In closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill, Pompeo has been an intense critic of a covert CIA program to train and arm moderate rebel forces in Syria, according to U.S. officials who said that dismantling the program — or at least subjecting it to a major re-evaluation — would likely be at the top of his agenda if he is confirmed.
.. Pompeo is not widely known among the CIA rank and file but that his nomination was greeted at least initially as a reassuring development at a spy agency that has been treated largely with disdain by Trump.
.. Pompeo’s ties to the arch-conservative tea party movement and scant background on intelligence issues were also cited as a cause for concern among some CIA veterans.
“The tea party owns the drones now,”
.. He attended a dinner this week with CIA Director John Brennan at the home of former Republican congressman Mike Rogers, who had previously been seen as a leading candidate for the CIA job under Trump. The gathering included cast and producers of the CIA-themed show “Homeland,” according to a person familiar with the event.
.. Pompeo reportedly has close ties to the Koch family, Kansas billionaires ..
.. Articles in Kansas papers indicate that Pompeo built much of his wealth with investment funds from Koch industries and that his campaigns for Congress have been backed by Koch money.
.. In just five years in Congress, he has built a political following by staking extreme positions in polarizing debates
.. Pompeo was one of the more outspoken Republican members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, saying that the Obama administration was guilty of a scandal “worse than Watergate.”
..
During hearings, his questions to administration witnesses were often among the most accusatory. In October 2015, when Clinton testified for the second time, Pompeo grilled her on her relationship with slain U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. He asked a series of rapid-fire questions about why Stevens did not have her personal telephone number, did not know her personal home address and had never “stopped by your house.”
.. Separately, in remarks that drew sharp criticism from U.S. Muslim organizations, Pompeo said that Muslim leaders who fail to denounce acts of terrorism done in the name of Islam were “potentially complicit” in the attacks.
.. Pompeo cautioned against equating all Muslims with terrorism, saying that a “line needs to be drawn between those who are on the side of extremism and those who are fighting against them.”
The Magic of Donald Trump
The Apprentice debuted on NBC in 2004 with 20.7 million viewers, ranking it seventh among all primetime programs.
.. Did tens of millions ever cast their eyes on the junior senators from Florida or Kentucky or Texas, or the governor of Ohio, not to mention the ex-governors of Arkansas or Florida, or the ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard, before they chanced to mount the stage for a debate with Donald J. Trump last August, a television event that drew the unheard-of viewership of 24 million? Those 24 million tuned in to see Trump.
.. In the casually corrupt American political system the candidates serve as bagmen carrying cash from the corporations to the networks.
.. What other candidate is allowed to call in to morning shows or the sacred Sunday shows for television “interviews” whenever he pleases?
.. this in large part relies on the carefully cultivated illusion that it is all off the cuff, that it comes from the heart and that on a given day he might indeed say anything
.. So they have a choice: They can pretend some impossible solution is actually going to happen, or they can listen to the person who has proved that he can solve problems.
.. as the height of monomania. One can find, in any speech or tweet, more concentrated versions, for example this tweet on Easter Sunday: “Another radical Islamic attack, this time in Pakistan, targeting Christian women & children. At least 67 dead, 400 injured. I alone can solve.”
.. Ignorance and narcissism are joined together here, surely, but they are fortified by the very fact of the amazing events of the last ten months.
- He hired no pollster.
- He spent relatively little money, bought few ads.
- He promulgated few policies.
- He merely flew on his own plane from city to city, from arena to arena, talking about himself—about how the country “has big problems” and how only he can solve them
Who is there to contradict his claim that “there’s nobody like me. Nobody”?
.. These “exceptional powers or qualities” include not just the reputed business genius—a mysterious power that makes the promulgation of specific policies redundant—but the ability to tell a story about why “our country is in big trouble” that is simple, convincing, and satisfying.
.. “Our leaders are so incompetent,”
.. turning on its head the entire drift of post–World War II American propaganda that said the country acted to rebuild Europe and protect the free world not out of national self-interest but out of good old exceptional American generosity.
.. As he declared last November about waterboarding terrorists, “You bet your ass I would!… It works…. If it doesn’t work they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing!
..
certain European leaders of the 1930s would have recognized. The sense of threat from the Other—whether it be Mexican rapists swarming over the border or Muslim terrorists posing as refugees or “two young bullies cursing and threatening”; the sense of national decline that this signals (“We don’t win any more…”); the clear path to a restoration of greatness marked by simple, autocratic solutions (imposing tariffs, pulling out of NATO, bringing back torture, “bombing the shit” out of ISIS)—all of it springs from the populist toolbox, if not the fascist one, and the advertisements show that the roots of these positions and attitudes run very deep.
.. “fascinating intersection of celebrity and neo-fascism”
.. Trumpism is partly the child of the 2008 Wall Street collapse and the vast sense of political corruption and self-dealing it brought in its wake: the sense that the country was looted on a vast scale and that the politicians of all stripes made sure the criminals were not punished.
.. anger at and fear of the Other—illegal immigrants, Muslim refugees, an African-American and possibly Muslim president who seems in league with both—that Trump has skillfully cultivated.
.. Again and again when I asked rally-goers why they supported Trump I heard the word “honesty.” “He doesn’t slip and slide like all the others,” a retired accountant in his seventies told me. Or else: “I see strength in him, power. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks….” That he speaks clearly—that he is unafraid of the police of political correctness—itself bespeaks a power to cut through the corruption and the dealmaking, to fight and fight to get things done: to actually end illegal immigration, to actually repeal Obamacare. It suggests he has the sheer fighting power and energy to do what he says.
.. Rorty’s words prophesy not only the strongman’s rise but his blithe refusal to let “political correctness” prevent him making sexist and bigoted remarks, and his fans’ euphoric enjoyment of their hero’s reveling in the pleasures of free speech. He says what he wants: he is rich enough, strong enough, to do what he pleases.
.. So we started, and something happened called Paris. Paris happened, and Paris was a disaster. There’ve been many disasters but it was Paris and then we had a case in Los Angeles, in California
.. That this is a fact, and that Trump recognizes this fact, represents the greatest risk of that future that the political class still stubbornly refuses to take seriously
.. the longtime lobbyist and fixer Paul Manafort, confidentially assured Republican National Committee Members:
When he’s out on the stage,…he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose…. He gets it. The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting…. The negatives will come down. The image is going to change.
.. we are sure to be hearing a lot about “Crooked Hillary.” (“You have to brand people a certain way when they are your enemies,” he proclaimed to us at Boca. “You gotta brand people….”)
.. A President Trump could likely only emerge as a product of our own fears, carefully fostered as they have been ever since the airliners emerged out of that bright September sky one morning in 2001.
Taking Trump voters’ concerns seriously means listening to what they’re actually saying
There is absolutely no evidence that Trump’s supporters, either in the primary or the general election, are disproportionately poor or working class. Exit polling from the primaries found that Trump voters made about as much as Ted Cruz voters, and significantly more than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Trump voters, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver found, had a median household income of $72,000, a fair bit higher than the $62,000 median household income for non-Hispanic whites in America.
.. Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.
.. In the primary, though, the story was, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained at length, almost entirely about racial resentment. There’s a wide array of data to back this up.
UCLA’s Michael Tesler has found that support for Trump in the primaries strongly correlated with respondents’ racial resentment, as measured by survey data. Similarly, Republican voters with the lowest opinions of Muslims were the most likely to vote for Trump, and voters who strongly support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants were likelier to support him in the primaries too.
.. The white nationalist wing was gaining in strength, and due for a win. It got one in Trump.
.. Taking Trump supporters seriously means not pretending their concerns are about the economy
.. There’s a parallel temptation among leftists and social democrats who, in their ongoing attempt to show that neoliberal capitalism is failing, attempt to tie that failure to the rise of Trump. If economic suffering among lower-class whites caused Trump, the reasoning goes, then the solution is to address that suffering through a more generous welfare state and better economic policy, achieved through a multiethnic working-class coalition that includes those Trump supporters
.. But we have a good case study we can examine to see if Western European–style welfare states can prevent far-right racist backlashes from popping up. It’s called Western Europe. And Sweden’s justly acclaimed welfare state did not prevent the rise of the viciously anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, which has its origins in the Swedish neo-fascist and white supremacist movements and is now the third-largest party in Swedish parliament.
.. Nor has Germany’s strong, manufacturing-heavy and export-oriented economy, arguably the strongest in Europe, kept the far-right AfD party from gaining in recent local elections. It’s telling to note that while economically thriving Germany is facing a far-right menace, Spain, where unemployment is 20 percent (similar to the US in the Great Depression), has no far-right movement of much consequence.
.. Comprehensive welfare states are very, very good. They do not solve racism. Whites in both Europe and America have made it very clear that they will not accept becoming a demographic minority without a fight, and will continue to vote for candidates that speak to that concern and promise immigration policies that put off white minority status for as long as possible.
.. If Trump’s supporters are not, in fact, motivated by economic marginalization, then even full Bernie Sanders–style social democracy is not going to prevent a Trump recurrence.
.. What’s needed is an honest reckoning with what it means that a large segment of the US population, large enough to capture one of the two major political parties, is motivated primarily by white nationalism and an anxiety over the fast-changing demographics of the country.
Trump’s Fans Have More to Lose Than Trump Himself
If the Republican nominee loses, the millions of Americans supporting him will feel more isolated and disillusioned than ever before.
This is what Trump has done over the last year: He’s whipped up the darkest, angriest demons in the electorate. He has not simply given people permission to indulge any racist, sexist, xenophobic, or religiously intolerant tendencies they may harbor. He has insisted—loudly—that such bigotry is only common sense and mocked anyone who refuses to see the danger presented by “the other” as a blind idiot.
.. “I feel he’s the last chance we have to establish law and order and preserve the culture I grew up in.”