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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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For the bulk of my professional career, I’ve been studying maybe the most difficult and dangerous question in American foreign policy: how to handle a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons. During five of those years, my job at the Department of Defense was anything but academic. I was at the center of the Pentagon’s efforts to wrap our heads around what to do in a crisis; as part of that work, I advised Pentagon leadership through two real-world crises in 2010, and spent the years that followed figuring out how to prevent or overcome future North Korean attacks.
The nature of the work inhibits me from talking about particulars. But suffice it to say we examined the problem from every imaginable angle, from how to prevail in traditional war scenarios at an acceptable cost to how the U.S. military would manage the sudden collapse of the North Korean regime. Meanwhile, the task of managing North Korea has grown only more difficult as the country has advanced toward being able to hit the United States with a nuclear-tipped missile.
Now, I’m getting nightmare flashbacks as I read the fragmentary reports dribbling out in the media about what seems like an intense debate inside the Trump administration. …
Donald Trump has been obsessed with race for the entire time he has been a public figure. He had a history of making racist comments as a New York real-estate developer in the 1970s and ‘80s. More recently, his political rise was built on promulgating the lie that the nation’s first black president was born in Kenya. He then launched his campaign with a speech describing Mexicans as rapists.
The media often falls back on euphemisms when describing Trump’s comments about race: racially loaded, racially charged, racially tinged, racially sensitive. And Trump himself has claimed that he is “the least racist person.” But here’s the truth: Donald Trump is a racist. He talk about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.
Here, we have attempted to compile a definitive list of his racist comments – or at least the publicly known ones.
A complex understanding of Donald Trump’s presidency requires us to step back from appearances and to see Trump not as an end in himself, or even as an individual, but as a means to political ends. In The Wizard of Oz, the epiphany comes when Dorothy’s little dog pulls back the curtain to reveal that the ‘Great and Powerful Oz’ is an illusion used to manipulate Dorothy and her motley band of outsiders and minorities. The lesson is not that the little man pulling the levers has no power, but that all of the power he wields comes entirely from the emotions he is able to arouse in response to ‘the Wizard’s’ dramatic posturing and amplified assertions.
Behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner’s 1948 sci-fi novel Walden Two envisaged a perfectly socially engineered utopian society in which systematically altering environmental variables would generate perfectly unfree, but happy, citizens. Skinner’s character, Frazie, describes the determiners of human behaviour to Castle, a character who still foolishly believes in free will. He says that Castle’s mistake is to imagine that physical restraint, handcuffs, iron bars, and force exhaust the means of shaping human behaviour. The threat of force is a poor way of controlling human behaviour, he explains, since the person controlled knows he is being coerced and doesn’t feel free, therefore he is not loyal to his masters.
Frazie explains that positive reinforcement exerts a far more tremendous power over the controlled individual, since it is in the power of the masters to create any of the situations that a person likes or to remove any situation he doesn’t like. When he behaves as the masters want him to behave, the masters simply create a situation he likes, or remove one he doesn’t like. This way the controlled individuals feels as though he is doing exactly what he wants to do. Frazie says, ‘What is emerging at this critical stage in the evolution of society is a behavioural and cultural technology based on positive reinforcement alone.’[1]
Since positive reinforcement works and negative doesn’t, explains Frazie, cultural design is more successful than ever before, since we control the motives, the desires, the wishes of our citizens, so that the controlled, although more controlled than ever before, feel free. Skinner’s great insight was that men only feel unfree when they are up against jails and police. They don’t revolt against their own desires, since these are the very things that make them act the way they do.
WASHINGTON — Across the military, officers and troops are quietly preparing for a war they hope will not come.
At Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month, a mix of 48 Apache gunships and Chinook cargo helicopters took off in an exercise that practiced moving troops and equipment under live artillery fire to assault targets. Two days later, in the skies above Nevada, 119 soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division parachuted out of C-17 military cargo planes under cover of darkness in an exercise that simulated a foreign invasion.
Next month, at Army posts across the United States, more than 1,000 reserve soldiers will practice how to set up so-called mobilization centers that move military forces overseas in a hurry. And beginning next month with the Winter Olympics in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang, the Pentagon plans to send more Special Operations troops to the Korean Peninsula, an initial step toward what some officials said ultimately could be the formation of a Korea-based task force similar to the types that are fighting in Iraq and Syria. Others said the plan was strictly related to counterterrorism efforts.
In the world of the American military, where contingency planning is a mantra drummed into the psyche of every officer, the moves are ostensibly part of standard Defense Department training and troop rotations. But the scope and timing of the exercises suggest a renewed focus on getting the country’s military prepared for what could be on the horizon with North Korea.
But while Trump may be stupid or crazy, the people enabling him are neither of those things. The lucky-bounce election of Trump by a freak of the Electoral College offered US Republicans an unexpected opportunity to enact a deeply unpopular agenda. In return, Trump has demanded that they protect him — and attack his enemies. On the very day before the ‘very stable genius’ tweets, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee ordered the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation of Christopher Steele, compiler of the famous dossier of Trump’s activities in Russia. They didn’t consult or even inform committee Democrats, a sharp breach of Senate practice. Trump wanted it, so they did it. What the world needs to understand is not Trump’s complex hairdo, but his self-serving system of power. That’s my story anyway.
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws ...
Letter From a Birmingham Jail | The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute
Letter From a Birmingham Jail | The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute
There cannot be serious doubt that President Trump in a meeting last Thursday with lawmakers made a comment about Haiti, El Salvador and African countries to the effect of: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” No one in good faith can dispute that he then said that “we need more people from Norway,” a nearly all-white country. How do we know he said it — or something close?
The White House did not deny the news report for the remainder of the day Thursday. It was not until the next morning that Trump gave a halfhearted walkback but still did not deny making the comment. “Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said ‘take them out.’ Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings – unfortunately, no trust!” He didn’t bother to deny his slur of African countries or his preference for Norwegians.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) reportedly took umbrage during the meeting. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) went public with the remarks. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Sunday, “Well, all I can say is I was in a meeting directly afterwards where those who had presented the president our proposal spoke about the meeting. And they — they said those words were used before those words went public. So that’s all I can tell you is I — I heard that account before the account even went public.”
Even conservative commentators confirmed the president’s remarks. Rich Lowry said, “He said s-house, and not s-hole. That’s not going to make a difference to anyone. But the general remarks — yes — I’d like to have a transcript, because everyone is putting so much weight on this to see exactly what was said in what ways, but the general tenor of the discussion has been reported accurately.”
Erick Erickson tweeted, “It’s weird that people in the room don’t remember Trump using that word when Trump himself was calling friends to brag about it afterwards. I spoke to one of those friends. The President thought it would play well with the base.”
And yet Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.), who initially put out a rather odd statement saying they had no memory of the event, decided to double down. (Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, used the same memory dodge on Fox News on Sunday. “I don’t recall him saying that exact phrase.”) Cotton entirely reversed himself, in keeping with his utter shamelessness in defending and promoting Trump.
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So what does all this tell you?
First, many GOP lawmakers now consider lying in defense of the president to be routine, part of their normal duties as card-carrying Republicans. They don’t care that it makes them look foolish to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. They, like Trump, now operate in the populist bubble that depends on protecting Trump and reaffirming their bond with the base on behalf of white grievance. For Perdue and Cotton, defending the preference for immigrants from richer countries — i.e. whiter countries — requires they not concede that this, at bottom, is about race.
Second, no White House or Hill staffer quits, it seems, when their boss behaves dishonestly even to the point of changing their story. In remaining day after day, they consent to and enable the culture of nonstop lies. Gary Cohn — reportedly “troubled” after Trump’s Charlottesville debacle — is still there. To our knowledge, no one in either of the two senators’ offices has quit on principle. Everyone makes excuses (well, I wasn’t there) and convinces themselves that it’s imperative to remain on the job.
Third, aside from the Kool-Aid drinkers, why aren’t the conservative media denouncing Cotton and Perdue for their transparent dishonesty? Ah, the tribal mentality runs deep. Conservative outlets’ silence reinforces the inclination of the Perdues and the Cottons to mislead the next time, and the time after that. Somehow they rationalize that what Trump said was bad and racist but that covering it up is not.
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