DragonI

Trump and His Aides Seek to Dismiss Mueller Hearings as a Desperate Act

The president said that he had no intention of watching the former special counsel testify before Congress, but then he added, “Maybe I’ll see a little bit of it.”

www.nytimes.com

The president’s tone was echoed by his aides. Kellyanne Conway, his counselor, called the hearings “a do-over of the do-over of the do-over” and said they were an insult to taxpayers and American democracy.

“The ‘Squad’ is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart,” Mr. Trump wrote. “They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left, and were against humanitarian aid at the Border...And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!”

Mr. Trump went on to claim that “there’s no racial tension” in the United States, citing unemployment rates for African-Americans and other minorities. “We have fantastic relationships with the African-American community, and I think you’ll see that in 2020.”

Mr. Mueller is scheduled to testify before two congressional committees starting at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Cable and broadcast television networks have said they intend to air the hearings live. 

Conspiracy theorists are already trying to discredit the bombing suspect’s pro-Trump van

Not even authorities' confirmation that suspected mail bomber Cesar Sayoc owned a van covered in pro-Trump stickers is enough to convince some that this isn't all just a "false flag" operation.

theweek.com

1. Cesar Sayoc IS a DIE HARD REPUBLICAN EXTREMIST
2. A fanatical Trump Cult member. Indoctrinated by Dear Leader.
3. The FIRST #MAGAbomber #DomesticTerrorist
4. Cesar’s threats against his targets on Twitter
5. Photos of Cesar at Trump rallies and #TRE45ON inauguration
6. Not a single bomb was mailed to a Republican

• Loomer on Twitter Friday wondered aloud why the suspected bomber's van, which the FBI seized Friday, looks "brand new." 
• Sayoc's van was covered in pro-Trump stickers, including some that depicted crosshairs over prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton. But Loomer dismissed this by contending the stickers seemed to be "printed yesterday," implying a wild conspiracy is afoot.
• In another tweet, she sarcastically asked for "nature-proof Trump stickers" and questioned why the ones on the van weren't damaged in Hurricane Michael.

• made a similarly wild argument on his show Friday, using the fact that the stickers aren't faded from sunlight as "evidence" that this is all a ruse, The New York Times' Trip Gabriel reports. This theory is despite Sayoc's apparent longstanding social media profiles, that are reportedly full of right-wing conspiracy theories, threats against Democrats, and videos taken at Trump rallies. 
• Sayoc's fingerprints were discovered on one of the pipe bombs, authorities said. The "false flag" theory is also in spite of the fact that numerous Twitter users have posted pictures of the van covered in the same stickers that they say were taken up to a year ago.

Many in the conservative media over the past few days have been floating conspiracy theories that a Democrat was responsible for the attempted attacks or that the entire thing was a hoax. Limbaugh previously suggested that it would "make a lot of sense for a Democrat operative or Democrat-inculcated lunatic to do it." 

Puerto Rico's Hurricane María Death Toll On Par With 9/11 Terrorist Attack

In October 2017, weeks after Hurricane María first made landfall in Puerto Rico, Donald Trump praised Governor Ricardo Rossello on the disaster’s low death toll.

www.theroot.com|Anne Branigin

In yesterday’s White House press briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the administration’s response, calling it the “the largest domestic disaster response mission in history,” according to Time.

She added that Trump “[remained] proud of all of the work the Federal family undertook to help our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico.”

The Puerto Rican government just updated the official death count for Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975 people. @realDonaldTrump and his Administration utterly failed in their response, and US citizens died. That's the appalling, tragic reality. https://t.co/S03fuuHd2J

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 29, 2018

That MSNBC Interview Was Not the First Time Kellyanne Conway Referred to the "Bowling Green Massacre"

Conway used the same wording in a conversation with Cosmopolitan.com on Jan. 29.

www.cosmopolitan.com

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”, Joseph Goebbels

Trump Promised White Supremacy. Now He’s Delivering It.

He's implementing his campaign platform—and he's only getting started.

newrepublic.com

My colleague Jeet Heer argued recently that top Trump advisor Steve Bannon, the white nationalist former chairman of the racist propaganda website Breitbart, is responsible for the consistency. “providing a coherent political philosophy for the president’s scattered ideas.” In other words, Trump isn’t a vessel for whichever Svengali-like figure happens to gain influence with him. He and Bannon share similar instincts, but Bannon is deliberate enough to make Trump’s id-driven pronouncements cohere.

There’s a precedent to the Trump-Bannon White House, according to Heer, in the relationship between Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, who “[gave] ideological coherence to his leader’s rants and blabber.” But we don’t have to turn the clock back to World War II to find a harbinger of their partnership. Trump ran a racist campaign for months without Bannon by his side. He won the GOP primary by portraying white America as under siege by immigrants and Muslims, shut out of urban life by what Breitbart would refer to as “Black Crime.”

The substantive platform, though, didn’t become clear until Bannon joined the campaign—after Trump had already accepted the GOP nomination—and the very policy agenda Trump is now implementing came into focus. Trump came up with the wall and the ban on his own, but Bannon threaded them together, and then into a broader plan of action that has white nationalists across the country swooning. We can safely assume that Bannon has been giving ideological coherence to Trump’s rants and blabber, because that’s what he’s done for Trump all along.