SOCIAL CRITICISM REVIEW |
SELECTED READINGS
|
SPECIAL: FASCISM IN AMERICA (2017-)
"These are the times that try men's souls" - Thomas Paine
This is how fascism comes to America
"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." - Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism
A totalitarian movement thrives on the denial and destruction of reality, offering alienated and rootless people a coherent and empowering counter-narrative, a false reality actualized through thoughtlessness, lies, disruption, dehumanization, lawlessness, propaganda, violence, terror, domination, and radical evil. Hence the importance of safeguarding democracy with a free press, good education, critical thinking, and participatory self-government. – "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them." - Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Donald Trump - Schoolyard bully, archetypal psychopath, malignant narcissist, ruthless machiavellian, pathological liar, amoral charlatan, antisocial ratcatcher, racist hatemonger, apocalyptic arsonist, unbridled demagogue, mob boss, would-be tyrant, attack dog, crass misogynist, sexual predator, manipulative and exploitative, entitled and victimized, angry and vengeful, violent, cruel and sadistic, impulsive and reckless, vain and insecure, a scared child, driven by instant gratification, heedless of consequences, unhinged from reality, obviously demented, morally bankrupt. An authoritarian megalomaniac - paranoid and vindictive - with his personality flaws aggravated by power. Mentally unfit for the presidency. – But the real illness is a society that is in denial
- James Hamblin (The Atlantic) - Donald Trump: sociopath? Taking his biographer's claim seriously
- Henry Alford (Vanity Fair) - Is Donald Trump actually a narcissist? Therapists weigh in!
- Alex Morris (Rolling Stone) - Trump and the pathology of narcissism. Diagnosing the president was off-limits to experts – until a textbook case entered the White House
- Psychology Today - Shrinks battle over diagnosing Donald Trump
- David Ignatius (Washington Post) - Donald Trump is the American Machiavelli
- Benjamin Hufbauer (Politico) - How Trump's favorite movie Citizen Kane explains him. He never believed in anything except himself
- David Auerbach (LA Review of Books) - How Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities predicted the rise of Donald Trump
- Neil Macdonald (CBC News) - The U.S. descends into brutality as the real-life Archie Bunker is sworn in as president
- Cole Moreton (Independent) - Donald Trump: How the tycoon's message of racism and hatred has struck a chord with evangelical Americans
- Sarah Posner (Washington Post) - Trump as televangelist: The scam of the prosperity gospel explains why the faith healer's opulence attracts evangelical voters
- Jim Wallis (Sojourners) - House of lies: The pathological lying of the president of the United States is a moral crisis for the nation. It is time to speak truth to power
- Neal Gabler (billmoyers.com) - The 100 days that turned America upside down: Trump promised to disrupt the country. He has also disrupted truth and morality
- Los Angeles Times - Our dishonest president: Trump's erratic, impulsive, narcissistic personality poses a threat to our democracy
- Richard North Patterson (Boston Globe) - The presidency as psychodrama
- Henry Giroux (The Conversation) - Donald Trump's passion for cruelty
- Michael Moore - Use this moment to create a world without abusers
- Michelle Goldberg (New York Times) - The Caligula administration lives on. The Epstein case is a reminder of the depraved milieu from which our president sprang. Sexual abuse scandals, corruption and misogyny continue to swirl around him. He boasts about sexually assaulting women, and leaves behind a trail of accusers. He can only show empathy for the abusers and disdain for the abused. And we continue to tolerate behavior that is right out in the open
- Dan McAdams (The Guardian) - It's an alpha male thing: what dominant chimpanzees and Donald Trump have in common. His incendiary tweets are the human equivalent of a charging display. Designed to intimidate his foes and rally his submissive base, these verbal outbursts reinforce the president's dominance by reminding everybody of his wrath and his force
- David Brooks (New York Times) - When the world is led by a child
- James Poniewozik (Vanity Fair) - How Trump learned to control TV – and what happened when TV began to control him as president. A symbiotic relationship turns into a nightmarish feedback loop (Excerpt from Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America)
- Timothy Egan (New York Times) - The beast is us | Burning down the house
- Peter Wehner (New York Times) - Declaration of disruption. We have as president a nihilist and an institutional arsonist
- John Feffer (TomDispatch) - Trump the arsonist and his apocalyptic paranoia: evangelical prophecy, anti-globalist survivalism, and alt-right racist conspiracies
- Ava Siegler & Karin Kamp (billmoyers.com) - The president's behavior is at odds with the values we try to instill in our children (On How Do I Explain This to My Kids? Parenting in the Age of Trump)
- W.J.T. Mitchell (LA Review of Books) - American psychosis: Trumpism and the nightmare of history
- Tony Schwartz (The Guardian) - Trump is still a scared child. We need to speak out against his culture of fear
- Stephen Greenblatt - The tyrant and his enablers. How is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant? According to Shakespeare, it could not happen without widespread complicity (From Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics)
- Lance Dodes, Gail Sheehy, Philip Zimbardo, Rosemary Sword & James Gilligan (Newsweek) - The most dangerous man in the world (Excerpts from The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump)
- John Gartner - Donald Trump is bad, mad, and getting worse. He evinces the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible for a leader (From The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump)
- Robert Jay Lifton & Bill Moyers (billmoyers.com) - Psychiatrists and mental health experts have a duty to warn that the president is dangerously unfit (On The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump). Trump is the most dangerous person in the world because of his solipsism – amplified by malignant normality: the impunity with which he can violate the norms of civil society – in combination with his finger on the nuclear trigger
- Robert Jay Lifton (Dissent) - Trump's assault on reality: A major segment of our society now ignores or defies the principles of reason, evidence, and shared knowledge that are required for the function of a democracy
- Thomas Singer - America's narcissism and wounded collective self. On the 2016 presidential election, American culture, and the soul of America
- Bandy Lee (editor) - The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (pdf)
- Bandy Lee, Edwin Fisher, Leonard Glass, James Merikangas & James Gilligan - Mental health analysis of president Trump based on the Mueller report
- Bandy Lee, Leonard Glass & Edwin Fisher (Boston Globe) - Looking at the Mueller report from a mental health perspective
- Bandy Lee & Chauncy DeVega (Salon) - Leading mental health experts study the Mueller report: Trump can no longer see reality. He is mentally unfit for the presidency, delusional and destructive, an imminent threat to the United States and the world, and should have his powers severely restricted. Having passed a point of no return, the delusion is normalized as institutional complicity with a destructive presidency. The greatest sign of danger is the failure to treat Trump as a national and global emergency
- Bandy Lee (MedPage Today) - Normalizing a dangerous and mentally sick president is a formula for tyranny. How the American Psychiatric Association sickened America
- Peter Wehner (The Atlantic) - Trump's personality disorder: Our democratic duty is to prevent a psychologically and morally unfit person from becoming president
- House bill - Mandating a procedure for medically and psychiatrically evaluating a president who is suspected of being incapacitated to a degree that would require removal under the 25th Amendment
- House bill - Restricting the first-use of nuclear weapons
- Steven Hassan (Daily Beast) - Alarming parallels between Donald Trump and a murderous cult leader
- Tom Nichols (USA Today) - As America tops 4 million COVID cases, the cult of Donald Trump has become a death cult
- Chris Hedges (Truthdig) - The cult of Trump. If we fail to confront the cult leader and his origin – the corporate state responsible for our failed democracy – we will continue the march toward tyranny
- Janja Lalich & Tom Jacobs (Pacific Standard) - A cult expert finds cult-like behavior in Trump's Republican party: strict enforcement of total loyalty to a charismatic but volatile leader
- Alexander Hurst (New Republic) - Escape from the Trump cult
- Margaret Thaler Singer (Psychology Today) - Coming out of the cults
- Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman - Challenge cult members with questions
- Steven Hassan - Combatting Cult Mind Control (pdf)
Every sane person would agree that a child should not have access to an assault weapon. Nor anyone with mental health issues. So isn't it utterly irresponsible to give this mad and bad child-president sole authority over the launch of America's nuclear arsenal?
"A cult is a mirror of what is inside the cult leader." - Margaret Thaler Singer, Cults in Our Midst
"Real power is... fear." - Donald Trump (In Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House)
Free speech and a free press – president Trump attacks the free press as "the enemy of the people" to discredit, intimidate and silence his critics
- Bernie Sanders (In These Times) - How corporate media threatens our democracy. This is a crisis we can no longer afford to ignore
- George Monbiot (The Guardian) - Frightened by Donald Trump? Wait until you hear about the corporate misinformation network
- David Bornstein & Tina Rosenberg (New York Times) - A plea for media reform to also report good news: The best defense against the fear-mongering of the demagogue is to report on the decency, competence and courage of people determined to fix their society
- Francine Prose (The Guardian) - A top White House official told the media to "keep its mouth shut". That's a threat
- David Remnick (New Yorker) - Donald Trump and the enemies of the American people
- Committee to Protect Journalists - CPJ chairman says Trump is threat to press freedom
- BBC - "Enemies of the people": Trump remark echoes history's worst tyrants
- Amanda Erickson (Washington Post) - Trump called the news media an "enemy of the American People". Here's a history of the term
- Andrew Higgins (New York Times) - Trump embraces "Enemy of the People". A phrase with a venomous past now rattles American politics
- Roy Peter Clark (Poynter) - "An Enemy of the People." In Trump's anti-press rhetoric, a dark echo from the past
- Arthur Gregg Sulzberger (New York Times) - President Trump's anti-press rhetoric is divisive and increasingly dangerous. Labeling journalists "the enemy of the people" undermines democracy, erodes free speech and a free press, and will lead to violence | David Remnick (New Yorker) - Trump vs. the Times: inside an off-the-record meeting
- Arthur Gregg Sulzberger (New York Times) - Trump's dangerous anti-press rhetoric is inspiring autocratic leaders abroad
- U.S. Senate resolution - The Senate unanimously "affirms that the press is not the enemy of the people"; "reaffirms the vital and indispensable role that the free press serves to inform the electorate, uncover the truth, act as a check on the inherent power of the government, further national discourse and debate, and otherwise advance the most basic and cherished democratic norms and freedoms of the United States"; and "condemns the attacks on the institution of the free press and views efforts to systematically undermine the credibility of the press as an attack on the democratic institutions of the United States"
- Bob Salsberg (Boston Globe) - Trump's dirty war against the free press. The Globe rallies newspapers to protect the free press from Trump's attacks: We are not the enemy of the people. An attack on the First Amendment is unacceptable. We are a free and independent press, it is one of the most sacred principles enshrined in the Constitution | Boston Globe editorial
- New York Times - America's newspapers join in an affirmation of the fundamental institution of the free press. Being increasingly under attack, the free press and the public are in it together
- The Guardian - Speaking truth to power: The Guardian stands with the US press in its efforts to maintain the objectivity and the moral boundaries that president Trump is doing so much to destroy
- David Remnick (New Yorker) - Trump and the enemies of the people. The language of Stalinism has always come at a cost. During the Stalinist repression everyone lived in fear, and millions were shot or banished to the Gulag. Trump's assault on the press as enemies of the people – and our refusal to bend to it – is essential to the future of American democracy and people everywhere
- Emma Goldman - Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People
- Albert Hunt (Bloomberg) - No Mr. Trump, the press is only the enemy of lies
- Klaus Brinkbäumer (Der Spiegel) - Trump, Erdogan and the assault on the free press
- Thomas Edsall (New York Times) - Donald Trump would like freedom from the press
- Robert Reich - Trump's two-step strategy to take over the truth
- Los Angeles Times - Trump's war on journalism
- James Fallows (The Atlantic) - Donald Trump's attacks on the free press undermine the public's capacity to think, act, and defend democracy
- David Zurawik (Baltimore Sun) - The more Trump attacks, the more popular culture articulates and celebrates the role of the free press
- Bret Stephens (Time) - Trump's attacks on the media signal: Truth is what he can get away with. – Maintaining intellectual integrity in the age of Trump
- Marc Fisher (Washington Post) - Trump borrowed his press tactics from Joe McCarthy
- Norman Pearlstine (Columbia Journalism Review) - The Apprentice: Donald Trump and Joe McCarthy. Lying, bullying, and trying to stifle dissent. Like all things Trump, it will be far bigger than the original
- Berl Falbaum (Oakland Press) - Donald Trump's Roy Cohn connection
- John Avlon (Daily Beast) - "The Press is the Enemy": How president Nixon's hatred of the press led to his downfall
- Frank Bruni (New York Times) - The master of psychological projection toys with "treasonous". Trump divines in others what's so deeply embedded in himself
- Jeff Flake - The president has it precisely backward: The free press is the guardian of democracy. Despotism is the enemy of the people. The president's attacks on truth are moral vandalism, which we can no longer compound with our silent acquiescence (speech to the Senate)
- Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NBC News) - Being Trump's mouthpiece is risky for Fox News – and democracy. As a sycophantic echo chamber it's like state media in strongman regimes
- Jane Mayer (New Yorker) - The making of the Fox News White House. Fox News has always been partisan. But has it become propaganda?
- Lee Bollinger (Columbia Journalism Review) - Can the First Amendment save us? Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are in peril. And with that the ethos of tolerance and the power of reasoned debate
- Lee Bollinger - Free speech is the foundation for a fearless and robust debate. It protects against suppression of unpopular and dissenting voices, victimization of vulnerable groups, attacks on the media, and the rise of demagoguery, with its disdain for facts, reason, expertise, and tolerance
- David Cole (The Nation) - Donald Trump vs. the First Amendment. Confronted with an abusive president, and a failure of the separation of powers, citizens can find rescue in their extra check – enshrined in the First Amendment – to criticize those in power
- New York Times - The uninhibited press, 50 years later (Supreme Court decision on New York Times v. Sullivan)
- Marty Baron & Indira Lakshmanan (Poynter) - Trust in media: Fair and honest reporting will be validated over the long run
- Christiane Amanpour (CNN) - Being truthful: Journalism faces an existential crisis in Trump era
- Mark Thompson (New York Times) - It's a battle between facts and lies: If you're worried about fake news, pay for quality journalism
- Lucia Graves (Pacific Standard) - How Trump weaponized "fake news" for his own political ends. It has become one more way for the president to distort truth. But his worst use of "fake news" is to discredit the institution of the press, that exists as a check on power
- Dan Mangan (CNBC) - President Trump told Lesley Stahl of CBS "60 Minutes" that he bashes the press "to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you"
- Connie Schultz (Creators Syndicate) - Trump hates journalists because we are constitutionally empowered to expose threats to democracy
- Jonas Kaiser (Nieman) - From both-sides journalism toward journalism fortified against a large-scale anti-democratic disinformation campaign | Geneva Overholser - Death to bothsidesism
- John Avlon (Daily Beast) - Trump's war on the media is a war on the truth, as the president and his surrogates attack the institutions that work to hold him accountable. – How we can fight it
George Orwell's 1984
Facts, lies and bullying
- PolitiFact file on Donald Trump
- FactCheck.org on Donald Trump
- Washington Post fact checker on Donald Trump | Update
- New York Times - Trump's lies
- New York Times list of the insults Donald Trump made on Twitter
- The Guardian - How does Donald Trump lie? A fact checker's final guide
- David Graham (The Atlantic) - When the president says it, that means it's true
- Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine) - Trump insists he is the sole arbiter of truth
- Aaron Blake (Washington Post) - Twenty-three bizarre conspiracy theories Trump has elevated
- Charlotte Alter (Time) - How conspiracy theories are shaping the 2020 election and shaking the foundation of American democracy
- Chris Cuomo (CNN) - Exposing the truth behind Trump's claims of "genius": He brings out the devil in us (video)
- Lauren Duca (Teen Vogue) - Donald Trump is gaslighting America. He relies on deceit to undermine the truth so his critics would question their own judgment | More
- Lee McIntyre (New Statesman) - Why Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin lie. Post-truth is not merely about lying and fake news, nor even about disinformation, spin doctoring, or propaganda. Post-truth is the first step towards authoritarian rule
- Chris Hedges (Truthdig) - The permanent lie, our deadliest threat
- Union of Concerned Scientists - Sidelining Science Since Day One | The State of Science in the Trump Era
- Stephen Collinson (CNN) - Trump's assault on reason, facts and science continues – as unprecedented wildfires, hurricanes and a once-in-a-century pandemic rage
- Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine) - Die große Lüge works: Trump is making us all live in his delusional reality show. The press is the only viable opposition to the Trump cult, helping us live within the truth to oppose an alienating totalitarian system
- Robert Jay Lifton (Dissent) - Trump's assault on reality: A major segment of our society now ignores or defies the principles of reason, evidence, and shared knowledge that are required for the function of a democracy | Eight criteria for thought reform, brainwashing and mind control | Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (pdf)
- Joost Meerloo - The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (pdf)
- Václav Havel - The Power of the Powerless "Living within the truth"
- Peter Wehner (The Atlantic) - Trump's sinister assault on truth. The president appears committed to destroying the very idea of facts
- Garry Kasparov (CNN) - Soviet echoes in Trump's America. The utter denial of reality must be overcome by everyone facing the facts
- Michael Hayden (New York Times) - Now we need truth-telling to save America from ourselves (From The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies)
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - The intelligence chiefs' report strikes a blow for truth in the Age of Trump | Steve Benen (NBC News) - Trump reacts with gaslighting
- Margaret Sullivan (Washington Post) - The need for media literacy. Authoritarianism loves nothing more than a know-nothing vacuum: people who accept that they can't tell facts from lies. Americans must again rise to the great task to defend our democracy. We must go beyond our echo chambers and be news consumers who stay informed and act accordingly
The know-nothing flip-flop president
"Make America great again" is used as dog-whistle politics: a big tent salesman trick to trigger nostalgia among the general population, with a built-in coded message for racists of fear, rancor, hate, scapegoating, dehumanization, demonization, intolerance, divisiveness, inequality, exclusion, dominance, authoritarianism, ruthlessness, violence, destruction, and undoing civil rights Trump as the ultimate con artist essentially suggests "I am the American Dream", making the megalomanic prophecy "I am the only one who can make America truly great again"
- Jim Wallis (Sojourners) - Studying racism as an act of reconciliation and resistance in the Trump era
- Ian Haney Lopez (The Nation) - This is how Trump convinces his supporters they're not racist
- Ian Haney Lopez (billmoyers.com) - Strategic racism: the cold calculation of expressing racially loaded ideas in coded terms
- David Corn (Mother Jones) - Trump's demagoguery is the culmination of the decades-long politics of exploiting racism, bigotry, hatred, and fear
- Heather Cox Richardson (Salon) - Republican party is hell-bent on tearing us apart: Its decades-long Southern strategy to win by divisiveness now leads to president Donald Trump
- Peter Wehner (The Atlantic) - Trump's words are poison. The president has done more than any politician in living memory to fan the flames of ethnic and racial antipathy and nurture a culture of bigotry
- Sasha Abramsky (The Nation) - How Trump has normalized the unspeakable. He has legitimized bigotry and given the imprimatur of a major political party to criminal violence (From Jumping at Shadows: The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream)
- Bill Moyers & Michael Winship (billmoyers.com) - NRA issues call for white supremacy and armed insurrection
- Eric Foner & Jon Wiener (The Nation) - White nationalists, neo-Confederates, and Donald Trump
- Mitch Landrieu - New Orleans mayor on removing Confederate monuments: They stood for the lost cause of maintaining slavery and white supremacy. We are one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all
- Steve Phillips (New York Times) - Trump wants to make America white again
- Nicholas Kristof (New York Times) - Is Donald Trump a racist?
- Adam Shatz (London Review of Books) - Wrecking ball as Trump encourages racism
- Sarah Kendzior (Globe and Mail) - There is only one right side to racism, and Trump is not on it
- David Leonhardt & Ian Prasad Philbrick (New York Times) - Donald Trump's racism: the definitive list
- Marjorie Cohn (Consortium News) - Trump's blindness toward the grotesque evils of slavery and Jim Crow
- Vann Newkirk (The Atlantic) - Voter suppression is the new old normal: massive purges of people of color
- Ian Samuel (The Guardian) - Rigging the vote: How the American right is on the way to permanent minority rule
- Carol Anderson (Time) - Republicans want a white republic. They'll destroy America to get it
- Victor Ray (Newsweek) - Trump coalition threatens a return to the Jim Crow era
- Tara Setmayer & Nate Nesbitt (CNN) - Republican party's pandering to racism has to stop
- Ishaan Tharoor (Washington Post) - Trump's racism cements his party's place among the West's far right
- Paul Mason (New Statesman) - Donald Trump's attacks on congresswoman Ilhan Omar show fascism is coming to the US. With his deportation rhetoric against citizens of color, the president is making his most overt attempt yet to mobilize votes using deep white supremacism
- Ruth Ben-Ghiat (GQ) - "Send her back" and the advancement of Trump's authoritarian playbook. Leader-follower relationships and the fascist purpose in targeting congresswoman Ilhan Omar at Trump's rally
- Baltimore Sun - A bigoted president. Reacting to congressman Elijah Cummings' criticism of his border policy, Trump dehumanizes the representative's Baltimore district using racist tropes: "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" where "no human being would want to live"
- Ben Zimmer (Politico) - What Trump talks about when he talks about infestations. The frightening political history of the word "infest"
- Charles Blow (New York Times) - The rot you smell is a racist president. Trump and his views are the real infestations in America
- Brian Naylor (NPR) - Obama urges Americans to reject language that "feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments"
- Andreas Musolff - Excerpts from Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic (pdf)
- James Whitman (Aeon) - Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration: a belief that what made America great was American racism (From Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law)
- Seema Mehta (Los Angeles Times) - Trump's touting of "racehorse theory" tied to eugenics and the Nazis' final solution
- Jonathan Kahn, Marcy Darnovsky & Jonathan Marks (Center for Genetics and Society) - Trump's "racehorse theory" is a racist call to cull the weak and vulnerable so that the strong can thrive
- Steven Rosenfeld (Common Dreams) - Trump is copying Hitler's early rhetoric and policies (On Burt Neuborne's When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic)
- Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic) - He's getting worse. Trump is turning the American presidency into a platform for the wholesale demonization of minorities, with tacit approval to the use of violence against immigrants
- Jeremy Peters et al. (New York Times) - A white supremacist echo chamber: How the El Paso killer echoed the incendiary words of conservative media stars
- Masha Gessen (New Yorker) - Donald Trump's war on reality. Elected on the demonization of immigrants, Trump is mobilizing Americans for a war against immigrants as the existential enemy. He has reframed America – stripping it of its ideals – from a nation of immigrants into a nation of a supreme ruler with concentration camps
- Martin Niemöller - First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out...
- Sarah Kendzior (De Correspondent) - A free press should document how the Trump campaign has mainstreamed bigotry and white supremacist violence
- Paul Waldman (Washington Post) - Welcome to the Fox News presidency. It's one entity pursuing a common set of goals. The message is anger, resentment and fear. Politics isn't a search for solutions to problems. We are in a battle between darkness and light – Fox tells its audience, and Trump tells his base – what makes America great is either endangered or has been lost
- Edward Luce (Financial Times) - Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and the politics of resentment
- Claire Boost - Social media constitute the greatest propaganda machine in history. Spreading conspiracy theories incites hatred, violence and genocide. "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities"
- Allan Thompson (editor) - The Media and the Rwanda Genocide
- Michael Higginbotham (Baltimore Sun) - Voting Trump is a big risk. "Making America great again" could set civil rights back 50 years – to a time when blacks were separated, discriminated against, and lynched with impunity
- Henry Louis Gates (Time) - How the Reconstruction after the Civil War still shapes American racism and the resistance to it (Adapted from Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow)
- Adam Gopnik (New Yorker) - How the South won the Civil War. During Reconstruction true citizenship finally seemed in reach for black Americans. Then their dreams were dismantled (On Henry Louis Gates' Stony the Road)
- Martin Luther King - Letter from Birmingham jail | I have a dream
- Michael Eric Dyson & Norman Stockwell (The Progressive) - Interview on Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
- Ibram Kendi (The Conversation) - Uncovering the roots of racist ideas in America | Transcending racism following Martin Luther King
- Sarah Kendzior (Globe and Mail) - A fascist's win, America's moral loss. Electing a cruel, vengeful bigot puts white supremacy center stage. Let's continue to fight for freedom for all
- Michael Kimmel (Chatham House) - Trump's angry white men: feeling entitlement and victimization (From Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era)
- Jessica Valenti (The Guardian) - How do I tell my daughter that America elected a racist, sexist bully?
- Jill Filipovic (Cosmopolitan) - How America failed women. Donald Trump's victory is a huge insult to women by white male America
- Richard Wolffe (The Guardian) - Trump's war on women may well be successful in a Supreme Court he is now shaping for the next generation. Overturning the abortion rights of Roe v. Wade
- Bill Moyers & Michael Winship (billmoyers.com) - Trump, his virus and the dark age of unreason – the most dangerous demagogue in American history
- James Risen & Tom Risen (New York Times) - Donald Trump's politics of fear follows the playbook of McCarthyism. His demagoguery and constant lies trigger a wave of paranoia and fearmongering
- Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post) - The Republican party has become the party of Joseph McCarthy – the party of conspiracy theories, fake news, false accusations and paranoid fantasies, tinged with racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism. Until that cancer is excised, Republicans should not be entrusted with power
- Sasha Abramsky & Mark Karlin (Truthout) - How a culture of fear helped propel Trump into the White House (On Jumping at Shadows)
- Molly Ball (The Atlantic) - Donald Trump and the politics of fear
- Alex Altman (Time) - No president has spread fear like Donald Trump
- Bernard Weisberger (American Heritage) - A nation of immigrants
- John F. Kennedy - A Nation of Immigrants (pdf)
- Julie Hirschfeld Davis & Peter Baker (New York Times) - Build a wall: How the border wall is boxing Trump in
- Derek Flood (Sojourners) - The dangerous rise of American authoritarianism
- Robert Reich (American Prospect) - It's the divide-and-conquer strategy of a tyrant: Trump makes it all about himself, continually stoking racism and xenophobia
- Henry Giroux (The Conversation) - Trump's fascist efforts to demolish democracy: the need for an informed citizenry
- Federico Finchelstein (Washington Post) - Idolizing the leader is key to fascism. Trump uses racism, a pseudo-religious cult of personality, a myth about a golden past where one ethnic group ruled uncontested over the others, and mass media-based propaganda – to insulate himself from criticism and accountability, and to motivate his followers to persecute and even exterminate others in service of the leader
- Daniel José Camacho (The Guardian) - The justice department cites scripture historically used to justify slavery and to block the civil rights movement, to invoke submission to authority. – But when the government snatches children, it's biblical to resist the law
- Sarah Posner (New Republic) - Amazing disgrace: How Donald Trump hijacked the religious right
- James Carroll (New Yorker) - What the Bible really says about Trump's zero-tolerance immigration policy. Immigrants are America's scapegoat
- Katherine Stewart (New York Times) - Why Trump reigns as biblical king Cyrus: Christian right sees anti-Christian despot as ideal leader for paranoid times
- John Feffer (TomDispatch) - Trump the arsonist and his apocalyptic paranoia: evangelical prophecy, anti-globalist survivalism, and alt-right racist conspiracies
- Chris Hedges (Truthdig) - Trump and the Christian fascists (On American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America)
- Chris Hedges (Truthdig) - Onward, Christian fascists. Trump's legacy will be their empowerment
- Marlene Winnell (Alternet) - Trump's worldview mirrors the most archaic and apocalyptic of Christian beliefs
- Betsy Hartmann - Excerpt from The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness
- Kevin Kruse (New York Times) - How corporate America invented a "Christian nation": a propaganda campaign following the Great Depression to cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity (On One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America) | Interview
- Jeff Sharlet - The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (pdf)
- Sarah Churchwell (The Guardian) - Excerpt from Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream
- Casey Michel (People For the American Way) - The rise of the "Traditionalist International": How the American right learned to love Moscow in the era of Trump
- E.J. Dionne (Washington Post) - Russia and the far right's cozy affair. Russia is creating a new Reactionary International around nationalism, a critique of modernity, and a disdain for liberal democracy. It tries to wreck the Western alliance and the European Union by undermining a shared commitment to democracy, pluralism and tolerance
A pawn in Russia's hybrid warfare – to disinform, to divide society, to undermine democracy, and thus to destabilize the US, the EU, NATO, and the UN Putin's mafia state and Trump are fighting a joint war against freedom and democracy
- Center for American Progress - Moscow on the Potomac. Trump's worrisome ties to Russia
- Max Bergmann & Carolyn Kenney (Center for American Progress) - War by other means: Russia's weaponization of information
- Massimo Calabresi (Time) - Inside Russia's social media war on America. Its information war against global democracy achieved its prime objective: undermining the credibility of American democracy. The best way to compete requires truth telling and critical thinking
- Peter Pomerantsev (The Atlantic) - Russia and the menace of unreality. How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare | Surkov
- Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Daily Beast) - Russia's cyberattacks aren't meddling – they're acts of war (Excerpt from Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President)
- David Remnick (New Yorker) - Trump, Putin, and the Big Hack
- Anne Applebaum (Washington Post) - Stop obsessing over "secrets" about Trump and Russia. What we already know is bad enough | More
- David Corn (Mother Jones) - A veteran spy has given the FBI information alleging a Russian operation to cultivate Donald Trump, to encourage divisions in western alliance | More
- David Corn (Mother Jones) - The Trump-Russia conspiracy: looking to collude with a foreign power to gain an advantage in the election
- VARA Zembla - The dubious friends of Donald Trump: a racketeering conspiracy with the Russian mafia (video)
- Bob Dreyfuss & Diana Pilipenko (The Nation) - Moscow's potential kompromat: Does Russia have leverage over Trump?
- Diana Pilipenko (Center for American Progress) - Cracking the shell: Trump and the corrupting potential of furtive Russian money
- Diana Pilipenko & Talia Dessel (Center for American Progress) - Following the money: Trump and Russia-linked transactions from the campaign to the presidential inauguration
- Craig Unger (New Republic) - Trump went to Russia in 1987, is that when the real estate tycoon became compromised by the KGB? (From House of Trump, House of Putin) | Trump's business empire as a money laundering machine for the Russian mafia state
- Craig Unger & Sean Illing (Vox) - One of the greatest intelligence operations in history: Trump's ties to the Russian mafia go back three decades
- Michael Hirsh (Foreign Policy) - How Russian money helped save Trump's business
- Franklin Foer (Slate) - Putin's puppet. If the Russian president could design a candidate to undermine American interests – and advance his own – he'd look a lot like Donald Trump
- Paul Waldman (American Prospect) - Trump's always been a con artist. But now he's the sucker
- Richard North Patterson (Boston Globe) - Was Trump Putin's fool or his partner in crime?
- Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine) - Will Trump be meeting with his counterpart – or his handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion | More
- Thomas Friedman (New York Times) - Our democracy is in serious danger. President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians, a towering fool, or both. He fails to defend America against the Russian attack on our democracy. Instead this chaos president actively undermines our democratic institutions
- The Economist - Russia's election interference, president Trump's failure to defend American democracy, exacerbated by his systematic breaking of democratic norms – Undermining American democracy is the new normal
- George Soros (Project Syndicate) - These times are not business as usual. Wishing you the best in a troubled world
- Anne Applebaum (Washington Post) - For the U.S.-European alliance, everything has changed. Trump prefers dictators over America's longtime democratic allies
- Stephen Walt (Foreign Policy) - Trump isn't sure if democracy is better than autocracy
- Julian Barnes & Helene Cooper (New York Times) - As Russia works to weaken NATO, Trump threatens U.S. withdrawal from alliance
- Lawrence Martin (Globe and Mail) - Whose team are you playing for, Mr. Trump?
- Marshall Cohen (CNN) - 37 times Trump was soft on Russia and gave its authoritarian leader Putin a boost, rejecting US foreign policy views and aligning himself with the Kremlin
- Craig Unger (New Republic) - Putin lost perhaps the most valuable asset the Soviet Union or Russia had ever had – a president of the United States who spent four decades trying to implement one and only one overriding foreign policy goal: Destroy NATO
- Jennifer Rubin (Washington Post) - Lesson from the Ukraine crisis, after Trump's four year propaganda campaign on behalf of Putin: Defend democracies and don't appease dictators
- Thomas Higgins (Mercury News) - As Russia threatens a large scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump and his enablers need to choose which side they are on. Americans must stand for freedom and against its enemies. Yet Trump consistently takes the Russian side
- Ryan Bort (Rolling Stone) - Trump praises "genius" Putin as Russia invades Ukraine. As the world watches in terror, the former president is cheering on the autocrat's "peace force" of "army tanks"
- Fiona Hill & Maura Reynolds (Politico) - Ukraine has become the frontline in a struggle between democracies and autocracies. Putin has blown up the entire rules-based world order and asserts "might makes right". His information war succeeded to recruit Trump for Russia. We are in the middle of a third World War, wherein Putin is likely to use nuclear weapons
- Robin Wright (New Yorker) - Putin is playing a game of nuclear brinkmanship | Backgrounder
- Dmitry Glukhovsky (Novaya Gazeta) - Now we know: Russia's horrific past could become our future under Putin
- Katie Stallard (New Statesman) - Putin's "denazification" fantasy is a grotesque attempt to justify an unjustifiable war on Ukraine. It is an unprovoked war of aggression. The greatest threat to Russia is Putin himself
- Timothy Snyder (NY Review of Books) - Ivan Ilyin, Putin's philosopher of Russian fascism. Creepy propaganda of Russia's mafia state to overcome Evil with lawlessness and mass murder. This is no longer just Russian philosophy. It has become real life, also in America
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - Putinism is breeding in the heart of the Republican party. Putin's authoritarian neo-fascism has rooted itself in America. The cold war has come home
- Robert Reich - Europe's view of Trump
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - Without the Russians, Trump wouldn't have won the election
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - The evidence doesn't prove collusion. But it sure suggests it
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset
- Jim VandeHei & Mike Allen (Axios) - The biggest political scandal in American history
- Garrett Graff (Wired) - A complete guide to all 17 (known) Trump and Russia investigations
- Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt & Nicholas Fandos (New York Times) - FBI investigated if Trump secretly worked for Russia | More
- Luke Harding, Julian Borger & Dan Sabbagh (The Guardian) - Kremlin papers appear to show Putin's plot to put Trump in White House
- Malcolm Nance - The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West (pdf)
- Max Bergmann, Jeremy Venook & the Moscow Project Team (Center for American Progress) - Conspiracy against the United States: the story of Trump and Russia
- Intelligence community report on Russian interference in US election | Senate reports on Russian IRA social media campaign – aligned with Trump election campaign – of disinformation, manipulation, polarization and voter suppression: (1) Computational Propaganda | (2) New Knowledge | Senate intelligence committee bipartisan report on Russian active measures campaigns and interference in 2016 U.S. election: (1) Russian efforts against election infrastructure | (2) Russia's use of social media | (5) Counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities | Indictments: (1) IRA | (2) GRU DNC hack | Democratic party lawsuit on Trump-Russia conspiracy | Intelligence community assessment on foreign threats to the 2020 US federal elections | UK Commons report on disinformation and "fake news" by Facebook, Russia and Cambridge Analytica | Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (UK Commons) - Russia report | Tim Kendall - Facebook "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook" to make website "addictive", laying "the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis", "raising the voices of division, anger, hate and misinformation" and "pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war" (House testimony)
- Mueller report (misleading and partisan summary by AG Barr) - Russia criminally interfered in the presidential election to elect Donald Trump. Extensive contacts of the Trump campaign with Russia did not rise to the level of criminal conspiracy. Criminal obstruction of justice by the president could not be established, but neither was he exonerated. The attorney general decides to not charge the president with a crime
- Senate judiciary committee hearing (C-Span) - Senator Kamala Harris questions attorney general William Barr on DOJ independence (video)
- Mueller report (published version as redacted/censored by AG Barr) - Russia criminally interfered in the 2016 presidential election to benefit Donald Trump. The Trump campaign welcomed and encouraged the help of the foreign adversary. Once elected, Trump arranged a massive cover-up and repeatedly tried to obstruct the investigation into Russian interference. The report portrays a culture of lying, corruption and criminality. Extensive contacts of the Trump campaign with Russia did not however rise to the level of criminal conspiracy. Criminal obstruction of justice by the president could not be established, but neither was he exonerated. The president falsely claims that he is exonerated by the report. The fact is that Trump would have been indicted, were it not that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Moreover, there are 14 spinoff investigations still ongoing. Mueller essentially suggests that his criminal investigation should be referred to Congress as a political investigation, inviting Congress to start impeachment proceedings for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. The president is not above the law. An impeachment referral requires a lower burden of proof than a criminal indictment. Unanswered questions: Does Russia have kompromat? Was the Trump campaign knowingly manipulated by Russia? Was there a quid pro quo? Why does Trump try to cover up his Russia connection? Why does he side with Putin? Why does he lie incessantly? Did Trump abuse his power? Main takeaway from the Mueller report: The president is not above the law
"Might makes right" versus international law, human rights, and constitutional government
How corporate America bought our democracy After campaigning against the evil bankers, Donald Trump puts Goldman Sachs in control
- George Monbiot (The Guardian) - Donald Trump is no outsider: He embodies our corrupt political culture dominated by corporate money
- Pete Tucker (Huffington Post) - Did the Kochs bring us president Trump? (On Jane Mayer's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
- Jane Mayer & Lauren Kelley (Rolling Stone) - How the Koch brothers have changed America (On Jane Mayer's Dark Money)
- Jane Mayer (New Yorker) - In the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, the Koch brothers' campaign becomes overt
- Charles Alexander (The Nation) - Time magazine, once a soldier for truth, may fall casualty to the forces of greed and deception – as the Koch brothers, long-time funders of climate denial, bid to buy this stalwart advocate of climate action
- Carole Cadwalladr (The Observer) - Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media. The rightwing US computer scientist with links to Donald Trump and Steve Bannon is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network, notably Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica
- Carole Cadwalladr (The Observer) - Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie on psychological warfare against the US electorate, by the Trump campaign and its Russian co-conspirators, based on an unprecedented hijack of Facebook data
- Carole Cadwalladr (New York Review of Books) - Why Britain needs its own Mueller investigation: Brexit and Trump are inextricably entwined by Russian interference in our democracy – through Nigel Farage, Arron Banks, Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook | Nick Cohen (The Observer) - Why isn't there greater outrage about Russia's involvement in Brexit?
- Jane Mayer (New Yorker) - Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica's role in Brexit
- Rebekah Wilce (PR Watch) - Trump ally Sinclair moves to consolidate TV empire
- Gabriel Sherman & Terry Gross (NPR) - Fox News and the Trump White House are now basically one organization
- Jane Mayer (New Yorker) - The making of the Fox News White House. Fox News has always been partisan. But has it become propaganda?
- Garrett Graff (Wired) - Fox News threatens to transform the country into an authoritarian cult, by its furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth
- Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) - The Vampire Squid occupies Trump's White House. After running against Goldman as a candidate, Donald Trump licks the boots of the world's largest investment bank
- Bernie Sanders (CNN) - Trump's budget is immoral: a massive transfer of wealth to the very rich, while the top 0.1% already owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%
- Bernie Sanders (The Guardian) - The Republican budget is a gift to billionaires: it's Robin Hood in reverse
- Paul Krugman (New York Times) - Zombies of voodoo economics. It's the same old snake oil. Why massive tax cuts for the very rich won't magically trickle down by generating growth and jobs, but will instead explode the federal deficit and hurt working families | More
- Seth Hanlon (American Prospect) - How the Tax Act embodies the Republican culture of corruption: a rushed and secretive process of showering massive new tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy – at the expense of working Americans – to placate campaign donors
- David Rothkopf (Daily Beast) - Donald Trump just pulled off the greatest long con in history
- Robert Reich (Newsweek) - Trump is a con man: massively throwing money to the super rich and red meat to the white working class
- Jonathan Metzl (Vice) - Trump is a health hazard to his supporters: Why white working-class voters continue to support Trump despite the negative effects of his policies on their lives – at the benefit of wealthy corporations (On Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland)
- Paul Krugman (New York Times) - Trump is terrible for rural America. His biggest supporters are his biggest victims
- Amy Chua (Politico) - How billionaires learned to love populism. What's behind the Trump alliance between self-dealing plutocrats and blue-collar voters (From Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
- Elizabeth Warren - Government for sale: Concentrated money and concentrated power are corrupting our democracy
- Barry Lynn & Phillip Longman (Washington Monthly) - Populism with a brain: fighting against monopolies and for self-government
- Nancy Pelosi & John Sarbanes (Washington Post) - Restore democracy: Get dark money out of politics, clean up corruption and ensure fair elections
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - State of disunion: Trump's hateful speech is meant to divide and conquer, to distract from the deepening divide of wealth and power between the many and the few
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - Donald Trump tells a fake American story. We must tell the real one of a reinvigorated democracy, free from the crony capitalists who have corrupted America
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - There is no "right" vs. "left": It is Trump and the oligarchs against the rest of us. We must join forces against their divide-and-conquer strategy. We must fight for democracy and oppose oligarchy. We must focus on ending big money in politics, stopping corporate welfare and crony capitalism, busting up monopolies, and stopping voter suppression
- Bernie Sanders - Economic rights are human rights. Democratic socialism is the way to fight against oligarchy, unfettered capitalism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. We must fight against corporate tyranny by taking up the unfinished business of Roosevelt's New Deal – by guaranteeing a decent job, healthcare, education, housing, and a clean environment to all as a right (speech at George Washington University)
- William Barber (The Atlantic) - A new poor people's campaign: a moral call to face the evils of racism, poverty, militarism, and environmental devastation
- Mike Tanglis (Public Citizen) - President Trump Inc.
Impeachment Led astray by the moral void of its president, America faces a moral crisis as a country and as a people
- Robert Kuttner (Huffington Post) - Impeaching Trump
- Robert Reich - Four grounds to impeach Donald Trump
- Allan Lichtman & Allie Conti (Vice) - How Trump's inaction on climate change could lead to impeachment
- Laurence Tribe (Washington Post) - Trump must be impeached for obstruction of justice
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - Obstruction of justice: The president is flouting the law in plain sight
- Jennifer Rubin (Washington Post) - Trump exemplifies abuse of power
- John Shattuck (Boston Globe) - Donald Trump raises specter of treason
- Richard North Patterson (Huffington Post) - Did Trump collude with Russia or obstruct justice? Probably both. Just follow the facts
- Richard North Patterson (Huffington Post) - Trump's legal defenders are arguing for autocracy – rendering us defenseless against a president who may have conspired with a foreign adversary to undermine our democracy
- Norman Eisen, Richard Painter & Laurence Tribe (Brookings) - The emoluments clause: Its text, meaning, and application to Donald J. Trump
- Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine) - A tale of unchecked greed: Corruption, not Russia, is Trump's greatest political liability
- Adam Serwer (The Atlantic) - There is only one Trump scandal: It's a massive tale of corruption of the American government by a president, who came to office essentially promising to eliminate official corruption
- Ezra Klein (Vox) - Government corruption is spreading like a cancer. Donald Trump's winning argument in 2016 is his key weakness in 2020. He's gone from promising to drain the swamp to drowning in it
- Jill Abramson (The Guardian) - Nepotism and corruption: the handmaidens of Trump's presidency
- Anjali Kamat (New Republic) - Political corruption and the Art of the Deal: How Trump's business partnerships in India are creating conflicts of interest in the White House and corrupting the presidency
- McKay Coppins (The Atlantic) - "He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested." Why Nixon's former lawyer John Dean worries Trump could be one of the most corrupt presidents ever – and get away with it
- New York Times - The Republican's guide to presidential etiquette
- Michael Kimmel (The Cut) - Raise your son to be a good man, not a "real" man
- Charles Blow (New York Times) - What Trump is teaching our children. Part of the president's job is to inspire young Americans to be better citizens. Trump is doing the opposite
- Joe Biden (The Atlantic) - We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation
- Annette Gordon-Reed (New York Review of Books) - Charlottesville reminded us why Jefferson matters: Being an American is about holding fast to high ideals in the face of harsh realities
- Barbara Perry, Audie Cornish & Samantha Raphelson (NPR) - Fathers of our country: How U.S. presidents exercised moral leadership in crisis
- Jon Meacham (Time) - A leader should appeal to the people's best instincts. Donald Trump appeals to the worst. – So is he the harbinger of a new dark age of Jim Crow? Not if We the People fight for justice and take responsibility for the government we get (On The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
- Barack Obama - What could be more American than the people coming together – self-critical and trying to live up to our highest ideals – to shape our country's course toward freedom? (speech on patriotism at the 50th anniversary of the Selma march)
- Liz Goodwin (Boston Globe) - Patriotism and dissent: a painful history of Trump's "America, love it or leave it" argument. The project of America is all about criticism, debate and change for the better | Ralph Young - Introduction to Dissent: The History of an American Idea
- Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic) - Trump: Americans who died in war are "losers" and "suckers"
- Jeffrey Engel (Washington Post) - Impeach the president. America's Founders would have judged Trump unfit for office because he has no virtue. He is a malicious and selfish man who places himself above the well-being of the nation
- Henry Giroux (Tikkun) - Trump and the ghosts of the past in fascist America. He is at the forefront of fascism's war against democracy
- Mehdi Hasan (New Statesman) - Donald Trump ushers in a new era of kakistocracy: government by the worst people
- Sarah Kendzior (De Correspondent) - Follow your conscience in the Age of Trump
- David Corn (Mother Jones) - A fundamental crisis. Donald Trump is a threat to democracy
- Hillary Clinton (The Atlantic) - American democracy is in crisis (Adapted from What Happened)
- Barack Obama - Our democracy is at stake
- Ed Pilkington (The Guardian) - The president is a pathological liar: Bernie Sanders accuses Trump to lie all of the time, with the purpose to undermine the foundations of American democracy, and to push the nation towards authoritarianism
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - Trump is the ultimate authoritarian personality. Faced with his assault on democracy and the rule of law, our checks and balances are so far working
- Jill Abramson (The Guardian) - Trump's assault on the rule of law. His lawyers essentially claim the president is above the law and has limitless power
- John McCain - President Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio is contempt for the rule of law | Cecillia Wang (ACLU) - With his pardon of Arpaio the president has chosen lawlessness over justice. It is a presidential endorsement of racism
- Tom Shachtman (Daily Beast) - Our Founding Fathers feared a Trump. They knew that if the checks and balances proved to be not strong enough to restrain the executive, that way lay tyranny
- John Nichols (The Nation) - Impeach Trump. As the radical resolve of Thomas Paine to oppose tyranny led to American independence, let us now resist this monarchical president and robber-baron Congress. Let us celebrate independence by impeaching this mad and lawless president
- Thomas Jefferson - Declaration of Independence
- John Nichols (The Progressive) - The case for impeachment
- Richard Cohen (Washington Post) - Trump is a modern-day McCarthy
- Ron Fein (The Hill) - Trump's "treason" talk is unprecedented, un-American
- Michael Gerson (Washington Post) - Trump is a fraud
- David Graham (The Atlantic) - Why Trump keeps creating crises: He needs them to bind his supporters, posing as a president for times of crisis
- Alex Shephard (New Republic) - Trump manufactures crises to cast political blame and to promote himself as a last resort against extreme chaos. But he distances himself from crises he cannot control, because he is incapable of moral leadership or accepting responsibility
- Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post) - Manufactured emergency over border wall leads to new period of paranoia and foolishness: Trump conjures a crisis out of thin air and paralyzes the government – using deception and scaremongering – to invoke warlike authority and to muzzle opposition
- Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine) - Trump demands homeland security secretary who will break the law
- Paul Waldman (American Prospect) - The government shutdown – and all the other Trump chaos – is just what we expected
- Ross Barkan (The Guardian) - "Starving the beast": Trump's eagerness to shut down the government reveals the Republican anti-government agenda – make government ineffective to make Americans lose loyalty to it
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - Trump is using the government as a bargaining chip, like a dictator sacrificing democracy to his own power
- Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt (New York Times) - Autocrats love emergencies – real or fabricated – as a means to subvert democracy | How Democracies Die (pdf)
- Chris Cillizza (CNN) - Warning against impeachment Trump uses the rhetoric of fear: The market would crash and the American people would revolt
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - If Trump loses, we know what to expect: anger, fear and disruption. If he is beaten in 2020 he will not leave peacefully
- Robert Reich (American Prospect) - A megalomaniacal president gets cornered. Will Trump unleash the military and vigilantes against democracy?
- Ian Buruma (Project Syndicate) - Trump's flirtation with violence. How aspiring dictators always undermine democratic institutions to incite mob rule
- Jeet Heer (New Republic) - Trump's dysfunctional presidency unleashes an anti-democratic cocktail of militarism and armed fascists in the streets
- Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) - Trump threatens with violence. Constitutional rights are for him, but denied to others. Lawful opposition will be met with unlawful violence
- Alex Hinton (Project Syndicate) - Given Donald Trump's flirtation with right-wing extremist rhetoric and violence, and his refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, the 2020 election could trigger atrocities. If Trump loses, Americans should be prepared for full-scale race war and genocide
- Paul Mason (New Statesman) - Donald Trump has shown how he plans to use far-right violence to try to retain power
- John Nichols (The Nation) - Fascist tactics: President Trump assaults American cities and the right to dissent
- Jonathan Greenberg (Washington Post) - Twelve signs Trump would try to run a fascist dictatorship in a second term. He lies about voter fraud, admires authoritarians, tries to suppress free speech, and uses the law against those who would hold him accountable
- Jeff Sharlet (Vanity Fair) - Trump aims at a presidency-for-life: How he uses joking-not joking rhetoric to normalize his authoritarian and extremist provocations
- Masha Gessen (New Yorker) - Donald Trump's fascist performance. The power grab begins with a claim to power, and if the claim is accepted – if the performance is believed – it takes hold
- Jonathan Martin & Mark Landler (New York Times) - Republican chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee Bob Corker says Trump's recklessness threatens "World War III". His closest aides function as an "adult day care center" to "separate our country from chaos"
- Philip Rucker (Washington Post) - A rogue presidency: The era of containing Trump is over
- Brian Klaas (Washington Post) - The adults in the room gone, we are left with a reckless man who will happily create a crisis – burn down the international order or launch missiles – to distract the country as he tries to save his own skin
- Sasha Abramsky (The Nation) - Trump is a cornered megalomaniac – and that's a grave danger to the country. He will likely resort to all the tricks of the demagogue as he fights for his survival
- Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Washington Post) - When investigators threatened his power, he declared himself dictator. Trump follows Mussolini's authoritarian playbook
- Jefferson Morley (Alternet) - The terrifying danger of Trump's deteriorating mental health. Is the Mueller investigation pushing him toward the nuclear button?
- Howard Fineman (Huffington Post) - Trump wants to divide the country, to discredit any institution in his way, to win amid the chaos he sows, ultimately to destroy the country to maintain his own power
- Jeffrey Sachs, Bandy Lee & Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Project Syndicate) - Trump's sadistic leader-follower relationship makes him a danger to the world. He must be stopped before he launches a war, or before his armed backers step up violence against his political opponents
- Joe Scarborough (Washington Post) - A storm is gathering
- Michael Wolff - Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (pdf) | Siege: Trump Under Fire (pdf)
- Bob Woodward - Fear: Trump in the White House (pdf) | Rage (pdf)
- John Bolton - The Room Where It Happened (pdf)
- Carol Leonnig & Philip Rucker - A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America (pdf) | I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (pdf)
- Philip Rucker & Robert Costa (Washington Post) - The nervous breakdown of Trump's presidency (On Bob Woodward's Fear: Trump in the White House)
- Anonymous (New York Times) - I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration, meant to protect the country from the president's amorality
- Bandy Lee (The Conversation) - Thousands of mental health professionals agree with Woodward and the New York Times op-ed author: Trump is dangerous
- James Fallows (The Atlantic) - A call for conscience and responsibility. It's been an open secret all along: Everyone in Washington knew but failed to act
- Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic) - James Mattis denounces president Trump as a threat to the Constitution – for dividing the nation and for ordering the U.S. military to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens
- Ben Jacobs (New York Magazine) - Top U.S. general said Trump preached "Gospel of the Führer" | Reis Thebault (Washington Post) - Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley feared potential "Reichstag moment" aimed at keeping Trump in power (On Carol Leonnig & Philip Rucker's I Alone Can Fix It)
- Hans Christian Andersen - The Emperor's new clothes
- Jim VandeHei & Mike Allen (Axios) - The biggest political scandal in American history
- David Frum (The Atlantic) - America is under attack and the president doesn't care. Trump's gravest responsibility is to defend the United States from foreign attack – and he's done nothing to fulfill it
- Paul Krugman (New York Times) - A Quisling and his enablers. Trump serves his Russian masters, attacks our closest allies, and betrays America – enabled by a corrupt Republican party
- Paul Krugman (New York Times) - The great Republican abdication. A party that no longer believes in American values. Sacrificing freedom and the rule of law, and exploiting racial resentment, to benefit corporations and the wealthy
- Michael Cohen (Boston Globe) - Trump the traitor
- John Shattuck (Boston Globe) - Is Donald Trump committing treason?
- David Rothkopf (Daily Beast) - The way Trump and the GOP deal with Russian attacks is textbook treason
- Lili Loofbourow (Slate) - Worse than appeasement: Trump's approach to Putin is aggression by a president against his own country
- Michael Gerson (Washington Post) - Personal vanity as foreign policy: Trump surrenders to Russia and refuses to defend American interests
- Chris Cillizza (CNN) - The most shameful, stunning moment of the Trump presidency: He considers former KGB officer Putin as more trustworthy than the unanimous American intelligence community on Russia's election interference
- Richard Wolffe (The Guardian) - Trump outdoes Orwell with his abject abandonment of truth in service of Russia
- David Corn (Mother Jones) - The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki and the second Mueller indictment: Trump's treachery is that he helped to cover up Russia's assault on American democracy | The Mueller indictment confirms that Trump and his enablers assisted and encouraged the Russian attack | At the summit Trump himself proves the collusion and the cover-up
- Walter Dellinger & Samantha Goldstein (Washington Post) - During the 2016 election, American democracy was under Russian attack. Candidate Trump encouraged it. To this day, president Trump has failed to respond to the Russians' military intervention or to take steps to ward off future attacks
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset
- David Frum (The Atlantic) - Collusion is worse than a crime. Trump is a national-security threat: the installation of a president beholden to Russia
- Greg Miller (Washington Post) - Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration | Lawsuit
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - Trump is an illegitimate president whose election is tainted by fraud. As a crook he directed and conspired in the crime of campaign finance violations – meant to silence his critics – in order to mislead the American people and win the presidential election. Without this and the Russian intervention on his behalf Trump wouldn't have won. And ever since his enablers in Congress fail to hold the president accountable for his abuse of office
- John Cassidy (New Yorker) - A reckless conman: As a businessman, Trump was the biggest loser of all
- Garrett Graff (New York Times) - Like the mafia and with its omerta broken, the Trump Organization may be prosecuted as a criminal enterprise
- Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine) - The mafia ethos of loyalty: Trump wants to ban flipping because he is almost literally a mob boss. The president puts silence and loyalty to him above truth and the law
- Eric Levitz (New York Magazine) - Mueller report confirms Trump runs the White House like it's the mafia. His philosophy that loyalty to one's boss should take precedence over adherence to the law, is that of a mafia boss running a criminal enterprise
- Michael Cohen - Foreword to Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump
- Heather Digby Parton (Salon) - Trump issues his enemies list. Abusing the power of the presidency to punish citizens for criticizing the president
- David Nakamura & Felicia Sonmez (Washington Post) - Trump starts to silence his leading critics | New York Times version
- Peter Bergen (CNN) - Demonization of the media: America's domestic terrorism echoes Trump's "enemy of the people" rhetoric
- Mark Weinberg (CNN) - Condemn Trump's "enemy of the people" rhetoric. Seeking to turn the people against our free press, he poses as great a threat to our democracy as does Putin
- Adele Stan (American Prospect) - Trump continues his war on journalists. He condones violence, primes his base for more assaults on the First Amendment, and signals the coming clampdown on dissent
- Arthur Gregg Sulzberger (Wall Street Journal) - Accusing the New York Times of treason, Trump crosses a line in his campaign against a free press. The Founders considered it the gravest of crimes. Tossing the charge around is irresponsible and wrong
- Ben Clements & Ron Fein (Common Dreams) - Trump is undermining the freedom of the press. That's an impeachable offense. The Senate has laid the groundwork with a unanimous resolution in defense of the free press against Trump's attacks | Senate resolution
- PEN America - Lawsuit against president Donald J. Trump for abuse of power – in violation of the First Amendment – to retaliate against the press for criticism of him | Complaint
- Arne Duncan (The Guardian) - Trump's neglect of education is by design. Authoritarian regimes benefit when citizens lack education. The president loves "the poorly educated", because he wants Americans to be unable to think critically. Our fight for education is not just a fight for our children, but also for truth, for an educated citizenry, and for our democracy
- Richard Cohen (Washington Post) - Trump is the president the Founding Fathers feared. America once again has a mad king
- Robert Reich (American Prospect) - Trump's art of the no deal. One of the biggest cons from the biggest conman to occupy the Oval Office is that he's a dealmaker. He's not. All he really knows is how to bully friends, stage photo ops with enemies, and claim victory
- Robert Reich (American Prospect) - Constitutional crisis worsens: a malignant megalomaniac facing no countervailing power
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - Trump's most dictatorial move: In fighting all oversight, he treats Congress with contempt and thus attacks the separation of powers
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - Trump's wrecking ball assaults the American system of government. Luckily, it is strongly built and overwhelmingly supported by the American people
- Ruth Marcus (Washington Post) - Federal judge criticizes Trump's attacks on the judiciary – as a coequal branch of government – as dangerous | More
- James Reston (New York Times) - Trump's other impeachable offense. As Nixon, he failed to comply with congressional subpoenas – lacking respect for the rule of law, Congress, and the separation of powers
- Ken Hughes (The Conversation) - Like Donald Trump, Richard Nixon tried to stonewall congressional investigations into crimes allegedly committed in the White House. Nixon's use of executive privilege didn't help him to avoid congressional oversight. Using obstruction to conceal his earlier obstruction and his other crimes, rather led to his resignation from the presidency
- Neal Katyal (New York Times) - Trump's effort to stonewall the House impeachment investigation is a serious threat to the rule of law. Striking at the heart of American democracy, his obstruction of Congress is itself an impeachable offense
- Walter Shaub (Slate) - Saturday Night Massacre in slow motion: Trump abuses his authority to undermine the special counsel investigation of his election campaign
- Simon Tisdall (The Guardian) - American democracy is in crisis, and not just because of Trump. Dark money, unchecked presidential power and a politicized Supreme Court are wrecking the world's flagship democracy
- 44 Former U.S. Senators (Washington Post) - We are in a constitutional crisis: The Senate must stand in defense of democracy
- Protect Democracy & Stand Up Ideas - The Republic at Risk: American Democracy One Year into the Trump Administration
- Barry Berke, Noah Bookbinder & Norman Eisen (Brookings) - Presidential obstruction of justice: the case of Donald J. Trump
- Jonathan Alter & Nick Akerman (Daily Beast) - Quid pro quo in the presidential election: contours of the criminal conspiracy case against Donald J. Trump
- Elizabeth Holtzman (The Intercept) - No one is above the law: Hold the president accountable as we did with Nixon in Watergate, to avoid the road to tyranny (Adapted from The Case for Impeaching Trump)
- Elizabeth Holtzman (Just Security) - Protecting our democracy: The Nixon impeachment is a blueprint for today
- Brenda Wineapple (New York Times) - The impeachment of president Andrew Johnson in 1868 was an attempt to restore faith in America's original ideals. Johnson's crimes included abuse of power and racism. The Civil War had been fought to liberate the nation from slavery – and to enshrine freedom and equal citizenship. The president's white supremacy was not condoned, he was not a king, and he could neither ignore Congress nor the ideals on which the nation had been founded (On The Impeachers: the Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation) | Excerpt
- Peter Irons (NBC Think) - Trump's racism is an impeachable offense. The precedent of Andrew Johnson proves it
- Yoni Appelbaum (The Atlantic) - Impeach Donald Trump. Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals – and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs
- John Nichols (The Nation) - Impeachment is the cure for our constitutional crisis: When a president thinks he's above the law and displays despotic tendencies. Each failure to demand necessary accountability invites greater abuse and diminishes the prospect that accountability will ever be achieved (Excerpt from foreword to Ron Fein, John Bonifaz & Ben Clements' The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump)
- Rashida Tlaib & John Bonifaz (Detroit Free Press) - Now is the time to begin impeachment proceedings against president Trump
- Ben Clements & Ron Fein (Boston Globe) - The case for starting impeachment hearings against Trump immediately
- Ben Clements & Ron Fein (Boston Globe) - The Mueller report is a referral and roadmap for an impeachment investigation. The rule of law, our democracy, and the legitimacy of the presidency and Congress itself hang in the balance | Mueller report (published/redacted version)
- David Cole (New York Review of Books) - Mueller report an indictment in all but name
- Jeffrey Sachs (CNN) - Congress should initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump
- Laurence Tribe (USA Today) - The Mueller report invites Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings. It's time for Congress to heed that invitation
- Susan Hennessey & Quinta Jurecic (Lawfare) - The Mueller report demands an impeachment inquiry. Congress has to carry out its constitutional responsibilities. To not act is to accept the president's conduct as tolerable
- Elizabeth Drew (New York Times) - The danger in not impeaching Trump: We have to answer to history that we kept a dangerous and authoritarian man as president who was abusing his power. It may be risky politically, but Congress has a responsibility to act
- Tom Steyer (San Francisco Chronicle) - The case for impeaching president Trump – now
- Jamie Raskin & John Nichols (The Nation) - Has Donald Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors?
- Ralph Nader (Common Dreams) - Donald Trump is the most impeachable president in American history
- Quinta Jurecic (The Atlantic) - All of the impeachable offenses. Focusing on the Mueller report alone risks leaving out the obvious
- George Conway & Neal Katyal (Washington Post) - Trump just invited Congress to begin impeachment proceedings – the president is not above the law
- David Ignatius (Washington Post) - We're entering a new phase of the Trump-Russia investigation by crossing Trump's red line not to investigate his finances
- Max Bergmann & Jeremy Venook (NY Daily News) - If Mueller didn't follow the money, Congress must: There are huge red flags regarding potential Russian financial improprieties in the election
- Al Green & Ron Fein (The Hill) - Trump's racist abuses demand impeachment
- John Bonifaz (Free Speech For People) - We are here today on behalf of millions of Americans across the country who are demanding that members of Congress uphold their oaths of office and confront the constitutional crisis facing the nation today (speech in front of the Capitol building for petition delivery demanding an impeachment investigation of the president)
- John Nichols (The Nation) - Congress receives petitions signed by 10 million Americans. Rashida Tlaib recognizes Trump must be held to account by beginning the impeachment process
- Free Speech For People Impeachment Project - Legal grounds for an impeachment investigation of president Donald Trump
- Free Speech For People - Grounds for impeachment proceedings against president Donald J. Trump; resolution to authorize impeachment hearings; and model articles of impeachment
- Free Speech For People - Impeachment for the People. House Democrats should lead with moral courage and go for a broad impeachment, covering the full range of Trump's abuses of power (with proposed articles of impeachment)
- Ron Fein, John Bonifaz & Ben Clements (Free Speech For People) - The legal case for a congressional investigation on whether to impeach president Donald J. Trump | Full report
- Ron Fein (Free Speech For People) - When Is Racist Abuse of Office an Impeachable Offense?
- Need to Impeach - Donald Trump's 10 impeachable offenses
- Social Criticism Review - Open letter to Congress on the immediate start of an impeachment inquiry against president Donald J. Trump
- Free Speech For People - Impeachment coalition urges the House judiciary committee, to make a clear and unambiguous statement that it has in fact started an impeachment inquiry, to speed up the inquiry in the face of obstruction by the president, and to broaden the scope of the inquiry to include the prevention of tyranny
- Bill Blum (Truthdig) - Impeachment is designed for presidents like Trump. Call Senate Republicans out on being enablers of Trump's racism and fascism
- Steven Rosenfeld (Common Dreams) - Trump is copying Hitler's early rhetoric and policies (On Burt Neuborne's When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic)
- Common Cause - The case for an impeachment inquiry of president Trump
- Evan Davis (The Hill) - An impeachment inquiry has begun
- George Conway & Neal Katyal (Washington Post) - Trump has done plenty to warrant impeachment. But the Ukraine allegations are over the top
- Dan Balz (Washington Post) - Trump is yet again weakening nation's checks and balances. He abuses the presidency to pressure a foreign government to investigate – and damage – his main opponent in the upcoming election
- Nicholas Fandos (New York Times) - Nancy Pelosi announces formal impeachment inquiry of Trump for betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - Impeachment is imperative to put Trump on notice that he can't necessarily get away with abusing his presidential power to win re-election
- Kamala Harris - Facing his impeachment inquiry president Trump abuses Twitter to make blatant threats – death for spying and treason, and even civil war – that put people at risk and our democracy in danger | Mary McCord (Lawfare) - Armed militias are taking Trump's civil war tweets seriously | Nicole Hemmer (CNN) - Why it's so scary when Trump tweets about civil war: It amplifies his regular calls for political violence
- Michael Fuchs (The Guardian) - The Ukraine scandal is not only undermining American democracy – it's damaging national security. US foreign policy increasingly looks like that of a mafia state, wielded at the behest of, and for the benefit of, one man's personal interests, and for sale to the highest bidders
- Jeffrey Toobin (New Yorker) - From Russia to Ukraine, Trump is eager to do Putin's bidding and to accept political favors. His abuse of power is accelerating, with each unpunished act serving as a license for more. Impeachment should halt this out-of-control presidency
- Laurence Tribe (USA Today) - Trump is abusing the power of the presidency for personal gain. The House must move on impeachment articles now. Every day he's allowed to stall, obstruct justice and remain in power, the country is in still graver danger
- David Smith (The Guardian) - Trump's assault on impeachment inquiry is obstruction of Congress, pushing the U.S. towards a constitutional crisis | House speaker Pelosi warns president Trump – who brazenly pressures foreign powers to intervene in the 2020 election – that the cover-up of his abuse of power will be regarded as obstruction, that he is not above the law, and that he will be held accountable for the betrayal of our national security, our Constitution, and our democracy
- Greg Sargent (Washington Post) - Trump is openly telling us he's above the law and in total defiance of oversight by Congress. He declares absolute authority to conscript a foreign power to facilitate the corruption of the next election on his behalf and to cover up the corruption of the last election on his behalf
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - Trump is the spoiled kid with his hand in the cookie jar. More and more Republicans agree that his denials, tantrums and defiance ask for sober parental control – impeachment
- Robert Reich (The Guardian) - Donald Trump: xenophobe in public, international mobster in private. The president has been selling America to foreign governments for his private gain. The Founding Fathers said betraying America to foreign powers was an impeachable offense. The president must go
- Philip Zelikow (Lawfare) - Self-dealing and bribery in Ukraine: the core of the impeachment inquiry
- Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic) - The Founders would have called out Trump for bribery
- Neal Katyal & Sam Koppelman (Newsweek) - Trump's bribery is blatantly impeachable. Asking foreign powers to interfere in our elections over and over again, is an abuse of power for personal benefit (Excerpt from Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump)
- Neal Katyal & Sam Koppelman (Time) - No one is above the law: Impeaching Trump is imperative to preserving our democracy (Adapted from Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump)
- Sean Wilentz (Rolling Stone) - Why we must impeach. The president's abuse of power has surpassed any we've seen in our history – and Congress must act
- Whistleblower complaint | U.S. ambassador to Ukraine confirms president Trump's subversion of official American foreign policy and his blackmailing of a foreign country, essentially offering a quid pro quo for Trump's personal gain. The president decided to withhold military aid to Ukraine against Russian aggression – signaling this through a shadow foreign policy channel – until Ukraine would publicly commit to conduct investigations that would help Trump's reelection | House intelligence committee - The Trump-Ukraine impeachment inquiry report (pdf)
- Sarah Kendzior (Globe and Mail) - Trump's strategy of "investigate the investigators". He conspired in Russia's attack on the U.S. in 2016, but now projects the crime on Ukraine
- Noah Feldman (New York Review of Books) - Trump and the meaning of impeachment
- Brian Beutler (Crooked) - The Ukraine scandal just scratches the surface. What other scandals and abuses of power is the White House covering up?
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - It's time to impeach and remove Trump. Given his administration's track record of unethical and illegal conduct, the president has lost all credibility and hence his ability to carry out the duties of his office
- Mehdi Hasan (The Intercept) - Impeach Trump for all his crimes, not just for Ukraine. For House Democrats to wait this long and then impeach a reckless, lawless, racist, tax-dodging president only over his interactions with the president of Ukraine would be to effectively give Trump a clean bill of health on everything else
- Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine) - Surrounded by criminals Trump is the most criminal president in American history. His focus on corruption means promoting corruption not fighting it
- Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine) - The full case for impeachment: a menu of high crimes and misdemeanors
- Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington - The case for a Trump impeachment inquiry
- David Leonhardt (New York Times) - Donald Trump vs. the United States of America
- Bruce Ackerman (American Prospect) - Trump's war against Iran is an impeachable offense. Starting the war is an abuse of presidential power, to gain public support when a Senate impeachment trial is threatening his re-election prospects. Despotism is on the rise in the United States
- Star Tribune - The Senate must do its duty and hold a fair trial. Give president Trump a chance to defend himself. And call witnesses that could clear his name and attest that the actions he took were not for his personal gain
- Kamala Harris (New York Times) - Fair impeachment trial or cover-up? With the Constitution and the rule of law at stake, every senator has a duty to pursue truth, justice and accountability
- New York Times - The Republican party is confronting a crisis of conscience, as Trump assaults our democracy, the rule of law, as well as our morality. Republicans have to choose between loyalty to an autocrat and loyalty to country
- John F. Kennedy - Profiles in Courage (pdf)
- Noah Feldman (New York Review of Books) - Is Trump above the law?
- Sarah Kendzior (Globe and Mail) - Impeachment trial as power play and loyalty test. Americans are witnesses to the formalization of dictatorship
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (obstruction of justice)
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (obstruction of justice; violation of emoluments clauses; abuse of power; undermining freedom of the press)
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (bigotry)
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (abuse of power; obstruction of Congress) | House judiciary committee - Constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment (updated) | Report | Trial memorandum | Adam Schiff's opening statement | House impeachment managers' presentation of the facts and law | Continued President Trump impeached
- Just Security - Federal criminal offenses and the impeachment of Donald J. Trump
- Ralph Nader, Bruce Fein & Louis Fisher - Article of impeachment
- House judiciary committee - Articles of impeachment that led to the resignation of president Nixon in the Watergate scandal | Constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment | Report
- Gene Healy (Cato Institute) - Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution's Impeachment Power
- Charles Black - The impeachable offense (Excerpt from Impeachment: A Handbook) | Full text (pdf)
- Constitution of the United States of America (annotated)
- Free Speech For People - Revoke the corporate charter of the Trump Organization
- Tom Steyer & Ron Fein (NBC News) - Donald Trump shouldn't nominate the Supreme Court justice who will decide the fate of his presidency, while he is under criminal investigation and facing the prospect of impeachment proceedings
- Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law & Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington - Report on the Department of Justice and the rule of law. Recommending an impeachment inquiry into the conduct of Attorney General William Barr
- Washington Post - Our democracy in peril: the damage president Trump has caused, and the danger he would pose in a second term
- New York Times - End our national crisis: the case against Donald Trump. His re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II
- Democratic House chairs (Washington Post) - Here's how we can protect democracy from a lawless president
- Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian) - Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart
- Garry Kasparov (CNN) - Win or lose, with Trump, prepare for the unimaginable after the election
- Barton Gellman (The Atlantic) - The election that could break America. How to restrain a lawless president, when the chaos candidate is the commander in chief?
- Bernie Sanders - Trump's threat to our democracy. On the danger that this country faces from a president who is a pathological liar, who has strong authoritarian tendencies, who neither understands nor respects our Constitution, and who is prepared to undermine American democracy in order to stay in power. We need to make certain that the president of the United States, if he loses this election, will abide by the will of the voters and leave office peacefully (speech transcript)
- Melissa Block (NPR) - The Big Lie and the road to authoritarianism: Can the forces unleashed by Trump's big election lie be undone?
- Fiona Hill (Politico Magazine) - A coup attempt by Trump, to keep himself in power, done in slow motion and in plain sight. To avoid another coup and a civil war, Republicans must thoroughly refute the Big Lie that Trump won the election
- Edward Luce (Financial Times) - The nightmarish end to Donald Trump's presidency. There are deep concerns about what the US leader may do in his remaining two weeks
- Zachary Cohen & Whitney Wild (CNN) - FBI warns "armed protests" being planned at all 50 state capitols and in Washington DC ahead of Biden inauguration
- Norman Eisen & Katherine Reisner (USA Today) - Incitement of insurrection: President Trump incited a violent attack on American democracy
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (incitement of insurrection) | Report | Democratic impeachment managers trial memorandum lays out the case for the conviction of former president Trump for "incitement of insurrection against the Republic he swore to protect". After months of spreading his Big Lie that he won a landslide victory in the 2020 election, and after judges and election officials concluded that his challenges lack proof and legal merit – president Trump summoned, assembled and incited a violent mob that attacked the Capitol, to halt the finalization of the election result. Congress should make it clear – to future presidents and to the American people – that it stands vigilant in defense of our democracy | Jamie Raskin's closing argument: Trump was the "inciter in chief" of the insurrection President Trump impeached twice
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (abuse of power; undermining the democratic system of government; attempting to make himself an authoritarian ruler)
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (abuse of power; interference with the election process; inciting violence and orchestrating an attempted coup against the country)
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (abuse of power; conspiring to commit sedition by inciting an insurrection; corrupting the electoral process; violation of emoluments clauses; obstruction of justice)
- House resolution - Impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors (weaponization of hate; incitement of insurrection and an assault on democracy)
- Senate judiciary committee - Subverting justice: How the former president and his allies pressured DOJ to overturn the 2020 election (majority staff report; pdf)
- Ewan Palmer (Newsweek) - Donald Trump admits he wanted his vice president to overturn the election. He incited his supporters to insurrection to get his way
- Barbara McQuade (Just Security) - United States v. Donald Trump: a "model prosecution memo" on the conspiracy to pressure vice president Pence
- President Joe Biden - Democracy was attacked. But it held and we the people prevail. Address to the nation on the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection
- Congress select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol (final report; pdf)
- Norman Eisen et al. (Brookings) - Fulton county, Georgia's Trump investigation (pdf)
- Sidney Blumenthal (The Guardian) - The insurrection is the tip of the iceberg of a still ongoing coup
- Paul Waldman (Washington Post) - Republican war on democracy. Donald Trump's presidency began and ended with two of the most profound attacks on American democracy in our history. After colluding with Russia's election interference and inciting the Capitol insurrection, the GOP continues its war on democracy by voter suppression
- John Nichols (The Nation) - Trump steals a strategy from Mussolini's playbook. The former president's promise to pardon January 6 insurrectionists recalls the fascist's strongman tactics. Trump continues to incite violent insurrection and should be barred from running for presidential office again | Free Speech For People 14point3 campaign
- Jason Stanley (The Guardian) - America is now in fascism's legal phase
- Bill Blum (Alternet) - The question is no longer whether Trump's MAGA movement is fascist – but can we defeat it?
- Jason Stanley & Sean Illing (Vox) - American fascism isn't going away. If a demagogue seizes power by us vs. them propaganda, without being held accountable
- Heather Cox Richardson (billmoyers.com) - Rats leaving a sinking ship. When people finally start to turn on a bully, there is a stampede for the exits
- Eugene Robinson (Washington Post) - Cruelty for cruelty's sake: Above all else, Trump is a bully
Donald Trump acts like a child. He is mentally unfit for the presidency. His White House is utterly dysfunctional. The president brings nothing but chaos, divisiveness, corruption, and a culture of abuse. He is deranged, amoral, a bigot, a pathological liar, and a danger to the republic
"No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices." - Edward R. Murrow (on McCarthyism)
"You have to treat the presidency with respect." - Donald Trump (bullying the press corps). – You yourself are debasing the presidency Mr. Trump. You are a bully and a pathological liar. You are always projecting your sins on others. You continuously call the free press "the enemy of the people" to discredit, intimidate and silence your critics. You thus reveal yourself as a would-be tyrant. You violate the Constitution with your relentless attacks on the free press. You disrespect the Senate in its unanimous resolution reaffirming the First Amendment that "the press is not the enemy of the people" and that your attacks must stop. Have you no conscience? Have you no self-criticism? Have you no grain of morality? Have you not sworn to uphold the Constitution? Have you nothing to uphold but your ego?
The president of the United States as a mob boss: "The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth." - James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
"A president beholden to Russia had been installed in the Oval Office: the most successful foreign espionage attempt against the United States in the nation's history [...] And from beginning to end, the president's political party rallied to protect him - and itself - from investigation, exposure, and consequences." - David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic
"There was a cancer growing on the presidency." - John Dean (on Nixon)
An age of global confrontation and authoritarianism
- Richard North Patterson (The Bulwark) - Trump's personal pathology is America's foreign policy. The world is hostage to an unwell president
- Stephen Wertheim (Washington Post) - Quit calling Donald Trump an isolationist. He is a militarist and a warmonger
- Mikhail Gorbachev (Time) - It all looks as if the world is preparing for war
- Kim Sengupta (Independent) - Trump as Dr Strangelove. Why his access to nuclear weapons has 50 Republican national security experts terrified
- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Doomsday Clock | Russia's invasion of Ukraine highlights unprecedented threat of nuclear war, catastrophic climate change, biological weapons, and disruptive technologies: It is 90 seconds to midnight
- Bruce Blair (Politico) - What Trump doesn't get about nukes. Will Trump come to his senses in time to avert an arms race and a nuclear war?
- Bruce Blair (Politico) - What exactly would it mean to have Trump's finger on the nuclear button? A nuclear launch expert plays out the various scenarios
- Bruce Blair (Politico) - Trump could face a nuclear decision soon. In North Korea, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, escalating crises await the new commander in chief
- Mark Hertsgaard (The Nation) - Do you trust Donald Trump's finger on the nuclear button? As tensions with North Korea escalate, Congress and the military must prevent a nuclear first strike | More | More
- Colin Kahl & Jon Wolfsthal (Foreign Policy) - John Bolton is a national security threat. The über-hawk behind the immensely disastrous Iraq War is advising Trump to wage preventive wars on North Korea and Iran
- Garrett Graff (Politico) - The Madman and the Bomb
- Adam Shatz (London Review of Books) - The President and the Bomb
- Jeet Heer (New Republic) - Don't just impeach Trump. End the Imperial Presidency
- Scientific American - No one should have sole authority to launch a nuclear attack
- New York Times - Mr. Trump alone can order a nuclear strike. Congress can change that
- Fred Kaplan (Slate) - Nothing can stop an unstable president like Trump from launching nuclear weapons
- Fred Kaplan (Slate) - Trump's belligerent rhetoric and his exuberance about the sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons, are mirrored in his scary plan to make first use of nuclear weapons easier
- Mehdi Hassan (The Intercept) - Donald Trump wants to make it easier to start a nuclear war. Does the narcissist-in-chief plan on using his God-like power? Will an impulsive and aggressive Trump get us all killed?
- Joe Cirincione (Ploughshares) - How Donald Trump could blow up the world all by himself. Tell Congress that it is time to end this nuclear insanity
- House bill - Restricting the first-use of nuclear weapons | House bill - Establishing an oversight commission on presidential capacity
- William Perry (Arms Control Today) - The risk of "blundering" into nuclear war: lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis | Backgrounder
- Scott Sagan (Foreign Affairs) - The Korean missile crisis is "the Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion" – and even more dangerous
- Roger Cohen (New York Times) - Trump's envy of Kim Jong-un. As an authoritarian yearning for totalitarianism, the president saluted evil. North Korea is "no longer a nuclear threat". The real enemy is the media that speak truth to power
- Simon Tisdall (The Guardian) - Faced by the imminent collapse of his only diplomatic "breakthrough" that "there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea", and worried about his support ahead of mid-term elections, Trump may revert to his reckless posture to "totally destroy" North Korea
- Robert Dallek (NY Daily News) - What John F. Kennedy teaches us today: the need for peace in the nuclear age
- Masha Gessen & Isaac Chotiner (Slate) - Where Trump and Putin converge. The assault on democracy and the threat of nuclear holocaust
- Garry Kasparov (Newsweek) - Putin and Trump share an authoritarian spirit. Abandoning our principles in order to defend them leads to tyranny
- Anne Applebaum (Washington Post) - Totalitarian ideologies never die. Not even in America
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - Trump has given every despot on the planet a license to kill "enemies of the people"
- Robert Fisk (Independent) - The mad president of America talks of peace to the Muslim world, while advocating a war between Sunni and Shia Islam. A bizarre "battle between good and evil" in which the world's biggest arms supplier opportunistically sides with the head-chopping, misogynist, undemocratic, dictatorial Saudis whose Wahhabi Salafist extremism is the main fountainhead of terrorism | More
- Julie Ingersoll (The Conversation) - Why Trump's evangelical supporters welcome his move on Jerusalem. It is central in the end-times theology: hastening the rapture, the apocalypse, and the final establishment of God's kingdom
- Sandy Tolan (Truthdig) - Rapture-ready: How U.S. policy meshes with Armageddon. The return of Jesus to the Holy Land now drives the Middle East policy of the most powerful nation on earth. Christian Zionists embrace a chilling, apocalyptic vision of vengeance upon the many and salvation for the few. The evangelical conviction is that a strong Israel, fully in control of "Judea and Samaria", is essential for the apocalyptic prophecies to come to pass
- Julian Borger (The Guardian) - Bring on Armageddon: the evangelical grip on the Trump administration
- Cristina Maza (Newsweek) - Trump will start the end of the world, claim evangelicals who support him
- Mustafa Barghouti (The Nation) - The US ends the peace process by siding with the Israeli apartheid system
- Fareed Zakaria (CNN/Washington Post) - Trump is dismantling post-WWII order. Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement means that America is no longer the leader of the free world
- Jeffrey Sachs (Project Syndicate) - Trump's climate-change sociopathy. He is knowingly and brazenly jeopardizing the planet
- Richard North Patterson (Boston Globe) - Trump's misbegotten trade war risks a global recession and massive job losses
- Christopher Woolf (PRI) - Economists warn Trump's policies will start a 1930s-era trade war
- Edward Luce (Financial Times) - Make America 1929 again. The president is committed to the pursuit of a trade war even if it costs the country dearly
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - The Trump presidency takes a giant step toward destroying the post-World War II liberal international order based on free trade and alliances with other democracies
- Fareed Zakaria (Washington Post) - Does a Trump doctrine on foreign policy exist? Ask John Bolton. Rather than cooperate and compete peacefully in a rules-based world to pursue democracy and freedom, the U.S. must be aggressive and unilateral in a world of war and anarchy to pursue its national interest – thus inviting aggression by other countries as well
- Thomas Friedman (New York Times) - Trump is ushering in a new global political era of "anything goes". As America lost its moral authority, we see democracy recede and authoritarianism emerge around the world with utter impunity
- Sadiq Khan (The Observer) - Donald Trump is like a 20th-century fascist, a figurehead of the far right that is on the rise around the world
- David Rothkopf (Daily Beast) - Is our era more dangerous than the 1930s? The global rise of the hard right continues unchecked
- Bernie Sanders (The Guardian) - A new authoritarian axis demands an international progressive front | Speech at Johns Hopkins SAIS
- Bernie Sanders - Our common humanity: foreign policy and America's role in the world (speech at Westminster College)
- António Guterres - Tackling the inequality pandemic: a new social contract for a new era (Nelson Mandela lecture)
- Max Boot (Washington Post) - Can our democracy, our environment and our world order survive a second Trump term?
- Madeleine Albright (New York Times) - Will we stop Trump before it's too late? Fascism poses a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II (On Fascism: A Warning)
- Timothy Snyder (Time) - Donald Trump and the new dawn of tyranny
- Dana Milbank (Washington Post) - The Reichstag is burning. The 2020 election is surrounded by the authoritarian language of a coup d'état
"Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book." - Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
War on terrorism
HOMEPAGE