https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-rally-attendees-lawrence-jones-michigan-biden
Attendees of President Trump's Thursday rally in Michigan told "Hannity" election correspondent Lawrence Jones that they support the Republican because he "tells it like it is."
"Why are you supporting the president?" Jones asked one woman wearing a "MAGA" hat.
"Because he tells it like it is," she answered. Two other women told Jones that "he's real." One man indicated that Trump "tells the truth."
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday accused Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) of convincing President Trump to sit for interviews with Bob Woodward for the journalist's forthcoming book "Rage" that reveals remarks by the president downplaying the coronavirus threat publicly while acknowledging its severity in private.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/why-trump-talked-though-he-feared-an-atrocious-book-from-woodward
For all his attacks on fake news, Trump on some level craves the approval of the establishment media. He recently spent 40 minutes talking to a New York Times reporter, despite years of attacks on his hometown paper as biased and “failing.” And who is more of an establishment Beltway figure than Woodward?
But as officials in the Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama administrations learned, charming Woodward is a strategy that only goes so far. It’s hard for officials to say no to him when you realize you’ll be in the book anyway and many of your colleagues, and rivals, are probably cooperating.
But Trump’s calculation wasn’t all wrong. Although his coronavirus comments sparked a media explosion, the book is filled with lengthy presidential quotes, making the case on issues from the pandemic to race relations to foreign policy.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/11/politics/donald-trump-churchill-fdr-pandemic/index.html
President Donald Trump is now not just downplaying the coronavirus -- he's resorting to absurd historical allusions about great World War II leaders to try to disguise his culpability in 190,000 American deaths.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/287018
Bnei Brak Mayor Avraham Rubinstein issued an apology Thursday evening in response to the uproar over a video in which an actor pretended to block haredi passengers from boarding a train from the predominantly-secular city of Bat Yam.
"I am sorry for the way things happened, in particular I am sorry for the damage to the good name of the railway workers and the Transportation Ministry," Rubinstein said.
The video was commissioned by the Bnei Brak municipality through a public relations office, with the aim of protesting the removal of the city from the light rail programs in the Gush Dan region.
The actor stood between the haredi passengers and the train, physically preventing them from boarding, and proclaimed: "Haredim, do not board!"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54096520
An intelligence analyst at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said he was put under pressure to downplay the threat of Russian interference in the 3 November election as it "made the president look bad".
In a whistleblower complaint, Brian Murphy said he had been demoted for refusing to alter reports on this and other issues such as white supremacy.
The directives were illegal, he said.
The White House and DHS have both denied the allegations.
US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election but President Donald Trump has rejected allegations that his election victory was influenced by Russia, at times questioning findings from his own agencies.
Mr Murphy says he was under pressure from the White House to exaggerate the number of migrants with links to terrorism at a time when the administration was implementing tougher measures to halt the flow of undocumented migrants reaching the US-Mexico border, and making the case for a wall.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-bob-woodward-book/index.html
It matters who the president is.
The fallout from the Woodward bombshells just 54 days before the election goes beyond White House palace intrigue. Trump's own narrative of the crisis has now been shattered. His frequent complaints that no one could have foreseen the magnitude of the challenge from Covid-19 are shown to be flagrantly untrue. Woodward reports that Trump was told by his national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, on January 28 that the virus would be the greatest national security threat of his presidency.
President Trump mounted a public attack unusual even for him over the Labor Day weekend, accusing his military leadership of advocating war “so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
Even for a president who has never hesitated to contradict himself for political advantage, it was a remarkable shift. His questioning the patriotism and judgment of America’s military leaders, even accusing them of pursuing global conflicts to profit the military-industrial complex, marked an election-year shift in which he has turned against two of the remaining institutions he spent most of his first term embracing as pillars of his “America First” policy.
Mr. Trump himself has consistently championed American arms sales, forgiving Saudi Arabia for the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the high civilian death toll from the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen — justifying it because the country buys billions of dollars annually in American weapons.
As one of these officials noted, Mr. Trump’s critique of the military-industrial complex was not an effort to embrace a warning that President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued in his famed 1961 farewell address — an apolitical moment, since Eisenhower was leaving office.
Instead, one former senior defense official said, Mr. Trump appeared angry at the Republican national security officials who last month publicly declared that he was a danger to the Constitution, and especially at military contractors who were not donating more to his strapped campaign or, in his view, sufficiently grateful for how he has defended their sales. Mr. Trump never considered limiting sales to Saudi Arabia even after the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was implicated in international investigations of the Khashoggi killing.
“Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief,” said Anthony C. Zinni, a retired four-star Marine general who commanded American forces in the Middle East. “His despicable comments used to describe the honorable men and women in uniform, especially those who have given the last full measure, demonstrated the lack of respect for those he is charged to lead. He must go.”
“Just as he is endlessly frustrated by a media that will not bend to his whim, he’s frustrated by a military that takes an oath to the Constitution and not to the president,” he said.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/judge-andrew-napolitano-trump-attacks-the-military
I was appalled at the allegations against President Donald Trump leveled in a recent article in The Atlantic. The article claimed that the president referred to American soldiers killed in World War I and buried in France as “losers” and “suckers.” It also offered that the president is disdainful in general of military personnel who have been captured by the enemy or killed in combat.
I am loyal to my friends, but foremost I am loyal to the truth. So, when special counsel Robert Mueller made allegations about the unlawfulness of Trump’s behavior in the White House, it was my job at Fox to explain that the allegations offered that Trump committed numerous criminal acts of obstruction of justice while president.
In the history of the U.S., no general has started a war. Trump himself has ordered his generals to attack Iran, Iraq and Syria without congressional authorization. None of the generals did so on his own.
Then, as if to pour gasoline on this fire, an unprovoked Trump offered this gem: “I'm not saying the military’s in love with me, the soldiers are, the top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
Does the president have a cavalier attitude about the truth? Does he mean what he says? Is his presidency -- in his own mind -- showmanship or reality? I don’t know the answers to these questions, and it troubles me to be asking them. But the voters will answer in November.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/09/politics/barr-carroll-trump-defamation/index.html
The White House asked the Justice Department to take over the defense of President Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit filed by a woman who has accused Trump of sexual assault in the 1990s, Attorney General William Barr said Wednesday.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/09/politics/why-trump-talked-to-woodward/index.html
Trump has two Achilles heels in politics and life. The first is that he cares so desperately about how people think of him and remember him that he is willing to do almost anything to impact his legacy. The second is that he believes far too much in his own ability to persuade. Woodward (and the book he has produced) cuts at both of the heels.
That obsession with perception has naturally lead Trump into forever hunting out ways to cement his legacy in office. Whether that's the almost farcical attempt to buy Greenland or his fascination with the possibility of his face being added to Mount Rushmore, Trump has shown a unbending focus on creating and preserving his legacy. (Trump thinks like a real estate developer; he goes big!)
In short: Woodward is writing the history of each president as it happens. He is the most recognizable and famous political journalist in the country. When Bob Woodward says he wants to write about you -- even if you are a billionaire businessman or the president of the United States -- you are flattered. And you see opportunity, because if you can convince Woodward that the coverage of you is unfair and biased and that you are really doing a great job, well, then, maybe history starts remembering you the way you want it to.
Which means that Trump was essentially poking at his own weakest spots with every single word he uttered to Woodward. And yet, he couldn't stop himself.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/09/politics/trump-woodward-fallout-coronavirus/index.html
Journalist Bob Woodward's new book "Rage" sent shockwaves across Washington on Wednesday that left the White House, Trump campaign and congressional Republicans scrambling to react to revelations that President Donald Trump concealed what he knew early on about how dangerous and deadly the coronavirus was.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/09/politics/bob-woodward-rage-book-trump-coronavirus/index.html
"Rage" is a follow-up to Woodward's 2018 bestselling book "Fear," which portrayed a chaotic White House in which aides hid papers from Trump to protect the country from what they viewed as his most dangerous impulses.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/is-it-time-for-the-jews-to-leave-europe/386279/
For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.
Four deadly terrorist attacks launched specifically against Jewish targets have taken place during the 2012 to 2019 time period in Europe.j Each was launched by an individual or individuals with either an aspirational or actual association with a jihadi terrorist group. Underpinning the motivation for these different attacks has been a mix of al-Qa`ida/Islamic State ideological doctrines, ancient Islamic anti-Semitic tropes, and current Palestinian-Israeli political tensions.
The past seven months have seen the death of 12 Jews in the United States by the way of two politically motivated attacks against non-combatants, or terrorism.74 Accounted for by the October 27, 2018, attack in Pittsburgh in which 11 congregants of the Tree of Life Synagogue were killed and the April 27, 2019, Chabad of Poway, California, synagogue shooting in which one parishioner died,75 these attacks as well as the deadly 2014 attack at the Kansas City Jewish Community Center were carried out by white supremacist, neo-Nazi-affiliated individuals.
Every single fatal extreme right-wing terrorist attack on Jews in the West between 2012 and 2019 took place in the United States, suggesting the country is a new, emerging focal point of the extreme right-wing threat against Jews. The three deadly terrorist attacks (and at least four thwarted plots) against Jews in the United States in this period were carried out by individuals motivated to attack explicitly Jewish targets by violent extreme right-wing ideology. There were no deadly terror attacks on Jews in the United States that were perpetrated by jihadi extremists in this period.
Belgian authorities may consider the terrorist threat diminished enough to end the patrols.
The Department of Justice filed a motion notifying a New York State court Tuesday that it intends to replace President Trump's private lawyers to defend him in a defamation lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
Why it matters: It's highly unusual for the DOJ to intervene in such cases. The department said in its notice that it intervened because Trump was "acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States" when he said last year that Carroll was "totally lying" about claims that he raped her in the mid-1990s.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7204036-Carroll-2.html
https://nationalsecurityaction.org/newsroom/trump-military-industrial-complex
There’s only one problem with Trump’s latest defense: It’s pure fantasy. Trump has consistently prioritized the financial interests of America’s defense contractors -- and, in doing so, turned our values and long-term interests into collateral damage.
But CNN national security reporter Ryan Brown called Mr Trump’s comments an “unprecedented public attack by a sitting US president on the leadership of the US military”, and said comparisons to Mr Eisenhower’s address were off the mark.
“Some folks really ought to read what President Eisenhower actually said,” he tweeted. “While they are both critical of the military industrial complex, nowhere does Eisenhower actually accuse military leaders of engaging in shooting wars to boost profits for firms
Speaking on CNN, retired army lieutenant general Mark Hertling said it was interesting that Mr Trump had attempted to deny accusations he had insulted the military “by insulting the military”.
“It was insulting to me as a former general,” he said. “As a former soldier, going into combat the military-industrial complex was not even a portion of my thought process. All I wanted was the equipment and the resources to fight the battles.”
Mr Hertling also pushed back on Mr Trump’s “endless wars” jab, which he took as a criticism of how US conflicts in the Middle East had been run by military leadership.
“We are told what to do by our elected officials, so if there’s bad strategy, bad involvement in foreign wars, it’s because the political masters have sent us there to do their bidding,” he said. “We attempt in every way possible to conduct the operations.”
Mr Hertling said Mr Trump was attempting to sow division. “This is kind of like fighting an insurgency – President Trump has already gone after the intelligence community by separating their leaders from those who are in the trenches,” he said.
“He has separated the FBI, claiming the leaders are terrible but everybody in the FBI is good, now he’s attempting to do the same thing with the military. ‘The generals are all bad, they’re all working for the military industrial complex, but all you soldiers still love me, right?’”
In short order, Mollie Hemingway, Glenn Greenwald (who was retweeted by Trump himself), and Russia Today — the holy trinity of pro-Trump trolling — scrambled to cast Trump’s remarks as merely echoing Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military-industrial complex.
One of the favorite gambits of Trump’s defenders is to insist that national security professionals only oppose him because he stands athwart the American empire. And it is certainly true that military leaders disagree with some of Trump’s policies: his opposition to NATO, his betrayal of the Kurds, admiration of Russia, and (in some cases) desire to accelerate removal of troops from Afghanistan. Some of the most intense military opposition has come from the conviction by military leaders that he threatens its culture by encouraging war crimes and using troops as a domestic propaganda weapon, including to attack peaceful protesters. (By the way, it’s not true that “the soldiers” are “in love” with Trump — a Military Times poll shows his approval rating underwater and him narrowly trailing Joe Biden among active-duty service members.)
Trump is not a threat to the Pentagon budget. He has lavished as much money on defense as he can get from Congress, and boasts constantly that he “rebuilt” it after Barack Obama supposedly exhausted its entire supply of ammunition. If Trump is concerned about the influence of defense lobbyists on the Pentagon’s decision-making, it’s odd that he picked a top corporate lobbyist for Raytheon to serve as his current Defense secretary.
Trump has frequently cited the profits from arms sales as the main reason for the United States to continue supporting Saudi Arabia. Asked in 2018 about cutting off sales to the kingdom after its brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, he replied, “Well, I think that would be hurting us. We have jobs, we have a lot of things happening in this country. We have a country that’s doing probably better economically than it’s ever done before. Part of that is what we’re doing with our defense systems, and everybody’s wanting ’em, and frankly I think that that would be a very, very tough pill to swallow for our country.”
Later that day he reiterated, “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country … they are spending $110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs for this country.”
Trump probably assumed that having bought off the military brass with lavish spending, he could count on them to stay discreet about his occasional sociopathic remark. It is very believable that he would be unable to imagine a motive for their unease with his leadership other than venality. But nobody else needs to cooperate with the preposterous ruse that Trump poses a threat to the income stream of American military leaders.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/08/trump-military-defense-industry-booster-410396
Since becoming president, Donald Trump has overseen historic increases in defense budgets, fawned over military equipment, installed a number of defense industry insiders in top Pentagon positions and made a major push to sell weapons overseas.
But on Monday, Trump said leaders at the Pentagon “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
Yet Trump's record tells a different story. All three of his hand-picked defense secretaries had ties to the defense industry: Jim Mattis was a member of the General Dynamics board of directors, Pat Shanahan was an executive with Boeing, and Mark Esper was Raytheon's top lobbyist. Mattis also returned to his board position shortly after leaving the Pentagon, showing the revolving door between industry and the Defense Department.
The idea that Trump is taking on the defense industrial base is “pure fantasy,” National Security Action, a liberal advocacy group composed of former Obama administration staffers, said on Tuesday. "Trump has consistently prioritized the financial interests of America’s defense contractors — and, in doing so, turned our values and long-term interests into collateral damage."
Trump has also made an aggressive push to sell weapons overseas. In 2017, he took credit for a deal to sell arms worth $110 billion to the Saudis, although many of the deals were negotiated under Obama. Trump touted the jobs created by the deal, which will specifically benefit major primes such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, former White House spokesperson Sean Spicer said in a 2017 briefing.
The Army's most senior officer pushed back Tuesday on President Donald Trump's assertions that Defense Department leaders choose to continue fighting wars abroad in an attempt to keep private defense firms "happy."
"Senior leaders would only recommend sending troops to combat when it's required as a national security, or as a last resort," Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said Tuesday morning in a virtual event with media outlet Defense One. "I feel strongly about that."
Throughout the Trump administration, the president has proudly supported the U.S. defense industry and the jobs it creates, both at home and through overseas deals. Trump, in December 2018, called U.S. defense spending levels “crazy,” but he’s also boasted that he’s responsible for $2.5 trillion in spending on military equipment. (The figure is reportedly much lower.)
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/07/trumps-false-military-equipment-claim/
President Donald Trump has falsely claimed his administration invested “$2.5 trillion in all of the greatest equipment in the world” for the military. That’s approximately the total for defense budgets from 2017 to 2020, but the cost of purchasing new military equipment was 20% of that.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/justice-department-trump-e-jean-carroll-rape-allegation
The court papers aim to shift the New York case into federal court and to substitute the U.S. for Trump as the defendant. That means the federal government, rather than Trump himself, might have to pay damages if any are awarded.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/08/politics/e-jean-carroll-trump-lawsuit/index.html
The US Justice Department, in an extraordinary move on Tuesday, asked to take over the defense of President Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a woman who has accused Trump of sexual assault.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/08/politics/donald-trump-labor-day-press-conference/index.html
17. "I'm not saying the military is in love with me. The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren't because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy."
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/08/politics/trump-military-fallout/index.html
It was a relatively quiet weekend at the White House until Trump decided he wanted to hold a Labor Day news conference. Just as aides believed the story was quieting down, Trump accused top Pentagon military leaders of being beholden to defense contractors, an astonishing comment from the President as he's trying to bolster support with those people. Trump had been privately upset that more of the top brass at the Pentagon had not defended him in the wake of The Atlantic's story and some saw this as a response to that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_21st-century_France#2015_to_present
At the beginning of the 21st century, antisemitism in France rose sharply during the unrest of the Second Intifada in Israel and the Palestinian territories, as it did in other European nations.[6] In addition, a significant proportion of the second-generation Muslim immigrant population in France began to identify with the Palestinian cause, with some also identifying with radical Islamism.[7][8][9] In the early 2000s, a critical debate on the nature of antisemitism in France accompanied denunciation of it in relation to the situation in the Middle East and to Islam. Divisions developed among anti-racist groups.[6][10][11]
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/26/donald-trump-xenophobia-re-election-campaign-2020
Donald Trump had been intending to run a re-election campaign based on a strong economy and a socialist opponent. Both have vanished in the past month. But the US president still has his ultimate weapon: xenophobia.
France has the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe and a long immigration tradition. Official data do not recognize race, ethnicity, or religion as fundamental characteristics of people. For a long time crime data ignored foreigners and non-French immigrants as distinct groups. They are significantly overrepresented among criminal suspects in custody and in prison, though this varies by offense and according to status; an important proportion have violated immigration laws and are not a threat to society. Their overrepresentation may result from lack of fixed residence and the possibility they will not turn up if summoned by a judge. Research on this issue is scant. It is unclear whether disparities represent invidious bias or result from socio-economic disadvantages or differences in records of past criminality. Xenophobia among the broad French public, after declining substantially, is on the rise again, in great part due to the recent economic crisis.
There were 671 victims of homicide in the year ending March 2019, 33 fewer (5%) than the previous year, the first fall since the year ending March 2015.
There were 97 Black victims in the last year, accounting for 14% of all victims. This is an increase of four homicides compared with the previous year and the highest number of Black victims since 2001 to 2002 (106).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States
In the United States, the relationship between race and crime has been a topic of public controversy and scholarly debate for more than a century.[1] Crime rates vary significantly between racial groups. Most homicide victims in the United States are of the same race as the perpetrator.
Academic research indicates that the over-representation of some racial minorities in the criminal justice system can in part be explained by socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, exposure to poor neighborhoods, poor access to public education, poor access to early childhood education, and exposure to harmful chemicals (such as lead) and pollution.[2][3] Racial housing segregation has also been linked to racial disparities in crime rates, as blacks have historically and to the present been prevented from moving into prosperous low-crime areas through actions of the government (such as redlining) and private actors.[4][5][6] Various explanations within criminology have been proposed to excuse racial disparities in crime rates, including conflict theory, strain theory, general strain theory, social disorganization theory, macrostructural opportunity theory, social control theory, and subcultural theory.
Research also indicates that there is extensive racial and ethnic discrimination by police and the judicial system.[7][8][9][10] A substantial academic literature has compared police searches (showing that contraband is found at higher rates in whites who are stopped), bail decisions (showing that whites with the same bail decision as blacks commit more pre-trial violations), and sentencing (showing that blacks are more harshly sentenced by juries and judges than whites when the underlying facts and circumstances of the cases are similar), providing valid causal inferences of racial discrimination.[11][12][13][14] Studies have documented patterns of racial discrimination, as well as patterns of police brutality and disregard for the constitutional rights of African-Americans, by police departments in various American cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.[15][16][17][18][19]
