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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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On Wednesday, InTouch magazine ran excerpts from an interview with adult film Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) wherein she detailed having a 2006 affair with then-future-president Donald Trump.
The piece was the first confirmation from Daniels about the affair, which had been much rumored prior to the 2016 election and drew renewed attention this past week after the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s personal lawyer paid the adult star $130,000 to keep quiet.
But Wednesday’s story is just the beginning of the saga, not the conclusion of it. According to a source familiar with the matter, later this week, InTouch is planning to run the entire unedited interview it conducted with Daniels. All 5,500 words of it.
The interview with Daniels was conducted in 2011, which means it occurred before the performer signed the reported NDA. The magazine also verified Daniels’ account with two sources at the time and had the actress take a polygraph.
...
A source tells The Daily Beast that the full, unedited interview that will run later this week is 5,500 words of “cray.” Daniels didn’t leave much out in describing the affair, which involved a few more encounters in the months following their first tryst in Tahoe.
According to the source, the transcript contains details of “[w]hat he’s like in bed, pillow talk, she talks about what he’s like down there…”
A young Republican activist from Northern Virginia who was seen as a potential rising star quit the party Tuesday, citing President Trump’s “appalling comments” about Haitian immigrants and what he called a nativist streak in his home state.
Kyle McDaniel, 28, served on the party’s state central committee for two years and has worked as a top aide for Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield), who said he had hoped McDaniel would eventually run for public office.
But McDaniel said he harbored https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/some-republicans-positions-do-not-reflect-the-party-i-know/2016/01/10/542c0fa0-b49d-11e5-8abc-d09392edc612_story.html?utm_term=.ccfa8646d8e2 (increasing reservations) over where the party has been heading. On Tuesday, he sent a letter of resignation to state party chairman John Whitbeck that described events he “could no longer stomach,” including Trump’s reported reference last week to Haiti as a “https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/republicans-in-immigrant-rich-fla-scramble-in-wake-of-trumps-shithole-remark/2018/01/12/ace41058-f7c5-11e7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html?utm_term=.207959a42a73 (shithole)” country and the defense by some party leaders of a rally this summer by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville that led to the death of a 32-year-old woman.
McDaniel also cited an unsuccessful effort by himself and other younger Republicans to either remove or formally censure a member of the state party’s 11th congressional district committee in Northern Virginia, who, among other things, called Islam “https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/va-republican-apologizes-for-trump-like-tweets-against-muslims/2016/06/29/d089b5b4-3c7b-11e6-80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html?utm_term=.22ac74ad89da (a death cult created by Satan).”
“I have, on more occasions than I care to recall, been forced to ‘bite my tongue’ when in conversation with other party leaders about the issues of the day,” wrote McDaniel, who has gone to Haiti as a relief worker with his church and said he and his wife, Katie, have considered adopting a Haitian child. “I cannot in good faith continue to do that.”
While McDaniel is not a marquee name in the state party’s leadership, the news of his departure touched a nerve among some officials, who said they worry that Trump is causing deep fissures in the party, especially among younger Republicans. In Northern Virginia in particular, anti-Trump sentiments run high, helping to fuel a https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/virginia-legislature-shuns-drama-gets-underway-with-republican-leadership/2018/01/10/8014762c-f4a9-11e7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html?utm_term=.e80471cbf270 (wave of Democratic victories)in November.
Why lie? Why call into question the legitimacy of the election that he won? Riling up nativist and racist populist anger isn’t especially tactically useful at this moment.
To understand this kind of political untruth, I think we have to look to theorists of truth and language in politics; Frankfurt’s essay was only tangentially that. But the great analysts of truth and speech under totalitarianism—George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is. Sometimes—often—a leader with authoritarian tendencies will lie in order to make others repeat his lie both as a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them.
Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the huge lies and blatant reversals of language associated with the Holocaust. Havel documented the pervasive little lies, lies that everyone knew to be lies, of late Communism. And Orwell gave us the vivid “2+2=5.”
Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless; it also makes you complicit. You’re morally compromised. Your ability to stand on your own moral two feet and resist or denounce is lost. Part of this is a general tool for making people part of immoral groups. One child makes a second abuse a third. The second then can’t think he’s any better than the first, the bully, and can’t inform. In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them.
But in totalitarian and authoritarian politics, there seems to be something special about the lie, partly because so much of politics is about speech (and especially public speech) in the first place. Based on the evidence of his presidential campaign, I think Donald Trump understands this instinctively, and he relished the power to make his subordinates repeat his clearly outlandish lies in public. Every Sunday he provided fresh absurdities that Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Kellyanne Conway repeated on the talk shows. They didn’t persuade anyone who were strategically important to persuade; the audience for Meet the Press isn’t low-information, undecided, working-class voters, and the kinds of people who did watch those shows knew the claims were false. But making his surrogates repeat the lies compromised them; that tied them to him. And it degraded them, and made clear where power lay.
One of the many things that frightens me about the immediate future is this: the possibility that Trump now thinks everyone is his subordinate. He clearly wants his inner circle to be people he can make say things they know to be untrue. But he seems to love the prospect of expanding that circle: the more he can break establishment figures, from Paul Ryan to Mitt Romney, or the establishment conservative media, the greater his power will be. Why would he want people to believe an absurd lie like the one about millions of illegal voters? If we did, he’d up the ante. It’s more likely that what he wants is to test the loyalty and fealty of an ever-growing number of potential Chris Christies, seeing whether he can make them—and us—repeat a lie. He is strengthened by people who either fear him or crave a position with him more than they love the truth.
We hear a lot about the distraction problem. Trump’s more outrageous tweets eat up the news cycle and distract from hard news, like his massive conflicts of financial interest, or his massive fraud in the Trump University case. And it is important not to allow Twitter dustups to conceal real-world misconduct. But insisting on the difference between truth and lies is itself a part of the defense of freedom. Orwell, Arendt, and Havel teach us that the power to tell public lies and to have them repeated is evidence of, and a tool for the expansion of, a power that free people should resist and refuse. That is not a distraction.
Although Donald Trump is alleged to have paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in 2016 to keep quiet about a reported affair that took place 10 years previously, In Touch Weekly has published an interview with Daniels from 2011, before the signing of any NDA, in which she spills intimate details of meeting the then-Apprentice host at a celebrity golf event in Lake Tahoe.
A frequent theme throughout the interview concerns Trump being taken aback by how smart and business savvy Daniels was, with Trump going so far as to tell Daniels that he wanted to put her on The Apprentice. One of Daniels’s quotes on the subject which In Touch published in the print edition of the story but not online, is particularly striking.
“We had really good banter,” Daniels told In Touch. “He told me once that I was someone to be reckoned with, beautiful, smart, just like his daughter”
Trump, one figures, was talking about Ivanka Trump, who was 24 at the time. (His other daughter, Tiffany, would have been 11.) Our now president reportedly comparing a woman he was allegedly sleeping with to Ivanka is just another creepy addition to his long history of going out of his way to sexualize his daughter. Infamously, during a 2006 appearance on The View, Trump complimented his daughter’s body and told the panel, “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” Stormy Daniels and Trump may have only had a fling, but he paid her just about the highest compliment he knows.
Steve Bannon made one conspicuous slip up in his closed-door hearing on Tuesday with the House Intelligence Committee, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the confidential proceedings. Bannon admitted that he'd had conversations with Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer and legal spokesman Mark Corallo about Don Junior's infamous meeting with the Russians in Trump Tower in June 2016.
Why it matters: The meeting — and the subsequent drafting of a misleading statement on Air Force One — has become one of the most important focal points of the Russia investigations, both on Capitol Hill and within Robert Mueller's team, because it provides the closest thing that exists to evidence that the Trump campaign was willing to entertain collusion with Russians.
Bannon immediately realized he'd slipped up and disclosed conversations he wasn't supposed to discuss, because they happened while he was chief strategist in the White House. Throughout the rest of the session, committee members — in particular Republican Trey Gowdy and Democrat Adam Schiff — hammered Bannon over the fact that he'd mentioned those conversations but refused to discuss anything else about his time in the White House.
John K. Bush, a former blogger whom Trump appointed to the Sixth Circuit, just wrote an opinion holding that an individual's use of a computer in a crime justifies a search of his *entire home.* A huge blow to the Fourth Amendment.
[If you use your computer in any fashion to order UGL AAS [or anything] your *entire home" can now be searched.]
[If you use your computer in any fashion to order UGL AAS [or anything] your *entire home" can now be searched.]
TrumpFuckingIdiot, TrumpTard, TrumPOS ...
The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy.
FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said.
It is illegal to use foreign money to influence federal elections.
It’s unclear how long the Torshin inquiry has been ongoing, but the news comes as Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sweeping investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including whether the Kremlin colluded with Trump’s campaign, has been heating up.
All of the sources spoke on condition of anonymity because Mueller’s investigation is confidential and mostly involves classified information.
A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined comment.
Disclosure of the Torshin investigation signals a new dimension in the 18-month-old FBI probe of Russia’s interference. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article127231799.html (McClatchy reported a year ago)that a multi-agency U.S. law enforcement and counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s intervention, begun even before the start of the 2016 general election campaign, initially included a focus on whether the Kremlin secretly helped fund efforts to boost Trump, but little has been said about that possibility in recent months.
The extent to which the FBI has evidence of money flowing from Torshin to the NRA, or of the NRA’s participation in the transfer of funds, could not be learned.
