Police State Fascism: Trump Targets More Critics

 

The madman mob boss/ would-be dictator continues to target people and firms who righteously spoke out against his criminality (our emphasis):

President Donald Trump is targeting two former first-term appointees over their criticism of his actions, stripping their security clearances and opening federal probes of their tenures.

The directives that Trump signed on Wednesday order the Justice Department to scrutinize Chris Krebs, who ran Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and former senior Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.

The two critics are the latest to be swept up in Trump’s expansive retribution campaign, where he’s sought to use federal powers in unprecedented ways to punish political opponents, law firms, universities and others that he believes have wronged him.

A president ordering investigations of specific individuals whom he considers to be his political enemies is a remarkable breach of the traditional wall of separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Under that norm of separation, criminal investigations are supposed to be insulated from political pressure, but Trump has repeatedly scorned the notion of DOJ independence. Making Wednesday’s action even more remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented, is that Trump used the formal power of executive orders to effectively brand two individuals as subjects of criminal investigations.

This is more than "remarkable" and "unprecedented."  It's police state fascism.  What were their crimes?

Krebs, who was the administration’s top cybersecurity official responsible for election security, was fired by Trump via tweet after he had asserted shortly after President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 that “in every case of which we are aware, these claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” He had also authorized a joint statement by CISA and other stakeholder groups that said the election was secure and that there was no indication of votes being changed or stolen, which angered Trump.

He was also a key witness for the Jan. 6 select committee, describing his efforts to secure the 2020 election and rebut conspiracy theories about the election and shore up voters’ confidence in the results. In his interview, he lamented that Republican leaders had catered to the false notion that the election was stolen, creating a “self-reinforcing cycle” of doubt. “Republican officials, senior officials, including the former President, lied to the American people about the security of the 2020 election,” he told the panel.

The order signed by Trump labeled Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority.” As he signed the order on Wednesday stripping Krebs’ security clearance and opening an investigation into his activities, Trump repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged."

America is now a George Orwell canvas.

They're not just stopping at Krebs: 

Krebs is currently the chief intelligence and public policy officer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne. The order signed by Trump also takes aim at his current colleagues, suspending any security clearances held by individuals at SentinelOne who work with Krebs.

Continuing:

In another move stemming from Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election, the president on Wednesday signed a separate order imposing new limits on the law firm Susman Godfrey. The firm represented voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani and other Trump associates who falsely claimed the election was rigged.

Taylor authored a high-profile anonymous op-ed in 2018 that criticized Trump and offered a scathing firsthand account of his decision-making. He later authored a book portraying the chaos inside the Trump White House, before revealing his identity and endorsing then-candidate Biden in the days before the 2020 election.

Trump on Wednesday called Taylor a “traitor,” even as he insisted that the former DHS chief of staff played a minimal role in his first administration.  [snip]

Taylor left the Trump administration in 2019. On Wednesday, Taylor said Trump’s decision to target him was a sign the country was headed down “a dark path.”

“I said this would happen,” he posted on X. “Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

We'll have to see how much of this stands up in the courts.  But as with the Malignant Fascist's other acts of intimidation and revenge, it sends a chilling message that opposing the American dictator -- past, present, or future -- will bring retribution and harm to you, your colleagues, your firm.  Americans cannot watch the Malignant Fascist target these men, Susman Godfrey, and all the other firms and political opponents he's going after, as well as non- criminal undocumented immigrants caught up in mindless, brutal ICE sweeps, and do nothing.  Silence is consent from now on.  And if our political leaders don't have the foresight or courage to step up and stop this bully's fascistic behavior, the consequences will be far, far worse down the line.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Catherine Rampell has the legacy of Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump by the numbers:

261,000 (and growing): If anything is “sacred,” it is human life. This number is the minimum tally of U.S. lives lost to the novel coronavirus as of Wednesday night. By the time Trump leaves office it will be higher. Even by Thanksgiving morning, it will be higher.

$750: The amount Trump reportedly paid in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. He paid the same amount his first year in the White House, too.

14.7 percent: The unemployment rate in April 2020. Also the highest unemployment rate on record since modern statistics on joblessness began in 1948 and likely the highest rate since the Great Depression.

$421 million: The amount of loans and other debts for which Trump is personally responsible, with most of it reportedly coming due within four years — that is, a period when Trump had hoped to serve his second presidential term. [snip]

$130,000: The amount Trump paid an adult-film actress with whom he had an affair; this bought her silence ahead of the 2016 election.

26: The number of women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct.

26 million: The number of American adults who reported that their household didn’t have enough to eat just ahead of Election Day.

Those numbers belong in the Trump Presidential Library.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., writes about the craven Republicans unwilling to defend democracy:

Almost three weeks later. Trump retreats ever deeper into his delusions about election fraud — the resemblance to Hitler in his bunker, ordering non-existent armies into action, cannot be denied — yet it is still news whenever some lonely Republican musters the guts to refer to the president-elect as the president-elect. Even more so when some still-serving party member rebukes Trump.

New York Rep. Peter King said it was inexcusable, in the summer of 2014, for President Obama to wear a tan suit. Yet about Trump’s subversion of democracy, he has said nothing. Monday, on Twitter and CNN, respected reporter Carl Bernstein named 21 GOP senators — including McSally, Grassley, Cornyn, Collins, Rubio and Rick Scott — who in private, he says, “have repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for Trump and his fitness to be POTUS.”

Yet almost none has been willing to say so publicly. Why? Well, they’re scared Trump might tweet at them. That could even cost them an election. But if fear of losing your job keeps you from defending your country, you don’t deserve the job. Frankly, you don’t even deserve the country.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article247403315.html#storylink=cpy

Here's the insanity they're complicit in.  "20 Days of Fantasy and Failure: Inside Trump's Quest to Overturn the Election" is, as they say, the first draft of the history of this inflection point:

The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”

However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ”

ICYMI, here's a small part of the "60 Minutes" interview last night with lifelong Republican Chris Krebs, former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the DHS (you can view the full interview here):

“We can go on and on with all the farcical claims alleging interference in the 2020 election, but the proof is in the ballots. The recounts are consistent with the initial count,” says Krebs. “The American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.” https://t.co/SBqu3FlK6S pic.twitter.com/5ZMHcnLGYa

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 30, 2020

 

Infidel 753 has an interesting, and hopeful, essay about deprogramming the Red Hat Cult, and the significant role that mass pop culture, among other forces, could play.  Here's a brief excerpt:

It's a slow process.  It has to be subtle, because people react to being preached at by putting their guard up.  Any hint of explicit politics or argumentation would kill the effect.  It works because pop culture is light, fun, colorful, entertaining, and non-political.  And its reach is nearly universal.  Fundies and Trumpanzees actively avoid MSNBC, CNN, liberal blogs, or anything else that explicitly reminds them of the reality outside the bubble -- but except for those few who are in literal cults, nearly everyone consumes some kind of pop culture.  The global reach and popularity of American (and Japanese) mass culture has even helped foment such changes in attitudes in regions like the Middle East, Latin America, and parts of East Asia.  [snip]

I believe the people who create and shape mass culture know exactly what they're doing and have a fairly consistent agenda, even if there is no overall leadership or coordination.  It's not a conspiracy; shared values and aesthetics make a conspiracy unnecessary.  Dismantling the wingnut alternate-reality bubble hasn't been a priority, but now that the Trump episode has made clear the magnitude of the danger lurking in the hinterlands, I expect that we'll start to see the same kinds of influences and imagery that have been eroding homophobia and fundamentalism brought to bear against the various delusions and attitudes which comprise that threat.  It won't be fast.  It won't be obvious.  It will hardly be noticeable.  But over time -- not with all of them, but with many -- it will work.

While you're there, check out his link round-up for great leads to interesting posts from around the Internet.