Trump Is in Major Legal and Political Trouble — His Desperate Attempts to Escape Could Lead America to Catastrophe
Is it now time to imagine how far Trump and his Republican cronies in Congress might be able to push things? And how we, as Americans, might respond?
This isn’t the first time such a question has been raised.
A bit more than a week before the election of 2016—a week before Trump won the election—one of the few people on earth who’s really and truly studied Donald Trump up close and personal, Tony Schwartz, granted an interview to the British newspaper the Independent.
Schwartz, who wrote Trump’s book The Art of the Deal and spent months with Trump to gather information for the book, predicted that Trump would declare martial law. Not as a possibility, but as a near-certainty.
Schwartz predicted that Trump would do three specific things, although not necessarily all at once or in any particular order: He’d attack the free press; he’d compile an enemies list and begin getting revenge on those he thinks slighted him; and he’d declare martial law to solidify his power.
“When I said that,” Schwartz told the Independent, “I got a lot of rolling of the eyes from people in the media and other people to whom I was making that case. I think today, people do really begin to understand that this is a volatile man with very low self control.”
How would this happen? Andrew Buncombe, who interviewed Schwartz for the Independent, wrote: “Asked how Mr. Trump would go about undertaking such a drastic measure, [Schwartz] said many of Mr. Trump’s supporters were police, members of the border guards force and the ‘far right wing’ of the military.”
It’s enough to make you think that Charlottesville was just a dress rehearsal for our version of the Brownshirts, and that Trump is counting on the support of these “very fine people” if he ever needs them in a pinch. Our very own version of Kristallnacht could be not far off.
For example, imagine that Trump, his family members, and numerous Republicans are indicted for actual crimes, and, particularly with the Nunes faction of Congress, for conspiring to conceal or obstruct investigations of those crimes. And the indictment comes right after the election in November when Democrats have won control of one or both houses of Congress, but Republicans are still in charge until January.
This combination would present Trump and his GOP with both a problem and an opportunity.
The problem, of course, is that Trump, Jared, Don Jr., and the Republicans who’ve conspired with Trump like Devin Nunes (for example) might all be heading toward jail, and possibly even impeachment after the first week of the New Year.
The opportunity is to create a constitutional crisis and grab even more power and immunity for themselves, possibly even “temporarily suspending” the 2020 presidential elections.
There are numerous possible scenarios; I’ll just outline a few trigger points, and you can fill in the rest.
Trump thrives on creating crises, and then “solving” the crisis he, himself created. He did it with DACA, with Obamacare, and with North Korea. It seems he’s trying the same playbook with Iran and immigration/asylum.
But what if the crisis he creates in this case involved what looked like widespread violence?
The Constitution gives Congress (controlled by the GOP) the power to “suppress insurrections,” while numerous laws including the Patriot Act and its successors give the president the power to declare various levels of emergency or even martial law. (It’s been done before; Lincoln did it and even suspended habeas corpus, which was clearly unconstitutional.)
In 2004, the Congressional Research Service (a federal agency that researches legal questions for members of Congress) looked into whether a president could suspend elections in a time of crisis. They concluded: “While the Executive Branch does not currently have this power, it appears that Congress may be able to delegate this power to the Executive Branch by enacting a statute.”
Is it inconceivable that our current Congress might do such a thing? Wouldn’t it depend on how many people were in the streets protesting (after the election it was a million-plus) and how many right-wing open-carry armed thugs show up?
If Heather Heyer was only the first anti-Trump protester murdered by white supremacists, and dozens or hundreds more were to fall to the guns or bombs of Trump’s Very Fine People, Congress may well consider it a state of emergency.
This was, after all, the exact scenario that Timothy McVeigh thought he would bring about. Following the Turner Diaries script, known to every white supremacist, McVeigh believed that President Bill Clinton would react to the Oklahoma City bombing with widespread gun control, which would cause all the good well-armed white people to start a killing frenzy against people of color and bring about the Aryan forces’ “triumph.”
And McVeigh’s thinking on the subject is widely shared in the hard-right-wing underground today.
We Americans tend to think of ourselves as totally unique, but numerous democratic republics have gone down this or similar roads in past generations. As Trump biographer Tony Schwartz noted, “Just look at any country that has been taken over by the military. He’d say there is a threat to the republic and the military needs to crack down and he would start with curfews, and the stop and frisk of anyone who is not white, male and rich.”
But what about the power of the Article III courts to restrain Trump, you might ask?
So far, with his Muslim ban and his brutal confinement of refugee children, Trump has gone along with the courts. But consider his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson, the man whose picture Trump hung by his desk in the Oval Office.
Not just the lower courts, but the Supreme Court itself told Jackson that he couldn’t do things—twice—and both times he simply defied them. One was ending the second National Bank, and the other was the genocidal Trail of Tears.
John Marshall was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time. President Jackson simply ignored the earlier SCOTUS ruling in the constitutionality of the bank (McCulloch v Maryland), and ignored legislation supporting the Court and the bank that passed through both the House and the Senate.
Ignoring the law and legal precedent, Jackson proceeded to shut the bank down, an action that, in part (along with paying off the national debt), produced the deepest and longest depression in the history of the United States.
And when Marshall ordered him not to forcibly relocate the Cherokee Indians from Georgia to Oklahoma (indirectly; the case had to do with a Vermont man held in Georgia who was going to be relocated along with the Cherokee), Jackson was said to have bragged to his friends, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”
So, what if Trump were to simply follow the example of his hero, Jackson?
If Mueller used federal courts to indict Trump and his merry band, and Trump directed the police agencies of the U.S. to ignore the order (as Jackson directed the U.S. Army to ignore the Supreme Court and relocate the Cherokee, and they complied), then Mueller may find that he has precisely as much power over Trump and his family and friends as Chief Justice John Marshall had over Andrew Jackson.
This wouldn’t just provoke a constitutional crisis; it’s the very definition of one.
As Alexander Hamilton noted in #78 of the Federalist Papers, “The judiciary… has no influence over either the sword [President] or the purse [Congress]; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” (Capitals Hamilton’s.)
But Trump doesn’t need a fight with Mueller in the courts to provoke a crisis: war works just as well.
FDR declared martial law in Hawaii (which wasn’t even a state then) after Pearl Harbor, and [then-General] Andrew Jackson declared martial law in New Orleans during the War of 1812. (There’s that name again…)
Provoking Iran or North Korea into a limited war may give Trump all the power he needs.
And, as George W. Bush noted to his biographer Mickey Herskowitz in 1999, war gives a president political capital. Bush even thought he’d get enough political capital from invading Iraq (this was before he was elected, keep in mind) that he could use it to privatize Social Security.
“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker that Bush told him.
“My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it,” Bush said, adding, “If I have a chance to invade…. if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”
(Much like Schwartz writing Trump’s autobiography, Herskowitz wrote the first draft of George W. Bush’s autobiography A Charge to Keep. We should attend to the warnings of presidential biographers.)
Privatizing Social Security was very, very important to George W. Bush (maybe as important as staying out of jail is to Trump). Bush ran an unsuccessful campaign for the House of Representatives in 1978 in Texas on that singular platform.
And, after winning reelection and being sworn back into office in 2005, Bush began a campaign, traveling all across the country, trying to convince people privatization was a good idea.
As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington Bureau Chief Marc Sandalow wrote the day after Bush won reelection, “President Bush proclaimed his election as evidence that Americans embrace his plans to reform Social Security… Bush staked his claim to a broad mandate and announced his top priorities at a post-election news conference, saying his 3.5 million vote victory had won him political capital that he would spend enacting his conservative agenda.”
“I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” Bush told reporters. “It is my style.”
The more Bush traveled pitching the idea, though, the more people hated it. He ultimately gave it up, as Brookings reported.
But if Bush was willing to start a war with Iraq to get himself reelected and privatize Social Security, imagine how much more motivated Trump may be to start a war—with anybody, anywhere—if he saw his financial empire slipping away, his presidency imperiled, and his children facing jail time.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (that country’s version of NPR/PBS) is reporting right now that Donald Trump is studying plans to bomb Iran as soon as a month from now. To quote the article that is rocking Australia right now: “Senior figures in the Turnbull Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, perhaps as early as next month, and that Australia is poised to help identify possible targets.”
If Trump believes that Bush was right that war is good for politics and lifts war-making presidents and parties, perhaps this is his midterm strategy in the face of terrible poll numbers. Tragically, such a bombing could well bring Iran’s allies, including Russia and China, into a larger war, triggering World War III in a manner similar to how World War I spiraled out of control.
Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, and early in the Trump presidency, it was nearly impossible to imagine the things that he would later do and get away with.
That failure of imagination has cost us dearly.
While the time for freak-out is hopefully far in the future, imagining and gaming out our response to some of the worst-case and most extreme possibilities is not at all a hysterical reaction. If anything, it’s the essence of prudence.
What do you think he could do? And how should we best react?
An entire generation of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards are aging into their twilight years right now wishing they’d had such imagination in the early 1930s.
It’s time for a conversation.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... e-it-could
absence of a conscience
Donald Trump could be ready to order a strike against Iran, Australian Government figures say
Exclusive by political editor Andrew Probyn and defence reporter Andrew Greene
Thu at 8:31pm
Updated
US President Donald Trump points a finger straight ahead Photo: Australian Government sources believe the US is prepared to strike Iran's nuclear capability. (AP: Markus Schreiber)
Senior figures in the Turnbull Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, perhaps as early as next month, and that Australia is poised to help identify possible targets.
Key points:
Senior Government figures say Australian defence facilities would likely play a role in identifying possible targets
But another senior source, in security, emphasises there is a difference between providing intelligence and "active targeting"
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he has no reason to believe the US is preparing for a confrontation
It comes amid intense sabre-rattling by US President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani.
The ABC has been told Australian defence facilities would likely play a role in identifying targets in Iran, as would British intelligence agencies.
But a senior security source emphasised there was a big difference between providing accurate intelligence and analysis on Iran's facilities and being part of a "kinetic" mission.
"Developing a picture is very different to actually participating in a strike," the source said.
"Providing intelligence and understanding as to what is happening on the ground so that the Government and allied governments are fully informed to make decisions is different to active targeting."
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said this morning he had no reason to believe the US was preparing for a military confrontation.
"President Trump has made his views very clear to the whole world, but this story … has not benefited from any consultation with me, the Foreign Minister, the Defence Minister or the Chief of the Defence Force," he said.
The top-secret Pine Gap joint defence facility in the Northern Territory is considered crucial among the so-called "Five Eyes" intelligence partners — the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand — for its role in directing American spy satellites.
A warning sign next to a road says "No through road. Joint defence facility Pine Gap. Turn around now." Photo: Pine Gap is considered crucial to Five Eyes intelligence partners. (Wikimedia Commons, file photo)
Analysts from the little-known spy agency Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation would also be expected to play a part.
Canada would be unlikely to play a role in any military action in Iran, nor would the smallest Five Eyes security partner New Zealand, sources said.
Iran is a signatory to international agreements such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is not known to currently possess any weapons of mass destruction, but Mr Rouhani has recently boasted his nation's nuclear industry is advancing at a fast pace.
Last month Iran's nuclear chief opened a new nuclear enrichment facility that he said would comply with the nuclear deal Tehran signed with world powers in 2015.
Middle East braces for Trump
Middle East braces for Trump
As Israel faces off against Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, all eyes are on Donald Trump's next move.
Any US-led strike on Iranian targets would be fraught for a region bristling with tensions. Israel would have reason to be anxious about retaliation, given Iran rejects Israel's right to exist.
That said, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in April invoked the so-called "Begin Doctrine" that calls on the Jewish state to ensure nations hostile to Israel be prevented from developing a nuclear weapons capability.
"Israel will not allow regimes that seek our annihilation to acquire nuclear weapons," Mr Netanyahu said.
An Australian Government source said when it came to Iran, Australia relied on intelligence sourced from its Five Eyes partners, not Israel.
Government split on whether Trump's tweets are real threats
While some in the Turnbull Government firmly believe Mr Trump is prepared to use military force against Iran, others maintain it might be more bluster, given the consequence of conflict with Tehran might include unpredictable, dangerous responses in the Middle East.
Earlier this week, Mr Trump fired off an all-caps tweet directed at the Iranian President, seemingly warning of war:
He was responding to Mr Rouhani, who was quoted telling Iranian diplomats: "America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace and war with Iran is the mother of all wars.
"Do not play with the lion's tail or else you will regret it," he said.
Mr Trump has since adjusted his rhetoric, suggesting Washington is ready to go back to the negotiating table with Tehran for a new nuclear deal.
"I withdrew the United States from the horrible one-sided Iran nuclear deal, and Iran is not the same country anymore," he told a convention in Kansas City.
"We're ready to make a deal."
Donald Trump, in the background, gazes at Malcolm Turnbull as he speaks at a podium with his hands gesturing Photo: Malcolm Turnbull has previously said he and Donald Trump had "different perspectives" on the Iran nuclear deal. (AP: Carolyn Kaster)
Grappling with whether Mr Trump's Twitter missives should be believed has become a global quest — and not just his tweets about Iran or North Korea.
In response to the US President's all-caps tweet on Monday, a high-ranking Iranian army official told the ISNA news agency, a Tehran Government mouthpiece, that Mr Trump's threats were merely "psychological warfare".
General Gholam Hossein Gheibparvar, the chief of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard's volunteer Basij force, said Mr Trump "won't dare" take military action against Iran.
It was an assessment echoed by Iranian MP Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, who told Associated Press he doubted the escalating rhetoric would lead to a military confrontation.
Australia is urging Iran to be a force for peace: Bishop
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has emphasised diplomatic efforts to bring Iran to heel.
"Australia is urging Iran to be a force for peace and stability in the region," she told ABC's AM program on Thursday.
"The relationship between the United States and Iran is a matter for them.
"What we are looking to do is to ensure that all parties embrace peaceful and stable principles to ensure that our region is safe."
Julie Bishop speaking at AUSMIN with Marise Payne, Mike Pompeo, and James Mattis Photo: Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Defence Minister Marise Payne have been speaking with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Secretary of Defence James Mattis at AUSMIN in San Francisco this week. (Twitter: Secretary Pompeo)
Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne, when asked whether Mr Trump's threats against Iran should be believed, said: "Certainly President Trump has indicated that he's a person who's prepared to act in a way that previous presidents haven't.
"And for that reason, one should always take anything that he says extremely seriously."
US Secretary of Defence James Mattis reinforced America's hard line on Iran while speaking alongside Ms Bishop, Defence Minister Marise Payne and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo at the AUSMIN meeting in San Francisco mid-week.
Mr Mattis said Iran had been a destabilising influence throughout the region.
"The only reason that the murderer Assad is still in power [in Syria] — the primary reason — is because Iran has stuck by him, reinforced him, funded him," he said.
"We see the same kind of malfeasance down in Yemen, where they're fomenting more violence down there. We've seen their disruptive capabilities demonstrated from Bahrain to the kingdom.
"And it's time for Iran to shape up and show responsibility as a responsible nation.
"It cannot continue to show irresponsibility as some revolutionary organisation that is intent on exporting terrorism, exporting disruption across the region. So I think the President was making very clear that they're on the wrong track."
Is that a tweet or foreign policy?
Is that a tweet or foreign policy?
Australia is still learning how to deal with an unpredictable US President in Donald Trump.
The ABC understands AUSMIN discussed Iran, largely in the context of increasing sanctions on Tehran.
"We're concerned about its ballistic missile program and we talked about ways of constructively engaging with Iran to prevent the development of that program," Ms Bishop told AM.
"But more specifically, we talked about urging Iran to not support proxy groups, whether it's in Syria, Yemen or elsewhere."
Mr Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May and now seeks complete, verifiable and total denuclearisation, rather than the roll-back and temporary freeze of Iran's nuclear program.
The US plans on reinstating sanctions lifted by the Iran deal by November 4. This includes trade and investment by US firms with Iran and sanctions on Iranian oil exports.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-27/d ... y/10037728
Presidential election: Donald Trump will impose martial law if he wins, says ‘Art of the Deal’ ghostwriter | The Independent
Wednesday 26 October 2016 18:00
Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of the 1987 bestseller, has said he regrets the way it presented ‘the most dangerous human being I have ever met’ in a falsely positive light
Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of the 1987 bestseller, has said he regrets the way it presented ‘the most dangerous human being I have ever met’ in a falsely positive light ( AP )
Tony Schwartz spent the best part of a year trailing Donald Trump when he ghostwrote the tycoon’s 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal.
He believes he knows him well enough to predict that if Mr Trump is elected president, he would try and impose martial law, attack the free press and launch an attack on people he felt had slighted him that could make Richard Nixon’s actions against his enemies appear like "child’s play".
“I started out saying … that my highest fear was that because he was so thin-skinned, and because he is so insecure, he is a huge risk to set off, to punch in, the nuclear codes, because he happens to be irritated or frustrated by an enemy,” Mr Schwartz told The Independent.
tony-art1.jpg
Mr Schwartz said he was embarrassed by his work with Mr Trump (PBS)
“When I said that, I got a lot of rolling of the eyes from people in the media and other people to whom I was making that case. I think today, people do really begin to understand that this is a volatile man with very low self control.”
Mr Schwartz first broke his silence and revealed his views about what he considered Mr Trump’s unsuitability for the White House this summer, in an extended interview with The New Yorker. At the time, he expressed sadness about helping produce a glowing portrait of the businessman, that was in reality a work of fiction. He said he was obliged to “put lipstick on a pig”.
“I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is,” he said.
Since then, Mr Schwartz has been an outspoken thorn in the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign, launching scathing assaults from his Twitter account and appearing frequently as a guest on television panels.
On Friday, he will be speaking to students at Oxford University, with an address entitled “Into the belly of the beast: How Donald Trump led me on the path to dharma”.
But if Mr Schwartz can claim to have found a position of Zen calmness, on the topic of the man he once trailed, he can sound impassioned, emotional and even worried.
Most polls and simulations suggest that Mr Trump faces a very tough battle to beat Ms Clinton, but if he does make it to the White House, Mr Schwartz said he believed three things would happen very quickly.
“On day one he would end a free press,” he said, speaking from Washington DC. “In any way that he could, he would use the government to shut down a free press, and listen, he has plenty of precedents for doing that, including his hero Vladimir Putin.”
He said he believed Mr Trump would then “conduct an ‘enemies’ campaign that would make what Nixon did in the Sixties and early Seventies look like child’s play”. He said he would go after every person he felt had wronged him in the the most “intense way” he felt he could get away with.
Donald Trump said he'd love to fight Vice President Joe Biden
He added: “I think before very long, its quite possible that he would find a way to declare martial law.”
Asked how Mr Trump would go about undertaking such a drastic measure, he said many of Mr Trump’s supporters were police, members of the border guards force and the “far right wing” of the military.
“He controls the levers of powers. There is nobody standing between him and punching those nuclear codes other than the guy standing there is who is obligated to do what he is asked to do,” he said.
“Just look at any country that has been taken over by the military. He’d say there is a threat to the republic and the military needs to crack down and he would start with curfews, and the stop and frisk of anyone who is not white, male and rich.”
Mr Trump's campaign did not respond to inquiries. However, the tycoon has over the months dismissed Mr Schwartz’s comments, saying on Twitter: “Dummy writer @tonyschwartz, who wanted to do a second book with me for years (I said no), is now a hostile basket case who feels jilted!”
On another instance, he wrote: “I haven’t seen @tonyschwartz in many years, he hardly knows me. Never liked his style. Super lib, Crooked H supporter. Irrelevant dope.”
Asked if he was being paranoid about the dangers of a Trump presidency, Mr Schwartz said: “There is that phrase, just because you’re paranoid does’t mean people aren’t out to go you. I think it’s a healthy paranoia.”
He added: “It’s just a deep knowledge of who this human being is, and a recognition … that he is a classic sociopath, the most critical quality of a sociopath is an absence of conscience. It is a reflection of deep inner emptiness and the way to fill that emptiness is through power.”
He said that however extreme and bleak his comments sounded, they were not made as someone who was crazed or out control, but as a “trained observer of human beings”.
“This is the most dangerous human being I have met. I am not saying he is the most dangerous human being who has ever lived,” he said. “But he is the most dangerous human being I have ever met by a long distance, by virtue of the absence of a conscience.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/peop ... 82086.html
