Tag: trump appointees
Pete Hegseth

How Far Will Trump Appointees Push Their Hatred? No Limit

Just overnight I got a dozen posts in my newsfeed and in my email inbox suggesting that I shouldn't be doom scrolling through the horror show in Washington. But how do you avert your eyes from Donald Trump announcing he wants to takeover the Gaza Strip and dislocate all the Palestinians in Gaza by moving them into “beautiful” housing developments in nearby Arab states, and meanwhile back in this beleaguered country, Elon Musk and his tech minnows are swimming amok through our government?

Last night it became known that the CIA, under White House orders, sent an unclassified memo via regular email to the White House listing at least 2000 of its most recent hires naming them using people's first names and last initials. Intelligence experts interviewed on cable news last night said this is like handing over part of the CIA phone book to Moscow and China, because public email is so insecure.

But that's just one bad dream the nation suffered overnight. There was video coverage all day of ICE raiders continuing their rampage across the country arresting and detaining undocumented migrants, as many as 1000 to 1200 a day. This morning it was announced that the Department of Justice is suing the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois over their sanctuary policies.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Elon Musk’s tech mice, as part of their romp through the Treasury tried to shut down USAID payments all over the world. This included payments that support the PEPFAR program that distributes aid to governments and clinics in Africa that are fighting AIDS and HIV. A portion of the funds from USAID goes to support programs that treat pregnant women in Africa so that their babies are not born with AIDS. One of Trump's first executive orders ordered the shutdown of all foreign aid payments by the United States government around the entire world.

What this means when you get down in the weeds is that programs like PEPFAR and programs to feed hungry children in Sudan are going without money, and people and babies are dying. Meanwhile, the MAGA faithful cheer him on.

In this country, the new brutal strain of the flu from which you are apparently not protected by the new flu shot has killed 8,300 people during this flu season, and hospitalizations as of last week stand at 190,000 according to the CDC. That's amazing in and of itself isn't it, that the CDC is still functioning and still keeping records and still reporting the terrible things that are going on with threats to American health? It makes you wonder how much longer that's going to happen as the Senate vote to confirm RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services gets closer.

Out on the farms of America's South and Midwest, chickens are dying by the millions from bird flu, knocking out entire flocks and shutting down chicken farms for months so that chicken houses and processing plants can be disinfected. The spread of bird flu has egg prices in the supermarket over $5 a dozen, and they are $9 a dozen in California already.

Musk and his utterly illegal minions have been creating chaos in the Treasury Department for nearly two weeks and they've gotten into the highly secret Treasury payment system that contains the private records of the Social Security and tax systems, not to mention Medicare records and other private data. Do you remember how secret Donald Trump's tax records were? He refused to release his taxes when he ran in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 with the utterly spurious excuse that he was being audited.

Well, I'm sure Trump's records are still secret, but we learned this morning that Musk’s tech teenagers have been feeding highly sensitive records into an insecure artificial intelligence system accessed through the Microsoft cloud to “analyze” data for waste and fraud. I think we can assume that privacy rights have been cancelled for everyone who is not an oligarch and a signed-on-the-dotted-line Trump loyalist.

While the rest of this madness has been happening at warp speed in nearly every department of our government, the Trump administration announced that they will be opening a razor wire-topped Club Med to house 30,000 deportees at Guantanamo. Some sort of shady deal involving cash payments has been worked out between our new alleged Secretary of State, the cretinous Marco Rubio, and the corrupt president of El Salvador, so that we can create space in our prison system by sending violent convicted felons who are American citizens, to be held in Salvadoran prisons.

This is of course unprecedented -- deporting American citizens to prisons in a foreign country -- but then, is there anything that has been done by Trump and Co-President Musk over the past two weeks that has not been both illegal and unprecedented?

All of this began on the night of Trump's inauguration when he made a big show of signing his executive order banning DEI throughout the government. What is this virulent hatred that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have for programs that promote diversity, equality, and inclusion, you might ask. Well, it didn't just appear out of thin air like a hologrammatic right wing boogeyman.

No, the demonization of DEI began in the feverish brain pan of Christopher Rufo, he of the Manhattan Institute who got his start toiling in the vineyards of the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and the Discovery Institute, a little known Christian think tank that has long championed the teaching of so-called “intelligent design,” a bogus fundamentalist anti-evolution “scientific theory” based on biblical scripture.

Rufo was almost single handedly the author of the anti-critical race theory panic that gripped the right wing around 2020 when Rufo discovered to his horror that the city of Seattle was conducting anti-racism seminars based on the theories of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, whom Rufo quickly branded as Marxist radicals. When Donald Trump got a whiff of the controversy around critical race theory that was bubbling out of the right-wing fever swamp, he invited Rufo to Washington to pitch his ideas to Trump's reelection team. Before he knew it, Trump had signed an executive order banning racial and sexual stereotyping by the federal government.

“‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote in a political treatise published by the Manhattan Institute. In 2024, Rufo found himself at Mar-a-Lago surrounded by Trump's MAGA minions, this time pitching his new anti- DEI messaging plan, and they were off. It became a theme of the Trump campaign and then it became a promise, that he would “end DEI in America on day one.”

Democrats failed to come up with a rationale defending something that should have been part of their playbook, and Trump rode the anti-DEI mania he had whipped up into the White House.

But what is DEI exactly? Linda Hopper, a friend of ours from Washington D.C. who has spent her lifetime working in human resources wrote me recently lamenting the way that Republicans have been able to demonize programs that simply try to “ensure people in the workplace are treated with dignity and respect.” DEI isn’t understood by what she calls “the rightie tighties” as anything more than initials that stand for values they're against.

“Diversity training programs pissed off white men because their values were questioned especially about women and Black and Brown people,” according to my friend the HR veteran. The truth is, the DEI “dragon they're trying to slay is basically what we were taught in vacation Bible School…value each other; red and yellow black and white all are precious in His sight; be polite; seek to understand first and be kind to others.”

I'll take Linda Hopper’s definition of DEI any day over the bull crap being pushed by Trump and Vance and Hegseth and the rest of the little boys now running our government who are too frightened to look at the world with soft eyes and listen to others with open ears.

What the MAGA obsession with DEI really represents is a covert plan to turn back the clock to segregation and sexism. If you want evidence, you need look no further than to what West Point has just done. A memo was issued on Tuesday signed by Deputy Commandant Chad Foster ordering that a dozen cadet clubs be closed and “cease all activities.”

Among the clubs ordered closed are the Latin Cultural Club, the National Society of Black Engineers Club, the Spectrum Club which was organized by L.G.B.T.Q. cadets, the Society of Women Engineers Club, and the Corbin Forum, a club that was founded in 1976, the year that women were first admitted to West Point, and the Vietnamese-American Cadet Association.

Let me explain to you about cadet clubs at West Point, a subject about which I know a few things, having been a founder of what we called the “Culture Club” as a cadet. Most clubs are organized by cadets to have fun. Because it's the Military Academy, they have to have officer sponsors and certification by the Academy and they have to follow certain rules, but basically it's cadets wanting to get together during their time off and shoot the shit and complain about the tactical department and lament the fact that they've got so little leave time and none or few of the privileges enjoyed by regular college students. So, they form clubs and have meetings and lunches and they go on trips that are marginally connected to their stated purpose but are really just to get off the post at West Point and put on some civilian clothes and relax and maybe even do some extracurricular stuff with others of the same or opposite sex.

Got that? It's young people being young people, and now for the young people at West Point who have brown skin or black skin or are gay or female, that simple urge to get together in a club and be who they are is illegal.

Pete “take a look at all my white supremacist tattoos” Hegseth, in one of his first acts as Secretary of Defense, ordered that the Pentagon and the United States military would no longer celebrate what he called “identity months,” such as Pride Month, celebrating gay pride, and Black History Month.

There you go folks. That's how far they'll take their hatred of DEI. That's how afraid they are, how disdainful they are, and how little respect or just plain human feeling they have for anyone who is not a straight white male.

If they're shutting down cadet clubs at West Point, how long will it be before civilian colleges receive memos from the Trump government threatening to cancel their federal grants and loans and money for research if they don't shut down their clubs that are associated with minorities and women?

What will be next? Programs to feed hungry kids; anything that smacks of helping or being kind to the homeless; providing shelter to the unhoused -- the next thing you know, billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk will go after the law that requires emergency rooms to treat people in distress whether or not they have health insurance.

First they came for the immigrants.

Then they came for the foreign aid.

Then they came for the clean air and water.

Then they came for the schools.

Then they came for the sick and the elderly.

They'll come for the children next, and it won't end unless we can stop them.

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. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Political Press Keeps Echoing Special Counsel's Partisan Smear Of Biden

Political Press Keeps Echoing Special Counsel's Partisan Smear Of Biden

A Trump-appointed prosecutor dropped an unfalsifiable partisan bomb on President Joe Biden Thursday, playing into a years-long right-wing media campaign — and U.S. political journalists decided to treat it as a valid and impartial charge.

Biden, who has a 40-year record of public service in the U.S. Senate, as vice president, and in the Oval Office, is a self-described “gaffe machine” with a well-documented stutter. He is also, at 81, the oldest president in U.S. history.

The right has dedicated substantial time and resources since Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign to attributing his verbal miscues to his age. Republican political operatives surface out-of-context snippets of Biden’s misstatements and try to blow them up into national stories, and it is rarely-disputed canon in the right-wing media that the president is a mentally failing dementia patient.

This argument blew up in their faces when Biden performed so well in a debate against then-President Donald Trump that the GOP resorted to accusing him of taking performance-enhancing drugs, and again in 2023, when his canny dealings with then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy led McCarthy to describe him as “very smart” and Republicans to question how they’d been outmaneuvered by someone purportedly in mental decline. But undeterred by reality, the right has maintained the drumbeat over Biden’s mental status, driving up public concern over the president’s age.

Enter Robert Hur. Attorney General Merrick Garland presumably selected him as a special counsel to investigate Biden’s possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records because he thought he could quell potential complaints of political bias by putting in charge a former clerk to right-wing judges whom Trump appointed as a U.S. attorney with every incentive to do maximum political damage to the Democratic president. This is a regular pattern — Republican and Democratic administrations each appoint Republicans to investigate both Republicans and Democrats, though that never seems to halt the complaints from the right about the handling of those cases.

Last Thursday, after a year-long investigation, Hur issued a 345-page report in which he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter” and that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” But rather than stop there, he also levied an incendiary and gratuitous attack on Biden’s mental status, claiming that, “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur cited specific mental lapses he’d observed during their five hours of interviews — conducted at a time when Biden was responding to the international crisis caused by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel — including that his “memory appeared hazy” when discussing the intricacies of 15-year-old White House policy debates.

Hur’s argument that lawyers for the sitting president of the United States would argue in court that he shouldn’t be convicted of a crime because he is a senile old man is facially absurd. Indeed, Biden forcefully pushed back on the critique during a White House appearance Thursday night.

The special counsel’s actions drew sharp criticism from the legal community. Biden’s lawyers blasted claims about Biden’s memory in a draft report, saying, “We do not believe that the report's treatment of President Biden's memory is accurate or appropriate. The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.” On MSNBC, former FBI counsel Andrew Weissmann called the claims “wholly inappropriate,” “gratuitous,” and “exactly what you’re not supposed to do, which is putting your thumb on the scale that could have political repercussions.” Neal Katyal, the former acting U.S. solicitor general, likewise said that based on his tours in the Justice Department, Hur’s statements were “totally gratuitous” and a “too-clever-move-by-half by the special counsel to try and take some swipes at a sitting president.” And Ty Cobb, a former Trump lawyer, said on CNN that he had served on an independent counsel probe that declined to prosecute someone due to “health issues, but we didn’t tell the world that,” suggesting that such statements by Hur were inappropriate.

But by including those inappropriate and gratuitous statements, Hur put an official seal on a partisan attack.

The right jumped on Hur’s claims, with Republican politicians and right-wing commentators falsely claiming that the special counsel had found that Biden “is not competent to stand trial” and “has dementia.” Some called for the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and remove him from office.

The mainstream political press, meanwhile, turned Hur’s insinuations about Biden’s mental health — and not his declination to prosecute — into the report’s big takeaway. Here’s a sampling of top headlines from major newspapers, political tipsheets, and digital outlets on Thursday and Friday.

Stories about Biden’s mental state are clearly catnip for political journalists. They can demonstrate how “fair” they are by providing negative coverage of Biden to balance their treatment of his likely opponent Donald Trump, who is an unhinged authoritarian facing scores of federal and state criminal charges, including for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election. And they don’t need to bone up on policy nuances separating the candidates — “is the president addled” is an easy venue for hot takes.

The storyline is particularly toxic because no matter how many times it is repudiated by Biden’s public actions or the statements of people who have spoken to him privately, it cannot be falsified. The White House physician can release health summaries calling him “fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.” Democrats who have recently spoken to the president, like Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), and reporters who have recently interviewed him, like John Harwood, can attest to his mental acuity at the time of his special counsel interview. But Biden is still Biden, so he’s going to keep making gaffes, as he did Thursday night when he referred to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico,” leading journalists to downplay his newsmaking statements about the Israel-Hamas war and fixate instead on what the statement says about his mental health.

The choice for reporters is how they respond to such misstatements. On NPR, Mara Liasson said that the White House is pushing back by pointing out that Biden’s foes, like Fox’s Sean Hannity and Trump, have had similar mix-ups.

“But the difference is that one of these missteps, one of these guys who forgets things, Biden, has become a viral meme, and it's become a big problem for him,” she said. “Trump's misstatements, for some reason, have not risen to that level.”

It’s true that Trump’s own verbal missteps have not coalesced into an overarching narrative about his mental fitness for office. But the reason why is obvious: Political journalists decided to treat Biden’s missteps as a big problem, and Trump’s as a small one. They’re setting the agenda, following the lead of the Republican Party, the right-wing media, and now, Hur.


Update (2/12/24): Popular Information’s Judd Legum reviewed the output of three major newspapers and found a “deluge of negative media coverage based on Hur's conjecture” which treated “Hur's amateur medical judgments as a political crisis for Biden and an existential threat to his reelection campaign.”

“A Popular Information analysis found that just three major papers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — collectively published 81 articles about Hur's assessment of Biden's memory in the four days following the release of Hur's report,” Legum wrote. “Incidents that raised questions about former President Trump's mental state received far less coverage by the same outlets.”

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Legum also found that the papers provided significantly less coverage of Trump’s recent mix-up of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.

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    Former Trump Appointee Charged With Assaulting Officer On Jan. 6

    Former Trump Appointee Charged With Assaulting Officer On Jan. 6

    Federico Klein, a former Trump appointee to the State Department, was charged Thursday with allegedly assaulting a Metropolitan Police Officer using a deadly weapon during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

    According to an expanded indictment, Klein, "using a deadly or dangerous weapon, that is, a shield, did forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, and interfere with an officer and employee of the United States."

    Though Klein was first charged individually on March 19 for his actions on January 6, the Justice Department combined his case with that of six other defendants, and two individuals yet to be charged, on July 29.

    The superseding indictment alleged that Klein was part of a wave of rioters who engaged in a violent conflict with police officers in the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol and a nearby tunnel between 2:40 p.m. and 3:18 p.m. ET. In videos released by the Justice Department, rioters, including Klein, allegedly engaged in fierce coordinated assaults against the line of police officers attempting to block off the tunnel, using metal poles, riot shields, and other makeshift weapons.

    During the first hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6 — assembled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after an initial bipartisan commission failed to come together amid GOP pushback — Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) said that she and another member of Congress were sheltering in an office "40 paces" from the tunnel where rioters, including Klein, were fighting police officers attempting to hold them off from progressing farther.

    She credited law enforcement from keeping her alive.

    "I listened to you struggle," she told officers testifying during that hearing, who had been present at the Capitol and had pushed back the mob. "I listened to you yelling out to one another. I listened to you care for one another… I listened to people coughing, having difficulty breathing. And then I listened to you getting back into the fight."

    She added, "The reason I was able to hug [my children] again was because of the courage you and other officers showed that day."

    A video released by the Justice Department indeed appears to show Klein allegedly pushing his way to the front of a group of rioters attempting to break through a police line in that tunnel.

    According to D.C. CBS affiliate WUSA9, in the footage, Klein appears to grab at a riot shield in the hands of an MPD officer before ultimately picking up a large metal pole, all while urging on the other rioters and allegedly calling for mob reinforcements.

    Klein, along with the six other is currently facing at least eight charges, including multiple counts of assaulting a police officer.

    According to WUSA9, Klein was turned in by his former State Department colleagues who saw his photo on an FBI wanted poster following the attack.

    The January 6 insurrection ultimately resulted in several deaths, tens of millions of dollars in repairs, and more than 600 separate charges. At least 140 law enforcement officers, both Capitol and Metropolitan Police, were injured in the attack; several who guarded the Capitol that day have since died by suicide.

    Despite the damage, many Republican lawmakers, as well as former President Donald Trump, who was impeached for incitement of insurrection related to that attack, have attempted to rewrite what happened that day, insisting, among other things, that the incident was little more than a "tourist" visit, or that members of the mob were actually "antifa" activists dressed as Trump supporters, claims which are not rooted in reality and have been repeatedly debunked.

    The House committee's inquiry into the matter is ongoing, and separate investigations by federal law enforcement are also underway.

    Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

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