The Greatest Threat to peace in the WORLD aka Everywhere? = Putin and Trump

Trump and Putin Threaten to Return the World to the Age of Extremes

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-putin/

The ambitions of the Russian strongman and the American demagogue could put the planet on a path to destruction comparable to the upheaval of the early 20th century.





Most Wednesday evenings, when I turn my hand to this column, it’s easy to focus on cutting-edge economic or political developments emerging on the West Coast. But today, I am preoccupied by other things. There are Trump’s cascading legal woes: the epic takedown by New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the investigation into his bizarre hoarding of highly classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—as well as his overt leaning into QAnon rhetoric and his none-too-subtle intimations that if he is indicted he will mobilize his armed base in response. Then there is Putin’s Hitlerian speech about mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people into an all-out national effort to “defend” the motherland, including illegally annexed Ukrainian lands taken in a war of blatant aggression. As I find my attention drawn temporarily away from the Western US, consider this a column from the Left Coast, rather than one about the Left Coast.

Let’s start with Trump. For years, this king of charlatans has gotten away with one alleged crime and seedy activity and dubious business practice after the next, always managing to skirt the legal repercussions of his actions. Now, in Letitia James, he has an adversary who seems determined to hold his feet to the legal fire. Even though her investigation is a civil one, and the penalties she is seeking for Trump’s serial mendaciousness are financial rather than carceral, she made it clear on Wednesday that she believes state and federal criminal law was broken by the Trump family, and she announced that she had forwarded the relevant details to federal prosecutors.

James explained, vividly, why fraud to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars is not somehow a “victimless” white-collar crime. She reminded viewers that ex-presidents are just as legally liable if they defraud banks and tax collectors as are ordinary citizens, mocking the author of The Art of the Deal for instead specializing in “the art of the steal.” There was something magnificent in the steely tone of outrage that James managed to project during her televised statement announcing the lawsuit.

I don’t know if this is the comeuppance that will finally puncture the Trumpian bubble, but I do know that with this added to Trump’s growing laundry list of legal travails, and his inability to present coherent, consistent, legal arguments as to why he should not face legal consequences for his odious actions, the net has dramatically tightened around the ex-president. By a more than two-to-one margin, Americans polled about Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago think it’s a serious matter. By a large margin, too, Americans believe that the various investigations into Trump’s alleged wrongdoings should continue.

All of this drip-drip-drip is damaging the Trump brand. Earlier this week, an NBC poll found that Trump’s approval rating had declined to a mere 34 percent. For a man of The Donald’s insatiable ego, knowing that two-thirds of Americans disapprove of him, many of them with a passion, must feel like an almost unbearable burden.

And yet the further Trump falls, the more dangerous he becomes, the more willing he is to burn down the American house and to mobilize the millions who still adhere to his vicious cult to seek vengeance.

Trump’s back-against-the-wall persona is all too similar to that of Putin. Russia’s amoral apparatchik turned emperor has unleashed Europe’s most murderous war since 1945, acting on explicitly Napoleonic ambitions. He doesn’t manifest the slightest capacity for self-reflection or humility regarding his actions in Ukraine, and the consequences they have for peace in Europe or for the broader global economy.

The Ukrainians have, as had the Czechoslovaks in the late 1930s, the misfortune to reside next to a land-hungry despot who believes that he is on a God-given mission to seize land, either as Lebensraum for his people, or in pursuit of some vision of bringing everyone of a shared ethnic heritage under one imperial roof. If anyone had, somehow, previously given him the benefit of the doubt, if they labored under the illusion that ex-KGB agent Putin was simply righting the wrongs of the post–Cold War period, when Russia was needlessly humiliated, this week’s developments have surely put paid to that.

In announcing a partial national mobilization, Putin made it clear that he would sacrifice untold numbers of people to his charnel house “victory,” whatever that word means in the context of a clearly unwinnable war. In leaning into the idea of annexing large swaths of territory and then declaring that efforts to free them would be considered attacks on Mother Russia itself, Putin has created a narrative as historically vacuous, and at least potentially as dangerous, as that used to gird the creation of the Third Reich. In threatening nuclear attack on his opponents, most of whom are members of NATO, Putin has brought the world closer to the nuclear brink than it has been in decades.

There is to be seen, in the horizonless, banal sea that is Putinism, a savage implosion of one of the world’s truly great cultures. There is, in his unleashing of the security state, and in his willingness to terrorize domestic opponents—including by frog-marching anti-war protesters straight into the draft offices—a national collapse into a paranoiac, conspiracy-based, might-is-right miasma.

In America, we have the likes of Stephen Bannon and Alex Jones, who use their vile platforms to stoke hate and undermine democracy and pluralism. In Putin’s Russia, frothing-at-the-mouth commentators now openly call for the use of both tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield and strategic nuclear weapons as apocalyptic vengeance-deliverers against enemies in the US and Europe. There is a drumbeat-to-destruction from these nationalists, a constant demand for Putin to use hydrogen bombs against the UK, against air bases in Germany, against the Ukrainians, even against Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. There is a death-cult glee in these commentators’ longing to fight a nuclear war for the preservation of Russian greatness, and it is one that the Kremlin does nothing to dissociate itself from.

In such a world, it is sometimes difficult to focus on regional politics. But next week, dear readers, I promise that this column shall return to its Western stomping grounds.

Opinion  The Trump dictatorship: How to stop it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/07/robert-kagan-trump-dictatorship-how-to-stop/
By Robert Kagan
Editor at large

In an essay I wrote last week, I painted a grim picture of the prospects for dictatorship in the United States. Some readers were unhappy that I did not offer a solution. What follows is an attempt at one, and if it seems like a long shot, it is. Our options today are harder and fewer because we have passed up so many better and easier alternatives in the past. Nor was it for lack of knowing what needed to be done. It would not have taken a miracle for Republicans to unite around a single non-Trump candidate in 2016 or for 10 more Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.

The problem has never been knowing what to do. It has been doing it. In the past, stopping Trump has required people taking risks and making sacrifices that they did not want to make, whether out of selfishness, fear or ambition. Today, the challenges are even greater, but there is little evidence that the people we need to rise to the occasion are any more likely to do so than they have been for the past eight years.

Here are several things people could do to save the country but almost certainly won’t do, because they selfishly refuse to put their own ambitions at risk to save our democracy.


The first step is to consolidate all the anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party behind a single candidate, right now. It is obvious that candidate should be Nikki Haley and not because she’s pro-Ukraine but because she is clearly the most capable politician among the remaining candidates and the performer with the best chance, however slim, of challenging Trump. All the money and the endorsements should shift to her as quickly as possible. Yes, Ron DeSantis is likely too selfish and ambitious to drop out of the race, but if everyone else does and the remaining money and support all flow to Haley, he will quickly become irrelevant.

It won’t be enough, however, to rally the forces behind Haley. Even if she were to get every vote that’s now spread among the other non-Trump candidates (and she won’t), it would not come close to being enough to challenge Trump. Until now, she has been gathering support at the expense of other non-Trump candidates. To make a serious run for the nomination, she will also have to cut into the more than 50 percent of the party that now seems solidly behind Trump.

What is her theory for doing that? Does she think she will attract these voters with her policies or her winning political personality? Trump supporters fall into roughly three categories. The great majority are completely committed to what former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman has called the “cult” of Trump. They are out of reach for Haley. Another smaller group has no problem with Trump, so long as he can beat President Biden and the Democrats next year. This faction is undoubtedly reassured by polls that say that Trump can win, so the possibility that Haley can also beat Biden is irrelevant to them. They prefer Trump, and there is no reason for them to rethink their position so long as Trump remains clearly electable. Finally, there is a small percentage of Republicans who say they will support Trump unless he is convicted; recent polls suggest these people make up roughly six percent of GOP voters in some of the key swing states.

Haley, therefore, has no chance of getting more than a small fraction of current Trump supporters to add to her collection of Trump-skeptical Republicans. She might make a respectable showing as the No. 2 candidate, thus setting her up to be Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, if he will have her, in which case her entire campaign will have been largely for show. Indeed, it will have served chiefly as a conveyor belt for Trump skeptics to get onboard the Trump train in the end. If that is what she’s up to, then the joke will be on the Koch network, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and others who have lately looked to her as a last hope for stopping Trump.

If she is serious about trying to stop Trump, however, there is only one way to cut into his mammoth majority, and that is by raising doubts about Trump’s electability. The way to do that is to warn those Republicans still capable of listening that a Trump presidency really does pose a risk to our freedom and democracy and the Constitution. That is what will be required to win over the small percentage of Republicans who are still willing to drop Trump if he is convicted. And if Haley can begin to reel in those voters, she can begin to raise doubts in the minds of those who are supporting Trump because they think he can defeat Biden and the Democrats in November. In short, the way to beat Trump is to make him seem unelectable, and the way to make him seem unelectable is to show that he is unacceptable.

end of pt 1

(part2 of 2)
Trump’s dictatorial tendencies and open disdain for the Constitution can become his greatest vulnerabilities — they might be his only vulnerabilities — if sufficiently highlighted for the American voter, and he and his advisers likely know it. Trump’s bizarre assertion that he would be a dictator only on “Day One” of his presidency to “close the border” was, believe it or not, an attempt to deflect the charge. (But what if it takes two days?) Democrats have gotten mileage in downballot races by painting their Republican opponents as lawbreaking, MAGA radicals. Trump is aware that he needs to hold on to some normal, non-cultist Republicans — that is why he has taken a more moderate position on abortion than much of the rest of the party. Trump is nothing if not a shrewd politician (the people who persist in claiming he’s an idiot should have a talk with themselves), and he knows he cannot win the general election on cult votes alone.

So, are Haley and other Republicans trying to exploit these vulnerabilities? No. Quite the contrary, they are helping Trump by continually affirming his acceptability as president. Every time Haley and other Republicans say they will support Trump if he is the nominee, they are telling Republican voters, including their own supporters, that Trump is acceptable. When New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu says, “I just want Republicans to win; that’s all I care about,” he might as well just get it over with — and endorse Trump. To say that Biden is so dangerous to the country that even Trump would be better is to endorse the world as Trump and his MAGA cultists portray it. Not only does this undercut the rationale for Haley’s candidacy, but it also makes it extremely difficult to peel away current Trump supporters. If Trump is acceptable, then he is electable. And if he is electable, then why should any current Trump supporter shift to Haley? Haley’s posture is not only incoherent; it is fatal to her prospects.


The problem is about to get much worse, moreover, because Trump himself is going to get much worse. He has clearly decided that his best response to charges of being a potential dictator is to double down. Instead of trying to calm people’s concerns by disavowing the accusations against him, he has issued more threats of investigations and persecutions should he become president. And he has taken another page out of the dictator’s playbook: claiming that he is the savior of democracy while the Biden administration is the real dictatorship. Republicans are already girding themselves for what they know is going to be an endless stream of frightening statements for them to comment on in the days and weeks to come.

This, of course, is also Trump’s legal strategy: to argue that the Biden administration is a dictatorial regime using the justice system to persecute its primary political opponent. In time-honored fashion, Trump is going for the biggest lie. His goal is to delegitimize the trials and convince Republican voters that he is the victim of corruption and abuse of the judicial system. He has just begun making that case, but he is going to bang it like a bass drum for the next year.

Can he succeed in establishing this as the narrative? You bet he can, and for the reasons outlined in the previous essay: As he becomes the presumptive nominee, the vast Republican campaign apparatus will be at his disposal, putting out his line on an hourly basis. If he says that the Biden administration is a dictatorship engaged in political persecution, then that is going to be the Republican line. Are leading Republicans going to say they support Trump but not his legal case? That they are for Trump — but not his defense? At best, they will be silent, as they are now; at worst, they will support his legal case.

As Trump remakes himself into a victim of persecution, will Haley and other Republicans still insist that they will support Trump if he is the nominee? In doing so, they will be tacitly agreeing, and certainly not refuting, the claim that Biden is a dictator and Trump is being persecuted. By the time the trials get underway, that will be the standard Republican talking point. Today, it is just the most devoted Trumpers, but before long, we will see even respectable Republicans “raising questions” about the prosecutions, to the point where the entire court proceeding will be delegitimized in the eyes of the ordinary Republican voter.

What effect will that have on that small percentage of Trump supporters who now say they would drop their support if he were convicted? Those who cling to the hope that the trials will bring Trump down need to understand that the number of Republicans willing to abandon Trump because of a conviction, already small today, is going to be much smaller come spring. As the Trump narrative gains traction and becomes the baseline Republican position, Haley will become a footnote as Republicans of all stripes rally to the martyrdom of Trump.

That is, unless people start pushing back against Trump’s narrative right now — and by “people,” I mean Republicans.

Think about that precious small percentage of Republicans who now say they would not support Trump if convicted. They are actually saying a lot more than that. These are Republicans who still regard the justice system as important and legitimate, who consider special counsel Jack Smith’s charges worthy of a jury trial and legitimate, and who for the moment think a guilty verdict, were it to come, would be legitimate. Can we count on them maintaining those views over the coming weeks and months if all they hear from Republican leaders and conservative media is that the trials are illegitimate acts of persecution? Do the people hoping to be saved by the courts think that these voters will conclude on their own that the trials are legitimate when their entire party is saying they’re not?

What they need to hear right now (and for the rest of the campaign) is that they are right, that the Biden administration is not a dictatorship, that the trials are not an abuse of power, and that if Trump is convicted, justice will have been done. And they do not need to hear this from Democrats and Post columnists. They need to hear it from their fellow Republicans, from Republicans they admire. At some point, some leading Republicans are going to have to display the courage to defend the justice system even though that will put them in direct conflict with Trump and his supporters.

We probably can’t expect Haley to take the lead in making the case for Trump’s unacceptability, even though she should. But other Republicans certainly can. It is no secret what people such as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) think about Trump. Romney’s biography is filled with whispered comments by leading Republicans privately indicating their fear and loathing of Trump. But today, those Republicans remain in their coward’s crouch, hoping to survive as they have the past eight years — by keeping their heads down, by waving off Trump’s threats and dictatorial behavior. Romney, who once had the courage to vote to convict Trump for trying to overthrow the government in 2021, now tells us “at some point you stop getting worried about what he says.” At this moment, Trump and his supporters are engaged in an attempt to obliterate history right before our eyes, to say that down is up and up is down, and that instead of destroying democracy Trump is saving democracy from the Biden tyranny, and that this is what the trials are about. And this is Romney’s response? The people who want to put their faith in the good judgment of Republican voters are counting on those voters to come to the right conclusion themselves while even their most respected Republican leaders are too frightened to defend the justice system against Trump. That is a lot of faith indeed.

But imagine a different scenario. Imagine that Republicans who know Trump poses a threat of dictatorship suddenly discovered their courage and began speaking out, and not just one or two but dozens of them — current and former elected officials, former high-ranking officials from the Trump and past Republican administrations. Imagine if the wing of the Republican Party that still believes in defending the Constitution identified itself that way, as “Constitutional Republicans” implacably opposed to the man who blatantly attempted to subvert the Constitution and has indicated his willingness to do so again as president.

Then the Republican primary campaign would become a struggle between those defending the Constitution and those endorsing its possible dismantlement at the hands of a dictator. That small percentage of Republicans who now say they would drop Trump if convicted would remain in play, and those now sticking with Trump because he can beat Biden might have reason to start questioning that assumption. It would not take a lot of speeches, or well-placed interviews, or appearances on Sunday shows, by the right people to change the conversation. But that, it seems to me, is the only chance Haley has of giving Trump a run for his money in the primaries.

Even if she loses, as she probably would, her campaign could nevertheless establish a useful and interesting dynamic for the general election. The formula for defeating Trump in November is simple enough: Unite the Democrats, and split the Republicans. That is why all the third-party candidacies now under consideration are disastrous. A middle-of-the-road, bipartisan third-party candidacy of the kind being promoted by No Labels is sure to hand Trump the election by siphoning more votes from Biden than from Trump. To defeat Trump, a third-party candidate must attract almost exclusively Republican voters. Who would be in a better position to do that than the person who already has a substantial Republican following, such as Haley? If No Labels really wants to help the country, it will hold its third-party slot open for Haley. And if Haley really wants to save the country from Trump, , and if she cannot defeat Trump in the primaries, she will run as a third-party candidate with the intention of drawing away Republican votes from Trump. Should Republican voters devoted to defending the Constitution vote for Biden over Trump in the general election? Yes, they should. But it would be smart to give them a more palatable alternative.

Many people responded to my last essay by insisting that a majority of Americans oppose Trump, and they are right. But the way our system works today, that popular majority is prevented from coalescing. Many blame the electoral college or the two-party prejudice built into our system, and they might well be right. But, folks, are we going to fix these problems before November? The question is how best to bring this majority together in a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Republicans to prevent a dictatorship this coming year. Afterward, we can look at reforming the system. First, the system has to survive.

Could this coalition come into being? Yes. But it will require extraordinary action by a number of important individuals. People will have to take risks and make sacrifices, but is it asking too much? The risk of standing up today will not be nearly as great as it might be after January 2025. Does McConnell really want to go down in history as the silent midwife to a dictatorship in America? Can Romney not see that it is his destiny to lead the way at this critical moment in America’s history. Did Paul Ryan sell his soul for a Fox board seat? All these people went into public service for a reason. Wasn’t it to rise to an occasion such as this? Former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney shouldn’t have to fight this alone. For people such as Condoleezza Rice and James Baker and Henry Paulson Jr., what was the point of acquiring all this experience and respectability, if not to use it at this moment of national peril? Why are Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) defending Trump when they must know he is a threat to American democracy and the Constitution? Where is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the man who courageously pushed back against Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election? Where are all those officials who learned firsthand what a danger Trump was and who have occasionally said it out loud, people such as former attorney general William Barr and former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly? Where is former vice president Mike Pence, who single-handedly saved our system of government almost three years ago? Was that his last act? And for that matter, where is former president George W. Bush, who is well known to be appalled by Trump? A word from him would go a long way to emboldening others. What a service he could perform for his country.

What are they saving it for? If it’s for a future in the Republican Party, forget it. The Republican Party is finished as a coherent legitimate political party. Either it is about to become the party of the Trump dictatorship or it is going to break up into Constitutional and anti-Constitutional wings. The two-party arrangement the nation has known since the Civil War ended when the Trump cult captured the GOP. We are heading into a new era of politics in America. We could do worse than go into it with a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Republicans. The fact is, even if Trump is defeated in November, the nation will still be in crisis as Trump leads his supporters in rebellion against that outcome. Democrats and Constitutional Republicans will need to stick together then, too.


Can a Trump dictatorship still be prevented? Yes. It does not require a miracle, only courage. But will the people do what they need to do? Human frailty being what it is, and ambitious and selfish politicians being what they are, it is probably fanciful to imagine that the right combination of people will turn up and show a wisdom and courage they have not shown for the past eight years. Even now, we are being treated to what Abraham Lincoln called the “lullaby” arguments, the ones that urge you to go back to sleep and stop worrying. Such as: The voters will see reason. The polls are unreliable. The court system will work. Trump won’t do what he is threatening to do. Even as we get closer and closer to the possibility of a dictatorship in America, we accept the same assurances we have been accepting for the past eight years. Do we think that this time we will get a different outcome? There is a word for that.

Some readers of my last essay asked fairly: What can an ordinary citizen do? The answer is, what they always do when they really care about something, when they regard it as a matter of life and death. They become activists. They get organized. They hold peaceful and legal rallies and marches. They sign petitions. They deluge their representatives, Republican or Democrat, with calls and mail, asking them to speak up and defend the Constitution. They call out their political leaders, state and local, and give them courage to stand up as well. Americans used to do these sorts of things. Have they forgotten how? At the risk of sounding Capra-esque, if every American who fears a Trump dictatorship acted on those fears, voiced them, convinced others, influenced their elected officials, then yes, that could make a difference. Another ship is passing that can still save us. Will we swim toward it this time, or will we let it pass, as we have all the others? I am deeply pessimistic, but I could not more fervently wish to be proved wrong.

Opinion  Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/20/godwins-law-trump-hitler-comparisons/





Mike Godwin is an attorney and author in Washington.

My very minor status as an authority on Adolf Hitler comparisons stems from having coined “Godwin’s Law” about three decades ago. I originally framed this “law” as a pseudoscientific postulate: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” (That is, its likelihood approaches 100 percent.)

I first offered this axiom in 1990 as an observation about the discussions that had expanded like algal blooms in the nascent ecologies of online newsgroups. But within a handful of years, the law had taken on a life of its own, leaping beyond the internet and reaching into our broader popular culture.

I felt vindicated because I had designed Godwin’s Law to be viral — to self-propagate among internet users. I had a theory that an individual could have a positive effect on culture by making a catchy joke about people’s worst tendencies toward rhetorical excess. The next step was to release the joke into the wild, then hope others found it clever or funny enough to be worth repeating.

Years after I’d let Godwin’s Law run free, I learned that an actual political philosopher, Leo Strauss, had made a somewhat similar remark a few years before I was born about debates trending toward Hitler. Strauss (whom I confess I still haven’t read) chose to classify Hitler comparisons as a special instance of a particular logical fallacy: reductio ad Hitlerum. He was right about that, but he also missed how funny such an inappropriate comparison might be. The sitcom writers of “Seinfeld” didn’t miss the goofiness — consider their “Soup Nazi.” Similarly, I loved Mel Brooks’s subversion of Hitler in “The Producers” when I discovered it as a kid in the 1960s.

But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.

And that’s why Godwin’s Law isn’t violated — or confirmed — by the Biden reelection campaign’s criticism of Trump’s increasingly unsubtle messaging. We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.

Trump has the backing of political actors who are laboring to give the would-be 47th president the kind of command-and-control government he wants. Their proposals for maximizing and consolidating the powers of the federal government under a single individual at the top — provided that the individual is appropriately “conservative” — don’t sound like an American democracy. Sorry, sticklers, they don’t even sound like an American republic, either. What they sound and look like is a framework to enable fascism. And we have to thank Trump for being admirably forthcoming that he plans to be a dictator — although, he says, only on “Day One.”

What’s arguably worse than Trump’s frank authoritarianism is his embrace of dehumanizing tropes that seem to echo Hitler’s rhetoric deliberately. For many weeks now, Trump has been road-testing his use of the word “vermin” to describe those who oppose him and to characterize undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Even for an amateur historian like me, the parallels to Hitler’s rhetoric seem inescapable.

Unsurprisingly, though, there are plenty of people who push back whenever anyone or anything gets compared to Hitler or the Nazis — or to related subjects like the Holocaust or the confinement of Jews to ghettos or the systematic killing of civilian populations. Masha Gessen relearned that lesson recently after writing an article for the New Yorker that raised — in an exemplary, thoughtful, nuanced way — the question of whether modern Germany’s promotion of a particular way of thinking about the Holocaust might forbid public questioning of the morality of Israel’s choices in retaliating for Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Gessen was set to receive the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought, but the New Yorker article troubled two sponsors of the event enough to pull out of the award ceremony that had been set to take place in Bremen, Germany. Although Gessen ultimately received the award, the controversy raises two peculiar Godwin’s Law-related issues.

First, has the sheer absurdity of so many hyperbolic Nazi comparisons in popular culture made us less vigilant about the possible reemergence of actual fascism in the world? I think it shouldn’t — comparisons to Hitler or to Nazis need to take place when people are beginning to act like Hitler or like Nazis.

Second, is Germany’s specific culture of remembrance — which privileges the idea that the Holocaust is unique — working, as some have said Godwin’s Law has also functioned, to quash appropriate comparisons of today’s horrors to the 1930s and 1940s? I continue to insist that Godwin’s Law should never be read as a conversation-ender or as a prohibition on Hitler comparisons. Instead, I still hope it serves to steer conversations into more thoughtful, historically informed places.

The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin’s Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.

Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.

Trump skips Illinois loyalty oath promising not to overthrow government

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/01/06/donald-trump-loyalty-pledge/





Republican polling leader Donald Trump did not sign a loyalty oath requested of candidates for election in Illinois that asks, among other things, to swear that they won’t support overthrowing the government, according to an analysis of candidate petitions by the local news outlets WBEZ and Chicago Sun-Times.

His decision to not sign the pledge came near the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Trump is under indictment for alleged crimes in his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

Presidential hopefuls vying for a spot on Illinois’ March 19 primary ballot had to submit their nominating petitions to the State Board of Elections on Thursday or Friday. The loyalty pledge is not required but is a long-standing tradition that candidates undertake as part of that paperwork.

Trump has not publicly acknowledged the decision but had signed the oath during his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond on Saturday to a request for comment.

The loyalty oath dates back to the 1950s McCarthy era, when such pledges became popular among lawmakers fearful about the potential infiltration of communism in the United States. The pledge asks candidates to swear they are not affiliated with communist organizations or any “foreign political agency, party, organization or government which advocates the overthrow of the constitutional government by force.”

The oath remains enshrined in Illinois law but has been struck down as unconstitutional on free speech grounds in federal courts.

Other candidates, including President Biden and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), filed signed oaths along with their petitions, according to the local media reports.

The Biden campaign on Saturday condemned Trump’s decision to sidestep the pledge.

“For the entirety of our nation’s history, presidents have put their hand on the Bible and sworn to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States — and Donald Trump can’t bring himself to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t attempt a coup to overthrow our government,” said Michael Tyler, communications director for the Biden campaign.

The decision to skip the oath is in line with Trump’s unconventional start to his presidential campaign. In August, he said he would not sign a pledge to support the Republican nominee should he lose the presidential primary. He has also been a no-show at the four GOP debates and is set to skip a debate in Des Moines on Wednesday, slated days before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15.

The former president is the leading Republican candidate but is facing four indictments related to his business dealings as well as his role on Jan. 6.

Trump is also facing other challenges relating to his election — including a Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove him from the 2024 primary ballot after it ruled he had engaged in insurrection. Other states have similar challenges pending. The Supreme Court said Friday that it will take up the Colorado decision, with arguments scheduled for Feb. 8.

On Thursday — the same day Trump submitted his petition — five Illinois voters filed a petition to remove the former president from the state’s Republican primary ballot.


These politicians denied democracy on Jan. 6. Now, they want your vote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/steve-brodner-politicians-jan-6/?itid=hp_opinions_p002_f001

While the violent mob swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aiming to subvert democracy and keep President Donald Trump in power, another group was already working on the same project inside. In an unsuccessful bid to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, 147 Republicans formally supported objection to counting Joe Biden’s electoral votes.

Some have already left office. But as many as 117 of these members of Congress are running for reelection in 2024. Here they are, drawn together: a collection of American politicians engaged in using democracy to attain the power to subvert it.

Elise Stefanik (NY)
Now in the No. 4 role in the House GOP, Stefanik was
a strong defender
of Trump’s election conspiracy theories.

Scott Perry (PA)
Perry helped organize the effort to use the Justice Department to delegitimize the election results.

Mike Johnson (LA)
Now House speaker, Johnson tried to overturn 2020 results by filing
a Supreme Court brief claiming covid voting procedures rendered them void.

Matt Gaetz (FL)
Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA)
“We’re ashamed of nothing.”
Matt Gaetz, on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast, about his actions on Jan. 6.
After Jan. 6, Gaetz and Greene toured the country with an “America First” message, spreading baseless claims of a stolen election.
Greene has argued that Jan. 6 rioters were mistreated. Gaetz recently led the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).
“If Steve Bannon and I had organized that,
we would have won, not to mention, it would have been armed.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, about the insurrection.

Ted Cruz (TX)
The senator said he was “leading the charge” to prevent Biden’s certification as president and was deeply involved in helping Trump find ways to keep power.

Jim Jordan (OH)
One of the most vocal Republicans in favor
of overturning Biden’s win, Jordan spoke directly with Trump
on the day of the insurrection.

Jim Banks (IN)
Jordan and Banks weren’t allowed on the select committee investigating Jan. 6 because of their roles in spreading disinformation.

Josh Hawley (MO)
“I don’t regret anything I did on that day.”
Josh Hawley, about his actions on Jan. 6.
Hawley was the first senator to announce he would contest results on Jan. 6, paving the way for other senators such
as Cruz and Rick Scott (Fla.) to do so, as well.

Andy Biggs (AZ)
Biggs is one of five Republicans who allegedly sought preemptive pardons for their roles in the Capitol riot. (Biggs has denied seeking a pardon.)

Lauren Boebert (CO)
On the morning of the insurrection, Boebert conjured the American Revolution, tweeting “Today is 1776.”

Paul A. Gosar (AZ)
Gosar spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally just weeks before the riot: “Once we conquer the Hill, Donald Trump is returned to being the president.”
“Biden should concede. I want his concession on my desk tomorrow morning. Don’t make me come over there.”
Paul A. Gosar, in a tweet on Jan. 6.

There were 147 members of Congress who supported at least one objection to counting Biden’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. From that group, this piece highlights those who are still in government and who have declared that they will be running for federal office in 2024, or who have not yet announced, as of publication date. One exception is Yvette Herrell (N.M.), a former member of Congress who has announced she will run again. She is also included.

Biden blames Putin for Navalny’s death, praises Russian opposition leader

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/16/alexei-navalny-dead-russia-prsion/


President Biden blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for Alexei Navalny’s death Friday, calling it “proof of Putin’s brutality.” The opposition leader died in a remote penal colony in Russia’s far north, the country’s prison service announced without giving the cause of his death. News of Navalny’s death flooded across Russian Telegram news channels and was confirmed in a curt announcement by prison authorities, prompting the U.N. Human Rights Office to call for an independent investigation.

Here's what to know
Prison authorities reported that Navalny “felt unwell” after a walk, “almost immediately losing consciousness.” They said a medical team failed to resuscitate him. Navalny’s team did not immediately confirm his death but said his lawyer was flying to the prison colony in Kharp in Russia’s far north.
Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, called on “all the people in the world” to stand up for her husband. “We should fight this horrific regime in Russia today,” she said at the Munich Security Conference on Friday after Vice President Harris’s speech there.


Video of Navalny shows him joking and smiling Thursday

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/16/video-navalny-shows-him-joking-smiling-thursday/


Just one day before officials announced his death, Russian dissident Alexei Navalny appeared in court via video link from a Russian penal colony, making jokes and smiling.

In a video released by the Russian news outlet Sota, Navalny, known for his humor and charisma, teased the judge overseeing his case Thursday.

“Your Honor, I’m waiting — I will send you my personal account number, so that you can use your huge federal judge’s salary to fuel my personal account,” he said, laughing.

The Russian opposition leader and President Vladimir Putin’s greatest challenger, had been serving a combined decades-long prison sentence in a grueling penal colony above the Arctic Circle for charges including “extremism” and “embezzlement.”

“I am running out of money,” a grinning Navalny said in the video. “And thanks to your decisions, it will run out even faster. So please send me something. And you guys in the detention centers pitch in as well.”

Prison authorities reported Friday that Navalny “felt unwell” after a walk, “almost immediately losing consciousness.” They said a medical team failed to resuscitate him.

In the days leading up to the announcement of his death, reports indicated Navalny appeared relatively healthy.

The court told the Russian news outlet RBC that during the hearing Thursday, Navalny “seemed fine.” The outlet reported that he “did not express any complaints about his health, actively spoke, and presented arguments in defense of his position.”

Navalny’s lawyer, Leonid Solovyov, told the outlet Novaya Gazeta shortly after the news broke that a lawyer had visited the activist on Wednesday. “Everything was fine then.”

Navalny has been detained in Russia since 2021, when he returned home after surviving a 2020 poisoning attempt the State Department said was carried out by agents of the Russian state. Throughout his detention, he has gone on hunger strikes, was placed in solitary confinement, had limited contact with his family.


Alexei Navalny, imprisoned Russian opposition leader, is dead at 47

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/02/16/alexei-navalny-dead-russian-opposition/





Alexei Navalny, the steely Russian lawyer who exposed corruption, self-dealing and abuse of power by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies, sustaining a popular challenge to Putin for more than a decade despite constant pressure from the authorities and a near-fatal poisoning, died Feb. 16 in a Russian prison colony just above the Arctic Circle. He was 47.

His death at Kharp, in the Yamal-Nanets Autonomous Region, was announced by Russia’s prison service. Prison authorities said in a statement that Mr. Navalny “felt unwell” after a walk, “almost immediately losing consciousness,” and added that a medical team failed to resuscitate him.

Mr. Navalny had endured the country’s harshest prison conditions since December; the region is brutally cold. In August, his prison sentence was extended by 19 years on charges connected to his anti-corruption foundation. Supporters said the charges were politically motivated and part of a campaign by Putin to silence him.

Mr. Navalny emerged over the years as a singularly successful blogger, activist and opposition leader in Putin’s Russia, reaching a mass audience through online videos that detailed ruling-class corruption and lavish spending. He was handsome, articulate and charismatic — a natural politician in a country where there is virtually no competitive public politics.

His corruption investigations received tens of millions of views on YouTube, fueling widespread street protests in Russia and embarrassing the Kremlin. Authorities branded him as unpatriotic, declaring that Mr. Navalny was a tool for Western intelligence agencies, and sought to diminish his popularity among liberals and other oppositionists by noting that he had allied himself with ultranationalists early in his career.

While Mr. Navalny spent weeks in jail at various times, he largely stayed out of prison as authorities seemed uninterested in making him a martyr. That calculus seemed to have changed by August 2020, when he became gravely ill and went into a coma. Western officials said he had been poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok, which British authorities said had also been used in the 2018 poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a Russian former spy who was living in England.

While recuperating from the poisoning in Germany, Mr. Navalny partnered with the investigative journalism group Bellingcat to uncover evidence linking the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, to the attack. In a brazen act that was captured on film for the Oscar-winning 2022 documentary “Navalny,” he phoned one of the FSB perpetrators, posing as his superior making an after-action report, and fooled the officer into revealing that the operation was intended to kill Mr. Navalny through the application of Novichok to his underwear. The officer blamed its failure on the quick work of the plane pilot and paramedics.

Alexei Navalny’s death

Alexei Navalny, leading Russian opposition leader, died in a remote penal colony at 47.

Why his death matters: Navalny emerged over the years as a singularly successful blogger, activist and opposition figure, reaching a mass audience through online videos that detailed ruling-class corruption and lavish spending.

Navalny was jailed in 2021. In August, a Russian court handed him a 19-year sentence on charges of “extremism” and transferred to a “special regime” penal colony in Russia’s far north. Such facilities are notorious for their severe conditions and harsh treatment of prisoners.

Just one day before officials announced his death, Navalny appeared in court via video link, making jokes and smiling.
Reactions have poured in from international leaders. President Biden blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for Alexei Navalny’s death Friday, calling it “proof of Putin’s brutality.”
Read the Opinion from Navalny in 2022: This is what a post-Putin Russia should look like.
In photos: The resilience of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny


Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/23/here-are-ten-critics-of-vladimir-putin-who-died-violently-or-in-suspicious-ways/

MOSCOW – Not everyone who has a quarrel with Russian President Vladimir Putin dies in violent or suspicious circumstances — far from it. But enough loud critics of Putin's policies have been murdered that Thursday's daylight shooting of a Russian who sought asylum in Ukraine has led to speculation of Kremlin involvement.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the shooting in Kiev of Denis Voronenkov, a former Russian Communist Party member who began sharply criticizing Putin after fleeing Russia in 2016, an "act of state terrorism by Russia."

That drew a sharp rebuke from Putin's spokesman, who called the accusation "absurd." Throughout the years, the Kremlin has always dismissed the notion of political killings with scorn.

But Putin’s critics couldn’t help drawing parallels with the unexplained deaths of other Kremlin foes. "I have an impression — I hope it’s only an impression — that the practice of killing political opponents has started spreading in Russia," said Gennady Gudkov, a former parliamentarian and ex-security services officer, to the Moscow Times.

Here are some outspoken critics of Putin who were killed or died mysteriously.

Alexei Navalny 2024
Boris Nemtsov, 2015
Boris Berezovsky, 2013
Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, 2009
Sergei Magnitsky, 2009
Natalia Estemirova, 2009
Anna Politkovskaya, 2006
Alexander Litvinenko, 2006
Sergei Yushenkov, 2003
Yuri Shchekochikhin, 2003


Putin rival Prigozhin listed as passenger in deadly plane crash

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/23/prigozhin-russian-plane-crash-wagner-passenger/





RIGA, Latvia — Two months to the day since he launched an audacious challenge to Russian President Vladmir Putin’s rule, Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin was on the passenger list of a plane that crashed northwest of Moscow, killing all 10 people aboard, according to Russian aviation authorities.

It was not immediately clear whether Prigozhin, who led the short-lived mutiny in June, was on the Embraer business jet when it went down in the Tver region, but Rosaviatsiya, the country’s air transport agency, said his name was on the flight manifest.

“An investigation has been launched into the crash of the Embraer aircraft,” the agency said in a statement. “According to the list of passengers, among them is the name and surname of Yevgeniy Prigozhin.”

There was no confirmation of his death Wednesday from Russian or U.S. officials, or from Prigozhin’s press service, which has not posted online since June. One Telegram channel associated with the Wagner Group urged against publishing “unverified data and messages” about Prigozhin’s fate.

But later Wednesday, Grey Zone, another Wagner-linked Telegram channel, posted an obituary: “The head of the Wagner Group, Hero of Russia, a true patriot of his Motherland - Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin died as a result of the actions of traitors to Russia,” the post read. “But even in Hell he will be the best! Glory to Russia!”

If confirmed, Prigozhin’s death would cap a meteoric rise and fall for a convict turned restaurateur turned warlord. He used his mercenary army to expand Russian influence in Africa and the Middle East and came to Putin’s rescue during his stalled invasion of Ukraine, only to rebel against the country’s military leadership and be branded an enemy of the state.

On June 23, Prigozhin launched what he called “the march of justice” — pulling his mercenary fighters from the front lines in Ukraine and sending them toward the Russian capital. The rebellion sent shock waves through Russia’s elite and posed an unprecedented challenge to Putin’s authority.

President Biden speculated in July that Prigozhin could be a target of assassination, like a number of Russian dissidents and journalists in the past, including opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who survived a poisoning in 2020.

“I’d be careful what I ate. I’d keep my eye on my menu,” Biden said last month. His comments were echoed by CIA Director William J. Burns at the Aspen Security Forum: “Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold. So he’s going to try to settle the situation to the extent he can,” Burns said. “In my experience, Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback.”

On Wednesday, as reports of Prigozhin’s death circulated, Biden told journalists: “I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised.”

Asked if Putin could be behind the crash, Biden said, “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind. But I don’t know enough to know the answer.”

Eyewitnesses on Wednesday reported hearing two explosions before the plane tumbled from the sky and burst into flames in a field, Russian media reported. There were seven passengers and three crew members on board, aviation officials said, including Dmitry Utkin, Prigozhin’s second-in-command. The plane was flying from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport to St. Petersburg, which is Prigozhin’s hometown and the site of Wagner’s former headquarters.

At least two Wagner-affiliated planes were in the air near Moscow on Wednesday evening, according to Grey Zone, adding to the confusion over who was killed.

A foul-mouthed, larger-than-life figure known for his ghoulish sense of humor and online media empire, Prigozhin was popular among rank-and-file soldiers and hard-line pro-war figures.


Prigozhin plane debris points to sabotage

“This airplane was flying along normally one minute and experienced catastrophic failure the next,” one aviation expert said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/prigozhin-plane-crash-sabotage-explosion-evidence-rcna101756


The severed wing from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private jet was apparently found miles away from the crash site Friday — evidence, according to aviation experts, to support a growing consensus that the Russian mercenary leader was killed after his plane was sabotaged and tumbled out of the sky in pieces.

Prigozhin is believed to have been on board the Embraer Legacy 600 that crashed north of Moscow on Wednesday, exactly two months after he launched a brief rebellion against Russian President Vladimir Putin's military.

While much remains unclear, Western officials and analysts shared a mounting conviction based on public evidence and private intelligence: This was no simple accident.

“The aircraft clearly came apart in-flight following some sort of catastrophic event at altitude,” said Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation expert and NBC News contributor. “It literally fell to the ground like a Coke bottle, totally out of control and missing wing parts. New jets like this don’t come apart like this unless something bad happened.”

U.S. intel points to sabotage
Video clips geolocated by NBC News appeared to show the Embraer falling uncontrollably to the ground, missing one of its wings and trailing puffs of smoke amid the white clouds in the blue sky north of Moscow.

What appeared to be the plane's severed wing was found almost 2 miles away from the main crash site, based on photos shared by Russian mainstream and social media early Friday showing that section of the aircraft bearing the same serial number.

Two American officials told NBC News that intelligence points to sabotage being the most likely cause, one of them adding that a leading theory is the plane was downed by an explosive on board, although information is still too scant to confirm that.

There is no evidence to support the idea that the jet was downed by a surface-to-air missile, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, told a briefing Thursday. The unnamed officials said that's because neither the United States nor its allies detected the heat signature of a missile capable of hitting this jet at cruising altitude.

The Pentagon spokesman said the “initial assessment based on a variety of factors” was Prigozhin was likely killed. The British defense ministry added that while there was no “definitive proof” the Wagner boss was aboard, “it is highly likely that he is indeed dead.”

President Joe Biden and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock are among those raising the suggestion that Prigozhin has become the latest Kremlin enemy to die in suspicious circumstances — something Moscow railed against Friday.

Putin’s spokesman decried as “absolute lies” the speculation that the Russian leader had ordered a hit on Prigozhin, and urged the world to wait for forensic tests and more facts to emerge.

“I think that Washington officials’ reasoning about what is happening in our country is a reflection of the general and blatant disregard for diplomatic methods,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said. “It is not really up to the U.S. president, in my opinion, to comment on tragic events of such nature.”

NAVALNY

The CNN Film follows Russian opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, through his political rise, attempted assassination and search to uncover the truth.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/22/world/who-is-alexey-navalny/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/shows/navalny-cnn-film
https://www.max.com/movies/navalny/11a4cff7-b90a-44c0-8cb6-c56b5cbfe5aa
Subscribers:
https://play.max.com/movie/11a4cff7-b90a-44c0-8cb6-c56b5cbfe5aa
https://play.max.com/video/watch/7dee46c8-eb03-436e-881d-1f972da90d6f/e4c71d86-d437-4441-893e-9fd5d0744f00


Putin refuses to give guarantee Navalny will survive prison




Navalny - Official Clip - Alexei Navalny's Final Message




Watch Alexey Navalny's final court appearance a day before Russia reported his death




"Hope dies": Moscow residents react to Alexei Navalny's death | AFP




Alexei Navalny dies: Russian police arrest mourners & journalists




Hundreds of arrests across Russia at Navalny memorials




Experts break down suspicious timing of Navalny’s death




Alexey Navalny and Putin's history of suspected poisonings and crackdowns | 60 Minutes Full Episodes




Pussy Riot joins Berlin protests mourning Navalny: “A beacon of hope”




Pussy Riot co-founder: Navalny 'a beacon of hope' | REUTERS




Bono gedenkt Alexej Nawalny




Exclusive: Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin




Five key moments from Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin: Elon Musk is unstoppable




Tucker Carlson, the fired Fox News star, makes bid for relevance with Putin interview

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/08/1230024588/tucker-carlson-putin-interview-video

Navalny's tearful wife Yulia: 'Putin killed half of me but I will fight with all that is left'





ALEXEI Navalny’s wife has shared a heartbreaking tribute to her husband following his death in jail.

Navalny died on Friday while serving a three-decade prison sentence in a hellhole Arctic prison.

Read more:
Alexei Navalny’s wife Yulia shares heartbreaking photograph and poignant message following his death in jail
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2602623...

Navalny’s wife accuses Putin of murdering husband with deadly novichok…then hiding body until traces of the toxin vanish
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2603439...

The Sun delivers breaking news, latest gossip and incredible exclusives around the world with hubs in London, New York, Scotland and Ireland.
Covering topics from news, money and sport along with our famous Fabulous Magazine, The Sun is the biggest news brand in the UK and one of the fastest growing news sites in the US.

Stay tuned for video clips across the biggest news stories and segments from The Sun’s expert journalists.

Become a Sun Subscriber and hit the bell to be the first to know.

Read The Sun: https://www.thesun.co.uk/?utm_source=...
Like The Sun on Facebook: 

 / thesun 
Follow The Sun on X: 

 / thesun 
Follow The Sun on TikTok: 

 / thesun 
Subscribe to The Sun on Snapchat: 

 / 1633225139 
#thesun #alexeinavalny #russia


Donald Trump says he warned Nato ally he would let Russia ‘do whatever they want’










Trump compares himself to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny



https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-compares-navalny-presidents-day-rant-1234970832/

Russian defector found dead in apparent murder in Spain, Ukraine says

Bullet-riddled body found in Spain was Russian defector, Ukraine says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/20/spain-russia-ukraine-kuminov-assassination-defector/





A man’s corpse, found riddled with bullets and run over by a vehicle in Spain last week, was identified as that of Russian military pilot Maksim Kuzminov, who flew his Mi-8 helicopter to Ukraine in a dramatic defection in August, Ukrainian officials said.

His apparent murder — after a very public threat to his life last year on Russian state television — has raised questions about whether this was a Russian-ordered assassination carried out on European soil.

News of Kuzminov’s violent demise emerged just days after the sudden death in prison of Russian political opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which European and U.S. officials have framed as evidence of the Russian government’s unchecked brutality.

The spokesman for Ukraine’s intelligence service, Andriy Yusov, confirmed to The Washington Post on Tuesday that the body found at the entrance to a residential complex in Villajoyosa, in Alicante, was Kuzminov’s.

Russian officials have not claimed responsibility for the killing. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the case Tuesday, saying it was “not on the Kremlin’s agenda.”

But Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, spoke to Russian journalists Tuesday, saying that Kuzminov was dead the moment he started planning his defection.

“In Russia, it is common to speak well of the dead or say nothing at all. This traitor and criminal already became a moral corpse at the moment when he was planning his dirty and terrible crime,” Naryshkin said, according to reports in Russian state news agencies Tass and Ria.

In October, Dmitry Kiselyov, host of the state television news program “Vesti Nedeli,” aired a segment on Kuzminov’s defection. The report ended by quoting three masked men in camouflage, identified as special forces members of Russian military intelligence, stating that they had been given the order to eliminate Kuzminov.

“We will find the man and punish him to the full extent of the law of our state for treason,” said one. “We have long arms.”

“He will not live to see the trial,” said another.

Russian propagandists celebrated the pilot’s reported death Tuesday.

Pro-Kremlin blogger Sergei Markov posted on Telegram that Kuzminov was “eliminated.”

“We will not rejoice in anyone’s death. But this news can save many lives, because it reminds everyone: Save your lives and never cooperate with the Ukrainian neo-fascist regime in anything,” he said.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, warned that the killing of Kuzminov could embolden Russians to take more such actions.

“If the Russians feel so empowered within the European Union that they start killing people, the question becomes quite complex. This is not the first instance where Russians behave this way,” he told Ukrainska Pravda newspaper late Monday.

As a result of one of the most brazen cases in Europe, Russian agent Vadim Krasikov is serving life imprisonment in Germany for fatally shooting former Chechen rebel Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten park in 2019. German prosecutors said during his trial that Krasikov probably acted on the orders of Russian state security services.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement, but Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to undercut those denials with an oblique comment in his interview this month with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Putin suggested that he might be open to a swap involving the release of Evan Gershkovich — a Wall Street Journal correspondent being held on spying charges that he and the State Department vehemently deny — in exchange for “a person serving a sentence in a country allied to the U.S.”

Putin described Krasikov as “a person who, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals.”

“Whether he did it of his own volition or not, that is a different question,” Putin added.

British authorities also blamed Russian security services for the fatal poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Federal Security Service officer and Putin critic, in London in 2006, and again when former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England, in 2018. The Skripals survived, but a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, died after handling the discarded perfume bottle that contained the nerve agent.

Spain’s Interior Ministry on Tuesday would not confirm the identity of the body found in Villajoyosa. Investigators had initially believed the person who died was a Ukrainian by a different name.

“In the course of the investigation that is being carried out, it has come to our attention that the identity of this person could be false and could be that of another individual. The Guardia Civil is proceeding to verify this, but we are unable to provide any further information at this time,” the ministry said in a statement.

Spanish media cited sources inside the Guardia Civil confirming that the body was Kuzminov’s. Witnesses told local media that gunmen shot him several times, then ran him over and escaped in a car.

Ukraine announced with great fanfare in August an intelligence operation that persuaded Kuzminov to fly his Mi-8 helicopter loaded with jet parts into Ukraine to defect. The two crew members with him were unaware of the plot and were shot by Ukrainian forces when they refused to surrender, according to officials.

The Ukrainian government later announced that the pilot had received a $500,000 reward in local currency and encouraged other Russian service members to follow suit.

Kuzminov recounted how his defection came about in a September interview published by Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence.

“I contacted representatives of Ukrainian intelligence, explained my situation, to which they offered this option: ‘Come on, we guarantee your safety, guarantee new documents, guarantee monetary compensation, a reward,’” he said.

According to a Ukrainian intelligence official, Kuzminov ignored instructions from the Ukrainian government not to leave the country, where security services could have provided him with a degree of protection.

Kuzminov did not want to stay in Ukraine, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal discussions. The Russian pilot “broke protocol” by leaving for Spain, the official added.

Putin threatens nuclear response to NATO troops if they go to Ukraine

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/29/putin-russia-state-union-speech-military/


https://d21rhj7n383afu.cloudfront.net/washpost-production/Reuters/20240229/65e075cf743d051279a62943/65e075d4d9dfd01cdcfb0445/file_1280x720-2000-v3_1.mp4


MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin used his annual State of the Nation address on Thursday to take aim at the West, threatening to use nuclear weapons against NATO countries if they send forces to help defend Ukraine from a Russian victory.

In a speech to Russia’s Federal Assembly that was predominantly dedicated to Russia’s domestic affairs, Putin delivered a tough warning, threatening retaliatory strikes against the West in the event of attacks on Russian territory.

“They must understand that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory,” he said, warning of “tragic consequences” if NATO forces were ever deployed to Ukraine. “All this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons and the destruction of civilization. Don’t they get that?”

Western leaders, he continued, thought that war “is a cartoon,” adding that Russia’s “strategic nuclear forces are in a state of full readiness.” He boasted that Russia’s most advanced hypersonic nuclear-capable weapons, such as the Kinzhal and Zircon missiles, had been used in Ukraine, while others were in the final stages of testing.

Putin has hinted before of Russia’s readiness to use its nuclear weapons, but Thursday’s warning was unusually sharp.





“They are talking about the possible deployment of NATO military contingents to Ukraine,” said Putin, referring to this week’s comments by French President Emmanuel Macron, who suggested that the deployment of foreign forces to Ukraine remained an option — one that some NATO leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have since contradicted.

“We remember what happened to those who once sent their contingents to our country’s territory. Now, invaders will suffer much more tragic consequences,” said Putin, adding that Russia would also strengthen its western military district now that Sweden and Finland — which shares a long land border with Russia — have joined the alliance.

Sweden cleared the final hurdle for admission to NATO when the Hungarian parliament approved its bid to join the alliance on Monday. Both Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

As Putin touched on his familiar anti-Western themes, including his accusation that Western nations were determined to destroy Russia from within, his audience was composed of members of the military, Russian parliamentarians and handpicked members of the public such as sports stars, film directors and patriotic volunteers. Some in the audience nodded along and took notes during the president’s speech. Some stared blankly into space, while others chuckled and applauded on cue.

The speech was also broadcast live on advertising screens on shopping malls across the nation, as well as in movie theaters.

At the start of the address, which lasted for just over two hours, a moment of silence was observed for Russian soldiers fighting on the front line.

“The special military operation was supported by the absolute majority of the people. People were adamant about this decision,” said Putin, using the Kremlin’s name for the war in Ukraine.

The Russian leader is poised to remain in power for the foreseeable future, with a presidential election next month that has been manipulated by the Kremlin to exclude real opponents. Only three other candidates have been allowed to run, part of the Kremlin’s effort to convey the sense of democratic competition without posing any threat to Putin’s rule.

All three have stated their support for Putin, while two antiwar candidates were both barred from running.

The speech comes at a sensitive moment politically — on the eve of the burial of his main political rival Alexei Navalny, in Moscow on Friday. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, on Wednesday accused Putin of ordering her husband’s murder and of preventing the family from renting a private hall where his coffin could be laid for a public farewell ahead of the funeral.

On Thursday, Navalny’s aides said that, with less than 24 hours before the funeral, the family had not been able to secure a hearse to transport his body.

“At first we were not allowed to rent a funeral hall to say goodbye to Alexei. Now … agents tell us that not a single hearse has agreed to transport the body,” wrote Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, on social media. “Unknown people call all the firms and threaten them in order to prevent them from taking Alexei’s body anywhere.”

Navalny was barred from running against Putin in the 2018 presidential election, was poisoned by Federal Security Service agents in 2020, was jailed in 2021 and died in the “Polar Wolf” prison on Feb. 16.

After Russia’s recent capture of the town of Avdiivka and nearby village of Lastochkyne — both settlements virtually leveled after months of Russian bombardment — Putin projected his growing confidence of a victory in Ukraine.

Uncertainty about Ukraine’s capacity to prevail against Russia has deepened with the failure of its counteroffensive last year — and with a $95 billion U.S. security assistance package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan stalled in Congress after Republican Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) sent the House on a two-week vacation without bringing the bill to a vote.

What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign

Donald Trump has pledged to scrap President Biden’s policies on electric vehicles and wind energy, as well as other initiatives opposed by the fossil fuel industry.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/





As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.

Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.

The contrast between the two candidates on climate policy could not be more stark. Biden has called global warming an “existential threat,” and over the last three years, his administration has finalized more than 100 new environmental regulations aimed at cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, restricting toxic chemicals, and conserving public lands and waters. In comparison, Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies over four years.

In recent months, the Biden administration has raced to overturn Trump’s environmental actions and issue new ones before the November election. So far, Biden officials have overturned 27 Trump actions affecting the fossil fuel industry and completed at least 24 new actions affecting the sector, according to a Washington Post analysis. The Interior Department, for instance, recently blocked future oil drilling across 13 million acres of the Alaskan Arctic.

Despite the oil industry’s complaints about Biden’s policies, the United States is now producing more oil than any country ever has, pumping nearly 13 million barrels per day on average last year. ExxonMobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. energy companies, reported their biggest annual profits in a decade last year.

Yet oil giants will see an even greater windfall — helped by new offshore drilling, speedier permits and other relaxed regulations — in a second Trump administration, the former president told the executives over the dinner of chopped steak at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump vowed at the dinner to immediately end the Biden administration’s freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports — a top priority for the executives, according to three people present. “You’ll get it on the first day,” Trump said, according to the recollection of an attendee.

The roughly two dozen executives invited included Mike Sabel, the CEO and founder of Venture Global, and Jack Fusco, the CEO of Cheniere Energy, whose proposed projects would directly benefit from lifting the pause on new LNG exports. Other attendees came from companies including Chevron, Continental Resources, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, according to an attendance list obtained by The Post.

Trump told the executives that he would start auctioning off more leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a priority that several of the executives raised. He railed against wind power, as The Post previously reported. And he said he would reverse the restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.

“You’ve been waiting on a permit for five years; you’ll get it on Day 1,” Trump told the executives, according to the recollection of the attendee.

At the dinner, Trump also promised that he would scrap Biden’s “mandate” on electric vehicles — mischaracterizing ambitious rules that the Environmental Protection Agency recently finalized, according to people who attended. The rules require automakers to reduce emissions from car tailpipes, but they don’t mandate a particular technology such as EVs. Trump called the rules “ridiculous” in the meeting with donors.

The fossil fuel industry has aggressively lobbied against the EPA’s tailpipe rules, which could eat into demand for its petroleum products. The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, an industry trade group, has launched a seven-figure campaign against what it calls a de facto “gas car ban.” The campaign includes ads in battleground states warning that the rule will restrict consumer choice.

“Clearly, if you are producing gasoline and diesel, you want to make sure that there’s enough market there,” said Stephen Brown, an energy consultant and a former lobbyist for Tesoro, an oil refining company. “I don’t know that the oil industry would walk in united with a set of asks for the Trump administration, but I think it’s important for this issue to get raised.”

Trump’s Brain Is Not Okay
An expert’s view of Trump’s mental slide into dementia.

https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/john-gartner-trump-cognitive-decline?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
mental fitness at face value.

Given this, we wanted to hear from John Gartner, founder of Duty To Warn, a group of mental health professionals who have been raising the alarm about Trump’s increasingly sociopathic behavior since 2017. Now in 2024, Gartner has an even more dire warning about Trump: that there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia. 

Seven months out from Election Day, it’s more important than ever to understand the signs of Trump’s steep and disturbing decline directly from a mental health professional. And then it’s on all of us to help amplify the signal. 

— Jay and The Big Picture Team

American people: Pathologizing Biden’s normal signs of aging, such as forgetting names, and normalizing Trump’s flagrant signs of dementia. That false narrative was having a real impact on the polls, and no one with the right letters after their name was stepping in to correct the record.

This wasn’t a new issue for me. I had written a series of op-eds about Trump’s signs of dementia in 2018 and 2019, and I was part of a group that publicly pressured Ronny Jackson to give Trump the dementia screening test that he can’t stop bragging about “acing.” I’d known for years Trump was showing medically unmistakable signs of dementia, but the press was hyper-focused on Biden falling off his bike, forgetting names, and being “too old.”

One day, in silence, in my garden, I felt the Universe, God, the Force, whatever you want to call it, communicate with me. It was a simple message: If someone was going to take up this struggle, it would have to be me and I said yes. I reactivated my long-dormant Twitter account, to fight the information war, one last time.

too, has objectively performed well at his job, despite, or maybe even because, of his age. Don’t judge us senior citizens by how fast we walk, or if we stumble over a name or two. Judge us by our performance.

And hello. Forgetting the name of the president of France isn’t the same as thinking Obama is president or that Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi are one person. Can we introduce a sense of proportion and some common sense here?

on that. An “interview” with a demented person doesn’t usually yield a lot of information, for obvious reasons.

As a professional community, thousands of us have observed hundreds of hours of Trump’s public behavior. We also have dozens of informant reports. So all the people hyperventilating about “diagnosing from a distance” should take a breath. This is more business as usual than you might think. In real life, we’ve institutionalized tens of thousands of patients on far less data.

The evidence for Trump’s dementia is this: Trump shows an overall decline from his own cognitive baseline, with marked progressive deterioration in 4 areas: memory, ability to use language, behavior, and gross and fine motor skills.

Let’s take these one by one:
“In the 1980’s,” Begley wrote, “Trump fluently peppered his answers with words and phrases such as “subsided,” “inclination,” “discredited,” “sparring session,” and “a certain innate intelligence.” He tossed off well-turned sentences such as, “It could have been a contentious route,” and, “These are the only casinos in the United States that are so rated”…Now, Trump’s vocabulary is simpler. He repeats himself over and over, and lurches from one subject to an unrelated one.”

A Boston Globe study found in 2015 that Trump was speaking at a 4th grade level, much lower than the other candidates, but more importantly much lower than his former self. An Ivy League graduate who once “tossed off well-turned phrases” had fallen to a 4th-grade level of speech. The MOCA dementia screening test that Trump brags about passing is slated to the mental age of a kindergartener (“Show me the picture of the lion?). Only a few grades to go.

But not only has Trump declined dramatically since the 1980s. More alarming is that Trump has declined far more precipitously in the last 4 years. Multiple former members of his administration report being shocked that “he’s not the same person he was.”

This is very important for people to understand. Not only will Trump continue to get worse and worse, his rate of decline is accelerating, and if he is typical, he will fall off what they call the “cognitive cliff” relatively soon. Based on his current accelerating rate of decline, it seems very unlikely that Trump could see out a second term without falling off the cliff and becoming totally incapacitated.

2) Memory:

Forgetting names and dates is normal for people who are aging, like Joe Biden, and me, and millions of others. By stark contrast, the Dementia Care Society says “confusing people and generations” is a sign of advanced dementia. And this is the type of profound memory disturbance we’re seeing in Trump.

Recently, Trump confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. You can kind of intuit how the demented thought process works in Trump’s mind to combine people. There’s an archetype in his head of a hated powerful female politician he is fighting. Fragments of Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi stick to this miasma of ill-defined thought and feeling, and combine in his imagination to form a new combined person who doesn’t really exist: Bad, bad, Nikki-Pelosi woman. Me hate her.

8 times he’s said he’s running against Obama. How often does he say and think it in private? I think this suggests that Trump has also combined Obama and Biden into one imaginary hated Joe-Obama person. The Trump campaign is trying to spin it as if Trump was either joking or suggesting Biden is an Obama puppet or some such thing. Nice try. Trump said it plainly, over and over. He didn’t look like he was joking (does he ever?) and said literally nothing to suggest he was referring to some Biden-Obama cabal.

The more plausible explanation is that once again we are watching the workings of his demented mind in real time. Obama and Biden have something very important in common in Trump’s brain that can allow them to be fused in his molten mind: two Democratic presidents who bested and humiliated him have become one imaginary super-villain.

What happens to a nation when its chief executive has lost his capacity for executive functioning? Michael Wolff wrote that Trump not infrequently failed to recognize old friends. I don’t mean he forgot their names. He acted as if he’d never seen them before in his life. If you’ve ever had a relative with dementia you know how heartbreaking that stage of decline can be-- to have to remind a loved one of who you are.

Trump is almost there.

3) Language

Trump shows formal signs of disordered speech we typically see only in organically impaired dementia patients:

A) “phonemic aphasia”

Trump uses non-words in place of real words, that usually include a fragment of the actual word. For example saying “mishuz” instead of missile, or “Chrishus” instead of Christmas. You can look at supercut reels assembled by Ron Filipkowski on Twitter, The Daily Show, and now by the Democratic House Judiciary Committee, as well. Both Chairman Nadler and Rep. Swalwell showed their own supercuts of Trump’s cognitive decline at the Hur hearings, to counteract Hur’s partisan slur about Biden’s “poor memory.”

To demonstrate how pervasive these errors are, I present this long but far from exhaustive list of Trump’s phonemic aphasias:

“President U-licious S Grant” (For Ulysses S. Grant)

“space-capsicle” (for space capsule)

“combat infantroopen”(for combat infantry)

“sahhven country”(for sovereign country)

“renoversh” (For renovations)

“Anonmmiss” (for anonymous).

“transpants” (for transplants)

“lawmarkers” (for lawmakers)

“supply churn” (for supply chain)

“Rusher” (for Russia)

“raydoh” (for radio)

“Liberal-ation (for liberation”)

“benefishers” (for benificiaries)

“con-ducking” (for conducting)

“stat-tics, suh-tic-six” (for statistics)

“crimakle” (for criminal)

“armed forsiva” (for armed forces)

“internate” (for Internet)

“transjija” (for transition)

“stanktuary” (for sanctuary)

That last example took place during Trump’s State of the Union Address, just to contrast that with the SOTU we just witnessed. In recent rallies in GA, NC, and VA over the course of just a few days Trump evidenced more examples:

“We have becrumb a nation”

“All comp-ply-ments” to Joe Biden.

“I know Poten.”

“He can’t cam-pay. He can’t campaign.”

“We will expel the wald-mongers.”

But of course, this is exactly what we should expect. As he deteriorates, these deficits will make themselves apparent more and more often. Now he can’t get through a rally without an example. Cornell psychologist Harry Segal speculated Trump may be “sundowning” and hence most vulnerable to going off the rails at night-time rallies.

Some have argued that Trump’s impaired speech could be an articulation problem, rather than a brain problem. Some have argued he could be slurring from a variety of causes, from loose dentures to drug toxicity (indeed many have speculated that Trump might be abusing or even snorting Adderall or some other stimulant.)

But all those competing explanations are disproven by one fact. Trump commits these aphasic errors in his written posts, as well, proving the problem is in his brain, not his articulation.

For example, he recently posted:

“Joe Buden DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES”

B) “Semantic aphasia”

Semantic aphasia is using a real word, but in a way that doesn’t correspond to its meaning. For example, when Trump referred to the “oranges of the investigation.” Another example would be “midtown and midturn elections.” Recently, when apparently trying to say “three years later,” Trump said:

“Three years, lady, lady, lady.”

More recently Trump said at a rally:

“We’re going to protect pro-God…”

In mid-sentence he goes blank and looks at the ceiling. When he reboots, the words he uses to complete the sentence don’t make sense:

“…context and content.”

C) Complete loss of all verbal language

Like an infant sometimes, Trump just makes sounds:

“Gang boong. This is me. I hear bing.”

Until finally, he is reduced to silence. 

“Saudi Arabia and Russia will re-ve-du. Ohhh…”

Trump’s face went blank, followed by a sigh, and a silent pause while he looked at the ceiling.

D) Tangential Thinking

Trump evidences “tangential thinking” where he drifts from one unrelated thought fragment to another, and sometimes tries to “confabulate” them into a story. But the narrative is literally incoherent. When the press describes Trump’s speeches as “rambling,” they are gaslighting us with a euphemistic word that normalizes the grossly abnormal. Trump regularly degenerates into incomprehensible strings of words.

Just recently outside a New York courtroom, Trump declared:

“We can’t have an election in the middle of a political season. We just had Super Tuesday. And we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already.”

Other examples would be:

“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”

“I could tell you about aircraft carriers, where they use electric catapults. They couldn’t go to the steam, which works better for about 1/100th the price, you know? The electric catapult, you know that story? I could tell you about the elevators on a tremendous carrier, the Gerald Ford, and they decided not to use hydraulic like the John Deere tractor, they decided to use magnets, ‘we’re gonna use magnets!’ to lift up the elevators with seven planes.”

In a recent string of rallies in GA, SC, and VA he said:

The Big Picture

SubscribeSign in

Read in the Substack app

Open app

Trump’s Brain Is Not OkayAn expert’s view of Trump’s mental slide into dementia.

THE BIG PICTURE AND JAY KUO

APR 11, 2024

2,520

497

As the legal walls close in around him, Donald Trump is becoming more unhinged by the day. And yet, he has not yet paid a political price for his increasingly unstable behavior.

While for many it’s obvious how serious Trump’s declining mental capacity has become, for too many Americans that reality has not yet broken through. The media continues to treat Trump like a normal candidate; many Americans have baked Trump’s bizarre behavior into their perceptions of him; and many take right-wing lies about Joe Biden’s mental fitness at face value.

Given this, we wanted to hear from John Gartner, founder of Duty To Warn, a group of mental health professionals who have been raising the alarm about Trump’s increasingly sociopathic behavior since 2017. Now in 2024, Gartner has an even more dire warning about Trump: that there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia. 

Seven months out from Election Day, it’s more important than ever to understand the signs of Trump’s steep and disturbing decline directly from a mental health professional. And then it’s on all of us to help amplify the signal. 

— Jay and The Big Picture Team

Trump guilty on all counts

Historic verdict on 34 felony counts in scheme to illegally influence 2016 election

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/30/trump-guilty-verdict-hush-money-trial/





NEW YORK — A New York jury on Thursday found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to an adult-film actress, delivering a historic verdict that could shape the November election and that makes Trump the first former U.S. president convicted of a crime.

The verdict is an extraordinary loss for the presumptive GOP nominee, who delivered near-daily tirades outside the courtroom throughout the trial — excoriating the justice system and declaring his innocence.

Twelve jurors, whose names were shielded by the judge from public view, spent a little more than a day weighing the felony counts against Trump before returning their judgment unanimously saying otherwise.

Trump, 77, faces a maximum sentence of 1⅓ to four years in prison after being deemed a felon in the city where he first rose to prominence. Given his age and lack of a prior criminal record, he could serve a shorter sentence or no term of incarceration at all.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan scheduled the former president’s sentencing for July 11 — just days before the start of the Republican National Convention, where Trump is set to be formally nominated by his party.

The verdict propels the country into unprecedented territory, and its impact will reverberate across U.S. politics in the coming months. While awaiting his sentence, Trump will continue to campaign to reclaim the White House. Trump, who has been charged in three other criminal cases, is expected to appeal the New York verdict; neither the conviction nor any sentence he may receive prevents him from serving as president.

After the verdict was read, Trump was told he could go free without bail. He turned to his son, Eric, and the two shared a stern handshake before Trump left the courtroom with a grimace, his face flushed. While Eric and his brother, Donald Trump Jr., attended multiple days of their father’s trial, former first lady Melania Trump and the former president’s daughter Ivanka stayed away.

Outside the courtroom, Trump again declared himself innocent, calling the trial “a disgrace” and falsely insisting that the case was driven by President Biden, his opponent in the Nov. 5 election.

“This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” Trump said. “The real verdict is going to be November 5, by the people, and they know what happened here.”

The conviction is a major victory for Manhattan prosecutors, who brought a local case with immense national implications even after their federal counterparts declined to seek an indictment against Trump in the matter years earlier.

“While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial, and ultimately today at this verdict, in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), the elected prosecutor whose office brought the case, said after the verdict, “by following the facts and the law, and by doing so without fear or favor.”

Asked about legal commentators and analysts who questioned the indictment — with some calling it the weakest of four criminal prosecutions facing Trump — Bragg said there was only one group whose view of the case ultimately mattered.

“Today, we have the most important voice of all,” Bragg said at a news conference, delivering his first extended public remarks about the trial since it began. “And that’s the voice of the jurors.”

The trial, which began in mid-April, hinged on a $130,000 payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress who alleged a sexual encounter with Trump in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 2006. Trump denies they had sex.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime attorney and fixer, paid Daniels on the eve of the 2016 presidential election to keep her from publicly sharing her claims of a tryst. Cohen was then given monthly reimbursement payments from Trump that were recorded as legal fees in documents maintained by Trump’s company. Prosecutors say classifying the payments as legal fees was criminal.

Prosecutors accused Trump of overseeing “a long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.” The government’s complex theory of the case was built on interlocking alleged criminal violations, and jurors were given a convoluted set of instructions as a result.

Defense attorneys argued that monthly $35,000 payments made to Cohen in 2017 were in fact compensation for legal services and that the classification of the business records was correct. The defense team also took blistering aim at Cohen, the prosecution’s key witness who has pleaded guilty to multiple crimes, including lying to Congress.

“You cannot convict President Trump of any crime beyond a reasonable doubt on the words of Michael Cohen,” defense lawyer Todd Blanche had told jurors.

Cohen told jurors that he was acting at Trump’s direction in arranging the Daniels payment. He was the only witness to testify that his former boss was directly involved. Defense attorneys subjected Cohen to brutal cross-examination, accusing him of lying on the stand and painting him as singularly focused on seeing Trump punished.

Blanche said after the verdict that it appeared jurors accepted Cohen’s testimony despite his attempts to convince them otherwise.

“At the end of the day, it remains true that if the word of Michael Cohen was not accepted at all, then you could not have convicted President Trump,” Blanche said on CNN a few hours after the verdict was reached. “And the jury convicted. So at the end of the day, they looked past what we thought were fatal flaws in Mr. Cohen’s story and his past, and they reached a guilty verdict.”

He also said he did not believe New York was “a fair place” to put Trump on trial.

Concerns about Cohen’s credibility were part of the reason federal prosecutors declined to pursue charges against Trump in connection with the hush money payment years earlier, according to people familiar with the decision who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions.

But Bragg’s office continued scrutinizing the issue. The hush money allegations had been known around his office as the “zombie” case because for years, it seemed lifeless without truly dying. Last year, a Manhattan grand jury took the historic step of voting to indict Trump, the first of four times he was charged in a span of about five months.

The verdict Thursday was Trump’s latest legal defeat in a New York court since last year. He lost two civil cases to the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of battery and defamation, and was ordered to pay her nearly $90 million; he is appealing. He was also hit with nearly half a billion dollars in penalties following a civil fraud lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), though he was allowed to post a lower bond while appealing that decision.

And Trump faces criminal cases in Florida, Georgia and D.C. — though due to appeals and pretrial motions, it is quite possible none of them will go to trial before Election Day.

The jury in Manhattan was tasked with deciding whether Trump was guilty on each specific count of falsifying business records and whether he did so in an effort to unlawfully impact an election. Prosecutors offered three types of underlying crimes that could raise the unlawful election-meddling allegation; jurors did not have to be unanimous about which of those they felt was at play.

A jury of seven men and five women — seated during a week-long selection process in April — began deliberations Wednesday and, within hours, said they wanted to hear part of the trial testimony and some of Merchan’s instructions repeated to them. After that happened Thursday morning, the jurors retreated to the jury room to continue deliberations.

Attorneys were preparing to leave court for the day at 4:30 p.m. without a verdict and return Friday morning. Then a note from the jury room arrived.

“We the jury have a verdict,” the note said.

Trump and his legal team then spent an agonizing half-hour waiting while the panel filled out the lengthy jury form.

Jurors looked solemn as they filed into the jury box to reveal their verdict. All eyes in the courtroom were on the jury foreman as he rose from his seat to deliver their findings count by count. After he repeated “guilty” 34 times, once for each count, the jurors were individually polled by the clerk to confirm they were unanimous.

Trump watched them, frowning, his hands resting on his lap.

Merchan then thanked the jurors for their work, saying they had “a very stressful and difficult task.” He also told them that they were now free to discuss the case but did not have to.

They filed out of court a short while later, walking one final time in front of Trump. As usual, they looked forward but not directly at him.

Bragg left the courtroom. His trial team, all smiles, remained for several minutes, holding their transcripts and other materials.

The jury had deliberated for about 11 hours across two days, including the time spent hearing testimony and instructions repeated Thursday.

“The speed with which this verdict was returned is shocking,” particularly given the legal complexity of the case, said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice.

“It signals that despite the doubts raised by the defense about the credibility of Michael Cohen, the jury viewed this as an overwhelming case for prosecutors and there was little dissent among jurors about this outcome,” he said.

During the trial, witness testimony frequently veered into sordid territory, offering an expansive education about tabloid practices as well as how famous, powerful people work to keep scandalous stories and allegations hidden.

Daniels testified in graphic detail about what she said happened between her and Trump in 2006, when they met at a celebrity golf tournament. She described what sounded at times like a nonconsensual sexual encounter with him, leading his attorneys to unsuccessfully call for a mistrial.

Trump ultimately did not take the stand — an unlikely scenario, but one he publicly insisted was on the table throughout the proceedings.

Instead, he frequently pilloried the case on his way in and out of court, often castigating Merchan and Bragg.

Merchan had issued a gag order prohibiting Trump from commenting on witnesses or jurors in the case. He ruled that Trump violated the gag order 10 different times and twice found him in contempt of court, warning that jail time could follow if that continued.

Inside the courtroom, Trump could be a passive figure and closed his eyes while witnesses testified, leading to speculation that he had dozed off — something that he denies. Other times, he glowered or appeared angry, including when Daniels testified, leading Merchan to tell Trump’s lawyer the former president was “cursing audibly” and needed to stop.

In the trial’s final stretch, Trump was accompanied to the Manhattan courthouse by a rotating entourage of political allies and supporters, who sat behind him in the courtroom and appeared before cameras in a nearby park to denounce and question the trial.

Some of those allies pilloried the outcome Thursday. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called it “a shameful day in American history,” while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) decried what he called “radical partisan Democrats behind this abuse of power.”

Biden’s campaign said in a statement that the verdict showed “no one is above the law,” while noting that Trump would still be on the ballot in November.

If Trump wins that election, he would regain the presidency’s broad power to grant pardons. He could not, however, pardon himself, because he was convicted Thursday in state court. Presidents can only grant clemency on federal charges.