June 17, 2023

Saturday, June 17, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

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Deeper dives into Trump’s behavior.

First…

I Won’t Let Donald Trump Invade My Brain.

One Republican, New York Times columnist David Brooks, acknowledges how corrosive Donald Trump is to anything good.

This is very sad - and in my view, also very true.

I try to be a reasonable person. I try to be someone who looks out on the world with trusting eyes. Over the decades, I’ve built up certain expectations about how the world works and how people behave. I rely on those expectations as I do my job, analyzing events and anticipating what will happen next.

And yet I’ve found that Donald Trump has confounded me at every turn. I’ve found that I’m not cynical enough to correctly anticipate what he is capable of.

I have consistently underestimated his depravity. I was shocked at how thuggishly Trump behaved in that first debate with Joe Biden in 2020. As the Jan. 6 committee hearings progressed, I was stunned to find out just how aggressively Trump had worked to overthrow the election. And then, just last week, in reading his federal indictment, I was once again taken aback to learn how flagrantly he had breached national security.

And yet I can’t quite feel ashamed of my perpetual naïveté toward Donald Trump. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily enter the head of an amoral narcissist.

I’d rather not let him infect my brain. I’d rather not let that guy alter my views of the world. If occasional naïveté is the price for mental independence from Trump, I’m willing to pay it.

I’ve been thinking about all this while bracing for the 17 months of campaigning that apparently lie ahead, with Trump probably once again the central focus of the nation’s consciousness. I’m thinking about how we will once again be forced to defend our inner sanctums as he seeks, on a minute-by-minute basis, to take up residence in our brains.

I cling to a worldview that is easy to ridicule. I hold the belief that most people, while flawed, seek to be good. I hold the belief that our institutions, while fraying, are basically legitimate and deserve our respect. I hold the belief that character matters, and that good people ultimately prosper and unethical people are ultimately undone.

I don’t think this worldview is born of childish innocence. It comes out of my direct experience with life, and after thousands of interviews, covering real-life politicians like Barack Obama, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Donald Trump, by his mere presence, is an assault on this worldview. Trump is a tyrant. As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything.

Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary. Even when Trump doesn’t wield state power, when he is merely campaigning, Trump wields cultural power. Under cultural tyranny internal values become arbitrary too — based on his whims and lusts of the moment.

The categories we use to evaluate the world lose their meaning — cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High-minded values begin to seem credulous and absurd, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Trump’s mere presence spreads his counter-gospel: People are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing. Under his influence, subtly and insidiously, people develop more nihilistic mind-sets.

Trump has already corroded the Republican Party in just this way.

Let me focus on one value that Trump has already dissolved: the idea that there should be some connection between the beliefs you have in your head and the words that come out of your mouth. If you say something you don’t believe, you should at least have a twinge of guilt about your hypocrisy.

I used to at least hear Republicans express guilt privately when they publicly supported a guy they held in contempt. That guilt seems to have gone away. Even the contempt has gone away. Many Republicans have switched off the moral faculty, having apparently concluded that personal morality doesn’t matter.

Trump’s corrosive influence spreads far beyond his party. Any stable social order depends on a sense of legitimacy. This is the belief and faith that the people who have been given authority have a right to govern. They wield power for the common good.

Trump assaults this value too. Prosecutors are not serving the rule of law, he insists, but are Joe Biden’s political pawns. Civil servants are nothing but “deep state” operatives to take Trump down. This cynical attitude has become pervasive in our society. Proper skepticism toward our institutions has turned into endemic distrust, a jaundiced cynicism that says: I’m onto the game; it’s corruption all the way down.

Over the coming months, we face not merely a political contest, but a battle between those of us who believe in ideals, even though it can make us seem naïve at times, and those who argue that life is a remorseless struggle for selfish gain. Their victory would be a step toward cultural barbarism. (New York Times)

Second…

Trump’s promise of payback for prosecution follows years of attacking democratic traditions.

As Donald Trump became the first former president to face federal charges, he and his supporters went through a familiar routine of mounting a victimhood defense in the face of unprecedented allegations of wrongdoing. But this time, the stakes are higher.

Trump upped the level of his claims and threats as he faces the potential of years in prison if convicted on 37 charges of obstruction, illegal retention of defense information and other violations. Hours after pleading not guilty, Trump claimed he is being targeted by the special prosecutor, who is nonpartisan, for political reasons and vowed to retaliate against President Joe Biden if he is elected president in 2024.

“There was an unwritten rule” to not prosecute former presidents and political rivals, Trump told supporters in a speech at his golf club in New Jersey. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family.”

The vow is reminiscent of the “lock her up” chants against Democrat Hillary Clinton that Trump led during his 2016 campaign, but the new level of specificity alarmed many experts.

“If he did that, it’d be an authoritarian system, the end of a system of laws rather than of one man,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian.

Even as he pledges to retaliate if elected, Trump and his supporters claim he is being targeted in a way that is similar to authoritarian regimes — such as in Russia, where opponents of President Vladimir Putin have been jailed, or Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro’s chief rival was prosecuted. There is no evidence that Biden made the sort of pledge to target Trump that the former president has now made, and the president said he has never tried to influencethe Justice Department on any case.

Trump’s attacks on the justice system are the latest step in a now eight-year campaign by the former president and his allies against the traditions and institutions that have helped maintain American democracy.

Trump has long complained about being unfairly treated by the legal system, from contending that the judge in a lawsuit against his for-profit university was biased against him to targeting the FBI over its probe of Russian interference in his 2016 win. He even vowed retribution in that case, assigning a special prosecutor to review how the investigation into his campaign’s possible coordination with Russia was handled, which led to only one conviction.

That track record makes his pledge of retribution more menacing, said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group advocating for better government.

“He has shown repeatedly during his presidency that he is perfectly willing to misuse and abuse his office to carry out purely personal activities,” Wertheimer said.

Stephen Saltzburg, a former top official in the criminal division of the Justice Department who is now a George Washington University law professor, said Trump was signaling that he would use the department to settle scores — just the thing he is claiming led to his indictment.

“This is typical of what Donald Trump does,” Saltzburg said. “He essentially accuses people of doing what he would do if he were in the position.”

The indictment came from a grand jury in Trump’s adopted state of Florida after an investigation led by a special counsel, Jack Smith, who is independent of political appointees in the Biden administration and has previously prosecuted Democrats as well as Republicans. Speaking after the indictment was made public, Smith stressed that investigations such as the one into the documents follow the facts and the law.

We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” he said.

Many experts, of all political persuasions, said the charges against Trump stem from the proper functioning of the legal system, rather than a political vendetta. William Barr, Trump’ s former attorney general, said the allegations in the indictment were serious and that Trump had no right to keep such documents.

“There is not an attorney general of either party who would not have brought today’s charges against the former president,” Michael Luttig, a former federal judge who was a conservative favorite for a Supreme Court post, wrote on Twitter.

According to the indictment, Trump held onto classified documents after leaving the White House, admitted on tape that they were classified and that he no longer had the presidential power to declassify them, then refused to return the records when the government demanded them back.

The former president’s complaints about being persecuted, if not his vow of retribution, have been taken up by a wide swath of Republicans, from longtime supporters in Congress to governors who position themselves as moderates. That includes Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who bemoaned on Twitter what he called “a two-tiered justice system where some are selectively prosecuted, and others are not.”

Another sign of how the right has absorbed Trump’s world view came Tuesday night, hours after his court appearance, when Fox News briefly captioned images of Biden and Trump with the words “wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” The network took down the chyron and said in a statement the matter was “addressed” without providing further details.

Trump’s complaints about being persecuted are standard for former political leaders in other countries who are charged with crimes, said Victor Menaldo, a political scientist at the University of Washington.

“It makes sense politically if the leader has a rabid support group like Trump,” Menaldo said. But in other countries, he said, the leaders are usually successfully prosecuted, and democracy continues.

The federal charges against Trump come two months after the Manhattan District Attorney’s office charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business information in arranging payments to a porn star who said she had an affair with him. He also faces legal jeopardy in Fulton County, Georgia, where local prosecutors have launched a wide-ranging investigation of his attempt to have the state’s electors assigned to him even though he lost the state to Biden in 2020, a result that was affirmed multiple times. A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., continues to probe Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss.

The Manhattan charges have drawn skepticism even from some Trump critics, who contend they’re legally dubious. Trump’s defenders — who include much of his own political party — don’t make that distinction, condemning all probes of the former president. Indeed, after taking control of the House of Representatives following November’s elections, Republicans empaneled a committee investigating the so-called “weaponization of government” against conservatives that is highlighting perceived injustices in the Trump probes.

The combination of the new federal charges, filed Friday, and the Republican presidential primary has led to stepped up complaints about scrutiny of the former president.

“I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted after Trump announced the indictment against him. “House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”

He and other Trump allies note that Biden also improperly had classified documents from his time as vice president — though there are big differences with the Trump case. The current president returned the records when requested and there is no evidence that he tried to conceal more, as is alleged with Trump. A second special prosecutor is looking at Biden’s document handling.

Former U.S. Attorney Roscoe Howard said he has faith that the public will see past those protestations in the current case just by looking at the indictment.

“You can read it and make a determination of whether he’s violating the law. And anybody who does the same thing, we treat them the same way,” Howard said. “When you peel back some of the arguments we’re hearing, it is a bit like, ‘Oh I don’t have to follow these rules.’”

That’s the point when it comes to Trump, said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who studies authoritarians.

“It’s an old situation he’s in, but now because this is extremely serious, of course he’s going to ramp up that narrative,” Ben-Ghiat said. “What strongmen do is, if you are corrupt, you need to get back into power to shut down all the institutions that can harm you.”

(Associated Press).

Third…

The Former President is mentally ill.

At the Heart of the Documents Case: Trump’s Attachment to His Boxes.

This article 👇 from the New York Times makes clear how truly mentally ill the former occupant of the White House is.

Don’t turn away from what we learn here. It should inform all our thinking about Trump. Remember his staff accepted the idea that his behavior was like that of someone psychotic.

During President Donald J. Trump’s years in the White House, his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the “beautiful mind” material.

It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.

The phrase had a specific connotation. The aides employed it to capture a type of organized chaos that Mr. Trump insisted on, the collection and transportation of a blizzard of newspapers and official documents that he kept close and that seemed to give him a sense of security.

One former White House official, who was granted anonymity to describe the situation, said that while the materials were disorganized, Mr. Trump would notice if somebody had riffled through them or they were not arranged in a particular way. It was, the person said, how “his mind worked.”

The contents of those boxes — and Mr. Trump’s insistence on hanging onto them — are now at the heart of a 38-count indictment against the former president and his personal aide, Walt Nauta. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Trump of obstructing their investigationinto his possession of classified material after leaving office and putting national security secrets at risk.

His intense desire to keep the materials comes through in a text message cited in the indictment about the possibility of the boxes being moved after they were shipped to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club.

When one employee asked the other if some could be moved to storage, the second employee, identified by multiple people as Mr. Trump’s former assistant Molly Michael, replied, “Woah!! Ok so potus specifically asked Walt for those boxes to be in the business center because they are his ‘papers.’”

At another point, she used the phrase “the beautiful mind paper boxes” in a text message, the indictment says.

Mr. Trump’s attachment to the contents of the boxes has now left him in serious legal peril, but it appears to be in keeping with a long pattern of behavior.

Mr. Trump has always hung onto news clippings, documents and other mementos, according to more than a half-dozen people who have worked for him over the years, including before his presidency.

His office at Trump Tower in New York, a corner space on the 26th floor, had a desk that was often piled high with papers. He kept keepsakes for decades, including a series of letters written to him by famous people more than 30 years ago, which he later published as a book that he sells for nearly $100 a copy.

Starting in the early months of his administration, Mr. Trump began using a cardboard box to bring papers and documents from the West Wing up to the residence at the end of the day.

In the White House, according to two people familiar with the practice, Mr. Trump was generally able to identify what was in the boxes most immediately around him. One of those people said he was “meticulous” in putting things in specific boxes — notwithstanding a picture released by the Justice Department showing classified documents spilled on the floor of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago.

Shortly after John F. Kelly took over as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff in July 2017, Mr. Kelly and other aides grew concerned that some documents were likely presidential records and might go missing if they were kept in the residence. They impressed upon Mr. Trump that the papers had to be tracked, but he was not especially interested, the people said.

Aides started examining the boxes to check for presidential records, but Mr. Trump still found ways to bring items to the residence. And the boxes began to multiply.

He could point to specific boxes that he wanted to take with him on Air Force One when he was traveling, and decline to take others, appearing aware of the contents inside the boxes he chose, both officials said.

The same was true when Mr. Trump left the White House, according to one person briefed on how he behaved. He knew the contents of the boxes around him. Some aides would periodically encourage him to condense the number he had in his immediate vicinity. Another person familiar with Mr. Trump’s habits said that when one box filled up, aides over the past two years would take it away and store it, bringing him a new one.

The charging document includes photos detailing just how many dozens of those cardboard boxes Mr. Trump had amassed. They are piled on a stage at Mar-a-Lago, stuffed into a storage room, even stacked in a bathroom, with some behind a shower curtain.

At his club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night, hours after he was arraigned in a Miami courtroom, Mr. Trump insisted to several hundred supporters that the boxes included “newspapers, press clippings” and “thousands and thousands of White House pictures,” as well as “clothing, memorabilia and much, much more.”

“I hadn’t had a chance to go through all the boxes,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a long, tedious job, takes a long time. Which I was prepared to do, but I have a very busy life.”

That claim — that the boxes mostly contained personal items like clothing and that Mr. Trump was not aware of exactly what they held — is one he had made to his own advisers toward the second half of 2021.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers included a similar argument in a letter sent to Congress in April, claiming that Mr. Trump had little to do with how the documents were packed and shipped to Florida after he left office. In the letter, the lawyers claimed that “institutional processes, rather than intentional decision by Mr. Trump,” resulted in classified material leaving the White House.

“The White House staff simply swept all documents from the president’s desk and other areas into boxes, where they have resided ever since,” the letter said.

According to prosecutors, the notion that Mr. Trump was simply too busy to know all that he had is undercut by the facts.

As early as January 2021, as Mr. Trump was preparing to leave office after efforts to thwart the transfer of power to Joseph R. Biden Jr., he and his White House staff members, including Mr. Nauta, packed materials into boxes, the indictment says. “Trump was personally involved in this process,” it says.

On two occasions after he left office — once in late 2021 as he was reluctantly responding to demands from the National Archives to return the material he had taken from the White House and then later after a grand jury subpoena demanding the return of any classified documents still in his possession — Mr. Trump was brought a number of boxes to review, indicating that he was aware of their contents. Mr. Trump repeatedly told advisers the boxes of documents were “mine,” according to several people familiar with his remarks.

One psychiatrist’s view of Trump’s hoarding.

Donald Trump held on to important classified documents in part because they made him feel "greater in his own mind," a retired Harvard psychiatry professor said on Wednesday.

Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who previously broke down Trump's "severe, continuous, mental disturbance" for Raw Story, appeared on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell to discuss Trump's mental state following his first federal indictment. O'Donnell asked if there was "a psychiatric explanation for why he kept those documents after the federal government demanded them and his attorneys told him to give them back."

"My guess would be that it makes him greater in his own mind," Dodes said. "Now, he has secret documents, which he had when he was president, but if he loses the presidency, at least he has the secret documents."

Dodes added that, "It's like having a badge on your four years old that says you're a secret policeman."

“I think it's something like that. He needs it for himself," he explained.

Dodes further predicted that, as Trump's legal troubles continue to grow, he will "look worse and worse."

"That is the psychiatric explanation. He is fundamentally different from normal people. We'll see more and more of that," the psychoanalyst said.(Raw Story).

Watch the video interview with Dr. Dodes. 5:56.👇

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