Trump found his Roy Cohn in the form of Bill Barr, and now he’s found his J. Edgar Hoover in the form of Erik Prince. nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/…
Erik Pince is the brother of Betsy DeVos. He is the founder and former CEO of the infamous Blackwater. His partner in crime here, James O’Keefe, is a long time right wing hoax artist. theguardian.com/us-news/2017/n…
This domestic espionage ring is of a piece with the “deep state hit list” which a group of Trump operatives (including Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence) recently exposed in this piece. axios.com/trump-memos-de…
Thomas and O’Keefe have a long-standing working relationship with each other spreading pro-Trump propaganda and disinformation. rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-tho…
This was one of the first tweets I wrote after Trump was elected. If only I'd known all of the ways in which Trump's Nixon-like qualities would manifest in the coming years.
Trump associate (and likely Wikileaks cutout) Roger Stone literally got his start in politics by helping Richard Nixon ratf*ck his Democratic opponents. politico.com/magazine/story…
For those who don't know or remember, Richard Nixon had a literal "enemies list" and he had his FBI director J. Edgar Hoover dig up dirt on those people. One person on the list was journalist Daniel Schorr.
Where Nixon had the FBI do his dirty work for him, the Trump administration (like the good Republicans they are) have privatized and outsourced the operation.
But just because Trump's ratf*cking has a more anarchic and dispersed feel to it, that doesn't make it any less potent or unethical (if not illegal). After all, Trump's acting DNI, Rick Grenell, was an integral part of the Trump attack network aimed at American journalists.
The gall of these people to whine incessantly about the Steele Dossier (a decent chunk of which is accurate) while they're engaged in behavior like this. newyorker.com/news/our-colum…
One last thought. It strikes me that there are two Boomer paths from Nixon to Trump. The first goes from those who think Nixon got shafted, & that he was the victim of a nasty media hit job. They see the same thing happening to Trump, so they rally around.
The other path involves Boomers who learned the (incorrect, IMO) lesson from Watergate that *all* politicians are unethical liars, therefore you can trust no one and ethics are for suckers so who cares whether the President is a crook because they're all crooks.
Trumpism feeds off that profound cynicism about politics and the media. He needs supporters who don't care about whether he lies or whether he does some shady things...that's how he inoculates them against true stories that reflect badly on him, i.e. "fake news."
The people who most benefit from the public perception that "all politicians lie" are...the politicians most inclined to lie. That's the magic sauce here. Nothing authorizes unethical behavior more than the public perception that "everyone does it."
The politician who tells you that "all politicians lie" is not taking your side against "the bad guys." They are ripening you up to be the mark for their next grift. This is the lesson we could have learned from Nixon. But many of us, especially Boomers, did not. And here we are.
Thanks to @reallywallpaper for reminding me of this third path from Nixon to Trump. Nixon aide, Roger Ailes, literally hatched the idea for Fox News with the idea that it would inoculate future GOP presidents from future Watergates. theweek.com/articles/88010…
In so many ways the Trump Admin is just running the old Nixon playbook...only this time the corrupt GOP president has a party, a right wing media, and a voting base willing to defend him to the end.
