itself did not enhance their chances of gaining any seats whether it be Presidential or midterm. Democrats need to focus their efforts on running the government which is what they were elected to do.
Never learn what? the GOP set out to kneecap Hillary in whatever way possible, and they succeeded. All they learn from that is “more hearings” & “more unfounded disinfo”, like the gratuitous (but possibly successful PR-wise) pre-impeachment hearings for Biden.
The idea they’d feel foolish or ashamed for being wrong is misguided.
Didn’t learn to not use the powers of their position to politically smear the opposition in a fool’s hope that the electorate at large is as dumb as they think they are. Hillary almost won, and lost partly because everybody (including Trump) expected her to win, which allowed someone unqualified and little experience to swing enough votes his way. Which did not repeat in his reelection since Biden won both Michigan and Pennsylvania by wider margins than Trump did in 2016 when he won both by under a point each (Wisconsin has always had close races) and Biden even added both Arizona and Georgia. Why Trump lost in 2020 was for a number of reasons, impeachment is most likely not one of them. I can’t figure out if the main reason was because he was really bad at the job or campaigning for reelection (which wasn’t a factor in 2016) I guess it’s a combination of both.
The MSM has orange bronzing make-up on their hands.
Uranium One, was originally based in South Africa, but merged in 2007 with Canada-based UrAsia Energy. Shareholders there retained a controlling interest until 2010, when Russia’s nuclear agency, Rosatom, completed purchase of a 51% stake. Hillary Clinton played a part in the transaction only because it involved the transfer of ownership of a material deemed important to national security — uranium, amounting to one-fifth of U.S. reserves — thus requiring the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), on which the U.S. Secretary of State sits. Nine U.S. Cabinet members of the Obama Administration approved that deal.
They were told that repeatedly. It didn’t stop them from creating a false narrative that the Clinton’s were somehow profiting off the sale.
Marcy,
This little ball of thread of yours is gonna shine a light. “And then Russia dropped a match on that already flaming bonfire”. Heat is what you do best. Finding the individual distinct components that when mixed in proportion and proximity, combustion is inexorable takes your unique talents. Thank you and you community family for all of your illumination of our democracy’s vital signs.
Exactly! Well said!
I wrote this with some trepidation as I know this will be an unpopular take.
I was a victim of this Manafort op. I foolishly voted for Bernie Sanders in that election. In a way, it didn’t matter, as I lived in a state that Trump was bound to win. But if you look at the 3rd party returns in 2016, they were remarkably strong…moreso on Johnson and Stein’s side, but there were also several other choices, including writing in Bernie. Take a look at PA for example: 2012 3rd party got 1.4% of the vote, 2016 a whopping 4.3%(!!), and in 2020 back to a more reasonable 1.2%. The Libertarian party had the strongest showing in 2016, but the Greens were up there too. There’s a reason Stein was at that table with Flynn for the RT gala.
All of this is preamble for the uncomfortable truth IMHO, that 2016 was an election with incredibly poor candidates and that Russia was poised to benefit regardless of the outcome. You can argue they really hit the jackpot with Trump, and likely they did. But there’s some highly credible reporting (see David Shimer’s work in the book “Rigged” published in 2020), that Stone’s Stop the Steal in 2016 was much more organized than 2020, to the point that the WH had crisis teams in large cities on standby if Hilary won and Trump tried to mobilize his followers with claims of a rigged election. In my mind it’s unclear how the government would have fared. It could have been 1/6 on steroids. Certainly Trump was gearing up for this scenario a couple of weeks prior to the election.
My point in writing this is that I’m not sure what the worse outcome would have been. Certainly, I’m not happy we have a radicalized Trump and GOP. But I wonder if that would have happened no matter what.
And I suspect there’s still a lot more to the story than we will ever know.
Let’s make clear where the responsibility lies. Clinton was perhaps the most qualified person to ever run for president. She was a great candidate. She won the popular vote, by a lot. The problem was the press, not her, acting as an amplifier for right-wing lies about her. Remember the NYT front page a few days before the election, with what, a half-dozen stories about “her emails?” This is a problem we have today, too, with Biden’s mental capacity – which no one who works with him seems to question – a constant theme of negative stories, while Trump’s incoherent speeches seem to get a pass.
Hear, hear
On The Media has a podcast this week delving into the NY Times’ amplification of Rwing talking points to the detriment of democracy. Other media amplifies NYT’s ledes. The NYT then promotes this media feedback loop as fact because media has made the Rwing talking point via the NYT a concern that everyone is talking about.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538775/on-the-media
NPR has its own problems in that department. Nowhere near the reach or prestige of the Times, but still plagued by the compulsion to both-sides political issues.
re ” Clinton was perhaps the most qualified person to ever run for president”
Who were the other contenders for this? Seroiusly, It’s probably a bit more likely that current President’s running for a second (or, in the case of FDR a third and a fourth term)) may have been a tad more qualified.
Biden was a mediocre candidate going for his 3rd attempt & still needed to be saved by Covid (preventing need to campaign) & a deal with James Clyburn.
As a president he’s been great, & his credentials were of course very strong. Running & serving are very different. He *is* feeling old, but still competent. In a sane world a nearly-as-old shyster pitching cap snafflers & ginsu knives wouldn’t be in contention, and the Dems would have a lot more viable candidates. (MSM & Fox have been picking them off)
You’re giving too much weight to COVID. There were also protests going on by people who did not normally protest. All of this sparked by the outrage over how the police slowly murdered someone just because they could. Trump’s reaction through the DOJ and other agencies had an impact on the electorate and the election was probably decided before early voting began.
It was obvious to me that wa-rickf was referring to non-incumbents. Just about any presidential incumbent running for a non-first-term would have the benefit of having done the job for at least 4 years. This is the kind of low-grade put-down that perpetuates the HRC as devil woman hysteria on all sides.
I still think that it’s a bit of a hyperbole to say HRC was the most qualified Presidential candidate for the office ever. And, yeah, I’m not a fan of Clinton’s foreign policies on a number of levels…in case anyone was wondering. In case no one noticed, there’s still civil wars going on in Syria and Libya…like more than a dozen years after these were thought to be great places to destabilize.
On PAPER, yes, but so were Herbert Hoover and G HW Bush. She was a terrible campaigner. She ran not to lose. She picked an uninspiring White Guy as her running mate instead a person of color. Predictably voters of color had lower turnout than in the Obama elections of ’08 and ’12. Her commercials sucked. She picked terrible people to run her campaigns in ’08 and ’16. Still, BUT FOR James Comey’s thumb on the scale, she would have won.
I voted for but I seriously wondered about what kind of president she would be given the horrible choices she made in her campaign support.
Mika and Morning Joe didn’t help either. The constant harping on the emails . . . Not to mention all of Secretary Clinton’s predictions about Don came true. I’m still curious about what Guccifer 2.0 did with the hacked but never released RNC emails . . .
IMO, if it weren’t for the instability from the economic crash of 08-09, Clinton likely would have become President in 2016. But both the GOP and the DP had to look outside their regular party machinery just to maintain relevance to many voters.
Was Hillary Clinton the most qualified presidential candidate ever? I liked this analysis from October 2016, which, after noting that the “most broadly and lengthily experienced president in US history was James Buchanan, also the worst president in US history,” tallied up relevant experience of each major candidate (prior to becoming president) back to the 1948 election:
https://kalimac.livejournal.com/911613.html
As you can see, by the criteria listed there, Bob Dole was the most qualified candidate and Hillary Clinton was either second or eleventh (of twenty-six) depending on what you counted. Donald Trump was the least qualified if business experience doesn’t count, and the most qualified if it does.
Even in real time, what struck me about 2016 was that both major parties ran the one candidate who could possibly lose to their main opponent.
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[citation needed]
Yo forgot the email smear campaign. And the pneumonia smear campaign. And all the Clintons-in-general smear campaigns.
With control of both houses of Congress, a J6 type event in 2017 may well have ended Democracy then n there.
How ironic that a Trump win in 2016 might have derailed a plot to subvert.
I think most of the above is true, but it misses one thing. Even with Clinton fatigue, years of demonization by the GOP, Comey’s action near the end, we all knew that Hillary would win. Voters who might have voted Democratic if they were in love with Hillary stayed home or went third party. It didn’t matter, they reasoned, she’s going to win anyway. Trump hasn’t got a chance. Really sad.
I don’t know if that’s true or not…I voted; most folks I know voted, and I live in a purplish turning blue state…people knew about the orange Mussolini, and they knew about Hilary’s qualifications and her baggage. She won, except she didn’t…
James Comey reopening the Clinton investigation for a week during early voting – then said, “never mind” absolutely had an effect on voters.
The reason why Comey reopened the investigation was due to pressure from his wife.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3886942/Resignation-letters-piling-disaffected-FBI-agents-wife-urging-admit-wrong-Director-Comey-jumped-chance-reopen-Hillary-investigation.html
People keep saying about poor candidates in 2016. Hillary was not a poor candidate. It is really hard to win a third term and this is what people perceived her to be after two Obama terms.
Among other things, she lost because of association to Bill.
It was a lot of poison against her on social media, that was not organic.
The fracture of the Democratic Party between the Sanders camp and Clinton camp has not been healed. It was a real division and it was fascinating to watch the caucus between these two factions in Albany County Wyoming. The two groups were arrogant in their own ways but in the end the Clinton supporters forced their way into the lead. The younger, more male Bernie supporters were cast aside and many left the party never to return.
A Clinton supporter brought the Bernie Bros up in a recent platform committee meeting and I felt it necessary to point out the Russians divided all of us and we should attempt to understand how everyone was influenced by Putin’s organized division. I have tried to influence some of the Bernie Bros to return to the Party but most had no clue that how they had been played.
The younger voters coming out to support Biden during the last election were not tainted by the Clinton/Sanders division. The Party is attracting and keeping these voters so far but the Palestinian issue looks like another way to divide the Party again.
Your point re:the Palestinian issue is a good one. Those of us who have watched the MidEast for the past 50 years realize there is little black and white, just multiple shades of highly imperfect.
It is easy to believe in perfection when you are young, and to react with passion and belief. Sometimes however, an imperfect good that can be is better than a perfect-perfect that will never be.
HRC was the right candidate for the right time. She was defeated by the skullduggery outlined here, but also the desires for the perfect-perfect candidate.
excellent. I remember well the constantly ‘beating down’ of HRC. constant. I grew weary and then I got angry …at her. It was the weirdest fucking moment, I was stunned. Q; Why her? I voted for her sure but I Q’ed it? Then Comer came out and prior to djt’s running, I never experienced the level of lies, deceit, manipulation on steroids (internet) of ‘believe what I say not what you see, hear’.
Santos’ really comical capture of the GOP’s essence, blowing up reality and the constant montage of manipulation, AND the failure of mainstream media to provide any life raft for us at all..
I thank you again and always Marcy for your in.you.face tweets when a reporter is not practicing Journalism but just being a microphone for the lies. I believe
And now with the ongoing attacks on Hunter Biden as a means to attack his father, we’re watching what is more or less the same playbook with a different cast.
— plant some stink;
— launch fraudulent investigations and make lots of noise while doing so;
— blow it up in media, both news and social.
Rinse, repeat. This is the Republican way of “winning” the hearts and minds of the American public, because they can’t do it offering genuine democratic governance.
Come on, Rayne. You can’t have an autocratic fascist state without your Emmanuel Goldstein to direct the Two Minutes Hate towards. First it was Clinton, now it’s Biden, soon it will be any Democrat writ large.
As I told my erstwhile “friend,” who is now very much a member of the Koch Octopus, “1984 is a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual.”. He seemed to think I was joking.
Orange Jesus selling sneakers for $399. “Sneaker Con” was the perfect name for it. Just saw a pair on craigslist for $3000. Josh Hawley should get them for his next insurrection sprint.
A good shot of a couple of those sneakers:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218697579
from Roger Friedman/Showbiz411: “On the website, Trump out and out lies about owning the sneaker line. In small print at the bottom the site reads: ‘Trump’ and the associated design are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of CIC Ventures LLC. Trump Sneakers are not designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals. 45Footwear, LLC uses the Trump name, image and likeness under a license agreement which may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.’
I [Roger] can tell you exclusively that in fact CIC is registered to Trump’s lawyer, John Marion, in West Palm Beach, Florida. The authorized person is Nicholas Luna, Trump’s aide aka ‘body man’ who testified in front of the January 6th committee.”
That describes Trump’s standard licensing arrangement. Owning the trademark does not require that the owner design, manufacture, distribute or sell the underlying product. The owner can merely license it. He does have to do something to “work” the mark or lose it.
Even when they do not manufacture, distribute, or sell, mark owners often do influence or control product design. Some owners, those that own marks for shoes and jeans, for example, exert considerably more influence, but structure that influence to avoid the costs and liability associated with manufacturing, distributing and selling, especially internationally.
Trump, on the other hand, seems to know squat about those other tasks and cares less, so long as the license fees are paid. Might be why he sold so many shitty products in the past. He does often use cutouts to hide his involvement, and is likely to do more of it.
It’s not even much hiding when he uses his own golf course as the address as I linked above.
A lot of discrete legal owners can operate from the same or similar address. It can be legit. With Trump. probably not, but it requires investigation and proof, hurdles that before now kept enforcement at bay.
A greedy grifter exploiting humanity.
I emailed an insulting reply to the craigslist ad. (Ad location was given as SoHo NYC.) Got this reply:
Included was a link to a fundraiser: “Let’s pay the Trump $364 million unjust fine!!!, organized by James Bott”
I’ll bet Murdochs could raise a pretty penny for their $787 million Dominion payout by selling Tucker’s discarded underwear (in the unlikely event Jesse Waters would let it go).
[FYI – blockquote tags added to offset your email excerpt for improved readability. /~Rayne]
Any chance you looked to see if actor Harvey Keitel’s political ideology is conservative or liberal? I have a suspicion that’s a phish attempt masquerading weakly as a well-known actor.
Thanks for cleaning that up for me.
No, I did not check; I assume it’s all a scam.
Shouldn’t be long now until Sneaker Con Man brags about the high demand and resale price for his incredibly fine footwear.
Or checked to see if that was Harry, Herman, Hunter, Hugo or Huxton Keitel?
I’m going with “Huckster”.
Which of those names would come to mind as soon as you saw “H. Keitel” on the signature line? *eye roll*
Exactly, or so I’ve heard from R. Hudson and T. Selleck.
When I say “F. Trump” I don’t mean Fred.
Well, in 2016, he was unabashedly pro-Hillary: https://www.thedailybeast.com/harvey-keitel-real-tough-guys-dont-vote-trump.
So this likely phishing attack is a two-fer, potentially smearing a Clinton supporter. They’re like abusive exes who never give up punishing their ex.
It may not be political, and just a scam. MAGA supporters seem to be easy marks, and Trump won’t see even a penny.
Which is why I said a phishing attack and not a solicitation for donations — but why stop at just phishing if you can also score a political hit while trying to acquire the authenticity which comes with a celebrity’s name.
“It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.” Voltaire
That t-shirt needs to have a picture of the Trump Cheeto-Jesus.
I wish somebody would sell a t shirt with Smiling Tish James With Coffee photo on front and Smiling E.Jean Carroll With Roberta Kaplan photo on the back. No words needed.
Donald was booed during his Sneaker Con presentation and probably cut his presentation mercifully short.
https: //abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-met-boos-chants-selling-sneakers-philadelphia/story?id=107329562
More money for Jean Carroll!
Great analysis and knitting of multiple fibers to create a fully comprehensible and highly plausible story. (non-yarn).
I am struck at the unbelievable amount of sustained effort it requires to pull off this nonsense. The hatching of the idea(s), working out the details, the players, the messaging. The tedious repeating and repeating and repeating. Does all that energy that they expend to achieve the goal of power indicate that they are aware that they are either totally incompetent or unwilling to do something productive? I would think that if they redirected that same amount of energy into solving real problems and writing useful legislation and used ethical influencing, we, as a country would be amazing! My totally worthless opinion about why is this: they have all realized that their ideology is completely beaten down by the modern world. It just doesn’t apply anymore. Their dogma is simply at odds with reality; therefore, they must make stuff up and bash the other side to retain even a scintilla of relevance.
The Manaforts of the world and the people he answers to only care about one thing: power. Anything that impedes that is a direct threat to them. Ideals, ideology, morals, society, etc; these are just means to an end or impediments blocking their way forward, nothing more, nothing less.
I put Putin in that camp too, but Putin also is motivated by this mythical Slavic empire he pines for that never really existed in the first place.
seems like your comment, horsewoman, is a totally sane one describing what used to be true in a more or less sane world.
It’s really hard to attribute how a person would want to do this ‘nonsense’ with their life, but I think people are compromised step-wise within mafias through mutual complicity in the crimes they commit together. They mentor each other like the Greek junta in the 50’s, who had a program to train their torturers by first having them stand guard outside the door. It’s the foot-in-the-door technique. They are reborn in the organization. Cognitive dissonance predicts that symbolic consciousness might lose the form of normal human moral reasoning. Maybe there isn’t hope for moral purpose after you have worked for Jonas Savimbi.
Elseweb years ago was an insightful article on how the ‘hatching of ideas, working out the details, players, messaging’ actually works. Social media is an incredibly effective way to vet ideas. Post a meme, see if it gets amplified. If not, try again. If so, modify slightly (and this is happening organically with each poster tweaking messaging on their own) and see how it fairs.
When you get a message that is really starting to get traction, spin it to the pre-arranged network that has been created – those posters who have reach in the hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. Bang, nationwide single message coverage.
And if you have a network of foreign actors willing to amplify, so much the better.
…and in 2016 there was also Jill Stein to hoover up all the ultra-principled, so the perfect was indeed the enemy of the good. And instead America got the absymal. A history lesson to be learnt, no..?
This conversation is not complete without an acknowledgment of an arguably scary claim: whatever may be said about Republican’s willingness to flout rule of law, they now *must* do so. Their “popular vote deficit” going back to 1992 (the first true post-Reagan election) is 35 million votes over 8 elections. And current statistics are even worse for them. Some analysts have argued that even a 5% increased turnout rate, once a ridiculous goal but in the era of mail-in ballots and Taylor Swift-inspired SM campaigns now simply aspirational, would wipe out Republican control of the House indefinitely. And those studies were before any pilfering of RNC coffers, replacement of qualified internal staffers, or stigma of a likely soon-to-be convicted leader.
The fundies won’t accept compromise on reproductive rights. I have a family member who treats it as a point of honor that they have sat out elections rather than vote for a candidate who “supports killing babies”, and there’s many in that camp I’m sure. At the same time, the (mutual fund)ies won’t accept compromise on progressive taxation and assistance programs. But poll after poll demonstrates not just a plurality but a majority of Americans do not support both at the same time. Thus the paradox, in many cases only a candidate with bona fides in both areas can survive a primary, but on average they enter at a significant nationwide (and not uncommonly state-wide) electoral disadvantage that grows worse by the year.
There is no coming back from this for them. The very survival of the Republican Party is in question, and there is no Southern Strategy this time around that will allow the elites to safely migrate and hold their power. It’s the Macbeth quote in action: “They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, but, bear-like, I must fight the course”. And we the people are the ones that will get mauled if they succeed. So vote, canvass, even run if it fits.
I fear this is exactly where we are. The Republicans have self-destructed into several groups who don’t trust each other. Perhaps one of those groups has any moral compass but has been sidelined. Since hate of the Other is a prime concept, they can’t come back together and can’t contribute to society in general.
I read something that referenced the article below last week in a non-political publication like Elle or Vogue. Can’t remember but the link below is to the primary source, from the Survey Center on American Life, founded and directed by Daniel A.Cox., a project of the American Enterprise Institute. This is a ‘center right’ organization, so this research has helped provide a play book for the GOP’s battle plan. They are running scared.
“The people most likely to take on the political identity of their parents are those raised in politically cohesive and active families. Americans raised by parents who consistently voted for one party are far more likely to adopt their parents’ politics. Sixty-two percent of Americans raised by parents who consistently voted Democratic, identify as Democrats today, while 57 percent of those who had Republican-voting parents report being Republican….
But there’s a critical exception to this rule. Young women raised in Republican households are far less likely than young men to identify as Republican as adults. Less than half (44 percent) of young women with Republican parents report that they are Republican compared to two-thirds (67 percent) of young men. ”
“When young women are raised by Democratic parents, their values strongly align with their family’s politics. More than seven in 10 young women (73 percent), and a similar number of young men, who have Democratic parents are themselves Democrats. ” And “Only 37 percent of college-educated women raised in Republican households are still Republican as adults, compared to 65 percent of women with less formal education.”
That is the basis for the Taylor Swift paranoia. It is why you see women voting against expectations in states that have been trying to outlaw abortion, in spite of polling in those states, such as Ohio. And most importantly, why you see the GOP plotting to eradicate or at least mortally wound education across the country.
https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-republican-parents-raise-democratic-daughters/
My mother was raised in a Republican household, when it was still respectable. After she left home, she started voting D, but she didn’t change her registration until they moved to Texas in 1980. She said she told her aunt, her father’s sister, and got the response “your father would be rolling over in his grave.” To which my mother responded “then someone will have to go out and pat down the grass.”
I was raised in a republican household but the minute I learned about FDR in middle school I knew I was a democrat. My republican mother cried when FDR died & was furious at overhearing Rotarians celebrating his death. That info just cemented it for me.
I grew-up in SoCal in the 70s and 80s – L.A. County, not behind the Orange curtain, in a middle-class white neighborhood. Both patents were Republicans although they never stated so. I knew because of their bigotry and racism – especially dad’s. I never wanted to be like my parents and have consciously made nearly every choice opposite of theirs – even to the point of parking my car in the garage st night. My parents could never do that – ever. Their garage was always full of junk they never used again. My philosophy: If you haven’t used it in a year, you don’t need it.
Hating the rule of law, it seems to me, has been premised on hating each other. We now accept “divisiveness” as part of our national identity to the point of cliche, like some kind of Original Sin; I pity those too young to remember a time when online affiliations did not serve to define one’s identity–when, in fact, you got to define your perceived self anew with every interaction.
America’s best self–its most egalitarian, idealistic, aspirational identity–shines in its laws. That is reason enough for professional cheaters and conmen to personally countervail the justice system. What’s new is the phenomenon EW writes about: a “hostile” foreign adversary with every incentive to torpedo America’s image has succeeded in installing at the apex of our government a human bomb set to explode in its silo.
None of this gambit would have succeeded without Russia first reading the room. What they saw: despite our denial, we remained a profoundly racist (and less obviously misogynist and hetero-centric) nation well into the 21st century. The hate curdled on the ground. All they, and their fool of a puppet Trump, had to do was channel it.
Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.
Maya Angelou
I love that thought and sentence Ginerva…very well put, and hopefully true too.
“America’s best self–its most egalitarian, idealistic, aspirational identity–shines in its laws.”
I hate to disagree with Ginerva’s post and your second, since I understand the underlying sentiment, but I have to respectfully state that many of the worst aspects of America’s past — slavery and segregation being the most obvious examples — were also enshrined in its laws. The law is just as much a part of human society as anything else, and as such is imperfect. Adherence to the rule of law has been used as cudgel against freedom for much of America’s existence.
The law in its majesty forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under the bridges of Paris. Having been an attorney for far too long, I have worried that I’ve become, in Smedley Butler’s words, a” gangster for capitalism.”
This is absolutely true, JSG. Especially on the state level, America’s laws hold up a mirror to its values, however bigoted and craven those values might be.
Our constitution, however, has served as a vehicle for our noblest aspirations with remarkable durability, particularly when you take into account the flaws of those who wrote it. Their limitations still hobble us in the form of anachronisms, such as the Electoral College and the difficulty of enacting an amendment (those being related issues), that serve to perpetuate the founders’ legacy of power being preserved for white men of wealth.
But American federal law is the rare place where a vision of true equality has ever been codified. I would never call it perfect, certainly not while a federal death penalty exists. But I can’t believe that we would conduct ourselves better without it.
When, in fact, our Constitution codified both slavery and that slaves were to be counted as 3/5ths of a person, making a moralistic distinction between state and federal laws doesn’t hold water.
You realize that the 3/5th clause was an attempt to reduce the relative power of the slave holding states. The slavers wanted to count each of their slaves as a person for purposes of apportioning representatives in the House, but of course not allow them to vote or to have any rights as a citizen. (Right Roger in Dredd Scott.) The 3/5 Compromise gave each a little of what they wanted.
Then after Reconstruction ended this very situation occurred. Blacks were counted for apportionment of the House but had no rights. Thus the abolition of slavery worked to increase the relative political power of the Solid South. Section Two of the 14th Amendment was supposed to prevent this, but conservatives took control of the USSC and effectively prevented the enforcement of the 14th Amendment as it was intended.
Look! It’s deja vu all over again!
Yes, I understand the historical context of the 3/5ths clause. Understanding the context doesn’t make it any less odious, nor does it make America’s “best self… [shine] in its laws.”
There was NEVER going to be a united country without compromises on slavery. Some think that Paris is worth a mass while others complain about the compromise/ surrender on moral and ethical issues. It’s how the sausage gets made.
Again I understand the context of the clause and the need for compromise in order for the Constitution to be ratified. I have no truck with that.
What I am saying is that it is inaccurate and at best naive to make any claim that American laws are somehow an example of this country at its best, when such egregious examples from history exist, regardless of context.
Another way to take my point out of the realm of historical examples and into contemporary American life is to look at the process, still unreformed, of mass incarceration in America. That is, if our laws are where America “shines,” why do we incarcerate so many of our fellow citizens at a rate similar to China and Russia? What are their circumstances? Why is prison labor akin to slavery (an exception from the Reconstruction Amendments) still in effect in many states?
May I point out that we no longer have the 3/5 clause?
I said “best,” not ideal. Not perfect. And America’s best self, as we’ve all learned the hard way in the last decade, is just not all that great or fair or humane.
But it’s better than the alternative.
Yes, bringing up the 3/5ths clause was a way to look at the statement through a historical lens.
Looking at contemporary American society, I respectfully disagree that our system is “better than the alternative,” as there are several European countries who we could look to as more humane both in incarceration rates and sentence lengths, to take but two examples.
Slow your roll. You’ve posted three comments in one thread inside 26 minutes. This isn’t the dead bird app.
Marcy, this is a perfect chaser to the HCR newsletter. I had already sent that out to several folks this AM and now I’m going to follow it with your excellent post. This is really, really well done.
I read the HCR essay last night before going to sleep and was also impressed with it. And what surprised me were the many commenters below the essay thanking her educating for them about Manafort’s background, all the stuff about Yanukovych, the poisoning of Yuschenko, the smearing of Tymoshenko, removal of support for Ukraine from 2016 GOP platform etc. etc.
Back then, all that stuff was standard following-the-daily-news for me. I didn’t become obsessed about domestic/international political shenanigans in general until 2018 when Bill Barr whitewashed the Mueller report, which really upset me, and the upset has basically not stopped since then. Just a bit surprised that many HCR followers’ knowledge of recent European history was so lacking…
I agree that this post (and many others and EmptyWheel) are very good at bringing together many other threads and sources.
However, I don’t think that the large majority of HCR’s readership is unaware of the history of Manafort or the machinations of Yanukovych and others. We all enjoy getting history refreshers from her blog and there’s always something new to learn from these two fantastic sources.
There once was a man named Manafort
Who had a profitable plan afoot
He’d mind The Donald
Like Benedict Arnold
And be Earl of Cambridge by Agincourt
How Trump trained the GOP to hate the law.
Interesting. It wasn’t that hard. You’re looking at a party where you can get people to vote against their own interests and be more concerned about the interests of the billionaires. They aren’t that smart to begin with and they had some really good snake oil sales persons.
The Black, Manafort and Stone consulting group, formed in 1980, has been responsible for so much political subterfuge, crime and death around the world that it is just incredible. Roger Stone was involved in Nixon dirty tricks in the 1970s, the “Brooks Brothers” riot in Palm Beach, FL in 2000 that threw the election to George W. Bush and for much of the Trump hijinx in the 2000s! Manafort was behind a bloody coup in Indonesia and worked hard to bring Ukraine back under the Soviet umbrella. Charles Black helped brutal dictators in the Philippines and Zaire maintain power. There is a torrent of innocent blood dripping from the hands of these evil men and I hope all three burn in Hell for their sins.
“A shoe salesman.”
Imagine how he would use that on, for example, a DeSantis.
It’s hard to believe a PRESIDENT hawking sneaks.
Maybe Boeing jets or some brand of yachts, but sneaks?
TYPO: to find out of hostile powers/to find out IF hostile powers
I supported and voted for Clinton in 2016 but I will also contend that her running for the US Senate in NY while Gore was attempting to win the Presidency was a colossal mistake.
If anyone has some good sources on evaluating Janet Reno’s tenure at the DOJ I would be interested in studying those events. She came up the other day when discussions turned to Mathew Shepherd.
“I supported and voted for Clinton in 2016 but I will also contend that her running for the US Senate in NY while Gore was attempting to win the Presidency was a colossal mistake.”
A mistake based on what exactly? Vibes? Her Senate campaign didn’t detract from Gore winning New York, which he did with over 60% of the vote.
Looking back through all post-Reagan elections, here’s how Gore’s results in New York compare to those of other Democratic presidential candidates, all of whom won the state whether or not they won nationally (corrections welcome):
1. 63.4% — Obama 2012
2. 62.9% — Obama 2008
3. 60.9% — Biden 2020
4. 60.2% — Gore 2000
5. 59.5% — B. Clinton 1996
6. 59.1% — H. Clinton 2016
7. 58.4% — Kerry 2004
8. 51.6% — Dukakis 1988
9. 49.7% — B. Clinton 1992
Right and HRC won her Senate seat with 55%. So I still don’t understand why anyone would think her candidacy in 2000 was somehow bad for Al Gore.
Lets pretend you were Bill and Hillary looking at the NY State electorate in late 1999 up until May 20th, 2000. What are the challenges you need to overcome?
1. Rudy Giuliani was a popular NYC Mayor.
2. Clinton is underwater with one the major minority groups that would vote in the upcoming election, the Puerto Rican electorate.
Do you have data on what the polling that can parse the Puerto Ricans was like during that time period?
I have written on this issue several times but my mention of Janet Reno was a tell. I spent a great deal of time in Florida during late 1999 and early 2000. I was in Miami during the riots at the Miami DOJ when Janet Reno sent Elian back to Cuba. I was also in Tallahassee when the ‘chads’ were delivered and while I did not understand what was happening at the time, that whole issue stuck with me as I could never fathom why Janet Reno was allowed to do what she did in FLA?
It took me years to understand what went on but alas my analysis gets no consideration but I think Gore would have won FLA easily had Janet Reno not been dispatched to Miami.
“I was also in Tallahassee when the ‘chads’ were delivered and while I did not understand what was happening at the time, that whole issue stuck with me as I could never fathom why Janet Reno was allowed to do what she did in FLA?”
What is this in reference to? To my best recollection and research, the DoJ and Janet Reno explicitly stated that there was no role for them to play in the 2000 Florida election results.
“Among the many but-fors that decided that election, Comey’s actions were easily the most important. … We’ll never know, but that effort, the orchestrated campaign to criminalize Hillary followed by a ham-handed effort to convince right wingers of the legitimacy of a considered prosecutorial decision, by itself, may have been enough to carry Trump to victory.”
There was a little reporting in November 2016 that some Hillary Clinton campaign staffers felt that James Comey’s second exoneration of Clinton — on Nov. 6, two days before the election — hurt the campaign as much as the Oct. 28 announcement that he was reopening the investigation into her emails (because of what had been found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop). Their thinking was that Comey’s second letter to Congress fed into a narrative of the FBI covering up Clinton’s supposed wrongdoing.
I’m having flashbacks to all the insane nonsense that was happening that fall. I was regularly reading political articles, and the comments thereon, at the website of my local newspaper to see how national news was playing locally. So many commenters there were pushing Pizzagate nonsense and also the claim that Clinton was seriously ill — or even dead and replaced by a body double. To think that she’d be nearing the end of her second term now if just 40,000 people spread across three states had voted differently. (If Donald Trump wasn’t so corrupt and incompetent, i.e., if he wasn’t Donald Trump, I think he would have coasted to a second term in 2020. His approval ratings got a boost in March-April 2020, probably due to a rally-round-the-flag sentiment for a president in a time of crisis, but he just wasn’t able to respond like a normal person and capitalize on that effect. And of course, had he not spent so much of his first term stoking outrage and for that matter not been elected under scandalous circumstances, his approval rating would have been somewhat higher to begin with.)
Listening to Willis’ father on Friday, he talked about how outside the US covid was a known thing in 2019.
So Trump and his administration must have known about it in 2019 and if they’d taken just a tiny bit of action and acknowledged it, even if it would have been unsuccessful, he would have had an easy victory.
Willis’ father sounds as ignorant as she is. I have never in my life seen a more arrogant, belligerent and out of control witness in a major trial, and I have been in, and seen, an awful lot of them.
I know all the Trump Deranged people and academics that don’t know squat, think it is all hunky dory. It is not. Will has proven herself an even bigger disgrace than I initially thought. If you think this half ass garbage is okay, picture you or a client being on the other side of it. If Willis and her shitshow are not the epitome of “appearance of impropriety”, then I wonder what people think would be.
She’s already gotten 4 to flip with one singing throughout the country.
If the show gets back on the road, more will flip and if she has the right juries, she’ll have wins.
She’s already proven herself in the teacher test score scandals.
What a load of bullshit. “4 to flip throughout the country”?? Not to mention all the rest of your comment? That is nuts.
bmaz, is your vision deteriorating?
I wrote “4 to flip with one singing throughout the country.”
And you write ““4 to flip throughout the country””
There was a lot of speculation and tentative reporting in 2020-21 about what the U.S. government knew about Covid-19 outbreak and when. Various reports suggesting that there was some knowledge of the disease in November 2019 or earlier — based, e.g., on supposed photographs showing high traffic at Wuhan hospitals as early as October — seem to have been refuted, and the earliest known case now seems to date to December 1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_2019
This would undercut the later never-quite-explicit theorizing of one prominent online political commenter who made much in 2020 of Donald Trump’s sudden and then-unexplained visit to Walter Reed hospital on Nov. 15, 2019. The implication of that speculation seemed to be that Trump, aware via classified sources of a mysterious outbreak in China, panicked when he developed cold symptoms and was rushed to the hospital. But if the U.S. didn’t have information about Covid-19 by that date, then that far-fetched theory goes away.
It certainly didn’t help that the excuse the White House gave at the time for Trump’s jaunt to the hospital, that Trump went for the first half of his annual physical, was obviously baloney. A different explanation was later suggested in late 2021 by Stephanie Grisham and reportedly confirmed by other unnamed former Trump administration officials: he (1) went for a colonoscopy and (2) did it without anesthesia, because (1) he didn’t want to be the “butt” of jokes (the pun was in the 2021 reporting) about the procedure and (2) he didn’t want Mike Pence to temporarily assume his duties because he thought that would be a show of weakness. That also sounds fishy, but who knows? If true, it was certainly handled incompetently, but that at least would not be a surprise from the Trump White House.
The US prides itself with all its greatness, especially military and intelligence prowess, so how could they miss this if it really was a 2019 thing?
Of course they missed or maybe didn’t 9/11, 10/7/23 Gaza, Afghans ripping off US, etc.
We may never know when this zoonotic virus made its first leap from animals to humans. That first human to contract it may have never had contact with the Chinese medical system or died quickly and the death was attributed to simple pneumonia. Some of the early swabs from the Hunan Seafood Market suggest there were possibly two (2) early strains of the SARS-COV2 virus circulating early on, one which became dominant thanks to the existence of a furin cleavage in the spike protein, which enhanced the virus’ transmissibility and pathogenicity. The strain that won out became the virus that infected the world. The fairy tale about Trump having COVID-19 early on in November of 2019 is BS, in my opinion. Where would he have gotten it? I think his disappearance and secrecy was probably due to a colonoscopy, which almost everyone over 50 gets in the U.S., but Trump made it a major league production like everything in his dysfunctional life!
The 2016 conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton being too ill to be president are being repeated in some of the attacks on President Biden. Just now, Youtube’s algorithm put a video in front of me titled “Clumsy Joe just STUMBLED on the Short Stairs of Air Force One Today…TWICE!” And there are all sorts of clip compilations purporting to show Biden drifting into senility. I hope Democrats are making comparable efforts on that platform with collections of Trump’s gaffes and slips.