The waning of Trump’s influence

James Risen writes that there are many signs that Trump’s influences is waning. One of those is the fact that the US military is proceeding with the renaming of military bases that had been named after leaders of the Confederacy. Trump had vigorously opposed such changes, pandering to the racists in his party who view the Confederacy sympathetically. But now there are hardly any protests at the changes.

THE U.S. ARMY began to strip its bases of their old Confederate names last week, as Donald Trump faced a possible criminal indictment. The timing was hardly a coincidence.

Neither reckoning would have been possible if Trump were still president. Both have been winding their way through the government bureaucracy for the past two years since Trump left office and are now happening at the same time as part of a growing repudiation of Trump and Trumpism.
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After Trump was defeated in 2020, he vetoed legislation creating a commission to rename the bases, but Congress was finally able to override it. If Trump had been reelected, he almost certainly would have continued trying to obstruct the renaming efforts.
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THE RENAMING OF Fort Pickett last week prompted no protests and hardly a murmur of criticism, apart from a few nasty comments on the Facebook page of the Virginia National Guard, which uses the base. Indeed, the lack of outrage seems to be one more small sign that Trump’s power, and his ability to generate anger outside of his devoted base, are waning.

Trump’s mounting legal problems pose a more direct threat to his power and are a more personal form of reckoning. Although some Republican pundits and political figures have claimed that Trump will regain political strength by being indicted, the ex-president’s own fury at the prospect, which was on full display in Waco, reveals the truth: Trump is deeply afraid of ending up in prison.

He has spent his life exploiting legal loopholes and has often succeeded by outlasting his opponents. But his victories have mostly come in civil lawsuits when he was in business or while he was president and controlled the Justice Department. He has never faced the kind of legal peril that he does now.

The threat seems to be driving him even further around the bend than ever before. He now openly engages in full-throated conspiracy theories while inciting violence against his opponents; he held his rally in Waco knowing that it was scheduled in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound there, which ended with a deadly government raid and fire that has taken on deep symbolism among violent, far-right extremists.

It is hard to be confident about predictions of Trump’s demise since he consumes so much media space. But he gets that attention by resorting to more and more extreme claims and rhetoric. Someone who is more assured of his position would not feel the need to be so inflammatory.

The cruelty of solitary confinement

In a recent episode of the show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took on the issue of placing prisoners in solitary confinement, how it is extremely cruel, and how sometimes prisoners are subjected to it for punitive reasons for minor infractions.

I learned that the practice was started by Quakers, of all people, who thought that it might encourage thoughtfulness and penitence. I also learned that the average size of a solitary confinement cell is just 6ft by 9ft, which means that there are some that are smaller than that. Imagine being cooped up in such a small space for 22 or 23 hours a day.

What to do if you get bitten by a snake

Sri Lanka has a lot of snakes, many species of which, like cobras, are venomous. There is also a lot of folklore surrounding them and many of them likely originated as tales made up to scare the daylights out of children, like ghost stories. I vividly recall one story that was told about the Russel’s viper. The story was that if anyone in your household encountered a viper and killed it (and killing a poisonous snake was often the chosen method of getting rid of them), then seven other vipers would come to your home and they would hang like a chain from the rafters of the roof if your house did not have a ceiling or from a fixture, each one clasping the tail of the other, until they lowest one reached you where you were sleeping and bit you. Needless to say, that story was enough to give small children sleepless nights.

As children, we did not question the validity of this preposterous theory and the fact that it seemed like it required a lot of coordination and hard work by the vipers just to get at you when they could instead easily have have waited for you by hiding in the grass or under some furniture until you passed by before striking, even allowing for the improbability that there existed some kind of viper committee that organized these revenge attacks and recruited members to carry them out, like some kind of commando snake strike force. There was something so frightening about the idea of snakes slowly lowering themselves down from the roof at night while you slept that it banished any critical inquiry.
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Republicans choose abortion as the hill to die on

It has long been clear that Republicans were using the abortion issue as a vote getting strategy. That seemed to have worked for a while to rally especially the religious zealots to their cause. But what has happened, as often occurs when a party panders to a fanatical base, is that the zealots get out of hand and push the issue much further than the party leaders would have liked. We see that with gun control measures. People in general approve of common sense gun control measures but Republicans are in the grip of the extremists so that now they cannot do anything at all, however reasonable, that might anger the extremists even if they say they want the right to openly carry bazookas and hand grenades in the streets.

What the Republican establishment seemed to have wanted is to place restrictions on abortion to make it very difficult to get while not blocking it entirely, because that policy of making it access harder seemed to have some appeal. They attacked the Roe v. Wade ruling by portraying it as allowing ‘abortion on demand’ (though it did not) and called for its overthrow. They got that result by packing the US Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices who hid their beliefs during their conformation proceedings, and exulted over victory of their stealth strategy.

But the zealots essentially want to outlaw any and all abortions at any time and without any exceptions, even for rape and the health of the mother. These moves to so severely restrict abortion access are not popular as can be seen in how it galvanized voters to largely reject Republican candidates in the 2022 mid-term elections.
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Fox’s own fact checking team knew the claims of election fraud were false

One of the nice things about legal opinions is that, although often long, they tend to lay out the facts of a case in an ordered, chronological manner, making it easy to understand what the case is all about. I have been reading the ruling by the Delaware judge Eric Davis on the defamation case brought by Dominion voting systems against Fox News Network (FNN) and its parent company Fox Corporation (FC) and I learned some new things. It appears that Fox News has a research department called the ‘Brainroom’ that is called upon to give definitive answers to questions and as early as November 13, 2020 (just 10 days after the election on November 3) they said that the fraud claims were rubbish. And yet, Fox continued to make the allegations for weeks and weeks after that.

Here is the relevant section on pages 17-18:
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The case against Trump

The indictment against Donald Trump that was presented in court yesterday charged his with 34 counts, each of which consisted of “falsifying business records in the first degree” that were taken “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise”.

The indictment itself did not specify the evidence that was used to arrive at these charges but they consist at a minimum of the payment of $130,000 made to Stormy Daniels to prevent her speaking out in public about her affair. Note that it is not the payment itself that is illegal. One question is what was the intent of the payment. If it was meant to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, then that would be a violation of campaign finance law since it could be considered a campaign contribution that exceeds the allowed amounts.
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Trump the creep

During this week when it will be all Trump, all the time, this article in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow from back in 2018 shows what a pathetic creep Trump is and how his cronies worked out a system for concealing his affairs with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate, and other women.

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own.

The interactions that McDougal outlines in the document share striking similarities with the stories of other women who claim to have had sexual relationships with Trump, or who have accused him of propositioning them for sex or sexually harassing them. McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.

On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story, which it never ran. Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call “catch and kill.” This is a favorite tactic of the C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who describes the President as “a personal friend.”
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Adam ruins AI

Adam Conover was the host of the excellent show Adam Ruins Everything that ran from 2016 to 2019 where in each episode he took apart a popular belief, tackling a wide variety of subjects, using research and experts and humor. A lot of humor. It was similar in spirit to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight except that Conover has a goofier sense of humor and did not sit behind a desk and had a lot of actors and high production values to help make his points
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He now has a podcast on YouTube where he does similar debunking and it is also worth checking out. In the episode below, he does a brutal takedown of all the recent hype surrounding AI, with the hype about self-driving cars part of the collateral damage.

Get ready for the next 18 months to be very dark

With the indictment of Donald Trump scheduled to take place tomorrow (Tuesday) in Manhattan at 2:15pm Eastern time, this week is going to be all about this case and him. The more he is pushed into a corner, the more he lashes out and the next eighteen months at least are going to be dark times in politics in the US as the indictments against him start to pile up and he has to keep fighting legal battles.

It is clear that Trump is going to portray the next election as akin to Armageddon and so we are headed for a steady diet about how America is doomed to go to hell unless he is re-elected. Susan B. Glasser writes that Trump has a far more sinister vision of America and his role than just a couple of years ago, as can be seen from his speech at CPAC last month.
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