Gessen has more recent observations on Trump as an authoritarian that are compelling. Her principal observations (published yesterday) seem sound.
On Trump as authoritarian:
“What we’ve learned in the last few weeks is the kind of government Donald Trump is building: it’s a Mafia state,” Gessen continued. “In a Mafia state, the patriarch rules as in a family. He doesn’t need to spell things out — he expects intuitive obedience, and there are penalties for not intuiting his wishes. He’s going to choose people based solely on loyalty and family membership. If they get their positions through merit, they wouldn’t owe everything to him. It’s not his ultimate goal to destroy freedom and democracy, but you have to, if you want to steal as much as possible, especially if you have such a thin skin.”
On Trump as confidence man:
Many commentators have focused on Trump’s unpredictability, but to Gessen’s mind, “He already has a long and consistent public record as a real estate magnate. We already know he has a history of institutional racism, that he is a bad-faith partner. Contractors are stiffed by Trump, workers go unpaid. He’s entered into a contract with American voters and he’s going to stiff them too, because he always stiffs people.”
On the challenge from authoritarian rule:
“I’m not aware of any aborted autocracies in modern history. Democracy is an aspiration, and it is defenseless against people who use it in bad faith. America’s advantage is that it has an incredibly rich cultural environment, a vibrant public spirit. Can we learn from other countries’ mistakes? The only thing to do is the exact opposite of what Germans, Poles and Hungarians did, which is to wait and see. We must panic and protest, presumptively assume the worst.”
I’d not use her word panic, to be sure, but would substitute something like relentless opposition. Still, I take her point: we can expect a long, painful conflict against a disordered authoritarian, unsuited for leadership of a free society, and likely unwilling to relinquish power once he assumes it.
To recap: Lie No. 1 is that thousands of U.S.-based Muslims celebrated 9/11. Lie No. 2 is that the disabled reporter’s original story backed Trump and that the reporter backtracked on it. Lie No. 3 is that Trump didn’t mock that disabled reporter (in fact, he flapped his hands around frantically after saying, “you gotta see this guy!”).
Here’s the text of Trump’s three tweets, combined:
[1] Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a…..[2] Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never “mocked” a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him…….[3]”groveling” when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!
Sargent replies:
Here Trump is telling two lies about a third lie. A quick review: Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter came after he claimed “thousands and thousands” of Muslims living in America celebrated 9/11. Kovaleski had written an article just after 9/11 that claimed law enforcement “detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks.” Under fire for his falsehood about celebratory Muslims, Trump cited that article to push back, even though an “alleged” “number” is hardly proof of “thousands.” In response to that, the reporter put out a statementsaying he did not witness Trump’s version of events. But Trump cited that statement as proof that the reporter had dishonestly backtracked on a story that backed Trump’s position (a lie Trump repeated in Monday’s tweets). That’s how Trump’s mockery of the reporter arose: He waved his arms and mock-quoted the reporter saying “I don’t know what I said!” (See Glenn Kessler’s extensive anatomy of the full story.)
Sargent’s post on this is excellent, and the only change that I’d make is that his recap should be a summary at the beginning of his post. On content, though, he’s assessed Trump nicely.
(One additional point: Trump says he doesn’t care about media celebrities, but that’s false, too: it’s what he is, and he can’t stop watching others who are.) more >>
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with an even chance of afternoon snow showers and a high of twenty-eight. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:40 PM, for 9h 16m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}sixty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On January 9, 2001, iTunes 1.0 was released at Macworld in San Francisco. On this day in 1863, the 23rd Wisconsin Infantry participates in the Battle of Arkansas Post.
Recommended for reading in full —
Bruce Vielmetti reports that on the view of a federal Appeals judge: ‘Bad police work’ in custody death: “Federal appeals judges tore into Milwaukee police handling of a prisoner who died in custody during an epileptic seizure in 2010, during oral argument on an appeal of his family’s civil rights case last week.”I must say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such bad police work,” said Judge Richard Posner, part of a three-judge panel at the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals hearing the case in Chicago. It was a rough morning Thursday for the city’s attorney, Susan Lappen, who was interrupted repeatedly by Posner and Judge Ann Williams during a session that lasted more than an hour, about double the time normally allotted for oral argument.”
Hank Steuver reports from last night’s Golden Globes: Lots of ‘La La’-dee-da, but a wake-up call from Meryl Streep: “The hands-down highlight of the show came from a hoarse-voiced Meryl Streep, who accepted the association’s Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement award with sharp criticism of Trump and the cultural forces that led to his victory. Recalling a moment from the 2016 campaign when Trump appeared to mock a New York Times reporter’s physical disability, Streep likened it to an effective movie performance. “I still can’t get it out of my head,” she said, with genuine sadness.”
Ben Gilbert writes about how One man spent 5 years creating an incredible ‘Minecraft’ universe: “As one of the world’s most popular, most widely played games, “Minecraft” attracts a large swath of players. Many of these folks are just like you and me — casual, into playing fun games, but maybe not ready to dig in and spend, like, years handcrafting a massive world. And then there’s a small section of that massive playerbase that takes the game’s creation aspect to stunning heights. Such is the case with the “Kingdom of Galekin,” an enormous, incredibly ambitious world that one “Minecraft” player has been building for nearly five years.”
Jim Rutenberg observes that In Election Hacking, Julian Assange’s Years-Old Vision Becomes Reality: “…last week brought the sight of Mr. Hannity speaking with Mr. Assange in glowing terms about “what drives him to expose government and media corruption” through Clinton campaign hacks that American intelligence has attributed to Russia. And Ms. Palin hailed him as a great truth teller, even apologizing for previous unpleasantries. (Cue sound of needle sliding across record album.)….The answer has been in front of us all along. And the current imbroglio over Russia, WikiLeaks and their role in Mr. Trump’s victory — or, more to the point, Hillary Clinton’s loss — might be viewed as the realization of the vision Mr. Assange had when he started WikiLeaks over a decade ago. Mr. Assange spelled it out in prescient terms in an essay he posted online in November of 2006, the year of WikiLeaks’ founding.”
This Tuesday, January 10th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Hell or High Water @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.
Hell or High Water is a 2016 crime drama about a divorced father and his ex-con older brother who devise a criminal scheme to save their family’s ranch in West Texas.
The film is directed by David Mackenzie, written by Taylor Sheridan (screenwriter of Sicario) and stars Dale Dickey, Ben Foster, Chris Pine, and Jeff Bridges. Hell or or High Water is a Golden Globes nominee for best film (drama), as is Jeff Bridges as a best-supporting actor nominee (any motion picture). The movie has a run time of one hour, forty-two minutes and carries a rating of R from the MPAA.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighteen. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:39 PM, for 9h 14m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}sixty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Judd Legum observes that Trump mentioned Wikileaks 164 times in last month of election, now claims it didn’t impact one voter: “President-elect Trump says that information published by Wikileaks, which the U.S. intelligence community says was hacked by Russia, had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” This was not the view of candidate Trump, who talked about Wikileaks and the content of the emails it released at least 164 times in last month of the campaign. ThinkProgress calculated the number by reviewing transcripts of Trump’s speeches, media appearances and debates over the last 30 days of the campaign. Trump talked extensively about Wikileaks in the final days of a campaign that was ultimately decided by just 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania combined.” [Clinton won the national popular vote by 2,864,974 votes, or 2.1%]
Aaron Blake describes Trump’s bogus claim that intelligence report says Russia didn’t impact the 2016 election outcome: “So while Trump says the intelligence report “stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results,” the intelligence report itself says it “did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election.” No assessment does not mean no evidence. It means they’re not attempting to answer that question.”
Greg Sargeant observes that Yes, Donald Trump ‘lies.’ A lot. And news organizations should say so: “Take Trump’s biggest lie of all — his racist birther claim. Trump himself originally conceived of it as a means of entree into the political consciousness of GOP primary voters. It was debunked countless times over many years. Yet Trump kept his birther campaign going all throughout anyway. In these cases, was Trump lying? The standard that Baker adopts — that there must be a provable intent to mislead — seems woefully inadequate to informing readers about what Trump is really up to here. Sure, it’s possible that Trump continued to believe these things after they were debunked. We cannot prove otherwise. But so what? If we accept that it’s possible to prove something to be false — which [Wall Street Journal editor Gerard ]Baker does [on an episode of Meet the Press], judging by his own comments — then we presumably also accept that this can be adequately proved to Trump. And so, Trump is telling a falsehood even though it has been demonstrated to him to be a falsehood. If we don’t call that “lying,” or if we don’t squarely and prominently label these claims as “false,” don’t we risk enabling Trump’s apparent efforts to obliterate the possibility of agreement on shared reality?”
Anna Fifield finds that Japan’s trains are in a league of their own. Japan’s subculture of train fanatics is no different: “TOKYO — Just as Japan’s trains are in a league of their own, so too are its trainspotters. This country, where a 20-second delay leads to profuse apologies on the platforms and conductors bow to passengers as they enter the train car, has taken train nerd-dom to a new level. Sure, there are the vanilla trainspotters who take photos of various trains around the country. They’re called tori-tetsu. (Tori means to take, and tetsu means train.) But there are also nori-tetsu, people who enjoy traveling on trains; yomi-tetsu, those who love to read about trains, especially train schedules; oto-tetsu, the people who record the sound of trains; sharyo-tetsu, fans of train design; eki-tetsu, people who study stations; and even ekiben-tetsu, aficionados of the exquisite bento lunchboxes sold at stations. And that’s not even getting into the subcultures of experts on train wiring, the geeks who intercept train radio signals or the would-be conductors. Even in the internet age, Japan still prints phone-book sized tomes of train timetables. “It’s really hard to find people here who hate taking trains,” said Junichi Sugiyama, a journalist who writes about trains and the author of train-related books including “How to Enjoy Railroads From Train Schedules.”
A salmon in Alaska makes an unlikely journey on “the Mount Everest of rivers” – the Susitna – as residents consider the costs/benefits of a government-proposed mega-dam.
Whitewater’s Saturday will be sunny with a high of thirteen degrees. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:38 PM, for 9h 13m 24s. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 69.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the sixtieth day. Today is the {tooltip}sixtieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1953, Pres. Truman announced that America had (the previous year) successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. On this day in 1901, Robert Marion La Follette is inaugurated as governor of Wisconsin.
Recommended for reading in full —
Greg Miller and Adam Entous report Declassified report says Putin ‘ordered’ effort to undermine faith in U.S. election and help Trump: “Russia carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and ultimately sought to help elect Donald Trump, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a remarkably blunt assessment released Friday. The report depicts Russian interference as unprecedented in scale, saying that Moscow’s role represented “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort” beyond previous election-related espionage. The campaign initially sought to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, “denigrate” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and damage her expected presidency. But in time, Russia “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” and repeatedly sought to artificially boost his election chances. The report released to the public is an abbreviated version of a highly classified multiagency assessment requested by President Obama. Even so, it amounts to an extraordinary postmortem of a Russian assault on a pillar of American democracy. The 14-page document made public also serves as an explicit rebuttal to Trump’s repeated assertions that U.S. spy agencies cannot determine who was responsible for a hacking operation that extracted thousands of emails from Democratic Party computer networks and dumped them into public view via the WikiLeaks website.”
Jim Higgins writes that Ayad Akhtar’s ‘Disgraced’ pushes hot buttons: “In “Disgraced,” hard-charging New York attorney Amir appears to have a good life: He lives in a gorgeous New York residence with Emily, his beautiful artist spouse, and is on the verge of making partner in his firm. But a dinner party with another couple — one of his colleagues and her husband, Emily’s art dealer — erupts into an argument with explosive consequences. In Akhtar’s tragedy, Amir, who has obscured his background, will suffer both for hiding his Muslim roots and reluctantly helping an imam in trouble. “Disgraced” was the most-produced play in the United States during the 2015-’16 season (excluding Shakespeare and versions of “A Christmas Carol”), according to American Theatre magazine. That popularity continues: it’s tied for second-most productions in 2016-’17, American Theatre reports.”
Ronald Brownsten explains Why the European Right-Wing Loves Putin: “But the conservative-populist nationalists in both the United States and Europe view Putin as a potential ally because they are focused on a sharply contrasting set of international priorities: resisting Islamic radicalization, unwinding global economic integration, and fighting the secularization of Western societies. Top Trump advisers like incoming White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn have expressed strikingly similar views….“It’s certainly not that they follow him the way Communist parties used to follow the Soviet Union. That’s a misrepresentation,” said Cas Mudde, a University of Georgia associate professor of international affairs who studies these movements. “But … they do like his strength, what they perceive as defense for strong traditional values, nationalism, and opposition to Islam.”
David Leonhardt considers Lies, Journalism and Objectivity: “The reality is, media organizations sometimes have to decide between the risk oflooking like they’re not being objective and the risk that they’re actually not being objective. (Hat tip to Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, who made this point on Twitter.) Each of the following factual statements, to pick a few disparate examples, runs the risk of appearing subjective to large numbers of readers:
Capitalism has worked better than any other economic system.
Tax cuts generally fail to pay for themselves and cause the budget deficit to increase.
Human actions are warming and damaging the planet.
There is no escaping this tension at times. News organizations have to decide whether they place a higher priority on seeming subjective to some readers or on stating the facts.” [Leonhardt’s essay is in response to Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker’s view that newspapers should largely avoid using the word “lie.”]
One good way to prepare for life in space is by living in a cave —
I posted yesterday on James Surowiecki’s contention that Trump’s success with non-college whites was predictable, but that Trump’s better-than-expected success with college-educated whites is what the press missed. See, James Surowiecki on What the Press Missed About Trump’s Win.
Surowiecki makes a few follow-up remarks to his tweet-stream of yesterday. First, Surowiecki is not saying that college makes whites more liberal: “I’m actually not saying anything about education making people liberals. I understand why college-ed. whites voted for Romney.” (6:03 PM – 5 Jan 2017.) On the contrary, he contends that “I don’t agree with them [Romney voters]. But I can see why they did it. Romney was a rational, experienced politician who would protect their interests.” (6:06 PM – 5 Jan 2017.)
It’s Trump’s better than expected showing with college-educated voters that surprises Surowiecki: “Trump is irrational, has no experience, ran an avowedly racist and nativist campaign and acted horribly toward women” (6:08 PM – 5 Jan 2017) “[s]o yes, I did assume that would make him much less popular with college-ed voters, who have a lot invested in keeping the system stable.” (6:09 PM – 5 Jan 2017.)
But Surowiecki acknowledges that some college-educated communities did abandon Trump, and Trump fared poorly with them as the press expected: “This seems exactly right. In places like Westchester and Fairfield County, Boston suburbs, college-ed whites did abandon Trump.” (6:54 PM – 5 Jan 2017.)
Surowiecki’s tweets from yesterday seem right to me: (1) Trump did predictably well with non-college whites, (2) college-educated voters aren’t necessarily more liberal, but they are stability-oriented, even so (3) Trump did better than expected with college-educated white voters, but (4) still did (predictably) poorly in some college-educated white communities (e.g.,Westchester and Fairfield County, Boston suburbs).
There are no local data to show how college-educated whites (here I mean those already graduated) in the Whitewater area voted. It’s an interesting question: did they vote for Trump in relatively-low numbers like college-educated whites in the suburban areas Surowiecki lists, or did college-educated whites in this area vote for Trump in greater-than-expected numbers?
I’ve written before that Whitewater seems a community divided by college and non-college educated residents. See, One Degree of Separation. They are, though, perhaps not so divided in their votes (or as different as they might wish to think) this last election.
The end of the work week in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seven. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 12m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}fifty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Adam Entous and Greg Miller report that U.S. intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win: “Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome. The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country’s cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.”
Amber Phillips offers Six big takeaways from the extraordinary congressional hearing [yesterday] on Russian hacking: “2. Russia’s leaders authorized some of the hacking. The three intelligence officers [Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., Adm. Mike Rogers, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcel J. Lettre II] released a statement before the hearing. One key line in it read that only “Russia’s senior-most officials” could have authorized the hacking of the Democratic Party’s emails. The leaks arguably had an impact on Democrats at a critical moment in their campaign: You’ll recall that some of those emails were leaked on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in the summer and resulted in the resignation of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This assertion that Russia’s top leaders signed off on this directly flies in the face of Trump’s insistence on repeatedly giving Russian President Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt. Shortly before the new year, Trump praised Putin for not retaliating to President Obama’s sanctions on Russia for the hacking.”
Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto and Pamela Brown report on the Intel report says US identifies go-betweens who gave emails to WikiLeaks: “Washington (CNN)- US intelligence has identified the go-betweens the Russians used to provide stolen emails to WikiLeaks, according to US officials familiar with the classified intelligence report that was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday. In a Fox News interview earlier this week, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denied that Russia was the source of leaked Democratic emails that roiled the 2016 election to the detriment of President-elect Donald Trump’s rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.”
Meanwhile, along Hübschhorn East ridge, Simplon pass, Switzerland —
We’re early in this new political era, with a long time ahead of us, and there’s a need to get a sense of one’s bearings. (The sound way to approach the new politics that has overcome America through the three-thousand-year traditional of liberty to be found in many places, the Online Library of Liberty being only one. But that’s the reading and study of a lifetime; there are essays contemporary to us that are both useful and readily distilled.)
These recent essays and posts consider, or a useful to understand, the incipient authoritarianism of America’s next administration. They are a good basis for a beginning, for a distillation of one’s thinking.
