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Trump's Ban On 'Enemy' Law Firms Advances A More Efficient Fascism

Donald Trump is in the process of issuing a series of executive orders targeting law firms he doesn’t like. The orders strip partners and employees of the firms of their top-secret security clearances, bar the firms from doing business with the federal government, ban employees of the firms from federal office buildings, ban federal contractors from doing business with the firms, and initiate federal investigations of the firms for hiring and promoting people on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Trump’s first order was against Covington & Burling, a firm that had done legal work for Jack Smith, the Special Counsel assigned to investigate Trump for his theft of top-secret national security documents and attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He then went after the Perkins Coie law firm, which the New York Times identifies as being “aligned with Democrats.”

Trump then turned his attention to Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, signing an executive order with the same restrictions on the firm, saying that one of the lawyers for the firm had worked as a prosecutor in New York on the indictment of Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, and that another lawyer had been involved in a lawsuit against January 6 insurrectionists. The order against Paul Weiss similarly forbade the firm from doing business with the federal government, barred any of its clients from federal contracts, and stripped the firm’s access to federal facilities.

The most egregious paragraph in the executive orders against the law firms was the one entitled “Personnel:”

“The heads of all agencies shall, to the extent permitted by law, provide guidance limiting official access from [sic] Federal Government buildings to employees of Perkins Coie when such access would threaten the national security of or otherwise be inconsistent with the interests of the United States. In addition, the heads of all agencies shall provide guidance limiting Government employees acting in their official capacity from engaging with Perkins Coie employees to ensure consistency with the national security and other interests of the United States.”

In essence, what this paragraph does is accuse the law firms’ leadership and employees of disloyalty to the United States, because everything they're being banned from belongs to the United States government. That's where the words “national security” come from. The nation's security is defended by the government. The implication is that if any of the law firms’ employees come in contact with government buildings or personnel, that contact would be a threat to national security, so it must be forbidden.

No evidence is cited for this outrageous allegation. There is nothing in the rest of the language of the executive orders to support why any of the law firms or their employees would be such a threat. Lacking that evidence, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the disloyalty of the law firms and their employees is to Donald Trump, not to the nation. This is just rank unsupported prejudice.

Perkins Coie did not take the ban lying down, immediately suing in federal court on the basis that the executive order was unconstitutional. Judge Beryl Howell issued a temporary restraining order forbidding the enforcement of the executive order. The Trump DOJ then moved in the D.C. Court of Appeals to get the judge disqualified. This was after the Trump administration had filed another appeal trying to disqualify Judge James Boasberg from hearing the case involving the deportation of more than 100 Venezuelan migrants on the basis that they belong to a drug gang.

So not only is Trump banning entire law firms from going into court against the administration, he is attempting to convince the D.C. Court of Appeals to get two well regarded federal judges with long experience banned from hearing cases against Trump and his administration.

What Trump has done is to make it impossible for these law firms to do business with the federal government, to file lawsuits against the federal government, or take clients who had business with the federal government. They must be able to do research, interview witnesses, and gather evidence if they're going to sue the federal government or defend anyone against charges brought by the Department of Justice. So, if you represent, say, Lockheed Martin, you wouldn't have any access to the Pentagon where the company's contracts for the F-35 fighter were written. If you represent a contractor who worked on a naval vessel like an aircraft carrier or a submarine, you wouldn't be able to enter a naval base where those ships are located, or interview anyone involved in the building or contracting for naval vessels.

This is the meat and potatoes of what lawyers do. Take away the right of employees from these law firms to walk into federal buildings, access federal documents, and review documents or interview anyone on any subject involving secrets and national security, and you're taking away the lifeblood of their business.

The Paul Weiss firm quickly made a deal with Trump promising to do $40 million worth of pro bono work for the White House. The White House issued a statement saying that the firm had “acknowledged the wrongdoing of its former partner Mark Pomerantz,” and had committed to ending its program of diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring and promotion.

In other words, the Paul Weiss law firm caved into Trump's demands so that security clearances held by its employees could be retained and the business the firm and its clients do with the federal government would not be damaged.

What Trump is doing with his assault on major law firms by executive order smacks of what Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s when he brought the entire legal profession and judicial system of Germany to heel by barring Jewish lawyers and judges from the German courts and forbidding Jewish lawyers from doing business with the German government.

This is from an article published by the Federal Bar Association titled “Lawyers and Bar Associations Play a Vital Role in Preserving the Rule of Law: A Study of How Hitler Perverted Germany’s Judicial System Highlights the Importance of Lawyers.”

“Hitler’s early decree stripping Jewish lawyers and judges of their professional capacities marked an early step in the decline from liberty to dictatorship. According to research conducted by the German Federal Bar and documented in its exhibit, “Lawyers without Rights: Jewish Lawyers under the Third Reich,” Hitler’s 1933 decree barring Jewish lawyers and judges from German courts did not trigger any formal protests or objections from non-Jewish lawyers or judges. There were many respected bar associations in Germany, but they did not oppose this action.”

The only difference here is that Trump is not starting with a religious minority, but with a minority of law firms and a minority of judges handling cases against the Trump administration. He knows that if he can knock down one or two big time law firms and manage to bar several of the judges hearing lawsuits against his administration from hearing the cases before them, he will have the entire legal profession and judiciary intimidated into falling in line.

This is the way fascism starts, with the few not the many, but the many are next. Today it's law firms barred from government buildings and judges barred from hearing lawsuits. Tomorrow it could be individual citizens barred from appealing decisions about their taxes or Social Security because Trump doesn't like the political party they belong to or the demonstration they attended or the club they joined in college. Today it's alleged drug dealers rounded up without charges and banned from the country.

Tomorrow it could be you and me.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter

Biden's Doing Very Well — But Here’s How He Might Do Better

Among right-wingers, there has been some delight about polls showing that Joe Biden's popularity at the 100-day mark is the lowest of any president since World War II. Oh, if you exclude Donald Trump. Undaunted by this detail, they note with satisfaction that Biden's approval rating, according to multiple polls, is somewhere between 52 and 57 percent. At this point in his presidency, Trump's approval was 40 percent.

Americans were far less partisan in the era of Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush and even Clinton than they are now. Large numbers of Democrats were willing to give high marks to Eisenhower when the economy was thriving, or to George H.W. Bush when we had just won a quick war, and a not insignificant number of Republicans approved of Clinton when we enjoyed balanced budgets and booming markets. But in recent years, negative partisanship has curdled our perceptions. One symptom of negative partisanship is the sharp decline in ticket-splitting. As the Cook Political Report's Amy Walter noted:

"After the 1992 election, for example, there were 103 split-ticket House seats; 53 that voted for George HW Bush and a Democratic member of Congress, and 50 that voted for Bill Clinton and a Republican member of the House ... Post-2020, there are only 17, or just four percent of the House."

Starting with the presidency of George W. Bush, the partisan divide in presidential approval ratings went through the roof. Some 80% of Republicans expressed approval for Bush, but only ten percent of Democrats agreed, and it was the reverse for Barack Obama.

The same pattern has been apparent in the past year. A Washington Post poll found that 49 percent of Democrats say the economy is doing well now versus only 18 percent who said that before the election. Among Republicans, 35 percent give the economy high marks today compared with 69 percent in September of 2020. Partisanship similarly colors peoples' perceptions of health care, race relations, and other issues.

So, in this environment, Biden's approval ratings are quite an accomplishment. That 33 percent of Republicans give him high marks for this handling of the coronavirus is a testament to something — maybe reality can sometimes penetrate our epistemic bubbles?

Biden ran on unifying and healing the country. His inaugural address hit all the right notes, and his low-key handling of the office has served to relieve the national migraine that the Trump years caused.

Biden is clearly gambling that putting vaccines in people's arms and deposits in their checking accounts will be enough to transcend whatever kulturkampf the Fox News ecosystem is currently spinning up. And that may work out for him.

On the other hand, since he ran to be a national healer, there are some pitfalls he might want to avoid. Several observers I spoke to cited Biden's race rhetoric, for example, as unhelpful. David French, a conservative who wishes Biden well, recalled that verbal excess on this subject has been a weakness for Biden. In 2012, he told an African American audience that Republicans wanted to "put y'all back in chains." His recent comment on Georgia's election law as "worse than Jim Crow" was ridiculous (though the Georgia law was passed for bad faith reasons and did impose some new burdens while lightening others).

Biden is passionate about racial justice and has included a racial element in many of his proposals, including clean energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and small business loans. His heart is in the right place, but is it politically savvy?

David Frum, citing a newly published study by Micah English and Joshua Kalla, agrees that toning down the racial appeals is advisable. English and Kalla tested whether pitching reforms as attempts to atone for past discrimination were effective or ineffective, compared with class-based or neutral appeals. Their results showed that couching reforms in the language of racial justice did nothing to increase support for the proposals even among Blacks and Democrats, but did provoke a backlash among Republicans. A class frame, by contrast, increased the likelihood that white voters would see the policy as "benefiting people like me." A class appeal was also linked with more respondents of all subgroups saying the policy was "fair."

There is no denying that racial discrimination has stained American history, but that doesn't mean that explicitly racial appeals are good politics. It wouldn't cost Biden anything to signal openness to Republican ideas. He could incorporate some of Sen. Tim Scott's police reform ideas for example. That might defuse some Republican resentment. (And even if it doesn't pacify Republicans, it's the right thing to do.)

Ben Wittes also stressed to me that the Biden administration should be meeting "on a weekly basis" with Republicans "if only for show." Biden met with a group of Republican senators to discuss the COVID-19 relief bill but has essentially disregarded Republican counteroffers. Negative partisanship may be at a boil, and yet 60 percent of Americans told The Washington Post that the president ought to be willing to make "major changes" to his proposals to gain Republican support, versus only 30 percent who thought he should try to push through his legislation as is.

Biden inherited a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Whatever criticisms one can lodge about this or that, he deserves our lasting gratitude for restoring decency, normal order and sanity to the business of governing. Whether it will be enough to reverse the slide into chaos remains uncertain, but defusing our deep mutual loathing, to the degree he can, should be a high priority.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the Beg to Differpodcast. Her most recent book is Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Obama’s Success Has Driven Republicans Out Of Their Minds

On the day that Donald Trump finally acknowledge that President Obama was born in the United States and that the GOP nominee can’t win without declaring “victory” and attempting to terminally muddy the waters on the issue that made him a conservative hero, the president’s approval hit 54 percent in the Gallup daily tracking poll.

For some perspective, Ronald Reagan was at 53 percent in early September 1988, according to Gallup. And in early September of 2008, George W. Bush was at 31 percent — a number that would only be impressive if it were first two digits of a shortstop’s batting average.

These numbers matter not because a contemporary approval rating is the final verdict on the tenure of a president or the achievement of any individual. Gallup’s last measure of Martin Luther King Jr.’s popularity in 1966 had him at 32 percent approval, closer to W. Bush than to Obama. Opposing the Vietnam War and launching the Poor People’s Campaign made Dr. King a prophet reviled by many in his own time, not a savvy politician.

However, this measure of Obama’s popularity, which is at heights not seen since the years following his two electoral college landslides, gives us a nation’s sense of the president’s effectiveness after nearly eight years. And it suggests he benefits from some perspective provided by the candidates who may replace him.

Almost no honest person thinks President Obama would be denied a third term in November were he permitted to run. Yet Republicans continue to act as if he’s a drowning failure like George W. Bush, tied to an anchor made of a cartoon Jimmy Carter and an even more corrupt Richard Nixon.

It isn’t just Obama’s approval ratings to prove the lie in that delusion.

A U.S. Census report found that middle class incomes rose at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2015 as poverty fell — one year after Obamacare went into full effect and two years after we raised taxes on the rich, two Obama policies Republicans assured us would destroy the economy. The last seven years haven’t been perfect, the gains of 2015 are still digging us out of the mess the last Republican president left us with, just as our foreign policy is an endless attempt to deal with the hell Bush and Cheney unleashed in the Middle East.

But when it comes to steering us from a depression, launching a green energy revolution, expanding LGBTQ rights, insuring 20 million and uniting the world in an effort to fight climate change, President Obama’s legacy must be ranked with the most consequential presidents of the last century, especially if the gains he inspired are not reversed.

But Republicans seem intent on doing just that — deregulating Wall Street, un-insuring millions, bending the tax code back toward the rich, empowering those who’d discriminate against same-sex couples or the sick and unleashing carbon polluters. And Obama’s success only seems to make them more determined to do all of this as soon as possible.

It would be easy just to blame the billionaire funders behind the party for engineering an agenda that only benefits them. But the hatred they’ve sewed within their party, with decades of highly effective marketing that has created an self-sustaining media often infused with the coded racism of dog whistle politics, has fostered a monster that threatens the mad scientists who built the laboratory that gave him life.

By nominating the birther-est birther who ever birthed, the GOP revealed that was seeking a nominee who not only disagreed with President Obama but reviled him and considered him less than an American. But the party’s depravity was even more evident during the GOP primary when not one of his opponent called out the racism behind Trump’s birther campaign, which lasted well after President Obama’s long-form birth certificate was revealed.

Hatred of Obama is so strong that Republicans are joining in Trump’s sick assertion that Vladimir Putin — who has gutted democracy and the economy in Russia — had been a better leader for his people than President Obama.

When conservative anti-Obama/Clinton agitpropper Dinesh D’Souza expressed his admiration for Putin’s love for his country, several Twitter users noted that if Obama loved America enough to deal with critics the way Putin does, D’Souza would be dead.

Unwilling to back off his dictator worship, D’Souza noted that famed chess master and Putin critic Garry Kasparov is still alive.

Kasparov’s response?

Have you noticed I live in New York now? Stop spitting on the graves of Putin’s victims with your dictator worship. https://t.co/SlLEfDZ1E3
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) September 17, 2016

Trump’s lying attempt to pin birtherism on the Clinton campaign, his insinuation that Clinton should face death because she supports gun safety legislation and his argument that black people are a unitary blob of impoverished fools who’ve been tricked by the Democratic Party are all common tropes in the comment sections of Republican blogs. But now this hateful propaganda has passed up through the articles into the mouth of the party’s nominee for president. The party has become the people it used to hide.

This isn’t to say Republicans aren’t torn.

A small but vocal group of conservatives think that Trump is a terrible racist. But they’re a tiny minority compared the the vast majority of the party who think he’s a wonderful racist. And even those who oppose Trump with all their being are willing to take the logical step to support the only candidate who can beat them. The hatred of Democrats is so ingrained that they’d rather elect a man who they don’t trust with access to nuclear weapons.

There’s some horrible justice to the GOP’s flaming hatred of Obama becoming the inferno that could destroy the party.

They could have embraced the changes America is going through. Instead they waged a war on voting like we haven’t seen since the 1960s. They could have acknowledged the mistakes of economy built to drive heath to the top. Instead they nominated the personification of welfare for the rich. They could have passed bipartisan immigration reform. Instead they walled themselves into a obsession with deportations.

Either Republicans are about to be rewarded for stirring up hatred at immigrants, refugees and vague foreign interests of all sorts, the way Republican Pete Wilson won an easy reelection in 1994 by stoking similar fires, or they’re exacerbating the demographic trends that could eventually deny them the White House forever.

Either way, they invited into our politics an existential threat — one that could consume just the GOP, or all of us.

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama addresses the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 46th annual Legislative Conference Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington, September 17, 2016. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

Our Poisonous Partisan Politics

A recent study from the Pew Research Center shows that contempt across the partisan divide is bitter and widespread. Respondents displayed a nasty animosity for the opposing side and showed little sign of tolerance for conflicting views.

Party polarization has been underway for years, and the Congress has never been so divided. But the toxic, finger-pointing rabble has escaped like a demon from Capitol Hill and spread plague-like throughout the United States. The toxicity doesn’t stifle, it chokes. Discourse has become nearly impossible. Wherever one stands, the other side is no longer judged as merely wrong or misguided, but is now considered dangerously stupid and lazy; scary, dishonest, immoral, and more than anything, a threat.

In 2014, a Pew study of political polarization noted the “growing contempt that many Republicans and Democrats have for the opposing party,” and since then, “many” is now “most.”

This year, 58 percent of Republicans have a “very unfavorable impression” of Democrats, 12 percent more than two years ago and 26 percent more than in 2008. Democrats’ disdain for Republicans has followed a similar trajectory.

The 2014 survey asked Democrats and Republicans who offered “very unfavorable opinions” of the opposing party if they felt the other side was “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Thirty-seven percent of Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats felt this way, and in two years those numbers have increased by eight and 10 points, respectively.

Among Democrats, 55 percent say the Republican Party makes them feel “afraid.” Forty-nine percent of Republicans say that about Democrats. These numbers increase among the highly politically engaged, with 70 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans fearing their opposition.

Disdain for the other side is as strong, and sometimes outweighs, positive feelings about the party one belongs to. Majorities of Democrats and Republicans cite their party’s platform as their deciding factor for joining, but almost as many say they were driven by “the harm caused by the opposing party’s policies.” Even independent voters, who have come to outnumber members of both major parties and tend to lean Democratic or Republican, are overwhelmingly inclined to cite negative factors for their loose partisan ties.

On a “thermometer” scale of 0-100, where zero is the coldest rating and 100 is the warmest, Democrats give Republicans the mean rating of 31, and Republicans give Democrats a 29. Things get even colder for politicians: Democrats’ average rating of Trump is 11, and Republicans, on average, give Clinton a 12.

Among Democrats, the most resonating critique of Republicans is that members of the GOP are more closed-minded than other Americans; 70 percent of Democrats feel this way. Forty-two percent of Democrats say Republicans are more dishonest, 35 percent say they are more immoral, and 33 percent say they are more unintelligent. By contrast, more than half of Republicans, 52 percent, see Democrats as more closed-minded than other Americans and nearly as many say Democrats are more immoral, dishonest, and lazy.

Not surprisingly, respondents expressed approval for members of their own party. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats consider themselves more open-minded than other Americans, and 59 percent and 51 percent of Republicans, respectively, say GOP members are more hardworking and moral. Republicans and Democrats also show a tendency to view the opposing party as highly ideological, while considering their own less ideological.

There is some hope for social cohesion among diverging parties, but little hope for helpful political discussion. The majority of Democrats and Republicans think they could get along with a new neighbor from the other party, but 42 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans say it would be easier to welcome members of their own party into the neighborhood. Democrats and Republicans are about equally inclined to say political conversation with people whom they disagree with is “stressful and frustrating” as “interesting and informative” — and either way, an equal amount of Democrats and Republicans, 44 percent, say they “almost never” agree with the other party’s positions.

The cause for this divide is unclear, but researchers suggest a merging of politics, lifestyle, and choice of residence has limited many Americans’ exposure to people with different opinions.

Pew President Michael Dimock told NPR, “If we in fact are surrounding ourselves increasingly with like-minded people, that becomes another factor that can potentially create distance between ‘our side’ and ‘their side.’”

In a 2015 article for the Washington Post, titled The top 10 reasons American politics are so broken, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and political science professor Sam Abrams write, “Liberals and conservatives dress differently, decorate their rooms differently, read different books, take different vacations and drink different alcoholic beverages. As the differences between supporters of the two parties became ever more pervasive and ever more visible to the naked eye, it became easier to spot members of the other team and then dislike them for the way they live.”

There is also the strange relationship between policy positions and political parties that seems to decide voters’ stances on how to handle seemingly disconnected issues.

“The more conservative you are on foreign policy, the more likely you are to be conservative on social issues, on economic issues, on the role of government,” Dimock said. “These dimensions, many of which had very little correlation with each other in the past, are getting increasingly aligned.”

Haidt and Abrams say this is the result of a combination of geography, immigration, and what they call ideological purification, meaning a lack of intellectual diversity within both major parties. The Republicans are conservatives and the Democrats are liberals, which was not the case before 1980.

“The Democratic Party was historically an agrarian party with its power base in the South,” Haidt and Abrams write. “But with the political purification of the parties, the Democrats have become the urban party, focused on issues of concern to city dwellers and expressing more cosmopolitan and secular values. Rural areas, meanwhile, shifted toward the Republican Party. The GOP became much more hospitable to rural interests and values, which tend to be more religious, patriotic and family-oriented.”

So why is there so much hostility on the political landscape? As Haidt and Abrams note, “a basic principle in social psychology is that people will divide themselves up quite readily based on the most trivial distinctions” – and these are not trivial matters.

Photo: Protesters confront a woman, center, leaving a rally for Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump in Fresno, California, U.S. May 27, 2016. REUTERS/Noah Berger

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Trump's Ban On 'Enemy' Law Firms Advances A More Efficient Fascism

Biden's Doing Very Well — But Here’s How He Might Do Better

Obama’s Success Has Driven Republicans Out Of Their Minds

Our Poisonous Partisan Politics

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