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Trump’s Blacklist: His Fascism, Legal Fuck-ups, and Business Failures

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On October 20, Peter Baker wrote a rare comprehensive story on Trump’s alleged and convicted crimes.

His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.

He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.

He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.

Mr. Trump beat some of the investigations and lawsuits against him and some proved unfounded, but the sheer volume is remarkable.

The story was remarkable expecially by Baker’s terms — he has a history of pulling his punches with Presidents.

When Baker wrote a piece on Trump’s picks of Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbard less than a month later, Baker dropped the focus on how meritorious were the investigations into Trump — instead letting Steve Bannon claim, without correction, that the “Deep State” set out to break Trump.

If confirmed, Mr. Gaetz, Mr. Hegseth and Ms. Gabbard would constitute the lead shock troops in Mr. Trump’s self-declared war on what he calls the “deep state.” All three have echoed his conviction that government is seeded with career public servants who actively thwarted his priorities while he was in office and targeted him after he left. None of them has the kind of experience relevant to these jobs comparable to predecessors of either party, but they can all be expected to take “a blowtorch” to the status quo, to use Stephen K. Bannon’s term for Mr. Gaetz.

“You tried to destroy Trump; you tried to imprison Trump; you tried to break Trump,” Mr. Bannon, a onetime White House strategist for Mr. Trump, said on his podcast on Wednesday after Mr. Gaetz’s nomination was announced. “He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him. And now he has turned on you.”

To be sure, it’s common for journalists, including Baker, to let Trump air his claims of grievance without correction. It was just striking to see Baker do so so soon after writing that rare comprehensive review of Trump’s alleged and convicted crimes.

In between those two stories, CJR reports, an attorney for Trump wrote a letter to the NYT threatening a $10B lawsuit for the Baker story and three others.

The letter, addressed to lawyers at the New York Times and Penguin Random House, arrived a week before the election. Attached was a discursive ten-page legal threat from an attorney for Donald Trump that demanded $10 billion in damages over “false and defamatory statements” contained in articles by Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner.

It singles out two stories coauthored by Buettner and Craig that related to their book on Trump and his financial dealings, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, released on September 17. It also highlighted an October 20 story headlined “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment” by Baker and an October 22 piece by Schmidt, “As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator.”

“There was a time, long ago, when the New York Times was considered the ‘newspaper of record,’” the letter, a copy of which was reviewed by CJR, reads. “Those halcyon days have passed.” It accuses the Times of being “a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democratic Party” that employs “industrial-scale libel against political opponents.”

The other stories include Mike Schmidt’s interview — backed by recordings!! — of John Kelly, in which Trump’s former Chief of Staff warned that he would rule as a fascist. It’s not clear about which stories from Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig Trump complained (CJR did not include the letter or NYT’s response). But they teamed up to write a damaging piece about how The Apprentice gave Trump the false appearance of success; they’ve got more dated work in which they showed how Trump made little from the inheritance he got from his father.

Whichever Buettner/Craig stories they are, now is probably a good time either to get a copy of their book, Lucky Loser, yourself, or to create demand for it at your local public library!

Unlike the frivolous complaints against CBS (for editing a transcript of Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview less extensively than Fox edited the transcript of Trump’s women’s town hall) or WaPo (for reporting positively on Harris), Trump does not appear to have followed up on his threat to sue the NYT. Those other lawsuits, I suspect, were part of an effort to claim the election was unfair, in the same way Trump has wailed that he lost the 2020 election because voters were not permitted to look at Hunter Biden’s dick pics before the election.

But the letter to NYT appears, so far, to be no more than a warning shot: that he will come after them if they do accurate reporting describing that Trump is not the guy he sold himself as.

That’s telling, though. Trump has telegraphed that he believes accurate reporting debunking his con is dangerous enough he would be willing to take on the NYT about it.

Crazy, I know. But what if simply reporting the truth about Trump’s con is what he most fears? And that is where he’ll focus his authoritarian gaze first.

Will Peter Baker Exhibit the Same Tenacity about Medical Records on the Trump Shooting as He Did a Parkinson’s Conspiracy Theory?

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Something funny happened on Xitter.

In an attempt to demonstrate the double standard and cowardice of the captive media, I tweeted at Peter Baker asking if he was ever going to exercise the same diligence about getting a medical report on Donald Trump’s shooting injury as he was at engaging in conspiracy theories about a Parkinson’s doctor.

Jesse Singal screen capped the tweet, admitted “it would be good to know exactly what happened” but then scolded that my single tweet was a weird thing, “to spend one’s resources on…”

Singal babbled on in telling ways, if you’re into that kind of thing.

But his complaint is useful illustration of something larger.

Given replays, I have no reason to doubt that the teleprompters were not hit by any bullets Thomas Crooks shot; I accept that early reports that Trump was hit by glass from his teleprompter were wrong.

I have no preconception about what we would learn from a medical report on the treatment Trump got. It might be something as banal as the news that plastic surgeons had to do some quick reconstruction to replace cartilage in Trump’s ear. Though Eric Trump has already revealed that Trump did not require stitches, which is the most detailed report we’ve gotten.

What I do know is there once used to be a norm in the United States that presidents and presidential candidates were expected to offer some transparency, however feigned, about two subjects: their finances and their health.

Biden has done that. Indeed, the report he released from his January physical not only described that he had been screened for Parkinson’s, which was ruled out, but it provided explanations for the things, like his halting step, that had raised concerns about Parkinson’s. Sure, by all means question that — but before you do, at least cross check the visitor logs on which you’ve built a conspiracy theory to see if they back your insinuations (which these never did).

Biden has similarly released several reports about the progression of his COVID, down to his temperature, treatment, and oximeter levels (one, two, three). Given the current state of COVID treatment, I have no big worries about his diagnosis (just as I have no preconceived notion about what Trump’s medical treatment would reveal). But it’s good to have. It is an important part of democracy. At the very least, such reports offer reassurances that if something were to happen — such as the time Trump got pre-vaccination COVID and almost killed Chris Christie, before walking into a debate with Joe Biden — we would know about it.

Obviously, we never got anything remotely reliable as to Trump’s medical records. He had two hack doctors write up his reports, one of whom disclosed alarming details about a cover-up after the fact. He had at least one medical event that remains unexplained.

And so, even if Trump’s entire right ear had been replaced, I doubt we’d know about it.

But, particularly amidst an otherwise diligent effort to learn what happened, I would expect that journalists would nevertheless demand such reports. If Trump refused to provide such reports, I would expect that to be a story — certainly a far bigger story than Peter Baker’s baseless insinuations about Biden’s health.

And yet, crickets. Either they asked and were refused that basic information, or they have stopped bothering to ask for basic transparency from Trump, knowing he’ll refuse.

Either way, the failure to demand a formal medical report after a shooting attempt represents the utter collapse of the most basic kind of journalism.

Do not obey in advance, Tim Snyder has written about how to resist fascism.

Ask for the medical report, even if you know they’ll refuse. If they do refuse, that — by itself — is a story.

Update: Shortly after I posted this, Trump released what purports to be a medical report from Candy Man Ronny Jackson.

It serves as an excellent test of whether self-imagined journalists are exercising any assessment of source credibility. More on this tomorrow.

NYTimes Launders Its Own Agency

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After having scolded the President that he “should leave the race” that Democratic primary voters elected him to run.

And having ordered the Democratic Party to “speak the [NYT’s] plain truth to Biden,

And having ignored Trump’s own actions in the meanwhile (for example, NYT has no report yet on Viktor Orbán’s latest shenanigans, and they’ve only just reported on Trump’s attempts to disavow Project 2025, which they put in a both-sides frame and don’t cite NYT’s long focus on his Project 2025 aligned plans; Update, 10:09AM ET: NYT has now posted a cursory 7¶¶ 3-byline piece on Orbán.), NYT has now weighed in against Trump.

At least in its headline, the NYT doesn’t scold Trump. It doesn’t order the GOP to do anything.

It observes.

Once you click through to their actual op-ed, however, NYT does something else.

It launders agency it has been exercising all over its front page.

“The Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate,” the paper that has supplanted every other kind of news to frame that debate says.

“The debate is so intense,” NYT says, not because reporters have engaged in conspiracy theorizing, lied, and (as Nancy Pelosi said of NYT’s overreading of her attempt to be subtle, “ma[d]e stories up.”

After which, NYT has relabled as “analysis” and done significant massaging of their story — though not without labeling Biden “defiant” again.

No.

The debate is so intense because, NYT says, “a compelling Democratic alternative is the only thing that will prevent [Trump’s] return to power.”

Which is to suggest that Joe Biden’s historic success  — the policy stuff that, at NYT, always takes the backseat to Biden’s age — is not compelling at all.

Meanwhile, rather than bossing the Republican Party around like NYT did Democrats, NYT wrings its journalistic hands: “It is a national tragedy that the Republicans have failed to have a similar debate,” like the one NYT has forced down Democrats’ throats.

Rather than scolding about what Trump “should” do or ordering what Republicans “must” do, NYT simply “urges” voters here.

This is the op-ed page. It’s where NYT is supposed to exercise the omniscient narrator they’ve sicced on a non-stop flood of Joe Biden stories.

But it would be really nice if elsewhere, off the op-ed page, NYT would focus on reporting, including on the guy they claim is unfit to lead.

Peter Baker Argues Joe Biden Is Unfit because Peter Baker Is Too Lazy to Read the Homework

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The NYT and ABC have now joined the insane mob tying the White House visits of a neurologist who has written papers on topics that include Parkinson’s, Dr. Kevin Cannard, to their wild brays that Joe Biden is unfit to stay in the race.

The NYT version is particularly remarkable, because Peter Baker, along with NYT’s health care correspondent, Emily Baumgaertner, describe Dr. Cannard’s specialty as “movement disorder specialist.”

The expert, Dr. Kevin Cannard, is a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders and recently published a paper on Parkinson’s. The logs, released by the White House, document visits from July 2023 through March of this year. More recent visits, if there have been any, would not be released until later under the White House’s voluntary disclosure policy.

And they link the report from Biden’s physical earlier this year, which they then quote, describing that after “an extremely detailed neurologic exam,” doctors like Cannard and White House physician Kevin O’Connor determined that Biden did not have Parkinsons.

That means they had all the tools they needed, aside from some basic reading comprehension, I guess, to discover that elsewhere in the same report they linked, under the heading that included “neurology,” O’Connor described adding a movement disorder neurologic specialist — someone just like Dr. Cannard!!! — to advise him on Biden’s gait problems.

In November 2021, O’Connor added a movement disorder neurologic specialist to Biden’s healthcare team, and these crack NYT journalists have decided that the evidence in front of them suggests Parkinson’s.

Remember, they’re supposed to be engaged in this mob out of a belief that Biden is not fit for his job.

Yet over and over, participants in this mob rush to provide evidence that the fitness problems lie elsewhere.

Update: O’Connor has now written a letter confirming that the only times Cannard has met with the President were in conjunction with his yearly physical.

As I have written in each of the President’s medical reports, as part of the President’s annual physical, he sees a team of specialists that have included Optometry, Dentistry, Orthopedics (Foot and Ankle), Orthopedics (Spine), Physical Therapy, Neurology, Sleep Medicine, Cardiology, Radiology, and Dermatology. Dr. Cannard was the neurological specialist that examined President Biden for each of his annual physicals. His findings have been made public each time I have released the results of the President’s annual physical. President Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical.

Cannard is, as O’Connor describes, someone with a long background in general neurology before he did a movement disorders fellowship, and much of what he appears at the White House to treat are other neurological problems of military personnel tied to their service.

Dr. Cannard has been the Neurology Consultant to the White House Medical Unit since 2012. He was chosen for his breadth of experience and expertise across the specialty of Neurology. Prior to his Movement Disorders fellowship at Emory University, he had practiced as a general neurologist for six years. He is the longest serving Neurologist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and in the Military Healthcare System. He has been a member of the faculty at the Uniformed Services University’s medical school since 1991 and is core faculty of the Neurology Residency Program. He has numerous local and national teaching awards, and is highly regarded for his clinical skills. These qualities make him a valued and versatile consultant to assess and treat a wide variety of conditions. Prior to the pandemic, and following its end, he has held regular Neurology Clinics at the White House Medical Clinic in support of the thousands of active-duty members assigned in support of White House operations. Many military personnel experience neurological issues related to their service, and Dr. Cannard regularly visits the WHMU as part of this General Neurology practice.

Peter Baker Discovers that Russia Sows Partisan Antagonism and Then Helps Them Do So!

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I laughed yesterday when Peter Baker tweeted about how “striking” it is that Vladimir Putin is adopting Trump’s perceived enemies as his own.

But then Baker wrote up his laughably naive observation into a NYT story.

Baker, you’ll recall, is one of NYT’s crack journalists who buried Trump’s admission that he had spoken to Putin about adoptions before writing a false explanation about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting emphasizing adoptions. Baker and Maggie Haberman chose instead to emphasize Trump’s scripted attack on Jeff Sessions. The Mueller Report showed that NYT’s willingness to dumbly repeat Trump’s script proved even more useful to Trump’s efforts to undermine the Rule of Law than his covert effort to get Corey Lewandowski to ferry orders to Jeff Sessions.

And here we are, almost five years later, and Baker still naively plays into obvious Russian efforts to sow division in the US, in significant part by playing to Trump’s narcissism and the feral loyalty of Trump’s supporters, to say nothing of playing up racial division. Baker picks out three names from among 500 newly added to Russian sanctions: Tish James, Brad Raffensperger, and Michael Byrd, the Black cop who prevented Ashli Babbitt from breaching the hallway through which Members of Congress were fleeing by shooting her.

Among the 500 people singled out for travel and financial restrictions on Friday were Americans seen as adversaries by Mr. Trump, including Letitia James, the state attorney general of New York who has investigated and sued him. Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia who rebuffed Mr. Trump’s pressure to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, also made the list. And Lt. Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot the pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6, 2021, was another notable name.

Reviewed more broadly, however, the sanctions were an attack on US Rule of Law generally, or certainly the notion that Trump’s people should be subject to it. They include the current or former Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington, DC, Wisconsin. Aside from former Oklahoma AG John O’Connor, which may be a mistake, it almost seems like they worked from an outdated membership list from the Democratic Attorneys General Association. Though for some reason, Putin missed Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel, maybe because she’s a badass lesbian who makes Putin afraid.

The sanctions list does include every US Attorney who has presided over the January 6 investigation.

  • Michael Sherwin (who as Acting US Attorney in DC oversaw the beginning of the January 6 investigation)
  • Channing Phillips (who, as Acting US Attorney for DC in 2021 oversaw the early parts of the January 6 investigation)
  • Michael Graves (currently US Attorney for DC overseeing the January 6 investigation)
  • Jack Smith (Special Counsel)

But it also includes other senior legal officials, some of whom have gotten more attention for investigating Russia than Trump.

The inclusion of Kohler, who played a key role in the Trump stolen documents case but who also presided over the Charles McGonigal and other Oleg Deripaska cases that came through SDNY, is particularly notable. This is, in significant part, an attempt to suggest that if either Russia or Trump is held accountable legally, it will harm Russia. It is a transparent effort — no different than dozens of similar efforts going back to 2016, and to the extent that this plays to racism, goes back a half century — to lead Trump supporters to believe their interests are more aligned with Putin’s than those of the United States, or at least the United States when led by Joe Biden.

In addition to Brad Raffensperger, Putin also included Mark Esper, who got fired as Defense Secretary because he undercut Trump’s authority to attack the US government by invoking the insurrection act.

A broad swathe of the list includes members of NGOs, particularly those NGOs that fascists are attempting to discredit with claims that attempts to combat disinformation equate to censorship. Nina Jankewicz got sanctioned in her own right.

Of two members of the Open Society Fund, Leonard Benardo is included; his name may become prominent if John Durham’s abusive attempt to investigate Benardo, which may be detailed in the classified section of the Durham Report, begins to leak.

Along with all those defenders of truth and justice, Putin included Stephen Colbert and Heather Cox Richardson.

Again, this is a transparent effort, one that continues past efforts that extend to sheltering members of the far right and stoking US racism, to supplant the allegiance of Trump’s supporters to the United States with an affiliation, through Trump, to Russia. Trump’s narcissism might lead him to magnify these sanctions. His campaign advisors likely will try to prevent that.

But Putin won’t need to rely on Trump to magnify this statement of a shared allegiance.

He has Peter Baker for that.

Baker somehow could not distinguish language as transparent truth from language as an attempt to manipulate, and so stated as fact that “Trump’s perceived enemies” are Putin’s own. Aside from the law enforcement officials who’ve targeted both Russian hackers and Trump, they’re not. Rather, this is an attempt — an utterly transparent one!! — to make Trump’s followers believe that, and so regard Russia more favorably.

Because Baker thought his banal observation about these sanctions was worth a story in the NYT, he called up the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment. That’s how the claim that the people who attacked democracy on January 6 are simply dissidents got inserted into the NYT.

None of those three has anything to do with Russia policy and the only reason they would have come to Moscow’s attention is because Mr. Trump has publicly assailed them. The Russian Foreign Ministry offered no specific explanation for why they would be included on the list but did say that among its targets were “those in government and law enforcement agencies who are directly involved in the persecution of dissidents in the wake of the so-called storming of the Capitol.”

You got played, Peter Baker, into serving as a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda.

You got played into contributing to Russia’s efforts to undermine US democracy.

The Banality Of Evil Access Journalism

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A tweet from a talented, but maybe Stockholmed, journalist favorite of Mr. Trump:

This reporter is old enough and smart enough to know and understand exactly what Rudy and Trump are, but still evinces this blithe acceptance bullshit?

Please stop, yer killing me. With every passing day, the initial criticisms as to the lameness of Haberman, Baker and Schmidt’s on and off duality of record “interview” of Trump look smarter. Greg Sargent was early with this:

President Trump’s extended, rambling new interview with the New York Times provides perhaps the clearest picture yet of his conviction that he is above the law — a conviction, crucially, that appears to be deeply felt on an instinctual level — and of his total lack of any clear conception of the basic obligations to the public he assumed upon taking office.

There are numerous worrisome moments in this interview, from his incoherence on the health-care debate (“preexisting conditions are a tough deal”) to his odd asides about history (Napoleon “didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death”).

But, frankly, the entire tenor and credulity of the interviewers – and the interview – as a whole is simply beyond belief. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen hit on the latter in a very cogent tweetstorm, as to the interview itself.

But I have to ask the same questions about the journalists conducting this interview. There were a lot of knee jerk defenses, mostly by other journalists, of the manner in which the interview was conducted sans followup questions and factual corrections of Trump’s blatant and rampant absurdity and lying, early on Twitter. The thin skinned “interviewers” of course blanched and professed how much they were just “doing their job”.

At what point does it become journalists’ “job” to stand up for truth, have the guts to speak it to power actually during their access, and not just in seeking it? But, hey, maybe these NYT journalists can deflect it all by comparing the current American crisis to the not even close to analogous bogosity from 20 years ago in the Clinton era. You know, the same misdirection horse manure their access point Donald Trump relentlessly tries to foster.

The United States is not dealing with the same paradigm of politics it was even as recently as seven months ago. Both the citizen public, and the press that supposedly serves them, need to understand the fundamental change and adapt. The presumption of normality still being afforded Trump and his Administration is a disservice to both the people and their democracy. It is, in this critical living breathing moment, the banality of evil.