They will remember, a century from now, who stood up to the tyrant Donald Trump and who found it expedient to throw out the most basic American values — the “Vichy Republicans,” as the historian Ken Burns called them in his Stanford commencement speech.
The shrug from Mitch McConnell, the twisted explanation of Paul Ryan, who said Trump is a racist and a xenophobe, but he’s ours — party before country. As well, the duck-and-hide Republicans, so quick to whip out their pocket copy of the Constitution, now nowhere to be seen when the foundation of that same document is under assault by the man carrying their banner.
.. but it’s just a role
.. the time when the man leading the party of Lincoln suggested that a sitting president was a traitor, somehow sympathetic to Islamic nihilists who slaughter innocent Americans. Trump implied it. Then he banned a newspaper for its headline about it.
.. “Man up,” wrote the Republican strategist Rick Wilson. “Show courage. Say what’s in your hearts; he’s insane. He’s poison. He’s doomed. He’s killing the party.”
..Seal this week. Put it in a time capsule. Teach it. History will remember. But come November, will we?
Keillor: The punk who would be president
he is proud as can be of his great feat, the first punk candidate to get this close to the White House. He says that the country is run by a bunch of clowns and that he is going to make things great again and beat up on the outsiders who are coming into our neighborhood. His followers don’t necessarily believe that — what they love about him is what kids loved about Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, the fact that he horrifies the powers that be and when you are pro-duck you are giving the finger to Congress, the press, clergy, lawyers, teachers, cake-eaters, big muckety-mucks, VIPs, all those people who think they’re better than you — you have the power to scare the pants off them, and that’s what this candidate does better than anybody else.
.. How, in a few weeks, should Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell teach him basic humanity? The bigot and braggart they see today is the same man that New Yorkers have been observing for 40 years. A man obsessed with marble walls and gold-plated doorknobs, who has the sensibility of a giant sea tortoise.
.. If Mitt Romney or John McCain had been elected president, you might be disappointed but you wouldn’t fear for the fate of the Republic. This time, the Republican Party is nominating a man who resides in the dark depths. He is a thug and he doesn’t bother to hide it.
.. So the country is put to a historic test. If the man is not defeated, then we are not the country we imagine we are. All of the trillions spent on education was a waste. The churches should close up shop. The nation that elects this man president is not a civilized society. The gentleman is not airing out his fingernail polish, he is not showing off his wedding ring; he is making an obscene gesture. Ignore it at your peril.
Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin
A rancid foretaste of imperial President Trump came Wednesday, when he advised congressional leaders, “Don’t talk. Please, be quiet. . . . We have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself.”
.. He received a portion of the $14 million paid by Agalarov and other investors to bring the pageant to Moscow. Agalarov said he and Trump signed an agreement to build a Trump Tower in the heart of Moscow — at least Trump’s fifth attempt at such a venture. And Trump seemed energized by his interactions with Russia’s financial elite, at the pageant and a glitzy after-party in a Moscow nightclub.
“Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump bragged to Real Estate Weekly upon returning home.
.. Trump’s relationship with Putin and his warm views toward Russia, which began in the 1980s when the country was still part of the Soviet Union
.. The overwhelming consensus among American political and national security leaders has held that Putin is a pariah who disregards human rights and has violated international norms in seeking to regain influence and territory in the former Soviet bloc.
.. In 2012, one year before Trump brought his beauty pageant to Moscow, then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney called Russia the United States’ top geopolitical threat — an assessment that has only gained currency since then.
.. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
.. In a Republican Party in which an ability to stand up to Putin has been seen as a test of toughness, Trump’s relationship with the Russian leader is instead one of mutual flattery.
.. He has called for overhauling NATO, the allied military force seen as the chief protector of pro-Western nations near Russia. And Trump has surrounded himself with a team of advisers who have had financial ties to Russia.
.. Russia has signaled a deep interest in the U.S. election, and in Trump in particular.
.. And this week, The Washington Post reported that hackers tied to the Russian government had gained access to the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research file on Trump.
.. Part of the allure was what Trump and his associates saw as a huge opportunity — the chance to market American-style luxury apartments to the wealthy elite in a place that still mostly offered utilitarian Soviet-style construction.
.. Trump claimed in a later court proceeding that Russian investors were spooked when a 2005 book questioned his net worth.
.. “I convinced my father it would be cool to have next to each other the Trump Tower and Agalarov Tower, and he was kind of into it at some point,” Emin Agalarov said.
.. At a debate in March, Trump said Putin “has been a very strong leader for Russia,” even contrasting him with President Obama. “I think he has been a lot stronger than our leader, that I can tell you,
.. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort has done multimillion-dollar business deals with pro-Russian oligarchs and was a longtime adviser to the Russia-aligned Ukrainian president
.. An adviser who helped run Trump’s efforts in the New York primary, Michael Caputo, lived in Russia for seven years in the 1990s, working with groups that supported then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Caputo also had a contract for several months in 2000 with the Russian conglomerate Gazprom Media to improve Putin’s image in the United States, damaged after he had taken over a private television station.
Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values
Earlier in his speech, he claimed, “If we don’t get tough, and we don’t get smart—and fast—we’re not going to have a country anymore—there will be nothing left.” That is to say that isis is capable of achieving what the Soviet Union could not at the height of the Cold War—the destruction of the United States. This is not simply an error of degree but a failure of category. Trump, of course, offered himself as our only apparent savior. “We have an incompetent Administration, and if I am not elected President that will not change over the next four years,” he added.
.. Trump’s concept of graduated citizenship coexists comfortably with his insistence that collective responsibility be placed on the communities he considers suspicious. “Now, the Muslim community, so important,” he said. “They have to coöperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith.” This thinking is not unfamiliar to anyone who has observed how racism works, how it suggests that one must constantly prove oneself worthy of trust.
If applied consistently after mass shootings, it would require that we hold the communities in Newtown and Aurora, the students at Virginia Tech, and the residents of the hundred and seventy-nine communities where shootings have occurred responsible for the violence of their neighbors, classmates, and relatives.