When people turn against a dictator-the dictator tries to turn people against themselves: Ex-FBI deputy director
President Donald Trump is using federal troops to help him create a B-roll for his campaign commercials by sending them into cities that he doesn’t like to supersede the police there.
Daily Beast editor Sam Stein explained that while Trump’s tactics may have worked in 2016, now that he’s president, he can’t blame anyone other than himself. All he can do is claim that somehow mayors are mismanaging the Black Lives Matter protests, most of which have been peaceful and quieted down since the month following George Floyd’s death. It was only after Trump sent the troops into the streets that things started to get worse. It first happened in Washington, D.C., in which Park Police cleared the streets so Trump could take a photo-op outside of a church with a Bible. Then mothers were attacked in Portland, with protesters thrown in unmarked vans like a scene out of “V for Vendetta.”
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace turned to former FBI counterintelligence expert Frank Figliuzzi, asking if Trump is “off” as he boasts about his dementia screening.
The president is without a doubt uninformed, but he’s also incredibly consistent with his constant arching and bending towards authoritarian practices. And sam stein is absolutely right to point us back towards the clearing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. Trump learned no lesson. He simply learned to replace active-duty military with border patrol agents.”
“Since at least March that he wants to be a wartime president,” Figliuzzi said, recalling a White House press briefing in which Trump referred to himself as precisely that.
“He likes that theme,” Figliuzzi continued. “He’s going to go with it. He’s not going to divert from it. In fact, as you just noted, he’s going to announce that he’s going to bring this really bad Hollywood, terrible movie, set to cities near you. He’s going to make it happen because that is going to stoke the fear that he needs in people to think the only way that they can get law and order is from him. As Tom Friedman points out, this is really a page right out of the textbook for tyrants. Historically, what dictators and authoritarian regimes do when their people turn against them is to pit their own people against each other.”
He went on to say that he thinks that’s exactly what Trump wants to happen.
“I heard a report this morning on Fox News of a Trump surrogate claiming that the entire city of Portland has been decimated,” said Figliuzzi. “That’s not true. We heard similar things about Seattle, and that kind of autonomous zone that they had taken the whole city away when really it was five or six blocks. The facts matter.”
He then said that he wanted to deliver a special message to federal agents being deployed to cities.
The other thing that matters is I want to make an appeal to the federal agents that are on the street of Portland and about to deploy to other cities. I was a federal agent for 25 years years. When I led FBI offices, one of the things I had to make certain of that I wasn’t asking agents to do something that would put them in legal jeopardy and take them outside the scope of their employment. I’m here to appeal to those DHS agents today and say there will one day be a legal reckoning for what you are being asked to do. And you are compelled to stand by the rule of law and the Constitution. You are operating outside the scope of your employment when you take people off the street, nowhere near federal buildings when you don’t tell them they’re under arrest, when you don’t tell them your name and your agency, and when you release them because you know you have no probable cause to arrest them. There will be a reckoning. You need to get your professional liability insurance paid up.”
Watch the full discussion in link below:
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/when-people-turn-against-a-dictator-the-dictator-tries-to-turn-people-against-themselves-ex-fbi-deputy-director/Trump may be showing sign of 'an immature president who refuses to leave the office’: political scientist
Much of the analysis of President Donald Trump’s use of federal Department of Homeland Security officers against protesters in Portland, Oregon has discussed Trump’s actions from a legal or constitutional standpoint. But Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University in Massachusetts, contemplates Trump’s possible political motivations in an op-ed published this week in the Washington Post.
“The official version is that federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security are protecting federal buildings that have been the focus of Black Lives Matter protests,” Drezner explains. “The more disturbing version is that unidentified U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel are wearing camouflage gear, assaulting protesters and driving around in unmarked vans picking up random people. These actions have raised questions about the legality of what is being done…. I’ll confine my response to a more concrete question: what is the political gain that Donald Trump and his administration perceive they will garner from these actions?”
Drezner is dismissive of Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf’s claim that Trump is merely using DHS to protect Portland from “violent anarchists.”
“This is not actually about anarchy in Portland because the city seems both ordered and copacetic with what’s happening,” Drezner argues. “This is about something else. What political gain does Trump see from escalating and nationalizing this situation?”
Drezner goes on to say that Trump is motivated by either “incompetence” or “malevolence,” although he isn’t sure which one and finds the latter to be the more frightening possibility.
If it’s “incompetence,” Drezner argues, Trump has made a political miscalculation because he fails to realize that that using DHS officers against protesters is only giving his detractors yet another reason to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, this year’s presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
“It is possible that Trump mistakenly believes that this is a winning political move,” Drezner writes. “But there is another, darker possibility. As 2020 has progressed, two things have become increasingly clear: (1) Donald Trump is losing the presidential race to Joe Biden. (2) Trump is doing everything in his power to consolidate and expand his power over the executive branch. From loyalty tests to D-list appointments to his attraction to legally dubious executive orders, Trump has tried to surmount his fundamental weakness as a political leader and augment the awesome powers of the presidency.”
Drezner writes that although he isn’t sure, he is inclined to see “incompetence” as the president’s motivation with DHS and the Portland protesters — quickly adding that if he is wrong, that possibility “scares the bejeezus out of me.”
“With Trump, I tend to choose incompetence over malevolence in explaining his actions,” Drezner writes. “It is likely that he thinks this will be a winning political move, even if it is not. This is one of those instances, however, in which one should absolutely be prepared for malevolence. Democrats in Congress, the Biden campaign, the courts, the governors, civil society organizations, and even the U.S. military need to start preparing for the contingency of an immature president who refuses to leave the office. Because this is all too plausible an explanation for why Trump and his toadies are doing what they are doing right now.”
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/trump-may-be-showing-signs-of-an-immature-president-who-refuses-to-leave-the-office-political-scientist/Conservative nails the hypocrisy of Trump and the right-wing trying to take down the Lincoln Project by calling them grifters
Instead of debating the allegations from the Republican-run Lincoln Project, President Donald Trump’s team is trying to take them down with attacks on them instead.
Conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot wrote in his Wednesday column that we should look no further for evidence that the Lincoln Project videos are working than the recent attacks.
“The most common charge is that, as Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel put it, the organization has a ‘record of grift’ and ‘profiting off attacking President Trump,’ Boot quoted. “This charge has been faithfully repeated with no evidence by the lapdog conservative press, e.g., the National Review and Ben Shapiro.”
It’s “pretty rich,” he said, coming from Trump’s team after watching Trump’s friends and top right-wing conservatives who have used the White House to benefit personally and for former employers.
"According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Trump campaign and affiliated committees have spent $22 million at Trump properties since he entered politics in 2015,” reported Boot. “Now we learn that Trump directed the U.S. ambassador to Britain to ask the British government to steer the British Open to his golf resort in Scotland.”
That, Boot said, is corruption, if McDaniel was confused. The Lincoln Project starting their group and hiring themselves to do the work is the everyday business of politics. The desperate attempt to attack them, however, shows the GOP’s hand.
“There is no reason to believe that the ‘Lincoln Project executives are simply pocketing the money that’s channeled through their political consulting firms,'” Boot quoted the Daily Beast. “If those working on the Lincoln Project are compensated, well, they deserve it. They’re turning out brilliant videos at a relentless pace that puts most political organizations to shame.”
They’re arguably also working hard to get their message out and do press and media around it. That’s how normal campaigns run. As far as we know, no one at the Lincoln Project has met with a Russian lawyer to discuss “dirt” on any candidate, they’re merely using the publicly available information from the president’s own mouth.
The war against the Lincoln Project is really a “thinly disguised attack on its tactics,” Boot said, noting the ways in which they pick apart Trump and the Republican Party from a moderate political position. The right-wing is furious, Boot described, for targeting vulnerable GOP senators. But the reality is that the Republican senators are only being held accountable for trusting that Trump would protect them or save them from being kicked out of office. As with Trump’s allies sitting in jail, it’s obvious that isn’t the way Trump works.
He went on to cite a book from Stuart Stevens, who has consulted with the Lincoln Project, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. The book outlines the extent to which the GOP has been willing to turn its back on their longtime values to score votes with the far-right.
The book blasts today’s Republican Party as “a white grievance party,” claiming “there is an ugly history of code words and dog whistles in the party.”
Any other parts of the GOP platform are “convenient fiction,” Boot said.
“How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held.… It had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie,” Stevens’ book reads.
“The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice,” the book goes on. “The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise.”
Like a farmer burning the fields, it appears the Lincoln Project thinks the only way to get the real GOP back to what it was is to burn the fields. Boot noted that you know things are bad when the GOP is going after conservatives like Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and John Bolton.
“If we are ever again to have a sane and sober center-right party in America — something we desperately need — then the Trumpified GOP must first be demolished,” Boot closed. “That is what the Lincoln Project is trying to accomplish and more power to it. By leading the charge against the Republican Party, its founders have shown greater fealty to conservative principles than 99 percent of elected Republicans.”
Read the full column at the Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/22/lincoln-project-is-trying-save-republican-party-itself/
