Let Them Eat #Alt-Facts

One Democratic Party wag noted on twitter yesterday that Trump's biggest enemy isn't Democrats or conservatives or the Deep State or President Obama... but facts. The Regime and it's congressional allies have been working vigorously it discredit the Congressional Budget Office because they know when they report what Trumpcare will cost and how many people it will throw off medical insurance, there is sure to be a public uproar. They're also hurling insults at organizations like the American Medical Association (long a GOP ally), the American Hospital Association and AARP, the country's biggest organization represented seniors. Ryan flipped out when the AARP reported that a 64-year old making $15,000 annually would pay $8,400 more for coverage under Trumpcare-- over half of his annual income! Ryan would much rather voters get all their information from the National Enquirer, the original fake news outlet-- and, of course, the first newspaper to endorse Señor Trumpanzee.

Over the weekend Ron Klain made a compelling case in the Washington Post that the Democrats' most potent weapon against the GOP-- think the special elections and then the 2018 midterms-- is that instead of delivering on his campaign promises, Trump is just spewing a lot of unsubstantiated bullshit. "Democrats," he wrote, "may find that it is what Trump has failed to do-- and is likely to continue to fail to deliver-- during his tenure that provides the most powerful case against him. The importance of this line of attack is underscored by the one pro-Trump finding that stands out among the president’s dismal poll numbers: a solid plurality believe Trump is 'being effective and getting things done.' For Democrats, debunking this misperception is vital."

Let them eat... um... Trumpcare

[V]oters are looking for results on bread-and-butter issues. Trump is not delivering for them, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding.  Democrats need to point this out-- relentlessly.

Take health care. During the campaign, Trump promised immediate action to repeal and replace Obamacare. In the world according to Trump, everyone was “going to end up with great health care for a fraction of the price” that would “take place immediately after we go in.”

Now, 122 days after the election, Trump’s laughable promise to call a special session of Congress to repeal Obamacare has evaporated. The plan circulated this week by House Republicans is under fire from conservatives and liberals. And Trump has still failed to put forward any approach of his own. About that “great health care for a fraction of the price”? Don’t hold your breath.

Or take trade. Trump promised “in the first 90 days” he “would immediately start renegotiating our trade deals with Mexico, China, Japan.” Not a single one of these negotiations has begun. He also said he’d “fight for... passage within the first 100 days of my administration” for legislation to end U.S. companies’ ability to manufacture goods overseas and import them without tariffs. Again, Trump hasn’t written any plan to do that, let alone asked Congress to pass it.

Trump promised to stop the loss of jobs going overseas starting on “day one. It's so easy.” But major manufacturers continue to move jobs overseas in far larger numbers than the jobs supposedly “saved” at Trump’s December photo-op at Carrier, even including jobs at Caterpillar and Nucor, companies represented on Trump’s own job-creation task force.

And then there’s infrastructure. Here, too, Trump promised to fight for passage of a $1 trillion public-private infrastructure plan within his first 100 days. Many-- myself included-- were skeptical that the plan Trump put forward during the campaign would create jobs or fund needed projects. But even the harshest critics thought he would at least try. Instead, the White House has told allies that Trump likely won’t even send an infrastructure plan to Congress until 2018-- meaning shovels won’t be moving until 2019 at the earliest.

The list of “kitchen table” concerns on which Trump promised focus and action-- “immediately”-- in his first 100 days as president goes on: affordable child care, middle-class tax relief, simpler tax forms, savings accounts for elder care and more. But Trump has not offered plans to do any of these things thus far-- not one.

Not only is Trump failing to deliver on the economic promises he made during the campaign, but also he is breaking new ones he made as president. On Feb. 23, Trump said he’d create jobs by insisting that the newly approved Keystone XL pipeline “buy steel made in this country” and promising that all pipe used in the project would be “coming from this country.” It took just days for the White House to repudiate Trump’s promise, saying that Keystone would be exempt from any Buy American rule.

Trump and his cronies can blare all the alternative facts they want about all the fabulous jobs he's creating and all the great health care Trumpcare provides but at some point even the hard core Trumpists on oxycodone, hydromorphone, codeine, or fentanyl are going to figure out that their miserable lives are still miserable no matter what Trump says he's done for them. In 2018, it's just a matter of how many Republicans in the House drown in his undrained swamp.

How to Run a Rogue Twitter Account with an Anonymous Email Address and a Burner Phone

by Gaius Publius

Thanks to the dark dawn of the Age of Trump, I suspect, we're seeing a bloom of Twitter accounts purporting to be either Alt-Agency accounts of current government employees, or more likely, Alt-Agency accounts of former employees of the department named in the account.

One rather large list of alt or rogue accounts is this one — Rogue Federal Tweeter. I've started a much smaller one here — RogueGovt — just to see what was going on in the alt-twitter world.

No one here wants anyone to break the law, but not all "rogue" or anonymous Twitter activity is unlawful. In fact, many would argue that the ability to be anonymous, if one chooses to be, is a right.

This got me wondering, in theory, what the process might look like if one wanted to be completely anonymous on Twitter, independent of the purpose. How would one do that? Could one even succeed at it?

As it turns out, there are indeed ways to do that, and yes, if one is careful, once can even succeed. One such guide recently turned up at The Intercept by the always-good tech and security writer Micah Lee.

So consider this an introduction, if only for the academic purpose of demonstrating that anonymous twittering is indeed possible. The purpose could be completely unrelated to politics. Let's say, for example, you are a Red Sox fan, so adamant a fan, in fact, that if people at work knew the depth of your passion and commitment, they might shun you at your regular Friday Happy Hour outings, or even cost you devoutly wished opportunity to make very good friends with, say, Janice in Accounting, sadly, an equally rabid Yankees fan.

Let's also add that, for example, like some people much more famous than yourself, you suffer from a terrible modern failing — you can't stay off of Twitter, especially when rattling around your lonely pad at night, and especially when your dander is up.

Micah Lee's piece offers these suggestions, including a step-by-step process, to create and use successfully an anonymous Twitter account, @Alt-RedSox, say. (Note the two parts to the problem — creating the account successfully so that your ownership can't be traced; using the account successfully so that your activity can't lead back to you. More on the second problem in a bit.)

Creating an Anonymous Twitter Account

Lee starts this way. (Note that his theoretical example involves the government, whereas me, I'm just theoretically worried about the Red Sox, my coworkers, and Janice in Accounting. The problem is the same in both cases.)

How to Run a Rogue Government Twitter Account With an Anonymous Email Address and a Burner Phone

One of the first things Donald Trump did when he took office was temporarily gag several federal agencies, forbidding them from tweeting.

In response, self-described government workers created a wave of rogue Twitter accounts that share real facts (not to be confused with “alternative facts,” otherwise known as “lies”) about climate change and science. As a rule, the people running these accounts chose to remain anonymous, fearing retaliation — but, depending on how they created and use their accounts, they are not necessarily anonymous to Twitter itself, or to anyone Twitter shares data with.

Anonymous speech is firmly protected by the First Amendment and the Supreme Court, and its history in the U.S. dates to the Federalist Papers, written in 1787 and 1788 under the pseudonym Publius by three of the founding fathers.

But the technical ability for people to remain anonymous on today’s internet, where every scrap of data is meticulously tracked, is an entirely different issue. The FBI, a domestic intelligence agency that claims the power to spy on anyone based on suspicions that don’t come close to probable cause, has a long, dark history of violating the rights of Americans. And now it reports directly to President Trump, who is a petty, revenge-obsessed authoritarian with utter disrespect for the courts and the rule of law.

In this environment, how easy is it to create and maintain a Twitter account while preserving your anonymity — even from Twitter and any law enforcement agency that may request its records? I tried to find out and documented all my steps. There are different ways to accomplish this. If you plan on following these steps, you should make sure you understand the purpose of them, in case you need to improvise. I also can’t guarantee that these techniques will protect your anonymity — there are countless ways that things can go wrong, many of them social rather than technical. But I hope you’ll at least have a fighting chance at keeping your real identity private.

For this exercise, I decided to pick a highly controversial political topic: Facts. I believe that what we know about reality is based on evidence that can be objectively observed. Thus, I created the completely anonymous (until publishing this article, of course) Twitter account @FactsNotAlt. Here’s how I did it.

The article then details the process, and frankly, if you're a Jack Reacher fan, you may find some of it thrillingly familiar. I'll send you to the piece for the highly readable step-by-step detail, but in general the process Lee outlines is this:

• Download and install the Tor Browser, which anonymizes Internet activity.

• Using Tor, get an anonymous email account (Lee offers suggestions).

• Get an anonymous phone number (here's where you'll feel the Reacher blood in your veins).

• Using Tor Browser, create the Twitter account of your choice (for example, @Alt-RedSox) and associate it with your anonymous phone number.

• Using your anonymous email address and anonymous phone, confirm the account to Twitter's satisfaction.

• Tweet.

These really aren't hard steps. A child could do them, or a child-like adult with time on his hands. Being neither, you could accomplish this much with ease.

Interesting exercise, isn't it, if a little academic. You could even call it a literary exercise if you're working on a novel about a mad Red Sox tweeter who has managed to score a friendship with Not-Janice in Accounting (who, it turns out, runs an equally anonymous Alt-Yankees account — shhh).

Maintaining Your Anonymity

The easier part of the process is creating the account. Just follow Lee's advice about which locations and networks you use while doing it. The harder part is maintaining your anonymity as you tweet away about the rotten management of your favorite team, its personnel and new budget policies, and so on.

About that part of the problem, Lee has some excellent, indeed vital, suggestions. Again, these aren't in general difficult to do; it's that they must be done always — no slippage, in other words. I'll send you to the piece for all of it, but for example:

• Be careful how you interact with people, both in real life and online. Especially, don't brag. The most common way operations like this fail is the old one — loose lips. Other Lee suggestions include not uploading images (of documents, say) unless they are screen grabs, since many images contain metadata. To upload a document, take a screen grab of it first, then upload that.
  
  You don't even want to write in a style that "sounds like you." Some people can ID writers by style (I'm one of them — shhh).

• Stay very compartmental. This means, use Tor for all tweeting from that account. Tweet from public networks only. Never use your anonymous phone number for anything but to create the account; then turn it off, record the number in case you need it for later verification, and destroy it. Don't tweet from work, especially if Janice is hovering nearby. Don't "follow" your anonymous account, or even read it outside of these restrictions (using Tor in a coffeeshop). And so on.
  
  If someone is out to find you — the off-the-leash FBI in Lee's example; Janice's brothers in mine — the chain of connection can't ever lead from your Twitter account to anything that touches you or your friends. In other words, complete lockdown compartmentalization of this small part of your life; zero traceability of its activity.

But that said, all should be fine in your Alt Twitter world. Your Sox-love can be as Red as you like, and your Yankee friends will never know. Just remember; don't break the law doing this. No one here wants that.

Scheduling note: My comments appear regularly here on Monday and Thursday, or Tuesday and Thursday if Monday is a holiday.

GP
 

Fake News Channel Fox Also Manufactures Fake "Experts" To Bolster The Lies It Feeds Its Hapless Viewers

Bill O'Reilly just making up his own "facts"

Trump and Putin re working furiously to reshape access to the minds of their followers, primarily by undermining public confidence in the media. Putin actually has media people who step too far out of line murdered. So far Trump has resisted that particular authoritarian impulse. But it's early yet.

While Trump and his regime were intensifying their campaign against the NY Times and the TV networks last week, the Putin regime was accusing The Times, Bloomberg and NBC of spreading false information about Mother Russia. American polls show that, by wide margins, Americans have more faith in the media than in either Trump or Putin, both of whom are widely seen as congenital liars and manipulators.

New PPP survey

Rememeber Hillary's "vast right wing conspiracy?" Trump and Putin are just cogs-- big ones-- in that wheel. But they're not alone. Yesterday the Daily Mail took a closer look at Fox News' attempt to justify Trump's crackpot statements about Sweden by airing an interview by Bill O'Reilly-- a master of fake news-- with a make believe Swedish national security advisor. Fox should lose its license to broadcast because of this incident. Seems harsh? I don't think so. Let's look into who Nils Bildt is.





Sweden may be laughing at Fox and Trump but Americans shouldn't be. Bildt is just a random right-wing nut from Sweden who O'Reilly and Fox tried portraying as a national security official to give credence to his reactionary, xenophobic ravings. The government of Sweden has denounced him as an imposter. Let's hope Trump doesn't appoint him to the National Security Council with all the other crackpots he's "accidentally" put onto that body!

[I]f viewers might have taken the 'advisor' for a government insider, the Swedish Defense Ministry and Foreign Office told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter they knew nothing of him.

In fact Bildt is an 'independent analyst' who moved to the US in 1994. He describes himself as a founding member of Modulus World LLC,  a corporate geopolitical strategy and security consulting business which has offices in Washington, Brussels and Tokyo.

In his bio, Bildt boasted of his expertise on defense and national security issues. He said he had served as a naval officer, worked for Japanese officials and had written books on creating business opportunities in hostile environments.

But security experts in Sweden said he wasn't a familiar figure in their ranks in that country.

'He is in not in any way a known quantity in Sweden and has never been part of the Swedish debate,' Swedish Defence University leadership professor Robert Egnell said by email to The Associated Press on Saturday.

He and Bildt-- also known then as Nils Tolling-- were in a master's degree program in war studies together at King's College London in 2002-2003, and Bildt moved to Japan soon after, he said.

Bildt has since admitted that he is merely an 'independent analyst' and says Fox knew as much when it booked him to appear on the show.

He told the Washington Post he made it 'clear' to producers before going on-air that he did not work in official capacity. In his response to Mediate, he said his job title wasn't the issue.

'Sorry for any confusion caused, but needless to say I think that is not really the issue. The issue is Swedish refusal to discuss their social problems and issues.'

Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who has a brother and son with the same name, said he believed the man was cashing in on his family's political pull.

The executive producer of The O'Reilly Factor said Bildt was recommended by people the show's booker consulted with while making numerous inquiries about potential guests.

'After pre-interviewing him and reviewing his bio, we agreed that he would make a good guest for the topic that evening,' executive producer David Tabacoff said in a statement.

The network said O'Reilly was expected to address the subject further on Monday's show.

Bildt's appearance comes  a week after Donald Trump appeared to refer to a terror attack in Sweden which never happened.

The president cited 'what's happening in Sweden right now' during a speech on terror across Europe, prompting many to deduce he was out of touch with facts.

President Trump later said he was in fact referring to the country's immigration issues that he'd read on Fox News.

Proof: It Was Trump, Not Richard Gere Who Did That Thing With The Gerbils

Meet The Press booked Jim Webb for Sunday's show. Had Chuck Todd gone outside the studio and scraped some dog shit off the ground and put it in the chair he would have had a guest more worth listening to. Or he could have booked Charles Blow, the NY Times writer whose column the next day may have been inspired by Webb-- one of the last of the notorious fake-Democratic racists who doesn't belong on national television. After all, part of Webb's right-wing schpiel Sunday was how rotten progressives are making a big mistake by being so mean to Trump and his regime. Blow reminded his readers this morning that "Trump is a vulgar, uninformed, anti-intellectual, extremely unpopular grifter helming a family of grifters who apparently intend to milk their moment on the mount for every red cent." Why would anyone be mean to him?

The Trump resistance movement is stretching its wings, engaging its muscles and feeling its power. It is large and strong and tough. It has moved past debilitating grief and into righteous anger, assiduous organization and pressing activism.

Welcome to the dawn of the fighting-mad majority: The ones who didn’t vote for Trump and maybe even some who now regret that they did.

They are charging forward under the banner of sage wisdom that has endured through the ages: Show up, get loud and fight back. Do it with your body and words, with your time and money, with every fiber of yourself. They see what this dawning regime means and they don’t intend, not even for a second, to wait around to see what happens. “What happens” is happening right now and it’s horrific.

But a grifter? A family of grifters? What does that mean? Back to Blow:

Trump still hasn’t released his taxes or fully disconnected from his businesses. His wife is suing The Daily Mail because she believes the newspaper may have injured her “unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to “have garnered multimillion-dollar business relationships for a multiyear term.” When his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line was dropped by Nordstrom, Trump lashed out at the retailer on Twitter, citing Ivanka as something of his moral compass: “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person-- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!” This begs the question: “Why do you need someone to push you to do the right thing?”

Then, top Trump adviser Kellyanne “QVC” Conway, from the confines of the White House briefing room, said during a televised interview: “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I would say.” She continued: “I’m going to give a free commercial here: Go buy it today, everybody; you can find it online.”

Unethical is too kind a word for these classless cretins. Furthermore, Trump has nominated, and his Republican conspirators in the Senate have confirmed, a rogues’ gallery of some of the least qualified, most questionable appointees in recent memory. Aside from some of them being the fiercest critics of the very agencies they are charged with leading, some have also been accused of bigotry, plagiarism, insider trading and overall vacuousness.

Jim Webb, clearly, has no understanding of who or what Trump is-- let alone what Trump/Bannon is. We're lucky that many of our political leaders do. Republicans-- led by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell-- see the problem and recognize it as a way of getting their toxic, soul-killing agenda signed into law. But thank God for real Democrats-- not the Jim Webb types-- like Ted Lieu, Al Franken, Elizabeth Warren and, of course... Bernie. And don't we need Alan Grayson back around now?

And in response to Jim Webb, the right-wing racist piggy who thinks there should be more Democrats like him who revere slave-holders: "Trump is not normal. He is not competent. And we will not simply sit back and suck it up." Oh... and John Oliver is back on TV! The Virginia racist should watch; everyone should.

Is There A Role For Government In Fighting The Latest World Wide Right-Wing Scourge: Fake News

The Washington Post recently defined fake news as "deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public." Last month California Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez-- currently running for the open L.A. congressional seat Xavier Bacerra left to become state Attorney General-- introduced a bill in Sacramento to empower educators to help school children understand the difference between actual news and Trump's and Putin's Alt-News, i.e., fake news. Some right-wing hack in a bowtie on Fox-- Tucker Carlson I think-- had a meltdown over it. After all, if people understood what fake news was, who would watch Fox? Gomez's bill "would require the state to establish curriculum standards and frameworks to teach 'civic online reasoning' to middle- and high-schoolers. The intention is to help give youngsters 'the ability to judge the credibility and quality of information found on Internet Web sites, including social media,' the bill states. That's an existential threat to would be tyrants like Team Trump, as well as to their media outlets.

“For every challenge facing this nation, there are numerous Internet sources pretending to be something they are not,” according to the proposed legislation. “With so much information shared on the Internet, it can be difficult to tell the difference between real news and fake news.

“Ordinary people once relied on publishers, editors, and subject matter experts to vet the information they consumed, but information shared on the Internet is disseminated rapidly and often without editorial oversight, making it easier for fake news to reach a large audience.”

It comes at a time when, Gomez said, “we have seen the corrupting effects of a deliberate propaganda campaign driven by fake news.”

“When fake news is repeated, it becomes difficult for the public to discern what's real,” he said in a statement, according to the Los Angeles Times. “These attempts to mislead readers pose a direct threat to our democracy.”

As you can imagine, Republicans and other purveyors of fake news have been hyperbolic over Gomez's proposal. Yesterday, a British newspaper, The Telegraph reported that Apple CEO Tim Cook is as concerned about fake news as Jimmy Gomez is-- and "is calling for governments to launch a public information campaign to fight the scourge of fake news, which is 'killing people’s minds."

In an impassioned plea, Mr Cook, boss of the world’s largest company, says that the epidemic of false reports “is a big problem in a lot of the world” and necessitates a crackdown by the authorities and technology firms.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, he calls for a campaign similar to those that changed attitudes on the environment to educate the public on the threat posed by fabricated online stories.

Made-up news reports trying to promote a particular agenda gained huge traction on social media in the US during the election.

“It has to be ingrained in the schools, it has to be ingrained in the public,” said Mr Cook. “There has to be a massive campaign. We have to think through every demographic.

"We need the modern version of a public-service announcement campaign. It can be done quickly if there is a will.”

The rise of fake news was being driven by unscrupulous firms determined to attract online readers at any cost, he said.

“We are going through this period of time right here where unfortunately some of the people that are winning are the people that spend their time trying to get the most clicks, not tell the most truth,” he said. “It’s killing people’s minds in a way.”

Tech firms, which have been criticised for doing too little, also need to up their game, he said.

“All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news.

"We must try to squeeze this without stepping on freedom of speech and of the press, but we must also help the reader. Too many of us are just in the complain category right now and haven’t figured out what to do.”

He said that this crackdown would help providers of quality journalism and help drive out clickbait. “The outcome of that is that truthful, reliable, non-sensational, deep news outlets will win,” Mr Cook said.

“The [rise of fake news] is a short-term thing-- I don’t believe that people want that at the end of the day.”

A new approach was required in schools, he said. “It’s almost as if a new course is required for the modern kid, for the digital kid.”

But he is optimistic. “In some ways kids will be the easiest to educate. At least before a certain age, they are very much in listen and understand [mode], and they then push their parents to act. We saw this with environmental issues: kids learning at school and coming home and saying why do you have this plastic bottle? Why are you throwing it away?”

Will The Trump Regime Use Orwell's 1984 As A Playbook?

The delusional self-imagine Trump and his lackeys are pushing out from the White House is colliding with the cold hard facts, if not the #AltFacts. He may style himself a "ratings machine," but his inaugural concert was "a dud, lacking A-list talent. On Friday, the inauguration ceremony pulled in 30.6 million viewers, 7 million less than Obama’s first swearing in, 12 million less than Reagan, and 3 million less than Jimmy Carter-- but slightly above that of Bill Clinton’s first- term ceremony of 29.7 million viewers. Trump, who recently Twitter-shamed Arnold Schwarzenegger for pulling in lower ratings than he had as a reality host of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice, barely bested George W. Bush, a president whose election was won only after an aborted recount and Supreme Court intervention... At times, the president-elect appeared distracted at his own inauguration. Never known for his patience [attention span], he could not seem to sit still. He rocked in his seat minutes before taking the oath, tapped his fingers together and whispered to newly sworn-in Vice President Mike Pence when others were taking up time on the mike."

Art by Tim O'Brien

No matter how you sliced it, the affair lacked the exuberance and adoration we’ve come to expect from a showman like Trump on the campaign trail. He often cites his own power to amass fans and followers (have you heard he has a Twitter account?) as one of his greatest assets. He’s referred to it as his edge above all the other “losers.”

Those losers seemed to be on his mind later that night as he danced with his model-beautiful wife wearing the look of a high school bully who’d just been named Prom King. Two lines from his inauguration speech seemed especially relevant to the moment: “Everyone is listening to you now... You will never be ignored again.”

Ignored? No, but upstaged, yes. The next morning the Women’s March on Washington flooded the areas around the Capitol Dome that had been noticeably less populated when Trump was waving from and walking near his stretch limo on the parade route. The half-empty parade bleachers and unoccupied ground tarps of Friday were swallowed up by a sea of protesters who’d flown in from across the country to voice concerns about the Trump presidency.

They were thousands among the millions who protested across the nation and the world for women’s rights-- and their concern about a president whose remarks about sexually assaulting women were as disturbing as some of his conservative Cabinet picks’ views of reproductive rights.

Madonna, America Ferrera, Ashley Judd, Scarlett Johansson and Gloria Steinem stoked the crowd’s exuberance in way that Trump did not the day before. It was a rousing spectacle. It was exciting. It was everything the show on Friday was not.

And maybe that is why Spicer was sent out on Saturday to belligerently berate the press-- “the opposition party,” in the words of one Trump official. Here was the “unbelievable” scene-- the likes of which we’d “never seen before.”

The true start of the Trump presidential reality show had begun.

In a Facebook post, Dan Rather warned that "These are not normal times. These are extraordinary times. And extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures." Will Newt Gingrich want to toss him into prison with Madonna for thought crimes?



Rather's point, though, is not blowing up the White House but that we all must step up "and say simply and without equivocation, 'A lie, is a lie, is a lie!' And if someone won't say it, those of us who know that there is such a thing is the truth must do whatever is in our power to diminish the liar's malignant reach into our society... Facts and the truth are not partisan. They are the bedrock of our democracy. And you are either with us, with our Constitution, our history, and the future of our nation, or you are against it. Everyone must answer that question."

Following the path Trump and his lackeys are headed is the road to tyranny and fascism. Are Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell going to countenance that?

Not that the first few days in the Trumpanzee Era were only about distorting the truth, Chuck Todd and his crew pointed out that it also highlighted America's great political divide, the structure on which Trump will build his government. "[Y]ou could argue," they wrote, "that the United States today is more politically divided than it was during the brass-knuckled 2016 campaign. In his inaugural address on Friday, President Trump took aim at Washington's political establishment ('For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost'), big cities across America ('Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones…; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives'), and globalization ('From this moment on, it's going to be America First'). Then, 24 hours later, millions of women-- as well as some men-- protested against Trump across the country and throughout the world. It was Rural America vs. Urban America. Nationalism vs. Globalism. 'American Carnage' vs. Women's Power. And we have 1,457 days to go in Trump's presidency."