Presidents Day 2019 Quotes

Support for Miller’s concerns came from an unlikely source in the person of Matt Taibbi, a veteran journalist who had written two best-selling anti-Trump books. In an article published five days after Miller’s interview and titled “We’re in a Permanent Coup,” he warned of the threat to America’s democratic order posed by the deep-state conspiracy: “The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped. “My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.”213 This warning from Taibbi was echoed by another liberal critic of Trump—Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. In a talk show appearance on New York’s AM 970 radio on Sunday, November 10, 2019, Dershowitz said, “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, whether you’re from New York or the middle of the country, you should be frightened by efforts to try to create crimes out of nothing. . . . It reminds me of what Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the KGB, said to Stalin. He said, ‘Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime,’ by which he really meant, ‘I’ll make up the crime.’ And so the Democrats are now making up crimes.

Kushner considered one of Trump’s greatest skills “figuring out how to trigger the other side by picking fights with them where he makes them take stupid positions.” He recalled Trump’s July 27, 2019, tweets about the district represented by the late Black Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings, which included Baltimore. “Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” Trump had tweeted. “No human being would want to live there.” Kushner saw this as baiting the Democrats. “When he did the tweet on Elijah Cummings, the president was saying, this is great, let them defend Baltimore,” Kushner told an associate. “The Democrats are getting so crazy, they’re basically defending Baltimore. When you get to the next election, he’s tied them to all these stupid positions because they’d rather attack him than actually be rational.” Cummings’s former district is in the top half of congressional districts in median household income, home prices and education levels. It has the second-highest income of any majority-Black congressional district in the country. Chris Wallace had Mick Mulvaney, then the acting White House chief of staff, on his Sunday show the next day. “This seems, Mick,” Wallace said, “to be the worst kind of racial stereotype—” Mulvaney tried to interrupt. “Let me finish,” Wallace said, “Racial stereotyping. Black congressman, majority-Black district—I mean, ‘No human being would want to live there’? Is he saying people that live in Baltimore are not human beings?” “I think you’re spending way too much time reading between the lines,” Mulvaney said. “I’m not reading between the lines,” Wallace replied. “I’m reading the lines.

Closing Remarks”, General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 2019.

The Palestine laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise. It’s unsurprising that repressive regimes want to mimic Israeli repression, using Israeli technology to oppress their own unwanted or restive populations, but the Jewish state craves Western approval to fully realize its diplomatic and military potential. Aside from the US, Germany is arguably the greatest prize of all. Israel helped Germany rehabilitate its shattered image after World War II, while Berlin grants legitimacy to a country that brutally occupies the Palestinians (a nonpeople in the eyes of successive German governments). Germany purchasing increasing amounts of Israeli defense equipment is just one way it can atone for its historical guilt. When Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas visited Germany in August 2022 and spoke alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he accused Israel of committing “fifty Holocausts” against his people. The German establishment expressed outrage over the comment but the hypocrisy was clear; the Palestinians are under endless occupation but it’s only they who have to apologize. Germany has taken its love affair with Israel to dangerous, even absurd heights. The Deutsche Welle media organization updated its code of conduct in 2022 and insisted that all employees, when speaking on behalf of the organization or even in a personal capacity, must “support the right of Israel to exist” or face punishment, likely dismissal.40 After the Israeli military shot dead Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022, German police banned a peaceful public vigil in Berlin because of what German authorities called an “immediate risk” of violence and anti-Semitic messaging. When protestors ignored this request and took to the streets to both commemorate Abu Akleh and Nakba Day, police arrested 170 people for expressing solidarity with Palestine. A Palestinian in Germany, Majed Abusalama, tweeted that he had been assaulted by the police. “I just left the hospital an hour ago with an arm sling to hold my shoulder after the German racist police almost dislocated my shoulder with their violent actions to us wearing Palestine Kuffiyas,” he wrote. “This is the new wave of anti-Palestinian everything in Berlin. Insane, right?” This followed years of anti-Palestinian incitement by the German political elite, from the German Parliament designating the BDS movement as anti-Semitic in 2019 to pressuring German institutions to refuse any space for pro-Palestinian voices, Jewish or Palestinian.41 The Palestinian intellectual Tariq Baconi gave a powerful speech in Berlin in May 2022 at a conference titled “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” He noted that “states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral. Their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes.

The next day, Trump toured Fauci’s lab, the NIH Vaccine Research Center, as part of the White House effort to showcase the president’s determination to speed up the creation of a vaccine. Fauci again reminded Trump that getting a vaccine in a year was wildly optimistic. At the end of the tour, Fauci and Azar drove with the president across Wisconsin Avenue from the NIH campus to the helipad at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where Marine One awaited to fly Trump back to the White House. “So how’s Francis Collins doing?” the president asked Azar, referring to the NIH director they had just said goodbye to. “He’s really helped us on the fetal tissue ban,” Azar said. He referred to Trump’s 2019 decision to dramatically cut government funding at NIH and elsewhere for medical research that relied on tissues of aborted fetuses. This was a move to please antiabortion conservatives, a key part of the president’s political base. Collins didn’t agree with the policy, Azar told Trump, but was “being very professional in implementing it.” Azar was surprised when Trump asked, “Is that fetal tissue issue going to slow down the vaccine and therapies?” When he learned the answer was yes, the president said he wanted them to reverse the ban, but that never happened.

At the beginning of 2019 there was an extraordinary leak of his daily schedules. What they showed, if you were being unkind, is that this president does next to no work. If you were being generous, you would say he allows himself to benefit from plenty of unstructured thinking time. ‘Executive time’ is the euphemism that is used. And a lot of each day is ring-fenced executive time. If anyone doubts this, just after the leak of these schedules there was a faintly hilarious episode where one of the cable news anchors accused Trump of being the laziest president ever. Within 45 seconds of the presenter saying this, Trump went onto Twitter to say, ‘No president ever worked harder than me.’ He hadn’t thought this through.