Passing Strange

March 15, 2017. Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson embarked on his first major trip to Asia this week–apparently sans any agenda to pressure China and North Korea about the virtues of having an open society, since he decided to exclude the American press corps from his plane. Apart from the concern raised domestically about media outlets being kept at arm’s length during the practice of our foreign policy, Chinese journalists, human rights activists, and human rights lawyers also met this development with clear dismay. One can safely assume that the Trump administration’s disdain for American journalists isn’t doing the American press any favors in terms of their treatment abroad either.

Asked whether Tillerson would be raising concerns about human rights, including press freedoms, while in Beijing, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said, “I’m just always wary of predicting exactly what will be on the agenda of any meeting, but I can guarantee that it is a concern.” For his part, Tillerson, in an interview with the Independent Review Journal, said: “I’m not a big media press access person. I personally don’t need it.”

March 10th, 2017. Across America. Since January of this year, in the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump and the ascension of the “alt-right” neo-fascists into prominent positions of power within the administration, there have been 134 bomb threats against 100 Jewish organizations in the United States – Jewish Community Centers, Jewish political organizations like ADL, and others. There have also been vandalism attacks on Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis, Missouri, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Rochester, NY, with hundreds of headstones toppled. At his “quasi-state of the union” address to Congress on February 28th, Trump condemned the rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes. Nevertheless, the administration was demonstrably slow in condemning the wave of anti-Semitic threats, and has done little since to take concrete action.

On March 10th, all 100 US Senators wrote to the Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director James Comey asking them to provide crucial assistance by helping JCCs, Jewish Day Schools and Synagogues improve their physical security, deterring threats from being made, and investigating and prosecuting those making these threats or who may seek to act on these threats in the future. Whatever one thinks about Trump’s claim to be the “the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life” the fact that he has surrounded himself with avowed racists and anti-Semites has clearly unleashed an unprecedented wave of intimidation campaigns against minorities across the country and emboldened all manner of hate groups.

March 5th, 2017, Washington DC. In a spectacularly unprecedented move, today the director of the FBI essentially accused the President of the United States of being a liar. He obviously didn’t use those words. Instead, he asked the Justice Department to publicly reject Mr. Trump’s assertion that former President Barack Obama wire tapped Trump’s phones on the grounds that the allegations are false.

And why would FBI Director James Comey do such a thing? Because if it were true, it would mean that the FBI broke the law–James Comey’s FBI.

The source of this Obama wire tapping conspiracy appears to be the Trump Administration’s own fake news propaganda outlet (recently run by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon), Brietbart news. If we were to assume that the President is a very stupid person, we might conclude that he’d fallen victim to the very fake news he incessantly denounces. If we were to assume he was a bit brighter, however, we might conclude that this whole wild goose chase is calculated to draw attention away from growing allegations that the Trump administration colluded with the Russian government to steal the Presidential election. See this New York Times piece for background on the genesis of this Obama wire tapping conspiracy theory.

And finally, if you want to watch a movie about wire tapping and electronic surveillance set in a time in history when Mr. Trump’s accusations against President Obama might actually make sense, watch Francis Ford Coppola’s excellent 1974 film The Conversation, starring the incomparable Gene Hackman.

March 4, 2017, Palm Beach, Florida In the wee hours of Saturday morning, tweeting from his unsecured Android device on the unsecured Mar-a-Lago wi-fi network, Nutcase in Chief Donald Trump accused President Obama of wire tapping his phones in Trump Tower prior to the election.

“How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” Trump tweeted. It’s unclear what this means. Does Trump have a land line in Trump Tower? And why would Obama have to “tap” it? Didn’t we learn from Snowden that everything is “tapped”? Couldn’t Obama simply have asked the NSA to share the transcripts? If we’re recording Angela Merkel, why would be assume we’re not also recording Trump? Might this be a good time to make a plug for the Signal app?

In support of this very serious accusation, Mr. Trump provided absolutely no evidence whatsoever. But he wants it investigated. Since then his administration also has provided no evidence for this very serious accusation. It is indicative, however, of how frustrated he is that the Russian collusion story is starting to have legs. First Michael Flynn and now Jeff Sessions. It seems everyone in Trumps administration has questionable ties to Vladimir Putin.

I don’t recall a President ever accusing his predecessor of such cloak and dagger behavior. Americans, including presidents past and present, tend to have a certain reverence for the office. Former chess champion Gary Kasparov finds it quite familiar however. It comes right out of Vladimir Putin’s strongman playbook. Kasparov tweeted yesterday, “The tradition of going after one’s predecessor in power is very familiar to anyone from an authoritarian regime. Purges, scapegoating, etc.” Why? Because “To play the victim despite holding power, one needs dangerous enemies. If they don’t exist, they must be created or their threat inflated.”

After his twitter rant against President Obama, Trump changed the subject by tweeting about how he thinks Arnold Schwarzenegger was fired from the reality TV show The Apprentice. Not even kidding. The President of the United States: obsessed with a reality TV show.

March 2, 2017, Washington DC. We’ve just learned that Attorney General Jeff  Sessions lied to Congress during his confirmation hearing on January 10th. And yes, I know, “lied” is such a morally charged word to use, isn’t it? In the spirit of avoiding hyperbole let’s be more precise and use legal rather than moral words. We’ve just learned that Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions committed perjury during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Just to be clear, under US Federal law, perjury is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Perjury, by the way, is a legal term that means lying under oath (i.e., lying right after you swore to tell the truth, which means it’s always a double lie).

Jeff Sessions joined the Trump campaign in February 2016. The Washington Post revealed yesterday that in Sessions met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after joining the campaign, including once in September–just a month prior to the controversial announcement just 11 days before the election by FBI Director James Comey that the FBI was investigating emails related to Hillary Clinton’s campaign presumably hacked by Russian Intelligence.

On January 10th, 2017, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) asked Jeff Sessions a very pertinent question for the Trump administration’s proposed top cop: what would Sessions do if he learned that anyone in Trump’s administration had communicated with the Russians during the 2016 Presidential campaign? “I’m not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions replied. “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

Oops! Probably just “forgot” about those two conversations. Nothing fishy here. No one is suggesting he might have been part of a conspiracy to collude with a foreign government to sway an American election or anything.

Even some Republicans have said that if this is true, then Sessions needs to recuse himself from any investigation into Russian election tampering. Some Democrats, however, are demanding that Sessions resign. Both of these options are inadequate. See the US Federal penalty for perjury above.

February 24, 2017, Washington DC. On December 16th of last year current White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer remarked that conservative, liberal, or otherwise, the government cannot ban media access because “that’s what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship.”

Today White House press secretary Sean Spicer banned reporters from the New York Times, CNN, The LA Times, Politico, and BuzzFeed from attending White House press briefings. Still on the “approved” list are Trump-friendly conservative propaganda outlets Fox News, Breitbart and the Washington Times, as well as the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, CBS, NBC, ABC, Bloomberg, and Time. AP and Time chose to sit out in solidarity with the banned press outlets.

This is after weeks of the Administration praising sycophant propagandists and pseudo-reporters and attacking critical coverage as “fake news”–and after the POTUS actually describing the press as an “enemy of the people.”

So there goes the free press. There goes the 1st Amendment. This is a remarkably bold step towards authoritarian rule. In fact, I’m willing to simply appeal to Sean Spicer’s own comments and say that the administration is now behaving like a dictatorship. Sean’s words, not mine. I know, I know. We shouldn’t invest too much in what Sean says because Sean lies frequently (and obviously and demonstrably). That’s another (closely related) problem–one that is best addressed by a free press…

If news outlets that are critical of the administration are barred, then there is no free press. And if the free press cannot attend press briefings, then press briefings are essentially just propaganda announcements. What’s the point of even having them? Shall we mark today as the end of the republic? February 24, 2017.

February 18, 2017. Melbourne, Florida. Just one month into his term, POTUS Trump has returned to holding campaign rallies. Before an exuberant crowd in Melbourne, Trump said, “I am here because I want to be among my friends and among the people.” While such a sentiment is perhaps understandable after his rocky and chaotic start, it’s truly remarkable to see a President, who should be getting down to work, unconcerned about the optics of launching his 2020 campaign at this juncture. Trump used the campaign rally as yet another opportunity to rail against the media, to attack the judiciary, and his predecessor. The campaign rally was clearly an opportunity for Trump to shed the very uncomfortable role (which he has in no way accepted) of civil servant with 300 million bosses. He obviously much prefers the job interview to the daily assessment of performance to which we are all subject on the job. The campaign rally, and others like it to come, give Trump visual fodder for his continued gaslighting, specifically, that his popularity is high rather than low. Formally, at least, it was hard to discern what exactly Trump was campaigning for. In response to a query about it, Trump said, “Life is a campaign.”

February 17, 2017, New York, NY.  Today the POTUS tweeted that the media is the enemy of the people. By the way, the copy of the tweet at right is the original that was quickly deleted and replaced with an updated version where “SICK!” is deleted and @ABC and @CBS are added.

This comes on the heels of long, incoherent press conference held by the White House the day before, which amounted to over an hour long tirade against the press corps for being “dishonest” and promulgating “fake news”. Ironically, in the course of conducting this unseemly lambast of the forth estate the POTUS spewed forth a series of demonstrable lies and falsehoods in such volume and rapidity as to be difficult to enumerate. Some of his lies offered seemingly no tactical advantage to his cause, making one wonder why he would utter them apart from feeding his own vanity–lies like this whopper about Electoral Votes:

“We got 306 because people came out and voted like they’ve never seen before so that’s the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.”

Surely the POTUS knows that Electoral votes are a matter of public record, that he most certainly did not receive the largest electoral college win since Reagan, that he received less than Presidents Obama (332 votes in 2012 and 365 in 2008),  Clinton (379 in 1996 and 370 in 1992), and George H.W. Bush (426 in 1988). You can just look it up. Anyone can. And incidentally, even the claim that Trump received 306 Electoral College votes is false. He received 304 (two faithless electors failed to cast their votes for Trump).

When called on this lie during the press conference by a member of “the enemy of the people”, POTUS simply responded, “Well, I don’t know, I was given that information. I was given — I actually, I’ve seen that information around.” Seen it around? Where? On Kellyanne Conways “alternative facts” notepad? This is all fine and well except that it’s demonstrably false (which I just demonstrated with fucking 5 second Wikipedia search!), and this was a press conference, and he’s the fucking President!

POTUS’s attacks on the press also follow comments made in January by white nationalist chief strategist, Steve Bannon, that “the media here is the opposition party,” and that it should “be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

This is obviously corrosive to the first Amendment of the Constitution, which the POTUS swore an oath to uphold. And given what a hindrance a free press is to the authoritarian usurpation of a democratic republic, it would probably we wise on our part to presume that this is precisely what anti-republican shadow President Steve Bannon intends.