List Of Trump Quotes

By the second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the White House seemed to be maintaining their own list of likely leakers and doing their best to leak before being leaked about.

The number of people who suffer from hole phobia apparently trumps the number who suffer from cancer phobia, which is number 11 on the list, while the fear of death itself sits at number 12.

Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.

...TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned.

Trump seemed not to remember his own decision because he did not ask about it. He had no list—in his mind or anywhere else—of tasks to complete.

Voters responded so well to Trump’s reference to Sykes and Pryor in debates and speeches that he decided to make a longer list of judges who met with conservative approval.

I Google “five star hotels, new york city” and scroll through the list. The Surrey—nah, too fussy. The Peninsula—just looked at that one last week. Anything Trump—no, thanks, too overdone.

GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation. This patchwork of Thanksgiving-ruining racist uncles might look and sound like a bad joke, but they became a real force behind giving Donald Trump the keys to the White House.

Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But

Trump’s mendacity is so extreme that news organizations have resorted to assembling lengthy lists of lies he’s told, insults he’s delivered, norms he’s violated, in addition to hiring squads of fact-checkers. And his shamelessness has emboldened politicians around him to lie with even more effrontery than ever. Republicans in Congress, for instance, blatantly lied about the effects their tax bill would have on the deficit and social safety net provisions, just as they lied about how much it would help the middle class, when in fact it was all about giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich.

Although Galen was a great physician, he was not a terribly courageous man. Galen was a self-promotor above anything else. According to McLynn, he consistently claimed to be a self-made man, casually downplaying the fact that he can from an extremely wealthy family and had inherited numerous estates as well as a stellar list of contacts. He employed underhanded tactics to win debates, and he constantly aggrandized his own achievements. Personality-wise, you could think of him as the Donald Trump of Ancient Rome.

Pushing past what’s comfortable, however, is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback—even if it destroys what you thought was good. As Colvin explains in his Fortune article, “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.” It’s so tempting to just assume what you’ve done is good enough and check it off your to-do list, but it’s in honest, sometimes harsh feedback that you learn where to retrain your focus in order to continue to make progress. Alex

Taking wildly different positions on the value of assets and using his emotional state to justify those valuations helps explain something else Trump has done repeatedly. Congress requires all presidential candidates to file a financial disclosure statement listing their assets, liabilities, and income. Trump’s ninety-two-page disclosure report valued one of his best-known properties at more than $50 million. But he told tax authorities the same property was worth only about $1 million. He valued another signature Trump property at zero—and demanded the return of the property taxes he had already paid.

When did the Q-Anon ideology start to really infect the Republican base? One of the first times that Donald Trump officially interacted with Q-Anon supporters was when Q-Anon user @MAGAPILL posted a Trump “accomplishment” list. Trump responded in a November 25, 2017, tweet less than a month after the first Q drop: “Wow, even I didn’t realize we did so much. Wish the Fake News would report! Thank you.”10 Most important, the retweet contained a link to MagaPill, a site loaded with conspiracy theories associated with Q-Anon.11 Millions of Twitter users saw Trump’s praise and clicked the link. This introduced Q to the entire MAGA audience.

In the Moonies, I was taught to suppress negative thoughts by using a technique called thought stopping. I repeated the phrase “Crush Satan” or “True Parents” (the term used to describe Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han) whenever any doubt arose in my mind. Another way to control thoughts is through the use of loaded language, which, as Lifton pointed out, is purposely designed to invoke an emotional response. When I look at the list of thought-controlling techniques—reducing complex thoughts into clichés and platitudinous buzz words; forbidding critical questions about the leader, doctrine, or policy; labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate or evil—it is astounding how many Trump exploits. As I have mentioned, one of the most effective techniques in the thought control arsenal is hypnosis. Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert, described Trump, with his oversimplifications, repetitions, insinuating tone of voice, and use of vivid imagery, as a Master Wizard in the art of hypnosis and persuasion.

The role of agents is to say, Here are the facts, here is what we found. Not, This guy’s good and that guy’s bad, but rather: This guy’s dead, that guy had a gun, here’s a list of phone calls that guy made, and here’s a money transfer from this one to that one the day before the death. That’s the agent’s role. That’s the job that I have loved.

I could fill this entire book with Mr. Trump’s dirty laundry list of proven lies, but his most zealous disciples are sure to just cite one or another in fake defense, or else deny the very possibility that fact can be known from fantasy at all, or perhaps make both claims at once. For the Trumpist, there is no objective truth, or at least no real responsibility to it. There is only 'my opinion,' more or less fun, more or less useful.

One day in September 2015, FBI agent Adrian Hawkins placed a call to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., and asked to speak to the person in charge of technology. He was routed to the DNC help desk, which transferred the call to Yared Tamene, a young IT specialist with The MIS Department, a consulting firm hired by the DNC. After identifying himself, Hawkins told Tamene that he had reason to believe that at least one computer on the DNC’s network was compromised. He asked if the DNC was aware of this and what it was doing. Tamene had nothing to do with cybersecurity and knew little about the subject. He was a mid-level network administrator; his basic IT duties for the DNC were to set up computer accounts for employees and be on call to deal with any problems. When he got the call, Tamene was wary. Was this a joke or, worse, a dirty trick? He asked Hawkins if he could prove he was an FBI agent, and, as Tamene later wrote in a memo, “he did not provide me with an adequate response.… At this point, I had no way of differentiating the call I received from a prank call.” Hawkins, though, was real. He was a well-regarded agent in the FBI’s cyber squad. And he was following a legitimate lead in a case that would come to affect a presidential election. Earlier in the year, U.S. cyber warriors intercepted a target list of about thirty U.S. government agencies, think tanks, and several political organizations designated for cyberattacks by a group of hackers known as APT 29. APT stood for Advanced Persistent Threat—technojargon for a sophisticated set of actors who penetrate networks, insert viruses, and extract data over prolonged periods of time.

By January 2020, about 1,095 days into his administration, the number of false or misleading claims made by President Trump reached 16,241 ... He told outright lies, repeated lies even after having been fact-checked repeatedly, and made up stories when the truth would do. He lied about little things and he lied about the most important issues a president must handle. He took credit for things he had nothing to do with and denied involvement in matters he orchestrated. To list the individual examples would fill the next twenty pages. Even the president's supporters admit this.

An eternity politician defines foes rather than formulating policies. Trump did so by denying that the Holocaust concerned Jews, by using the expression “son of a bitch” in reference to black athletes, by calling a political opponent “Pocahontas,” by overseeing a denunciation program that targeted Mexicans, by publishing a list of crimes committed by immigrants, by transforming an office on terrorism into an office on Islamic terrorism, by helping hurricane victims in Texas and Florida but not in Puerto Rico, by speaking of “shithole countries,” by referring to reporters as enemies of the American people, by claiming that protestors were paid, and so on.

Their concerns seemed realized just a week later, when Trump continued the process of destabilizing the government to push an authoritarian agenda. At 4:42 p.m. on January 27, the administration announced a travel ban on people coming from primarily Muslim countries. Executive Order 13769 stopped travel from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for 90 days. The list of countries appeared random—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries from which terrorists have sometimes come directly to the U.S., weren’t on the list—and appeared to fulfill a campaign promise and assert a new view of executive power. It also stopped the admission of refugees for 120 days and suspended the Syrian refugee program.

It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.

The problem, Augustine came to believe, is that if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it. To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride. What is pride? These days the word “pride” has positive connotations. It means feeling good about yourself and the things associated with you. When we use it negatively, we think of the arrogant person, someone who is puffed up and egotistical, boasting and strutting about. But that is not really the core of pride. That is just one way the disease of pride presents itself. By another definition, pride is building your happiness around your accomplishments, using your work as the measure of your worth. It is believing that you can arrive at fulfillment on your own, driven by your own individual efforts. Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven’t lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don’t associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it’s just that they are giving themselves a D– rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way. One key paradox of pride is that it often combines extreme self-confidence with extreme anxiety. The proud person often appears self-sufficient and egotistical but is really touchy and unstable. The proud person tries to establish self-worth by winning a great reputation, but of course this makes him utterly dependent on the gossipy and unstable crowd for his own identity. The proud person is competitive. But there are always other people who might do better. The most ruthlessly competitive person in the contest sets the standard that all else must meet or get left behind. Everybody else has to be just as monomaniacally driven to success. One can never be secure. As Dante put it, the “ardor to outshine / Burned in my bosom with a kind of rage.” Hungry for exaltation, the proud person has a tendency to make himself ridiculous. Proud people have an amazing tendency to turn themselves into buffoons, with a comb-over that fools nobody, with golden bathroom fixtures that impress nobody, with name-dropping stories that inspire nobody. Every proud man, Augustine writes, “heeds himself, and he who pleases himself seems great to himself. But he who pleases himself pleases a fool, for he himself is a fool when he is pleasing himself.”16 Pride, the minister and writer Tim Keller has observed, is unstable because other people are absentmindedly or intentionally treating the proud man’s ego with less reverence than he thinks it deserves. He continually finds that his feelings are hurt. He is perpetually putting up a front. The self-cultivator spends more energy trying to display the fact that he is happy—posting highlight reel Facebook photos and all the rest—than he does actually being happy. Augustine suddenly came to realize that the solution to his problem would come only after a transformation more fundamental than any he had previously entertained, a renunciation of the very idea that he could be the source of his own solution.

In other words, in the long list, most everything is about a leader’s character; only a single characteristic pertains to giftedness (teaching). Depending on how the traits are counted, the ratio is as drastic as twelve to one. There’s nothing on this list about being a strong leader, being able to cast a vision, or being charismatic or dynamic. I am not suggesting those aspects of leadership are irrelevant, but they certainly are not the heart of God’s concern for a pastor. Nor are they ever to trump God’s concern over character. As the Reformer Martin Bucer noted, “It is better to take those who may be lacking in eloquence and learning, but are genuinely concerned with the things of Christ.”33 When this God-given ratio is reversed and churches prefer giftedness over character, churches inevitably begin to overlook a pastor’s character flaws because he’s so successful in other areas. Leadership performance becomes the shield that protects the pastor from criticism. As Michael Jensen observed, “We frequently promote narcissists and psychopaths. Time and time again, we forgive them their arrogance. We bracket out their abuses of their power, because we feel that we need that power to get things done.”34

According to the Pulitzer-winning PolitiFact (a left-tilting website that’s clearly no admirer of Trump), President Trump has kept the following campaign promises: He promised to take no salary—promise kept. He promised to create a twenty-four-hour White House hotline for veterans—promise kept. He promised to slash federal regulations—promise kept. He promised to ban White House officials from ever lobbying for a foreign nation—promise kept. He promised to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia from a list of conservative, strict constructionist judges—promise kept. Trump promised to keep the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center open—promise kept. He promised to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—promise kept. He promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord—promise kept. He promised to persuade NATO nations to contribute more for their common defense—promise kept. He promised to halt emigration to America from unstable, terrorist-ridden nations—promise kept. And on and on, one campaign promise after another, kept by President Trump and checked off by PolitiFact.184 This isn’t the record of someone who aspires to be a dictator; it’s the record of a democratic politician who keeps his word.

No surprise, pharmaceutical interests launched their multinational preemptive crusade to restrict and discredit HCQ starting way back in January 2020, months before the WHO declared a pandemic and even longer before President Trump’s controversial March 19 endorsement. On January 13, when rumors of Wuhan flu COVID-19 began to circulate, the French government took the bizarre, inexplicable, unprecedented, and highly suspicious step of reassigning HCQ from an over-the-counter to a prescription medicine. Without citing any studies, French health officials quietly changed the status of HCQ to “List II poisonous substance” and banned its over-the-counter sales. This absolutely remarkable coincidence repeated itself a few weeks later when Canadian health officials did the exact same thing, quietly removing the drug from pharmacy shelves. A physician from Zambia reported to Dr. Harvey Risch that in some villages and cities, organized groups of buyers emptied drugstores of HCQ and then burned the medication in bonfires outside the towns. South Africa destroyed two tons of life-saving hydroxychloroquine in late 2020, supposedly due to violation of an import regulation. The US government in 2021 ordered the destruction of more than a thousand pounds of HCQ, because it was improperly imported. “The Feds are insisting that all of it be destroyed, and not be used to save a single life anywhere in the world,” said a lawyer seeking to resist the senseless order.

Democracy’s brand was also damaged by America’s reaction to the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001. George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 dealt a twin blow to Western democracy’s allure. The first came in the form of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for spying on American citizens and gave the green light to multiple dilutions of US constitutional liberties. That imperative was then extended to America’s relations with any country, democratic or not, which pledged to cooperate in the ‘war on terror’. Autocrats such as Putin and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf went from pariahs to soul brothers almost overnight. When the Bush administration said ‘You are either with us or against us,’ it was referring to the opening of ‘black sites’ where the CIA could waterboard terrorist suspects, and the no-questions-asked exchanges of terrorist lists against which there was little prospect of appeal – a practice known in international law as refoulement. This gave undemocratic regimes an excuse to logroll domestic opponents onto the international lists, with devastating effects on political rights around the world. In the decade after 9/11, the number of Interpol red notices rose eightfold.3 Such practices belied Bush’s democratic agenda. For example, it robbed the US of the moral standing to criticise the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-backed body of central Asian autocracies that today operates its own refoulement exchanges of political dissidents in the name of counter-terrorism. The Bush administration’s approach was also geopolitically shortsighted. Just as the West’s support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America’s Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world’s current democratic recession. That is certain to deepen under Trump.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

Yes, there are passages in Scripture—especially in Paul’s epistles—about women’s roles. But it is biblically untenable and soul crushing to tell a woman that the only worthwhile activity she can do is to birth children and serve a husband and a family. This mind-set also creates an idol out of the family structure, making success as a homemaker/mother the most important vocation in a woman’s life. And although this is a high calling, it should not trump our first and foremost calling: to believe in Christ.

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an “idiot.” For Gary Cohn, he was “dumb as shit.” For H. R. McMaster he was a “dope.” The list went on.

The ideas that you think about the most are the ones that automatically and irrationally rise in your mental list of priorities. And Trump made us think about the wall a lot. He did that because he knew voters would see him as the strongest voice on the topic. It also sucked up media energy that might have focused on political topics he didn’t understand at the same depth as his competitors. Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.

Bannon, who styled himself as a kind of black hole of silence, had also become a sort of official black-hole voice, everybody’s Deep Throat. He was witty, intense, evocative, and bubbling over, his theoretical discretion ever giving way to a constant semipublic commentary on the pretensions and fatuousness and hopeless lack of seriousness of most everyone else in the White House. By the second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the White House seemed to be maintaining their own list of likely leakers and doing their best to leak before being leaked about. But another likely leak source about his angst in the White House was Trump himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night from his bed, he frequently spoke to people who had no reason to keep his confidences. He was a river of grievances—including about what a dump the White House was on close inspection—examples of which many recipients of his calls promptly spread throughout the ever attentive and merciless gossip world.

The Oval Office itself had been used by prior occupants as the ultimate power symbol, a ceremonial climax. But as soon as Trump arrived, he moved in a collection of battle flags to frame him sitting at his desk, and the Oval immediately became the scene of a daily Trump cluster-fuck. It’s likely that more people had easy access to this president than any president before. Nearly all meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably surrounded and interrupted by a long list of retainers—indeed, everybody strove to be in every meeting. Furtive people skulked around without clear purpose: Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others. Trump liked to keep Hicks, Conway, and, often, his old Apprentice sidekick Omarosa Manigault—now with a confounding White House title—in constant hovering presence. As always, Trump wanted an eager audience, encouraging as many people as possible to make as many attempts as possible to be as close to him as possible. In time, however, he would take derisive notice of those who seemed most eager to suck up to him.

Robert Kelner tweeted on November 12, 2016, “A prediction: Donald Trump will make novel and unusual use of the President’s pardon power. An under-utilized tool of political power.

The individual voters featured in this book come from ten counties that switched allegiances from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016, in the five pivotal Great Lakes or Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Those counties were chosen to ensure as much variety among the population tiers listed above as is possible.

An accident with nuclear weapons is at the top of his list, and it is difficult to discuss that topic with someone who doesn’t have security clearance. But the Trump people didn’t have it either, I point out, so he’ll just need to work around my handicap. “I have to be careful here,” he says. He wants to make a big point: the DOE has the job of ensuring that nuclear weapons are not lost or stolen, or at the slightest risk of exploding when they should not. “It’s a thing Rick Perry should worry about every day,” he says.

Following 9/11 there was the creation by the FBI of a Terrorist Screening Centre. It is a single database used by all government agencies to keep tabs on those who might reasonably be suspected of having links to extremist groups. If you are on the terror watch list, there are serious restrictions placed on your ability to move around. For example, you will be banned from all internal and international flights. But, astonishingly, you are still able to wander down to the local firearms dealer and buy yourself a gun. Being on the FBI list is not in itself sufficient grounds for being banned from buying a rifle. The renewed fears about the terror threat within

Once you have established trust and rapport (although often this happens simultaneously), the next step in a negotiation is to begin searching out the other side’s wish list and identifying their strengths and weaknesses.

Once the list is developed, pick a dozen names from the list, which are a mix of both current and past celebrities. Then pose the problem and ask, “How would this situation be handled by…” • Donald Trump • Lady Gaga • Muhammad Ali • Bette Midler • Napoleon • Louis Armstrong • Gustave Eiffel • Renoir • Thomas Edison • Madam Curie • Hillary Clinton • Ronald Reagan • Big Bird • Donald Duck • Plato

A total of 779 prisoners have been held at Guantánamo since the facility was opened on January 11, 2002. Of those, 8 have died and 637 have been released or transferred. This left 134 inmates at Guantánamo at the end of 2014, however the number is constantly changing and as of January 2015 the official number of inmates remaining at the Guantánamo detention center was 127. Of these 127 detainees, 55 have been cleared for repatriation and are listed as being eligible to be transferred out. Some of the restrictions regarding the transferring of these prisoners have now been lifted, so they may be sent back to their home countries, provided those countries agree and are able to keep an eye on them. There are still problems regarding some of the more aggressive prisoners from countries that do not want them back. However, recently five of them were sent to the countries of Georgia and Slovakia. Another six detainees were flown to Uruguay over the weekend of December 6, 2014. There still remains a hard core of prisoners left incarcerated at the prison, for whom no release date or destination is scheduled. It is speculated that eventually some of them will come to the United States to face a federal court. Clifford Sloan, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy was tasked with closing the prison, said, “We are very grateful to Uruguay for this important humanitarian action, and to President José “Pepe” Mujica, for his strong leadership in providing a home for individuals who cannot return to their own countries.” Sloan added, “This transfer is a major milestone in our efforts to close the facility.” The question now is what will happen next under the Trump Administration? Presently there are still 41 men left, 15 of which are considered high value detainees. Five were to be moved out to cooperating countries during the Obama Administration but things happened too slowly and unfortunately they remained at Guantánamo. As of now the Trump plans are unclear, other than him saying that he wants to keep the detention center open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” Assuming that this happens, it is certain to bring on international protests!

On Thursday, February 19, 2015, two months after the United States and Cuba announced a willingness to re-establish normal diplomacy, after over 5 decades of hostile relations, the United States House Minority leader and eight fellow Democratic Party lawmakers went to Havana to meet with the Cuban Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel. On February 27th, Cuban Foreign Ministry Director for North America, Josefina Vidal, and her delegation met at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Although most Cubans and many Americans have a positive view towards improving diplomatic relations, there are conservative legislators in both the U.S. House and Senate that have not joined in the promotion and necessary détente and good will in easing the normalization of relations between the two countries. On May 29, 2015, by Executive Order, President Obama took a first step by removing Cuba from the list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism.” Since then President Trump has been determined to overturn most of what has been passed by the former administration. On June 16, 2017 President Trump moved to reverse many of President Obama’s policies towards Cuba. According to the CATO Institute the alleged justification for this reversal is that it will pressure the Cuban government to make concessions on human rights and political policies towards the Island Nation. Apparently Trump’s new restrictions will impose limits on travel and how U.S. Companies will be able to do business in Cuba. Although the final say regarding the normalization between the two countries is in the hands of politicians representing their various constituencies. The United States has long worked and traded with other Communist nations. Recently additional pressure has been applied by corporations that, quite frankly, are fed up with the slowness of the process. The idea that everything hinges on the fact Cuba is a Communist country, run by a dictatorship, does not take into account the plight of the individual Cuban citizens. The United States may wish for a different government; however it is up to Cuba to decide what form of government they will eventually have.

Hillary’s America was met with outrage on the Left, but no one could rebut a single fact in the book or movie. Even my most incriminating allegations proved invulnerable. I noted that, in 1860, the year before the Civil War, no Republican owned a slave; all the four million slaves at the time were owned by Democrats. Now this generalization could easily be refuted by someone providing a list of Republicans who owned slaves. The Left couldn’t do it. One assiduous researcher finally sought to dispute me with a single counterexample. Ulysses S. Grant, he pointed out, once inherited a slave from his wife’s family. I conceded the point but reminded him that, at the time, Ulysses S. Grant was not a Republican. Fearful that they had no substantive answer to Hillary’s America, the mainstream media went into complete denial. If you watched the major networks or public television, or listened to National Public Radio, you would have no idea that Hillary’s America even existed. The book was Number One on the New York Times bestseller list and the movie was the top-grossing documentary of the year. Both were dense with material directly relevant to the ongoing election debate. Yet they were completely ignored by a press that was squarely in the Hillary camp. Despite the failed fulminations and widespread denial, however, the book and movie had an effect. Many people credit it with motivating Republicans and persuading undecideds and thus helping Trump get to the White House. I have no idea how to measure this effect. I do know my book and film helped shape the election narrative. They helped expose Hillary as a gangster and the Democrats as her accomplices with a long history of bigotry and exploitation to account for. In the 2016 election, for the first time the Democrats could not drop the race bomb and get away with it.

On his desk was a printout of an article, set to run in the next morning’s New York Times. It explained how a Ukrainian government anticorruption team had discovered a secret handwritten ledger listing Manafort as the designated recipient of $12.7 million in previously undisclosed cash payments from a pro-Russian political party aligned with former president Viktor F. Yanukovych, Manafort’s client.

Jenny Hopkinson, a Politico reporter, obtained the curricula vitae of the new Trump people. Into USDA jobs, some of which paid nearly $ 80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT& T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés. “In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.

The next Task Force meeting also had a full agenda. As always, more items were listed than would be covered. At the end of the meeting, the VP remembered to squeeze in the testing guidance document, quickly asking for the added section on nursing homes in order to finish with the whole issue. Redfield distributed it around the table to everyone. It had no annotation of changes—all “Track Changes” indicators were now removed. I glanced through the document. It had been completely changed from the version approved by everyone at the previous Task Force meeting. True, a separate section on testing inside nursing homes had been added. However, nearly the entire document had been reverted to the original, old version of the guidance. Virtually none of the changes we had all agreed upon one week ago were present. I pulled out my notes from last week’s meeting. I was correct—that entire document had been ignored.

Trumpism is, at heart, not a philosophy but an enemies list.

enforcement more broadly including a list of names that had been seen as prying into activities of the Trump administration including: James Comey, James Clapper, NSA Director Michael Hayden, Susan Rice, former FBI members Lisa Page and Peter Strozk, former Deputy A.G. Sally Yates, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (who had already lost his security clearance when he was fired by Trump earlier in the year) and the DOJ's Bruce Ohr who had been recently demoted.

I’m done,” Trump said, cutting her off. “I’m starting my own party.” McDaniel balked. “You cannot do that,” McDaniel implored Trump on the phone. “If you do, we will lose forever.” “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., had declared onstage at the “Save America” rally on January 6. “Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump snapped at McDaniel. “This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking with me.” He wanted to take down the Republican Party. The Republican National Committee leadership would later make clear to Trump’s advisers that the former president’s lust for revenge would hurt not only his legacy but his finances. The Republican Party threatened to cease paying Trump’s legal bills and destroy the value of his campaign’s email list that contained 40 million Trump voters. Trump had been selling the list to other Republican candidates. If he tried to use it they would give it away for free. Trump backed down.

To believe that you can be captain of your own life is to suffer the sin of pride. What is pride? These days the word “pride” has positive connotations. It means feeling good about yourself and the things associated with you. When we use it negatively, we think of the arrogant person, someone who is puffed up and egotistical, boasting and strutting about. But that is not really the core of pride. That is just one way the disease of pride presents itself. By another definition, pride is building your happiness around your accomplishments, using your work as the measure of your worth. It is believing that you can arrive at fulfillment on your own, driven by your own individual efforts. Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven’t lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don’t associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it’s just that they are giving themselves a D– rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way. One key paradox of pride is that it often combines extreme self-confidence with extreme anxiety. The proud person often appears self-sufficient and egotistical but is really touchy and unstable. The proud person tries to establish self-worth by winning a great reputation, but of course this makes him utterly dependent on the gossipy and unstable crowd for his own identity. The proud person is competitive. But there are always other people who might do better. The most ruthlessly competitive person in the contest sets the standard that all else must meet or get left behind. Everybody else has to be just as monomaniacally driven to success. One can never be secure. As Dante put it, the “ardor to outshine / Burned in my bosom with a kind of rage.

One sizable gift came in 1994, when he gave enough to be listed as a “founder” of the Penn Club’s new location in midtown Manhattan. The minimum gift for that category was $150,000. Two autumns later, Donald Trump Jr. arrived at the leafy campus. In all, three of the four older Trump children—including Ivanka (transferring after two years at Georgetown) and Tiffany—would attend Penn, making the school almost an inheritance, a family emblem. In

the gay rights agenda must trump religious freedom concerns. To wit, Feldblum has authored the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) which turns some people into federally protected minorities based solely on their sexual orientation. ENDA was on a fast-track for passage in 2009, but then Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and the act stalled. If passed, ENDA would affect every business owner and religious institution in America with 15 or more employees. It would make it a crime for Christian groups

What about the Russians? They had tried to destroy us. Was she going to help? I wanted to file a lawsuit. We needed to sue those sons of bitches for what they did to us. I knew the campaign had over $3 million set aside in a legal fund. Could she help me get this lawsuit started? And don’t forget the murder of Seth Rich, I told her. Did she want to contribute to Seth’s reward fund? We still hadn’t found the person responsible for the tragic murder of this bright young DNC staffer. You’re right, she said. We’re going to get to that. But she really had to go. She had made the call and checked it off her list, and

The fact that the press could not get a straight explanation out of Hillary or her staff meant they turned to the next person on their list: me. I emailed advice to the campaign: “The media is going to run with the health narrative,

It’s not like they didn’t know who he was. The year before, in 2015, Politico magazine ranked Dave number two in its list of the fifty most influential people in American politics. He’d been the president of Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group with over 500,000 members and supporters, since 2001.

Trump’s White House was plunged into chaos and scandal from which it has not recovered—and may never. Bannon, the imaginative reconceiver of U.S. politics, hung streams of paper listing Trump’s “promises” from the walls of his West Wing office.

The Columbia Journalism Review analyzed the news outlets most frequently shared by supporters of Trump and Clinton. Fans of both candidates demonstrated a proclivity for outlets supporting their political biases, but the differences between the two camps were stark. On social media, Clinton supporters shared the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and New York Times the most. Trump supporters far and away preferred Breitbart, the Hill, and Fox News. Further down the list, Clinton supporters gravitated to a wide range of liberal outlets, most fairly well known. Trump’s camp, though, included a long list of lesser-known outlets, including the controversial Infowars, a media organization known for denying the occurrence of the Sandy Hook shootings and one I’d witnessed routinely regurgitating Russian propaganda.

Trump was still just a silly D-list celebrity firing people on television and seemed quite safely far away from being able to fire nuclear missiles.

In the internal paper, the employee explained that Trump had outspent Clinton between June and November, paying Facebook $44 million compared to her $28 million. And, with Facebook’s guidance, his campaign had operated like a tech company, rapidly testing ads using Facebook’s software until they found the perfect messaging for various audiences. Trump’s campaign had a total of 5.9 million different versions of his ads, compared to Clinton’s 66,000, in a way that “better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes,” the employee said. Most of Trump’s ads asked people to perform an action, like donating or signing up for a list, making it easier for a computer to measure success or failure. Those ads also helped him collect email addresses. Emails were crucial, because Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests. Clinton’s ads, on the other hand, weren’t about getting email addresses. They tended to promote her brand and philosophy.5 Her return on investment would be harder for Facebook’s system to measure and improve through software. Her campaign also barely used the Lookalike tool.

Romney argued that “a President can indeed commit acts against the public trust that are so egregious that, while they are not statutory crimes, they would demand removal from office.” It “defies reason” to think the constitutional authors expected Congress to pen a “comprehensive list of all the outrageous acts that a President might conceivably commit.” Romney voted to convict on the abuse of power (though not on obstruction of Congress) because of Trump’s “appalling abuse of public trust.

Today is November 18, 2016. I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured. Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today. Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget. Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.

They’re not exactly the most physically imposing people in the world (that’s what happens when you live on nothing but soy lattes and veggie burgers), but the sheer force of their numbers is shocking. They have allowed hate to spread at a rate we haven’t seen since the era of civil rights, when Democrats—the party that founded the KKK, in case you’ve forgotten—would organize lynch mobs and counterprotests all across the South, most of which ended in horrific violence. These people are irrational, hysterical, upset, and out looking for enemies. I should know. As of November 16, 2016, I became one of their top targets. Before the election, I was just a guy who appeared on television every once in a while, went to work, and went home at the end of the day and played with my kids. There were probably a few people who thought I was an asshole because I was blessed to have been born into a wealthy family. But no one was mailing suspicious powder to my home or screaming at me in a restaurant where I was celebrating my brother’s birthday. No one was threatening my life. After the election, I became the guy who receives the second highest number of death threats in the country (according to the Secret Service, second only to my father). And that’s a list that includes senators, former presidents, and ambassadors to several war-torn countries. Here’s what the exploding letter filled with powder that sent my then wife and a member of my Secret Service detail to the hospital said: “You are an awful person. This is why people hate you. You are getting what you deserve. So shut the f—k up.

The Loss of Freedom In the month of January 2021, when the MAGA Trump march in Washington, D.C. ended with a forced break-in at the U.S. Capitol, the media and talking heads of journalists interviewing so-called experts in political science began to express their real views, not just toward a few hundred instigators, but toward anyone and everyone who was conservative, and especially any Trump supporter. They made it clear that everyone, including all of the 75 million people who voted for Trump, needed to be forced to undergo “reprogramming” in a special government-sponsored camp. These same types of camps are used in China to “assist” (actually force) a person in changing their beliefs. In this case, these camps could be used to establish conservative ideology as wrong. One person suggested organizing special camps to force “these people” to undergo evaluations. One progressive publicly said it would be acceptable to separate parents from their children if need be. The radical left began saying that those in the House and Senate who believed there was voter fraud should resign, or at least be put on a no-fly list, which is a penalty for anyone being labeled a possible domestic terrorist. This is pure Marxist-style harassment.

Of course, they had ulterior motives, as most career politicians do. The Green New Deal is less about the reduction of fossil fuel and more a progressives’ letter to Santa with a list of all the gifts the liberals want for Christmas. If they couldn’t stand up to AOC, good luck with standing up to China and North Korea.

Because we had alienated so many of the “normal” Republicans in Washington, a lot of them were either unwilling to join the administration or were put on some do-not-hire list by someone in Trump World.

It held many years’ worth of memorabilia, chairs shaped like leather baseball gloves, and an odd selection of B-list celebrities of the day—reality-show players like a runner-up on American Idol and the then–Apprentice star, Donald Trump.

But what if McDaniel had not begged Trump to remain a Republican? What if McCarthy had not made his trek to Mar-a-Lago? For these Republican leaders, the principled path was the path not taken. Perhaps they would have been replaced by other people who would have done Trump’s bidding, adding their names to the long list of Republicans who have had their political careers ruined by the party’s conqueror. Perhaps the GOP would have splintered in two, with Trump following through on his threat to found the “Patriot Party.”[15] Or perhaps they—and the party—would have been able to turn the page on the Trump era by letting the former president flounder in Palm Beach. We’ll never know for sure. But we do know this: In the years since those decisions were made, the Republican Party has paid a steep price for placating a wounded, vindictive, and angry former president.

The unchallenged consensus of contemporaneous reporting on Falwell’s rise in the early 1980s made clear that abortion was not his or other evangelicals’ immediate spark for political engagement. According to the journalist Frances FitzGerald, who profiled Falwell for The New Yorker in 1981, Falwell didn’t say much publicly about abortion in the immediate aftermath of Roe, and he admitted that he and other evangelicals had not paid much attention to the abortion issue until at least three years after Roe. In 1976, three years after the Court’s decision, Falwell included abortion in a list of “America’s sins” in sermons and writings, but it was just part of a laundry list, not a lightning rod. He did not speak in any detail about abortion until 1978 or write at length about it until 1981

his lifetime NRA membership in a blistering letter. It’s worth reading the whole text to get a sense of the totality of Bush’s fury: I was outraged when, even in the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy, Mr. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of N.R.A., defended his attack on federal agents as “jack-booted thugs.” To attack Secret Service agents or A.T.F. people or any government law enforcement people as “wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” wanting to “attack law abiding citizens” is a vicious slander on good people. Al Whicher, who served on my [U.S. Secret Service] detail when I was Vice President and President, was killed in Oklahoma City. He was no Nazi. He was a kind man, a loving parent, a man dedicated to serving his country—and serve it well he did. In 1993, I attended the wake for A.T.F. agent Steve Willis, another dedicated officer who did his duty. I can assure you that this honorable man, killed by weird cultists, was no Nazi. John Magaw, who used to head the U.S.S.S. and now heads A.T.F., is one of the most principled, decent men I have ever known. He would be the last to condone the kind of illegal behavior your ugly letter charges. The same is true for the F.B.I.’s able Director Louis Freeh. I appointed Mr. Freeh to the Federal Bench. His integrity and honor are beyond question. Both John Magaw and Judge Freeh were in office when I was President. They both now serve in the current administration. They both have badges. Neither of them would ever give the government’s “go ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law abiding citizens.” (Your words) I am a gun owner and an avid hunter. Over the years I have agreed with most of N.R.A.’s objectives, particularly your educational and training efforts, and your fundamental stance in favor of owning guns. However, your broadside against Federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country. It indirectly slanders a wide array of government law enforcement officials, who are out there, day and night, laying their lives on the line for all of us. You have not repudiated Mr. LaPierre’s unwarranted attack. Therefore, I resign as a Life Member of N.R.A., said resignation to be effective upon your receipt of this letter. Please remove my name from your membership list. Sincerely, [signed] George Bush

Democrats and Republicans spent a year writing themselves a pork-packed Christmas list on the scale of the Iraq invasion, full of monster expenditures, including money for dangerous new forms of nukes. Yet the headline when Trump signed the freaking thing was that he forgot to mention the senator whose name was attached to the legislation.

Combined with the removal of Mogilevich from the Ten Most Wanted list in 2015 and the FBI’s unexplained reexamination of Clinton’s emails immediately before the election, this evidence calls into question both Sater’s and the FBI’s agendas.

At one point the Fox News PR department dispatched an intern to strike up a relationship with me. We went out a couple of times in New York City—we went to the late great Coffee Shop restaurant in Union Square, we rode the subway uptown, we even spent a late evening on her rooftop. There were moments when I thought these were dates—but her flirtatiousness was all part of the ruse. Years later I found out the intern was assigned to take copious notes and feed information back to her bosses. One email I viewed, dated Tuesday, September 6, 2005, was delivered at 11: 30 p.m. and listed what I told her during our faux-date; who called me during dinner (a PR person from a rival network); and what I said on the phone. Early the next morning the young woman was hauled into Ailes’s office because he wanted a full debrief. She was also tasked with friending me on Facebook and scouring my page for any evidence of anti-Fox bias or other material that could be used against me.

Jay Sekulow then turned the points raised by the special counsel into a list of specific questions—and then leaked them, as though these were in fact the special counsel’s questions

Russia-gate is a complicated, sprawling story: multiagency and transcontinental; spanning law-enforcement and intelligence operations; featuring top-secret redactions, classified leaks, intricate narrative threads, and a list of dramatis personae that would dizzy a Russian novelist. It is easy to lose track of basic facts. Here’s the most basic one: There was never a shred of evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin. Not to commit espionage. Not to violate any law. Zip, zero, nada.

The Austrian thinker listed three main reasons why, over time, an authoritarian personality is likely to be surrounded not by the best “but rather by the worst elements of any society.” President Trump’s inner circle has increasingly checked each of those boxes. First, Hayek explained, an autocrat needs a group with questionable morals. The cohort will also tend to be undereducated. “If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity in outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive instincts prevail.” Check. Second, the autocrat must expand the size of the subservient group. He “must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.” Check. Finally, Hayek said, authoritarian types need to weld the group together by appealing to their basic human weaknesses. “It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of the better off—than on any positive task. The contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses.” Check.

The massive breakdown of disaster relief with Hurricane Katrina was rooted in state and local governmental agencies’ and elected officials’ lying to the public for decades. Read the Brookings Institution’s list “Government’s Most Visible Failures, 2001–2014”; it is a heartbreaking accumulation of avoidable tragedies and misery in just that short period, almost all rooted in some large, fundamental miscalculation.

The long list of high-profile evangelical figures who scammed the public and lived their lives exactly opposite of what they preached reveals the essential truth of the Moral Majority and the like efforts it spawned. In The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe, an evangelical who grew up in the movement, describes the long list of disgraced preachers as “figures who were cartoonish, dramatic, deceitful, wealthy, white, smarmy, judgmental, callous, and, above all, hypocritical. Charlatans.”6 This is about as perfect a description of Donald Trump as one can find.

Hillary wasn’t in the room that day. But, in private conversations with top aides in the immediate days following her loss, she struggled with the question of why Obama hadn’t done more to apprise the public that the Russians had gone way beyond what had been reported. She wondered why the president hadn’t leaned harder into making the case that Vladimir Putin was specifically targeting her and trying to throw the election to Trump. “The Russia stuff has really bothered her a lot,” one of the aides said. “She’s sort of learning what the administration knew and when they knew it, and she’s just sort of quizzical about the whole thing. She can’t quite sort out how this all played out the way that it did.” On the long list of people, agencies, and international forces Hillary blamed for her loss, Obama had a spot.

secret 1984 work plan showed. The KGB’s “global priorities” included a long list of active measures. These were to be done covertly. According to Andrew and Gordievsky, the second-most-important priority was to “deepen disagreements inside NATO over its approach to implementing specific aspects of the bloc’s military policy.” And: “exacerbating contradictions between the USA, Western Europe and Japan on other matters of principle.” The Times reported that Trump had recently returned from Russia.

But including it, even in scaled-down form, in one of the most important briefings the intelligence chiefs might ever present to a president-elect made little sense to me. It would be as if I had reported and written one of the most serious, complex stories for The Washington Post that I had ever done—and then provided an appendix of unverified allegations. Oh, by the way, here is a to-do list for further reporting and we’re publishing it.

This intelligence, it was rumored, consisted of spreadsheets kept by Susan Rice that listed the Trump team’s Russian contacts; borrowing a technique from WikiLeaks, the documents were secreted on a dozen servers in different places. Before this broad distribution, when the information was

This—insulting Donald Trump’s intelligence—was both the thing you could not do and the thing—drawing there-but-for-the-grace-of-God guffaws across the senior staff—that everybody was guilty of. Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes. There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what. For Steve Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, he was an “idiot.” For Gary Cohn, he was “dumb as shit.” For H. R. McMaster he was a “dope.” The list went on.

There's a tendency toward seeing every problem as someone else's fault, whether it's Obama, liberal elites in the big cities, undocumented immigrants taking jobs, minorities soaking up government assistance -- or me. It's no accident that this list sounds exactly like Trump's campaign rhetoric.

Another way to control thoughts is through the use of loaded language, which, as Lifton pointed out, is purposely designed to invoke an emotional response. When I look at the list of thought-controlling techniques—reducing complex thoughts into clichés and platitudinous buzz words; forbidding critical questions about the leader, doctrine, or policy; labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate or evil—it is astounding how many Trump exploits.

Read the Brookings Institution’s list “Government’s Most Visible Failures, 2001–2014”; it is a heartbreaking accumulation of avoidable tragedies and misery in just that short period, almost all rooted in some large, fundamental miscalculation.

As for how her name would appear on the program, Melania said, “I want to be listed as First Lady Melania Trump.” “That’s your official title but not until after the swearing-in ceremony,” I said. “Then call me First Lady–Elect.” “We can’t do that because you weren’t elected.” “That’s what I want.

The White House accidentally emails House Democrats a list of talking points Wednesday that were intended to aid Trump administration allies in their efforts to respond to the Ukraine scandal — and then the White House asks Democrats to send those talking points back.

Do you think that George W Bush kept the US troop and foreign civilian death lists in Iraq next to his bible? Did Barack Obama use his Nobel Peace Prize as a paperweight for his kill list or the plans to initiate regime change Syria and destabilize Libya? Do you think that Trump is making America great by participating new foreign engagements in Yemen? Three widely different presidents with competing policies all seemed to agree on one thing, to them diplomacy is not as important as domination. The problem is not officials from one of the political parties; the problem is officials from both of them.

Nor was it especially difficult to find out that the things listed above were the issues that American voters cared about, and that they voted for Trump because he seemed more likely to provide them than Clinton did. Yet across this country’s collective conversation in the wake of the election, next to no one other than Trump voters wanted to hear it. Suggest that people voted for Trump because they were worried about the risk of war, afraid that Obamacare would bankrupt their families, hoping a change in policy would bring back full-time jobs at decent wages, or disgusted by the political trickery that kept Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination, and you could count on being shouted down. It became an item of unshakable dogma in the media and the realm of public discourse that every single one of the voters who supported Trump could only have been motivated by sheer evil.

My Top Eureka Moments: Focusing today is hard…really hard. But it can be learned. It can become a habit. Systems, processes, and routines trump willpower. Letting something go is sometimes the best way to complete it. A not-to-do list is more important than your to-do list. To attain knowledge add things every day; to obtain wisdom subtract things every day. The difference between successful people and very successful people is very successful people say no to almost everything. If you try to help everyone, you will end up helping no one. Neil Armstrong got it right…small steps lead to giant leaps. WWW: What am I doing right now? Why? What should I be doing? Focus on the important, not the immediate. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

In 2008, Donald Trump published a book with Meredith McIver titled Never Give Up. In it he compiled what he labeled his “Top 10 List for Success.” The items on his list are so close to Peale’s prescriptions that it worth listing them as they are deeply built into Trump’s self-psychology. Despite being written over ten years ago, one can see all these elements of Trump’s current rhetoric and conduct. Trump’s ten rules include: 1. Never give up! Do not settle for remaining in your comfort zone. Remaining complacent is a good way to get nowhere. 2. Be passionate! If you love what you’re doing, it will never seem like work. 3. Be focused! Ask yourself: What should I be thinking about right now? Shut out interference. In this age of multitasking, this is a valuable technique to acquire. 4. Keep your momentum! Listen, apply, and move forward. Do not procrastinate. 5. See yourself as victorious! That will focus you in the right direction. 6. Be tenacious! Being stubborn can work wonders. 7. Be lucky! The old saying: ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get’ is absolutely right on. 8. Believe in yourself! If you don’t, no one else will either. Think of yourself as a one-man army. 9. Ask yourself: What am I pretending not to see? There may be some great opportunities right around you, even if things aren’t looking so great. Great adversity can turn into a great victory. 10. Look at the solution, not the problem. And never give up! Never, never, never give up.

After I left the White House, when Trump abandoned the Kurds in Syria, there was speculation about who he might abandon next.27 Taiwan was right near the top of the list, and would probably stay there as long as Trump remained President, not a happy prospect.

Even Donald Trump, with his rants against a long list of groups he dislikes (notably Latinos, Muslims, and disabled people), his promulgation of the “birther” lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and his history of discriminatory treatment of African Americans, felt the need to assure the public via Twitter that “I am the least racist person you have ever met” and that “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” “Justification,” Crandall and Eshelman explain, “undoes suppression, it provides cover, and it protects a sense of egalitarianism and a nonprejudiced self-image.”41

Democrats and Republicans spent a year writing themselves a pork-packed Christmas list on the scale of the Iraq invasion, full of monster expenditures, including money for dangerous new forms of nukes. Yet the headline when Trump signed the freaking thing was that he forgot to mention the senator whose name was attached to the legislation. This is the trick. The schism is the conventional wisdom. Making the culture war the center of everyone’s universe is job one. A better way to think about it is that there are two sets of conventional wisdom: one for one “side,” one for the other.

Let us, however, not forget that the U.S. and NATO have flagrantly and repeatedly contravened international law in the past 15 years. It’s a long list — the bombing of Serbia, the separation of Kosovo from Serbia, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq without U.N. Security Council mandate, the overthrow of Moammar Gahdafi’s regime through aerial bombardment, the aiding of a still-raging bloody insurrection in Syria, and renditions and torture of terror suspects. The U.S. National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program also disregards international law. An international system based on the rule of law cannot be good unless norms and rules are respected on all sides. Yet power often trumps international law.

Donald’s desperate search for a way to promote his book onto the best seller list inspired one of the most cynical schemes of his career: the Trump for President campaign.

No one exemplifies this more than former president Donald Trump, who has declared a long list of topics that he “knows more about than anyone,” including campaign finances, courts, social media, renewable energy, taxes, construction, technology, and dozens of other items. Being loud and boisterous doesn’t signal confidence. It’s the opposite.

When you ask the average person, what do you think it means to be a Christian? They’ll say, pro-Trump, Republican, right-wing, anti-abortion, don’t like gays. They’ll go down the list,” Thomas told me. “Well, why would they say that? Because that’s what we’re modeling before the world. Those are our public priorities—not these other things, which get so little attention from man but all the attention from God.

This pincer movement resulted in a FLOOD of illegal ballots into the battleground states which was more than sufficient to tip the scales from a decisive legal win by President Trump to a narrow and illegitimate alleged “victory” by Joe Biden.7 In a landmark Time magazine cover story by Molly Ball, the Democrats have all but confessed to this Grand Stuff the Ballot Box Strategy. And Molly Ball is neither a right-wing hack nor a Fourth Estate slouch; she was the 2019 winner of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. In her “kiss and tell” article, Ball highlighted a long list of operatives who have openly boasted about how they gamed America’s election system to overthrow a sitting president. That she portrayed these smug zealots as saviors of the election rather than as thieves is yet another Big Reveal—not just of Ball’s own Progressive ideology but also of the much deeper rot eating away at our election system and our broader Republic. In this Big Reveal, we bare stark witness to an “ends justify the means” mentality that has gripped far too many Americans on the left. As Corey Lewandowski once put it, these Machiavellian cadres apparently hate Donald Trump more than they love their country.8 Memo number one to Molly’s Merry Band of Democrat Thieves: Destroying the integrity of our election system to topple a sitting president you loathe is no Devil’s bargain. It’s national suicide.

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