Trump Has A Plan To Steal The 2020 Election-- And It's Strong

Today began with one of the longest essays I ever posted on this blog-- and the parts about Beto O'Rourke fighting Nazis and Lindsey Graham roasting on a spit in Hell, were afterthoughts. What I had intended to include was another video from cult-fighter Steven Hassan, the one up top and a few thoughts about McKay Coppins' Atlantic piece yesterday, The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign To Reelect Señor Trumpanzee. We have come a long way from Jospeh Goebbel's day. And yet... Coppins set out to explore how new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election.

Coppins must have been planning this article for a long time. Last fall he created a new Facebook account in order to experience what people who slip into the Trump cult experience. "Facebook’s algorithm," he wrote, "prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like 'In Trump We Trust.' I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers." The Trumpanzee reelection campaign "was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside."

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video-- served up by the Trump campaign-- that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself-- about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else-- felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

I don't know Coppins personally and I'm not a psychologist. I've read his work for almost a decade and I know he was the editor of his college paper. My guess is that he IQ is considerably higher than average. The mean IQ, by definition, is 100. Half the country has IQs under 100 and half have IQs over 100. People who have IQs under 100 have a tougher time with abstract reasoning than people with IQs over 100. I always figured people with low IQs are easy victims for slick propaganda, whether on TV or the internet. I explained the Trump election by assuming-- with the skimpiest of evidence-- that Trump was elected by the half the country with the lowest IQs, the ones for whom those Russian Facebook posts were motivational. No one I knew. And yet... Coppins admits the strategy made him question what he knew to be logical and what he knew to be normative reality.

He warned that he was "seeing a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes-- jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise."

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view-- one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

Did you see any of the Iowa caucus-goers being interviewed during the process in the gyms? It scared me. Critical thinking was in short supply. No-- not short supply... nowhere to be seen. Every time a reporter asked a voter why he or she was voting for or switching to Biden or Klobuchar or Warren or Mayo Pete of whomever, they simply repeated that candidate's advertising talking points.

It was hilarious when after the voting a reporter asked a Mayo Pete supporter who voted for Mayo because of his phony-made-for-TV military service, if he knew Mayo was openly gay. The voter screamed he wanted his vote back.

Bloomberg has every attention of matching his former friend/bitter rival Trump million for million, billion for billion in these brainwashing efforts. Hurray for our side?

Brad Parscale, who looks like Satan, has a sulphur-odor and, wrote Coppins, had "no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending-- none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them... From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump 'got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.'"

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression [the ones that helped elect Filipino fascist leader Rodrigo Duterte] as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology-- muddy the waters; alternative facts-- but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting-- the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its “psychographic” targeting really had. But Wylie-- who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster-- said the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

“What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?” he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election. “There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do … and make it much more sophisticated.” These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

...Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they’re most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful-- and Trump’s advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of “illegal aliens”-- a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use-- and the corruption of the “swamp.”

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps-- including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser-- a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump’s reelection strategy. The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign’s texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas (“They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear-- and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. The texts-- written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent from a friend-- were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

...[A] lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content-- no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”

This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media-- while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. “They’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”

Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by the Palm Beach Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.”

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and the Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas-- which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm-- instead of paying the sites directly-- candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

NOTHING IS TRUE

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal-- the one in which Joe Biden is the villain-- and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to “give illegal aliens the right to vote.” At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that “the governor of Virginia executed a baby”-- prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, “Murderer!”

This incendiary fabrication didn’t seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case-- that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally “executed a baby.”

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor’s abortion comments to back up Trump’s smear.

After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal-- if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president’s accomplishments, she didn’t care if he “fabricates a little bit.” A man responded to my questions about Trump’s dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media “ought to try telling the truth once in a while.” Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not-- but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along-- and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear-- not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

The Last Kingdom's Aethelwold: Trump Of The Dark Ages

The Last Kingdom is historical fiction from the BBC that takes place during the reign of Alfred the Great (871-899), during which time Wessex is the last holdout in Britain against the Viking invaders. Netflix has been running Season 3 and last night I watched Episode 8. At one point, Alfred's malcontent cousin-- and claimant to the throne-- Aethelwold, tells his crony Sigebriht to just keep repeating a lie-- about a plot against the king and crown price-- over and over until everyone in Wintancaester (Winchester) accepts it as truth.

The brief scene, including the phraseology Aethelwold uses, immediately reminded me of the series of drawings (above) that Nancy Ohanian did a couple of months ago tying Joseph Goebbels and Fox News together as purveyors of this type of "Big Lie" propaganda, which also happens to be the essence of Trump's communication strategy. In fact, that Last Kingdom scene is like a Dark Ages version of Trump's twitter feed.

The Associated Press ran a fact check on just one tweet he put out yesterday: Entire Trump tweet on immigrant aid is wrong. "Wrong" is such a polite way to describe what it is. "Trump," wrote Calvin Woodward, "is spreading a false claim from supporters that people who are in the United States illegally receive more in federal assistance than the average American gets in Social Security benefits. Everything about the tweet he passed on to his 56 million listed Twitter followers Tuesday is wrong. In a tweet of his own, Trump sketched an overly simplistic portrait of the auto industry in suggesting that General Motors plants slated for closure would be chugging along if foreign cars were heavily taxed in the U.S. market." Trump's retweet was removed once the Associated Press called out the lies.

TRUMP’s retweet: “Illegals can get up to $3,874 a month under Federal Assistance program. Our social security checks are on average $1200 a month. RT (retweet) if you agree: If you weren’t born in the United States, you should receive $0 assistance.”

THE FACTS: Wrong country, wrong numbers, wrong description of legal status of the recipients. Besides that, immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally do not qualify for most federal benefits, even when they’re paying taxes, and those with legal status make up a small portion of those who use public benefits.

The $3,874 refers to a payment made in Canada, not the U.S., to a legally admitted family of refugees. It was largely a one-time resettlement payment under Canada’s refugee program, not monthly assistance in perpetuity, the fact-checking site Snopes found a year ago in debunking a Facebook post that misrepresented Canada’s policy. A document cited in the Facebook post, showing aid for food, transportation and other basics needs, applied to a family of five.

Apart from confusing Canada with the United States, the tweet distributed by the president misstated how much Americans get from Social Security on average-- $1,419 a month for retired workers, not $1,200.

Overall, low-income immigrants who are not yet U.S. citizens use Medicaid, food aid, cash assistance and Supplemental Security Income aid at a lower rate than comparable U.S.-born adults, according to an Associated Press analysis of census data. Noncitizen immigrants make up only 6.5 percent of all those participating in Medicaid, for example.

Despite that, the administration wants to redefine the rules for immigrants to further restrict who can receive benefits and for how long.

A retweet is not necessarily an endorsement of the opinion it contains, but Trump does not populate his Twitter feed with views that are contrary to his own.

GM

TRUMP: “The reason that the small truck business in the U.S. is such a go to favorite is that, for many years, Tariffs of 25% have been put on small trucks coming into our country. It is called the ‘chicken tax.’ If we did that with cars coming in, many more cars would be built here ... and G.M. would not be closing their plants in Ohio, Michigan & Maryland. Get smart Congress. Also, the countries that send us cars have taken advantage of the U.S. for decades. The President has great power on this issue-- Because of the G.M. event, it is being studied now!”

THE FACTS: It’s a stretch to conclude that the plants General Motors plans to close would be spared if foreign-made cars were subject to hefty duties. Tariffs could indeed be an incentive to build cars in the U.S., but the overarching problem for GM is that people aren’t buying cars like they used to. More want SUVs or trucks now.

The 25 percent tariff on pickup trucks imported into the U.S. was put in place years ago to protect the Detroit Three’s major profit centers from imported pickups. It does not apply to trucks imported from Canada or Mexico at present. So GM, for instance, builds pickups in Mexico and exports them to the U.S. without such a tariff. Fiat Chrysler also builds heavy-duty Ram pickups in Mexico, although it plans to move that production to the U.S. next year.

Japanese automakers, mainly Toyota and Nissan, use U.S. plants to build nearly all of the pickups that they sell in the country. Honda switched production from Canada to Alabama. Toyota does sell a small number of Mexican-built Tacoma pickups in the U.S., but most are built in Texas.

So there are grounds to believe car duties could make a difference, but it’s not that straightforward.

Six years ago cars were 49 percent of new-vehicle sales in the U.S., while trucks and SUVs were 51 percent. Through October of this year, it’s 68 percent trucks and 32 percent cars. All the factories GM wants to close make cars that aren’t selling well. The Commerce Department has been studying whether it can use national security reasons to justify putting tariffs on imported cars but has yet to make a decision.

Most automakers, including those based in Detroit, import vehicles from abroad that would be affected by any tariffs. And U.S. car exports would probably be subject to new or higher tariffs overseas.

The Emperor Has No Mind

by Noah

Nixon was pretty damn bad. We knew he was a bad guy. He’d given some signs of mental instability too, perhaps most notably with his 1962 “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” speech. Sadly we did 6 years later. But, it wasn’t until he was heading for his exit that we learned just how wacked out he was. Now we have Donald Trump. Like with Nixon, the signs were there before he got "elected" President. It was even more obvious, but his voters went to the parade and saw what they wanted to see and saw what they were told to see by the corporate media.

What we have here in Donald Trump and his supporters is a variation of the old Emperor Has No Clothes thing. He acts like he should be bowed down to by all, as if he was an emperor or dictator. His enablers and supporters look at him and they refuse to see the reality that their "president" is stark, raving mad and could destroy us all, including them, if he isn’t stopped. A madman can lose his mind but that doesn’t mean he can’t plot his trajectory, and ours, every day.

Crazy as he is, he is able to deliberately create chaos. He does it in order to achieve a result. History and comic books are full of truly evil and demented people like Donald Trump. Consider Trump a real life example of The Joker from the Batman comics, a twisted man bent on creating mayhem simply for his own gratification and personal gain.

On Wednesday, the day after the elections turned over the control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, Trump was fuming and panic stricken over what he correctly saw as a rapidly coming future of at least some level of reckoning. For the first time in his life, at least since he and his father lost a racial bias court case or two in New York, Trump stands to face, if not some accountability, some high profile exposure of his misdeeds and criminality. He knows that his obsequious cabana boy, California Rep. Devin Nunes, is no longer in charge of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Come January, California's Rep. Adam Schiff will be.

So, what was a sniveling caged rat in a freaked out panic state of feverish mental illness like Donald Trump to do? Ever the marketing man, he knew a smokescreen, a distraction was required and it had to be an elaborate one. He would hold a long and rambling press conference. Don’t look over there! Look here! He would pretend the takeover of the House was meaningless, almost never happened. Takeover? What takeover? Ditto for the losses of governorships and state legislatures. He would play up the Senate victories and he would display his vile, virulent pettiness and mock those in his own party who lost House and Senate races as getting what they deserved for not embracing and praising him at every opportunity. He would, once again, attack the press as “the enemy of the people” when it is only the perceived enemy of himself. His mobster-style message to all was “If you don’t kiss my ring and kiss my ass, then bad things will happen to you.“ In so doing, he once again displayed his massive insecurities and psychosis; something a person in full control of their mind would never do, certainly not live on national TV.

As if to deliberately reveal how far gone Trump’s aides are, one of them was heard to say words to the effect that “this is going to be great” as Trump waddled into the room to give his version of the theater of the absurd. What followed could just be titled “President Crazy Pants Loses It On National TV For An Hour And A Half” or, perhaps, “The Crackup Of A President” or some thing similar.

It backfired. Trump could not control his mind and he went off the deep end. He went way too far. He was more than confrontational, petulant and belligerent as he fumbled at his podium and stalked around it aimlessly like a deranged street person. His mental illness is in full bloom now. It's more out in the open than ever before. Only his support group of fellow crazies could possibly look at the actual film of the press conference and see it otherwise and they did. FOX “News” reported that CNN reporter Jim Acosta “strong-armed” a female intern who Trump had sent to seize his microphone. Nothing could be further from the truth of course, as film of the entire incident clearly shows, but FOX “News” and their White House partner showed the public a doctored version of the film of the incident that had been made by another one of Trumpanzee’s favorite “news” outlets, Alex Jones’ Infowars. When you’re afflicted with Republican Insanity Syndrome, the truth is not the truth.

The White House’s presentation of the Alex Jones video recreation of the Acosta incident did nothing to change the minds of sane people but it was a real Goebbels moment. In tandem with their presentation of genuinely fake news, however, the White House revoked Jim Acosta’s White House press credentials. Trump sent out Sarah Huckabbee Sanders to lie to the world about what everyone had seen with their own eyes on live TV; and lie she did with all of her customary great fervor; falsely accusing Acosta of putting his hands on the female intern. It was a perfect manifestation of the Republican “truth is not the truth” way of life. That girl Sarah was born to lie! But, born of what, who knows?

I’m actually happy for Acosta. I know he must be disappointed and frustrated at the turn of events but I know I wouldn’t want the job of visiting an insane asylum every day forever. Having to constantly look in on the insane likes of sociopaths like Stephen Miller, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, John Kelly and all the rest of Trump’s servile toadies is bound to take its toll. It has to be one of the very most depressing jobs in journalism, right up there with seeing kids in cages, reporting on people who are doomed to die simply because they can’t afford proper medical care, or listening to Eric and Donnie Jr. talk.

Once the whole press conference debacle blew up in their faces, Trump and his White House needed yet another “event” to redirect the spotlight yet again. They came up with a doozy, they pulled out AG Jeff Sessions’ resignation “at your request” letter. Yeah, that’s going over real big, just like Nixon’s infamous Saturday Night Massacre. Sessions is now free to go home to Alabama and bake swastika cookies for the rest of his days, but odds are, he will try to run for the Senate. Oh joy!

Did You Know... Trump Lies About Stuff?

Today, as Trump continued his bombast and gaslighting on every front, the stock market had it's worst day in 8 months, the Dow plunging more than 800 points (3%). I also noticed today that gasoline-- at least in L.A.-- was at its highest price to consumers since about a year before Obama left office. Please take a look at that video above. At about the one minute mark on the CBS News report, Señor Trumpanzee says, "I think a lot of Democrats are going to be voting Republican on November 6th." You think anyone believes him? He probably doesn't even really think that himself-- but as with all his bullshit, he does think that if he repeats it enough times, it'll come true, just like Trump role model, former-Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels said it would.

The Republican Party campaign strategy revealed

Trump, McConnell, Ryan and all the little lemmings claim that the Kavanaugh vote sealed the deal for them. I guess they don't talk with many women. Yesterday afternoon, CNN released the latest SSRS poll. To start, the generic polling (of likely voters) was the best it's been for the Democrats and the worst it's been for the Republicans since November, 2012. 54% say they plan to vote for a Democrat and 41% say they plan to vote for a Republican-- up 2 for Team Blue and down 1 for Team Red since the Kavanaugh scandal.

In terms of enthusiasm for the midterms, 55% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans say they are either "extremely enthusiastic" or "very enthusiastic" about voting. 15% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans are not enthusiastic. Replies to another notable question-- 38% of likely votes think the country will be better off if the Democrats win control of Congress while just 32% think the country will be better off if the GOP maintains control. 27% said it makes no difference.

This morning, Politico had some bad news for Trump and his team. A new Morning Consult poll doesn't just show that voters disapprove of his job performance 56-41% and that the voters want Democrats to control Congress-- 48-38%-- but that they disapprove of him and his Republican enablers after that whole Kavanaugh scandal played out.

And following the GOP-led effort to push through his nomination, enthusiasm among Democratic voters has surged. More than 3 in 4 Democrats (77 percent) say they are “very motivated” to turn out and vote in the midterms-- more than the 68 percent of Republicans who say they’re “very motivated.”

...[T]he Politico/Morning Consult poll suggests that Republicans’ decision to confirm Kavanaugh lacks broad support and has animated Democrats with only four weeks to go until President Donald Trump’s first midterm election.

...Independent voters are far less supportive of the decision to confirm Kavanaugh: 47 percent say the Senate erred in confirming him, while 34 percent say it made the right decision.

...The poll also shows a spike in voter enthusiasm-- particularly among Democrats.

“Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation battle appears to be a significant motivator, as voter enthusiasm for the upcoming midterms has hit its highest point since Morning Consult and Politico began tracking the issue,” said Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president. “In this week’s poll, 70 percent of voters say they are very motivated to vote-- including 77 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of Republicans, and 60 percent of independents. One month ago, 64 percent said they were very motivated-- including 67 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of Republicans, and 55 percent of independents.”

...While Republicans have cited an increase in excitement among their voters during the Kavanaugh fight-- and some polls last week indicated that the GOP had closed the enthusiasm gap-- both the Politico/Morning Consult poll and a CNN/SSRS survey conducted over the past weekend and released Tuesday show Democrats more animated than Republicans.

There's another way to look at this-- and Barnes and Noble just has. Look at this map:

Books about politics are selling like hotcakes-- a nice fat 57% boost over a year ago. But, generally, in the states that voted for Trump people bought books that were positive towards him and in states that went for Hillary, people bought anti-Trump books. "The top three sellers so far in 2018," reports CNBC, "are widely viewed as taking a more negative view of Trump and his White House. They include former FBI Director James Comey's memoir, A Higher Loyalty, and the hotly debated tell-all Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff. The number-one bestseller, Fear: Trump in the White House by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, sold more than one copy per second on its release day, Barnes & Noble said. It was the fastest-selling book, overall, for Barnes and Noble in over three years."

So what did the brain-washed dummies in the backward parts of the South buy? A good example is the one written by Fox New's insane right-wing propagandist, Gregg Jarrett, some garbage collection called The Russia Hoax that was popular in the Old Confederacy and in other states with large pockets of low-information Trump supporters and dumbbells.

Do Republicans Not Know Trump Is A Congenital Liar? Or Do They Just Not Care? Or Even Approve?

If you input "Big Lie" into Google, the first thing that pops up is Post Malone's song.

Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you got the shit you don't got
Heard you say that shit a hundred times, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie

Right after that you get the wikipedia definition-- including the original German große Lüge-- explaining that the Big Lie is a propaganda technique that was coined by Hitler in 1925 for his book, Mein Kampf, the only book that Trump is known to have read and which is first wife says he keeps on his night stand. Hitlerexplained that the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Sound familiar?

Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, a forerunner of Huckabee's daughter, "put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression 'big lie'. Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler's first use of the phrase. The article, titled Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik (English: "From Churchill's Lie Factory") was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

During World War II the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, a precursor to the CIA) prepared a report on Hitler's psychological profile, that included this-- "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Who does that sound like?

Last year, Emily Dreyfuss, writing for Wired, explained how the Big Lie technique is used by people like Trump: repetition.

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high.

None of those things are true.

But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the “illusory truth effect,” a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias-- which perhaps you have become more familiar with lately.

President Trump is a "great businessman," he says over and over again. Some evidence suggests that might not be true. Or look at just this week, when the president signed three executive orders designed to stop what he describes-- over and over again-- as high levels of violence against law enforcement in America. Sounds important, right? But such crimes are at their lowest rates in decades, as are most violent crimes in the US. Not exactly, as the president would have it, "American carnage."

...Repetition is what makes fake news work, too, as researchers at Central Washington University pointed out in a study way back in 2012 before the term was everywhere. It's also a staple of political propaganda. It's why flacks feed politicians and CEOs sound bites that they can say over and over again. Not to go all Godwin's Law on you, but even Adolf Hitler knew about the technique. "Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea," he wrote in Mein Kampf.

The effect works because when people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar. The first condition is logical: People compare new information with what they already know to be true and consider the credibility of both sources. But researchers have found that familiarity can trump rationality-- so much so that hearing over and over again that a certain fact is wrong can have a paradoxical effect. It's so familiar that it starts to feel right.

I'm going to guess this works even more effectively as you descend the intelligence curve and get to the average Trump voter.

This week presidential historian Jon Meacham castigated Trump for calling the media an "enemy of the people," pointing out that the phrase itself and that the whole reason authoritarians use it is part of a "totalitarian" strategy. "It’s an elective kind of base management. It’s pernicious, it’s dangerous... It’s simply a Stalinist phrase, for God’s sake. It comes out of totalitarian regimes to declare that a free press is the enemy of the people."

Early yesterday morning The Atlantic published an essay by Olivia Pascall, Trump's Tweets and the Creation of 'Illusory Truth', asserting that Trump's repetition of words like "witch hunt" could have a psychological effect on Americans-- say it enough, and people might start to believe it... Trump’s consistent tweeting-- and the constant media coverage of those tweets-- makes his favorite phrases familiar to the American public. And that familiarity could be key to making his claims seem plausible, even believable."

Every time a Trump tweet calling the investigation a “witch hunt” flashes up on people’s Twitter feeds or television screens-- regardless of the context-- it’s becoming more and more familiar to them. They’re becoming increasingly fluent in the language of Trump’s claimed innocence. Even if they don’t think Mueller’s investigation is a rigged witch hunt, they are becoming more and more familiar with the idea that it could be.

... [T]he way to combat this effect would be for people to stop responding directly to the president’s charges. “It’s actually very ineffective to say, ‘Oh, this isn’t a witch hunt,’ because what you’re doing is reinforcing the ‘witch hunt’ frame,” he says. “You can’t just get people to stop believing something by contradicting it.” [A more effective response is] creating a positive, alternative story, such as “Mueller’s investigation is aimed at safeguarding America’s elections.” But that’s not always a natural position for the president’s opponents, or the media, to take. What effect all of this repeated language could have on public opinion of the investigation itself is unclear. It probably won’t turn public opinion in the president’s favor anytime soon, but it might mean that people take the Russia investigation less seriously-- the most recent Suffolk poll is already indicating that it’s a relatively unimportant issue for voters in the midterms. It’s almost certainly succeeding in framing the debate around whether it’s a witch hunt. And maybe, for the president’s purposes, that’s enough.

Yesterday everyone was talking about Susan Glasser's New Yorker piece about Trump lying more... and purposefully. "In his first year as President," she wrote, "Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to The Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. In June and July, he averaged sixteen false claims a day. On July 5th, The Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were 'false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.'" The Post fact-checkers never refer to his lies as "lies," although their chief, Glenn Kessler pointed out that Señor T "has a habit of repeating the same falsehoods over and over again, especially as they concern his core political causes, such as trade or immigration or getting European allies to contribute more to NATO."

History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency, and Kessler’s laborious work gives us metrics that confirm what is becoming more and more apparent: the recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump’s increasingly unbound Presidency and a signal attribute of it. The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to. The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than eighty per cent of Republicans-- the group at which his lies seem to be aimed-- means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the “Make America Great Again” slogan. The untruths, Kessler told me, are Trump’s political “secret sauce.”

...Other metrics make clear the significant changes in Trump’s approach to the Presidency in recent months, as he has become more confident, less willing to tolerate advisers who challenge him, and increasingly obsessed with the threats to his Presidency posed by the ongoing special-counsel investigation. One is the epic turnover rate of Trump’s White House staff, which as of June already stood at the unprecedented level of sixty-one per cent among the President’s top advisers.

...The previous gold standard in Presidential lying was, of course, Richard Nixon. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential nominee four years before Nixon won the White House in 1968, famously called Nixon “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Writing in his memoirs, Goldwater observed that Nixon “lied to his wife, his family, his friends, longtime colleagues in the U.S. Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people, and the world.”

There have been comparisons between Nixon and Trump since Trump first entered office, but these, too, have escalated in recent months as the President has been shadowed by the threat of the ongoing special-counsel investigation into the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee (another eerie Watergate echo) and whether Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. Trump’s obsession with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, also comes with metrics: he has called the Mueller probe a “witch hunt” on Twitter more than twenty-one times a month on average this spring and summer, compared with an average of just three times a month in the previous nine months.

A little entertainment?

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

As the new week begins, we look back at Herr Trump's biggest lie of last week and await, with grim anticipation, what lies he will spew upon America this week.

Some might say that a dishonorable mention should go to his related lie that only Congress could fix the situation, a situation his policy created, and then pretending to make everything all better with a toothless executive order that was only designed to deflect and quiet down the angry reaction to his policy. That was just smoke and mirrors. However, I will give Señor Trumpanzee a little slack on this one. You see, Congress could fix the situation, just not in the way he and his supporters would like.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

Fox "News" and Señor Trumpanzee are partners now, and both have a semi-silent partner named Vlad Putin. The circle of sell-out is complete. Both FOX and Trump have pushed their Goebbels-style pathological lying across new boundaries into new dimensions of absurdity and incredulity, and they'll keep pushing those boundaries as far as they can, until a breaking point is reached and the lies are so preposterous that even the most gullible and naive start thinking about and questioning the bullshit. But, therein lies the basic problem: Millions love the bullshit. They eagerly marinate themselves in the bullshit. They never think to question. If a crackpot voice on TV or radio is saying something, those who lack critical thinking ability will accept whatever lie it is as truth; especially if it's designed to trigger their emotions or their prejudices. It's a propaganda technique that's as old as the human race; practiced by political scoundrels and their media enablers all that time.

The lies keep getting bigger and bigger. To the suckers, they are beautiful lies they want to live in. They've gotten more and more ridiculous. Funny how so many never catch on, no matter what price they end up paying.

As Goebbels himself said in 1943:

Make the lie big. Make it simple and eventually they will believe it.

 

Bush: Almost Gone

There's a whole page of quotes from Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels. Obviously the first one, his most classic one is:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

In his buh-bye, suckers speechyesterday, Bush repeated the biggest of the Big Lies that were the hallmarks of his tragic regime, the most infamous one of all: "I kept you safe."

In fact, no modern president-- say, post-James Madison-- has presided over as big a domestic calamity of unsafeness as Bush, who can and should be blamed for not protecting us from the events of 9/11-- and who then proceeded to make us less safe every single day for the rest of his horrendous time in office.

“There is legitimate debate about many of these decisions," he blathered, "but there can be little debate about the results. America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil.” Funny how he conveniently started the clock ticking on 9/12. I guess Clinton was still technically president on 9/11, right? Bush had been in the White House how long? Not paying attention.

In his last scheduled-- please God-- appearance beefore he finds himself on the ash heap of history, Bush quacked out another pathetic attempt to justofy the worst presidency in our country's history.

With a touch of nostalgia for his accomplishments and an air of defiance to his critics, Mr. Bush took Americans back to the first night that he addressed them from the White House only hours after terror had struck American soil and killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

“We must resist complacency. We must keep our resolve,” Mr. Bush said. “And we must never let down our guard.”

If only he had resisted complacency and if only he hasn't let his (our) guard down between his inauguration and that fateful September day, we might have avoided all the tragedies that followed.

The address was the latest attempt by Mr. Bush to help shape his legacy. But even though Democrats said they had no plans to offer a major response, saying that his time in office speaks for itself, the farewell speech would hardly be the last word on his tenure.

Dan Froomkin's take over at the WaPo, hits the nail squarely on the head. "President Bush bid the nation goodbye last night with a simpering speech that may have appealed to those who still believe in him, but offered nothing to change the minds of the vast majority of Americans who don't."

Bush smirked and twitched while delivering a highly defensive farewell address in which he tried to hearken back to his glory days right after 9/11, sought credit for having made "tough decisions" and insisted his intentions were good.

There was no real attempt to bind the wounds he leaves in his wake. There was no apparent awareness of irony when he held up his administration as a champion of moral clarity and human dignity. He even gave himself credit for his response to the financial crisis he didn't see coming: "When challenges to our prosperity emerged, we rose to meet them," he said.

And he tried one last time to conflate his "war on terror" with the unrelated debacle in Iraq, recasting the American troops perilously occupying that benighted country as "part of a broader struggle" between "a small band of fanatics" who demand "total obedience to an oppressive ideology" and a system "based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God, and that liberty and justice light the path to peace."

In a fitting end for a presidency that has often operated in its own reality, Bush was greeted warmly by his audience-- a hand-picked selection of hangers-on and human props-- even as public-opinion polls show that the nation is way past ready to move on.

Bush's former press secretary, Scott McClellan, listened to the speech too. He didn't seem very impressed.

"It's hard to talk about moral clarity when you have really tarnished the government's moral standing," McClellan said bluntly.

"There are really two problems that they don't seem to get. First of all, the public trust. The president, long ago, sadly, lost the public trust. They are no longer listening to what he has to say or buying what he is selling. You know, unless, he is willing to come out and talk candidly about his own mistakes, his own policy mistakes, and address those issues openly with the American people, then they are not really tuning in. It's the same old song. It's just a different variation of it. It's much like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher.

"The second part of this is... it's terribly mistaken to think that good intentions and your inner decency will somehow outweigh your actions and policies, and the way you went about them with the American people. They are terribly mistaken if they think that the American people are going to look at that as more important than what he actually did while he was in office."

But more important than analyzing Bush's self-serving speech is analyzing the reluctance of the Obama Administration to hold him and his cronies accountable. Paul Krugman summed it up nicely yesterday in the NY Times:

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

...Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.