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Farewell to, and remembrance of, Marc Pachter

I've posted these dispatches and extracts about the recently late Marc Pachter here on my Writers and Editors blog partly to make it easy for Marc's friends and colleagues to post comments.

 

Marc Pachter, Who Revived National Portrait Gallery, Dies at 80 (Sam Roberts, NY Times, 2-23-24)
     Marc Pachter, who transformed the National Portrait Gallery in Washington from a collection primarily of solemn paintings of old white men into a more up-to-date museum that now includes illustrations and interviews with diverse living luminaries, died on Feb. 17 in Bangkok. He was 80.
     The cause was cardiac arrest, his son, Adam, said. Mr. Pachter, who [after many years of living in Washington DC] lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, died in a hospital while vacationing in Thailand.
     As director of the Portrait Gallery from 2000 to 2007, Mr. Pachter presided over a $300 million renovation that reimagined the museum while maintaining its artistic integrity.


Marc Pachter, museum chief who led race to save Washington portrait, dies at 80 - The Washington Post
"Marc Pachter, an American cultural historian at the Smithsonian Institution who as director of the National Portrait Gallery led a nail-biting scramble for donors in 2001 that kept a famed painting of George Washington from leaving the collection for possible auction, died Feb. 17 in Bangkok. He was 80. He had a heart attack at an apartment he rented during an extended stay in Thailand, said his son, Adam Pachter.
     "Mr. Pachter described himself as a “a teller of lives” in his roles across the Smithsonian system, including overseeing a top-to-bottom renovation of the Portrait Gallery as director from 2000 to 2007."
      "As director of the National Portrait Gallery in 2001, he hunted for a donor to keep a famed painting of Washington in the collection. He found one."


In Memoriam: Marc Pachter 1943–2024 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2-21-24) "Marc Pachter's distinguished career at the Smithsonian spanned more than thirty-three years. In addition to being the National Portrait Gallery's director, he served as the museum’s chief historian and assistant director. Marc was the Smithsonian assistant secretary for external affairs, chair of the Smithsonian’s 150th anniversary celebration in 1996, and acting director of the National Museum of American History." And more, about his career with the Smithsonian.


The art of the interview (video, Ted Talk, January 2008) Cultural historian Marc Pachter has conducted live interviews with some of the most intriguing characters in recent American history as part of a remarkable series created for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. In this talk he reveals the secret to a great interview and shares extraordinary stories of talking with Steve Martin, Clare Booth Luce and more. Marc profiled here as a cultural historian. It is worth listening to Marc's talks, which bring him to life. 


Q&A with Marc Pachter (C-SPAN, 12-12-07, 58 minutes) A fascinating Q&A. Marc Pachter talked with Brian Lamb about his work at the National Portrait Gallery and the operations of the Smithsonian Institution. He retired in 2007 after 33 years at the Smithsonian, where he served as chief historian and assistant director at the Portrait Gallery, acting director of the National Museum of American History, as well as deputy assistant secretary for external affairs and chair of the Smithsonian's 150th anniversary celebration in 1996.

     Asked about being interviewed: "Well, I just told my son, Adam, that it's the first time I've ever been nervous on stage. It's because, when you're the interviewer, you're in control of the situation and when you're being interviewed, suddenly I realize, or whether you're being portrayed in a portrait or written about in a biography, somebody else is in charge of your life, so it's interesting."

    The worst quality in an interviewee, says Marc: Modesty.

    About his education: 'Berkeley made me lucid.'

    His ex-wife Lisa put his finger on why they never loved Washington DC: "It lacks a sense of healing irony. This is a very literal place." But the opportunities it gave him he would forever be grateful for.

---See Additional C-SPAN interviews with Marc.

 
“History Is A Construct. A Lot Happened, But What Do We Remember From It?” (Heather Jaber and Nicole Bogart, Salzburg Global News, 1-29-18) As a historian and former museum director of the National Portrait Gallery, Marc Pachter was tasked with signifying achievement in American culture. “This used to be very easy… White men on horses, usually generals or Presidents,” he explains.

     “True history began with thinking of race and gender in general. But... the road was still stopping short of LGBT questions – also part of the reveal of what a culture really is.” During his tenure at the Gallery in Washington, DC, Pachter, a multi-time Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar, "was involved in introducing the controversial HIDE/SEEK exhibition to the National Portrait Gallery in which homosexuality was depicted as a core theme in the work of many American artists. He believes national museums play an important role in signaling a growing consensus within society to discuss the history of LGBT communities. Moreover, including those exhibitions acknowledge that LGBT rights and visibility are not new issues – they have always existed in history."
---Marc Pachter on history as a construct: What do we remember from it? (YouTube video, Salzburg Global Seminar, 9-30-15) Marc Pachter in conversation with Salzburg Global LGBT Forum Chair Dr. Klaus Mueller on public readiness for using lenses of race, gender, and sexuality on history.

      As explained on the Gallery’s website, the exhibition (developed by a team under his successor), which ran from October 2010 to November 2011, was “the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture. HIDE/SEEK considers such themes as the role of sexual difference in depicting modern America; how artists explored the fluidity of sexuality and gender; how major themes in modern art--especially abstraction--were influenced by social marginalization; and how art reflected society's evolving and changing attitudes toward sexuality, desire, and romantic attachment.”

      “It boils down to invisibility; history is a construct; lots happened, but what do we remember from it?” Pachter says. “And that we chose as a nation not to think about it says a lot. The history was always there… People that were not known as gay were living their lives. The nation needed to say: our history telling is incomplete. “We already knew that about race; we already knew that about women… but we needed to think this way [about queer history]. It felt both revolutionary and, happily, in the end ordinary to do this.”

 
Marc's talk on the Living Self Portrait Series (Marc Pachter, Director Emeritus, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (EG3) February, 2008) Do listen to this lecture. Marc Pachter shares stories from years spent celebrating great American lives. Marc prefers sprawling, messy cities like LA and Berlin to beautiful self-regarding ones like SF and Paris, but these portraits were of Americans of a certain age (60s thru 90s), the idea being to sit at the feet of people who "know how the story turned out." Always worth listening to one of Marc's talks and this one is particularly interesting on how to do interviews that are different--that are empathic, that "feel like what they want to say," etc. What qualities in the interview subject made them more interesting (and what made them boring).


Smithsonian's Veteran Man-in-the-Middle Stands His Ground (Adam Goodheart, In the Capital, NY Times, 4-24-2002)
     "The tensions at the history museum would test any acting director -- though in some ways Marc Pachter seems the perfect man for the challenge. A 28-year veteran at the institution, he was regarded as a pathfinder through the thicket of the cultural wars of the 90's. Now, his admirers say, he is a lone voice of reason drowned out in the continuing din. The question, they say, is how much any museum director, even a visionary, can accomplish amid the current tensions.
    "Mr. Pachter is, in a sense, the Smithsonian's resident philosopher -- a role that he quickly steps into when we finally reach the ruby slippers. On this afternoon, the slippers' display case is surrounded by throngs of school-age visitors. As Mr. Pachter surveys the scene with satisfaction, I ask him the type of question that the museum's detractors have long raised: isn't Judy Garland's footwear a bit trivial to be given a place of honor in a national museum?
     '' 'They're here because they're important to people,'' he answers. ''It's a touchstone to their childhood, a point of contact with the whole story of 'The Wizard of Oz' and how that came to be created. It's a way of getting them to think of history as including their own lives.'
     "Many of the Smithsonian's critics, Mr. Pachter says, talk as if the museum were faced with a stark choice between academia or Disney World. For Mr. Pachter, the best analogy for a museum's cultural role is another, perhaps slightly old-fashioned, comparison: a cathedral. It's a view he has been preaching for years in a number of well-regarded speeches and articles to the international museum world, and, possibly less effectively, to his Smithsonian colleagues. Indeed, a few days after the Reynolds gift was withdrawn, Mr. Pachter was at Oxford University to deliver a prestigious Slade lecture, a speech he titled ''The Museum as a Sacred Place in a Secular Age.'' 

      "For Mr. Pachter, such ecclesiastical comparisons don't suggest aloofness and sterility, but rather the opposite: an experience that combines both theatricality and reason, both rapture and contemplation. In other words, both Disney World and academia. It's a dualism that, he says, goes all the way back to the origins of modern museums in the 18th century."

 

      The tensions at the history museum would test any acting director -- though in some ways Marc Pachter seems the perfect man for the challenge. A 28-year veteran at the institution, he was regarded as a pathfinder through the thicket of the cultural wars of the 90's. Now, his admirers say, he is a lone voice of reason drowned out in the continuing din. The question, they say, is how much any museum director, even a visionary, can accomplish amid the current tensions. Mr. Pachter is, in a sense, the Smithsonian's resident philosopher -- a role that he quickly steps into when we finally reach the ruby slippers. On this afternoon, the slippers' display case is surrounded by throngs of school-age visitors. As Mr. Pachter surveys the scene with satisfaction, I ask him the type of question that the museum's detractors have long raised: isn't Judy Garland's footwear a bit trivial to be given a place of honor in a national museum?

 

Portrait Gallery Director to Retire in '07 (Jacqueline Trescott, Washington Post, 12-11-2006) "As director, Pachter was a key part of the team that redesigned the Portrait Gallery and refocused and expanded its view of history and art. The gallery was closed for a longer-than-expected six years for a top-to-bottom renovation; since reopening in July, it has had record crowds visiting the building it shares with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. About 30 percent of the visitors are coming after 5 p.m.; the decision to extend the museum's hours till 7 p.m. was made to fit "the vibe" of the revitalized Gallery Place neighborhood, Pachter said."


American Flâneur (Instagram) Photos and reels. (I passed, then kept flunking, Instagram's test, but maybe it will work for you.) Maybe it will come back. Maybe you need to be a member of Instagram. See also Barge rehearsal in Thailand (Reels) Scroll down for more photos of Marc


• Marc had a few words to say in 2016 about Trump’s election, by way of boosting morale.
       "This is not the first setback in our political history as a nation. It is important to remember that in a democracy there are always different views as to the direction the nation should take. Every major body of opinion gets a shot at Presidential leadership. And it's also important to remember that our system never allows a President complete authority. In fact the system is set up to frustrate authority. When the person you support has been elected you often see the limits of what he (and someday she) can do. Obama had his successes but was often blocked. The same will happen to the President-elect.
       "What we are now obligated to do is monitor the new administration and if we disagree with its policies to make our opinions known and to expect our representatives and the judiciary to reflect on these issues. The American system is not meant to be efficient or to support only one set of views. It is meant to check and balance. This is a loud, messy and very American process."


Marc Pachter (Wikipedia entry) Marc Pachter (born 1942 or 1943) is an American museum director who headed up the United States National Portrait Gallery from 2000 until 2007 and was the acting director (after coming back out of retirement) of the National Museum of American History between 2011 and 2012, both at the Smithsonian. While at the NPG Pachter played an instrumental role in acquiring the Lansdowne portrait for the...


Marc Pachter and the Washington Biography Group The Washington Biography Group was inspired by Marc Pachter, then chief historian of the National Portrait Gallery, who organized an all-day symposium on "Biography: Life As Art" at The Smithsonian Institution's Baird Auditorium. Held December 6, 1986, the symposium was attended by 325 people. Three biographers talked about their work: David McCullough, Phyllis Rose, and Marc Pachter. After the event, Marc Pachter, Judy Nelson, and others wondered if members of the audience would like to continue meeting, so Marc announced at the end of the day that those interested in meeting to discuss biography writing should send him a postcard and he would schedule a meeting. In February 1987, about 30 people attended the first meeting, at Chick and Judy Nelson's home.

     It was through the WBG that I got to know Marc. WBG survived Marc's post-retirement move to New York and his peregrinations through the world, but he always stayed in touch. He will truly be missed.


• Marc's two books:

     Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art

     A Gallery of Presidents (National Portrait Gallery)

________________

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Differences of Agreement on Capitalizing Black and White (or Not) as Race Terms

What should it be? Black and white?  Black and White? black and white?

A few well-expressed opinions, handy for classroom and copy desk arguments.

Frequently updated and as of 2-24-24 there is clearly no concensus on which of the two words (black, white) to capitalize or why.


Capitalization Style for Black and White as Race Terms (Right Touch Editing's useful chart of various organizations preferences, as of 10-26-21)


Why we will lowercase white (AP) "[P]eople who are Black have strong historical and cultural commonalities, even if they are from different parts of the world....White people generally do not share the same history and culture, or the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color."


Uppercasing ‘Black’ (New York Times, 6-30-30) 'The Associated Press and other major news organizations have recently adopted “Black,” which has long been favored by many African-American publications and other outlets. The new style is also consistent with our treatment of many other racial and ethnic terms: We recently decided to capitalize “Native” and “Indigenous,” while other ethnic terms like “Asian-American” and “Latino” have always been capitalized.
      We will retain lowercase treatment for “white.” While there is an obvious question of parallelism, there has been no comparable movement toward widespread adoption of a new style for “white,” and there is less of a sense that “white” describes a shared culture and history. Moreover, hate groups and white supremacists have long favored the uppercase style, which in itself is reason to avoid it.'

    The term “brown” as a racial or ethnic description should also generally remain lowercase and should be used with care.


Capitalizing for Equality (Conscious Style Guide) The New York Times, Poynter, and Columbia Journalism Review "have argued for capitalizing black and white when used as racial terms, for the sake of respect, equality, and typographical integrity. Other groups are entitled to the visibility conferred by a capital letter—Hispanic, Native, Asian American—and despite the lack of consensus that any of these are one people, these overly broad and arbitrary labels endure."
       However, "If your editorial directive is to call people what they want to be called—including names, pronouns, and labels—then look to Black media outlets like Ebony and Essence for accepted usage and avoid overriding their terminology. By capitalizing black and white, we also make necessary distinctions between color and race—black hair and Black hair—similar to distinguishing between native and Native. Don’t wait for your style guide to catch up, because it’s waiting for you to demonstrate sufficient usage."


Why we capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’) (Mike Laws, Columbia Journalism Review, 6-16-20) "For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists." "...as my CJR colleague Alexandria Neason told me recently, “I view the term Black as both an ethnic identity in the States that doesn’t rely on hyphenated Americanness (and is more accurate than African American, which suggests recent ties to the continent) and is also transnational and inclusive of our Caribbean [and] Central/South American siblings.” To capitalize Black, in her view, is to acknowledge that slavery “deliberately stripped” people forcibly shipped overseas “of all other ethnic/national ties.” She added, “African American is not wrong, and some prefer it, but if we are going to capitalize Asian and South Asian and Indigenous, for example, groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture, then we also have to capitalize Black.”


The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black (Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Atlantic, 6-18-2020) Black and white are both historically created racial identities—and whatever rule applies to one should apply to the other.


Why ‘White’ should be capitalized, too (Nell Irvin Painter, Washington Post, 7-22-20)

 

•  After a long discussion on the Copyeditors' listserv, participants tended to agree that at the moment the best thing is to follow the style guide of your publisher or publication, because there are reasons, many of them good, to capitalize both Black and White, to capitalize only Black, and to capitalize neither. (H/T Jeannette de Beauvoir)

 

• James McBride, in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, uses lowercase for both black and white.


The Washington Post announces writing style changes for racial and ethnic identifiers (7-29-20) 

      "The Post to capitalize Black to identify groups that make up the African diaspora."

      "[P]olitical terms used to promote racist ideologies or to advocate ethnic superiority or separation should remain lowercase (i.e. white supremacist, black nationalist). And in crime stories, where cultural and historical identity aren’t key to a suspect’s actions, use the lowercase versions of black, white and brown as race descriptors."


Ask a Radical Copyeditor: Black with a Capital “B” (Alex Kapitan, “Black” vs. “black,” Radical Copyeditor, 9-21-16) In his book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, author Touré explains: 'I have chosen to capitalize the word “Black” and lowercase “white” throughout this book. I believe “Black” constitutes a group, an ethnicity equivalent to African-American, Negro, or, in terms of a sense of ethnic cohesion, Irish, Polish, or Chinese. I don’t believe that whiteness merits the same treatment. Most American whites think of themselves as Italian-American or Jewish or otherwise relating to other past connections that Blacks cannot make because of the familial and national disruptions of slavery. So to me, because Black speaks to an unknown familial/national past it deserves capitalization.'
      'I choose to use Black and white in my own writing out of a dedication to centering the leadership, authority, and truths of the people I’m writing about—particularly when those people are marginalized. Although all people of African descent by no means agree with each other on everything, in the United States the Black press and many Black authors use Black and white.' [It is worth reading this full entry.]


A Debate Over Identity and Race Asks, Are African-Americans ‘Black’ or ‘black’? (John Eligon, NY Times, 6-26-2020) The push to capitalize black to refer to African-Americans is far more than a typographical change.


Recognizing Race in Language: Why We Capitalize “Black” and “White” (Ann Thúy Nguyễn and Maya Pendleton, Center for the Study of Social Policy, 3-23-20)


Why We're Capitalizing Black (NY Times, 7-5-2020) The Times has changed its style on the term’s usage to better reflect a shared cultural identity. Here’s what led to that decision. Here's Tony Mancini's good argument against it.


Why hundreds of American newsrooms have started capitalizing the ‘b’ in ‘Black’ (Elahe Izadi, Washington Post, 6-18-2020) A good overview of why it's changing.

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Big hubbub about science fiction's Hugo Awards

Expect to hear continuing controversy about the 2023 Hugo Awards, awarded at the Worldcon convention held in Chengdu, China. Several authors who should have qualified for the science fiction awards were disqualified without any explanation, including R.F. Kuang, author of Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence, Xiran Jay Zhao, author of Iron Widow, and Paul Weimer, who would have been eligible for Best Fan Writer as well as an episode of Netflix's The Sandman series.

 

Worldcon in the news Charlie Stross, Charlie's Diary, 1-26-24) "The important thing to note is that the 'worldcon' is *not a permanent organization. It's more like a virus that latches onto an SF convention, infects it with worldcon-itis, runs the Hugo awards and the WSFS business meeting, then selects a new convention to parasitize the year after next.
     Charlie's takeaway: "The world science fiction convention coevolved with fan-run volunteer conventions in societies where there's a general expectation of the rule of law and most people abide by social norms irrespective of enforcement. The WSFS constitution isn't enforceable except insofar as normally fans see no reason not to abide by the rules. So it works okay in the USA, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and all the other western-style democracies it's been held in ... but broke badly when a group of enthusiasts living in an authoritarian state won the bid then realized too late that by doing so they'd come to the attention of Very Important People who didn't care about their society's rulebook.
      Immediate consequences:
    "For the first fifty or so worldcons, worldcon was exclusively a North American phenomenon except for occasional sorties to the UK. Then it began to open up as cheap air travel became a thing. In the 21st century about 50% of worldcons are held outside North America, and until 2016 there was an expectation that it would become truly international. But the Chengdu fubar has created shockwaves. There's no immediate way to fix this..."
    Check out the 200+ comments.


Resignations, Censures Follow in Wake of Hugo Awards Controversy (Sophia Stewart, Publishers Weekly, 2-1-24) "Two leaders of Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP), the nonprofit that holds the service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, have reportedly stepped down from their posts following accusations of censorship in the voting process for the 2023 Hugo Awards.

     "The Hugo Awards are the most prestigious honors in the sci-fi/fantasy community. The awards, administered by the World Science Fiction Society, are awarded annually at the group's global convention, Worldcon. Last year's Worldcon was held for the first time in China, in Chengdu. "The resignations and disciplinary actions come after the nomination data for the 2023 awards was made public on January 20 and it was revealed that certain authors and books—including R.F. Kuang's hit novel Babel—had been inexplicably deemed "not eligible" for the Hugo. Kuang is Chinese American, and her work draws heavily from Chinese culture and history. Many fans and authors have speculated that state censorship—or self-censorship under the state's watch—was the reason for the opaque ineligibility rulings by the Chengdu–based committee."

 

Inside the Censorship Scandal That Rocked Sci-Fi and Fantasy's Biggest Awards (Adam Morgan, Esquire Magazine, 2-2-24) Insiders tell Esquire what really happened when the Hugo Awards melted down over unexplained disqualifications—and what it could mean for the future of literary awards.


Genre Grapevine on the Hugo Awards’ “not eligible” problem (Jason Sanford, Genre Grapevine, January 2024) Once again, the Hugo Awards are making international news. And once again, not in a good way. The "Hugo Award stats revealed that a number of writers and works were kept off the award’s final ballot for no valid reason. One of the biggest shockers was that Rebecca F. Kuang’s acclaimed fantasy novel Babel, which won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, was left off the final ballot despite earning 810 nomination votes, enough to place it third on the list of nominated novels."

     See also Worldcon Intellectual Property Announces Censure of McCarty, Chen Shi and Yalow; McCarty Resigns (Mike Glyer's News of SF Fandom, 1-30-24) and Hugo Award nominations raise questions Jane Friedman on The Hot Sheet, 1-31-24) Others also listed as ineligible for Hugo Awards: Xiran Jay Zhao, Neil Gaiman, and Paul Weimer.


The Hugo Awards controversy goes back a few years:

 

Attack the Bloc: The Hugo Awards Controversy (Emmaline Soken-Huberty, Gildshire, 8-28-19)

 

Sci-fi’s right-wing backlash: Never doubt that a small group of deranged trolls can ruin anything (even the Hugo Awards) (Arthur Chu, Salon, 4-6-15) Lazy democracy is like an open comments section -- left unmoderated and unguided, the worst people take over.

 

The Sad Puppy Takeover (Brooke Gladstone interviews Arthur Chu, On the Media radio, 4-17-15) The Hugo Awards are science fiction writing's highest honor, and this year conservative fans, concerned with the liberal leanings of recent awards, banded together to nominate their sci-fi ideals. Brooke speaks with actor and writer Arthur Chu about how the awards controversy reflects a larger history of cultural backlash.

 
The Hugo Awards Were Always Political. But Now They're Only Political. (Charlie Jane Anders, Gizmodo, 4-4-15) Last August, the Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy were swept by a younger group of women and people of color. At the time, we said "This was really a year that underscored that a younger generation of diverse writers are becoming central to the genre." So maybe it's not surprising that there was an organized backlash....When the nominees are mostly white men, as they have been during most eras except for the mid-1990s and the past five years, it does send a message about whose work is going to be considered valuable.

 

Freeping the Hugo Awards (Susan Grigsby, Daily Kos, 4-12-15) "The Nebulas are awarded by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The Hugos are nominated and awarded by fans of the genre who are members of Worldcon, making them basically a popularity contest." This piece is about how a group of conservative people ("Sad Puppies"--and not necessarily sci fi readers) gamed the system, stacking the ballot for Hugos with some unlikely candidates with acceptable attitudes toward white males (and fewer heroes who are woman or people of color).

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Trump, January 6, opinions vs. facts, indictment, trials, election tactics, political agenda

Trump, disrupter in chief

 

Updated March 14, 2024
"Call me old-fashioned but I don't think a president who incites a coup against the U.S. government deserves a $200,000 pension for the rest of his life, along with a million-dollar travel budget, all financed by U.S. taxpayers. Just sayin."
~ Robert Reich

 

"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus."

 

Tracking the Trump investigations and where they stand  (Washington Post)

(Derek Hawkins, Nick Mourtoupalas and Natalie Vineberg)  

      A helpful calendar, with useful background information, presumably to be kept up-to-date.

Keeping Track of the Trump Criminal Cases (The New York Times) "Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? The New York Times is here to help.

 Key Cases and Inquiries: The former president faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

   Here is a close look at each.

Case Tracker: Trump is at the center of four criminal investigations.

   Keep track of the developments in each here.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign? Can a convicted felon even run for office?

   Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.

Receive a Weekly Update: Sign up for the Trump on Trial newsletter to get the latest news and analysis on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

 • Keeping Track of the Trump Criminal Cases (New York Times, updated regularly)

 

And from other sources:

Catch Up on Where the Trump Investigations Stand (Ben Protess, Alan Feuer and Danny Hakim, NY Times, 2-12-24) Donald J. Trump has been sued in New York and indicted in Georgia, Florida, Manhattan and Washington, as federal and state prosecutors elsewhere have opened a number of investigations.
Lawfare’s coverage of the Trump trials Coverage of the criminal indictments against former President Donald Trump in the Southern District of Florida, Washington, D.C., and Fulton County, Georgia. Much good information here, well-organized.
Tracking the Trump criminal cases (Politico Status, charges, and strengths and weaknesses of each case, key players, prosecution, Trump's team, Who could pardon him.
Tracking Trump's trials (NPR)

 

Back to regular programming: Trump in general:

I gathered these links (to both facts and opinion and, above, a guide to information on various Trump cases and investigations) because I have found myself occasionally arguing about the man.

I admit bias, but where there is a solid argument for Trump's innocence, let me know. ~ P.M.

 

The magnitude of Pence refusing to endorse Trump (Aaron Blake, Washington Post, 3-16-24) “It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” Mike Pence told Fox News on Friday. "Pence’s lack of an endorsement also highlights the chasm between GOP elected officials and those who actually served alongside Trump in his Cabinet. NBC News last summer reached out to 44 former Cabinet officials and found that only four of them would commit to backing Trump in what was then the early stages of the primary contest. Many have turned into strong Trump critics, like former chief of staff John F. Kelly and former defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper."

Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 3-5-24) Super Tuesday. Just as voters don’t appear to know much about what the [Biden] administration has done to make their lives better, a recent study from a Democratic pollster suggests that voters don’t seem to know much about Trump’s statements attacking democracy. When informed of them, their opinion of Trump falls.

      "Trump has called for mass deportations of immigrants and foreign-born U.S. citizens; on February 29, he said he would use local police as well as federal troops to round people up and move them to camps for deportation. Asked yesterday by a Newsmax host if he would “order mass deportations if you win the White House,” Trump answered: “Oh, day one. We have no choice. And we’ll start with the bad ones. And you know who knows who they are? Local police. Local police have to be given back their authority, and they have to be given back their respect and immunity.”
      "On the one hand [Biden], caps to credit card late fees and an attempt to address price gouging; on the other hand [Trump], local police with immunity rounding up millions of people and putting them in camps, for deportation. And, in between the two, an election. People had better start paying attention."
I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 3-14-24)

      The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024.

     "Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”; “I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind, “weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”

      "Indeed, Trump’s efforts this year to blame Biden for literally everything have taken on a baroque quality even by the modern-day standards of the party that introduced Willie Horton and Swift-boating into the political lexicon."
What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term (Carlos Lozada, Opinion, NY Times, 2-29-24) it is easy to imagine “Mandate for Leadership” wielding influence in a second Trump term. It is an off-the-shelf governing plan for a leader who took office last time with no clear plan and no real ability to govern. This book attempts to supply him with both--for a conservative agenda.

Trump Fraud Trial Penalty Will Exceed $450 Million (Jonah E. Bromwich and Ben Protess, NY Times, 2-16-24) The ruling in Donald J. Trump’s civil fraud case could cost him all his available cash. The judge said that the former president’s “complete lack of contrition” bordered on pathological.
Judge Engoron’s Ruling Is a Detailed Road Map to Trump’s Thievery (David Cay Johnston, Simply a Crook, TNR, 2-19-24) The $355 million judgment is bad enough. But if you want the full flavor of the Trump Organization’s chicanery, read what the judge had to say. "In justifying his findings of fact, New York Judge Arthur Engoron’s analysis of testimony in Trump’s seven-week civil fraud trial in Manhattan showed how everything Trump does is based on consistent and shameless cheating, deceiving, falsifying documents, and lying.
      "The 92-page ruling establishes that Trump isn’t a business genius, a modern Midas who turns everything he touches to gold. Instead, the former TV entertainer and real estate mogul is simply a crook, a white-collar thief who uses flattery, threats, lies, and an ink pen to rip off everyone he can, particularly banks and insurance companies. Engoron’s opinion provides a road map to understanding Trump’s outrageous behavior and thus what we should expect from a second Trump administration.
       "Trump, to use his words, does “whatever the hell” he wants. Trump is just being true to himself, whether cheating his niece Mary out of most of her inheritance; sexually assaulting women like E. Jean Carroll; making up lies about Carroll in hopes of discrediting her; or tricking banks, insurance companies, and our government into valuing his properties in ways that stuff greenbacks into his pockets."

       "...The judge's opinion is a sequel to Trump's 1987 autobiography, The Art of The Deal, in which he brags about cheating at golf, deceiving business partners, and thumbing his nose at the law. That book is a guide not just to Trump's megalomaniacal ego but to how he serially ripped off unsuspecting people and then moved on to the next victim."
Pump and trump (Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with Andrea Bernstein and Meg Cramer, WNYC, and Peter Elkind, ProPublica, 10-17-18) Donald Trump claims he only licensed his name for real estate projects developed by others. But an investigation of a dozen Trump deals shows deep family involvement in projects that often involved deceptive practices. Trump’s licensing strategy originated with his early-2000s comeback, as “The Apprentice” propelled him to international TV stardom and restored luster to a reputation tarnished by multiple bankruptcies.
The New York Times published a 13,000-word examination of how Donald’s father, the late Fred Trump, and his estate, funneled millions of dollars to his children, in possible violation of tax rules and criminal laws. With copious documentation showing that Fred directed $413 million in today’s dollars to Donald — not the single loan for $1 million, with interest, that Donald has always claimed — it exploded Trump’s long-propagated claim that he is a self-made man.
This article examines another Trump claim: that his post-millennium comeback and global expansion rested on the brilliant purity of a licensing strategy that paid him millions simply for the use of his name. That, it turns out, is no truer than the notion that Donald Trump is self-made.
Here Are the Trump Projects Where Ivanka and Her Dad Misled Buyers (Katherine Sullivan and Heather Vogell, ProPublica, 10-17-18) Read the Trumps’ false statements — and what the actual facts were. Part of a series exploring Trump business practices.

 

For Donald Trump, the Recriminations Will Be Televised (James Poniewozik, NY Times, 2-17-24) The former president’s trials aren’t being aired. That isn’t stopping him from turning them into a political reality show. "The civil-fraud case against Donald J. Trump’s businesses in New York, in which he was ordered to pay a penalty of $355 million, was not televised. Neither was his civil trial for the defamation of E. Jean Carroll. Nor — barring an unlikely change in federal court policy — will be his looming federal election-interference trial.
But outside the courtroom, the show goes on.
      "In each case, Mr. Trump has sought out the cameras, or brought in his own, to offer a stream-of-consciousness heave of legal complaints and re-election arguments. In the process, the former reality-TV host and current presidential candidate has turned his many legal cases into one-sided TV productions and campaign ads.
      "To TV producers, because Mr. Trump is a former president, a candidate and high-profile defendant, his on-camera tirades are news. But there is also a kind of transaction at work. TV news craves conflict and active visuals. There are only so many times you can show a motorcade, or reporters cooling their heels in the street. Mr. Trump’s appearances give them sound, fury and B-roll.
      ""At the same time, Mr. Trump gets the kind of unfiltered access to the airwaves that networks were, once upon a brief time, wary of giving a candidate notorious for fabrications and conspiracy theories."


'A number of civil rights groups blame former President Donald J. Trump for creating an atmosphere of intolerance in America's schools. His promotion of what he called "patriotic education" — which sought to minimize the country's history of slavery — spurred conservative policymakers to support a series of efforts, including banning books, revising curriculums and challenging diversity programs...."We cannot underestimate the normalizing of intolerant behaviors..."' ~Strife in the Schools: Education Dept. Logs Record Number of Discrimination Complaints


Trump, House Republicans plot to kill border deal (Stef W. Kight, Politics & Policy, Axios, 1-29-24 and ongoing) The migrant crisis at the border and in major U.S. cities is one of the most jeopardizing issues for Biden and Democrats this November. It's also Trump's marquee political issue. He has every incentive to keep it front and center as he heads toward a likely rematch against Biden. Biden has doubled down on a tougher border image in recent months, and has signaled his willingness to "shut down the border" if he's given new authority under the Senate agreement. But Republicans seem ready to walk away from the border deal."
• Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) on Trump reportedly discouraging a GOP border resolution before the election: “"The fact that [Trump] would communicate to Republican senators…that he doesn't want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling."   (And not surprising.)


How the Biden-Trump Border Visits Revealed a Deeper Divide (Shane Goldmacher, NY Times, 2-29-24)Their approaches to immigration represent a test of voters’ appetite for the messiness of democracy, pitting the president’s belief in legislating against his rival’s pledge to be a “Day 1” dictator. “The difference is between a president who is trying to address a complex policy issue through our political system and one who is promising quasi-authoritarian solutions.”


Trump's extraordinary history lesson about airports and the Revolutionary War (Barbara Morrill, Daily Kos):

Do you want as president again someone whose history adlibs are so bad?
     "In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified Army out of the Revolutionary Forces encamped around Boston and New York, and named after the great George Washington, commander in chief. The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown.
     "Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant."

 • The Good Republicans’ Last Stand (David Frum, The Atlantic, 2-12-24) Will enough of Trump’s party finally be willing to stick up for Ukraine rather than follow his lead and bow to Russia?

An Outburst by Trump on NATO May Push Europe to Go It Alone (David E. Sanger, NY Times, 2-11-24) [A shared link that should allow non-subscribers to read this piece.]

     “Many were alarmed by comments that he would “encourage” Russia to attack U.S. allies that didn’t pay into NATO, but European leaders were already pondering the prospect of an alliance without the United States. “Long before Donald J. Trump threatened over the weekend that he was willing to let Russia 'do whatever the hell they want' against NATO allies that do not contribute sufficiently to collective defense, European leaders were quietly discussing how they might prepare for a world in which America removes itself as the centerpiece of the 75-year-old alliance.
     “Even allowing for the usual bombast of one of his campaign rallies, where he made his declaration on Saturday, Mr. Trump may now force Europe’s debate into a far more public phase.
    “So far the discussion in the European media has focused on whether the former president, if returned to office, would pull the United States out of NATO.
    “But the larger implication of his statement is that he might invite President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to pick off a NATO nation, as a warning and a lesson to the 30 or so others about heeding Mr. Trump’s demands.”

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Maggie Haberman, the Confidence Man’s Chronicler (Katy Waldman, New Yorker, 1-7-23) In her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Haberman 'presents Trump as a bullshit artist whose grand theme is his own greatness. Trump, Haberman writes, “was usually selling, saying whatever he had to in order to survive life in ten-minute increments.” He “was interested primarily in money, dominance, power, bullying, and himself.

     'Haberman sees herself as a demystifier. Her coverage is often grounded in statements about Trump's character—that he thrives on chaos but loves routine, or that he stirs up infighting among his cronies. When I asked her about these conceptual scoops, she corrected me: "They're contextual scoops." Context is key to Haberman's project. A characteristic article, which she co-wrote in July of 2017, emphasized that Donald Trump, Jr.,'s huddle with a Kremlin-linked lawyer proved "unusual for a political campaign" but "consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with." It was a quintessential Haberman balancing act, which underlined both the meeting's extraordinary nature (for Washington) and the mundane pattern that it fit (for the Trumps). A reader wondering whether to be surprised by such carelessness, such corruption, gets her answer: yes and no.'
Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ (Jeffrey Goldberg,The Atlantic, 9-3-20) The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic. President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, saying “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
I chatted with a courtroom sketch artist who draws Trump (Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, 1-25-24, illustrated with court drawings) Christine Cornell has been at this for nearly 50 years—and she's seen it all. "I've been getting a lot of emails from all over the country, especially since Trump became my most current news...." Asked What’s it like capturing someone [like Trump] who is such an emotional trigger for people: 

     CORNELL: "You know, his face is—everybody knows it. And he has about three expressions: One is just implacable. You don't know what the heck is going on. The other is angry, and the other is a smug smile."
Trump Is the Greatest Evil! (YouTube video, Liz Cheney The Bulwark Podcast with Charlie Sykes, 12-6-23) Listen and follow the transcript.
How Joe Biden Could Address the Age Issue (Dhruv Khullar, New Yorker, 2-26-24) It "would be a mistake to cast concerns about Biden’s age as simply a distillation of biases against the elderly. Trump, if reëlected, would also finish his term as an octogenarian, but voters harbor considerably fewer misgivings about his age. (It’s possible that the question of age is overshadowed by Trump’s more general incoherence; earlier this month, he claimed that Democrats were trying to change the name of Pennsylvania, and encouraged Russia to attack U.S. allies.)...Some longevity researchers, having pored over publicly available medical information about Biden and Trump, have deemed both men “super-agers.”

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Jeff Greenfield On Trump and History (On The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan, 1-19-24) Excellent summary, but listen, also.
How the Biden-Trump Border Visits Revealed a Deeper Divide (Shane Goldmacher, Politics, NY Times, 2-29-24) 'Their approaches to immigration represent a test of voters’ appetite for the messiness of democracy, pitting the president’s belief in legislating against his rival’s pledge to be a “Day 1” dictator. “What’s being proposed is more than a difference on immigration policy,” said Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth, who helped found a group that monitors American democracy. “The difference is between a president who is trying to address a complex policy issue through our political system and one who is promising quasi-authoritarian solutions.”
      'For his part, Mr. Biden made the case on Thursday that his hands had been tied by the failure of a bipartisan border package that had been negotiated on Capitol Hill. The legislation would have increased border spending, made asylum claims harder, and stiffened fentanyl screening. It unraveled when Mr. Trump demanded its defeat.'
     ...'The thing about Mr. Trump’s lightning-rod pledge to be a “Day 1” dictator was that it was not just a blanket promise of authoritarian rule. It was grounded in a specific policy. He said he wanted to close the border — the limits of governmental red tape be damned.'
Is $83.3 Million Enough to Make Trump Stop Lying? (David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 1-26-24) To avoid today’s eye-popping verdict, he just needed to stop talking about E. Jean Carroll. Is there any sanction so dire that it can keep Trump from lying?

     12-22-24: Four of Trump's co-defendants have pleaded guilty to illegally conspiring to overturn his defeat. They include three lawyers associated with Trump — Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell — as well as Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall. All could testify against the other defendants if those cases go to trial.
The Constitutional Case for Barring Trump from the Presidency (Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 8-23-23) Does the Fourteenth Amendment empower state election officials to remove him from the ballot? The argument rests on Baude and Paulsen’s interpretation of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that officeholders, such as the President, who have taken an oath to “support” the Constitution and “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” will no longer hold such an office....

     Laurence Tribe, a liberal law professor, and J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, wrote an article for The Atlantic, in which they essentially endorsed the view advanced by Baude and Paulsen: “The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again.”
      See: The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again (J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe, The Atlantic, 8-19-23) "As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president."
       "This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies."

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Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 1-20-24) "Last night at a rally in New Hampshire, former president Trump repeatedly confused former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is running against him for the Republican presidential nomination, with Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the former speaker of the House....

     "Observers have been saying for a while now that once Trump had to start appearing in public, his apparent cognitive decline would surprise those who haven’t been paying attention....
      "The Trump Organization’s auditor said during a fraud trial in 2022 that the past 10 years of the company’s financial statements could not be relied on, and Trump was forced to turn to smaller banks, likely on much worse terms. Now the legal case currently underway in Manhattan will likely make that financial problem larger. The judge has already decided that the Trump Organization, Trump, his two older sons, and two employees committed fraud, for which the judge is currently deciding appropriate penalties....
      "Since 2023, right-wing organizations, backed by Republican state attorneys general, have argued that banks are discriminating against them on religious and political grounds....

     "The attempt to create distrust of large financial institutions is part of a larger attempt to destabilize the institutions of democracy. Trump is the figurehead for that attempt, but it is larger than him, and it will outlast him....

    "Once elected, Trump and MAGA Republicans started to undermine faith in the rule of law that underpins our democracy. Less than four months after he took office, Trump fired the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, for investigating the connections between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives, and his attacks on the FBI and the Department of Justice under which the FBI operates have been relentless ever since.
     "Trump and his supporters have also challenged the U.S. military, insisting that it is weak because it is “woke.” He has called its leaders “some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my life.”
     "Over all, of course, is the Big Lie that undermines the nation’s electoral system by insisting that the 2020 presidential vote was “rigged” against Trump. Although there has never been any evidence of such a thing, 30% of Americans think Biden won the presidency only through “voter fraud.”
What Trump's lawyer was really advocating (Robert Reich, 1-11-24) America is not the Weimar Republic in its final days and Trump is not Hitler, but … the parallels between a potential Trump presidency and the Weimar Republic on the eve of 1933.

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Jonathan Karl: Donald Trump and the End of the GOP (YouTube video, In Conversation with Jonathan Swan, 12-9-23, intelligent Q&A  at Commonwealth Club, well worth listening to).

      Karl is author of Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. In this special online-only program Karl details the former president’s quest for retribution, talks about how Trump talked about leaving the Republican party (during the post-election-defeat time when he was a pariah in the party) and provides a glimpse at what the GOP would be signing up for if it once again chooses him as its standard bearer.

      Interesting stories, about Trump threatening to leave the party, the role of the massive database of Trump supporters (which Trump made a lot of money from, renting it out to the Republican party), about the threat of being ineligible ever to run for president again. Most shocking to Karl was Trump's belief that he could resume the presidency without being re-elected. He's drawn working class voters (Hispanic and African American men) and he really brings out the voters (from both parties). This has never been about policy. It's about orienting the party towards the whims of one man.
Trump on Trial newsletter (NY Times) The latest news and analysis on the trials of Donald Trump in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.
Trump Will Be a Dictator on Day One and Every Day Thereafter (Matt Ford, TNR, 12-6-23) His interview with Hannity told us everything we need to know about his second-term plans. His supporters have argued that Trump’s opponents actually struck first by charging him with a series of crimes after he left office. It’s a neat rhetorical trick from Trump and his allies: simultaneously arguing that the cases against them are illegitimate and that any targeting of his opponents would be legitimate.
     "But that reasoning is detached from reality. First, the reason that Trump has been indicted multiple times is that he appears to have committed a wide variety of genuine crimes. He manipulated property values in New York to secure favorable loans from banks and lower taxes rates before taking office. He pressured local officials to “find” enough votes to let him win Georgia in the 2020 presidential election. He summoned a mob to attack the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power. And he stole classified documents from the federal government after leaving office."

• In a New York Times piece about Joe Biden's verbal slips: "Mr. Trump, at age 77, has not exactly been a smooth operator himself. He has long strayed off message, and has his own growing record of verbal slips. He has confused Mr. Biden with Mr. Obama, suggested America is on the verge of entering World War II, praised Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, and told supporters not to worry about voting."

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Trump doubles down, saying ‘Obamacare Sucks’ and must be replaced (NBC News, 11-29-23) Despite the GOP 2024 front-runner's call, congressional Republicans are divided on whether to pick that battle again after they tried and failed to eliminate the law in 2017.
A Court Ruling That Targets Trump’s Persona (Lora Kelley, The Atlantic, 9-27-23) 'A New York judge’s decision undermines the former president’s image as a “deals guy.” He rode his image as real-estate mogul and a maestro of transactions first to pop-culture stardom, then to the White House. Now a judge has ruled that much of that dealmaking was fraudulent: New York Judge Arthur Engoron found yesterday that Trump and his associates, including his sons Eric and Donald Jr., committed persistent fraud by toggling estimates of property values in order to get insurance and favorable terms on loans. The judge ordered that some of the Trump Organization’s “certificates,” or corporate charters, be canceled, and that a receiver be appointed by the court to dissolve some of its New York companies. This latest blow for Trump puts on record that his mythos of business acumen was largely built on lies.'
Why have so many Americans succumbed to Trumpism? (Robert Reich, Alternet) An opinion piece well worth reading. Trump has responded to America's lopsided economy "by portraying himself as a strongman who would fight for the “forgotten Americans.” He has responded to their suspicions by giving them a set of villains who, he claims, have conspired to keep them down — the so-called “Deep State,” the cultural elites supporting it, and the political establishment guarding it.

     "In his 2024 campaign, Trump is using the criminal proceedings against him as a means of fusing his own identity with that of millions of Americans who have felt mistreated and bullied by the system. He is them. This fusion is a hallmark of authoritarian fascism. "As we have seen, many of the key political and economic institutions of our society have abandoned their commitments to the common good — and along the way, abandoned the bottom half of the adult population, especially those without college degrees. The consequence has been a catastrophe, especially for the bottom half.

     "Trump’s attempted coup could not have gotten as far as it did — and it continues to this day — without the deepening anger, despair, and suspicions that have subsumed a substantial portion of the American population. This is especially true of Americans without college degrees, without good jobs, whose pay has stagnated, who have little or no job security, and whose adult children are no longer doing better than they did — in places that have been hollowed out and economically abandoned."

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Trump’s Chaos Agenda (Robert Reich, 10-9-23) Reagan’s negative view of government has morphed into a malevolent anti-democracy fervor. Ronald Reagan told Americans that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”
    "Reagan is still revered, especially by Republicans, but his negative view of government has morphed into an authoritarian fervor within the Republican Party. And that fervor has become the basis of a strategy — led by Trump — for seeking to persuade the rest of America that the nation is ungovernable as a democracy and therefore in need of an authoritarian strongman."
    "The more chaos Trump and his allies create, the more pessimistic Americans feel about the capacities of our democratic institutions to govern the nation — which advances their authoritarian agenda."

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Trump’s Long Fascination With Genes and Bloodlines Gets New Scrutiny The former president’s remark about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country is one of several comments he’s made over the years regarding “good genes.” Mr. Trump dismissed criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology.
Maggie-Koerth Baker Untangles the Story behind Trump’s False Claims of Immigrant Voter Fraud (Jeanne Erdmann, Open Notebook, 9-12-17) Trump proclaimed he had peer-reviewed research to support his claim: a 2014 study that said enough noncitizen immigrants were registered to vote to swing an election. What Trump didn’t tell his base is that other scientists had debunked the study, identifying a major flaw in the data analysis.
Keeping Track of the Trump Investigations (The New York Times) State and federal prosecutors are pursuing multiple investigations into Donald J. Trump’s business and political activities, with the cases expected to play out over the coming months. Here is a guide to the major criminal cases involving the former president.
Covering Trump: An oral history of an unforgettable campaign (Shelley Hepworth, Vanessa Gezari, Kyle Pope, Cory Schouten, Carlett Spike, David Uberti and Pete Vernon, Columbia Journalism Review, 11-22-16. Series reported in partnership with Guardian US). Did Trump's tactics wound the media?

     "You hear him talk for five minutes and understand that he does not believe in free and independent media. We know how threatening that is, not just to journalists, but to the idea of having accountability and the idea of democratic governance. That's part of what we all react to viscerally."
Trump Thinks Running for President Again Is His Get Out of Jail Free Card (Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, 7-18-22) Justice Department policy says a sitting president cannot be prosecuted—and Trump knows it. He doesn’t care that rational people believe that inciting an insurrection (or being an abject racist, or trying to use the government to punish his enemies, or pardoning war criminals, or setting the wheels in motion to overturn Roe v. Wade) should disqualify him for holding office again, and he has apparently decided that another run for the White House is happening.
The Patriot: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic,11/23) Until General Mark Milley, no chairman of the Joint Chiefs had confronted the possibility that the president might provoke a coup, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes in our cover story. Milley may have done more than any other American to protect the Constitution from Donald Trump.
     "In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said....

    "In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”

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My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump (Tim Alberta, The Atlantic, Jan 2024) 'Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.” '
Fox Will Pay $787.5 Million to Settle Defamation Suit (Jeremy W. Peters and Katie Robertson, NY Times, 4-18-23) The settlement with Dominion Voting Systems was the latest extraordinary twist in a case that exposed the inner workings of the most powerful voice in conservative news....
      "Producers referred to pro-Trump guests like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani as “gold” for ratings and acknowledged that the audience didn’t want to hear about subjects like the possibility of a peaceful transition from a Trump administration to a Biden administration.
      "Those communications have shown how employees at Fox expressed serious doubts about and, at times, were scornful of Mr. Trump and his allies as they spread lies about voter fraud, questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s election. Some at Fox mocked Mr. Trump and his lawyers as “crazy” and under the influence of drugs like L.S.D. and magic mushrooms.
The Mar-a-Lago Documents Indictment (Doug Muder, The Weekly Sift, 6-12-23) As clear and complete an explanation as you're likely to find in this short a space.
Fact-Checking the Breadth of Trump’s Election Lies (Linda Qiu, Fact Check, 8-17-23) The former president faces multiple charges related to his lies about the 2020 election. Here’s a look at some of his most repeated falsehoods.
Newspaper editorial boards reflect on Trump indictment across the U.S. (Politico, 8-2-23) On Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The United States “had never seen an indictment of this magnitude,” The New York Times Editorial Board wrote.
Fact check: 14 of Trump’s false claims on ‘Meet the Press’ (Daniel Dale and Jack Forrest, CNN, 9-17-23) He's keeping fact checkers busy, for sure.
George Will: Republican Party Living in Fear of Voters (MSNBC, MTP Daily,8-20-20) Columnist George Will says the GOP has enabled President Trump, and “fear” is the main reason they aren’t pushing back, “The Republican Party today lives in terror of its voters, and that’s, again, a very dangerous political condition.”
Trump's debate response: The fascist who doesn't want America to think (Robert Reich, 8-25-23) The presidential mugshot. He deals in images designed to invoke defiance in supporters and outrage in opponents. Or complains about unflattering shots, of which this is surely the prize (scroll to bottom).
True patriotism is the opposite of Trump’s White Christian Nationalism (Robert Reich, 7-3-23) For July 4th, Trump advances his version of patriotism based on White Christian Nationalism. For example (and I quote):
---He commended the Supreme Court for rejecting affirmative action “so someone who has not worked as hard will not take your place.”
---He saluted the court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade so “radical left Democrats will not kill babies.”
---He condemned foreign governments that "send" over the border "people in jails and insane asylums" and promised to deny entry to "all communists and Marxists." And so on.
Trump’s Legal Woes Mount as Trial Dates and Campaign Calendar Collide (Charlie Savage, NY Times, 7-19-23) The Republican front-runner is facing a growing tangle of criminal and civil trials that will overlap with next year’s presidential primaries. A rundown on all his trials.

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Years later, Jan. 6 fallout continues for journalists (Kirstin McCudden, Press Freedom Tracker blog, 7-28-23)
Newspaper editorial boards reflect on Trump indictment across the U.S. (Kierra Frazier, Politico, 8-2-23) The United States “had never seen an indictment of this magnitude,” The New York Times Editorial Board wrote.
Global media reacts to Trump’s third indictment (Jenna Moon, Semafor, 8-2-23) American democracy itself will hinge on this trial, said Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. This indictment will be the most important, he wrote, because the center of the argument is that Trump is a threat to political freedom.
Jared and Ivanka made up to $640 million in the White House (Jordan Libowitz and Caitlin Moniz, Citizens for Ethics, 2-8-21) One major factor in their outside profits came from Ivanka Trump's ownership stake in the Trump Hotel in DC, just blocks from the White House and the locus of influence peddling in the Trump administration...

    "Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump should never have been allowed to work in the White House. The Department of Justice reversed decades of precedent to grant President Trump's wish to have his children work in the White House. While taking on enormous responsibilities that they were unqualified to carry out, and debasing their positions with constant ethics scandals, they likely made hundreds of millions of dollars from questionable sources. All that was waived off by the same nepotism that got them their jobs." 
Trump, Macho Macho Victim (Maureen Dowd, NY Times, 11-19-22) 'It wasn’t really an announcement [of his candidacy for president] so much as another Trump scam to fend off prosecutions and to keep raising money from his supporters. Trump is no victim....Trump is the first former president subjected to a special counsel investigation into whether he masterminded a coup attempt. That’s mind-blowing, especially since he’s running for president again....Trump told Fox News that he "won't partake" in the investigation, as if it were a breakfast buffet at Mar-a-Lago that he's skipping.'
To Jail or Not to Jail (Maureen Dowd, Opinion, NY Times, June 17, 2023) 'During his presidency, The Times reported, “his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the ‘beautiful mind’ material. It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.”
     "The aides used the phrase — which turned up in the indictment — as shorthand for Trump’s organized chaos, how he somehow kept track of what was in the boxes, which he held close as a security blanket. During the 2016 campaign, some reporters said, he traveled with cardboard boxes full of real estate contracts, newspaper clippings and schedules, as though he were carrying his world around with him. "The guy likes paper."
    'Trump has said one of his favorite movies is “Citizen Kane.” Perhaps the boxes at Xanadu he’s obsessed with, the papers that could make him the locked-up loser he dreads being, have been revealed as his Rosebud.

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What the January 6th Report Is Missing (Jill Lepore, New Yorker, 1-9-23) The investigative committee singles out Trump for his role in the Capitol attack. And that, in brief, is the report, which concludes that “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump.” And that, in brief, is "the problem: chasing Trump, never quite untethering itself from him, fluttering in the biting wind of his violent derangement, like a ribbon pinned to the tail of a kite during a tornado, and failing, entirely, to see the tornado."

      "As prosecution, the report is thorough. But as historical explanation it’s a mess."
Trump Real Estate Deal in Oman Underscores Ethics Concerns (Eric Lipton, NY Times, 6-20-23) Details of the former president’s agreement to work with a Saudi firm to develop a hotel and golf complex overlooking the Gulf of Oman highlight the ways his business and political roles intersect.Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, has already brought in at least $5 million from the Oman deal. The project could also draw scrutiny in the West for its treatment of its migrant workers, who during the first phase of construction are living in compounds of cramped trailers in a desertlike setting and are being paid as little as $340 a month, according to one of the engineers supervising the work.
Indictment Presents Evidence Trump’s Actions Were More Blatant Than Known (Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman, News Analysis, Trump Documents Inquiry, NY Times, 6-8-23) The accounts in the 49-page indictment provide compelling evidence of a shocking indifference toward some of the country’s most sensitive secrets. The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump that was unsealed on Friday provided compelling evidence that Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents was more cavalier, and his efforts to obstruct the government’s attempts to retrieve them more blatant, than previously known. A classic example of what is known as a “speaking indictment,” the charging document did far more than merely lay out seven crimes, among them obstruction of justice and the willful retention of national defense records.
       "Prosecutors say that Trump knowingly removed classified information from the White House; that the information was sensitive, including some relating to the country’s military vulnerabilities; that Trump left the documents in public places where others might have seen them; and that when asked to return the documents, he lied to federal investigators and tried to obstruct an investigation. Trump says he is innocent and the case is a witch hunt intended to prevent him from returning to the presidency."

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Indictment turbocharges Trump’s fundraising (Alex Isenstadt, Political, 4-15-23) The former president’s two political entities brought in $18.8 million during the first quarter of this year, through his joint fundraising committee and his campaign. But the campaign also says it brought in nearly the same amount in the two weeks after the charges were filed against the former president — $15.4 million — underscoring just how much the charges against Trump have animated his backers... nearly a quarter of those who contributed to Trump during that period had never given to him before. While the former president’s indictment — along with potential future charges in several ongoing investigations — puts him in serious legal jeopardy, it has helped to solidify his standing with his supporters and grow his campaign war chest."
Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 8-6-23) From Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield's powerful speech in 1880 about how "four years after unreconstructed southern Democrats had taken control of all the former Confederate states and cemented the process of taking the vote away from Black men" this essay shifts to "Trump is charged with conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding—violating a law passed to stop Ku Klux Klan terrorists from breaking up official meetings in the late 1860s—and obstructing that proceeding: the counting of electoral votes."
     "In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Republican-dominated states immediately found ways to keep minority voters from the polls and their votes from being counted, and in 2020, then-president Trump tried to throw out the votes of people in majority Black districts in order to overturn the results of that year’s presidential election."
Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 6-11-23) "Trump supporters have flooded media channels with accusations that President Joe Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice to use as a political cudgel against former president Trump...While committed Republican partisans seem to believe Trump is a victim, according to the CBS News poll, 38% of likely Republican primary voters do, in fact, believe Trump endangered our security—and national security, after all, is the primary job of the president...The question is how much damage the fight for control will do to the Republican Party, especially in light of the fact that Smith’s other investigation, the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has not yet been concluded. There is reason to suspect those congress members involved in that effort might have been spooked by just how thorough the investigation of the documents case turned out to be."
Trump’s Indictment Reveals a National-Security Nightmare (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic Daily, 6-9-23) Republicans are trying to gaslight America about the former president’s astounding recklessness. Trump and his enablers are already trying to brush the charges away as the result of a witch hunt over a minor issue, but this indictment shows why Trump was, and remains, a threat to national security. (Check out the photos of how and where he stored classified documents and read about who he shared their contents with.)

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America’s First Indicted Ex-President Is Very Sorry—for Himself (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 4-5-23) "Indicted and Arraigned Trump, in other words, turned out to be just like his most recent previous incarnation, Impeached and Defeated Trump: a rambling, unrepentant grievance machine...he’s already raised more than seven million dollars as a result of Bragg’s indictment, began sending out fund-raising e-mails using his “NOT GUILTY” plea even before he had entered it....you could get a T-shirt emblazoned with a fake mug shot of the former President for a contribution of a mere forty-seven dollars to the campaign."
For Now, Trump and Allies Focus on Political Upside of a Criminal Case (Maggie Haberman, Michael C. Bender and Jonathan Swan, NY Times, 4-5-23) The indictment of the former president has unlocked a rush of fund-raising and has frozen the 2024 Republican primary, but he faces deeper legal peril in multiple inquiries.

      To convict Trump of a felony, prosecutors must show that Trump’s “intent to defraud” included an intent to commit or conceal a second crime. That turns on the untested question of whether a state prosecutor can invoke a federal crime even though he lacks jurisdiction to charge that crime himself.
The Cases Against Trump: A Guide (David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 3-23-23) The timelines, the issues at stake, and the threat they pose to the former president--arranged by Graham's assessment of the seriousness of the allegations to democracy and the rule of law, from the least significant to the most.
How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole (Jim Rutenberg, NY Times, 4-6-23) Rupert Murdoch built an empire by giving viewers exactly what they wanted. But what they wanted — election lies and insurrection — put that empire (and the country) in peril. Win or lose, Fox News will still face a choice in the coming election and beyond. Do they continue catering, perhaps with more careful lawyering, to paranoid fantasies like those that led to Jan. 6, or do they pull back from the brink?
Manhattan Prosecutors Will Begin Presenting Trump Case to Grand Jury (William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess and Jonah E. Bromwich, NY Times, 1-30-23) The Manhattan district attorney’s office will begin presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months. A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.
Judge Imposes Sanction on Fox for Withholding Evidence in Defamation Case (Katie Robertson and Jeremy W. Peters, NY Times, 4-12-23) Judge Eric Davis also said an investigation was likely into Fox’s handling of documents and whether it had withheld details about Rupert Murdoch’s corporate role.

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Trump’s ‘Secret Weapon’? College Accreditation (Katherine Knott, Inside Higher Ed, 5-4-23) The issue of accreditation has become the subject of much debate between the two leading Republicans eyeing the presidency in 2024. Trump said in a campaign video that his plan would reclaim colleges and universities from the “radical Left.” If Trump returns to the White House, he plans to replace college accreditors and impose new standards on the nation’s colleges and universities that include removing diversity, equity and inclusion staff members; protecting free speech; and “defending the American tradition and Western civilization.”

      Trump’s plan also would fine college and university endowments if they are found to have engaged in “unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity.”
Inside the Hush-Money Payments That May Decide Trump’s Legal Fate (Ronan Farrow, New Yorker, 4-6-23) Years of interviews with potential witnesses provide insights into the Manhattan D.A.’s case. 'Trump had met with Michael Cohen, his personal attorney at the time, and David Pecker, then the chief executive of A.M.I. The three men formalized a scheme in which Pecker and A.M.I. agreed to buy the rights to incriminating stories on behalf of Trump’s campaign and never publish them. The practice of purchasing a story in order to suppress it is known in tabloid circles as “catch and kill.”'
The Same Ole Line Dudes Are Waiting for You (Eric Lach, New Yorker, 4-7-23) Donald Trump’s arraignment may have been a circus for the media, but it was just another day at the office for New York’s professional line sitters.
House Jan. 6 Committee to Issue Criminal Referrals, Chairman Says (Luke Broadwater, NY Times, 12-6-22) Representative Bennie Thompson, the panel’s chairman, said no decision had been made on who would be the subject of the referrals or what the charges would be. Scroll down for the Times coverage of the Jan. 6 Investigations (status of various hearings, trials, and investigations).
Trump’s New Recruits (Tom Nichols,The Atlantic, 9-19-22) His embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theorists represents a new expansion not only of Trump’s cult of personality, but of his threats to sow violence.

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Elections and Trump's claims of election fraud
Fact check: Trump lies about voter fraud while states, CDC encourage voting-by-mail as pandemic-friendly option (Facts First, Fact Check, CNN) CNN holds elected officials and candidates accountable by pointing out what’s true and what’s not.
Trump repeats false election fraud claims during speech in Washington (Jill Colvin, AP/PBS, 7-26-22) In his first return to Washington since Joe Biden ousted him from the White House, former President Donald Trump vigorously repeated the false election-fraud claims that sparked the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. In a dueling speech not far away, his former vice president, Mike Pence, implored the Republican Party to move on from Trump’s defeat.
Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump (Nicholas Confessore and Jim Rutenberg, NY Times, 3-8-23) Fox hosts and executives privately mocked the former president’s election fraud claims, even as the network amplified them in a frantic effort to appease viewers.
      "It was a week after the 2020 elections, and Tucker Carlson — along with Fox News executives and other hosts — had watched with panic as Fox viewers, furious and disbelieving at President Donald J. Trump’s defeat, began to turn against the top-rated network.
     "Fox News has been the most trusted and watched source of information for conservative America for decades, and its frequent symbiosis with the Republican Party is well established. But the internal documents released in recent days have provided an unprecedented glimpse into network decision-making as its dual imperatives — to keep its base audience of conservatives satisfied and meet its promise to maintain journalistic standards of fairness and factuality — came into conflict as never before.
      "Mr. Carlson texted with staff members in early January 2021, adding, “I hate him passionately.”...But in the months after the Jan. 6 attacks, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” doubled down on a pro-Trump narrative that both Mr. Carlson and his bosses knew was rooted in a lie. According to a New York Times analysis, in 2021 nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — featured segments downplaying the Capitol riot, casting the insurrectionists as innocent citizens seeking legitimate redress for election fraud, and suggesting the riot itself was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by federal law enforcement to entrap Trump supporters....Senator Mitch McConnell pushed back against Mr. Carlson’s characterization of the Capitol attack.
      "Top Fox personnel agonized over the difficulty of escaping Mr. Trump’s influence over their own audience. “This day of reckoning was going to come at some point — where the embrace of Trump became an albatross we can’t shake right away if ever,” Dana Perino, a prominent Fox host, wrote to a friend in November 2020.
     "Yet the shoals they were trying to navigate had been in no small part laid by Mr. Carlson, one of Fox’s most-watched hosts. Though the newly released messages show Mr. Carlson expressing skepticism in his private emails about the extent of “voter fraud,” he had been an early and energetic promoter of the doubt Mr. Trump was trying to sow."

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The Enduring Power of Trumpism (Jelani Cobb, New Yorker, 9-15-22) No matter what becomes of Donald Trump, the forces of intolerance, racism, and belligerence he harnessed in American politics will persist. "The G.O.P. has abided all manner of corrupt, dishonest, anti-democratic, and potentially illegal behavior from Trump, including his incitement of an armed insurrection against the United States Congress, but the lacklustre midterm performance of Republicans seems to suggest that, like McCarthy sixty-eight years ago, the former President has reached a point where his demagogy has become a liability for his own party."
It’s Just Fraud All the Way Down (David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 9-21-22) The complaint filed today by New York Attorney General Letitia James is remarkable not for the shrewdness of the misconduct it alleges, but for its audacity. "At times in his prepresidential life, Donald Trump represented himself as a real-estate mogul, a television star, a business visionary, and a salesman par excellence. But according to a complaint filed today by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the Trump Organization was actually just a massive fraud with incidental sidelines in property development, merchandising, and entertainment."
How they did it: Reporters uncovered Trump hush payments to two women (Denise-Marie Ordway, 3-11-19) A Wall Street Journal reporter discusses the newspaper's investigation into secret payoffs Donald Trump and his associates arranged to suppress sexual allegations from two women during the 2016 presidential campaign.
How they did it: ProPublica investigates Trump's ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy (Chloe Reichel, 3-4-19) “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I haven't ever been part of a story that has had such powerful impact so swiftly,” Ginger Thompson, senior reporter at ProPublica, said.
Key Takeaways From Trump’s Tax Returns (Jim Tankersley, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, NY Times, 12-30-22) Thousands of pages of tax documents contain details that have not previously been revealed. Among insights: Trump made no charitable contributions in 2020. In a bad year for business, Trump didn’t take a full refund. His own tax law may have cost him. Fred Trump is a silent actor in the returns. (Charlie Smart, NYTimes, 12-21-22)

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Appeals Court Restores Justice Dept.’s Access to Sensitive Files Seized From Trump(Charlie Savage, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, NY Times, 9-21-22) A federal judge had temporarily barred the department from using the records marked as classified in its inquiry into whether the former president illegally retained national defense documents. The decision by the appeals court was a striking repudiation of Mr. Trump’s attempts to claim in public, but not in court, that he had declassified the sensitive records at issue. The ruling was the latest turn in what began as a legal sideshow to the investigation into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of government documents, including some marked as highly classified.
      Mr. Trump “suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was president,” the appeals court wrote. “But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified.” The court went on to say, “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal.
Heather Cox Richardson (2-21-23)
"Right-wing media has been trying to spin Biden’s trip to Kyiv and speech in Poland as proof that he doesn’t care about the derailment of the train carrying hazardous chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. In fact, Republican governor Mike DeWine initially rejected federal help when Biden offered it, saying he didn’t see the need for it.
        "The right wing has also gone after Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for the accident, although it was the Trump administration that weakened safety regulations put in place under Barack Obama that could have mitigated the crisis, and railroad personnel cuts that left the train understaffed. Before the accident, train workers had worried that the 151-car train, 9,300 feet long and weighing 18,000 tons, was too long and too heavy to travel safely."

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Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson, 11-15-22) "The [Republican] party’s losses in the midterms appear to have opened the door for Trump's opponents to toss him under the bus. According to Jonathan Swan at Axios, at this morning’s annual meeting of the Republican governors, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie got “huge applause” from the room full of hundreds of politicians, consultants, and wealthy donors when he blamed Trump for three cycles of losses for the Republican Party. Christie said voters “rejected crazy.”
    "Meanwhile, Trump has told the special master that the president has the authority simply to declare which records are personal records, and that he declared all the seized documents to be personal records while in office. He suggests his careless handling of the classified documents proves he considered them personal records. The Department of Justice has responded with incredulity (that’s the gist of it, anyway).

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'Times' Journalists Puncture Myth Of Trump As Self-Made Billionaire (Terry Gross interviews investigative reporters Susanne Craig and David Barstow, who say the president received today's equivalent of $413 million from his father's real estate empire, through what appears to be tax fraud. See also Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father (Susanne Craig and David Barstowand Russ Buettner, NY Times, 10-2-18) Much of the $413 million Trump received (in today’s dollars) from his father’s real estate empire came through schemes to avoid paying taxes on multimillion dollar gifts in the family. Trump has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.

Kari Lake was unflinchingly loyal to Trump. Then her campaign unraveled. Isaac Stanley-Becker and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, WaPo, 12-12-22) "Advisers wanted her to focus less on Trump’s false claims of voter fraud and more on homelessness, water independence and border security, according to people familiar with their counsel. Business leaders recommended that she tone down her MAGA message to create a friendlier climate for capital. Republican strategists asked her to stop denigrating early ballots, a method of voting once critical to Republican victories in the state....After pushback from some members of Lake’s team, the candidate herself spoke up. She said that True The Vote, the Texas-based group pushing unfounded claims of voter fraud, had told her to instruct supporters to mail in their ballots — not put them in drop boxes — as a way to “confuse the Democrats....Lake burst onto the national political stage this year as perhaps the purest embodiment of Trump’s grievance-fueled brand of politics....As advisers urged her to consolidate GOP support after the primary, Lake remained fixated on a grudge match against people loyal to the legacy of the late Sen. John McCain." See also True the Vote leaders sent to jail after contempt ruling by federal judge (Azi Paybarah, WaPo, 10-31-22) The organization, which has pushed false claims about the 2020 election, had been sued by a software company that has alleged defamation
Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t? (Michael Gerson, Opinion, Washington Post, 9-1-22) A long, thoughtful essay about the Christian embrace of populist politics in America. "Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics. This has included deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions." The essay links to other op-ed pieces about specific issues, among them:
---The GOP celebration of covid ignorance is an invitation to death
---Of all the conservative bans on teaching about racism, the one in Texas is the worst
---Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 assault on American democracy (neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event). "In both public perception and evident reality, many White, conservative Christians find themselves on the wrong side of the most cutting indictments delivered by Jesus of Nazareth."
A Timeline of Trump’s False and Misleading Statements on the Mar-a-Lago Search (Stuart A. Thompson, NY Times, 8-16-22) The former president has pushed frenetic and sometimes contradictory claims about the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida home. He and his allies have given often conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents without addressing why he had kept them. In the wake of the search, Mr. Trump has accused the nation’s justice system of being exactly what he tried to turn it into: a political weapon for a president. Republicans have struggled to coalesce around a unified strategy to respond to the F.B.I.’s search of Donald J. Trump’s headquarters in Palm Beach, Fla.
The Part of the Espionage Act That Matters (Jan Lodal, a longtime defense and intelligence official, in a guest post on James Fallows blog, Breaking the News) "Trump’s violation of this Subparagraph (d) of the Espionage Act could not be clearer. Unlike all other crimes being considered for prosecution, Subsection (d) requires no probing of intent or consequence. It defines as criminal a clear process violation -- “failing to return” classified documents when properly asked to do so."
Trump’s Shifting Explanations Follow a Familiar Playbook (News Analysis, NY Times, 8-14-22)
The Complete Guide to All the Ways Donald Trump Is Legally Screwed (Vanity Fair, 8-22)

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A Sober Look at the ‘Cartoonishly Chaotic’ Trump White House (David Greenberg, NY Times, 9-14-22) In “The Divider,” political journalists keep their cool as they chronicle the outrageous conduct and ugly infighting that marked a presidency like no other. It’s all here: the culture wars and the corruption, the demagogy and the autocrat-love, the palace intrigue and the public tweets, the pandemic and the impeachments (plural).
How Trump Supporters Came to Hate the Police (Luke Mogelson, New Yorker, 9-10-22) At the Capitol riot and elsewhere, MAGA Republicans have leaped from “backing the blue” to attacking law-enforcement officials.
Most Americans see Trump's MAGA as threat to democracy (Jason Lange, Reuters, 9-8-22) A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Wednesday found a majority of Americans believe Trump's movement is undermining democracy.
“We need to take away children.” (An investigation by Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic, 8-7-22) The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy. "It is easy to pin culpability for family separations on the anti-immigration officials for which the Trump administration is known. But these separations were also endorsed and enabled by dozens of members of the government’s middle and upper management: Cabinet secretaries, commissioners, chiefs, and deputies who, for various reasons, didn’t voice concern even when they should have seen catastrophe looming; who trusted “the system” to stop the worst from happening; who reasoned that it would not be strategic to speak up in an administration where being labeled a RINO or a “squish”—nicknames for those deemed insufficiently conservative—could end their career; who assumed that someone else, in some other department, must be on top of the problem; who were so many layers of abstraction away from the reality of screaming children being pulled out of their parent’s arms that they could hide from the human consequences of what they were doing....

    “Congress, too, deserves blame, because it failed for decades to fill a legislative vacuum that anti-immigration officials moved to exploit. For too long, an overworked and underequipped border-police force has been left to determine crucial social, economic, and humanitarian policy....What happened in the months that led up to the implementation of Zero Tolerance—the Trump administration’s initiative that separated thousands of families—should be studied by future generations of organizational psychologists and moral philosophers.”
Among the Insurrectionists (Luke Mogelson, Reporter at Large, New Yorker, 1-15-21) The Capitol was breached by Trump supporters who had been declaring, at rally after rally, that they would go to violent lengths to keep the President in power.

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January 6: A chronicle of an attack foretold.
Plot to Overturn the Election (video, Frontline, 3-29-22) Many Republican voters believe his election was illegitimate, and the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump is now a defining issue of the Republican Party. In a new investigative collaboration, FRONTLINE and ProPublica trace the hidden sources of misinformation about the 2020 election, demonstrating how a handful of people have had an outsized impact on the current U.S. crisis of democratic legitimacy.
How ‘Stop the Steal’ Captured the American Right (Charles Homans, NY Times Magazine, 7-19-22) "The movement to reinstate President Trump has gone far beyond him — and now threatens the future of American elections. It could properly be said to constitute a movement, but one that no longer gathers under the banner of “Stop the Steal,” preferring the good-government language of “election integrity” — though the movement has next to nothing in common with earlier efforts to shore up genuine vulnerabilities in the American election system....The insistence on America as a “republic” but not a “democracy” is a tendentious reading of James Madison popularized by the John Birch Society, the conspiratorial anti-communist organization — a justification for governing the country according to conservative values and policy prerogatives, even when the numerical majority of its people did not vote for them."
The January 6 Hearings Are Changing Republicans’ Minds (Sarah Longwell, The Atlantic, 7-28-22) GOP voters want political power. And they’re no longer sure Donald Trump is the best way to get it.
Will Be Wild (Wondery) An 8-part podcast series about the forces that led to the January 6th insurrection and what comes next. "Through in-depth stories from a wide range of characters – from people who tried to stop the attack to those who took part – hosts Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz explore the ongoing effort to bring autocracy to America, the lasting damage that effort is doing to our democracy, and the fate of our attempts to combat those anti-democratic forces. Because January 6th wasn't the end of the story, January 6th was just a practice run."


Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump (Greg Olear, Prevail, 3-31-20) What happens when a Confidential Informant becomes President? This old post has come up in several recent Substack comments in response to the question, "Why hasn't Tя☭mp been arrested all these years?"

Trump Claims He’s Not Ignoring N.Y. Attorney General Subpoena, He Just Lost His Phone (Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, 5-10-22) According to the ex-president, he is simply “not currently in possession” of the electronic devices prosecutors say contain crucial documents concerning his Trump Organization work.

•  In Sworn Deposition, Trump Says He Has Real Concerns About Being Killed By a Piece of Fruit (4-27-22) Pineapples, tomatoes, and bananas are “dangerous stuff” that could take a person’s life, the ex-president testified.
Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the Creation of Trump’s Stolen Election Myth (Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica, 4-26-22) Internal emails and interviews with key participants reveal for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the rigged election theory touted evidence they knew to be disproven, disputed or dismissed as dubious.
A Fact-Checked List of Trump Accomplishments (Farah Stockman, Opinion, NY Times, 9-11-2020) A checklist, in case you can't remember them all.
How Biden Should Investigate Trump (James Fallows, The Atlantic, 12-9-2020) The misdeeds and destructive acts are legion. The new president should focus on these three: "corrupt and possibly criminal” offenses, "corrosion of government rather than corruption of government," and three outright catastrophes, of which one, the mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic is "the greatest failure of governance in U.S. history."
Yoni Appelbaum's pieces in The Atlantic up to 2021.
Litigation Tracker (Just Security) Pending Criminal and Civil Cases Against Donald Trump.

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She Took the White House Photos. Trump Moved to Take the Profit. (Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman, NY Times, 3-31-22) The former chief White House photographer made plans to publish a book of Trump photos. The former president had other plans. Official photographers from every White House since President Ronald Reagan’s have published their own books. Barack Obama and George W. Bush were so supportive that they wrote forewords for them. But like so much else involving Mr. Trump, the plan by his chief photographer, Shealah Craighead, did not follow this bipartisan norm. Mr. Trump jumped the gun and did his own book of photographs.

      "Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has sought multiple ways to monetize his presidency, from charging supporters to attend an event and take photos with him to selling MAGA merchandise. He also has a long history of disputes from before his political career with business partners and over the years faced regular accusations that he did not properly compensate contractors."
How Donald Trump Captured the Republican Party (Romesh Ratnesar, NY Times, 2-22-22) A review of INSURGENCY: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted by Jeremy W. Peters.“Insurgency” chronicles the astonishingly swift transformation of the Republican Party, from the genteel preserve of pro-business elites to a snarling personality cult that views the Jan. 6 insurrection as an exercise in legitimate political discourse. The outlines of the Republicans’ hard-right turn are by now largely familiar. Watching the reality-television star deliver remarks from the Trump Tower food court to a crowd that allegedly included actors who had been paid $50 to hold signs and cheer, [Steve] Bannon couldn’t contain himself. “That’s Hitler!” Bannon said. And, as Jeremy W. Peters writes in this spirited new history, “he meant it as a compliment.” What distinguishes “Insurgency” is its blend of political acuity and behind-the-scenes intrigue.
How did Trump’s name end up on coronavirus relief checks in 2020? ABC News successfully sued to find out. (Chris Young, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 3-2-22)
Trump had positive COVID test before event with Gold Star families: book (Leo Shane III, Military Times, 12-1-21) When Trump came down with a life-threatening case of Covid, he suggested that he might have caught it from Gold Star families he had met with after his positive test. He not only concealed the result but also proceeded to put hundreds of people at risk by continuing his normal activities while refusing to wear a mask or practice social distancing. H/T Paul Krugman.
The Ecological Destruction from the Border Wall, in “American Scar” (New Yorker documentary, Film by Daniel Lombroso, Text by Murat Oztaskin, 4-30-22) Congress didn't go along with Trump's call for a border wall, so in early 2019, the President found a different way: he declared a national emergency at the southern border, a move that allowed him to reallocate funds for the wall’s construction from the Department of Defense. All told, the Trump Administration built more than four hundred and fifty miles of the barrier, about a quarter of the length of the U.S.’s border with Mexico. Construction continued until the moment of Joe Biden’s Inauguration. Funding the project from the D.O.D.’s budget and classifying it as a matter of national security offered the Trump Administration a way around protections: it made the wall’s construction exempt from the stipulations of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and more than eighty other laws and statutes. “There’s a certain kind of lawlessness that applies to the southern border that does not apply anywhere else,” said Stephania Taladrid, a New Yorker writer who’s covered the effects of the border wall, and who reported and produced “American Scar.”


Why has Trump remained so popular with Republicans? (Mark Mellman, The Hill, 1-17-24) "After the 2016 elections, I wrote a book chapter exploring his initial electoral appeal, which I argued arose from uniting three strands of conservatism—aversion to government, aversion to change and aversion to difference—along with the billionaire bounce, the view that a successful businessperson (which he was less of than he claimed) could fix the economy."
       "Since then, lots has happened and most of it should have hurt the former president, even among Republicans. But it hasn’t. Why not? In my view, three factors taken together account for much of his continuing appeal—partisanship, the persistence of preexisting beliefs and (faux) authenticity."
Insult Politics: Donald Trump, Right-Wing Populism, and Incendiary Language (Oscar Winberg, European Journal of American Studies, Open Edition Journals, Summer 2017) "This article positions the Trump campaign in historical traditions of right-wing populism, incendiary political language, and insulting rhetoric. Trump’s mocking and insulting rhetoric in the campaign was widely described as both norm-breaking and, surprisingly, not politically harmful. This article challenges both assumptions, illustrating how Trump fits into a long tradition of insult politics, and how it remains controversial and politically dangerous. The insult politics Trump utilized throughout his campaign served a political purpose. However, there are strong indications that Trump won the White House in spite of his mocking rhetoric, not because of it. Rather, the particular political position of Trump, and his media image, explains how he could utilize insult politics to his advantage."
The Trump Presidency and the Mainstreaming of Far-Right Politics (Aurelien Mondon and Antonia Vaughan, Gale, 2021) By proceeding through the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, this article has underlined how the evolving role of the alt, far and extreme right reflects the broader normalisation of far-right discourse. No longer the outrageous cheerleaders of 2016, 2020 saw the far-right discourse lose its shock factor, in the process migrating the Republicans further to the right. This migration is perhaps best highlighted by Trump’s own words to the insurrectionists: ‘We love you’, in defiance of the outrage.

Trumpism (Wikipedia, where you can see footnotes to this extract) "Trumpism is an authoritarian movement that consists of the political ideologies and political movement associated with Donald Trump and his political base. Scholars and historians have identified Trumpism as consisting of a wide range of right-wing ideologies such as right-wing populism, national conservatism, neo-nationalism, and neo-fascism. Trumpist rhetoric heavily features anti-immigrant, xenophobic, nativist,and racist attacks against minority groups. Other identified aspects include conspiracist, isolationist, Christian nationalist, protectionist, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBT beliefs.
      "Trump's rhetoric has its roots in a populist political method that suggests nationalistic answers to political, economic, and social problems. These inclinations are refracted into such policy preferences as immigration restrictionism, trade protectionism, isolationism, and opposition to entitlement reform....Referring to the populism of Trump, sociologist Michael Kimmel states that it "is not a theory [or] an ideology, it's an emotion. And the emotion is righteous indignation that the government is screwing 'us'".
      As media scholar Daniel Kreiss summarizes Hochschild, "Trump, along with Fox News, gave these strangers in their own land the hope that they would be restored to their rightful place at the center of the nation, and provided a very real emotional release from the fetters of political correctness that dictated they respect people of color, lesbians and gays, and those of other faiths ... that the network's personalities share the same 'deep story' of political and social life, and therefore they learn from them 'what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about.'"
Trumpism, an ideology for the extreme far-right globally (Mariano Aguirre, openDemocracy, 12-14-20) Trumpism is the extreme far-right ideology that attacks democracy and normalizes violence against progressive agendas and liberal cultures, while promoting full market deregulation.
Biden May Win, but Trump Remains the President of Red America (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 11-4-20) His attacks on “the rigged election” are a worst-case scenario for the country. “Trump’s incessant questioning of the basic institutions of our government and electoral system has now produced his desired result, even if he may not be back for another four years: a superpower torn apart from within, no longer trusting of its own democracy.”

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A Political Obituary for Donald Trump (George Packer, The Atlantic, 12-9-2020) "The United States’ score on the human-rights organization Freedom House’s annual index dropped from 90 out of 100 under President Barack Obama to 86 under Trump, below that of Greece and Mauritius. Trump withdrew the U.S. from 13 international organizations, agreements, and treaties. The number of refugees admitted into the country annually fell from 85,000 to 12,000. About 400 miles of barrier were built along the southern border. The whereabouts of the parents of 666 children seized at the border by U.S. officials remain unknown."
Documentary “Plot to Overturn the Election" Reveals Origins of the Stolen Election Myth (ProPublica and Frontline, 3-29-22) A group of people working from a plantation in South Carolina spread misinformation about the November 2020 election. These falsehoods have since become articles of faith for many Republicans. Watch "The Plot to Overturn the Election" (54 min.)
Trump lost the election, but he won the online disinformation war (Peter Geoghegan, openDemocracy, 11-9-2020) "Social media platforms have allowed US conservatives to delegitimise the election and sow mistrust of democracy. Posts by far-right news site Breitbart had been shared three times as often as posts from the official pages of every Democratic member of the US senate combined in the previous 30 days....As Tuesday night moved into Wednesday morning, Trump held the Sunshine State comfortably, mainly thanks to Latino voters in the state's most populous county, Miami-Dade, shifting in huge numbers from Clinton in 2016 to Trump this time around. Why? One reason is the months of YouTube videos and Facebook posts that led many in Miami to believe that Biden was a stalking horse for socialism, anathema to the city's large Cuban ex-pat population. These conspiracy theories were shared widely and then repeated incessantly on Spanish-language radio."

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What if a U.S, presidential candidate refuses to concede after an election? (Van Jones, TED Talk about how to stop a coup, October 2020) You can read transcript as you listen. "The president’s litigation strategy is unlikely to succeed, but it’s doing great harm in the meantime." Explaining why the customary concession speech is one of the most important safeguards for democracy, Jones exposes shocking legal loopholes that could enable a candidate to grab power even if they lose both the popular vote and the electoral college.

     Did you know "that under our constitution a presidential candidate could actually lose the popular vote, fail to get a majority in the electoral college, refuse to concede, manipulate hidden mechanisms in our government and still get sworn in as the president of the United States of America? Everyone essentially ignores the elite electoral process...".A concession speech is "the one speech no presidential candidate ever wants to give, and yet, it is that public address that is most important for the health and the well-being of our nation....The best way to stop a coup is to update and strengthen our democratic system as soon as this election is over. Maybe we need to rethink, reimagine or just get rid of this whole electoral college, extra inning thing in the first place.
      "Get informed. A number of progressive organizations are already working hard to warn Americans about this growing threat to our democracy. Some organizations you could look into and research for yourself: choosedemocracy.us, electiontaskforce.org, protectdemocracy.org, mobilize.us, allamericans.org, civicalliance.com and the Fight Back table at demos.org. All these groups are working on this. Now, on the right, if that's your cup of tea, you could also check out The Heritage Foundation or the Government Accountability Institute."

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The Making of Donald Trump David Cay Johnston. An easy read: a once-over lightly survey of why this man should never have been allowed to hold office -- covering Trump's taxes and shockingly crooked tax dodging (easily done as a real estate tycoon), his casinos, Trump University, the fake names he's used in phone calls with the press, links with mafia members and Roy Cohn, his use of lawyers to bully, how he caused the destruction of the nascent United States Football League, his amorphous net worth, fake awards he has given himself, his golf courses, and the huckster's perpetual myth maintenance. (H/T Franklin the Mouse)
He Bought Health Insurance for Emergencies. Then He Fell Into a $33,601 Trap. (Jenny Deam, ProPublica, 5-8-21) Since the Trump administration deregulated the health insurance industry, there’s been an explosion of short-term plans that leave patients with surprise bills and providers with huge revenue.
How a Future President Can Hold the Trump Administration Accountable (Sam Berger, Center for American Progress, 8-5-2020)
President Trump’s 3,400 conflicts of interest (Corruption, Crew, 9-24-2020) The conflicts include visits to Trump properties by foreign government officials, taxpayer spending at Trump businesses, and Trump’s own blatant promotions of the businesses. CREW has tracked around two conflicts of interest per day, but that is likely only the tip of the iceberg. According to data from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Trump made at least 500 visits to his own hotels, golf courses, restaurants, and other facilities during his four years in office. Special-interest groups held 130 events at Trump properties.

Trump wanted to launch missiles into Mexico to rid of drug labs: Esper memoir (Kelly McClure, Salon, 5-5-22) In a memoir written by Trump's former defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, it's revealed that the former president would often suggest shocking weapons-based forms of problem solving such as blowing up Mexican drug labs with missiles and shooting anti-police brutality demonstrators.
Heather Cox Richardson (5-6-22) "In other news today, a new book coming out by Mark Esper, former secretary of defense under Trump, reveals that the former president wanted the military to recall to active duty retired General Stan McChrystal and Admiral William H. McRaven in order to court-martial them for disloyalty to him. It also says that Trump wanted to have the U.S. military launch missiles at Mexican drug labs, quoting him as telling Esper that “[w]e could just shoot some Patriot missiles” into our neighbor and ally, Mexico, and no one would know it was the U.S. because Trump could just deny it.
"Esper pointed out that such an attack on a sovereign nation would be an act of war."

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Trump’s company has received at least $970,000 from U.S. taxpayers for room rentals (David A. Fahrenthold and Joshua Partlow, WaPo, 5-14-2020)
Judge slaps down Trump appointee who has sought to reshape Voice of America and related agencies (Paul Farhi, Wash Post, 11-21-2020) 'Lee R. Crain, one of the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs, said Howell’s ruling ensures that journalists at the agencies can ‘rest assured that the First Amendment protects them from government efforts to control” their reporting. “They are free to do exactly what Congress intended: export independent, First Amendment-style journalism to the world.”... Michael "Pack had asserted the right to direct how journalists at VOA and sister networks such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia covered the news, a violation of the traditional “firewall” that ensures the networks aren’t government mouthpieces.'

      See also Court Injunction Bars USAGM From Editorial Interference (Jessica Jerreat, VOA News,11-21-2020) and see U.S. Government-Funded Broadcasters Must Remain Free from Political Interference PEN America (11-22-2020) decries "vandalism" being committed by USAGM CEO Michael Pack, files court brief in lawsuit against the U.S. Agency for Global Media. "Since its inception, public broadcast journalism's challenge has been to win the trust of its audience—to bury any impression that Radio Free Europe, for example, is an American Pravda."
An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry (David A. Graham, Adrienne Green, Cullen Murphy, and Parker Richards, The Atlantic, June 2019) His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage. "One of the things Trump learned when he injected himself into the Central Park Five case was that he could get attention for himself because he was a spokesman for a certain type of Archie Bunker New Yorker. I think that’s one of the bonds that he shares with [Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor] Rudy Giuliani: They’re both profoundly guys from that moment in New York when a lot of racial boundaries got drawn."
Making Sense (Sam Harris's podcast, 10-30-2020). This link takes you to Harris's fascinating discussion with Andrew Sullivan about why Trump has been so successful despite being a horrible person.
How Trump Became the Pro-Infection Candidate (Dhruv Khullar, New Yorker, 10-23-2020)
The Coup Stage of Donald Trump’s Presidency (Masha Gessen, New Yorker, 11-20-2020) Is it a coup or a con? Trump’s bad con continues to show how easy it would be to stage a good one. Then we would call it a coup.

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Trump's Clown Coup (Susan B. Glasser, New Yorker, 11-20-2020) We’ve been getting used to painful truths for so long that the awful enormity of the current situation doesn’t hit us in the way it should. The G.O.P. leadership, which has tolerated so many abuses by Trump, is now openly complicit in his worst one yet.
How Trump and His Enablers Are Laying the Groundwork For a Coup d'état (A Pointed View, 11-10-2020) There's an interesting discussion of this on Facebook (launched by Anita Bartholomew's post).
In 1,316 days, President Trump has made 22,247 false or misleading claims (Washington Post Fact Checker) The Fact Checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump since assuming office. A timeline of untruths, along with the facts. See also Trump is averaging more than 50 false or misleading claims a day (Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, The Fact Checker, 10-22-2020)
Disappearing Data (HuffPost Report, 10-28-2020) Data is the lifeblood of a functioning government. Over the past four years, the Trump administration has destroyed, disappeared or distorted vast swathes of the information the state needs to protect the vulnerable, safeguard our health, and alert us to emerging crises. This is an accounting of the damage in several areas where data is crucial: The Pandemic, Climate Change, The Vulnerable, Pollution, Science, Food, Conservation, and the Census.

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The President's Taxes: Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance (Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire, NY Times, 9-27-2020--part of a series) The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due. "Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made." The returns "reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base....Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name."
The Swamp That Trump Built (Nicholas Confessore, Karen Yourish, Steve Eder, Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman, Grace Ashford, Michael LaForgia, Kenneth P. Vogel, Michael Rothfeld and Larry Buchanan, NY Times, 10-10-2020) A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family’s hotels and resorts — and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration.
18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records (NY Times, 9-27-2020) Times reporters have obtained decades of tax information the president has hidden from public view. Among the key findings of The Times’s investigation: "Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750. He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service. Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes."Read on.
Trump Engineered a Sudden Windfall in 2016 as Campaign Funds Dwindled (Susanne Craig, Mike McIntire and Russ Buettner, NY Times, 10-9-2020) Tax records expose more than $21 million in highly unusual payments from the Las Vegas hotel Donald Trump owns with Phil Ruffin, routed through other Trump companies and paid out in cash. His tax records show that "his 'self-funded' presidential campaign was short on funds, and he was struggling to win over leery Republican donors. His golf courses and the hotel he would soon open in the Old Post Office in Washington were eating away at what cash he had left on hand....And in early 2016, Deutsche Bank, the last big lender still doing business with him, unexpectedly turned down his request for a loan. The funds, Mr. Trump had told his bankers, would help shore up his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. Some bankers feared the money would instead be diverted to his campaign."

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Misinformation about Biden’s health spreads after debate (Elizabeth Dwoskin, Washington Post, 9-30-2020) TikTok videos and Trump ads with false information got more than 700,000 views and clicks. See also Right-wing voices are dominating Facebook after the first presidential debate (WaPo, 9-30-2020) Many Americans who primarily get news from Facebook are living in a media ecosystem where the winner of the debate is clear: President Trump crushed Joe Biden. But Facebook and Twitter take unusual steps to limit spread of New York Post story (Dwoskin, WaPo, 10-15-2020) "Four years after Russian operatives exploited tech giants’ services during a presidential contest, the companies’ swift and aggressive steps in responding to the unverified story, and their divergent responses, are a real-time case study in their ability to protect the integrity of an election that has been marred by domestic disinformation and misleading accounts. That activity has included misinformation about Biden’s health, the dying wish of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the validity of mail-in ballots — much of it spread by Trump and his supporters."
Trump got a $21 million tax break for saving the forest outside his N.Y. mansion. Now the deal is under investigation. (Joshua Partlow, Jonathan O'Connell and David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post, 10-9-2020) Five years ago, Donald Trump promised to preserve more than 150 acres of rolling woodlands in an exclusive swath of New York suburbia prized for its luxury homes and rural tranquility. He wrote off the cost as a business expense and the family calls it "a retreat for the Trump family."

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Trump says he's leaving hospital for White House, feels good (Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin, and Aamer Madhani, AP, 10-5-2020) "For more than eight months, Trump's efforts to play down the threat of the virus in hopes of propping up the economy ahead of the election have drawn bipartisan criticism....According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those with mild to moderate symptoms can be contagious for as many — and should isolate for at least — 10 day. On Sunday afternoon, Trump briefly ventured out of the hospital while contagious to salute cheering supporters by motorcade — an outing that disregarded precautions meant to contain the virus....Less than one month before Election Day, Trump was eager to project strength despite his illness. The still-infectious president surprised supporters who had gathered outside the hospital, riding by Sunday in a black SUV with the windows rolled up. Secret Service agents inside the vehicle could be seen in masks and other protective gear....[Sunday] was the second straight day of obfuscation from a White House already suffering from a credibility crisis. And it raised more doubts about whether the doctors treating the president were sharing accurate, timely information with the American public about the severity of his condition."
‘It’s like every red flag’: Trump-ordered HHS ad blitz raises alarms (Dan Diamond, Politico, 9-25-2020) "The health department is moving quickly on a highly unusual advertising campaign to "defeat despair" about the coronavirus, a $300 million-plus effort that was shaped by a political appointee close to President Donald Trump and executed in part by close allies of the official, using taxpayer funds....[Michael] Caputo, who has no medical or scientific background, claimed in a Facebook video on Sept. 13 that the campaign was "demanded of me by the president of the United States. Personally."...But 10 current and former health officials told POLITICO that they have concerns about the campaign's scope, goals and even how it has been funded — by pulling money out of health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control that are in the midst of fighting the pandemic, rather than working with lawmakers to set up a brand-new advertising effort with congressional oversight, or drawing on substantial internal resources and expertise in running health-related public service campaigns....But 10 current and former health officials told POLITICO that they have concerns about the campaign's scope, goals and even how it has been funded — by pulling money out of health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control that are in the midst of fighting the pandemic, rather than working with lawmakers to set up a brand-new advertising effort with congressional oversight, or drawing on substantial internal resources and expertise in running health-related public service campaigns."

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The Coronavirus and the Threat Within the White House ( David Remnick, New Yorker, 10-3-2020) "The best security system and the most solicitous medical officers in the world could not protect Donald Trump from a danger that he insisted on belittling and ignoring....The Centers for Disease Control and other public-health institutions have long said that wearing masks is essential to minimizing the spread of the coronavirus. Trump has been of another opinion, a delusional one."

The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19 (Michael Grabell, ProPublica, 5-13-22) Newly released documents reveal that the meatpacking industry’s callousness toward the health of its workers and its influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known. Congressional investigators have reported on a high-pressure lobbying campaign by the meat industry leading to one of the most consequential moments in the nation’s COVID-19 response: Trump's presidential order that effectively thwarted efforts by local health officials to shut plants down and slow the spread of COVID-19.
The Battle Over “The Room Where It Happened” Continues (Authors Guild, 9-24-2020) "On September 15, the Trump Administration continued its campaign against John Bolton and his book The Room Where It Happened by opening a criminal inquiry into whether Bolton had unlawfully disclosed classified information in his bestselling memoir. Ellen Knight, formerly of the National Security Council, expressed concern 'about the politicization -- or even the perceived politicization -- of the prepublication review process. Once authors start perceiving that manuscripts are being reviewed for political considerations, they will lose confidence in the integrity of the process and find ways to publish or release their works without submitting them for review. This could result in unchecked disclosures of sensitive information and the potential for serious damage to our national security.' Ms. Knight’s letter states that the Bolton prepublication review process “entailed an unprecedented amount of interaction between the political appointees in the NSC Legal staff and the career prepublication review staff.”
Twitter’s Trump Fact Check Won’t Solve Much, but at Least It’s Something (Dahlia Lithwick, Future Tense, Slate, 5-27-2020) Twitter took the unprecedented step of attaching warning labels accompanied by links to fact checks to two of the president’s false tweets. The president then went on to threaten that Twitter was “completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” although anyone with a brain quickly pointed out that private companies are not state actors and Trump has no First Amendment claims here.
The First Amendment: what it really means for free speech and why Donald Trump is trampling on it (Eliza Bechtold, The Conversation, 8-5-19) "...there is no First Amendment right to use Twitter or have a Facebook page. As private entities, social media companies are free to adopt policies relating to user content and to remove users who violate such policies without implicating the First Amendment. Moreover, the First Amendment protects the expression of corporations and other associations, as well as individuals. This means that Facebook, Twitter, and others have free speech rights."

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Judges toss lawsuit alleging anti-conservative bias on social media (Marc DeAngelis, Engadget, 5-28-2020) In 2018, the nonprofit organization Freedom Watch and a conservative YouTuber named Laura Loomer tried to sue social media companies. They alleged that Twitter, Facebook and Google -- which owns YouTube -- broke antitrust laws and violated their First Amendment rights by conspiring to suppress conservative viewpoints. Their case was dropped last year, but they appealed the decision. According to Bloomberg, a federal appeals court today affirmed the decision to drop the suit, leaving the tech companies in the clear.The plaintiffs say that tech companies conspired to suppress conservative views. See also Freedom Watch and Laura Loomer Lose Lawsuit Against Social Media Platforms (Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy, 5-27-2020) No, said the Court. The plaintiffs' First Amendment claim failed because "the First Amendment 'prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech," because there was no evidence of an anticompetitive behavior by platforms, and because D.C.'s public accommodation statute doesn't apply to online service providers.
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President (McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, 2-10-2020) How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election. After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world's demagogues and strongmen in power.
Literary Group Goes to Court to Stop Donald Trump From Violating the First Amendment (Eriq Gardner, Hollywood Reporter, 10-16-18) The Pen America Center says Trump is using his power to unconstitutionally punish and intimidate The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, the White House press corps and others who cover his administration.

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Why Bill Barr Turned on Trump (Donald Ayer, The Atlantic, 9-19-22) No one should think he’s having second thoughts about the awful things he did in office. Remember that Barr sought out the opportunity to serve as Trump’s attorney general by submitting a memorandum in June 2018, expanding upon his long-held, breathtaking vision that the Founders created an all-powerful president immune from virtually any limitation on his powers.
Almost 2,000 former Justice officials condemn department for dropping Flynn case (Rebecca Klar, The Hill, 5-11-2020) 'Nearly 2,000 former Department of Justice (DOJ) officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations condemned the DOJ and Attorney General William Barr on Monday for moving to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The former officials said Barr “once again assaulted the rule of law” and accused the attorney general of using the department “as a tool to further President Trump’s personal and political interests.” '

     See also ‘A constant battle of you against the leadership of your country’: Justice Dept. rattled as Flynn fallout reaches FBI (Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, and Josh Dawsey, Washington Post, 5-8-2020) 'While the president continued to criticize the FBI’s conduct, multiple federal law enforcement officials interviewed Friday expressed varying degrees of anger, resignation and alarm over the decision by Attorney General William P. Barr to abandon the prosecution of Flynn for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States before Trump took office. “The attorney general is supposed to be above reproach and apolitical in terms of how the department operates and how he or she as an individual operates, and he’s just completely lost that,” said one veteran Justice Department lawyer who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “He’s Trump’s attorney. He’s not the country’s attorney.” '
How Trump Supporters Came to Hate the Police (Luke Mogelson, New Yorker, 9-10-22) At the Capitol riot and elsewhere, MAGA Republicans have leaped from “backing the blue” to attacking law-enforcement officials."One way to think about January 6th is as the consummation, in real time, of a tumultuous shift between two distinct eras of conservatism. Before 2020, most conservatives celebrated law enforcement as the protectors of a system that was, on balance, reliably favorable to their interests. By the end of 2020, after the lockdowns and the election, many conservatives had come to see that system the same way that right-wing extremists did—as corrupt and tyrannical, perhaps even satanic. At the same time, so long as Trump was still in power and weaponizing law enforcement against leftists, neither conservatives nor the police were forced to confront what this meant for their alliance. That reckoning could no longer be avoided on January 6th, and it is understandable that people on both sides of the line persisted in respecting the terms of a compact that was now obsolete."

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Kelly and Pompeo: How A Journalist Masterfully Combated Gaslighting (Stephanie Sarkis, Forbes, 1-25-2020) A brief demo on how to address gaslighters talking over you, spouting misinformation, acting as if they're being bullied, lying to make you look unreasonable, etc.
Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All (Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 7-18-16) “The Art of the Deal” made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that myth—and regrets it. Over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is likely to lie about anything.”

     “He has no attention span.” “. . .it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein.”
Defending Rights & Dissent Opposes Trump Executive Order Equating Support for Palestinian Rights with Anti-Semitic Discrimination (Defending Rights & Dissent, 12-11-19) Anti-Semitism is a real threat, but it is a distortion of civil rights to use federal civil rights law to suppress speech in support of Palestinian rights.
Judgment days (Stephanie McCrummen, Washington Post, 7-21-18) In a small Alabama town, an evangelical congregation reckons with God, President Trump and the meaning of morality. How can people who purport to disapprove of sinfulness of all kinds vote for a twice-divorced alleged adulterer who has boasted of sexual assault? What was important was not the character of the president but his positions, they said, and one mattered more than all the others. “Abortion,” said Linda, whose eyes teared up when she talked about it. Read that and then read this: Avoiding false judgments in journalism about Trump’s evangelical supporters (Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Nieman Storyboard, 4-11-19) A religion scholar assesses how the Washington Post's Stephanie McCrummen avoids predictable pitfalls in "Judgment Days."

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‘A Terrible Mistake’: Trump Criticizes DeSantis on Abortion Ban (Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, NY Times, 9-17-23) The former president, while denouncing his chief rival for the Republican nomination, also largely evaded questions on the issue. "Mr. Trump's advisers are mindful that abortion was a political loser for Republicans in the 2022 midterm cycle."

       "Since announcing his candidacy — just a week after Republicans underperformed expectations in midterm elections shaped by a backlash against the overturning of the abortion ruling — there has been no policy issue on which Mr. Trump has appeared more uncomfortable than on abortion. "In interview after interview since the repeal of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Trump has ducked questions about whether he would support a federal ban on most abortions at 15 weeks — the baseline position of many Republicans, including the leading anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America....

      "In reality, Mr. Trump — who years ago said he supported abortion rights before switching his position in 2011 as he considered a presidential campaign that year — appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, providing a majority to reverse the Roe ruling. Democrats have made clear they plan to make Mr. Trump’s role in Roe’s end a key focus in the 2024 general election if he is the nominee." 

 

 
ICE Has Kept Tabs on ‘Anti-Trump’ Protesters in New York City (Jimmy Tobias, The Nation, 3-6-19) Documents reveal that the immigration enforcement agency has been keenly attuned to left-leaning protests in the city. “If [the Department of Homeland Security] is specifically focusing on those who are against the current president, it gets into the realm of what fascist regimes do,” says Jody Kuh, a volunteer organizer with Rise and Resist. “If they are watching us because we are against the current president’s policies, it is more than a little disturbing.”

A Brief History of Fascist Lies by Federico Finchelstein (University of California Press, 2020) Excerpt: "The same lies that motivated the El Paso killer are at the center of Trumpism and the so-called effort to Make America Great Again. Lying about things that are part of the permanent record has become part of the American president’s daily routine. Trump continuously has used specific propaganda techniques, lying with-out consequence, replacing rational debate with paranoia and resentment, and casting reality itself into doubt. Trump’s attacks on the mainstream media and the extensive documented instances where he claims he didn’t say something that is in fact in the public record are related to the history of fascist lies analyzed in this book."

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Inside the Steele Dossier & The Fusion GPS Investigation Of Trump (listen to Terry Gross, Fresh Air, 11-26-19) During the 2016 campaign, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch hired former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to investigate Donald Trump's involvement with Russia. Their book about this topic is Crime in Progress (the inside story of the high-stakes, four-year-long investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia ties—culminating in the Steele dossier, and sparking the Mueller report—from the founders of political opposition research company Fusion GPS) This Washington Post review of the book may help you decide whether to read further.
The Summer of Chaos and God (Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, 9-5-19) 'A preference for chaos on the far right is connected to God in ways Democrats can barely talk about, much less comprehend, whether it’s the fundamental disconnect around evangelical support for unfettered gun rights or the right’s rejection of environmental protection or immigrants’ rights. But the more morally discordant Trump’s policies and politics are, the more he is seen as fighting for religious rights. This is not a claim that all or even most religious belief is nihilist—it is just a recognition that there is a deeply nihilist strain in some religious quarters, one that dovetails perfectly with the impulse to “blow it all up.”'
Trump Can’t Block Critics From His Twitter Account, Appeals Court Rules (Charlie Savage, NY Times, 7-9-19) "Because Mr. Trump uses Twitter to conduct government business, he cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he does not like their views, a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled unanimously." "The decision may have broader implications for how the First Amendment applies to officials’ accounts in the social-media era."
The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine (Jane Mayer, New Yorker, 10-4-19) How a conservative dark-money group that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2016 spread the discredited story that may lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment. See also the book Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green, as well as the article “Stupid Watergate” Is Worse Than the Original (David Remnick, New Yorker, 10-4-19) "...his corruption is totally as we see it, out front. He doesn’t try to hide it. He doesn’t try to hide the conflicts of interest or the lying. He is not a secretive conspirator. Donald Trump’s behavior echoes Nixon’s in one sense: he and his confederates appear to have been engaged in an effort to undermine the integrity of a Presidential election."

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The Difference Between Leaking and Whistle-Blowing in the Trump White House (Masha Gessen, New Yorker, 10-4-19) 'A whistle-blower often speaks out with the aim of halting some wrongdoing, but a leaker’s motives are generally self-serving....We have normalized Trumpism to such an extent that journalists and politicians didn’t know how to think about the Ukraine story until the whistle-blower framed it as an egregious abuse of power....Yet it took two and a half years for someone with significant access to the Administration to go through the process of systematically collecting information and transmitting it through the institutional channels created specifically for the purpose of saying, “This is not normal.”'
What is Trumpcare? (Larry Levitt, news@JAMA, 9-25-19)
Who Are Donald Trump's Supporters? Trump Nation (USA Today Interactives) They’re not clichés. The USA TODAY NETWORK interviewed voters in every state to find out. Read their comments.
Trump the Truth: A Timeline of Assaults on Free Expression (Pen America) The Trump the Truth timeline, maintained and updated by PEN America during the first year of the Trump Administration, was used to track important developments during the Trump Administration that posed a threat to undermine free expression and press freedoms (or, from another viewpoint, express his opinion). See also PEN America's Trump the Truth report and timeline (PDF in standard prose format).
PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter report on Trump. See especially All statements by Trump, rated as true or false or somewhere in between. (36 pages as of 7-25-19)
•“My father never got so much as a speeding ticket in his life,” says Eric Trump, whose father paid $25 million to people he defrauded through Trump University.
Under Trump, LGBTQ Progress Is Being Reversed in Plain Sight (Kirsten Berg and Moiz Syed, ProPublica, 11-22-19) Donald Trump promised he would fight for LGBTQ people. Instead, his administration has systematically undone recent gains in their rights and protections. Since taking office, Trump’s administration has acted to dismantle federal protections and resources for LGBTQ Americans, particularly those gained under President Barack Obama. Here are 31 examples.
'Times' Journalists Puncture Myth Of Trump As Self-Made Billionaire (Terry Gross interviews investigative reporters Susanne Craig and David Barstow, who say the president received today's equivalent of $413 million from his father's real estate empire, through what appears to be tax fraud. See also Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father (Susanne Craig and David Barstow and Russ Buettner, NY Times, 10-2-18) The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through schemes to avoid paying taxes on multimillion dollar gifts in the family. "Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more."
Mueller report suggests the ‘fake news’ came from Trump, not the news media (Paul Farhi, WaPo, 4-18-19) Mueller's report cites multiple instances in which Trump and White House aides misled or lied to journalists or in public statements as the investigation was unfolding....In fact, according to Mueller’s report, Trump’s first reaction [to news of Mueller's appointment] was anything but calm. According to notes taken by an aide, Trump responded by saying, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m f-cked. . . . This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
Donald Trump Fact Check (Toronto Star)

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When Donald met Scott: a reporter's view of Trump and his White House wonderland (Katharine Murphy, The Guardian, 9-27-19) Australian PM Scott Morrison received a full-blown welcome from the US president. " If he doesn’t understand, the president will say: “Say it.” This means ask the question again, she says."
Why PEN America Is Suing Donald Trump (Jennifer Egan, LitHub, 10-18-18) "Trump's vitriol against reporters has made political journalism a more dangerous practice....President Trump’s frank admiration for authoritarian rulers makes his efforts to hobble a free press here in America all the more alarming. His actions conform to what some call an 'authoritarian playbook' for modern tyrants, in which the curtailing of free speech occurs subtly and gradually through a system of governmental rewards and punishments that encourage cooperation and gradually chill opposing voices."
Hundreds of Newspapers Denounce Trump's Attacks on Media in Coordinated Editorials(James Doubek, NPR, 8-16-18) Over 300 newspapers published editorials against Trump’s attack on the press. The President responded by calling the media “the opposition party,” and many believe this will only bolster his current platform. Will a united media be enough to reaffirm the First Amendment? NPR does not have an editorial board, and did not take part in Thursday's coordinated effort. The project was spearheaded by staff members of the editorial page at the Globe. See
---A Free Press Needs You (Editorial, NY Times, 8-15-18)
--- "Americans may not like the news they see or hear but they should not hold that against those who report it. In short, don’t shoot the messenger." --TriCorner News, LakeVille Journal, 8-15-18)
---Journalists are not the enemy (Boston Globe editorial board, 8-15-18)
---"Self-governance demands that our citizens need to be well-informed and that's what we're here to do. ... Some think we're rude to question and challenge. We know it's our obligation."--The Times of North Little Rock
---"Journalists are used to being insulted. It comes with the job ... But being called an enemy — and not of a politician or cause, but of the whole people of a nation — that's something else entirely."-- Topeka Capital-Journal
EPA Lets AP Reporter Back Into Summit After She Was Shoved Out Of Building (DAvid Bauder, Talking Points Memo, 5-22-18) AP journalist Ellen Knickmeyer and reporters from CNN and E&E News were told they could not attend an invitation-only event, a summit on a class of chemicals present in dangerous amounts in many water systems around the country. Knickmeyer "was earlier barred and shoved out of the building by a security guard." “We understand the importance of an open and free press and we hope the EPA does, too,” CNN said. Scott Pruitt apparently does not.

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Trump admin tightens media access for federal scientists: report (Ali Breland, The Hill, 6-21-18) The Trump administration is directing federal scientists in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to get approval from the Department of the Interior, its parent agency, before speaking to reporters, according to the Los Angeles Times. "The employees said that they believe the new policies were established to control the voices of Interior employees. They believe the move is a part of larger efforts to quell discourse about climate change, which the agency has produced research on."
"It's the law, stupid," and seven other lessons from the EPA's botched media blackout. (Indira Lakshmanan, Poynter, 5-24-18) The Federal Advisory Committee Act requires that any advisory group making recommendations to the federal government “shall be open to the public.” Journalists protect their interests if they’re versed in open records and open meetings laws.
Board objects to EPA press office action (National Association of Science Writers, 3-26-18) Inpart: "With the March 20 “press release,” EPA effectively limited its discussion of a major science policy story to a handpicked, partisan outlet. It also encouraged journalists to learn details about this story from a published article, which can never be a basis of responsible news reporting.
"When reporters contact the EPA Press Office asking for information regarding the activities of a taxpayer-funded organization, those queries should be answered swiftly by knowledgeable staff. The same holds when journalists request public documents from an agency."
Judge: Trump Can’t Block Twitter Users(Mark Joseph Stern, Slate, 5-13-18).S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that President Donald Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking Twitter users who criticized him and his policies. Her ruling is an extraordinary victory for free speech on the internet and a harsh rebuke to Trump’s effort to prevent his critics from engaging with him online.

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The White House's attack on scientists could manipulate public opinion (Lauren Kurtz and Romany Webb, Opinion, The Hill, 2-28-18) "The Trump administration’s FY2019 budget, unveiled last Monday, proposes cuts in essential funding for scientific research and education. Unfortunately, this attack on science is not an isolated incident. Barely a year into President Trump’s term, there have already been 111 attempts by the federal government to censor, misrepresent, or stifle science. Many appear intended to gain support for the administration’s efforts to prop up the fossil fuel industry... At the Department of the Interior (DOI), a website discussing the environmental and other risks of fossil fuel development was changed to emphasize economic benefits [and to argue against human causes of climate change]. A few months later, large swaths of land previously protected from coal mining and oil and gas drilling were opened to development. Shortly after this, DOI’s Bureau of Land Management changed the image on its homepage from a scenic park vista to a pile of coal, presumably to reinforce the message that public lands are for mining."
Words banned at multiple HHS agencies include ‘diversity’ and ‘vulnerable’ (Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin, WashPost, 12-10-17) "The Trump administration has informed multiple divisions within the Department of Health and Human Services that they should avoid using certain words or phrases in official documents being drafted for next year’s budget. The words to avoid: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.” Participants at HHS were also told to use “Obamacare” instead of ACA, or the Affordable Care Act, and to use “exchanges” instead of “marketplaces” to describe the venues where people can purchase health insurance. At the CDC, budget analysts were told they could use an alternative phrase instead of “evidence-based” or “science-based” in budget documents. That phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”
     The CDC analyst said it was clear to participants that they were to avoid those seven words but only in drafting budget documents.

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Homeland Security Used a Private Intelligence Firm to Monitor Family Separation Protests (Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept, 4-19-19) In the last two years, law enforcement agencies executing the Trump administration’s immigration agenda have cracked down on critics of the president’s policies. Among the targeted: humanitarian volunteers providing food, water, and medical aid to migrants trekking through the desert, and immigration attorneys, journalists, and activists working with, and around, migrant caravans.“This is a chilling revelation, but follows an even scarier trend of constant government surveillance and policing of immigrant communities, and targeting of activists and journalists,” Jesse Franzblau, a senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center.
The police threw the book at Trump Protesters in DC but sat and watched White Supremacists terrorize Charlottesville (Sandra Fulton, HuffPost, 8-29-17) "Last week, the Department of Justice altered a sweeping warrant, which sought to collect personal information on every visitor to an anti-Trump website that organized protests on Inauguration Day....The demand seems to be in line with a broader trend within the Trump Administration—a harsh crackdown against any group that disagrees with President Trump. For his part, Trump has categorized these protesters as the “Alt-Left,” a term that doesn’t seem to apply to any easily-defined entity beyond the paranoid imaginings of Trump and his allies." "The administration and law enforcement are using a range of tactics — from electronic surveillance to a growing number of anti-protest laws — to criminalize anyone that organizes in the streets to protest the president and his policies. But how are law enforcement and the administration responding to the very real threats coming from white supremacists like those who marched earlier this month on Charlottesville?'

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Leaked FBI Documents Reveal Bureau’s Priorities Under Trump (Ken Klippenstein, The Young Turks, 8-8-19) Under President Trump, the FBI’s official counterterrorism priorities have included “Black Identity Extremists,” “anti-authority” extremists, and “animal rights/environmental extremists,” according to leaked Bureau documents.... When an August 2017 internal FBI report referencing the counterterrorism threat posed by “Black Identity Extremists” was published by Foreign Policy, the FBI became the subject of intense criticism for adopting what critics alleged was a racially loaded term....While the documents depict concerns about violent black extremist attacks, they do not cite a single specific attack — unlike white supremacist attacks, of which several prominent examples are provided....So grave did the Bureau consider the threat of black extremists that from 2019 to 2020, using new designations, it listed the threat at the very top of its counterterrorism priorities — above even terror groups like Al Qaeda."
Justice demands 1.3M IP addresses related to Trump resistance site (Morgan Chalfant, The Hill, 8-14-17) "DreamHost claimed that the complying with the request from the Justice Department would amount to handing over roughly 1.3 million visitor IP addresses to the government, in addition to contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors to the website, which was involved in organizing protests against Trump on Inauguration Day. “That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” DreamHost wrote in the blog post on Monday. “That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”
Trump Administration Starts Returning Copies of C.I.A. Torture Report to Congress (Mark Mazzetti and Mathew Rosenberg, NY Times, 6-2-17) "The Trump administration has begun returning copies of a voluminous 2014 Senate report about the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program to Congress, complying with the demand of a top Republican senator who has criticized the report for being shoddy and excessively critical of the C.I.A....The committee, which was then run by Democrats, also sent copies of the entire classified report to at least eight federal agencies, asking that they incorporate the report into their records — a move that would have made it subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. That law, which allows citizens, the media and other groups to request access to information held by the federal government, does not apply to congressional records...The full report is not expected to offer evidence of previously undisclosed interrogation techniques, but the interrogation sessions are said to be described in great detail. The report explains the origins of the program and identifies the officials involved, and also offers details on the role of each agency in the secret prison program."

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How Can Journalists Protect Themselves During a Trump Administration? (Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic, 11-10-16) The president-elect’s attacks on the press hint at an unfriendly atmosphere for reporters.
Trump Hates the Press? Take a Number. (Jack Shafer, Politico, 2-17-17) "No matter how grievous the sins of the press may be—and as a press critic, let me tell you, they are grievous—a president can’t forever blame everything on “dishonest reporters,” the “mess” the previous president left behind or the dug-in elites. Reckonings tend to take a while to form, as Nixon and Agnew learned. Trump’s will come."
Trump, who received hundreds of millions of dollars from his father's real estate empire, calls John Fetterman spoiled: 'He lived off his parents' money' (Isabella Zavarise, Yahoo, 9-4-22)
Journalists around the country are joining a Slack channel devoted to FOIA and Trump (Krysten Hare, Poynter, 1-25-17) A few days before President Trump's inauguration, MuckRock opened up a Slack channel to help journalists better cover him and his administration. Sign up here: www.muckrock.com.
How far will President Trump’s media blackout spread? The Sunlight Foundation is trying to find out (Kelly Hinchcliffe, Poynter, 1-25-17)
Trump tried to ban top aides from penning tell-all books (Nancy Cook and Andrew Restuccia, Politico, 8-13-18) After the controversy surrounding the Omarosa Manigault Newman tell-all, the President’s use of non-disclosure/disparagement agreements is facing public criticism. The idea that top government officials could be censored from speaking out against abuse of power is frightening. What happens in a world where important political stories cannot be told?

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The Memory Hole 2, run by Russ Kick, and The Internet Archive (The Wayback Machine) save pages that disappear from the Web. Kick's site has been good about saving items deleted by the Trump Administration (including Trump's error-filled Tweets).
Trump shares Twitter accounts linked to conspiracy theory QAnon (Tony Romm and Colby Itkowitz, WaPo, 7-30-19) How QAnon, the bizarre pro-Trump conspiracy theory, took hold in right-wing circles online. (And how Trump tweets its latest claim.
Unsolicited Advice for the White House Press Corps (Jack Shafer, Fourth Estate, Politico, 2-6-17) And keep up to date on Shafer's Twitter feed.
Poll: Trump More Trusted Than the Media (by Republicans) (Curt Mills, US News, 2-9-17) Views on the press and the administration break down along clear party lines. ""The partisan split on this topic is clear – 89 percent of Republicans find the Trump administration truthful, versus 77 percent of Democrats who find the administration untruthful. Conversely, 69 percent of Democrats find the news media truthful, while a whopping 91 percent of Republicans consider them untruthful. Independents consider both untruthful," according to a poll conducted by Emerson College." Mind you, this was in 2017.'
The Private Trump Angst of a Republican Icon (Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, New Yorker, 9-27-2020) James Baker thinks Trump is “nuts,” but he voted for him once—and may soon do so again?

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The Invention of Thanksgiving (Philip Deloria, The New Yorker, 11-18-19) Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday--in which white Americans have from the start tended to play a villainous role. 'Today, Wampanoag people debate whether Thanksgiving should be a day of mourning or a chance to contemplate reconciliation. It’s mighty generous of them....“American Indian” is a political identity, not a racial one, constituted by formal, still living treaties with the United States government and a long series of legal decisions. Today, the Trump Administration would like to deny this history, wrongly categorize Indians as a racial group, and disavow ongoing treaty relationships.'
Trump organizations agree to pay $750,000 to settle lawsuit with D.C. (Keith L. Alexander, WaPo, 5-3-22) The city alleged the groups misused nonprofit funds donated for inauguration to benefit Trump and his family. Lawyers for the District also accused Trump’s organization of improperly using nonprofit funds to throw a private party on Jan. 20, 2017, for Trump’s children — Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric — which cost $300,000. The city also alleged that the Trump Organization, the inaugural committee and the Trump International Hotel misused $1.1 million.
With New Trump Policy, Is the Moon for the Taking? (Ramin Skibba, Undark, 5-30-19) The Trump administration has been vague about what it hopes to accomplish on the moon, but mining may be on the agenda. "Worse yet, the 2024 target date suggests a selfish motive — an attempt by Trump to conjure a dramatic legacy before he leaves office, assuming he is reelected next year. Indeed, recent comments by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine suggest the deadline was chosen with little, if any, consideration of the scientific and engineering challenges."

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If you have an LLC, read about new BOI federal filing requirement for 2024

New in 2024:

The BOI E-Filing System supports the electronic filing of the Beneficial Ownership Information Report (BOIR) under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA)--"beneficial ownership information" meaning information about the individuals who directly or indirectly own or control a company. The CTA requires certain types of U.S. and foreign entities to report beneficial ownership information to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

[Emphasis here and below added for clarity about what this is all about. Let me know if someone presents crystal clear and concise information anywhere about who has to do what. In particular, do freelance writers and writing firms need to comply?Meanwhile, read this only when brain working at full capacity.]

 
Small Entities Must File New Beneficial Ownership Information Reports in 2024 (Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation, Iowa State University, 11-30-23) The CTA was enacted as part of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, Public Law 116–283. The CTA was enacted to prevent money laundering, corrupt financial transactions, and financial terrorism. It requires the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN, a bureau of the U.S. Treasury) to establish and maintain a national registry of beneficial owners of entities that are otherwise not subject to disclosure regulations. Specifically, FinCEN has stated that collection of BOI will “help to shed light on criminals who evade taxes, hide their illicit wealth, and defraud employees and customers and hurt honest U.S. businesses through their misuse of shell companies.” In furtherance of these goals, the CTA authorizes FinCEN to share the collected information with government agencies, financial institutions, and financial regulations, subject to safeguards and protocols. Answers clearly these questions: Who must file a report? Exceptions to Reporting

 

Do you have an LLC? There’s a new federal filing requirement known as BOI. (Jane Friedman, Electric Speed blog, 2-3-24)

       "In January 2021, the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) was enacted by Congress, which requires business entities to file a beneficial ownership information (BOI) report with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network within the US Department of the Treasury. The CTA went into effect on Jan. 1, 2024. If you have an LLC, you have one year to file your BOI. There is no fee to file, but you may be fined if you don’t file on time."


New Year, New Rules: 2024 Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirement (Wolters Kluwer) What (small) business owners, lawyers, accountants must do under the Corporate Transparency Act. Find out how to comply.


FinCEN issues final rule on access to the beneficial ownership information reported under the Corporate Transparency Act (Sandra Feldman, Wolters Kluwer, 12-22-23) "On December 22, 2023, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a final rule (the Access Rule) that sets forth the circumstances under which beneficial ownership information (BOI) may be disclosed to authorized BOI recipients.
" The CTA allows FinCEN to disclose BOI only to six categories of requestors. The Access Rule, among other things, clarifies the purposes for which these requestors may use BOI, the steps they must take in making their request, and the steps they must take to ensure the security and confidentiality of the information. The very long final access file can be accessed here:

     https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-12-22/pdf/2023-27973.pdf

 

File the Beneficial Ownership Information Report (BOIR)

Welcome to the BOI E-Filing System

     The BOI E-Filing System supports the electronic filing of the Beneficial Ownership Information Report (BOIR) under the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The CTA requires certain types of U.S. and foreign entities to report beneficial ownership information to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

       A “beneficial owner” under the BOI Rule is defined as any individual who, directly or indirectly, either exercises substantial control over a reporting company or owns or controls at least 25% of the ownership interests of a reporting company.

 

Fact Sheet for Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Rule (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, 9-29-22) Under the rule, a beneficial owner includes any individual who, directly or indirectly, either (1) exercises substantial control over a reporting company, or (2) owns or controls at least 25 percent of the ownership interests of a reporting company. The rule defines the terms “substantial control” and “ownership interest.”


Small Entity Compliance Guide (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Version 1.1 December 2023) Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Requirements (BOIR requirements). FinCEN's
Select the filing method that works best for you: File PDF BOIR


Updates on U.S. Corporate Transparency Act Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements (Sidley, Anti-Money Laundering Update, 12-14-23) "This unprecedented collection of information by the government is intended to curtail the deliberate misuse of legal entities and deter illicit financial activity and national security threats that result therefrom."

      'The BOI Rule includes 23 categories of exemptions from the definition of “reporting company” from the CTA for entities already generally subject to substantial United States federal or state regulation under which beneficial ownership may be known. These exemptions include, among others, banks, insurance companies, public companies registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), broker-dealers, certain investment funds, investment advisers and pooled investment vehicles, certain tax-exempt entities, subsidiaries of certain exempt entities, and a category of “large operating companies.” '

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Indie Author Conferences in 2024



The Women In Publishing Summit

    Virtual, March 6-9, 2024


BookMARCon 2024

    Virtual, April 5-7, 2024


Pikes Peak Writers Conference

    Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 25-28, 2024


Inkers Con 2024

    Dallas, TX June 7-9, 2024

     Attended by several hundred people, perhaps 75% new authors. If you can't attend the live conference, pay for online access (good for 6 years or so) at Inkers Con Digital Conference (July 20 to August 2, 2024). Bestselling author Pamela Kelley says "InkersCon is fantastic. A smaller conference, about the same size as NINC around 400-450 or so people and a good range of workshops. It's held in Dallas I think. I do the virtual every year and it's about $200 and well worth it--as we have access for six years. Some really great sessions."


The Self Publishing Show LIVE!

    Live, London’s South Bank, June 25-26, 2024


Killer Nashville

    International Writers Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, August 22-25, 2024

    For writers in all genres incorporating mystery, thriller, action, or suspense elements


NINC 

    Novelists, Inc., TradeWinds Island Grand Beach Resort, St. Pete Beach, Florida, September 18-22, 2024

      Writes bestselling novelist Pamela Kelley: "NINC is for more experienced authors, both trad and indie, and meets yearly in St. Pete, Florida. I don't go for the workshops, I go for the networking with vendors and to see my author friends. NINC is the one I never miss and the only one I attended in-person last year."
Moonlight & Magnolias

    Romance Writers conference, Atlanta, Georgia, October 3-5, 2024


Self-Pub Con

    The Self-Publishing Advice Conference, a free online author conference run in association with the Alliance of Independent Authors (three days, October 21-24, 2024)


Author Nation

    Las Vegas, NV, November 11-15, 2024

     Taking over from the 20Books conference, last held in 2023.  On YouTube: 20Booksto50k[R]-Live Events, check out 20Books sessions from past years, free). Author Nation has the same location and general timing as 20Books, but is different. Listen to past events here.

       Writes popular novelist Pamela Kelley in 2024: "I went to Author Nation a few years ago when it was 20books. It only changed hands this year because the organizer retired from doing it--it's a huge project--close to 2000 attendees in Vegas. It's a great conference, very inexpensive and there are sessions for all levels. It's probably about 75% newer authors so new people shouldn't feel intimidated--they will be in good company as it's a friendly, inclusive conference. And all the sessions from past years are up for free on Youtube. I don't know if that will continue now that it's Author Nation, there may be a fee attached to the videos going forward, possibly."


 

ROUNDUP ARTICLES
Eight Indie Author Conferences to Attend In 2024

     (Clayton Noblit, Written Word Media, 1-24-24)
5 Amazing Conferences For Indie Authors To Attend in 2024 (Mackenzie Harrison, BookBrush)
A Guide to the Best Author Conferences (Self-Publishing.com, 5-3-23) Not necessarily indie author events.

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Good books about motherhood (both fiction and nonfiction)

THE FICTION LIST*


Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson

     "In a hilariously charming domestic memoir, America’s celebrated master of terror turns to a different kind of fright: raising children."
The Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill.

      "If I tell you that it’s funny, and moving, and true; that it’s as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1897, will you please simply believe me, and read it?” ~Michael Cunningham
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble.

     The story of an upper-middle-class unwed mother in 1960s London, from a novelist who is “often as meticulous as Jane Austen and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh”
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

      "Doris Lessing's real achievement in this book, I think, was simply in her matter-of-fact her handling of controversial matters (controversial in the period between World War II and the sixties, at any rate). She writes about the life of a divorced woman with a child, her relationships with that child, with her best (woman) friend, with her lovers, her comrades in the English CP, her body, the political world, etc., in ways that are remarkable for their straightforward candor."
The Women's Room by Marilyn French

      “An important fictional account of a whole generation of women . . . Arresting, very real and poignant.” ~ The Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar

      "Molnar's debut, about the first few sleep-decimated weeks in the life of a new mother...brings this particularly mind-eviscerating state of affairs into startlingly sharp relief in this uncompromising novel. And yet this is also an oddly affirmative novel, alive with a dangerous self-aware humor." ~ Daily Mail

      NY Public Library: Struggling with postpartum depression, a new mother, ill at ease with this state of perpetual giving, carrying, and feeding, strikes up a tentative friendship with her ailing upstairs neighbor, but they are both running out of time, and something is soon to crack."
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (to be published in 2024)

     "Anyone who has endured “the blurred days and the blurred nights” of early motherhood – or indeed anyone contemplating the possibility of embarking on them – be warned. You’re looking at a book-length panic attack....There were times when quite frankly I couldn't read on because it was the descriptions were so raw and jarringly close to home. A brilliant book but not an easy read."~Sarah Crown, The Guardian
Reproduction by Louisa Hall (to be published June 2024)

     A lucid, genre-defying novel that explores the surreality of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a country in crisis
The Green Road by Ann Enright

     Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart.
The Wren by Ann Enright

     "This is a powerful, thoughtful book by one of the great living writers on the subject of family. Speaking about love in terms both domestic and transcendent, Enright coos through newly connected wires." ~ New York Times

      "The power of Enright's novel derives not so much from the age-old tale of men behaving badly, but from the beauty and depth of her own style. She's so deft at rendering arresting insights into personality types or situations."~ Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

      "Taffy Brodesser-Akner updates the miserable-matrimony novel, dropping it squarely in our times. . . . Brodesser-Akner has written a potent, upsetting and satisfying novel, illustrating how the marital pledge—build our life together—overlooks a key fact: There are two lives.”—The New York Times Book Review
Beloved by Toni Morrison.

       “A triumph.” ~Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review
Night Waking by Sarah Moss

       This one might be tough to read.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

      In this blazingly smart and voracious debut novel, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. • "A must-read for anyone who can’t get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural that Yellowjackets exemplifies." —Vulture
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman

      "Dense to look at, challengingly epic, the novel is built around one Ohio housewife’s monologue, flowing with dazzling lightness and speed. The detritus and maddening complexity of domesticity unfold in one breath, over a thousand pages. Shards of film plot and song collide with climate change anxiety; the terrors of parenting, healthcare and shopping lists wrestle with fake news and gun culture."~Booker Prize judge, Joanna MacGregor
After Birth by Elisa Albert.

       Acclaimed for its insight, outrageous humor, and power to spark fierce debate, After Birth is a daring and transformative novel about friendship, history, and the body.
Crazy by Jane Feaver.

       Funny, philosophical, sobering and wise, Crazy is crammed with insight and laced with great sentences~Claire Kilroy, Guardian
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (short stories by Helen Simpson)

      This collection, Simpson's third and best yet, is a loosely linked set of stories about women - at work, at home and on holiday - that is poignant, perceptive, often sad and frequently funny.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

       "A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again." —Greta Gerwig
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

     If the first time you read it you loved the stories about the girls, read it again focusing on Mrs. March's role in the story.

 

THE NONFICTION LIST*
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich,

      'In order for all women to have real choices all along the line, ' Ardrienne Rich writes, 'we need fully to understand the power and powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture.'
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (the 50th anniversary edition)

      "Brilliant…[Friedan] succeeded where no other feminist writer had. She touched the lives of ordinary readers." ~ Louis Menand, The New Yorker
Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood a book of essays by Ann Enright.

     "Making Babies is a collection of short essays, some of them stream of consciousness, that move chronologically through the landmarks of motherhood. She writes with brutal candor and irreverence about the things that the feel-good baby books don’t tell you."~ Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk.

     "A funny, moving, brutally honest account of her early experiences of motherhood. When it was published it 2001, it divided critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk’s children be taken into care, saying she was unfit to look after them, and Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself."
Toddlers: The Mumsnet Guide: A Million Mums' Trade Secrets by Mumsnet and the Mumsnet Mums Morningpaper.

      Sensible, funny, "a breath of fresh air" (print on demand)

 

* SOURCES:

When I read the following two pieces, I realized that although I had read some of these novels and nonfiction accounts of motherhood, I had missed a lot of them. So this re-assembled list is a reading list for me (to refer to at the library) as well as for you, or parents you might want to give a book to. I have added quotes from other sources. Let me know of any book about motherhood that you would add to the list.
---Top 10 novels about motherhood (Claire Kilroy, The Guardian, 5-10-23) From Elena Ferrante to Taffy Brodesser-Akner, writers have captured the pressures that being a mother can inflict on marriage and on the creative self.
---Eleanor Birne's top 10 books on motherhood (Eleanor Birne, The Guardian, 3-30-11) From Anna Karenina to Anne Enright, here are 10 striking portraits of motherhood from fiction and non-fiction books.

The Guardian publishes a roundup piece on this topic every now and again; do a search and you can find a bunch of them online.

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What the heck does it mean to be "woke"?

assembled by Pat McNees

 

I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go down there. Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.” ~ Lead Belly, "Scottsboro Boys," 1938

 

"DeSantis engineered and recently signed into law the “Stop W.O.K.E.” Act, a title that precisely captures what the bill’s architects aimed to do: stop people in Florida from speaking out in ways that challenge racism and other kinds of discrimination." ~ Ishena Robinson, NAACP

 

"I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon' stay woke. And I'm gon' help him wake up other black folk." ~ Barry Beckham in his 1972 play Garvey Lives!

 


The Origin of Woke : William Melvin Kelley Is the ‘Woke’ Godfather We Never Acknowledged (Elijah C. Watson, Okay Player) In the first of his three-part Origin of Woke series, Elijah Watson highlights William Melvin Kelley, the Harlem author credited with coining the word.
---The Origin of Woke: How the Death of Woke Led to the Birth of Cancel Culture (Elijah Watson)

"Most people who are woke ain't calling themselves woke. Most people who are woke are agonizing inside. They're too busy being depressed to call themselves woke."

      "This is what Georgia Anne Muldrow — the woman who introduced woke to Erykah Badu who then introduced it to the world — told me almost two years ago. Throughout the 2010s, Muldrow's declaration became more declarative as woke became ubiquitous in the world. From "I'd stay woke" to "I stay woke"; "I stay woke" to "Stay woke"; and "Stay woke" to "Woke." As the phrase changed so did what it represented. With "stay woke," there was the implication that it was a continuous action — that one isn't only constantly challenging the injustices and transgressions of the world, but themselves, too. "Woke," on its own, is nothing more than a descriptor — a way to signal one's social awareness....Now used as a pejorative, woke has given way to online phenomenons like "call-out culture" and "cancel culture," both of which have also been met with derision. Despite its root function — to protect and give a voice to marginalized people and communities — woke is now seen as a detriment to societal progress.'

---The Origin of Woke: How Erykah Badu and Georgia Anne Muldrow Sparked The “Stay Woke” Era. Muldrow: "To be woke is to be black.  Woke is definitely a black experience — woke is if someone put a burlap sack on your head, knocked you out, and put you in a new location and then you come to and understand where you are ain't home and the people around you ain't your neighbors. They're not acting in a neighborly fashion, they're the ones who conked you on your head. You got kidnapped here and then you got punked out of your own language, everything. That's woke — understanding what your ancestors went through. Just being in touch with the struggle that our people have gone through here and understanding we've been fighting since the very day we touched down here. There was no year where the fight wasn't going down."

• If You're Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today's Negro idiom without a hip assist. (William Melvin Kelley, NY Times, 5-20-62, viewable in the Times Machine, but "woke" appears only in the title.)

A history of “wokeness” (Aja Romano, Vox, 10-9-20) Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war. In the six years since the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right. On the left, to be “woke” means to identify as a staunch social justice advocate who’s abreast of contemporary political concerns — or to be perceived that way. On the right, “woke” — like its cousin “canceled” — bespeaks “political correctness” gone awry, and the term itself is usually used sarcastically.

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Woke Is Now A Racial Slur Thanks to White People (Allison Wiltz, Writers and Editors of Color Magazine, 11-10-21) "Keep in mind White people can never be "woke." Thinking they can is part of the problem. Becoming "woke" is a unique experience for Black people because we live in a nation that constantly gaslights us about the racism we see in our communities and experience first hand. Waking up means rejecting the false narratives and overcoming the psychological shackles of White supremacy."
Wikipedia on "Woke" 'Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights.'
Earning the ‘Woke’ Badge (Amanda Hess, Amanda Hess, NY Times Magazine, 4-24-16) "These days, it has become almost fashionable for people to telegraph just how aware they have become. And this uneasy performance has increasingly been advertised with one word: “woke.” Think of “woke” as the inverse of “politically correct.” If “P.C.” is a taunt from the right, a way of calling out hypersensitivity in political discourse, then “woke” is a back-pat from the left, a way of affirming the sensitive. It means wanting to be considered correct, and wanting everyone to know just how correct you are.

The “Woke History” Wars Emma Green with Tyler Foggatt (New Yorker podcast, 3-8-23) discusses a major debate in academia about whether contemporary politics are shaping our understanding of the past too much.
The Roots Of Wokeness (Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish, 7-31-20) It's time we looked more closely at the philosophy behind the movement. 'There’s no conspiracy: we all act unknowingly in perpetuating systems of thought that oppress other groups. To be “woke” is to be “awake” to these invisible, self-reinforcing discourses, and to seek to dismantle them—in ourselves and others.'

 

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Amazon vs Book Publishers (Do Writers Win or Lose?)

Published initially 11/14/2014; updated 1-5-24


Everything and Less’ Review: Fiction in Prime Time (Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal, 11-5-21) Amazon has transformed the way we read books—and, according to Mark McGurl, Stanford professor and literary critic and author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, how they’re written. “Most literary studies focus their insights on the writers they consider the best, or the most significant artistically. But Amazon, being primarily a retail platform, doesn’t care about the content of books, only about how they sell and to whom. So under its hegemony the books suddenly elevated in stature belong to the traditionally “down-market sub-basement” commercial genres. In other words, like a private eye or tabloid journalist, Mr. McGurl spends his time digging through trash.”
      “In the Age of Amazon, all fiction is genre fiction. Dividing contemporary literature into a vast array of searchable genre categories, each with its own best-seller list, Amazon is the host of a genre system conceived as an engine of infinitely infoliating permutations of objects of narrative desire.” The most popular of those categories are post-apocalyptic fantasy sagas and romance novels, and Mr.McGurl devotes interpretive space to exemplars from each: Hugh Howey’s “Wool” series and E.L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy. These books are also notable for having been originally self-published, and it is through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform that the company has shown its true service-oriented ethos. Here writers can target increasingly niche customer wishes, and Mr.McGurl has a funny chapter on the explosion of fetish lit, like Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica, “the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature.”          See also McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

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Authors and Booksellers Urge Justice Dept. to Investigate Amazon (Alexandra Alter, NY Times, 8-16-23) The online retailer’s size and sway affects the free exchange of ideas, the groups argue. The Biden administration has stepped up enforcement of antitrust policies. On Wednesday, the Open Markets Institute, an antitrust think tank, along with the Authors Guild and the American Booksellers Association, sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, calling on the government to curb Amazon’s “monopoly in its role as a seller of books to the public.”
       "The groups are pressing the Justice Department to investigate not only Amazon’s size as a bookseller, but also its sway over the book market — especially its ability to promote certain titles on its site and bury others, said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group focused on strengthening antimonopoly policies.
       "What we have is a situation in which the power of a single dominant corporation is warping, in the aggregate, the type of books that we’re reading,” Lynn said in an interview. “This kind of power concentrated in a democracy is not acceptable.”

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Is Amazon Changing the Novel? (Parul Seghal, New Yorker, 11-1-21) In the new literary landscape, readers are customers, writers are service providers, and books are expected to offer instant gratification. "Amazon—which, as its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to point out, is named for the river that is not only the world’s largest but larger than the next five largest rivers combined—controlled almost three-quarters of new-adult-book sales online and almost half of all new-book sales in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. Unlike Mudie’s, it’s also a publisher, with sixteen book imprints...
      "The social-media site Goodreads, purchased by Amazon in 2013, hosts more than a hundred million registered users and, McGurl ventures, may be “the richest repository of the leavings of literary life ever assembled, exceeded only by the mass of granular data sent back to home base from virtually every Kindle device in the world.”

      But what McGurl considers the “most dramatic intervention into literary history” is yet another Amazon division, Kindle Direct Publishing (K.D.P.); it allows writers to bypass traditional gatekeepers and self-publish their work for free, with Amazon taking a significant chunk of any proceeds....

      "The K.D.P. platform pays the author by the number of pages read, which creates a strong incentive for cliffhangers early on, and for generating as many pages as possible as quickly as possible. The writer is exhorted to produce not just one book or a series but something closer to a feed—what McGurl calls a “series of series.” 

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Amazon to shut its bookstores and other shops as its grocery chain expands (Jeffrey Dastin, Reuters, 3-2-22) Amazon.com Inc plans to "close all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, pop-ups and shops carrying toys and home goods in the United States and United Kingdom, ending some of its longest-running retail experiments. The news marks a turning point for a company that began as an online bookseller and helped drive established rivals such as Borders to bankruptcy.
     "But the company's innovations were not enough to counter the march toward online shopping that Amazon itself had set off. Its "physical stores" revenue - a mere 3% of Amazon's $137 billion in sales last quarter, largely reflective of consumer spending at its Whole Foods subsidiary - has often failed to keep pace with growth in the retailer's other businesses.
      "Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said internet-savvy Amazon was right to forgo the niche market of brick-and-mortar book shoppers, as bad a match as electric car maker Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) opening gas stations."

 

Amazon’s Toll Road: How the Tech Giant Funds Its Monopoly Empire by Exploiting Small Businesses (Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, December 2021) "One of the most striking measures of Amazon’s monopoly power is the extraordinary amount of money that it’s able to extract from the independent businesses that rely on its site to reach customers. In this report, we find that, over the last two years, Amazon’s revenue from the fees it levies on third-party sellers has more than doubled. In 2019, Amazon pocketed $60 billion in seller fees.This year, its take will soar to $121 billion, our new research finds....
     "Amazon’s dominance of online retail means that small businesses have little choice but to rely on its site to reach consumers. This report finds that Amazon is exploiting its position as a gatekeeper to impose steep and growing fees on third-party sellers. Even as these exorbitant fees bankrupt sellers, they are generating huge profits for Amazon, a fact that the tech giant conceals in its financial reports. These profits are not only the spoils of Amazon’s monopoly power. They are the essential fuel that feeds its market-domination strategies, enabling it to absorb massive, predatory losses designed to lock-in market control and fund breakneck expansion."

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What Happened to Amazon’s Bookstore? (David Streitfeld, NY Times, 12-3-21) A lawsuit filed in federal court in Maryland "offers a glimpse into Amazon’s dominance and perhaps its vulnerability. Amazon’s online store has surpassed Walmart, making it the largest retailer outside China. By delivering essentials and luxuries to those stuck at home during the pandemic, it helped many people navigate a bleak moment....It is one of the few companies valued at more than a trillion dollars. For all that success, however, Amazon is under pressure from many directions....
     "There are sellers like Mr. Boland, who say they are suffering from the Wild West atmosphere on the site; regulators, who are taking a closer look at Amazon’s power; unhappy warehouse employees, who would like a better deal; and lawmakers, who want Amazon to disclose more about its third-party sellers. There are also the devious sellers themselves, whom Amazon says it is having a hard time eradicating....
      "The bookstore is the oldest part of Amazon, still central to its identity but no longer to its bottom line. It feels like where every Amazon shopping experience could be heading — immense, full of ads and unvetted reviews, ruled by algorithms and third-party sellers whose identities can be elusive.... “Should we care as a society that a single firm controls half of our most precious cultural commodity and its automation isn’t working right?” asked Christopher Sagers, the author of “Antitrust: Examples & Explanations.”... Offering tens of millions of items to hundreds of millions of customers prevents any human touch — but opens up a lot of space for advertising, and for confusion and duplicity....Mr. Boland said: “Amazon has done a great job of expanding the marketplace for books. It’s too bad they’ve decided not to police their own platform, because it’s leading to all sorts of trouble.”Amazon acknowledges that some third-party sellers bring problems, including fraud, counterfeiting and abuse." ...Amazon gives writers and publishers broad latitude to sell anything, including the mediocre and the misleading. The store’s logic has always been that the good work will rise and the bad will fall. In the meantime, however, some readers get suckered."

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People Now Spend More at Amazon Than at Walmart (Karen Weise and Michael Corkery, Technology, NY Times, 8-17-21) Proof that the online future has arrived: The biggest e-commerce company outside China has unseated the biggest brick-and-mortar seller. Propelled in part by surging demand during the pandemic, people spent more than $610 billion on Amazon over the 12 months ending in June... Indeed, the company’s delivery (many items land on doorsteps in a day or two) and wide selection first drew customers to online shopping, and it has kept them buying more there ever since.... “Walmart has been around for so long, and now Amazon comes around with a different model and replaces them as a No. 1.”

 

Amazon’s Importance to US Book Sales Keeps Increasing—for Better or Worse (Jane Friedman draws from material first published in The Hot Sheet, 9-23-2020) Since Hot Sheet started publishing in 2015, Amazon has changed, grown, and dominated more than any other company in the US book publishing industry. Among points discussed (quoting roughly from headings): Of all the writer-focused programs Amazon has launched in the last decade; only one is still active: Kindle Singles, an ebook subscription service which requires exclusivity, has become essential for some genre fiction authors. Amazon could be making it difficult for other publishers to break out new novelists. Amazon has doubled down on its own traditional publishing program, Amazon Publishing (APub). Amazon creates its own bestseller lists and also dominates its own Kindle bestseller list. Definitely worth reading (and The Hot Sheet is worth subscribing, if you're deeply interesting in publishing).

 

Amazon Publishes Books by Top Authors, and Rivals Fret (Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal, 1-14-2020) "Dean Koontz, Patricia Cornwell are among the blue-chip writers whose books the tech giant is not just selling but publishing. It was a surprising move because it means his new books likely won't appear in retail stores, which generally boycott Amazon-published titles. But Mr. Koontz is banking on Amazon’s vast retail machine to get his work to readers, whether in physical or digital formats."

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A lot has changed in book publishing in the last ten years (Mike Shatzkin, Shatzkin Files, 7-23-19) "At the beginning of this decade, Amazon Publishing had ideas about signing up big authors. But they were stymied then by the pretty stubborn refusal of the rest of the supply chain to stock books published by their biggest retail competitor.
"But that was when Amazon sales were about 20-25 percent of the market. Now they’re probably over half, and well above that for many books. Whether they will successfully sell Koontz beyond Amazon remains to be seen, but their no-middleperson structure enables them to pay far more of each retail dollar in royalties, so half the sales or more can generate more income to the author than a publisher without its own retailing capability can deliver selling a larger number of units. If this is a sign of things to come, and it is hard to see why it wouldn’t be, some profound changes might be just around the corner."

 

The Week’s Big Story: Amazon Publishing on Wooing Dean Koontz (Porter Anderson, Publishing Perspectives, 7-26-19)
Amazon To Open Hundreds Of Brick-And-Mortar Bookstores (Pavithra Mohan, Fast Company, 2-2-16) Amazon, the online retailer that killed off so many independent bookshops, is getting ready to launch its own brick-and-mortar book chain. According to the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of a major mall operator, General Growth Properties, revealed on Tuesday that Amazon intends to launch hundreds of bookstores.
Why Amazon's Rumored "Bookstores" Probably Won't Be What You Think (Rich Bellis, Fast Company, 2-3-16) If Amazon does expand its physical retail footprint, don’t expect it to focus exclusively or even primarily on books. It may see physical locations as (among other things) more akin to Apple Stores, where it can showcase the hardware it sells online.

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Meet the Guy Behind Amazon’s Secret Retail Store Plans (Jason Del Rey, re/code, 2-3-16) The man behind the Kindle is leading Amazon’s project to create the retail stores of the future. And bookstores are just the beginning. These are two of the new details Re/code has uncovered about Amazon’s plans for expansion into physical retail.
Amazon Plans Hundreds of Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores, Mall CEO Says (Greg Bensinger, WSJ, 2-2-16) mazon Plans Hundreds of Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores, Mall CEO Says

In the following pieces about a dispute among them, Amazon and book publishers take turns being the bad guy. Authors, read these often excellent arguments for and against book publishers, Amazon, and others engaged in this battle for market power and tell us what you think!

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About that police raid on a weekly Kansas newspaper, The Marion Record

The Aug. 11 searches of the Marion County Record's office and the homes of its publisher and a City Council member have been sharply criticized, putting Marion at the center of a debate over the press protections offered by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

 

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: As you may recall, in August 2023 law enforcement officers in a rural Kansas county raided the offices and homes of the editors of a local newspaper, seizing electronic newsgathering equipment and reporting materials and resulting in a nationwide uproar over the threats to our First Amendment principles of a free press.


---A conversation with the newspaper owner raided by cops (Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket, 8-12-23) Eric Meyer says his paper had been investigating the police chief, Gideon Cody, prior to the raids on his office and home. They did so because of a complaint by a local restaurant owner named Kari Newell. [This is the piece that took the story viral.]


---How a small-town feud in Kansas sent a shock through American journalism (Jonathan O'Connell, Paul Farhi and Sofia Andrade, Washington Post, 8-26-23. Illustrated.) A police raid without precedent on a weekly newspaper alarmed First Amendment advocates. The real story of how it happened, though, is rooted in the roiling tensions and complex history of a few key community members.

     "The emotional response to the raid was heightened by the sudden death of the editor's 98-year-old mother, who had railed furiously at the officers sorting through her belongings at their home and collapsed a day later. The Record blamed her death on her agitation over the raid.

     "Get out of my house!" Joan Meyer had shouted at Cody from behind her walker before calling him an expletive, home surveillance video revealed.       

     "Don't you touch any of that stuff!"
     Yet parsing the events that led to the search — and understanding its larger implications for a free press in the United States — comes down to untangling the complex interrelationships and tortured history of a small group of people coexisting in a single small town.
     At the center of everything were a business owner, a police chief and a newspaper.


---The Marion raid and the Privacy Protection Act (Gabe Rottman, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 8-21-23)

    How does the “subpoena-first” rule in the Privacy Protection Act actually work?
   "During the raid, the police carted off computers, cell phones, and documents. The computers, and possibly the phones, will contain not only raw reporting material — information and documents gathered, maybe photographs, etc. — but also things like unpublished stories and other actual “news” that reflects the editorial work of the reporters at the Record (all that stuff on all the computers seized). There is no "subpoena-first" rule for the latter, but it receives higher protections than the raw “documentary material” that is obtainable with a subpoena.

   RCFP addresses the question How does the "subpoena-first" rule in the Privacy Protection Act — the federal law limiting law enforcement's ability to conduct newsroom searches — actually work?  In so doing the authors unpack and clarify several terms — "work product" and "documentary materials" and "unlawful acts" — as well as several exceptions: the "suspect" exception and threats to life or limb, and “reason to believe” and the “subpoena-first” exception. And they conclude:

     "In short, it is true that the "subpoena-first" exception reflects the law's intention that police always use the least intrusive means possible when inquiring into the business of the newsroom, and, in practice, gives affected journalists and news organizations the ability to negotiate or challenge a legal demand. But it's important to remember that there is no such rule for a reporter's actual work, in recognition of the heightened sensitivity there. And that's potentially relevant in the Marion case in that the police department may have seized work product related to the newspaper's investigation into the police chief himself."


---After a police raid on a Kansas newspaper, questions mount (Sofia Andrade and Paul Farhi, Washington Post, 8-13-23) Law enforcement seized computers and other records from the Marion County Record on Friday, raising concerns about press freedom. Restaurant owner Kari Newell "claimed that the newspaper, the Marion County Record, had illegally obtained damaging information about a 2008 conviction for drunken driving and was preparing to publish it, leading a local judge to issue a warrant authorizing police to seize the newspaper’s files.
     'The Record, a family-owned weekly serving the small town of about 1,900, didn’t publish the information about Newell’s conviction for drunken driving and has denied that it came by it illegally.
      'Police raids on news organizations are almost unknown in the United States and are illegal under most circumstances under state and federal law.       

      “This shouldn’t happen in America,” said Emily Bradbury, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, in an interview Sunday. She added: “Freedom of the press is fundamental to our democracy. … We’re not going to let this stand on our watch.”
     'Bradbury said the newspaper’s records could have been obtained via a subpoena, a court-ordered command for specific material that is subject to legal objections, not “an unannounced search.”


---Warrant for Kansas newspaper raid withdrawn by prosecutor for ‘insufficient evidence’ (Luke Nozicka, Jonathan Shorman, and Katie Moore, Kansas City Star, 8-30-23)

On Wednesday, August 16, the county prosecutor withdrew the search warrant and directed law enforcement to return the seized material.


---Kansas commission seeks magistrate’s perspective on Marion search warrant complaint (Tim Carpenter,Kansas Reflector, 9-6-23)

     Judge Laura Viar asked to respond to ethics claim leveled by Topekan. First Amendment attorneys said they were convinced the judge ought to have been able to grasp the warrants were constitutionally flawed. The search warrant was secured based on an assertion a Record reporter somehow violated state law by looking up information on a public website of the Kansas Department of Revenue about a restaurant owner's driving license status.


'I'm more worried about the old lady,' Former Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody says on raid body camera footage (KSHB News 41, 11-6-23)

      On Aug. 11, police raided the newsroom and two homes looking for information regarding local restaurant owner Kari Newell's driving record.
      "The footage shows Gideon Cody, who stepped down as Marion police chief Monday, mostly sitting in a chair while his officers and the Marion County Sheriff's Department searches the offices of the newspaper.
      "Law enforcement appears frustrated with how long it's taking to download data from the Record's computers."


Marion police chief suspended after raid of Marion County Record newspaper in Kansas (Raja Razek and Nouran Salahieh, CNN, 10-1-23) 

        "Such acts were done by Chief Cody in retaliation for Ms. Gruver exercising her protected rights under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution as a reporter for the Record, which protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press," the lawsuit states.

         "In addition to having her computer seized, Gruver says Cody physically seized her personal cell phone from her, which the suit argues did not fall under the scope of the warrant.  By seizing the personal cell phone, the suit states, Cody violated Gruver's Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable search or seizure.  

       "The now-suspended police chief is also at the center of a federal lawsuit filed by Marion County Record reporter Debbie Gruver, who accuses Cody of violating her constitutional rights by obtaining an “unreasonable and unlawful” search warrant and seizing her personal property, according to the complaint.
      "The suit alleges Cody targeted Gruver because he knew she had been investigating allegations of misconduct against the chief during his time working for the Kansas City Police Department, although the newspaper has not published those allegations.

      "It's not just the police chief who has faced backlash over the raids. Judge Laura Viar, who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the searches, is facing a complaint about her decision and has been asked by a judicial body to respond, records shared with CNN by the complainant show.

 
Kansas officials downplayed involvement in Marion raid. Here’s what they knew. (Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector, 11-6-23)

     Documents show unquestioning support before raid, followed by attempts to sidestep outrage.

     The plot thickens.


•  Marion Police Chief Resignation Not Enough, Raided Newspaper Owner and Lawyer Say (Liam Scott, Voice of America, 10-5-23)
     “We should not be celebrating this whatsoever. We should be glad that his gun and badge have been taken away from him. But the city did nothing to convince me that they’re taking appropriate action,” Rhodes said. “The city took no action.
      “I don’t understand why it took two months for someone to take Chief Cody’s gun and badge. He is clearly unfit for duty. And this should have happened a long time ago,” he said.
The raid on the weekly newspaper has come to symbolize the yearslong plight of local news in the United States. Despite the many all-nighters spent working on the paper since the raid, Meyer said he has somehow managed to maintain an optimistic outlook.
      “You can look at Marion, Kansas, as the place where there’s a bunch of corruption going on,” he said. “Or you can look at Marion, Kansas, as the place where there was a bunch of corruption going on, and we caught it, whereas they might not have caught it in other places.”

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