TRUMP STORMS BACK
Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments to Women at Trump’s Direction
"Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, made the extraordinary admission in court on Tuesday that Mr. Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women during the 2016 campaign to keep them from speaking publicly about affairs they said they had with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen acknowledged the illegal payments while pleading guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and other charges, a litany of crimes that revealed both his shadowy involvement in Mr. Trump’s circle and his own corrupt business dealings. He told a judge in United States District Court in Manhattan that the payments to the women were made 'in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,' implicating the president in a federal crime. ... The plea represented a pivotal moment in the investigation into the president, and the scene in the Manhattan courtroom was striking. Mr. Cohen, a longtime lawyer for Mr. Trump — and loyal confidant — described in plain-spoken language how Mr. Trump worked with him to cover up a potential sex scandal that Mr. Trump feared would endanger his rising candidacy. ..."
NY Times (Video - The Ever-Changing Hush Money Story)
NY Times: Opinion - All the President’s Crook
Guardian - Donald Trump: 'worst hour' for president as Manafort and Cohen guilty (Video)
The Atlantic: What Michael Cohen’s Guilty Plea Means for Trump
Salon - President Donald Trump’s worst day yet: Manafort, Cohen fall and the walls are closing in
Paul Manafort, Trump’s Former Campaign Chairman, Guilty of 8 Counts
"Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted on Tuesday in his financial fraud trial, bringing a dramatic end to a politically charged case that riveted the capital. The verdict was a victory for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, whose prosecutors introduced extensive evidence that Mr. Manafort hid millions of dollars in foreign accounts to evade taxes and lied to banks repeatedly to obtain millions of dollars in loans. Mr. Manafort was convicted of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the remaining 10 counts, and the judge declared a mistrial on those charges. Kevin Downing, a lawyer for Mr. Manafort, said the defense was 'disappointed' by the verdict and that his client was 'evaluating all of his options at this point.' ..."
NY Times (Video - A Trail of Scandals)
The Atlantic: Blind Confidence Couldn’t Save Paul Manafort
The Atlantic: The Plot Against America (March 2018)
New Republic: The Worst Day Yet of Trump’s Presidency
The Atlantic: The President Is a Crook
Washington Post: Is this the worst day of Trump's presidency? (Video)
YouTube: The NY times Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments to Women at Trump’s Direction
What Donald Trump Would Do, in His Own Words
Trump ‘Could Tip an Already Fragile World Order Into Chaos’
Justice Dept. Unseals Indictment Against Trump
NY Times: Here are some of the charges Trump faces.
***NY Times: Trump’s Case Puts the Justice System on Trial, in a Test of Public Credibility
***NY Times: Opinion | Trump Left the Justice Dept. No Choice
***NY Times: Worldwide, Trump’s Latest Legal Woes Draw Outrage, and Shrug
New York attorney general files civil fraud lawsuit against Trump, some of his children and his business
“The New York state attorney general filed a sweeping lawsuit Wednesday against former President Donald Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they were involved in an expansive fraud lasting over a decade that the former President used to enrich himself. In the more than 200-page lawsuit, Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, alleges the fraud touched all aspects of the Trump business, including its properties and golf courses. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organization deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the value of his properties using misleading appraisals. ...”
Trump’s Reckless Choices for National Leadership
"Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible. For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security. The most irresponsible was his choice for attorney general. To fill the post of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the president-elect said he would nominate Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. Yes, that Matt Gaetz. ..."
NY Times: Opinion | EditorialsGRAND JURY VOTES TO INDICT TRUMP
The Democratic Party Has Failed—We Need a Radical Vision to Defeat Trumpism
"'Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?' Hillary Clinton asked a group of labor organizers in late September, when she and Trump were neck and neck in national polls. It seemed like a fair question. Throughout his entire campaign, Donald Trump utterly humiliated and disqualified himself in new ways almost every day. Tapes of him bragging about sexual assault dominated the final weeks of the campaign. ... For 40 years their wages have been stagnant even as productivity grows. For some groups, even life expectancy is now declining. Many who are living through this have been yearning for some sort of political revolution for years. ... A vote for Trump symbolized burning it all down. ..."
In These Times
New Yorker: Seven Electors Against Trump
In These Times - A Message to Trump: We’re Not Going Back in the Shadows
Jacobin: The Workers Versus Trump
2016 January: Donald Trump and the Joys of Toy Fascism, 2016 January: Sanders Is Not Trump, 2016 January: Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults: The Complete List (So Far), 2016 April: Lost in TRUMPLANDIA, 2016 November: Scenes From Anti-Trump Protests, 2016 November: Rust Belt, 2016 November: Autocracy: Rules for Survival, 2016 November: Rally in Brooklyn Park Condemns Swastikas and ‘Go Trump’ Graffiti
Trump-Carroll Defamation Trial: Jury Orders Trump to Pay Carroll $83.3 Million for Years of Defamation
--------- TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS--------
JAN. 6 RIOT ‘FUELED BY LIES,’ INDICTMENT SAYS
"Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted on Tuesday in connection with his widespread efforts to overturn the 2020 election following a sprawling federal investigation into his attempts to cling to power after losing the presidency. The indictment, filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington, accuses Mr. Trump of three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States; a second to obstruct an official government proceeding, the certification of the Electoral College vote; and a third to deprive people of a civil right, the right to have their votes counted. Mr. Trump was also charged with a fourth count of obstructing or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. ...”
Inauguration Protesters and Police Clash on Washington’s Streets
"A spate of violence erupted on Friday in the nation’s capital, as protesters damaged storefronts, threw rocks and bricks at police officers and lit a limousine on fire. Phalanxes of police officers used pepper spray, flash grenades and other nonlethal crowd-control tools to disperse the protesters. By the end of the day, six police officers had sustained minor injuries and more than 200 people had been arrested. Many of the protesters were dressed in black, wore face masks and carried flags associated with anti-fascist groups. They congregated on a series of streets just blocks from the parade where Donald J. Trump passed as he made his way to the White House for the first time as president, their activities creating a distraction as television networks played live footage of the clashes. ..."
NY Times
Members of Occupy Museums #J20 outside the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Artists Reckon With Trump’s Inauguration
"Kelli O’Hara sang 'A Cockeyed Optimist.' Chita Rivera delivered 'America.' Four more Broadway stars belted out 'I’m a Woman,' and a larger group made melody with 'What the World Needs Now Is Love.' In one of countless displays of cultural counterprogramming to Inauguration Day across the country, Broadway’s biggest stars — a group generally disheartened by the election of Donald J. Trump — performed show-tunes-with-a-message on Friday afternoon at Town Hall in Manhattan to raise money for social justice organizations. With Mr. Trump celebrating the start of his presidency, the singers celebrated art as a comfort, an inspiration and a rallying cry for the coming months and years. ..."
NY Times
An illustration of a crowd in front of the White House during Andrew Jackson's first inaugural reception in 1829.
The Wild Inauguration of Andrew Jackson, Trump’s Populist Predecessor
"Seeking to portray Donald J. Trump as a man of the people, some of his closest advisers have said he is the natural successor to President Andrew Jackson, America’s architect of political populism. With crowds streaming into Washington for the inauguration on Friday, commentators and historians were harking back to the inauguration of the seventh president on March, 4 1829, when a crowd of thousands mobbed the Capitol building and the White House, representing to many at the time the danger of the mob run amok. Biographers, historians and Mr. Trump’s own confidants have not been shy about drawing parallels. ..."
NY Times
A Dark Inaugural"Politicians, preparing for inaugurals, scurry for their histories. The Republican Senator Roy Blunt, who welcomed the crowd to Donald Trump’s Inauguration, chose to commemorate the peaceful transitions of the late eighteenth century, when partisan tensions were high and the Republic might not have survived. The Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, speaking just before the new President, read at length from a letter that Sullivan Ballou, a Union officer, wrote to his wife: 'I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us.' In the faces just behind the new President and his family, viewers could detect the partisan zigzag of our recent political history: the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas. ... This was a dark inaugural. The America Trump described was filled with victims: of 'inner city' poverty, of 'crime and drugs and gangs,' of 'rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.' But even starker was how forcefully Trump compressed history. ..."
New Yorker
Trump Impeached for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress
"The House of Representatives on Wednesday impeached President Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, making him the third president in history to be charged with committing high crimes and misdemeanors and face removal by the Senate. On a day of constitutional consequence and raging partisan tension, the votes on the two articles of impeachment fell largely along party lines, after a bitter debate that stretched into the evening and reflected the deep polarization gripping American politics in the Trump era. ... The impeachment votes set the stage for a historic trial beginning early next year in the Senate, which will have final say — 10 months before Mr. Trump faces re-election — on whether to acquit the 45th president or convict and remove him from office. The timing was uncertain, after Ms. Pelosi suggested late Wednesday that she might wait to send the articles to the Senate, holding them out as leverage in a negotiation on the terms of a trial. ..."
NY Times ((Video/Audio)
NY Times: Opinion - Trump Has Been Impeached. Republicans Are Following Him Down.
W - Impeachment of Donald Trump
Vanity Fair: Democrats Charge Trump With Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress
*****NY Times: After Impeachment, an Angry Trump Looks to Vindication in November
*****NY Times: Evangelical Magazine Christianity Today Calls for Trump’s Removal
2019 December: Panel Approves Impeachment Articles and Sends Charges for a House Vote, 2019 December: House Democrats Unveil Articles of Impeachment Against Trump
Trump Is Found Liable for Sexual Abuse and Defamation
"A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found former President Donald J. Trump liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages in a widely watched civil trial that sought to apply the accountability of the #MeToo era to a dominant political figure. The federal jury of six men and three women returned its verdict shortly after 3 p.m. after deliberating for only a few hours. The jury found that Ms. Carroll had not proved, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mr. Trump had raped her, as she had long claimed. ...”
******Vanity Fair: The Stunning Clarity of the E. Jean Carroll–Donald Trump Verdict
NY Times: New York Law Gave Jurors Three Types of Battery to Consider in Trump Case
NY Times: Read the Filled-Out Jury Verdict Form in the Trump-Carroll Case
In on the Joke
"Is Trump still a joke? It’s been two months since the election, and the mind still reels. We may never be able to handle the cognitive dissonance of Donald Trump, commander-in-chief, and Donald Trump, patron saint of talentless celebrities. The new president is a dangerous demagogue who fires up arenas with a hatefully catty speaking style that somehow evokes both Mussolini and your rambling Aunt Irene. This inescapable weirdness isn’t going to change when Trump takes office. Like prisoners huddled around the bulletin board on a demonic cruise ship, we’ll be forced to check the president’s cheerful Twitter posts to learn what horrors the new day will bring. ..."
Jacobin
2016 January: Donald Trump and the Joys of Toy Fascism, 2016 January: Sanders Is Not Trump, 2016 January: Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults: The Complete List (So Far), 2016 April: Lost in TRUMPLANDIA, 2016 November: Scenes From Anti-Trump Protests, 2016 November: Rust Belt, 2016 November: Autocracy: Rules for Survival, 2016 November: Rally in Brooklyn Park Condemns Swastikas and ‘Go Trump’ Graffiti, 2016 December: The Democratic Party Has Failed—We Need a Radical Vision to Defeat Trumpism, 2016 December: An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas, 2016 December: Sticky Notes Bearing Election Hopes and Fears Removed from Subway
Scenes From Anti-Trump Protests
"Thousands of people across the country marched, shut down highways, burned effigies and shouted angry slogans on Wednesday night to protest the election of Donald J. Trump as president. The demonstrations, fueled by social media, continued into the early hours of Thursday. The crowds swelled as the night went on but remained mostly peaceful. Protests were reported in cities as diverse as Dallas and Oakland and included marches in Boston; Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Seattle and Washington and at college campuses in California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In Oakland alone, the Police Department said, the crowd grew from about 3,000 people at 7 p.m. to 6,000 an hour later. ..."
NY Times - Not Our President’: Protests Spread After Donald Trump’s Election (Video)
Washington Post - ‘Not my president’: Thousands protest Trump in rallies across the U.S. (Video)
Dissent: Tomorrow’s Fight
"The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety. ..."
New Yorker: An American Tragedy
VOICE: It's Not Going to Be Okay
Jacobin: Politics Is the Solution by Megan Erickson, Katherine Hill, Matt Karp, Connor Kilpatrick, & Bhaskar Sunkara
Michael Moore’s “Morning After To-Do List” Facebook Post For Democrats Is Going Viral
2016 January: Donald Trump and the Joys of Toy Fascism, 2016 January: Sanders Is Not Trump, 2016 January: Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults: The Complete List (So Far), 2016 February: Bernie and the Millennials, 2016 April: Lost in TRUMPLANDIA, 2016 April: Bernie Sanders and the History of American Socialism, 2014 September: Anarchism in America (1983), 2015 August: The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders, 2016 August: Jill Stein, 2016 September: “The Spoiler” Speaks, 2016 September: Jill Stein’s Ideas Are Terrible. She Is Not the Savior the Left Is Looking For, 2016 October: Why Bernie Was Right.
Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines
“Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines. ...”
“About halfway into his Texas rally on Saturday evening, Donald J. Trump pivoted toward the teleprompter and away from a meandering set of grievances to rattle off a tightly prepared list of President Biden’s failings and his own achievements. ... Mr. Trump, who later went on to talk about ‘that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white,’ has left increasingly little doubt about his intentions, plotting an influential role in the 2022 midterm elections and another potential White House run. But a fresh round of skirmishes over his endorsements, fissures with the Republican base over vaccines — a word Mr. Trump conspicuously left unsaid at Saturday’s rally — and new polling all show how his longstanding vise grip on the Republican Party is facing growing strains. ...”
‘Trump Was at the Center’: Jan. 6 Hearing Lays Out Case in Vivid Detail
“The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol opened a landmark set of hearings on Thursday by showing video of aide after aide to former President Donald J. Trump testifying that his claims of a stolen election were false, as the panel laid out in meticulous detail the extent of the former president’s efforts to keep himself in office. Over about two hours, the panel offered new information about what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by Mr. Trump that culminated in the deadly assault on the Capitol. The panel’s leaders revealed that investigators heard testimony that Mr. Trump endorsed the hanging of his own vice president as a mob of his supporters descended on Congress. They also said they had evidence that members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. ...”
Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy, but Stops Short of Exonerating President on Obstruction
"The investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III found no evidence that President Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s 2016 election interference, according to a summary of the special counsel’s key findings made public on Sunday by Attorney General William P. Barr. Mr. Mueller, who spent nearly two years investigating Moscow’s determined effort to sabotage the last presidential election, found no conspiracy 'despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign,' Mr. Barr wrote in a letter to lawmakers. Mr. Mueller’s team drew no conclusions about whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice, Mr. Barr said, so he made his own decision. The attorney general and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, determined that the special counsel’s investigators had insufficient evidence to establish that the president committed that offense. ..."
***NY Times
***NY Times: Read Attorney General William Barr’s Summary of the Mueller Report
NY Times: As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York
NY Times: Mueller Delivers Report on Trump-Russia Investigation to Attorney General (Video)
FT: Robert Mueller delivers report on Donald Trump-Russia investigation (Video)
NY Times: For Trump and the System, a Turning Point and a Test (Video)
NY Times: Opinion - The Meaning of the Mueller Report
NY Times: Special Edition: Listen to ‘The Daily’ (Audio)
Guardian: What does the Mueller report mean for Trump? The key questions answered