In his denial of science, Donald Trump has guided the U.S. far past the tipping point of mitigating the unfolding existential threat of the climate crisis.  Under both Democratic and Republican administrations over decades, U.S. climate policy has fallen far short of the urgent action scientists have demanded. In crucial ways, Donald Trump has been far more dangerous than his deeply-flawed predecessors. Trump seems to actually revel in his dangerous denial of fundamental and scientifically indisputable realities. In part seven of “American Mythology,” we examine how the Trump administration has catapulted the corporate-fueled deregulation crusade dramatically forward. In the past four years, Trump has undone or weakened up to 70 rules and regulations aimed at protecting the environment, while another 30 policy changes are still underway. The majority of these 100 changes are being done at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is currently headed by a former lobbyist for the coal industry who fought the Obama administration’s attempts at environmental regulations. Trump has overseen the largest rollback of federal land protection in U.S. history, opening environmentally-sensitive areas for corporate and industrial development and has portrayed himself as opening up “God’s great creation” to mining and extraction, freeing it from government protections. We analyze the corporate and industry executives and lobbyists Trump has placed in key environmental positions, his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, and hear from environmentalists and scholars on how to proceed if the Earth is to remain inhabitable.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted. 

I’m Jeremy Scahill coming to you from New York City and this is part seven of an Intercepted special, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump.

Donald J. Trump: I believe that there’s a change in weather. And I think it changes both ways. Don’t forget. It used to be called global warming. That wasn’t working. Then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather because with extreme weather you can’t miss.

JS: In August, the United States recorded the highest temperature ever registered on Earth — 130 degrees fahrenheit in Death Valley, California

Amy Goodman: Scientists are working to confirm the reading, but say that the increase in record-breaking temperatures around the world is due to global heating. This comes as California is battling 30 wildfires amid a record-breaking heat wave.

JS: The West Coast was inundated again this summer, just like the one before it, by gruesome, uncontrollable wildfires. During the presidential debate against Joe Biden, Donald Trump blamed California:

DJT: Every year I get the call, “California’s burning. California’s burning.” If that was cleaned — if that were — if you had forest management, good forest management, you wouldn’t be getting those calls.

JS: In recent years, hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf have become more ferocious due to warming waters. The summer’s Arctic ice melt reached a record low — as the Arctic region warms two to three times faster than the rest of the globe. And as with every year before it, more species went extinct, new deadly diseases spread, biodiversity was lost, and humans suffered droughts and food shortages, while war and conflicts raged on. For many years, top climate scientists have warned about all of this, but now a stark reality has emerged: The unfettered desire for corporate profit over trust in science has simply been too strong.

Chris Wallace: But sir, if you believe in the science of climate change, why have you rolled back the Obama Clean Power Plan, which limited carbon emissions in power plants? Why have you relaxed —

DJT: Because it was driving energy prices through the sky —

CW: Why have you relaxed fuel economy standards that are going to create more pollution from cars and trucks? 

DJT: Well, not really because what’s happening is the car is much less expensive and it’s a much safer car —

JS: Donald Trump is certainly much more flippant and callous in disregarding the threats to the fate of the planet than his predecessors. And there is a tendency to act as though Trump represents a massive shift in the U.S. consensus on the climate crisis. The reality is that, in some ways, the Trump administration has not radically departed from the policy positions of some presidents who came before him. But in some key ways, Trump is far more dangerous than his deeply-flawed predecessors. In the broad picture, Trump seems to actually revel in his dangerous denial of fundamental and scientifically indisputable realities. 

DJT: So Obama is talking about all of this with the global warming and that and a lot of it’s a hoax. It’s a hoax. I mean it’s a money making industry. OK? It’s a hoax. A lot of it. Look, I want clean air and I want clean water. That’s my global — I want clean, clean — 

JS: The Trump administration was handed this live grenade of our warming earth with negative time left to fix the problem. 

The Earth is already at 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial standards. Some reports warn the earth is on track to see a jump of 3 degrees of warming, while others predict that an almost unthinkable 5 degree increase is possible by the end of this century. 

Amy Goodman: This is U.N. meteorological agency chief Petteri Taalas.

Petteri Taalas: And so far the progress hasn’t been good enough that we would move towards a 1.5 or 2 degrees target. So there’s clearly a need for a much higher ambition level to reach even 2 degrees target. So we are more moving towards 3 to 5 at the moment.

JS: From the beginning, Trump has cast doubt and scorn on science, at times even suggesting he knows better than science itself. And his administration has catapulted the corporate-fueled deregulation crusade dramatically forward.

DJT: What we’ve done has never been done. If you look at Alaska with ANWR — perhaps the biggest drilling site in the world. Even Ronald Reagan and Bush and Clinton — everybody wanted to get it done — I got it done. ANWR in Alaska — probably or possibly the biggest drilling site in the world. Now what we’ve done has been incredible. Recently, it look like the energy business — 

JS:  As he campaigned for president, Trump often celebrated his vow to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord as part of his broader onslaught on the record and person of Barack Obama. Set aside the fact that the Paris agreement itself falls far short of what the scientific community believes is urgently needed. But on a strictly policy level, Trump has made it very clear that his decision was not motivated at all by concern for the planet or because he had an alternative plan. It was singularly focused on ripping up what he believed was an impediment to the rights of corporations to pillage and pollute the earth for profit.

DJT: As president I can’t put no other consideration before the well being of American citizens. The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries. Leaving American workers, who I love, and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production. Thus, as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.

JS: Political dissident Noam Chomsky warned that in analyzing the Trump presidency, no other issue was more dire than the impact on climate.

Noam Chomsky: The most serious of all, by far overshadowing everything else, is his pulling out of the Paris negotiations that leaves the United States as the only country in the world which is refusing officially to take even small steps towards dealing with the true existential crisis, and that’s combined with the domestic programs of rapidly increasing the use of the most dangerous fossil fuels, cutting back regulations on economy for automobiles, eliminating safety protections for workers, and so on. All of that is just a race to disaster and that’s by far the most serious of the initiatives to undermine what’s loosely called the international order.

JS: While some news organizations have diligently catalogued the policy changes throughout these four years of the Trump administration — the sort of reporting that documents incremental changes can fall by the wayside. Particularly in this moment of sensational and short attention span news cycles. But taken in their totality, the changes the Trump administration has rammed through are monumental. 

DJT: Under our plan, every project will have one point of contact that will deliver one decision, yes or no, for the entire federal government — yes or no. You have to go through different agencies. You go through labor, you go through transportation, you go through another one, another one — EPA, where we’ve really streamlined the system, where we have really made it possible for people to get things done. So many projects are under construction right now that would never, ever in a million years, have gotten built. 

JS: A recent New York Times analysis found that up to 70 rules and regulations aimed at protecting the environment were officially undone or weakened by the Trump administration. Another 30 policy changes are still underway. The majority of these 100 changes are being done at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is currently headed by a former lobbyist for the coal industry who fought Obama’s attempts at environmental regulations. 

DJT: And EPA Administrator, a very powerful man. When he says you can do it, you do it. When he says you can’t, it’s over with; you don’t have a chance. Andrew Wheeler. Thank you, Andrew. [Applause] Thank you. Great job

JS: What Trump has done at the EPA is incredible — primarily in that it seems actively committed to further destroying rather than protecting the environment. Here’s just some examples of the men in charge at the EPA under Trump: 

A former fossil fuel lobbyist, Andrew R. Wheeler, is now running the agency. 

Andrew Wheeler: President Trump recognized this consensus when he asked me to take over the agency in 2018. And his directions were pretty straight forward. He said Andrew, I want you to continue to clean up the air, continue cleaning up our water, and continue to deregulate to create more jobs for the American public. 

JS: A guy named Peter Wright, who represented Dow Chemical in the cleanup of toxic Superfund sites, he now oversees the EPA’s Superfund cleanup program.

Sherrod Brown: Peter Wright has been at EPA for a year. Under his leadership the agency released a PFAS action plan that frankly included very little action. Now they expect the Senate to reward this action by confirming him to oversee EPA’s superfund program. And someone who has repeatedly — repeatedly — failed to hold pollutanters accountable for the damage they’ve done to drinking water in Dayton and across the country has no business serving as a leader at EPA. 

JS: David Fischer, who helped chemical companies try to circumvent chemical safety laws, now oversees federal implementation of chemical safety laws.

DJT: This is why I have been able to get the country going because so many jobs were stopped by not only the EPA, so many other agencies, where you have to go and get 11 different permits for essentially the same thing. I opened up LNG plants in Louisiana, where they were for years — 10, 12, 14 years, and longer — trying to get permits. They couldn’t get permits. I got them built: a $10 billion plant in Louisiana; the Keystone XL pipeline. I gave it in my first week — I got approval. The Dakota Access Pipeline — I got the approval. Forty-eight thousand jobs. And frankly, it’s more environmentally, you know, it’s better than having the train going up and down tracks —  

JS: According to the Center for American Progress, the Trump administration has removed, or attempted to remove, protections from nearly 35 million acres of public lands. Stripping protections from Bears Ears National Monument, along with the Grand Staircase-Escalante amounted to what CAP called the largest rollback of federal land protection in US history.

DJT: On the recommendation of Secretary Zinke, and with the wise counsel of Senator Hatch, Senator Lee, and the many others, I will sign two presidential proclamations. These actions will modify the national monuments designations of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. [Applause]

JS: TheTrump administration has opened up federally-protected lands for development in 12 different states. This strategy of trying to wipe out protected land is largely aimed at opening these environmentally-sensitive areas for corporate and industrial development. A former Obama Interior Department official said of Trump’s attack on protected lands, “It’s very effective. I call it evil genius.” 

At this point, Alaska’s long preserved lands have taken the biggest hit. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, has been opened for oil extraction. Here’s Trump openly bragging about rolling back protections that not even Ronald Reagan could achieve. 

DJT: And we did ANWR. ANWR, Ronald Reagan tried to do it 40 years ago. I mean, everybody’s been trying to do ANWR, and I got ANWR done as part of that same bill. So on top of the biggest tax cuts —

JS: As Donald Trump has eliminated protections on 16 times the amount of land that Teddy Roosevelt designated, Trump has simultaneously engaged in delusional claims that he’s the greatest environmentalist president since Roosevelt.

DJT: Last month, I signed the Great American Outdoors Act, the most significant investment in our national parks in over a century — [applause] — since Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt. You know, they came to my office — a lot of the senators that I just introduced, and Ron, and everybody — they came to my office. They said that “This will make us and make you the number one environmental President since Teddy Roosevelt.” I said, “Huh, that sounds good.” Because I wasn’t going to do it. I figured, “You know, let’s not do it.” —

JS: It’s always difficult to discern what Donald Trump actually believes. But he truly does seem to have convinced himself that he has been this great defender of the environment, by opening up what he calls “God’s great creation” to mining and extraction, freeing it from government protections and regulations. 

DJT: I know all of you feel blessed to be living among some of the most glorious natural wonders anywhere in the world. You cherish Utah’s gleaming rivers and sweeping valleys. You take inspiration from its majestic peaks. And when you look upon its many winding canyons and glowing vistas, you marvel at the beauty of God’s great creation. [Applause]

JS: Yugoslav philosopher Srecko Horvat, author of “Poetry From the Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement is Our Civilization’s Last Chance,” said Trump’s rhetoric was rooted in the historical trend of eco-fascism.

Srecko Horvat: You’ve seen it, for instance, with [Marine] Le Pen recently during the European elections is something what we should call eco-fascism. And it’s not something completely new. If you go back to Hitler — to Hitler’s Germany — and if you look at the photos, you will see for instance, Eva Brown who was his mistress, doing yoga on a beautiful lake and then all the ideology was a kind of return to the you know, blut und boden [blood and soil.]

And you can see it today as well that this is precisely the fascists who are also using their — OK, they’re not talking about the Green New Deal, but they are also speaking about return to nature and so on, which is a very, very dangerous trend, I would say. 

JS: Horvat went on to describe the science-fiction-like reality we may face if a global consensus on the climate crisis is not respected.

SH: If you have rising sea levels, if according to the — what was it? I think it was even the World Bank, you know. If according to their statistics by 2050 you will have hundreds of millions of refugees — mainly from the global South — trying to come to Europe. Then the very concept of the nation state has to change. The very concept of sovereignty has to change. And we will need more global cooperation, you know. 

I’ve been recently watching Chinese science fiction. And it’s amazing, actually. The sun is turning into a red giant, so that the whole world has to unite. They form a sort of world government. They create a world government.  Sounds completely crazy what I will say now: They install 10,000 motors on the back of the planet of Earth, and then they try to bring planet Earth out of its orbit towards a new sun. And, you know, OK, it’s science fiction, but couldn’t have imagined that — You know, I think we cannot even imagine what might be happening because of the climate crisis.

If you have these trends, if you have hundreds of millions of refugees in the next two or three decades coming to the U.S. or to Europe and so on, I think we will need a kind of global cooperation which never existed yet in the history of humanity, I would say. 

Unless we are able to create a global community which would be a result of a global liberation movement and a sort of new realigned movement, I would say, which would be realigned against capitalism, against exploitation of natural resources, against the commodification of humans, their emotions and free will — what is happening with technology — unless we succeed to create this global movement and global society, which would be the first truly global society, I’m afraid that by 2050, we will see a world which would really resemble Chinese science fiction in the worst way.

JS: Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Accord while simultaneously dismantling the function of the EPA, deregulating pollutants and toxic chemicals, and opening the country up to drilling, extractions, and pipelines. 

DJT: This is with respect to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Dakota Access Pipeline.

JS: When Trump took office, the environmental protection wins against the Obama administration were systematically dismantled. Trump reversed the hard fought pipeline victories during the Obama era, and he backed private companies to resume construction of both the Dakota Access pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline. 

DJT: Pipeline, as you know. The big pipelines. The Keystone XL pipeline. We did the — [applause] right? And that was dead. Forty-eight thousand jobs. And the Dakota Access pipeline. And these are tremendous things, and, frankly, environmentally great — 

JS: Some companies who began building the pipelines in turn hired a U.S. mercenary firm to spy on environmental protests. The Intercept published an investigative series in May 2017 based on more than a hundred leaked internal documents from a private security firm called TigerSwan. This company surveilled activists on social media, from the air and through radio communications, as well as actually infiltrating activist groups and their campsites. All of the information collected was shared with local law enforcement in an effort to crush the protests.

Here are Intercept reporters Alice Speri and Alleen Brown.

Alice Speri: I think one thing that TigerSwan is positioning itself for it’s really monitoring that goes much beyond pipeline protests and environmental activism — some of the infiltration they did in Chicago, for instance, was into a very wide-ranging set of activist groups. They look at the anti-Trump resistance, which of course is a very broad movement, so to speak. They look at some Black Lives Matter activists. There’s all kinds of potential there for TigerSwan and others like it to stay in business. And that’s actually something else we want to remember, is TigerSwan is one of several private security companies that were involved in the policing of the DAPL [Dakota Access pipeline] protest. So, if their legal troubles eventually kill them off, there will be many others to pick up the work.

Alleen Brown: The level of freedom that a private company like this has to surveil a social movement should be really shocking. You know, we’ve done a lot of reporting at The Intercept about the deep limitations to the guidelines that entities like the FBI have to follow in order to carry out covert operations. You know, we’ve reported that their guidelines are essentially insufficient. But a private security firm like TigerSwan doesn’t have to follow anything like that. There are so few rules about what they have to do and the constitutional protections that they have to keep in mind that it raises a lot of important questions about the tactics that private companies — profit-seeking companies — can use to enhance their bottom line.

JS: In the big picture in the U.S., corporate negligence and greed, cultivated by corporate-friendly bi-partisan policy-making and Republican-led deregulation is to blame for polluting our air, water, land, and food, as our earth becomes uninhabitable. 

It’s clear that another Trump term would be catastrophic for the biosphere. The administration would continue to flat out deny science is, in fact, science and govern accordingly. Here’s how vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris described Trump’s overarching perspective on climate during her debate with Mike Pence: 

Kamala Harris: I served, when I first got to the Senate, on the committee that’s responsible for the environment.  Do you know this administration took the word science off the website? And then took the phrase climate change off the website?  We have seen a pattern with this administration which is they don’t believe in science. 

JS: Harris is, of course, correct here. But there are indications that a Biden administration may continue to squander the remaining opportunity to reverse course. 

Though Biden has agreed to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, many scientists believe those principles don’t go far enough, and more robust and immediate action would be needed for what they see as a five alarm fire. 

While young climate activists beg politicians to sign on to the Green New Deal, Biden won’t. In fact, Biden has gone out of his way to say he opposes the Green New Deal.

Joe Biden: Pardon me? 

Chris Wallace: You support the —

JB: No, I don’t support the Green New Deal. 

DJT: Oh you don’t. Oh, well that’s a big statement — 

JB: I support the Biden [cross talk] —

DJT: That means you — 

JB: I support the Biden plan that I put forward. 

CW: OK. 

JB: The Biden plan, which is different than what he calls — 

JS: In a sea of lies that the Trump team has unleashed during this campaign, they have inaccurately attacked Joe Biden as a radical environmentalist. They’ve also suggested that Biden would ban fracking — a method for extracting natural gas or oil that scientists have long warned is a destructive process that could pollute water and air, and may cause earthquakes. The problem is, that is not Biden’s position.

In fact, Biden’s campaign has gone to great lengths to make sure people understand that he will never ban fracking. Here again is Kamala Harris. . 

KH: So first of all, I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact. That is a fact.

JS: Activists, particularly those from younger generations, have made it clear who they believe is responsible. They have demanded urgent and unprecedented action. 

Betsy Reed: Ever since NASA climatologist James Hansen testified before the Senate in 1988, we’ve known that our planet is warming to dangerous levels because of human activities. And yet, since 1988, 100 companies have been responsible for 70 percent of continued greenhouse gas emissions. 

JS: Betsy Reed is the editor in chief of The Intercept.

BR: We know who to blame for polluting our air, and heating our oceans. We know who is responsible for this emergency. But still, the culprits have slithered out of accountability. The tides are turning though, and it’s clear that the younger generation won’t rest until they can extract a measure of what they call climate justice: meaning that those who have committed these crimes will pay a price, while those who have suffered as a result will find safe haven and relief. It’s a simple idea, really. The 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg has become controversial for making a point that should be obvious: Corporations should be held to account for what they’ve done.

JS: Last year, a global movement to confront the climate crisis gained unprecedented visibility and support. Teenage activist Greta Thunberg of Sweden launched a worldwide climate strike and used her platform to chastise heads of state at the United Nations.

Greta Thunberg: The world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just “business as usual” and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

JS: In the U.S., a national conversation around the Green New Deal was ushered in by first term Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

[Clapping]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Because today is the day that we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social, and racial justice in the United States of America. That’s what this agenda is all about because climate change, climate change, and our environmental challenges are one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, not just as a nation but as a world. And in order for us to combat that threat we must be as ambitious and innovative in our solution as possible. 

JS: But the Green New Deal is hardly being enthusiastically embraced by the elite rulers of the Democratic Party — not Joe Biden and not Nancy Pelosi:

Nancy Pelosi: We welcome the enthusiasm that is there. The Green New Deal points out the fact that the public — 

JS: There was also this moment in early 2019 when longtime Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein was confronted by a group of young school children asking her to back the Green New Deal. 

Child: Some scientists have said that we have twelve years to turn this around.

Dianne Feinstein: Well, it’s not going to get turned around in ten years. What we can do—

Unknown person: Senator, if this doesn’t get turned around in ten years, you’re looking at the faces of the people who are going to be living with these consequences. 

Child: The government is supposed to be for the people and by the people, and all for the people. 

DF: You know, what’s interesting about this group is I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here and say, “It has to be my way or the highway.” I don’t respond to that. 

JS: The recent wave of climate mobilization came after four decades of inaction on scientists’ desperate pleas to combat the rising threat of global warming. The Intercept’s Naomi Klein described the importance of that mobilization, particularly the role of young people. 

Naomi Klein: Every day, there seem to be multiple reports telling us in different ways that we are seeing ecological unraveling at a speed that really is ahead of schedule in terms of what we were expecting. You know, whether it is species collapse, whether it is glacial collapse, sea-level rise, historic storms, it’s all happening so very, very quickly. And so, there’s terror there and I think we have to be honest. But at the same time, we are seeing a level of climate mobilization that I’ve never seen in my life —  a clarity, a moral clarity coming from particularly young people who really understand that they are fighting for their futures. They’re fighting for the right to plan, the right to have options in their lives, to not have lives that are just punctuated by massive disaster. So, we’re hearing that from the streets. And I think even more than that, we’re also hearing — particularly in the United States, thanks to the Sunrise Movement, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the way that dynamic redrew the map and put the Green New Deal on the political agenda — we are also hearing a vision for a response to the climate crisis that isn’t just better than total ecological breakdown, but is actually in a lot of ways better than the kind of economy we have right now.

JS: Now even if the Green New Deal was enacted under a Democratic administration with a Democratic-controlled Congress, it would not resolve decades of inaction about mitigating global warming. As Naomi Klein points out, the facts of our reality cannot be evaded. 

NK: Within a neoliberal economy, everybody feels this sense of precariousness and directing attention away from the responsibility of elites, from the responsibility of their own nexus of corporate players that they all represent in their various countries and directing it towards the most vulnerable. So, I think we’re going to see more of this. And I don’t think that we will have a response to it that doesn’t address these underlying causes, that isn’t fundamentally about building a fair economy, that isn’t fundamentally about redressing deep, deep historical injustices and exclusions. And that is what the Green New Deal has the potential to do.

And I say the potential because there are various iterations of what a Green New Deal might be and some of them are quite sort of shallow and nationalistic. And some of them are deeper reckonings with the debts that are owed to Black and indigenous people in the United States and also what the United States as an economy, which is the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, owes to the countries on the frontlines of the impacts of climate change, that have done almost nothing to create it because the people there are too poor to emit carbon at high levels. You know, I really do believe that we are at a crossroads, which is really about what kind of people we are going to be as we face a future of more and more dislocation, of more and more disasters. I mean, that’s already locked in even with a best case scenario of keeping warming levels below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

JS: It is not often discussed but one of the consequences of the climate crisis is the psychological toll it is taking on the people with the most to lose. For young people, anxiety and depression resulting from the state of the climate is a real and increasingly documentable problem. A recent study done by the Environment Agency in the U.K. found that people who experience an extreme weather event are 50 percent more likely to suffer mental health issues for years to come. Another survey found that over 78 percent of Gen Z-ers aren’t planning on having children because of the climate crisis. That same poll of 2,000 Americans found that 44 percent believe the Earth will become uninhabitable, no matter what we do.

One recent book powerfully addresses this grief of the climate crisis. It’s called “The End of Ice.” Here is author Dahr Jamail reading an excerpt.

Dahr Jamail: While Western colonialist culture believes in rights, indigenous cultures teach of obligations that we are born into, obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the earth itself. When I orient myself around the question “What are my obligations?”, the deeper question immediately arises “From this moment on knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?”

JS: This has been part seven of an Intercepted limited documentary series, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump. 

American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump is an Intercepted limited documentary series. You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Lucie Kroening. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Make sure to tell your friends and even your foes about this series. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The post Part Seven: Climate Carnage appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump has run the White House like his family business with one primary aim: to enrich his brand, his family, and his cronies. In part six of “American Mythology,” we examine how Trump and the GOP — at times with help from the Democrats — have opened the gates to the federal feeding trough for corporate greed and unaccountability. Throughout the 2016 campaign Trump claimed that, unlike Hillary Clinton, he was not beholden to corporate or special interests and that he would uplift the working class. Once in power, he appointed record numbers of Goldman Sachs veterans to his administration, passed sweeping tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, attacked organized labor, and chiseled away at an already abysmal health care system. Unprecedented inequality and stagnant wages have persisted. Fewer Americans currently have health insurance than when Trump was sworn into office. These sharp economic injustices have come into clear focus during the Covid-19 pandemic: Corporate robber barons like Jeff Bezos have increased their wealth by billions while 40 percent of Americans say they couldn’t withdraw $400 in the event of an unexpected emergency. In America, eight million more people have descended into poverty in recent months, as the wealth of billionaires grew by $845 billion.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted. 

I’m Jeremy Scahill coming to you from New York City and this is part six of an Intercepted special, “American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Donald J. Trump: This is the most important election in the history of our country. And people have to get out and vote because what they want to do is crazy. We will never allow this country to become a socialist nation, and that’s what they’re trying to do.  

JS: During the 2016 election, Donald Trump regularly criticized Hillary Clinton for her relationship with Wall Street, and in particular, her paid speeches to the investment bank, Goldman Sachs.

DJT: I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total, total control over him, just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton, they have total. But they have no control, they have no control over Donald Trump. I don’t want their money, I don’t need their money.

JS: While many progressives, including Clinton’s Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders also blasted her Wall Street ties, Trump’s attacks often utilized some unsavory tactics. He claimed, in one of his many antisemtic dog whistles, that Clinton’s past support of trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP proved she was a “globalist.”

DJT: Hillary Clinton is merely a vessel for those global special interests trying to strip our country of its wealth, its jobs, its status as a sovereign nation. And we have been stripped, folks. We don’t make anything anymore. We don’t make anything. We’re gonna start making things. We’re not going to let countries like China devalue their currency and have trade deficits of $400 billion and $500 billion a year. We’re not going to let it happen. She’s a globalist who makes a living taking jobs from our country and giving them to foreign countries.

JS: Trump claimed that unlike Clinton he was not beholden to corporate or special interests, and that he’d wouldn’t abandon the working class.

DJT: You have one magnificent chance to deliver justice for every forgotten man, woman, and child in this nation. The arrogance of Washington D.C. will soon come face to face with the righteous verdict of the American voter. Believe me, it’s enough. 

JS: Fast forward to that gray day in January 2017, when Trump took the oath of office.

John Roberts: Preserve, protect, and defend —

DJT: Preserve, protect, and defend —

JR: The Constitution of the United States — 

DJT: The Constitution of the United States —

JR: So help me God. 

DJT: So help me God.

JR: Congratulations 

[Cheers, claps, trumpets]

JS: In his inaugural address, reportedly written by Steve Bannon, Trump described an economic hellscape that, for many Americans, was a reality.

DJT: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. … 

This American carnage stops right here, and stops right now. … 

America will start winning again, winning like never before. We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams. We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work — rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor.

JS: Claiming he would spur economic growth and bring back manufacturing jobs, Trump promised to end NAFTA, pull out of TPP, close trade deficits, pass a massive tax cut, and invest in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. That is what he said. But my colleague Naomi Klein warned early on that in examining Trump’s business dealings, we would get a glimpse into what he might actually do with the U.S. economy.

Naomi Klein: What Donald Trump has done as a businessman. You know, how he has run his incredibly opaque company, the number of bankruptcies, the number of ripped off workers and contractors. I mean, he so consistently sacrifices his own investors, his — you know, his own partners, and just looks out for number one. 

When there are problems, and there are very often problems with Trump developments, whether — if it’s not on time; if it’s — if people aren’t able to — these are often revenue properties. If they feel that they’ve been lied to, whatever happens — and there have been several collapses — Trump is not responsible, right? The liabilities are held by these business partners to whom he’s just leased his name. So, if the U.S. government is run anything like the Trump organization: Expect to be looted.

JS: The looting began on day one. Trump appointed Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, to be his chief economic adviser. Contrary to Trump’s beratement of Clinton during the primary about the bank, there were more Goldman Sachs alumni working for Donald Trump than any other previous administration. 

DJT: This is the president of Goldman Sachs. Smart. Having him represent us, he went from massive to paydays, to peanuts, to little tiny — I’m waiting for them to accuse him of wanting that little amount of money. But these are people that are great brilliant business minds and that’s what we need. That’s what we have to have so the world doesn’t take advantage of us. We can’t have the world taking advantage of us anymore.

JS: Reporter Gary Rivlin also described Trump’s early moves that not only didn’t benefit ordinary people, they enriched the very players he accused Hillary Clinton of cozying up to.

Gary Rivlin: You know, they talk about a different approach to infrastructure, the $1 trillion dollar infrastructure plan, it’s kind of left, right, middle. Everyone understands that we need to be dealing with our infrastructure problem in this country, but the Goldman Sachs plan, the plan that Gary Cohn gave President-elect Donald Trump when he was just Goldman Sachs’s president meeting with Donald Trump, before he was named to the White House, he said, “You know, why don’t we put up a little bit of money, in this case a couple hundred billion dollars of government money, and the rest will be private financing from Wall Street firms.” And guess what firm is among the three or four largest in the public infrastructure business? Goldman Sachs. 

Goldman Sachs is huge in IPOs. When Gary Cohn was president of Goldman Sachs, he was lobbying to loosen the initial public offering laws. Well, six months into the administration, the SEC has loosened the IPO rules, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Goldman Sachs alone. And so here was a president who said, “I’m going to represent you, little guy, because it’s the big firms like Goldman Sachs that are draining the economy, that are enriching themselves at your expense.” And in the position as, to head his economic policy team, is a guy who, down the line, you look at every policy, is trying to perpetuate the Goldman Sachs’s of the world. The Wall Street firms draining the economy at the expense of the little guy.

If you voted for Trump because, “Wow! Someone’s going to finally fight for the little guy.” And it’s not just like the president of Goldman Sachs is the chief economic advisor, but one of the main villains in the subprime meltdown, is now your guy? To help turn around the economy? I actually think one of the reasons Donald Trump won is because there are a lot of Tea Party people on the right, who are really angry at Wall Street for what happened in 2008. So taking one of those main villains and putting him to top your economic team, I think it really infuriates people.

DJT:  And I love all people: rich or poor. But in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense? Does that sense? [laughter and applause] If you insist, I’ll do it. But I like it better this way. Right?

JS: Indeed. Here is former Goldman Sachs executive turned whistleblower Nomi Prins:

Nomi Prins: If tax cuts go through for companies, it will help those people who are already stashing money, not to bring it back, and to basically enrich themselves. It will help, you know, people with wealthy estates preserve it for their families. And, the point is, those are the people that are actually affecting the tax code and are in the offices and are in the dinners and are in the meetings and are at the golf courses with the individuals who are trying to push on to everybody else the idea that their plans will be beneficial to them.

JS: Despite Donald Trump’s promotion of himself as a billionaire and business genius, he was never really accepted into the club of New York’s financial elite. As filmmaker Michael Moore observed, Trump was sort of seen as an ostentatious and tacky wannabe.

Michael Moore: Trump was always treated very poorly by the uber-rich of New York City. Wall Street didn’t like him. The big banks didn’t like him and he always felt slighted by them. They treated him as if he was like the trailer trash of millionaires, from Queens, still talked like he was from Queens, you know, the whole thing. And they certainly were not that excited about him running. 

They immediately figured out how he could be a useful tool for them, for capitalism. And that’s why not only has there not been a peep out of them since he gave them their tax cut and it’s done all the other things in terms of gutting EPA regulations, and things that we don’t even know about that happen on a daily basis in each federal government department. Because you just could never keep up with it. If you actually knew what was going on every day.

Two weeks ago, you got rid of the department at the EPA that’s responsible for the environmental health of children. Fired the woman, got rid of the people. That’s it. Gone. Hardly anything on it in the news. You have no idea how many millions of acres of land he gave away today to the oil and gas companies. This happens every single day and he is doing the work now of Wall Street and the big banks in corporate America and they are the main beneficiaries of what he’s doing to dismantle from inside the federal government.

JS: In November of 2017, Trump signed into law the innocuously-named Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which was the largest tax overhaul in over three decades. It cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent. While Republicans claimed that this $1.9 trillion cut would “pay for itself,” the Congressional Research Service found that it had “a relatively small (if any) first-year effect on the economy”.

Mitch McConnell: I love the tax bill. I think the tax bill had an important impact on the economy.

DJT: It’s the largest — I always say the most massive, but it’s the largest tax cut in the history of our country, and reform, but tax cut, really something special. When you think you haven’t heard this expression but: We are making America great again. You haven’t heard that, have you? 

JS: Unsurprisingly, these tax cuts are projected to worsen economic inequality, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Job and wage growth have plateaued. When some cuts expire in 2025, the poorest Americans will see an increase in their taxes. Meanwhile, 91 of the top Fortune 500 companies paid $0 in corporate income tax in 2018.

This growing inequality ultimately undermines democracy, says economist and former Bernie Sanders adviser, Stephanie Kelton.

Stephanie Kelton: Income but also wealth inequality in this country is at dangerously high, and essentially, historically high levels. And that this is not just bad for the way our economy functions, it’s extremely dangerous when it comes to the way our democracy functions. Even though it’s a progressive tax system, that is you pay a higher share of taxes as your income increases. Even though we have a progressive income tax system, it’s not nearly progressive enough and we ought to be doing more to correct those imbalances that allow the people at the very top to become so extraordinarily rich that those riches then hinder the working of the economy and undermine the functioning of our democracy.

JS: While 8 million more people have slipped into poverty during this pandemic, the wealth of billionaires grew by $845 billion dollars. 

DJT: Under my leadership prosperity will surge. What we’ve done in the last three and a half years has been incredible. Nobody has ever done what we’ve done. There’s no administration that’s accomplished what we’ve accomplished in the first three and a half years. Not even close.  

JS: Donald Trump has presided over the worst job losses in U.S. history. A 50-year low in unemployment has vaporized. Only about half of the 22 million jobs lost because of coronavirus have returned. As of September, nearly 3.8 million people have been classified as permanently unemployed. About 26 million people are collecting unemployment. Trump’s trusty advisors at Fox and Friends have told Trump focus on the pre-pandemic economy. 

Steve Doocy: Essentially the best message is President Trump built a great economy then Covid screwed things up and President Trump is better at reubuilding than Joe Biden. That’s the message they would like to see. 

JS: But here’s the thing, countries that were better able to control their outbreaks have not suffered as much economic pain, according to analysis by the Financial Times. Unprecedented inequality and stagnant wages have persisted. Fewer Americans currently have health insurance than when Trump first became president. 

These sharp economic injustices have come into clear focus during the Coronavirus pandemic as corporate robber barons like Jeff Bezoses have become much wealthier while 40 percent of Americans couldn’t withdraw $400 right now if they had to. Filmmaker, author, and organizer Astra Taylor underscores the consequences of a government captured by minority interests. 

Astra Taylor: I mean, it’s interesting because you can have a conversation that’s like this is going to be difficult given the American political system and the number of veto points and the way that it’s structured and the way that money is a form of political speech, and the fact that we essentially have a system, an electoral system where bribery is legalized in terms of campaign contributions, right? You could say, there are lots of obstacles in the way of this. That’s not how they’re framing this. So I mean, I think there probably is something deeper. There’s a threat to their authority, right, and to the system that helped them rise to power and stay in power.

Thinking about democracy writ large, I mean, there’s a bigger thing they’re afraid of though because what this means, to have universal health care is to decommodify this huge industry, and it’s to connect decommodification with democratization. 

Maybe there are huge areas of social life that should not be not just subjected to the market extremes but actually taken off the market completely, right? And that’s very threatening to the status quo because once you start decommodifying one area, well why not others? 

JS: Despite the brazen economic disparities in the U.S., the obscene profits being reaped by the richest corporations and people, and the avalanches of so-called stimulus cash rained down on the already wealthy, Trump continually reassured the American public to just look at the stock market as proof of our collective prosperity. 

DJT: The stock market is hitting an all-time high record, for another, and think of this, 86 times since Election Day. 86 times it hit a record. 86 times. And we’re going to keep it going. 

JS: Only roughly half of American’s own stock, while the richest 1 percent own 50 percent of stocks. Again former Goldman Sachs executive Nomi Prins:

NP: Trump connects everything to the stock market because it is the one thing that you can objectively look at that has a number that has gone up. You can’t do that with wages. You can’t do that with job quality. You can’t do that job longevity. You can’t do that with your health coverage. You can’t do that with lots of other things that most people count on for their day-to-day lives and to make the day to day payments and money that they need to survive them. But what the stock market shows is not, not the expectation that there was going to be a tax cut. What the stock — which is what he’s saying, what the stock market shows is that for all of this period, and it happened during Obama as well, and yes it’s continued under Trump, there’s been a situation where companies have been able to receive very cheap money, because our rates are close to zero and they have been since the financial crisis, in order to subsidize the money that was lacking at the time for the banking system, that money has gone to banks, banks have bought back their own shares, banks pay themselves dividends on their own shares that they bought. That pumps the stock market up. That’s a significant set of buyers for their own stock which enriches the top level of the firms, and it also pushes the stock market up. And then they also get dividends on their own stock.

So all of that is more why the stock market has continued to rise throughout Obama’s administration as well as with Trump in there now. Because nothing has been done to effectively change that.

JS: Proponents of the 2017 tax cut promised that companies would have more money to invest in workers and capital improvements that would, in turn, spark greater economic activity. Instead the corporate tax cut went mainly to stock buybacks, rewarding shareholders and investors. Recent data from the Census Bureau suggests that the pre-pandemic economy under Trump was growing above two percent annually, but disproportionately benefitting wealthier Americans. The data also reveals that even before the global pandemic inequality reached its highest level in 50 years. But, as journalist Chris Hedges points out, it’s a trend that has been moving in that direction for decades. 

Chris Hedges: The fundamental engines of oligarchic global corporate power are advanced by both parties and one attempts to present that in a kind of multicultural, inclusive way. The other is, you know, it kind of embraced by troglodytes. But there’s no way within the American political system you can in any way tame or challenge the war machine or Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil.

And this is now where we’ve ended up, in the greatest income inequality in American history, the seizure of power by, and they’re not even traditional capitalist, they don’t make anything. They’re all speculators — global speculators. That’s what Goldman Sachs does. They’ve seized control of our economy and most economies. 

The breakdown that we experience has been bipartisan. Clinton was, of course, the poster child for this. Clinton understood that if he did corporate bidding, he would get corporate money. And of course, by the 1990s, fundraising parity with the Republicans was equal. And when Barack Obama first ran 2008, he got more.

So, we’ve got to look at the structural issues. I mean, I find Trump as repugnant and repulsive as everyone else. But our problem is not embodied in the personality of Donald Trump.

JS: Coronavirus laid bare the precariousness of the lives of so many people in the U.S. When the first known person in this country died from the disease on February 29th of this year, nearly 60 percent of Americans had less than a thousand dollars in savings. Half of Americans over 55 had zero retirement savings. Medical debt contributes to millions of bankruptcies every year. One in four Americans were defaulting on their student loans.

A month after the first known U.S. Coronavirus death, Donald Trump signed into law the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, better known as CARES.

DJT: Now I’m gonna sign this. And it’s a great honor. $6.2 trillion. I’ve never signed anything with a “T” on it. I don’t know if I can handle this one, Mitch. We can’t chicken out at this point. I don’t think so.

JS: It was the largest economic stimulus in U.S. History.

DJT: We also have a lot of money set aside for big businesses, you know, the big, powerful companies that were powerful four weeks ago. We have to save some of these great companies.

JS: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the only Democrat to say publicly she voted against the bill, which was done via voice vote. Speaking on the House floor, she described how the GOP used poor and working people as hostages to free hundreds of billions of dollars for the richest corporations.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: What did the Senate majority fight for? One of the largest corporate bailouts with as few strings as possible in American history. Shameful. The greed of that fight is wrong for crumbs for our families. And the option that we have is to either let them suffer with nothing or to allow this greed and billions of dollars which will be leveraged into trillions of dollars to contribute to the largest income inequality gap in our future. There should be shame about what was fought for in this bill and the choices that we have to make. 

JS: The poorest Americans were essentially expected to survive on $1,200 for six months during the pandemic. Congress and Trump also allowed the enhanced unemployment payment of $600 to expire in July, slashing aid during the pandemic to about $330 a week. 

Of the $350 bil­lion earmarked for small busi­ness­es in the Paycheck Protection Program, 70 percent of it went to large corporations, including Boeing whose stock is owned by at least 15 mem­bers of Con­gress (or their spous­es). Most notably, the airline companies that received a $25 billion bail out, have recently announced that they are laying off tens of thousands of workers.

HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter specializes in U.S. economic policy: 

Zach Carter: The trick is, when you look at what they’ve done in the overall coronavirus bailout package, they have been extremely, extremely generous with the wealthiest people in the world. The feature provision of the major piece of legislation that has already passed is $4.5 trillion to large corporations with almost no strings attached. That is money that goes straight to shareholders and executives. That is money that is going to the richest people in the world. And there’s really no kind of guardrails that Congress put on that funding to make sure that it’s used responsibly. So on the one hand, they talk a lot about means testing, making sure that ordinary people — you know, we don’t have too many lucky duckies who are making like $70,000 a year accidentally getting a $1,200 check. But the richest people in the world, if they get a multimillion-dollar dividend payout, that’s just fine.

Astra Taylor:  There’s broad majoritarian support for progressive social policy. This is what the people — the Demos — want. And we’ve entered a phase where that is sort of undeniable, if you just look at the numbers. 

JS: But as Astra Taylor explains, it doesn’t have to be this way. 

AT: The problem is actually that we’re living in the age of minoritarian politics, minoritarian control. You see that very strongly with the GOP and the fact that they want a politics of hierarchy, basically a return to aristocracy, right? They’re willing to gerrymander and disenfranchise voters — they absolutely don’t want people to go out and vote. But we see it with the Democrats as well, right? We see that they want to tell their constituencies, sorry, you can’t have these things that are not only popular, but actually pretty commonplace in other industrial democracies.

People’s complaints are pretty universal: it’s like corruption, massive inequality, the lack of workers rights, a lack of concern for the environment, just a lack of basic dignity. 

And to go back to democracy. This is the motor of democracy. This is what, democracy is not just procedures and elections, it is this moment where people come together as a kind of politicized philosophical public and are like what kind of world do we want to live in?

JS: From the very beginning, Donald Trump’s entire schtick about standing up for the downtrodden, the hard workers, the ordinary people of this country was a scam. One nonstop four-year grift. Trump has used his political career and his time as president to enrich himself and his cronies. But more than that, he has served as a Pied Piper for the most extreme anti-worker, anti-poor agendas of the Republican Party. And he dug deep into the well of the most vile aspects of U.S. politics and history to win power. It was this weaponizing of hate that allowed Trump and his allies to manufacture the state of grave danger that so many poor and working people now find themselves in in this country. The extreme economic injustices of the past four years were produced on the rhetoric of white nationalism, xenophobia, racism, sexism. 

But simply voting Trump out of office will not wipe any of this away. Many of these factors, while intensified during this administration, have persisted through both Democratic and Republican administrations. Both parties are beholden to corporate interests, even if one is more brazen and successful at producing dividends for the ultra-rich. The hard truth we must all face is that the political and economic system Trump has exploited and utilized will continue on in perpetuity unless the people of this country bravely muster the collective will to challenge its very existence.

This has been part six of an Intercepted limited documentary series, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump. Over the past week, we’ve been releasing an episode each weekday focusing on a different aspect of the Trump presidency and digging into the history and context of the actions of this administration. Make sure to tune tomorrow to part seven of this series, where we’re going to be taking an in-depth look at Donald Trump’s policies on the climate.

American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump is an Intercepted limited documentary series. You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Lucie Kroening. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Make sure to tell your friends and even your foes about this series and tune in tomorrow for episode seven. Until then, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The post Part Six: The Looting of the Nation appeared first on The Intercept.

While all eyes remain on the presidential election in November, Donald Trump has already secured a multigenerational victory with his radical reshaping of the judicial branch of government. In part five of “American Mythology,” we look at how the Trump administration has outsourced hundreds of federal judicial appointments to the right-wing Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation. The appointments made during the past four years will impact almost every aspect of life in the U.S.: health care, marriage equality, worker’s rights, freedom of speech and press, guns, racism, women’s rights, war powers, and others. We dig into the ideologies and organizations at the center of Trump’s judicial strategy, the influence of the Koch brothers, and the corporate and social agenda the GOP wants their new judges to impose. The stakes go well beyond the 2020 election: The impact of an extreme right-wing Supreme Court majority not only threatens reproductive rights, it could shut down any progressive attempts at lawmaking for decades to come. In some ways, confirming Judge Amy Coney Barrett is more important to the GOP than Trump winning reelection.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted. 

I’m Jeremy Scahill coming to you from New York City and this is part five of an Intercepted special, “American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Donald Trump: This president, whoever it may be — hopefully it’ll be me — is going to replace two, three, could even be four, and it could even be four Supreme Court judges. I mean, perhaps more than anyone. I even heard the scenario it can be five.

Jeremy Scahill: When campaigning for president in 2016, Donald Trump vowed that if he won the presidency, he would appoint judges to the courts who were staunchly anti-abortion and pro-gun. Trump repeatedly asserted that he wanted judges who were approved by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. And once elected, he kept that promise. 

DJT: The Federalist Society vetted very carefully great scholars, pro-life — very, very fine people. The Second Amendment — and you know, I think, a very good list. We have a list of 20 judges and all have been vetted by [the] Federalist Society.

JS: The Federalist Society has been around since 1982 and was forged by conservative law school students at Yale and the University of Chicago. It subscribes to a judicial philosophy of originalism and textualism. Meaning, it’s the role of judges to only interpret the Constitution in its plain text, no more or less than those who originally wrote and ratified it.

UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky once wrote, “Never in American history, thankfully, have a majority of the justices accepted originalism. If that were to happen, there would be a radical change in constitutional law. No longer would the Bill of Rights apply to state and local governments. No longer would there be protection of rights not mentioned in the text of the Constitution, such as the right to travel, freedom of association, and the right to privacy.”

In 2017, White House Counsel Don McGahn delivered keynote remarks at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C.: 

Don McGahn: The greatest threat to the rule of law in our modern society is the ever-expanding regulatory state, and the most effective bulwark against that threat is a strong judiciary.

JS: The Trump administration shared in the view — now dominating the Federalist Society — of applying the philosophy of originalism to government regulations. 

DM: The edifice of the modern administrative state was really not constructed until the 20th century on the misguided notion that independent experts, rather than our elected representatives, are best suited to govern the nation’s affairs.  

JS: In the view of McGahn and his cohort, federal agencies have become an unaccountable, out of control “administrative state.” In other words, federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or Centers for Disease Control or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration don’t have the authority to interpret what are often ambiguous statutes unless Congress explicitly mandates it.

DJT: I made a promise to the American people: If I were elected president, I would find the very best judge in the country for the Supreme Court. I promised to select someone who respects our laws and is representative of our Constitution and who loves our Constitution and someone who will interpret them as written. 

JS: The assertion being: A commitment to individual liberty and limited government. But in practice looks more like a libertarian interpretation of the Constitution. This commitment is what reportedly shot Neil Gorsuch to the top of the Federalist Society’s list of prospective nominees to replace arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch gained initial attention after publishing two judicial opinions that staked out radical originalist positions seeking to undermine federal agencies. In another notable appellate decision, Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius, Gorsuch argued that an individual’s faith could exempt them from Affordable Care Act mandates.

John G. Roberts, Jr.: Justice Gorsuch has the opinion of the Court this morning in case number 16-285, Epic Systems Corporation v. Lewis and the consolidated cases. 

Neil Gorsuch: These cases differ in detail but in substance present the same question. If an employer and an employee agree to arbitrate claims between them in individualized proceedings is that agreement enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act, or does the National Labor Relations Act displace the Arbitration Act and guarantee employees’ right to class or collective actions no matter what? 

JS: Since joining the Supreme Court, Justice Gorsuch has been a reliable conservative. In Epic Systems v. Lewis, Gorsuch joined the conservative court majority to make it harder for victims of wage theft to sue employers collectively.  He has ruled in favor of a baker’s right to discriminate against a same-sex couple. He has joined the conservative majority in allowing Ohio to purge its voter rolls of so-called “infrequent voters.” He upheld Trump’s Muslim ban. He has helped overturn 40 years of precedent to weaken labor unions. And he favored allowing North Dakota to make it harder for Native American’s using a P.O. Box to vote. And that’s just a sampling of his first year serving as a Supreme Court Justice.    

DJT: What they’re putting him through, and his family — his family is incredible — what they’re putting them through. Democrats want to raise your taxes. They want to restore job-killing regulations. There’s been no administration ever that’s cut as many regulations. And we have regulations. We want clean water. We want crystal, clear air. We want beautiful environment. We want. But you don’t have to have regulation that makes it impossible for our country to compete with other countries, and that’s what we’re doing.

JS: Brett Kavanaugh was recommended by the Heritage Foundation, another conservative think-tank that believes judges should not attempt to interpret the Constitution beyond what the original drafters intended. Remember we’re talking about a document from 1787. 

Now when Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, the White House wrote a one-page brief extolling Kavanaugh’s record of overruling “federal regulators 75 times on cases involving clean air, consumer protections, net neutrality and other issues,” that’s according to Politico. In a case about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kavanaugh described independent agencies as “a headless fourth branch of the U.S. Government.” In short, Kavanaugh views independent agencies as a threat to individual liberty and executive authority. And that includes regulations intended to protect individuals from corporations.

Christine Blasey Ford: When I got to the top of the stairs, I was pushed from behind into a bedroom across from the bathroom. I couldn’t see who pushed me. 

JS: And then of course there’s the matter of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. In gripping congressional testimony she alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago.

Christine Blasey Ford: Brett and Mark came into the bedroom and locked the door behind them. There was music playing in the bedroom. It was turned up louder by either Brett or Mark once we were in the room. I was pushed onto the bed and Brett got on top of me. He began running his hands over my body and grinding into me. I yelled, hoping that someone downstairs might hear me, and I tried to get away from him, but his weight was heavy.

Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time because he was very inebriated and because I was wearing a one piece bathing suit underneath my clothing. I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me. Both Brett and Mark were drunkenly laughing during the attack.

JS: At the time of the hearing, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman recounted a striking scene.

Amy Goodman: I think this was the key moment, because here you have Amy Klobuchar, who first reveals that her father is an alcoholic and still, at the age of 90, he’s going to Alcoholics Anonymous and says, “Judge, do you drink too much?”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar: Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened or part of what happened the night before?

Brett Kavanaugh: No. I remember what happened. And I think, you’ve probably had beers, Senator, and –

Sen. AK: So you’re saying there’s never been a case where you drank so much that you didn’t remember what happened the night before or part of what happened?

BK: You’re asking about, yeah, blackout. I don’t know. Have you?

Sen. AK: Could you answer the question, judge? I just — so you, so that’s not happened? Is that your answer?

BK: Yeah, and I’m curious if you have?

Sen. AK: I have no drinking problem, judge.

BK: Nor do I.

Sen. AK: OK –

AG: And then he has to take a break for about five minutes and I really felt at that point he was going to come back and apologize and that’s exactly what he did. After five minutes he comes back and he apologizes. And why was this so revealing? I mean, he was belligerent throughout. He lost control and he understood that. Whether it’s alcohol or rage that causes this kind of loss of control, it was most revealing.

JS: Despite Kavanaugh’s behavior at the hearing, despite Dr. Blasey Ford’s incendiary testimony, despite the history of Anita Hill and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — Kavanaugh was confirmed.

Mike Pence: On this vote the ayes are 50, the nays are 48. The nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh of Maryland to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is confirmed.

JS: Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have already helped roll back hard-won rights protecting workers, consumers, women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and voters. They both joined the conservative majority undermining workers and consumers’ ability to file suit as a class against businesses. They’ve allowed employers to cite religious or moral objections to providing health insurance that covers contraceptives. 

Surprise, surprise, they also ruled that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional — expanding presidential power over an agency established to protect consumers from the practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

CNBC: Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court Justice, during lower court rulings on this — debate on this — suggested that the CFPB director, because he or she was only able to be fired for cause by the president of the United States, was in effect one of the most powerful individuals in the United States government. Conservatives have argued for a long time that the CFPB director position is too powerful and now the Supreme Court is agreeing with them.

JS: Gorsuch and Kavanaugh supported allowing the government to hold detained immigrants indefinitely. They joined the court majority upholding the Trump administration’s immigration policies to make it harder for Central American migrants to seek asylum, to allow a wealth test to go into effect, and to make it easier to deport permanent legal residents. They also both dissented from an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts that the administration’s arguments to end DACA were “arbitrary and capricious.” 

In terms of protecting voting rights both have also sided on making it more difficult for voters to cast ballots during the pandemic and that gerrymandered districts can’t be challenged in federal courts. 

[Musical interlude.]

Lester Holt: Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died at the age of 87 just weeks before —

Senator Mazie Hirono: I know what her last fervent wish was: that she not be replaced until a new president is installed, and that’s how we should honor the legacy of this totally remarkable, courageous jurist —

DJT: Our thoughts and prayers are with her family. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. So article two of the Constitution says, “the president shall nominate justices of the Supreme Court.” [Cheering]

JS: Now Trump and the GOP are trying to rush through a third Supreme Court Justice. They clearly want to make sure the court is stacked in their favor, particularly in the event of a contested election. But also to make sure the court is dominated by radical right-wing ideologues in the event that a Democrat becomes president. Just 45 days before the 2020 election, and one day after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Donald Trump announced plans to replace the liberal justice with an arch conservative. 

DJT: I stand before you today to fulfill one of my highest and most important duties under the United States Constitution: the nomination of a Supreme Court justice. [Applause.] This is my third such nomination after Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh. And it is a very proud moment indeed.

JS: In the mad rush to fill Ginsburg’s seat, Trump held a gathering of more than 100 people in the White House Rose Garden to celebrate the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. It would turn into a Covid super-spreader event. Trump and more than a dozen people who either attended the event or have been in contact with the White House have tested positive for coronavirus.

Mitch McConnell: It’s just that our Democrat friends worry they might not like the outcome. For some reason they cannot bear to see Republicans governing within the rules as Republicans, doing exactly what Americans elected us to do. 

JS: Undeterred, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “We are full steam ahead with a fair, thorough, and timely confirmation process that Judge Barrett, the Court, and the nation deserves.” Now of course, this is the same McConnell, who eight months before the 2016 election, blocked President Obama’s nomination of the moderate Judge Merrick Garland after Justice Scalia died. 

MM: The American people may well elect a president who decides to nominate Judge Garland for Senate consideration. The next president may also nominate somebody very different. Either way, our view is this: Give the people a voice in filling this vacancy. 

[Music interlude.]

JS: So here we are, facing a third appointment from Trump of yet another judge who believes that the Constitution is fixed in time, just as some of his supporters believe that Adam and Eve lived with the dinosaurs.

DJT: Amy Coney Barrett will decide cases based on the text of the Constitution as written. As Amy has said, “Being a judge takes courage. You are not there to decide cases as you may prefer. You are there to do your duty and to follow the law wherever it may take you.” That is exactly what Judge Barrett will do on the U.S. Supreme Court.

JS: If Barrett is confirmed, that would solidify the Supreme Court as a right wing entity, with conservative justices holding a decisive 6-3 majority. Barrett could provide a crucial vote on cases winding their way up to the Supreme Court, including on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, described the potential impact.

Kamala Harris: If you have a pre-existing condition — heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer — they’re coming for you. If you love someone who has a pre-existing condition, they’re coming for you.

Susan Page: Thank you, Senator Harris. 

KH: If you are under the age of 26 on your parents’ coverage, they’re coming for you.

JS: Judge Barrett criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 ruling upholding Obamacare, writing that he “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.” Remember, Justice Roberts was nominated by President George W. Bush. 

Barrett’s deference to executive authority could lean in favor of the Trump administration’s efforts to end DACA, TPP, and asylum. And when it comes to reproductive rights, Barrett could be the vote that overturns Roe v. Wade, which would then leave abortion access to the whims of individual states.

[Musical change.] 

In 2018, The Intercept’s Jordan Smith discussed a Lousianna regulation that would have left the entire state with one abortion provider. It was identical to a Texas law previously overturned by the Supreme Court. 

Jordan Smith: So, the question, really, overarching — and then this would apply to other contexts outside abortion as well — is a question about whether just a change in the court’s makeup means a change of your constitutional rights. So in other words, this is kind of set up as a sort of, controlled experiment. This case was just decided three years ago, literally nothing in the universe about this has changed except for that there are two new judges on the court.

DJT: And we have two new Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Jordan Smith: Two judges are not supposed to change the universe, right? So it’s kind of a perfect setup to see exactly how this is going to play out. 

Jeremy Scahill: In June the Supreme Court narrowly struck down that law in a 5-4 vote. Both justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, voted to make it more difficult for Louisiana women to have access to health care.

On the second day of Amy Coney Barrett’s senate confirmation hearing, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee asked the judge, who opposes abortion, about its place in the Consitution.  

Marsha Blackburn: It’s important to note that abortion is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.

Amy Coney Barrett: The word abortion does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.

MB: That is correct. And Roe v. Wade is not an amendment to the Constitution.

ACB: Roe v. Wade interprets the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and locates the right to terminate a pregnancy in the liberty — in the due process clause, the liberty interest.

MB: Correct.

JS: The impact of an extreme right-wing court not only threatens reproductive rights, it could shut down any progressive attempts at lawmaking for decades to come. If Democrats regain control and successfully pass ambitious new laws — even moderate ones — those laws would likely find their way in front of an ultra-conservative court. In some ways, confirming Judge Coney Barrett is more important to the GOP than Donald Trump winning re-election.

Mitch McConnell: What can’t be undone is a lifetime appointment to a young man or woman who believes in the quaint notion that the job of the judge is to follow the law. That’s the most important thing we’ve done in the country, which cannot be undone.    

DJT: And the other thing, by the end of the term, we’ll have almost 300 federal judges and court of appeals judges, which is a record. So we will have had a great impact on the court system going forward.

[Musical interlude.]

JS: So much of the excitement over Donald Trump’s presidency among Republicans on Capitol Hill and conservative Christians has centered around the federal courts. What has occurred under Trump is nothing short of an extremist, semi-theocratic takeover of large sectors of the U.S. judicial system. The consequences of this will be sweeping and last for generations. It will impact almost every aspect of life in the U.S.: healthcare, marriage equality, workers’ rights, freedom of speech and press, guns, racism, women’s rights, war powers, on and on and on. To put it bluntly, it is a fulfillment of some of the wildest dreams of some of the most rabid right-wing forces in the history of U.S. politics. 

People like multibillionaire Charles Koch, who has not only mobilized his network of wealthy donors to help Barrett secure the Supreme Court nomination, but who for decades has given millions of dollars just to the Federalist Society to reshape the federal judiciary. In an interview with CBS in 2015, Koch defended his practice of funneling massive amounts of money in support of extreme libertarian and conservative groups and politicians.  

Anthony Mason: Do you think it’s healthy for the system that so much money is coming out of a relatively small group of people?

Charles Koch: Well I — listen if I didn’t think it was healthy or fair I wouldn’t do it because what we’re after is to fight against special interests. 

AM: Some people would look at you and say you’re a special interest. 

CK: Yeah, but my interest is just as it’s been in business, is: What will help people improve their lives?

Jane Mayer: The Kochs are libertarians, or you could call them neoliberals. 

JS: The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer wrote an in-depth exposé about the Koch brothers’ sponsorship of Vice President Mike Pence, one of the key figures spearheading Trump’s judiciary crusade.

JM: They are supposedly people who believe in a kind of social liberalism. But there they are having sponsored the career of Mike Pence. And I think it’s a real tip off to what the Kochs really care about.

The issue that matters to them is not any of the social issues, no matter what they’re saying. What matters to them is allowing business to take over the power in the country, and particularly their own business. So they’re pushing back on regulations, and they’re pushing back on taxes and trying to shrink the power of the government and replace it with their own power. And Mike Pence has been willing to carry their water on that. 

JS: People like Attorney General William Barr. Barr started his career at the CIA. After law school, he joined the Reagan White House whose legal team invented the unitary executive theory. Barr also served under George H.W. Bush and encouraged the president to pardon officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. During the George W. Bush years, Barr said passage of the U.S. Patriot Act didn’t go far enough. Last year, when he spoke at a Federalist Society, Barr chose to focus his talk on unitary executive power.

William Barr: I wanted to choose a topic for this afternoon’s lecture that had an originalist angle, and it will likely come as little surprise to this group that I have chosen to speak about the Constitution’s approach to executive power.

I deeply admire the American presidency as a political and constitutional institution. I believe it is one of the great and remarkable innovations in our Constitution, and has been one of the most successful features of the Constitution in protecting the liberties of the American people. More than any other branch, it has fulfilled the expectations of the framers. 

Unfortunately, over the past several decades, we have seen the steady encroachment on executive authority by the other branches of government.  This process, I think, has substantially weakened the functioning of the presidency, to the detriment of the nation.

[Musical scoring.]

JS: Donald Trump’s term in office is not even over. But with Mitch McConnell guiding the ship, this White House has successfully moved the federal judiciary far to the right — a long-term Republican strategy that will outlast this president and reshape the country. Trump has named 53 judges to the courts of appeal — where the majority of federal cases end up. In comparison, during Obama’s entire eight year presidency just 55 of his appointees were confirmed. On lower federal courts, again Trump has outpaced his predecessors, appointing 210 in less than four years, compared to Obama’s 262 appointments during his two terms.

Analysis by the New York Times of Trump’s appellate judges found that all but eight of them had ties to the Federalist Society. Trump appointees include judges who support adding a citizenship question to the census, ending same-sex marriage, and opposing the disclosure of the president’s financial records. As Congress has failed to effectively legislate, judges — with lifetime appointments — have become the most consequential policymakers in this country.

[Musical interlude.]

This has been part five of an Intercepted limited documentary series, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump. Over the past week, we’ve been releasing an episode each weekday focusing on a different aspect of the Trump presidency and digging into the history and context of the actions of this administration. Make sure to tune tomorrow to part six of this series, where we’re going to be taking an in-depth look at Donald Trump’s policies on the economy.

American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump is an Intercepted limited documentary series. You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Lucie Kroening. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Make sure to tell your friends and even your foes about this series and tune in for episode six tomorrow. Until then, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The post Part Five: Courting Corporate Theocracy appeared first on The Intercept.

On matters of war, Donald Trump has consistently spoken and acted in contradictory and unorthodox ways. He campaigned in 2016 with a mixed message of attacking the legacy of the Iraq War and U.S. military adventurism, while simultaneously pledging to commit war crimes and promote imperialism as a matter of policy. On part four of “American Mythology,” we take an in-depth look at Trump’s war and national security policies. He escalated drone strikes in Somalia and Afghanistan, authorized troop surges and massive bombings in Iraq, launched cruise missile strikes in Syria, and threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” On the other hand, he signed a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces, attempted to end the Korean War, and claims to have fired John Bolton to avoid being in “World War 6.” In assessing Trump’s war policies, we seek to navigate past the rhetoric from Trump and his critics and examine his place in the history of U.S. presidents. In many ways, Trump has represented a continuity of U.S. policy with largely tactical differences from his predecessors. Overall, Trump built on some of the worst excesses of the Bush/Cheney administration and took advantage of the weak guardrails left behind by the Obama administration.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

I’m Jeremy Scahill coming to you from New York City and this is part four of an Intercepted special, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump: But we’re fighting a very politically correct war. The other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. They say they don’t care about their lives. You have to take out their families.

JS: Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 with a mixed message of attacking the legacy of the Iraq war and U.S. military adventurism, while simultaneously pledging to commit war crimes and promote imperialism as a matter of policy.

DJT: When we went over there, I said “Hey! I assume we’re taking the oil. Are we taking the oil?” You know in the old days you had a war — you ever hear the expression, “to the victor belongs the spoils?” I said, “If we’d leave, take the oil! At least pay us back.” And I come out, front-page news, “Oh, Trump is a horrible human being. He wants to take the oil from a sovereign country.” Sovereign, give me a break. You see the people ripping off — sovereign. Ay.

JS: From the beginning of his campaign and throughout his presidency, Trump’s rhetoric on war would weave between denouncing past U.S. military operations and vowing to end wars with an occasional tweet threatening nuclear war or the wiping out of a country’s cultural heritage sites.

Mohammad Javad Zarif: He is showing to the international community that he has no respect for international law, that he is prepared to commit war crimes, because attacking cultural sites is a war crime, and disproportionate response is a war crime.

JS: Even as Trump authorized the expansion of some wars and the continuation of others, as president he suggested that he was weighing the toll of the nation’s foreign wars.

DJT: Nearly 16 years after September 11th attacks, after the extraordinary sacrifice of blood and treasure, the American people are weary of war without victory. Nowhere is this more evident than with the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history — 17 years. I share the American people’s frustration. I also share their frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most importantly, lives trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations.

JS: But he also hedged his positions, saying things like this:

DJT: My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts. But all my life, I have heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the oval office. In other words, when you’re president of the United States.

JS: Trump often hammered his opponents who supported the Iraq war. Or, in the case of Jeb Bush, whose brother started the war.

DJT: The war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, alright? Now, you can take it any way you want. And it took Jeb Bush — if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, it took him five days. He went back. It was a mistake, it wasn’t a mistake. Took him five days before his people told him what to say. And he ultimately said it was a mistake. The war in Iraq: we spent two trillion dollars, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.

JS: And less than a month into his presidency, Donald Trump stated a truth about the nature of the American Empire. And he did it on Fox News in an interview with Bill O’Reilly before the Super Bowl.

DJT: Will I get along with him? I have no idea.

Bill O’Reilly: He’s a killer though. Putin’s a killer.

DJT: There are a lot of killers. We got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?

JS: While what Trump said is indisputably true, he had just taken the helm of that U.S. killing machine.

Brian Williams: We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen, “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.” And they are beautiful pictures.

JS: Just three months into his presidency, Trump launched 59 cruise missiles at Syria, in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack that reportedly killed more than 70 civilians. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the bipartisan war machine responded accordingly.

Fareed Zakaria: I think Donald Trump became president of the United States. I think this was actually a big moment.

Thomas Friedman: I would be doing everything I could on every front to increase our leverage. Because in the Middle East, if you’re trying to do diplomacy without leverage, you’re playing baseball without a bat.

John McCain: It’s the beginning of a departure from the failed policies of the last eight years.

Lindsey Graham: The only constitutional requirement that exists regarding war is for Congress to put the nation in a declared state of war.

JS: That same month, Donald Trump authorized a massive strike in Afghanistan using a 20,000-pound munition known as the Mother of All Bombs. That strike was supposedly aimed at Islamic State fighters, but mostly it seemed like Trump wanted to show off some of his war toys.

DJT: And what I do is I authorize my military. We have the greatest military in the world and they’ve done a job, as usual, so we have given them total authorization. And that’s what they’re doing.

JS: A few months after that bombing, in August of 2017, Trump announced a new strategy for ending the war in Afghanistan: escalate the killing.

DJT: Finally, my administration will ensure that you, the brave defenders of the American people, will have the necessary tools and rules of engagement to make this strategy work, and work effectively and work quickly. I have already lifted restrictions the previous administration placed on our war-fighters that prevented the secretary of defense and our commanders in the field from fully and swiftly waging battle against the enemy.

JS: In 2018, documented civilian casualties in Afghanistan continued to top over 10,000 for a fifth year in a row. That’s according to the United Nations. More than 3,000 deaths and 7,000 injured were reported. 2018 saw the largest increase in airstrikes since the U.N. began documenting civilian deaths in 2009 and was attributed to “international military forces” — that is largely the U.S. Again in 2019, airstrikes represented about 10% of civilian casualties.

DJT: We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.

JS: While Trump expanded air-strikes in Afghanistan and the civilian death toll skyrocketed, the administration simultaneously opened direct negotiations with the Taliban. And on February 29, the Trump administration signed a deal with the Taliban to begin withdrawing significant numbers of U.S. troops from the country.

Osama Bin Javaid: In February the U.S. government agreed to pull out its troops from Afghanistan, provided the Taliban guaranteed to halt attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

JS: Earlier this month, as Trump returned to the White House after his hospitalization at Walter Reed following his coronavirus diagnosis, Trump tweeted that he would be bringing almost all U.S. troops from Afghanistan home by Christmas. The announcement seemed to take even his own military advisors by surprise, including the chair of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley. He appeared on NPR soon after Trump’s tweet was posted.

Mark Milley: I’m not going to engage in speculation. I’m going to engage in the rigorous analysis of the situation based on the conditions and the plans that I am aware of and my conversations with the president.

JS: In other wars started by his predecessors, Trump authorized a series of both covert and overt military operations that would endure throughout his presidential term. Among the first was the deadly military raid in Yemen just nine days into Trump’s presidency. That resulted in the deaths of several dozen people, among them ten children and a U.S. Navy SEAL. Trump portrayed it as a leftover operation from Obama’s presidency.

DJT: Well, this was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something that was, you know, just, they wanted to do. And they came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected. My generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I would — I believe. And they lost Ryan. And I was at the airport when the casket came in, the body came in. And it was very sad — with the family — and it’s a great family. Incredible wife and children.

JS: As was often the case under President Obama, it’s not possible to tally the number of drone strikes carried out by the CIA under Trump, but one drone war specialist told us Agency strikes have been significant. In terms of military operations, Trump expanded drone strikes in both Somalia and Afghanistan.

Amy Goodman: A U.S. drone strike killed five people after it struck a car that was rushing a mother to the hospital after she experienced complications from a home birth. The strike killed the 25-year-old mother Malana, three of her relative’s and the car’s driver in southeastern Afghanistan.

JS: In Iraq and Syria, Trump authorized scorched earth bombing runs and troop surges in the name of defeating ISIS. When Trump entered office, there were already sizable numbers of U.S. Special Operations Forces on the ground battling ISIS in Mosul and other cities. War reporter Mike Giglio said that by the time Trump took the oath of office, half of Mosul was already under the control of Iraqi forces backed by U.S. Special Operations teams.

Mike Giglio: Trump really sort of followed the blueprint that the Obama administration set out for him. The signature change that I think people need to keep in mind with Trump is that he loosened rules and restrictions that had been intended to prevent civilian casualties. And for that reason and other reasons, including the fact that western Mosul is a much denser terrain, and that it always was going to be a more difficult fight because it had traditionally been more of a stronghold for ISIS and for al-Qaeda, in western Mosul, it was a hellscape. They were pulling the bodies out of the rubble for months and months after victory had been declared. And the rebuilding efforts there have been much more halting. And so, I think when we look at Trump’s imprint on the war, to me the most obvious one is just the level of destruction that came with it.

JS: The Trump administration took the flexible justifications for military action that existed under Bush, and then to an extent under Obama, and made them even wider. Among the most important was the notion that the mere possibility of threats to U.S. forces or even interests could now warrant military force or even assassination. Hina Shamsi of the ACLU spent eight years fighting the Obama administration over its drone strikes and excessive secrecy.

Hina Shamsi: We’ve talked about this period of time and it’s no longer in the front pages the way that it used to be and really should be. The lethal strikes, the killing is happening under Trump without even the kind of weak safeguards that Obama put in place at the end of his administration, with ever greater secrecy

JS: In an interview with Intercepted in late 2017, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said that he was concerned that the expansion of the executive branch justifications for lethal operations was now entering a new phase with Trump.

Chris Murphy: The way in which this administration has broadened out its authority to conduct military activity in the Middle East suggests that it thinks it has the legal ability to go after anyone and any actor and any country in the region that potentially poses a threat to U.S. forces. Iran is on that list and so the broad jurisdiction that the administration has granted itself regarding military activity could conceivably convince them to launch an attack against the Iranians without congressional approval. Now, I don’t have any information that they are planning on doing that. I just worry that they have given themselves a carte blanche in the region that seems to have no end.

JS: Donald Trump has consistently spoken threateningly about Iran, but in the beginning, it was often used in a conspiratorial manner, including to state falsely that Obama had bribed Iran with $150 billion of US taxpayer money.

DJT: Iran’s hostilities substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013 and they were given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash.

JS: Like some of Trump’s other unhinged theories, the saber-rattling with Iran was potentially incendiary. Pandering to the neoconservative bloodlust on Iran, Trump proudly pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, a pledge he obsessively discussed on the campaign trail.

DJT: So you say to yourself, “Why didn’t they make the right deal?” This is one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history. The deal with Iran will lead to nuclear problems. All they have to do is sit back 10 years and they don’t have to do much.

Lester Holt: Your two minutes has expired.

DJT: And they’re going to end up getting nuclear. I met with Bibi Netanyahu the other day. Believe me, he is not a happy camper.

JS: But beyond the rhetoric, in terms of policy, Trump essentially picked up the mantle of the neocons from the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when George W. Bush accused Iran of being in a terrorist partnership with Iraq and North Korea.

George W. Bush: States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction. These regimes pose a grave and growing danger.

JS: It’s important to remember that, while there were voices within the Bush administration pushing aggressively for war with Iran, after 9/11 the U.S. largely maintained a bi-partisan posture of deadly economic sanctions and occasional covert action.

Barack Obama: Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not:  a comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

JS: The Obama-era nuclear deal represented the most significant steps toward normalizing relations with Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a fact that enraged neocons and other hawks who advocated regime change.

Just days into Trump’s presidency, his National Security Advisor, General Mike Flynn, who had been fired from a previous post by Obama, significantly escalated the threats toward Iran, accusing it of facilitating attacks against US-backed forces in the Persian Gulf.

Michael Flynn: The Obama administration failed to respond adequately to Tehran’s malign actions, including weapons transfers, support for terrorism, and other violations of international norms. The Trump administration condemns such actions by Iran that undermine security, prosperity, and stability throughout and beyond the Middle East and place, which places American lives at risk. President Trump has severely criticized the various agreements reached between Iran and the Obama administration, as well as the United Nations, as being weak and ineffective. Instead of being thankful to the United States in these agreements, Iran is now feeling emboldened. As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice. Thank you.

JS: But Trump’s preferred National Security Advisor would be forced to resign just a month into his tenure. That came after Flynn lied to the FBI and Vice President Pence about his contacts with Russian officials. A year later, in March of 2018, Trump named one of the most belligerent figures in U.S. politics to the post: John Bolton.

Tucker Carlson: You’ve called for regime change in Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Syria. In the first two countries, we’ve had regime change, and obviously, it’s been — I’d say a disaster, I think we can all agree.

John Bolton: No, no, I don’t agree with that. And let me —

TC: You don’t think it’s been a disaster?

JB: No.

JS: Two months after Bolton joined the administration, Trump officially pulled out of the Iran deal. As Iranian author and analyst Hooman Majd pointed out, it had an immediate impact on the civilian population of Iran.

Hooman Majd: Not only did we leave the JCPOA, did the Trump administration leave the JCPOA, it also went on this maximum pressure campaign to basically cut Iran off from the rest of the world economically — cut its oil exports down to zero, which it relies on to feed its people, basically, and medicine imports, everything —I  mean, really almost as close to an embargo, without actually calling it an embargo.

JS: Once the nuclear deal was trashed and John Bolton entered the Trump administration as National Security Advisor in 2018, the aggressive push for Trump to go all-in against Iran increased, as The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain described:

Murtaza Hussain: I really see the present behavior by the U.S. as a form of unfinished business from the 2003 Bush era. Now, you have people like Bolton back in power. You have people like Erik Prince in the orbit of the Trump administration, many of the same voices who very much wanted to see confrontation happening over a decade ago are now back near the helm of power. And all the same ideas and all the same ideologies and all the same desires for U.S. policy in the Middle East, they’re back and they have Trump.

And I’m not saying that Trump himself is somebody who campaigned on a war with Iran, but in many ways, he’s a cipher for these extremist elements in the United States and with him, they see an open door to achieving the dreams that were unfulfilled many years ago. And the Obama era was sort of [an] obstruction to that and things like the Iran nuclear deal need to be pulled apart in order to achieve their goals, but they’re working at that in earnest now. And if we see a second Trump administration, I think that the odds of confrontation with Iran militarily are very high.

JS: In September of 2019, Bolton was ousted from his post, reportedly because he was too much of a warmonger, even for Trump, who said if he had listened to Bolton, “We would be in World War 6 by now.” Former foreign policy official under Presidents Clinton and Obama, Wendy Sherman agreed.

Wendy Sherman: As I have said before, John Bolton never saw a war he didn’t want to wage. President Trump wanted to get Americans out of conflict, wanted to take Americans out of Afghanistan, out of the Middle East, didn’t want to go to war, wanted to negotiate directly at high levels with leaders of countries, and John Bolton had a different approach.

JS: Even with Bolton gone, by late 2019, it seemed as though the Iran hawks may actually get their war. One of Trump’s single most dangerous acts as commander in chief came on January 3, 2020, when he authorized the assassination of top Iranian general, Qassim Suleimani, in Baghdad, Iraq.

DJT: Last week, we took decisive action to stop a ruthless terrorist from threatening American lives. At my direction, the United States military eliminated the world’s top terrorist, Qassim Suleimani.

JS: The strike against Suleimani had reportedly been authorized months earlier when John Bolton was still Trump’s National Security Advisor. And Bolton cheered on the strike from the sidelines, calling it “the first step toward regime change in Iran.”

But legal scholars had a different label for the strike: war crime. Law professor Marjorie Cohn said authorizing a state-sponsored murder of a high-ranking official of another country is a crime under both U.S. and international law.

Marjorie Cohn: It’s called the War Crimes Act. It’s a federal statute. And this is a war crime. What Trump did was to mount a crime of aggression, as defined by the International Criminal Court. There are two different ways that someone can commit the crime of aggression: first, bombardment by the armed forces of a state against the territory of another state. And the other way that an individual can commit aggression under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court is the use of armed forces of one state which are within the territory of another state with the agreement of the receiving state in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement.

Well, Iraq and the United States have a joint military agreement that governs the stationing of U.S. troops in Iraq. And Iraq’s acting prime minister called the U.S. bombing a flagrant violation of the conditions of that agreement. And in fact, the Iraqi parliament voted that the U.S. forces must leave. Well, the U.S. forces said, “We’re not going to leave. We’re going to stay here.” And that, in my book, is an illegal occupation. So, if Congress wanted to do its job and use the war crimes statute, and guess how many times the war crimes statute has been used. Zero, zero times.

JS: If history and longstanding U.S. policy is any indication, Trump is not going to end up on trial at the Hague. In Washington, the Sulemani assassination was met with widespread support, if not celebration, among prominent Republicans.

Mike Pompeo: President Trump’s decision to remove Qassim Suleimani from the battlefield saved American lives. There’s no doubt about that.

Lindsey Graham: We killed the most powerful man in Iran short of the Ayatollah.

JS: The Democratic reaction was a mixed bag. For his part, Sen. Bernie Sanders immediately labeled the strike an “assassination.”

Bernie Sanders: President Trump ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general, Qassim Suleimani, in Iraq, along with…

JS: Other Democrats took a position that they didn’t like the strike but that they were glad that Suleimani was gone.

Robert Menendez: We’re not going to lament his death. But the question is — that has to be answered by the administration next week when Congress comes back into session is: What brought us to this moment? We have had other moments in which we could have taken Suleimani out. We did not.

JS: The open assassination of a foreign military official on the territory of a third country was, without question, a major escalation in the expansion of presidential authority. While many pundits and politicians rightly condemned the action, they overwhelmingly did so without acknowledging the precedent. It was analyzed in a vacuum, as though Trump had crossed the rubicon. The fact is, all presidents assassinate, but they invent different terms to describe the killings: high-value target strikes, leadership strikes, targeted killings. None of this takes away from the grave danger that Trump’s assassination of Suleimani presented, but historical context matters.

So much of the analysis of Trump’s most dangerous policies and actions has been portrayed as being uniquely Trumpian. And while some of them may be, failing to recognize the frightening and deadly powers built into the presidency by both Democrats and Republicans is not only dishonest. It once again leaves the door open for even greater abuses by future U.S. presidents.

[Traditional Saudi Arabian sword dance]

JS: Trump’s first foreign trip as head of state was to Saudi Arabia.

DJT: That’s beautiful.

Melania Trump: Beautiful.

DJT: That’s so beautiful.

Unknown Speaker: This is the war dance.

DJT: I can see that.

JS: And who could forget that strange ceremony around the glowing orb that celebrated the marriage between Trump and the Saudi Royals?

Donald Trump stood in a sea of tyrants, thugs, and dictators including the Saudi king, who believes that beheading people is an appropriate punishment for a nation-state to administer, and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the dictator of Egypt. Trump’s trip actually started with a speech celebrating a deal that he signed with the Saudis to purchase $110 billion worth of weapons from the United States. That’s despite the Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks and the Saudi campaign to support radical extremism across the globe.

DJT: This landmark agreement includes the announcement of a $110 billion Saudi-funded defense purchase. And we will be sure to help our Saudi friends to get a good deal from our great American defense companies, the greatest anywhere in the world.

JS: Much of that military aid to the Saudis would go to facilitating the scorched earth bombing of Yemen. That U.S.-sponsored war started under President Obama and it was the product of decades of bipartisan U.S. support for the Saudi regime. Although the Obama administration took some action in its closing time in power to reduce support for the Saudi bombings, the fact remained that the war in Yemen was, for years, overwhelmingly fueled by Washington with the backing of both U.S. political parties. An investigation by CNN last year found that Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have overwhelmingly depended on U.S. weapons for their murderous campaign in Yemen.

As’ad AbuKhalil: These tyrants have been sponsored and coddled by successive Western governments, from the socialist government of France to Jimmy Carter, the human rights president, all the way to Obama, and now Trump.

JS: As’ad AbuKhalil is professor of political science at the University of California-Stanislaus. He said that while Trump is more overt about his relationships with despots, it is a mistake to focus on that at the expense of historical context and the multi-decade continuity of U.S. policy.

As’ad AbuKhalil: When Trump was elected, many of my students in the international relations class were asking about what direction foreign policy will take under Trump. And I’ve always emphasized to them, which is that when you’re speaking about an empire, the ability of one man — be him Trump or Obama or anybody else — to make changes in the foreign policy direction of that empire is extremely small. They can only make stylistic changes here and there.

Newscaster: A year after the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman continues to deny ordering the hit. But in a new interview with Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes…

JS: Only after the brutal murder of Wahington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consul in Turkey and Trump’s refusal to acknowledge or condemn the role of the Saudi government or Mohammed bin Salman directly, did a popular mobilization against Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen gain momentum in the U.S. Congress. Not even U.S. intelligence reports on official Saudi involvement with 9/11 or the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from the Kingdom could crack the U.S.-Saudi alliance. Nor could the horrendous genocidal war the Saudis waged in Yemen with support from both the Obama and Trump administrations. Again, Sen. Chris Murphy:

Chris Murphy: I make a very tough argument, but I think it’s a fair one: that every single death inside Yemen today has a U.S. imprint on it. And when I talk to Yemenis — as I remind my colleagues all the time — they tell me that inside Yemen, this is not seen as a Saudi bombing campaign. This is seen as a U.S.-Saudi bombing campaign. And so the long-term effect of this is that we are radicalizing potentially millions of Yemenis against the United States.

JS: That it took the high-profile butchering of a U.S. resident and Washington Post journalist inside a Saudi diplomatic facility to spur actual congressional action was a clear indication of how entrenched the support for the Saudis had been for decades.

Rula Jebreal: America cares about human rights violations only when they perceive the enemy commits them. But allies, allies can commit whatever they want.

JS: Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal was a friend of Khashoggi.

RJ: Our relationship with Saudi Arabia — the addiction to cheap oil, and to contracts of military hardware, to Washington lobbyists, legal and financial services, petrol dollar that the Saudis are showering on America — we are addicted to that. We’re addicted. America is addicted to their money. And they bought consensus. They bought impunity — total impunity — to go and murder and chopped whoever they. They’re behaving exactly like ISIS. How is different, what ISIS is doing in Raqqa and what this Mohammed bin Salman has orchestrated in the consulate in Istanbul? It’s not different. It’s the same thing.

JS: The effort to cut the Saudis off was spearheaded in the House by Rep. Ro Khanna of California. He’s a Democrat who had long advocated ending U.S. military sales and support for the Saudi regime. Prior to Khashoggi’s murder, powerful Democrats like Pelosi’s top deputy Steny Hoyer were joining Republicans in trying to stop Khanna and his allies. After the murder, it became an untenable position for most Democrats and a surprising number of Republicans. Here is Rep. Khanna:

Ro Khanna: I don’t think the Saudis’ human rights record or their record in military conflicts are consistent with our values. I don’t think that we should be engaged in interventionism in the Middle East. I guess my view is we should have a policy of first, doing no harm. As you know arming Saddam Hussein to check Iran ended up hurting us. Our overthrow of Mossadegh back in ‘53 ended up hurting us. Our arming the Mujahideen ended up hurting us. So, we have this record of interventionism that has not made us any safer. And I view our pragmatic, or expedient, alliance with Saudi Arabia in the same way.

JS: In the end, legislation to cut off some military sales to Saudi Arabia passed the Senate in March of 2019. Donald Trump rejected it.

Newsy: President Donald Trump has vetoed three congressional resolutions to block the administration’s controversial weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In messages to the Senate on Wednesday, Trump said he vetoed the bipartisan bills because they would weaken America’s global competitiveness and damage the important relationships we share with our allies and our partners. He also said…

JS: Trump has remained a defiant, close ally of Mohammed Bin Salman, as has his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Newscaster: We have breaking news in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul back in October. Well, according to the New York Times, White House adviser and son-in-law of the president, Jared Kushner, offered advice to Mohammed bin Salman about how the Saudi prince could weather the storm after international condemnation of the Khashoggi death. Now, this week, the CIA director…

JS: Of all of the characters to serve in Trump’s administration, perhaps Jared Kushner was the one most unqualified and ill-equipped for the jobs he was given. It’s definitely stiff competition. But Trump put Kushner — a real estate developer born into wealth — in charge of the entire peace process between Israel and Palestine.

DJT: I love deals. And I used to hear the toughest of all deals is peace with Israel and the Palestinians. They say that’s the toughest of all deals. But if Jared Kushner can’t do it, it can’t be done. Thank you, Jared.

JS: To be blunt, there is almost nothing Donald Trump could have done regarding Israel that would have brought condemnation from powerful Democrats. Many of them celebrated Trump moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem because it was a long-term bipartisan project.

George W. Bush: As soon as I take office, I will begin the process of moving the United States ambassador to the city Israel has chosen as its capital.

Barack Obama: I continue to say that Jerusalem will be the capital of Israel and I have said that before and I will say it again.

DJT: Last month, I also took an action, endorsed unanimously by the U.S. Senate just months before. I recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

JS: As Israel continued to expand settlements and massacre Palestinians with impunity throughout Trump’s presidency, both Republicans and Democrats continued to blame the Palestinians for their own deaths at the hands of the US-backed Israeli military.

CBC News: Soldiers opened fire, killing more than 50 Palestinians, including eight children. [Siren] About 2,500 Palestinians were wounded, according to their health authority — half reportedly by live fire. It was the highest one-day death toll since protests began six weeks ago and, indeed, since the 2014 Gaza war.

JS: While the Trump White House did announce what it called a major peace deal between Israel and some Gulf monarchies in 2020, it did not involve the Palestinians. Instead, what Trump called a deal was essentially a business conference with crooked Gulf monarchies who share the U.S. and Israeli hate for Iran.

Jared Kushner: I think what you’re seeing is a new Middle East that’s being formed. And President Trump, again, he laid out his vision for it on his first foreign trip in Riyadh. We’ve executed that vision ever since. And I think that you have leaders that are tired of the way things have been done. Quite frankly, also, we put out our vision for peace — you saw the Palestinian leadership reject it before it even came out, before they knew what was in it. So, people are getting a little tired with the tactics played by the Palestinian leaders. They want to help the Palestinian people but they’re not going to allow them to hold back the national interests of all these different countries.

Wolf Blitzer: Are you having any conversations at all with the Palestinians.

JS: For all of the discussion of foreign collusion these past three-plus years, the open collusion with Israel was never portrayed as a major scandal, despite the Trump Tower meetings and the unending deference to Benjamin Netanyahu. Remember, some of Mike Flynn’s much-discussed calls with the Russian ambassador were part of a major push to try to get Russia to do Israel’s bidding.

Ali Abunimah: All of this got reported in, you know, the mainstream U.S. media, what I call regime media, and that includes MSNBC, you know, very breathlessly as more evidence of collusion with, between the Trump people and the Russians.

JS: Palestinian writer and analyst Ali Abunimah:

AA: In fact, what the Flynn plea deal showed and what the proffer and the documents that were filed in federal court showed, was not Flynn’s collusion with Russia in order to serve Russian interests, but rather an attempt to serve Israeli interests.

And, in short, what happened: Benjamin Netanyahu asked Jared Kushner to do everything possible to undermine the Obama administration’s policy. This was during the transition, so Obama was still president but the Trump transition team was asked by Netanyahu to contact all these governments, including Russia, to try to sabotage the vote that was taking place in the U.N. in December 2016, condemning Israel’s settlements in occupied Palestinian land.

The effort failed. The vote passed. The Obama administration abstained. But what was actually happening was the Trump team was colluding with a foreign power to undermine U.S. policy, but that foreign power was Israel, not Russia.

JS: For her part, Nancy Pelosi has always made clear that commitment to Israel goes beyond partisanship, even under Donald Trump, as she did in 2019 at a conference organized by the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC:

Nancy Pelosi: Israel and America are connected now and forever. We will never allow anyone to make Israel a wedge issue. That pledge is proudly honored in this Congress, where support for Israel remains ironclad and bipartisan.

DJT: Yes, I agree, the rhetoric was unbelievably harsh at the beginning. But we have a very good relationship. We were going to war with North Korea. That was what was going to happen. And then we fell in love, OK? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters and they’re great letters. We fell in love. But you know what? Now, they’ll say, “Donald Trump said they fell in love. How horrible! How horrible is that? So unpresidential.”

JS: One of the most revealing aspects of how Donald Trump’s national security policies unfolded was watching the reaction from establishment politicians and pundits. When Trump seemed to want to move away from belligerence — as in the case of North Korea — he was derided as naive and dangerous.

Amy Klobuchar: He keeps having these summits and meetings that really don’t produce anything. There’s been a number of them now and this time, you know, you just can’t look at this as going over and talking to your dictator next door and bringing them a hot dish over the fence.

Julian Castro: I’m not quite sure why this president is so bent on elevating the profile of a dictator like Kim Jong Un when Kim Jong Un has not lived up to his promise from the first summit.

JS: Journalist Allan Nairn said that the goading of Trump on North Korea, particularly from Democrats, was not only dangerous but ultimately undermined the potential security benefits of ending the Korean War — not just for the people of Korea but for the people of the U.S. and the world.

Allan Nairn: The U.S. system, for decades upon decades, has been evil in its willingness to kill civilians for political purposes, otherwise known as terrorism. But now here you have Trump with that unique personality being willing to cast aside various principles of the old establishment. So, he’s willing to say to the North Koreans: Yeah, we’ll end the Korean War.

How many Americans know that the Korean War is not over yet? I mean, of course, it’s a reasonable concession to say: Yeah, we’ll end the Korean War. Obama would never have considered it. Bush Jr. would never have considered it. These things are out of bounds. He’s willing to contemplate these things all to seize the photo op, all for the glorification of his own ego. It’s nuts in terms of the motivation, but it’s actually the right thing to do if you’re interested in averting a nuclear holocaust, if you’re interested in peace on the Korean peninsula. And what is the reaction of many of the Democrats and liberals? It’s grudging. It’s nitpicking. It’s rejecting it. It’s saying, “Oh no, you can’t do that, you can’t do this.” You can’t be partisan about these things. If the monster stumbles into something good, say, “OK, that’s a good thing.” It doesn’t automatically become a bad thing just because the monster did it.

It’s totally unnecessary for the Democrats and liberals to take that position, but they are. And it’s yet another example of how their approach is inadvertently strengthening Trump and the radical rightist Republicans, and creating even more peril for the working people of this country and for the entire world who are being devastated by this regime.

JS: While Trump would be attacked by establishment politicians for any apparent moves toward resolving war, when he’d act aggressively, the punditocracy often rewarded him with praise. It started with Trump’s first State of the Union address when he engaged in that bizarre pseudo-religious memorial to the Navy SEAL killed in the Yemen raid while the SEAL’s widow received sustained applause.

DJT: We are blessed to be joined tonight by Carryn Owens, the widow of U.S. Navy Special Operator, Senior Chief William Ryan Owens. Ryan died as he lived, a warrior and a hero, battling against terrorism and securing our nation. [Applause] And Ryan is looking down right now, you know that. And he’s very happy because I think he just broke a record.

JS: This is how Van Jones, the liberal commentator and former Obama administration official, reacted to that speech on CNN:

Van Jones: He became president of the United States in that moment. Period. There are a lot of people who have a lot of reason to be frustrated with him, to be fearful of him, to be mad at him. But that was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics. Period.

JS: But while Trump received praise from liberals for his militarism, there was scant mention of how disastrous that Yemen raid actually was and the fact that it resulted in the slaughter of civilians, including children. Journalist Iona Craig visited the scene of the raid for The Intercept and I spoke to her soon after.

JS: Let’s remind people. This was the raid that Donald Trump authorized when he was having dinner with, you know, the rabid right-wing character, Steve Bannon, his son-in-law Jared Kushner as well. And he’s, you know, chomping on his Trump steaks, and is like, “Oh yeah, let’s green-light this on the ground commando raid inside of Yemen.” So this thing happens. What did local people tell you?

Iona Craig: Well, they were totally confused when this first happened. It happened, obviously, in the middle of the night. As we know, they chose a deliberately moonless night, so it was dark. And because of the war, they’d been fighting the Houthi-Saleh forces in that area since the end of 2014. They assumed their village was being raided by the Houthi-Saleh forces. So every man with a gun within hearing distance of a gunshot, or then later, the helicopters that joined in, came in to defend the village, totally unaware that it was Americans they were going up against. And so, what happened was, you’ve got a predominantly civilian population in a very remote village on the side of a mountain in Yemen, and the Navy SEALS got pinned down. And when they got pinned down, of course, they called in air support, and they strafed the entire village. So you had women and children quite literally running for their lives, who were then gunned down by helicopter gunship fire. You had airstrikes and drone strikes being carried out.

JS: This January, after Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranian cultural heritage sites if Iran retaliated to the assassination of Gen. Suleimani, former Democratic presidential candidate and retired U.S. General Wesley Clark praised Trump.

S.E. Cupp: President Trump just tweeted warning Iran that the United States has identified 52 Iranian sites and, “will be hit very fast and very hard if Iran retaliates.” What’s your reaction to that?

Wesley Clark: It’s probably a good statement by the president. I mean, I think, I think the administration understands that there’s a serious risk of consequences here.

JS: Comments like these from prominent Democratic foreign policy elites put a fine point on a hard truth: Despite the claims of Trump’s exceptional nature, throughout his time in office he would carry out the very types of military policies his predecessors championed.

John Roberts: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear…

Barack Obama: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear…

JS: When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he did so after a campaign in which he promised hope and change. He pledged to reverse course on the Bush/Cheney borderless wars, close Guantanamo and end excessive secrecy.

Barack Obama: We all know what Iraq has cost us abroad. But these last few years we’ve seen an unacceptable abuse of power at home. We face real threats. Any president needs the latitude to confront them swiftly and surely. But we’ve paid a heavy price for having a president whose priority is expanding his own power. The Constitution is treated like a nuisance. Matters of war and peace are used as political tools to bludgeon the other side. We get subjected to endless spin to keep our troops at war, but we don’t get to see the flag-draped coffins of our heroes coming home. We get secret task forces, secret budgeting, slanted intelligence, and the shameful smearing of people who speak out against the president’s policies.

JS: But upon taking office, Obama developed strategies to undermine meaningful oversight. He refused to hold CIA officers and other officials who ran torture programs and secret prisons to account, perhaps the best way to ensure that such actions never happen again.

Barack Obama: And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices, and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backward. And part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the CIA you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.

George Stephanopoulos: So no 9/11 commission with independent subpoena power?

Barack Obama: We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on: How do we make sure that moving forward, we are doing the right thing?

JS: Not a single CIA officer was charged for their role in the kidnap and torture program during Obama’s presidency. Under President Obama, the CIA even spied on senate investigations into the CIA torture program and consistently stifled efforts at oversight and accountability.

John Brennan: As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s, that’s — that’s just beyond the scope of reason.

Bob Orr: But the CIA’s own inspector general determined the Agency did spy on senate investigators.

JS: Aside from his refusal to hold anyone accountable for the Bush/Cheney abuses and crimes, Obama’s embrace of executive power was most dramatic with his targeted assassination program. Obama authorized thousands of drone strikes across the globe, from Yemen to Somalia to Afghanistan and beyond. He also developed a secretive process for placing people on kill lists, including American citizens. They had regular meetings to determine who would die on any given day.

Barack Obama: I would argue we’ve gotten it about right, although I’m the first one to admit that we didn’t get it all right on day one. There were times where, for example, with respect to drones, that I had to kind of stop the system for a second and say, “You know what? We’re getting too comfortable with our ability to take kinetic strikes around the world without having enough process to avoid, consistently, the kinds of civilian casualties that can end up actually hurting us in the war against radicalization.”

JS: Despite some internal rules and so-called guardrails that Obama implemented toward the end of his administration, none of them were laws or written in stone. And he left office with the precedent of utilizing a deadly and dangerous parallel, secret judicial system.

Barack Obama: I had a chance to talk to President-elect Trump last night — about 3:30 in the morning I think it was — to congratulate him on winning the election and I had a chance to invite him to come to the White House tomorrow to talk about making sure that there is a successful transition between our presidencies. Now, it is not secret that the president-elect and I have some pretty significant differences. But remember, eight years ago, President Bush and I had some pretty significant differences. But President Bush’s team could not have been more professional or more gracious in making sure we had a smooth transition so that we could hit the ground running.

JS: Much like Obama railed against the excesses of the Bush/Cheney era on the campaign trail, Donald Trump consistently blasted the “deep state,” accusing the CIA, FBI, and eventually the Obama administration of spying on him and seeking to organize a coup.

ABC News: We begin tonight with that breaking news: President Trump’s striking allegations against former President Barack Obama. President Trump, in a Twitter tirade, accusing the former president of spying on him at Trump Tower by wiretapping phones, but offering no evidence or even what prompted those allegations.

JS: Trump regularly lambasted the intelligence community over leaks regarding the investigation into allegations of Russian aid to his campaign in the 2016 election. He even gave a speech just days before he was sworn in as president in which he compared the CIA to Nazis.

DJT: I think it was disgraceful — disgraceful — that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake-out. I think it’s a disgrace. And I say that, and I say that. And that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do. I think it’s a disgrace.

JS: But once in office, Trump would give the CIA wide latitude and he placed Gina Haspel, a longtime officer who was a key player in building and operating the post-9/11 torture program, in charge of the agency.

DJT: Our enemies will take note. Gina is tough. She is strong. And when it comes to defending America, Gina will never ever back down. I know her. I spent a lot of time with Gina.

JS: Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean told me that the combination of aggressive, pro-torture figures at the helm of CIA combined with Trump’s lack of desire for oversight was a dangerous cocktail that would mostly benefit the Agency.

John Dean: People are opening drawers and pulling out plans that they thought they’d never be able to do anything with, and now they’ve got a chief executive in the White House that really doesn’t have a clue what’s going on in the executive branch, and they’re likely to do anything. We’ve seen the lack of caliber of people that Trump has put in the top jobs, leaving so many vacancies in so many departments and agencies. That’s theoretically the management team that watches.

JS: Trump’s national security team has had a rolling cast of characters, plagued by firings, resignations, and scandals. As Trump’s first term comes to a close, almost all of the people who pundits assured us would be the “adults in the room” are gone. But there are some indications that Trump did, at times, push back against the militarism of figures like John Bolton and Gen. James Mattis. Rep. Ro Khanna, who introduced legislation to stop war with Iran said he was most concerned with a scenario where the most hawkish figures in the Trump orbit would prevail.

Ro Khanna: I in fact think the president’s instincts of not getting us into war are better than his advisers when it comes to Bolton and Pompeo. That’s not a high bar. But I think his interest is not in getting us into another war.

Mike Pompeo: President Trump has done everything he can to avoid war. We don’t want war. We’ve done what we can to deter this.

RK: What I worry about is that he has people in his administration who are trying to create the conditions that could lead to an escalation, that could lead to a conflict that spirals out of control and that, in some sense, forces the president’s hand. I think that’s exactly their strategy, to push the envelope as far as they can, knowing that this president campaigned on and doesn’t want to get into another war in the Middle East.

JS: But that would remain a point of contention for Trump and the war hawks in his administration. Investigative journalist and military historian Gareth Porter described Gen. Mattis’s departure in late 2018.

Gareth Porter: Mattis along with the other key people in the Pentagon, Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wanted to keep troops in Syria. And that was the cause of this clash which led to a split that finally caused Mattis to decide to resign. I think that the Pentagon is committed to a long-term strategy of having as many military permanent or semi-permanent military bases in the greater Middle East as possible. Trump wanted out. The Pentagon was unwilling to entertain that and it was a matter of — a very unusual case where Mattis was ready to resign. I think that there’s no other case quite like it in history.

JS: While there has been a tendency in the mass media to express horror at some of Trump’s belligerence and militarism, many Democrats have consistently voted to give Trump massive military budgets and sweeping surveillance powers even as they warn he is a dangerous and crazed tyrant.

Adam Schiff: That makes him dangerous to us. To our country. And you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump.

JS: In late 2019, more than 180 House Democrats voted with their Republican colleagues in favor of a $738 billion military spending bill. That represented a $22 billion increase for the Pentagon in 2020. It also stripped out amendments to stop fueling the war in Yemen. Democrat Ro Khanna was one of only 48 lawmakers to vote against it.

Ro Khanna: I rise in strong opposition to this defense authorization. There are many things that you can call the bill but it’s Orwellian to call it progressive. Let’s speak in facts.

JS: Journalist Allan Nairn argued that on matters of war, the differences between Trump and his predecessors has largely been tactical.

Allan Nairn: The Trump people say, go in, invade wherever you want, but do it absolutely without restraint, with no rules, no limits on how many civilians you can kill. One of the big criticisms from the Trump types was that during the Obama administration, you know, to stage an operation, you had to go through lawyers at the National Security Council who had to sign off. And that was actually true. There was a process of sorting and monitoring, and certain operations, certain bombing runs or drone runs or special forces actions or whatever could be vetoed if they exceeded the permitted — there was a permitted number of civilian casualties, but if they went over that, lawyers could actually veto them. And that’s kind of been the establishment approach in recent years. The Bush Jr. White House also did that.

When Trump came in, he said “Screw that, throw all the rules out the window. When you go in, you the Pentagon and CIA people on the ground, you have the authority to kill as many people as you feel you need to, as many people as you want. Go ahead, but get it over with quickly. Get it over with quickly and then let’s try to get out.” So it’s one, go in without restraint, kill as many as you want, but get it over with quickly. That’s the Trumper approach.

JS: In terms of Donald Trump’s military pursuits, he has proven less murderous than George W. Bush and more of a war criminal than Jimmy Carter. So far. That could certainly change with a second term.

DJT: They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening, beyond a normal statement. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Thank you.

JS: Perhaps the gravest threat posed by Trump’s presidency is that of the use of a first-strike nuclear weapon. It has never been beyond the pale to imagine an apocalyptic scenario that begins with a tweet from a foreign leader Trump hates.

Daniel Ellsberg: Right now, Trump is making threats of nuclear weapons, which is not a first with him. All of our presidents actually have used our nuclear weapons the way you use a gun when you point it at someone’s head in an encounter. And if you get your way without pulling the trigger, it’s the best use of the gun, that’s why people have them a lot.

JS: Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg published a book in late 2017. It revealed for the first time additional documents he had obtained that laid out U.S. nuclear war strategy. It was called “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” In an interview, Ellsberg placed the nuclear threat under Trump in historical context.

Daniel Ellsberg: Really what he says about it is not very new. When he says they should always be on the table, I would never —

DJT: I would never take any of my cards off the table.

Chris Matthews: How about Europe? We won’t use them in Europe?

DJT: I’m not going to take it off the table.

CM: You might use it in Europe?

DJT: No, I don’t think so, but  —

CM: How about just say it, “I would never use a nuclear weapon in Europe.”

DJT: I, I am not taking cards off the table. I’m not going to use nukes…

DE: That’s what every president has said. Of course, Trump is worrisome because he seems so erratic, impulsive, thin-skinned. I’m not sure that he’s crazier than a number of other presidents. In fact, to tell the truth, I have come to believe that he’s not crazy, he’s just an asshole, and that he’s catering to that in a certain segment of the population who admires him for precisely that.

I think that Trump’s apparent look of craziness has attracted people’s attention to dangers that really were always there, and the system that he has command of, all together, the strategic system which he is rebuilding at the cost over thirty years of more than a trillion dollars, a program that was, after all, launched under Barack Obama and he’s continuing it and claims to be even increasing it — if that were actually set into motion, not just rhetorically and by making the kind of use he is making now of pointing the gun but actually pulling the trigger, that would kill nearly everyone on earth.

Now, no one person, whether it’s Trump or anyone else, should have that power, and strictly speaking — very literally speaking — no nation should have that power.

JS: Donald Trump has been a militaristic president who has presided over the killing of civilians and has proudly celebrated — at times exonerated — war criminals. His reckless public threats and open coddling of dictators and thugs is no doubt disturbing. But to pretend that Trump is some presidential anomaly in U.S. war-making history is simply not true. The U.S. is the only nation on earth to use a nuclear weapon, and it did it twice. It has waged wars that have killed millions of civilians across the world, backed genocidal death squads, and armed and funded ruthless human rights abusers and murderers. It has engaged in coups and regime change the world over. It has assassinated its own citizens, run secret prisons, and tortured detainees. These haven’t been Democratic or Republican policies. They have been the American way for a long time. And that has also been true under Donald Trump.

This has been part four of an Intercepted limited documentary series, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump. Over the past few days, we’ve been releasing an episode each weekday focusing on a different aspect of the Trump presidency and digging into the history and context of the actions of this administration. Make sure to tune in tomorrow to part five of this series, where we’ll be taking an in-depth look at Donald Trump’s policies on the federal judiciary and the U.S. Supreme Court.

American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump is an Intercepted limited documentary series. You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Lucie Kroening. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Make sure to tell your friends and even your foes about this series and tune in for episode five tomorrow. Until then, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The post Part Four: “You Think Our Country’s So Innocent?” appeared first on The Intercept.

On the campaign and as president, Donald Trump has worked hard to resurrect the George Wallace strand of U.S. politics: He has consistently used racist and bigoted language to accompany his policy onslaughts. In part three of our limited audio documentary series “American Mythology,” we examine the ways Trump has used racialized fearmongering and incitement in both word and deed, from his Muslim ban to his denigration of immigrants to his attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump has openly encouraged police to act extrajudicially, brutally, and with impunity, while simultaneously emboldening violent white nationalists and militias. He has even defended a young man accused of shooting and killing BLM protesters. As he campaigns for reelection, Trump is hedging on many of his 2016 tactics but now is backed by the extraordinary power of the executive branch. The Justice Department, virtually privatized by Trump, appears to be coordinating its official functions with his reelection effort. Trump is intensifying his voter disenfranchisement operation, and he has threatened to remain in office regardless of the election results. We dig deep into Trump, race, and the wars at home.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill coming to you from New York City, and this is part three of an Intercepted special, “American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump.”

It is a widely known fact, but it bears repeating: The last “job” that Donald Trump held before becoming president of the United States was television reality show host. 

Donald Trump in “The Apprentice”: — Master the art of the deal and it turned the name “Trump” into the highest quality brand. And as the master, I want to pass along my knowledge to somebody else. I’m looking for: the apprentice.

JS: In 2005, “The Apprentice” was entering its fourth season. Viewership had been on the decline, and Trump, seeking to boost ratings, engineered a plan. It was simple. For the fourth season he’d set one team, made up entirely of white people, against another team, made up entirely of Black people.

Trump explained it to Howard Stern.

DJT: It would be nine Blacks against nine whites, all highly-educated, very smart, strong, beautiful people, right? 

Howard Stern: Yes.

DJT: Do you like it?

HS: Yes.

DJT: Do you like it, Robin?

Robin Quivers: Well, I think you’re going to have a riot after the show.

JS: Now, to their credit, the executives at NBC never greenlit Trump’s white versus Black reality show fantasy. This little-known episode is just one in decades of Trump’s overtly racist, anti-Black, attention-seeking career. From calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, to sparking a crazy right-wing troll operation dedicated to claiming that Barack Obama was not really an American, Trump’s racism and clear targeting of Black people has been publicly documented, his views on race clear as day.

DJT: They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

DJT: I want surveillance of certain mosques, OK? If that’s OK. I want surveillance.

JS: Donald Trump is, and has been, a racist his entire professional life. 

DJT: I think today that a well-educated Black person, male or female, has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white person. 

DJT: Of course I hate these people. And let’s all hate these people. Because maybe hate is what we need if we’re going to get something done.

DJT: They don’t look like Indians to me. And they don’t look like the Indians — now maybe we say politically correct or not politically correct — they don’t look like Indians to me.

JS: On a practical level, Donald Trump’s real political career began with his promotion of Birtherism, the racist conspiracy theory to delegitimize the first Black president, Barack Obama. Trump engaged in numerous publicity stunts in his Pink Panther-esque campaign to prove Obama was actually a Kenyan Muslim who was not really born in Hawaii.

DJT: Look, he was born Barry Soteros. Somewhere along the line he changed his name. I heard he had terrible marks and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway. 

DJT: Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? I think he’s probably —

Meredith Vieira: Why should he have to?

DJT: Because I have to and everybody else has to.

DJT: Three weeks ago, when I started, I thought he was probably born in this country. And now I really have a much bigger doubt than I did before.

MV: But based on what?

DJT: And you know what? His grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth, OK?

DJT: Today I’m very proud of myself because I’ve accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish. I was just informed while on the helicopter that our president has finally released a birth certificate. I am really honored, frankly, to have played such a big role.

DJT: Hillary Clinton [laughter] and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean.

JS: When Trump officially launched his presidential campaign, he told the world exactly who he believed America’s internal enemies were and what he would do as president. And the most public and open white supremacists celebrated accordingly.

Richard Spencer: Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!

JS: After Trump’s election as president of the United States, white nationalist groups, militias, and everyday racist Americans felt emboldened to act out in the open, and with more impunity. 

Trump supporter: Fuck political correctness. Fuck political correctness.

Trump supporter: Build the wall! Build the wall!

Trump supporter: Send them bastards back. I’m sure that paperwork comes in Spanish.

Trump supporter: Ignorance and immigrants, they mix together! Woo-hoo!

Trump supporter: If you don’t speak English and don’t contribute, get out!

JS: Hate crimes spiked and anti-immigrant rhetoric led to scattered attacks in the United States against minority groups — one gunman massacred 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

Police dispatch: Three, one, five. Hold the perimeter. We’re under fire. We’re under fire. He’s got an automatic weapon. He’s firing at us in front of the synagogue.

JS: While Trump and right-wing media attacked migrants as “invaders.” 

DJT: It’s an invasion!

DJT: Onslaught. This invasion.

DJT: It is an invasion, you know that. I say invasion, they say, ‘Isn’t that terrible?’ I don’t know what these people are thinking.

DJT: We’re talking about an invasion of our country.

DJT: No nation can allow its borders to be overrun. And that’s an invasion. I don’t care what they say. I don’t care what the fake media says. That’s an invasion of our country. 

JS: Back in 2018, novelist and comic book writer Mat Johnson explained on Intercepted how Trump’s election impacted his own family.

Mat Johnson: Like, this election has resulted in, in the last six months both my daughters have been called niggers at school. Right? One by a kid wearing a Trump hat. So, like, my life is directly affected by that.

My wife who was wearing a head wrap, she’s African-American and like a lot of African-American women, takes a lot of pride in her hair and getting the right products and everything else, and she was wearing a head wrap to go buy some products and was followed out to her car by somebody asking her about, you know, “Why are you wearing that?” And other white people stood around and watched — like nobody stepped in or anything. Like, my life has been affected by this. A lot of people’s lives have been affected by this.

JS: Trump’s narrative about the Obama era was often fired off as a buckshot with an array of fallacy-laced pellets. Obama was corrupt. He was not a real American. He depleted the U.S. military. Obama wanted to take away the guns of white people while offering support for so-called Black Identity Extremists. Trump also frequently used Obama’s home city of Chicago in his speeches as a catch-all placeholder for attacking Black Americans as violent criminals who needed to be put in their place. 

DJT: And you look at what’s going on in Chicago. What the hell is going on in Chicago? What the hell is happening there? 

DJT: It’s embarrassing to us as a nation. All over the world they’re talking about Chicago. Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison. 

DJT: It’s not even conceivable. That’s worse than Afghanistan. I hate to say it. That’s worse than any warzone that we’re in.

JS: Chicago-born educator and author Eve Ewing saw this rhetoric from Trump about her city as him preparing the battlefield for justifying state-sanctioned violence wrapped in the cloak of restoring law and order. 

Eve Ewing: It’s very convenient to use Chicago as a symbol that is really for many people kind of like an effective dog whistle. It frightens people. It’s used in the service of the same kind of rhetoric that we heard in past presidential administrations with things like, you know, “welfare queens” and “crack babies.” Right? These are racialized images that are meant to inspire fear and loathing in the hearts of Americans and to make them feel as though there’s justification for any kind of extreme crackdown, right, that might happen afterwards. It has nothing to do with an actual desire to help or care for, uplift or support or nurture or even listen to people who actually live here.

JS: This year, the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis ignited a new and revolutionary chapter in the Black Lives Matter movement. Sustained protests over the summer may have culminated in the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, with millions of Americans taking to the streets across the country, from major cities, to rural towns. 

Protesters: Don’t shoot!

Protester: Hands up!

Protesters: Don’t shoot!

Protester: Hands up!

Protesters: Don’t shoot!

JS: Trump has used his massive online platform and the office of the presidency to make the situation as incendiary and violent as possible. 

DJT: Every night we’re going to get tougher and tougher. And at some point there’s going to be retribution because there has to be. These people are vandals but they’re agitators, but they’re really — they’re terrorists, in a sense.

DJT: Because these are professional agitators. These are professional anarchists. These are people that hate our country.

DJT: These are not acts of peaceful protest but really domestic terror.

DJT: These are not acts of peaceful protest. These are acts of domestic terror.

JS: Instead of recognizing the validity of what so many activists and ordinary citizens have been saying about the state of racial injustice in this country — Trump’s done what he’s always done. He appealed to so-called real Americans with the language of hate, violence, threats, and historical revisionism.

DJT: The radical left wants to tear down everything in its way and in its place they want power for themselves. They want power. They want to uproot and demolish every American value. They want to wipe away every trace of religion from national life. They want to indoctrinate our children, defund our police, abolish the suburbs, incite riots and leave every city at the mercy of the radical left. That’s not going to happen. That’s not going to happen. It’s been hell for suburbia.

JS: Indigenous historian Nick Estes explained how Trump’s approach to these protests fit squarely in the long racist history of colonialism and the United States:

Nick Estes: Trump, he’s invoking this kind of idea of lawlessness that has been unleashed by Black-led resistance all over the country, and now internationally, to make this argument that the very core, the very idea of America “as we know it,” right, is under attack.

DJT: First of all, we have arrested, I think almost — but it could be over the number — hundreds of people. We have arrested a lot of people for what they’ve done. They’ve created bedlam. They’ve destroyed very important things. I mean you’re also talking about statues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln…

NE: And if there’s any lesson that we can learn from colonialism, it involves three things: God, gold, and glory. Right? The soft underbelly of this entire project has always been glory. The idea that this nation is built on an exceptional, kind of unique history, right? The city on the hill kind of thesis that came out of the pilgrim mythology. And so in this moment, Trump is trying to essentially rewrite history and to say that there are winners and there are losers, right? And it’s a very kind of facile reading of history and I don’t think that the advocates that are calling for the tearing down of these monuments or the, you know, even the replacement in some instances, are saying that we should reduce the history of racism, of imperialism to just the Civil War, but that it’s a very complicated history, especially when you factor in something like settler colonialism. And so, in this instance, he’s saying, you know, “our history,” deep ignorance of “our history,” and whose history is that?

DJT: We have to cherish our past. We have to cherish good or bad. We have to understand our past. We have to understand our history because if we don’t know our history, it could all happen again. Have to know our history.

JS: Trump’s reelection campaign has now placed the notion of a civil war, a race war, law and order versus socialism at the forefront. He is hedging on many of his 2016 tactics again, but now with the extraordinary power of the executive branch, the ability to send executive orders out like tweets, and a virtually privatized justice department that appears to be coordinating its official functions with his reelection campaign.

DJT: And I say this openly. Bill Barr can go down as the greatest attorney general in the history of our country or he can go down as just another guy. It depends. They have all the stuff. You don’t need anything else. You know they want everything. You don’t need anything else. They all lied to Congress. They were liars. They were cheaters. They were treasonous. There was treason.

Laura Ingraham: But Bill Barr, you’re saying, has to prosecute all of these individuals to be a great attorney general? I mean, he’s one of the most talented attorney generals —

JS: Trump has regularly encouraged brutality and extrajudicial action among police and law enforcement agencies and he appears to have the tacit, if not open, support of many hyper-militarized police forces. This dangerous reality has come into sharp focus over the past several months of rebellion and protest.

DJT: There has to be retribution when you have crime like this. There can’t be guys standing up that want to fight — they want to fight. You can’t throw bricks at people with shields on.

JS: While the Trump administration has sought to consolidate authority over government bureaucracies for the president’s political — and at times personal agenda — it has simultaneously encouraged actions from private actors and fringe paramilitary groups. 

DJT: You’re going to have a backlash like you’ve never seen if these people don’t stop. Because you have very smart, very tough people that aren’t going to take it anymore. And once they say, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore,’ it’s going to end in a very vicious backlash. And that’s a terrible —

JS: Over these four years, these unofficial White House forces have been at the center of racial violence acting as vigilantes responding to the dog whistles of their commander. Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. saw Trump’s rise as a victorious revival of the George Wallace strand of U.S. politics. 

Eddie Glaude, Jr.: That particular strand of politics has become mainstream. The fringe, you know, those white identity nationalists who are living in the mountains in Washington and in western Pennsylvania, right? They’re now at the heart, at the center of the political party that has control over the country.

And to my mind that is surprising, in the sense that I grew up in a moment in which, you know, racial code words, dog whistles with, kind of, political lexicon. Now it’s just foghorns. People don’t dog whistle. They just say it and activate all sorts of fears. And you combine that with the fact that the contradictions of neoliberalism are in full view. 

JS: Even as the Department of Homeland security identifies white supremacist violence as the greatest domestic terrorism threat in the United States, Donald Trump extols the right-wing extremism that has blossomed under his tenure, and that uses the spectre of violence to undermine and at times violently attack, in some cases to kill, his perceived enemies.

DJT: We have people that are very angry. You start seeing them — the trucks come in and the this comes in and that. All of a sudden you’re going to see a backlash the likes of which you haven’t seen in many, many years. Because people aren’t going to take it. You know, a lot of people, this is all a left movement, not a right movement. A lot of people on the right are sitting home watching a television set looking at Kenosha and looking at Chicago where they shoot people and kill people by the dozens every week. It’s not even believable. But they say, they look at it and they say, I’m not going to allow that to happen in my country. 

JS: In his first debate with Joe Biden, Trump staked out an openly fascistic position, refusing to bluntly condemn neo-nazis and white supremacists. Instead, Trump called on them to effectively sit tight and wait for his orders.

Chris Wallace: Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups

DJT: Sure.

CW: And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.

DJT: Sure. I’m willing to do that.

Joe Biden: Do it!

DJT: I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not from the right-wing.

CW: So what are you saying?

DJT: I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace.

CW: Well then do it, sir.

JB: Say it. Do it. Say it.

DJT: You want to call them — what do you want to call them? Give me a name. Give me a name.

CW: White supremacists.

JB: Proud Boys.

CW: White supremacists and right-wing militias.

DJT: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing —

JS: Trump has railed against self-identified anti-fascists. He has presided over kidnappings and even killings of activists, including a Portland man who was gunned down by U.S. Marshals deployed by Trump. The president appears to be celebrating that operation as a political assassination of a U.S. citizen on American soil.

DJT: Now we sent in the U.S. Marshals for the killer, the man that killed the young man in the street. Just shot him. I mean, it was on television. Just cold-blooded killed him. He didn’t like his hat, or he didn’t like something, and it wasn’t a Trump hat. 

Sean Hannity: Right. This peaceful prayer —

DJT: It was a religious hat. And he shot him cold blood. Two and a half days went by, and I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him. And in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal. And the U.S. Marshals killed him.

JS: Racial opportunism in presidential politics is certainly not unique to Donald Trump. It has been deployed by Democrats and Republicans alike throughout U.S. history. And it was used effectively by people now denouncing Trump, among them Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the so-called New Democrats, all of whom have used racialized propaganda and attacks to appear tough on crime. 

Joe Biden: And madame president, we have predators on our streets, that society has, in fact, in part because of its neglect, created.

JS: George H.W. Bush pushing his infamous Willie Horton ad. 

Narrator: Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.

JS: It was also a favorite tactic of Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan: She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, social security, veterans benefits for four non-existent, deceased veterans husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year. 

JS: In many ways, Donald Trump is a more open, craven expression of what the GOP has long thought and stood for. He is using some of the same tactics deployed by politicians from both parties — but he’s doing it with the opposite of subtlety and on a daily basis. Here’s The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer:

Adam Serwer: When you look back to Reconstruction after the Civil War, the white majority governments that took power from the Reconstruction governments often violently, in some cases more blatantly, violently than others — in some cases, it was simply repressing the vote, in other cases it was actually overthrowing the government — these guys were all saying that they were crusading against corruption. They were saying that the Reconstruction governments were taking taxpayer money and stealing it and spending it on things they shouldn’t have been spending it on. And this was just a necessary corrective to fatally corrupt governments. But that in itself was also not a justification for authoritarian rule.

Often those things go hand in hand. That is, a false anti-corruption crusade that justifies the kind of ethnic hegemony is something that in the past in American history has functioned very well to extinguish democracy as we understand how it should work. Here it has specifically worked with the ideology of white supremacy and so it’s not a coincidence that Trump is both extremely corrupt and rails against corruption and pairs that with his kind of white populism because that’s how he makes himself look incorruptible to his followers. It is precisely that commitment to his group, regardless of all other principles, that makes people feel as though he is incorruptible even though he is fundamentally corrupt in the most basic sense.

DJT: The Democrats’ brazen attempt to overthrow our government will produce a backlash at the ballot box the likes of which they have never ever seen before in the history of this country.

JS: The Trump administration has been packed with certain political figures that should have never been allowed back into public office. One of them is Trump’s former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. While his tenure as the AG was a short one, his appointment sent a clear message. Sessions is a man who, in 1986, was considered too racist for even a federal judge appointment. Decades later, thanks to Trump, Sessions found himself — almost gleefully — in a position to rescind voting rights protections, establish capital punishment for drug crimes, and curb Obama-era reforms of the unprecedented paramilitarization of state and local law enforcement agencies across this country.

Jeff Sessions: The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office. I know this, you know this.

Jeremy Scahill: And then, of course, there’s Stephen Miller, architect of some of the most heinous and racist immigration rhetoric and policies coming out of this administration. Miller emerged as one of the most vicious proponents against asylum seekers. Well-known for his extremist anti-immigrant ideology, once Miller was in the White House as a senior adviser, his policies ranged from attempting to flat out ban immigration from Muslim majority countries to separating children from their parents in ICE detention jails. 

Stephen Miller: The whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned. At stake is the question of whether or not the United States remains a sovereign country.

JS: Backed by men like Jeff Sessions, and Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s base of extremist supporters and white nationalists have been repeatedly encouraged by the president over these four years. 

DJT: I think there’s blame on both sides. You look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides and I have no doubt about it and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And if you reported it accurately you would say.

Press: Neo-nazis started this thing.

Press: — killed a person. Heather Heyer died.

Press: They showed up in Charlottesville to protest the removal of that statue.

DJT: And you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people — on both sides. You had people in that group — excuse me. Excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

JS: Trump’s defense of white supremacist violence feels like a demarcation line in his presidency. If there had ever been any doubt, white supremacists now knew they had an ally in the White House.

David Duke: This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back. We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we’ve got to do.

JS: For many Americans, the ascension of Donald Trump in the wake of the country’s first Black president was inexplicable. Many people looked outward to explain away his victory, while others sought to place blame on specific quarters of the U.S. electorate for what they perceived as a total aberration. 

Eve Ewing: During the Trump campaign and then right after he was elected, there was a lot of justifiable and understandable fear, hand-wringing, and shock, especially from corners of liberal, white America where people thought, basically, this was a referendum that made them realize that the America that they thought they lived in does not exist. Or this election constituted a transformational, historical event that somehow gave permission or highlighted new forms of racism or new forms of xenophobia.

JS: Again, author Eve Ewing. 

Eve Ewing: In no way do I want to undercut what I do think have been some of the uniquely awful aspects of this administration, but I also think it’s important for folks to remember that this is not like the man in a laboratory conjuring up these racist people like Frankensteins, who had never existed — you know, Frankenstein monsters that never existed. Rather it is him giving a voice and a platform for an energy behind white supremacy and hatred that has a long history in America and that actually, in my opinion, constitutes the very fabric of the nation.

And so I think that that’s important to realize, because it makes you understand that in order to conquer or change or transform the kind of hatred and vile evil that we’re seeing right now, it’s not just about these particular voters, it’s not just about this particular election, but we have to be brave enough to confront and understand a history that is much deeper.

JS: Despite bipartisan criticism of Trump’s response to Charlottesville, Trump spent the entirety of his term unabashedly spewing racist statements and attacking people of color.

News Anchor: The White House is denying claims that President Trump said in a June meeting that all immigrants from Haiti have AIDS. Trump said immigrants from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts.”

News Anchor 2: Saying Puerto Ricans want everything to be done for them.

News Anchor 3: The president has decided to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona.

DJT: They say get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!

News Anchor 4: He apparently said, this is a quote: “Why are we having all these people from shit-hole countries come here?”

DJT: You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK?

DJT: If you’re not happy here, then you can leave. As far as I’m concerned, if you hate our country, you’re not happy here, you can leave.

DJT: Omar has a history of launching vicious, anti-semitic screeds. 

Crowd: Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!

DJT: Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.

DJT: The Chinese virus. Kung-flu. 

DJT: I think I’ve done more for the Black community then any other president.

News Anchor 5: The White House press secretary also defending the president after he approvingly retweeted this video of one of his supporters.

Video: White power! White power!

DJT: I am the least racist person you’ve ever met.

DJT: And I can tell you I’m the least racist person there is in the world. 

DJT: Because I am the least racist person ever to serve in office, OK?

DJT: I am certainly the least racist person.

News Anchor 6: Are you racist?

DJT: I am the least racist person that you have ever met. I am the least racist person. 

DJT: As I say often, I am the least racist person that anybody’s going to meet.

DJT: I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world?

News Anchor 7: Are you a racist?

DJT: Absolutely not. I’m the least racist person that you’ve ever met.

JS: Underneath this naked hatred, something more insidious has been cultivated. Trump’s extreme nativist rhetoric inspired actual right-wing terrorism, and the chickens came home to roost.

Jake Tapper: And we’re back with the breaking news. You’re looking at new video showing the suspect. Cesar Sayoc holding a sign that says “CNN sucks” as well as a lot of other nonsense in there. He’s at a Trump rally in February, the 56 year-old Florida resident. And today was arrested and charged with sending a series of explosive devices — 13 IEDs — to prominent critics of President Trump this week.

Anchor 2: The White House is pushing back against accusations that President Trump’s rhetoric encourages white supremacists like the man accused in the New Zealand mass shootings. The manifesto purportedly written by the suspect calls the president a symbol of renewed white identity. 

DJT: I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand perhaps that’s a case. I don’t know.

Anchor 3: Twenty minutes, 11 dead, six injured. This time the attack was at a temple in Pittsburgh. It’s the deadliest attack on Jewish American in U.S. history. 

CNN Anchor: Do you welcome the president to Pittsburgh in the wake of this?

Lynnette Lederman: I do not welcome this president to my city. 

CNN: Why not?

LL: Because he’s the purveyor of hate-speech. 

Anchor 4: Tonight law enforcement officials telling ABC News that before the chaos broke out…

[Ambiance] Run, mi hija, run.

Anchor: that they believe the suspect had been looking for a good place to target and shoot Mexicans.

Beto O’Rourke: He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. I don’t know. Like, members of the press, what the [bleep]! Connect the dots about what he’s been doing in this country. He’s not tolerating racism, he is promoting racism.

DJT: And if your state was ever allowed to safely reopen by your governor who doesn’t have a clue — she’s like Joe. Open up your state, madam governor. Open up your state.

Anchor 5: The breaking news out of Michigan as state and federal investigators say they’ve broken up this elaborate domestic terror plot designed to overthrow Michigan’s government and kidnap or kill Governor Gretchen Whitmer while she was away on vacation.

Protesters: No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!

Protester: Say his name!

Protesters: George Floyd!

Protester: Say his name!

Protesters: George Floyd!

Protester: Say his name!

Protesters: George Floyd!

JS: This summer saw a historic watershed moment in the fight against anti-blackness and for racial justice in America. The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and other Black and brown men and women sparked what many activists themselves describe as an uprising in defense of Black Lives and against a racist police state. 

Protesters: No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!

JS: Protests soon spread from Minneapolis to every single state in the union, and a wave of confederate monuments around the country were defiantly torn down.

News 4: It has fallen. There it is. Let’s go. Breaking news here on News 4. We were right here. They have taken down the Confederate statue of Albert Pike.

JS: Though the overwhelming majority of protests were nonviolent, property damage and looting occurred in cities nationwide. Emboldened by these images, governors activated over 62,000 national guardsmen. Trump ratcheted up a pressure campaign against governors and mayors, criticizing them for not attacking protesters with enough force and he even threatened to send in the U.S. military.

Anchor: Twitter, rather, has flagged a post by the president saying that it violates the platform’s rules about violence.

Anchor 2: The president says, “These thugs are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control. But when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

JS: As Trump characterized the protests as “massive violent mobs,” scores of incidents of police brutality were reported in cities across the country and were often caught blatantly on camera. 

[Ambience police violence.]

Protesters: Leave him alone! Leave him alone!

Police: Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here. Get out of here, go!

JS: By the end of June, more than 14,000 people had been arrested. 

This focus on property destruction ultimately played into Trump’s racial rhetoric and gave sustenance to his campaign to portray himself as the noble defender of “real America” from the anarchists, terrorists and socialists. 

DJT: We are looking at long-term jail sentences for these vandals and these hoodlums and these anarchists and agitators and call them whatever you want. Some people don’t like that language but that’s what they are.

JS: While Trump certainly exploited the destruction of property during protests in various cities for political gain, that’s not the whole story. There’s a long tradition of property destruction during moments of intense public upheaval and protest, particularly after assassinations of Black leaders, police killings and beatings of Black people and, famously in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, in response to the acquittals of police who abuse or kill Black people with impunity. 

Archive: Western and Santa Monica and you can see the police have just arrived at this intersection and are just now trying to take control of it — LAPD officers arriving on the scene. Fire department fighting one fire. There’s a neighboring fire that is raging uncontrolled. 

Anchor: Utter anarchy in the streets of Los Angeles tonight. It’s just getting worse and worse by the hour.

JS: At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests earlier this year, the esteemed UCLA Historian Robin D.G. Kelley addressed this history and sought to give context to the destruction of property during times of rebellion.

Robin Kelley: So if you think of capitalism as racial capitalism, then the outcome is you cannot eliminate capitalism, overthrow it, without the complete destruction of white supremacy. You know, when we talk about the police and we talk about, like, defunding the police, if you think about what the police do, the police protect capital. The police were designed to protect property going back to, not just the slave patrols, but even the system of jails in cities in the 19th century. Those jails were designed to hold fugitives, runaways. When you’re trying to track down a runaway slave you pay a jail a fee to hold that enslaved person until the master could come, identify the person, and take them back into slavery. So when you think about the whole system of policing, it’s organized around property. If that’s the point of the police, then we shouldn’t be surprised that qualified immunity or that the violent acts of the police would be supported by capital. Why is that? Because capital needs a police force that could terrify people. That’s what the police do. 

[Police brutality ambience.]

JS: Trump has used his attacks on the Black Lives Matter protests and antifa as a distraction from his colossally incompetent and cold-hearted response to the Covid-19 pandemic, a crisis that has disproportionately impacted Black and Latino people, as well as the poor and working classes. It was this tactic that set the stage for Trump’s garish and disturbing nativist carnival in South Dakota earlier this year. At a Fourth of July speech at the foot of Mt. Rushmore, Trump sought to delegitimize the Black Lives Matter protests as being anarchist or Marxist ploys against America, while simultaneously defending Confederate symbols of white domination.

DJT: Make no mistake. This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol and memory of our national heritage. That is why I am deploying federal law enforcement to protect our monuments, arrest the rioters and prosecute offenders to the fullest extent of the law.

JS: As Trump spoke at Mt. Rushmore, Indigenous people and native tribes protested his appearance on what they consider to be stolen land. And they also did so in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives. 

[Ambience Indigenous protest.]

DJT: We have to cherish our past. We have to cherish good or bad. We have to understand our past. We have to understand our history. Because if we don’t know our history it could all happen again. Have to know our history.

Nick Estes: When somebody like Trump says, you know, “We’re here to protect our national monuments,” he’s been invoking the language of heritage, which is kind of like a dog whistle for the “it’s heritage, not hate” kind of speak around the Confederate monuments as well as the Confederate battle flag. 

JS: Native American historian Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

NE: He’s not including Indigenous people in this particular rhetoric because our monuments, our history as Indigenous people, is under constant erasure. And to reduce the kind of struggles over monuments, over how we know and how we write history in this particular moment, to just the idea of Confederate monuments or, you know, Union monuments, completely ignores the larger kind of context of U.S. history. And it attempts to sanitize it, between: Oh, we have good colonizers and we have bad colonizers.

JS: As protests continued, Trump summoned the threat of violence under the guise of “law and order,” not only through the power of the state, but once again through thinly veiled appeals to his supporters to act on their own. 

DJT: If Biden wins, the mob wins. If Biden wins, the rioters, anarchists, arsonists and flag burners…

DJT: And if they win, Sleepy Joe, if they win — because he has no power over these people. These people are crazed lunatics. If they win, your cities will be like this. You’ll lose all rights. Your Constitution will be worthless. It’ll be a terrible, terrible thing.

JS: Just like in Charlottesville, cars emerged as one of the preferred weapons of white supremacists. This summer, there were at least 104 incidents of people driving vehicles into protestors — 96 of those drivers were civilians, and eight were cops.

[Vehicle collision ambience, whistles.]

JS: Trump’s rhetoric once again manifested into real world violence. Armed militias took to the streets, looking to commit violence for Trump’s cause under the banner of “Making America Great Again.”

Protestor: This is America. This is our country. 

Protestor: That’s right.

Protestor: We’re taking it back.

JS: Historian Dr. Keisha Blain, author of “Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom,” explained the roots of this well-worn authoritarian strategy of using both official and unofficial forces to terrorize already victimized and vulnerable populations.

Keisha Blain: I think about the era of lynching and the reasons why we saw, in the late 19th century, even in the early 20th century, so many lynchings taking place across the country and one of the — you know, people would ask at the time, as we’re asking now about police violence, why are so many Black people being lynched? And one of the answers to that question is that so many Black people were being lynched because white racists were emboldened. They were emboldened by the state. They were emboldened by the support of local police. They recognized that they could do it and they could get away with it. And so the fear is in this moment — what will people do? What will white supremacists do when they recognize that their actions will not lead to any negative consequences? I do worry. 

And already there was one video that caught my attention of a group of white men, some carrying bats and just walking through the streets, emboldened and encouraged to go into the communities and squash the protests, you know, because they feel like Trump just gave them the green light.

Vigilantes in Philadelphia: A cop can’t defend himself, so we’re here. Anyone who wants to throw shit at a cop or pick on a cop, pick one of us the fuck out and we’ll go around the corner and fight, one on one.

KB: Today it’s bats and tomorrow it’s guns.

JS: By the end of August, an estimated 15 to 26 million Americans had participated in Black Lives Matter protests. On August 23, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a 29-year-old Black man named Jacob Blake was shot four times in the back by police as his three young children sat in the backseat of their car. 

Anchor: Tonight there’s growing outrage over this video showing at least two police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin with their guns drawn following 29-year-old Jacob Blake as he walks around the front of a gray SUV. We paused the video after he opens the door with his back to an officer. At least seven shots can be heard. 

[Gunshots.]

JS: Street protests soon followed with some demonstrators defacing police vehicles and the local courthouse. The National Guard was deployed and word began to spread that white supremacists were preparing to join them armed and in the streets.

Richie McGinniss: What are you doing out here? Obviously you’re armed and you’re in front of this business we saw burning last night. So what’s up?

Kyle Rittenhouse: So people are getting injured and our job is to protect this business. Part of my job is if there’s somebody hurt. I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle. It’s to protect myself.

JS: Like clockwork, armed counter protestors and militia members arrived in Kenosha with the sole ambition to confront the largely peaceful protestors. The local police were actually seen thanking these vigilantes and giving them water. 

Kenosha Police: Thank you for your cooperation. We understand what you’re doing. Thank you. If you need water. We appreciate you guys, we really do.

JS: On the third day of protests, a 17-year-old from Illinois named Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two protestors and wounded another. 

Kyle Rittenhouse: We’re protecting from the citizens. And I just got pepper sprayed by a person in the crowd. 

Interviewer: So you had non-lethal but you didn’t respond.

Kyle Rittenhouse: We don’t have non-lethal. 

Interviewer: So you guys are full-on ready to defend the property.

Kyle Rittenhouse: Yes, we are. Now, if I can ask, can you guys step…

Protester: We got a gun, baby. Oh!

[Gunshots.]

Protester: He shot him! [Bleep]

JS: Donald Trump defended Rittenhouse.

DJT: That was an interesting situation. You saw the same tape as I saw and he was trying to get away from them, I guess, it looks like. And he fell. And then they very violently attacked him and it was something that we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation. But I guess he was in very big trouble. He would have been — he probably would have been killed. But it’s under investigation.

JS: Like that Apprentice season that never aired, the stoking of racial animus, for Trump, has one primary function: to pay dividends to his agenda. But Trump is not the host of a reality show now. His words and deeds are deadly. His racism, emboldened by the power of the presidency, is lethal. Here is NYU professor Nikhil Pal Singh.

Nikhil Pal Singh: You remember his first, very first political act was taking out a full-page ad in The Daily News calling for the execution of five African-American boys who were wrongly accused, it turns out, of raping a white woman in Central Park. And Trump called for their death. He still, even in the revelations that have come since, never admitted that he was wrong. Trump is all of it, really. He’s the reactionary business ethic. He’s unilateral militarism. He’s hostile to a diverse demos, and he embraces the extractive mania of environmental deregulation. He represents, in some ways, all the worst aspects of our history. And they have all, in many ways, coalesced to all of our horror.

JS: And now, as the 2020 election looms ever closer, the Trump campaign, the GOP and the president himself are waging an open campaign to disenfranchise voters — particularly Black voters. 

Journalist Ari Berman, an election expert and author of the book “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” discussed these tactics.

Ari Berman: The first thing to understand is that Republicans were already engaged in a widespread effort to make it more difficult to vote because of the pandemic. They had already passed restrictions on voting in half the states in the country — in 25 states — ranging from requiring voter IDs, to cutting back on early voting, to closing polling places, to purging the voter rolls, to preventing people with past felony convictions from voting. So there are a whole series of restrictions they had already put in place before the pandemic, and now voting is just so much more difficult when people can’t safely leave their homes. And the country is really not prepared to hold anywhere close to an all-mail election.

JS: What Trump and William Barr have said in recent weeks about the upcoming election is absolutely chilling. Both are spouting blatant lies about widespread Democratic voter fraud.

DJT: This whole thing, I’ve been telling you, this whole ballot scam is going to cause a lot of problems for our country. I want to see a very peaceful transition but it’s got to be a legal process. 

William Barr: This is playing with fire. We’re a very closely divided country here. And if people have to have confidence in the results of the election and the legitimacy of the government, and people trying to change the rules to this methodology, which, as a matter of logic, is very open to fraud and coercion is reckless and dangerous. And people are playing with fire.

JS: Trump has called on his own supporters to just show up rogue at polling places on election day to monitor other voters, a clear call for acts of intimidation.

Chris Wallace: President Trump, you go first.

DJT: I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it. As you know today there was a big problem. In Philadelphia they went in to watch — they were called poll watchers, a very safe, a very nice thing — they were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia. Bad things. And I am urging, I am urging my people — I hope it’s going to be a fair election. If it’s a fair election —

CW: You’re urging them what?

DJT: I am a hundred percent on board. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that. 

CW: What does that mean, ‘not go along’? Does that mean you’re going to tell your people to take to the streets?

DJT: It means you have a fraudulent election. You’re sending out 80 million ballots.

CW: And what would you do about that?

DJT: They’re not equipped to — These people aren’t equipped to handle it, number one. Number two, they cheat. They cheat. 

Hey, they found ballots in a waste paper basket three days ago and they all had the name — military ballots, they were military — they all had the name Trump on them.

JS: It is abundantly clear that voter suppression, with all of its real and racist history in this country, it’s not going to be a concern for Donald Trump, it’s going to be an asset. As Ari Berman points out, William Barr, Donald Trump and others, they’ll be focused on how to intimidate, disenfranchise, and contest the results — plunging us all into assured chaos come November. 

Ari Berman: The biggest thing that I’m afraid about is a Bush v. Gore scenario not in one state, but in five or six states, and a Supreme Court declaring Donald Trump the winner of the next election, as opposed to the people actually deciding. 

JS: This has been Part 3 of an Intercepted limited documentary series, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump. 

Over the next week we are going to be releasing an episode each weekday focusing on a different aspect of the Trump presidency and digging into the history and context of the actions of this administration. Make sure to tune in on Monday to part four of this series where we’ll take an in-depth look at Donald Trump’s policies on war and national security.

American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump is an Intercepted limited documentary series. You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Lucie Kroening. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Make sure to tell your friends and even your foes about this series and tune in for episode four on Monday. Until then, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The post Part Three: The Neo-Confederate in Chief appeared first on The Intercept.

In the nearly four years that Trump has been in office, his administration has transformed U.S. immigration at a breakneck pace and governed with an overtly xenophobic posture toward immigrants. In episode two of our audio documentary series “American Mythology,” we chronicle the Trump administration’s war against immigrants from the southern border to the Muslim ban and beyond. Trump has already implemented more than 400 changes to immigration rules and regulations, changes that will impact millions of people. But to portray the extremism of this administration on immigration as an entirely radical departure from decades of policy under Democrats and Republicans is inaccurate. While Trump has wielded his signature cruelty in implementing new policy and has made some far-reaching changes, significant aspects of his policy are rooted in the agendas of his predecessors, from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Trump inherited an already punitive and authoritarian deportation machine constructed by both his Democratic and Republican predecessors and has taken it to new extremes. This episode offers an overview of what has changed and what has remained the same, featuring the voices of lawyers, immigrants, activists, journalists, and others who are on the front lines of the battle over immigrant rights.

Jeremy Scahill: I’m Jeremy Scahill coming to you from New York City, and this is part two of an Intercepted special, “American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Donald Trump: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

JS: Donald Trump ran for president on an often ad-libbed and reactionary campaign of hate, greed, xenophobia, misogyny, and racism. 

DJT: And when I said temporary ban on Muslims, I thought that was the end of my campaign. I didn’t care. I said we have to do something. We have to do something. And my numbers went through the roof. I didn’t know that. 

JS: Trump was the most famous so-called birther, staging publicity stunts purporting to prove that Barack Obama was not actually born in Hawaii, wasn’t a “real” American, and was possibly some sort of Muslim Manchurian Candidate.

DJT: I said, “There may be something on it.” And they asked me, “Like what?” I said, “Well, perhaps because he’s a Muslim, perhaps something.” I mean who knows what’s on it? I don’t know.  

JS: Trump clearly viewed the fact that a Black man had ascended to the presidency as an abomination and rightly assessed that there were a lot of racists who saw the eight years the Obamas spent living in the White House as a crime against the real, white America. 

DJT: I’m very honored to have gotten him to release his long-form birth certificate or whatever it may be. Now, many, many people have questions and very serious questions. I have a deal for the president, a deal that I don’t believe he can refuse and I hope he doesn’t. If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications and if he gives his passport applications and records —

JS: Back in 2016, Trump already had a brand, he realized early on the power of being an outsider in U.S. presidential elections, and he focused on some key economic issues, including trade, that would play well with people dissatisfied with the two party system’s regular offerings. 

DJT: Mexico is ripping off the United States big, big league. And we’d better do something. But jobs going to China, to Mexico, to Brazil. They’re going everywhere but here. And we’ve lost our manufacturing and we’ve lost our manufacturing base —

JS: But mostly, Trump focused on hate and xenophobia wrapped in the veneer of patriotism.

DJT: Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records ordered deported from our country are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens. [Crowd boos.] The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015.

JS: In the nearly four years that Trump has been in office, his administration has transformed U.S. immigration at breakneck pace. Within the first five days after his inauguration, Trump issued executive orders to build a wall at the southern border and to hire 10,000 additional immigration officers.

Protester: Is this the America that we believe in? 

Crowd: No. 

Protester: Is this liberty? 

Crowd: No.

Protesters at airport: Go home. Islamophobia has got to go.

Brandi Hitt: Airports have been flooded with protesters angry that the order —

JS: By his seventh day in power, Donald Trump issued an executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries.

DJT: I’m establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.

JS: Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, described the confusion and chaos that followed.

Vince Warren: So, we have a scenario where there are executive orders that say one thing. The heads of various administrations are saying another thing. Those are not getting passed down to the rank and file of the people who are responsible for enforcing. They’re not sure what to enforce and what not to. The federal judge says, “Don’t enforce anything.” Some of the agencies are still enforcing it, even though their leaders say that we shouldn’t.

This is the danger of leading by executive order because it’s created so much chaos. Everybody is very confused. And the people that are suffering are the poor people that are coming back to visit their relatives, that are trying to leave the country and don’t know if they’ll ever get back. And they’re put into handcuffs during these types of interrogations.

My assessment is, you know, the Center for Constitutional Rights has been around for 50 years, and for the last 15 we’ve been very deeply in the post-9/11 scenario. And we have been saying for a very long time under George Bush, under Barack Obama, and it’s the same thing under Donald Trump, is that it’s not just the person who is the president that is the ultimate problem — although we have a particularly problematic one these days — it’s the power of the presidency and the power of the executive branch that is the problem.

JS: By February 2017, the Trump administration issued memorandums to increase expedited removal proceedings, expand detention, and broaden who qualifies for priority deportation.

Journalist Aura Bogado described these significant changes in policy between administrations.

Aura Bogado: Under Trump, it is a big shift in policy, in that who is deemed a priority for detention and for deportation has changed. So ICE agents who were somewhat beholden to the Obama administration in the past have much more free reign under Trump. So now, anyone who’s not only been convicted, but done something for which they could be convicted, fall under the category of a person who’s detainable and deportable. And so that’s what we’re seeing now. 

You know, I would say that’s nothing short of a war on immigrants. You can be picked up in your home while you’re hanging out with your family. You can be picked up while leaving a church where you were staying to keep warm. You can be picked up in a hospital while you’re awaiting a life-saving operation for your brain tumor. So there is a shift in priority.

I can definitely critique the Obama administration, but in terms of the tone — and maybe the tone isn’t the correct focus or word here but in terms of the tone and, I think, the hatred, really, with which some of this is being thought out and implemented, is scary. This is different. This is very different.

JS: Around this time Jeff Sessions also assumed office as the U.S. Attorney General. 

Jeff Sessions: The program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama administration is being rescinded. I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry on our southwest border. If you cross the border unlawfully then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border then we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child may be separated from you as required by law.  

JS: Under the helm of Sessions, we witnessed even more inhumane policies, from rescinding DACA — a program that shielded about 700,000 young undocumented immigrants from deportation — to implementing the so-called zero tolerance policy. 

Under zero tolerance, the Department of Homeland Security began separating thousands of families. 

Lester Holt: Tonight these heartbreaking images from the southern border are sparking growing outrage. Thousands of migrant children being separated from their parents and now newly released audio, you could hear their desperation [child crying] —

JS: According to a report released last year from the Office of the Inspector General, “Without a reliable account of all family relationships, we could not validate the total number of separations, or reunifications.” After public backlash and a court order to stop the practice, the Trump administration initially admitted to separating more than 2,700 children from their parents. But then, under order from the judge, the administration further revealed more children had been taken from their guardians. According to the ACLU the administration has separated more than 4,200 families. But the true number remains unknown and the administration has found loopholes to continue the inhumane practice. 

The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux said border patrol agents are given a lot of discretion. 

Ryan Devereaux: I spoke to a veteran child care provider who has worked on these issues for 40 years whose organization contracts with ORR, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which takes in a lot of these young people. And she said this is something that she’s been seeing and something that she’s been concerned about. The Border Patrol agents on the ground seem to have a lot of leeway in terms of deciding what happens to the families that they separate. She described the case of a little boy whose father was taken from him, handcuffed in front of him, terrified the kid because he’s running from a country where people with badges and guns and uniforms really are the bad guys. And she said, as far as she can tell, what happened in this situation is that they grabbed the kid, grabbed the dad and they just decided, No, he doesn’t have a credible asylum claim and they quickly moved him out of the country. 

I mean, we’re seeing a lot of that. The government is deporting parents before these organizations that weren’t consulted before this was implemented even have a chance to start the process of reunification. So there’s parents gone in countries, there are kids — I mean, little kids, I’m talking about a six-year-old blind girl separated from her mother, preverbal kids, nonverbal kids, indigenous kids — who suddenly are on their own track, legally, within the system, who are completely overwhelmed and terrified. And they’re basically being asked to navigate their own case as their parents disappear.

JS: From the beginning, Trump’s approach to upending immigration in the country has been met with legal challenges, including on DACA and family separation. While those challenges wind their way through the courts, the Trump administration has also developed a sophisticated strategy of implementing interlocking changes that will be difficult to undo. They will last for years — and administrations — to come. 

Recent analysis from the Migration Policy Institute finds that the administration has adopted more than 400 changes to immigration rules and regulations. They’re using every tool available, from changing language in employee manuals to executive orders and proclamations. These changes are as vast as empowering officers to limit the period visas are valid to ICE and CBP training Guatemalan security forces in immigration enforcement.

Journalist Juan Gonzalez has written several books dealing with the history of US immigration policy. 

Juan Gonzalez: The fascist trend represented by Trump wants to totally reverse immigration policy to, instead of saying, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free — give me your best educated people, who have the most money, who can essentially buy their way into the United States, either as a graduate student working for Silicon Valley.”

They want family reunification out, because that would only allow the already existing working-class migrants who have already become legalized to bring more of their relatives. They want to end that. They want to bring in a whole different type of migration into the United States, and I suspect also increasingly make it a whiter migration.

JS: Trump has been able to leverage the existing immigration enforcement system to push harsh policies that not only aim to deter, but to systematically subject people to uncertainty and cruelty. Policies that stem back to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that have accelerated ever since. Trump has built upon the systems created and implemented by his predecessors. 

Bill Clinton: For example, I’ve asked the attorney general to increase those elements of our border patrol strategy that are proving most effective, including the use of helicopters, night-scopes, and all-terrain vehicles. I’ve asked the members of the cabinet to create, for the first time, a national detention and removal plan to dramatically increase the identification and removal of deportable illegal aliens. 

JS: Trump’s cruel policies have been constructed on the foundation laid by President Bill Clinton, who ushered in a new era of border militarization.

Bill Clinton: One of the cornerstones of our fight against illegal immigration is been a “get tough” policy at our borders. We initiated Operation Hold the Line at El Paso. Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego. Operation Safeguard in Arizona. All with one clear intention to secure the southwest border. 

JS: The stated goal was to fortify the border and close off the easiest places for migrants to cross. The massive Clinton-era undertaking increased border patrol personnel and the use of infrared body heat sensors and other surveillance technology. It also saw the construction of miles of fencing.

Clinton laid the groundwork for what we have in place today and ultimately for Trump’s much-hyped border wall dreams.

This “prevention through deterrence” effort did not address reasons people may be fleeing to the U.S.-Mexico border or sway people from coming. Rather it forced people to make more dangerous journeys. According to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection — CBP —more than 7,000 people died trying to cross the border in remote locations between the years 1998 and 2017. And those are just the official statistics. Other reporting and advocacy groups say the number is much higher.

Here’s Ryan Devereaux.

Ryan Devereaux: I look at this situation as sort of, as a continuation of a long historical trajectory of immigration enforcement in this country that’s sort of been passed down through multiple generations. You can go back to the Clinton administration. In the mid-90s, a bunch of Border Patrol chiefs and planners within the Pentagon got together and they drew up a plan for how to do enforcement on the border — it was called “prevention through deterrence.” The idea was you would funnel migration flows out of the border city areas and into more remote regions where enforcement would be easier. And that kind of has been the guiding strategy for the last two decades.

George W. Bush: Tonight I’m calling on Congress to provide funding for dramatic improvements in manpower and technology at the border. By the end of 2008 we’ll increase the number of border patrol officers by an additional 6,000. When these new agents are deployed we’ll have more than doubled the size of the Border Patrol during my presidency. At the same time, we’re launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history. We will construct high tech fences in urban corridors and build new patrol roads and barriers in rural areas.

JS: Trump has also utilized and expanded the architecture of repressive agencies created under George W. Bush. Among these—the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, better known as ICE. 

George W. Bush: Right after the September 11 attacks, I established the Office of Homeland Security in the White House and gave it a critical mission to produce a national strategy for homeland security. And today, I’m sending to Congress our new national strategy for homeland security. This comprehensive plan lays out clear lines of authority and clear responsibilities — responsibilities for federal employees, and for governors, mayors, community business leaders, and the American citizens. With a better picture of those responsibilities all of us can direct money and manpower to meet them.  

JS: In 2005, under Bush, CBP also rolled out the “Consequence Delivery System,” which increased the use of “formal removals” more commonly known as deportations. In other words, no longer were people apprehended by immigration enforcement agents allowed to voluntarily return. Instead people now faced higher consequences, including criminal prosecution and prison, if they returned. 

George W. Bush: This practice called “catch and release” is unacceptable, and we will end it. We’re taking several important steps to meet this goal. We’ve expanded the number of beds in our detention facilities and we will continue to add more. We’ve expedited the legal process to cut the average deportation time.  

JS: Under Bush, more than two million people were formally deported. Under Clinton, the number was roughly 800,000. During Obama’s two terms in office the number of deportations would soar to more than three million. These statistics earned Obama the moniker “Deporter-in-Chief” from immigration rights advocates and activists.

Barack Obama: In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we’ve tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places. So we prioritized border security — putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history. Today there are fewer illegal crossings than at any time in the past 40 years. We focus and use discretion about whom to prosecute — focusing on criminals who  endanger our communities rather than students who are earning their education. And today deportation of criminals is up 80 percent. 

JS: Obama would continue to say his administration’s policy was focused on “felons, not families.” But the Marshall Project examined more than 300,000 deportations under Obama. And found that roughly 60 percent of people had no criminal conviction or whose only crime was immigration-related.

BO: The issue is not that people are evading our enforcement officials. The issue is that we’re appending them in large numbers. And we’re working to make sure we have sufficient facilities to detain, house, and process them, appropriately. 

JS: Trump inherited an already punitive and authoritarian deportation machine constructed by both his Democratic and Republican predecessors. In 2014, the Obama administration expanded the use of family detention to deter an increasing number of women and children arriving at the border, including unaccompanied minors.

BO: While we intend to do the right thing by these children, their parents need to know that this is an incredibly dangerous situation. And it is unlikely that their children will be able to stay. And I’ve asked parents across Central America not to put their children in harm’s way. 

JS: While under pressure from immigration rights advocates, Obama did introduce DACA, which was the first form of temporary relief for undocumented immigrants in decades. The Trump administration has steadily sought to undermine, if not eliminate, these minimal protections— leaving hundreds of thousands of Dreamers in limbo. 

Obama focused deportations on recently arrived migrants, and people with criminal records, and gave lower priority to individuals with established roots in the U.S. But Obama’s enforcement strategy set the initial stage for the Trump administration to turn his xenophobic rhetoric into policy. 

DJT: For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities. They’ve allowed millions of low-wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans. Most tragically they have caused the loss of many innocent lives. 

JS: By the time Trump entered office he inherited a massive immigration enforcement apparatus — a growing bureaucracy that he would build upon with the help of Congress. Since the implementation of “prevention through deterrence” in the 1990s, border patrol spending has increased from $363 million to more than $4 billion annually.

DJT: In the upcoming omnibus budget bill, Congress must fund the border wall and prohibit grants to sanctuary jurisdictions that threaten the security of our country and the people of our country. We must enforce our laws and protect our people.

JS: Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, ICE’s budget has grown from $3.3 billion to $8.4 billion. The number of immigration enforcement officers has also spiked over the decades, from around 4,000 border patrol agents in the 90s to more than 19,000 in 2019.

DJT: Most importantly, let me extend my gratitude to every law enforcement professional representing ICE and CBC [sic], Enforcement and Removal Operations, Homeland Security Investigations, ICE prosecutors, the Office of Field Operations, Air and Marine Operations, and Border Patrol…

JS: Trump has used this growing immigration apparatus to not only increase the powers of agents to target migrants at the border seeking refuge, but also undocumented immigrants in the U.S. who have long-standing ties in their communities, including children, homes, and businesses. His administration has also taken actions to decrease legal immigration while further narrowing humanitarian relief for refugees and asylum seekers.

In early September of this year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Trump administration’s termination of TPS, that’s Temporary Protected Status. The decision means that some 300,000 immigrants in the U.S. could be deported — people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan. People who came to the U.S. after experiencing civil unrest, violence, natural disasters, or other humanitarian crises. Under TPS, one qualifies for deferred deportation and the ability to legally work while remaining in the United States. Many people with TPS status have been in the U.S. for years, some of them decades, building a life here. Congress and past administrations have not rectified this to create pathways for TPS holders to apply for green cards or citizenship. Many of them say that going back to their country of origin is not safe or viable. 

That’s what Yanira Arias told us in 2018 when Trump announced ending TPS for Salvadorans.

Yanira Arias: The United States has a big responsibility in how — in the shape of El Salvador, currently.

The amount of money that the U.S. government sent to the government of El Salvador back in the ’70s and the ’80s did a lot of damage to the public infrastructure, to our economy. And over a million people migrated outside of El Salvador because of the war. Remember between 1985 and 1990, 334,000 Salvadorans migrated to the United States due to the war. A lot of the claims, the asylum claims of these over 300,000 people were denied. So, there was a big movement of immigrant advocates, including the American Baptist Church and others. Thanks to that work, George Bush granted the first TPS for the Salvadoran community. 

For me, the cancellation, the termination of TPS, it’s not just an economic impact for my family, but also knowing that El Salvador has the highest rate of violence in the hemisphere is not an option for me to say that the program is going to be cancelled and just go back.

JS: In addition to these policy changes, such as canceling TPS, Trump has — at times — unleashed violent paramilitary forces on asylum seekers to publicly drive home his agenda, as happened in 2019. 

NBC: What started as a peaceful march turned into chaos. U.S. authorities fired tear gas at mostly adult males but some of it hit women and children, including Maria Mesa, her escape captured in this dramatic photo. We caught up with her today. “When I see that photo I just want to cry,” she says, claiming that she wasn’t crossing the border illegally but trying to reach it to apply for asylum. More and more of these tents are springing up at the shelter. U.S. authorities are processing less than a hundred asylum applications a day. 

JS: Suyapa Portillo Villeda, a Pitzer College Professor of Chicano/Latino Transitional Studies, illustrates this assault on asylum.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda: Tear gassing unarmed women and children, youth, is just deplorable. It’s first of all, a violation of international rights under the Refugee Convention of 1961. People have a right to ask for asylum. This is not something that’s up for grabs. I think that we’ve seen sort of the ignorance of the Trump administration over, and over, and over. This is a big oversight. This is an international oversight. We are beholden to these international conventions, and we must allow and review these asylum policies at the very least, right? So, if people come to our borders and seek asylum, they have a right to do that. They have a right to do that in any country at any time.

[Reporters speaking to detainees.]

JS: As the humanitarian crisis on the border continued in 2019, Vice President Mike Pence visited two migrant detention centers in Texas. In the footage you can see Pence being given a tour, standing in front of a chain link fence holding in 400 men who are crammed inside. Reporters said there was no room to lie down, no mats or pillows, and what they called a “horrendous” stench.

Mike Pence: The facility here at McAllen is at the very center of the crisis on our southern border. And this facility here today, while it’s clean and sanitary, is doing their level best to deal with this unprecedented flow. 

JS: That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s rule that bars asylum seekers from traveling through another country to apply for asylum in the U.S. — effectively disqualifying Central American asylum seekers who do not apply for asylum in the home countries they are fleeing from. And then the COVID pandemic hit.

Joe Kernen: Have you been briefed by the CDC? 

DJT: I have. 

JK: Are they worried about a pandemic at this point? 

DJT: No, we’re not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person, coming in from China. And we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine. 

Tom Costello: The warning from the CDC: the coronavirus is spreading so quickly around the globe it may only be a matter of time before it begins rolling across the U.S. with the potential to become a pandemic. 

Lester Holt: Good evening everyone, tonight as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in this country climbs to over a million and deaths surpass American losses in the Vietnam war… 

JS: Almost from the beginning of the pandemic, the Trump administration has used Covid-19 as the pretext to further limit immigration. 

DJT: By pausing immigration, we’ll help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. So important. It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. 

JS: Trump has effectively ended asylum at the southern border and suspended new visas for immigrants and nonimmigrants. Despite federal laws requiring the U.S. to accept children at the border, under CDC orders, Customs and Border Protection turned away more than 2,000 unaccompanied child migrants between March and June of this year. Active-duty military personnel have also been sent to the U.S.-Mexico border to operate alongside the 5,000 troops already there as well as border agents. 

Stephen Miller: I will not take moral lectures from a party that endorses the slaughter of innocent Americans in sanctuary cities. I will not take moral lectures from a party that has zero empathy for the thousands of Americans killed by drugs, killed by criminals who have no right to be in our country because they oppose immigration and border control. 

JS: That’s Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller deploying his favorite tactics: fear mongering and spewing false statistics. Miller has long been called the architect behind Trump’s immigration policies — from the Muslim travel ban to family separation, and ending asylum. A top DHS official told the New Yorker that Miller “was obsessed with the idea of consequences.” Miller proposed ideas like sending migrants to Guantánamo Bay, enlisting the FBI in immigration raids, and getting ICE to pull children out of schools. The Southern Poverty Law Center published hundreds of emails from 2015 and 2016 between Miller and editors at the right-wing news site Breitbart. In one email Miller suggested deporting people on trains as a scare tactic. Now, the pandemic has given Miller and the administration a silver bullet to close borders and halt immigration into the U.S.

SM: This administration, for the first time in history, has taken action to restore immigration enforcement after five decades of bipartisan betrayal of the American worker.

JS: Stephen Miller and the Trump administration often frame their anti-immigration rhetoric around protecting American workers, claiming immigrants are depressing wages. However, there are conflicting studies on the effects immigration influxes have on wages. Decline in unionization, globalization, automation, and the erosion of workers’ rights and bargaining power have had a tremendous effect on wages, particularly for blue-collar jobs.

Also, from day one, according to analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, of 50 of the most egregious actions Trump has actually rolled back worker protections and rights. This includes preventing workers from earning overtime, attempting to take away workers health care, and stacking agencies and the Supreme Court with anti-worker appointees. The “America first” rhetoric and the attacks on immigrants, it’s really just a racist shield that enthralls Trump’s base by signaling that he will end immigration from non-white countries. 

DJT: 700 percent increase refugees coming from the most dangerous places in the world, including Yemen, Syria, and your favorite country, Somalia right? You love Somalia. [Audience boos] This guy loves Somalia. Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp, and he said that. Overwhelming public resources, overcrowding schools, and inundating your hospitals, you know that. It’s already there. It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to your state. It’s — it’s absolute — it’s a disgrace, OK?

JS: At this moment, tens of thousands of migrants — many who are asylum seekers — remain in ICE custody in jails, prisons, and detention centers across this country. This as the administration has already reversed the practice of releasing asylum seekers on parole to wait out their cases in the community. Instead, the administration has opted for detaining people and issuing blanket parole denials, leaving many to languish in carceral facilities indefinitely or until people give up their claims and self-deport.

DJT: We stopped asylum fraud and we’ve deported 20,000 gang members and over a half a million criminal, illegal aliens of the worst kind. We’re enforcing the clear requirement that newcomers to our country must be financially self-sufficient and not reliant on welfare. They have to sign a document.  

JS: The deadly coronavirus pandemic adds another layer of inhumanity. More than 6,000 people in ICE custody have tested positive for Covid-19 and a total of eight people have died as of this reporting.

Back in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited Intercepted before she was universally known as AOC. It was right as she was running to unseat longtime Democratic incumbent and Nancy Pelosi ally Rep. Joseph Crowley. And in that conversation she called for abolishing ICE. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: This is really about, in some ways, we need to go all the way back to the root of our immigration policy to begin with, which the very first immigration policy law passed in the United States was the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s. And so the very seed — bedrock — of U.S. immigration policy, the very beginning of it was a policy based on racial exclusion. And I think that we need to really reimagine our immigration policy based around two things: foreign policy and criminal justice, and additionally our economic goals as well. And we really kind of need, I think, to reimagine our immigration services as part of an economic engine, as part of an accommodation to our own foreign policy aims and, where necessary, enforcement of serious crimes like human trafficking and so on.

So abolishing ICE doesn’t mean, get rid of our immigration policy, but what it does mean is to get rid of the draconian enforcement that has happened since 2003 that routinely violates our civil rights, because, frankly, it was designed with that structure in mind.

JS: While the total number of people deported under Donald Trump has not reached levels recorded under Obama’s two terms in office, the anti-immigration policies this administration has adopted put millions of immigrants — documented and undocumented — living in the country at risk.

This has been part two of an Intercepted limited documentary series, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump. 

Over the next week we are going to be releasing an episode each weekday focusing on a different aspect of the Trump presidency and digging into the history and context of the actions of this administration. Make sure to tune in tomorrow to part three of this series where we’ll take an in-depth look at Donald Trump’s policies on race and the wars at home.

American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump is an Intercepted limited documentary series. You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Lucie Kroening. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Make sure to tell your friends and foes about this series and tune in for episode two tomorrow. Until then, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The post Part Two: Administration of Xenophobia appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump is often portrayed as an aberration of U.S. history, an outsider who seized power and is intent on destroying democracy as we know it. In the premiere episode of “American Mythology,” we examine the ways that Trump has proven to be a particularly dangerous autocrat who doesn’t believe in any semblance of a democratic process. But that story cannot be told without also exploring how various U.S. systems and the policies of Trump’s predecessors carved the way for many of his most dangerous actions. Featuring interviews with lawmakers, journalists, activists and dissidents, world renowned historians, and constitutional scholars and lawyers on the front lines of scores of battles against the Trump administration, this episode offers an overview of how the Republican Party has embraced Trump as a Trojan horse to ram through its most extreme — and long-standing — policy agendas. It also probes the role of Democratic Party leaders in facilitating some of Trump and the GOP’s most dangerous policies and lays out the stakes of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump is already calling illegitimate.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill coming to you from New York City and this is part one of an Intercepted special, “American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump.”

JS: Where does the story of the presidency of Donald Trump begin? 

Shepard Smith: Pennsylvania goes to Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

Bret Baier: In an Electoral College victory that virtually no one saw coming a year ago, a few months ago.

SS: A week ago.

BB: Even yesterday.

Joe Scarborough: A complete earthquake. This was an earthquake unlike any earthquake I’ve really seen since Ronald Reagan in 1980. It just came out of nowhere. Nobody expected — I mean —

JS: Technically, the Trump presidency began on a dreary, cold day, January 20, 2017, when Trump gave his infamous American Carnage speech in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Donald Trump: This American Carnage stops right here and stops right now. 

JS: But the story of this presidency doesn’t begin on that day or even with the 2016 campaign.

DJT: You know you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.

DJT: He’s a war hero ’cause he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you.

DJT: Uh, I don’t know what I said. Uh, I don’t remember!

DJT: Database is OK. And watch list is OK. And surveillance is OK. If you don’t mind, I want to be — I want to surveil — I want surveillance.

JS: The story does not begin with Trump’s offhand threats to run for president over the decades. 

Rona Barrett: If you lost your fortune today, what would you do tomorrow? 

DJT: Maybe I’d run for president. I don’t know.

DJT: Somebody has to help this country. And if they don’t, the country, and the world, are in big trouble.

Oprah Winfrey: This sounds like political, presidential talk to me. And I know people have talked to you about whether or not you want to run. Would you ever?

Larry King: Donald Trump, the multimillionaire real estate developer is sounding more like a politician these days than America’s most grandiose and controversial builder.

DJT: I just want to tell you —

David Letterman: You act like you’re running for something.

DJT: No.

DL: We’ll do a commercial. We’ll let him think some of these over and try and get…

JS: There is value to exploring the specifics of Donald J. Trump’s personal path to unprecedented power. There is no doubt that his journey to the White House, amidst claims of outside interference and aid, was an extraordinary achievement with far reaching implications. 

John Roberts: I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear.

DJT: I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear.

JR: That I will faithfully execute.

DJT: That I will faithfully execute.

JR: The office of President of the United States.

JS: Beyond his inflammatory rhetoric, his systematic lying and crude nature, Trump is most relevant to this story because of what he facilitated and the incredible opportunities he gave to some of the most radical right wing forces in U.S. politics, as Naomi Klein predicted in the early days of his administration. 

Naomi Klein: I think here’s a worrying message of kind of like, it’s so outrageous. The hypocrisies are so intense that obviously people are going to see this. You know, Trump ran as champion of the working man, and he’s going to stand up to the corruption and billionaires in Washington. And then just fills, you know, his administration with them. And there’s — like some people seem to be expecting that there’s going to be sort of a spontaneous revolt of Trump’s base. And what scares me is that as the economic facade falls away, the racism, the sort of weaponizing of race, and the weaponizing of gender becomes all the more important because that’s all they have to offer. The economic stuff was obviously a sham. But they’re going to feed that to their base to make sure they don’t lose them. What we need to understand is how misogyny and racism are used to advance this agenda.

Protesters: This is what a feminist looks like.

Lead protester: Tell me what a feminist looks like!

Protesters: This is what a feminist looks like.

JS: The policies the administration began fast tracking from the first moments in power had long been high on the wish list of the leaders of the Republican Party, and Trump — more than any of his predecessors — dared to shout the quiet parts out loud, broadcast them on Twitter, and proudly embrace them at virtually every opportunity. Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude Jr.:

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Think of this moment as the decline of the empire, that something is dying while something is trying to be born. Donald Trump represents an exaggerated version of the rot that’s at the heart of the country, that he’s a reflection of something that’s here. In some ways, all of the contradictions of a particular economic order, of the kind of exploitation of white fear, combined with a deepening sense of precarity made Trump possible.

JS: In assessing the Trump presidency, there are two significant tracks we will explore. First: The ways in which Trump is, in fact, a particularly dangerous autocrat who doesn’t believe in any semblance of a democratic process. And second: The ways in which various U.S. systems and the policies of Trump’s predecessors carved the way for many of his most dangerous actions. 

NYU Professor Nikhil Pal Singh argued early on in Trump’s presidency that understanding these dynamics was essential to confronting what was to come.

Nikhil Pal Singh: But the idea that sort of we somehow just kind of flipped a switch and got Trump in this kind of weird way that doesn’t try to think about a longer story that takes us through some of the failure of reckoning of the Obama years, and, of course, the pathway that the Iraq war put the country on. And even before the Iraq war, the pathway that the Clinton-era mass incarceration project put us on, you know, I think makes it really difficult for us to make sense of what’s happening right now and to make sense of the forces that Trump has been able to mobilize.

JS: You cannot separate the past from the present. How Trump is specifically dangerous is, in significant ways, a direct product of the system and nation that produced him. History and context matter. As journalist and writer Chris Hedges pointed out, Trump did not come as a surprise apparition in the night. 

Chris Hedges: We’ve personalized the problem in Trump without realizing that Trump is the product of a failed democracy. Trump is what rises up from the bowels of a decayed and degenerate system. And you can get rid of Trump, but you’re not going to get rid of what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called that “anomie” that propels societies to engage in deeply self-destructive behavior.

JS: Upon taking office, the Trump administration immediately dispensed with any great effort to make serious legal or moral arguments when issuing policy edicts. It was clear that Trump and his team intended to assert sweeping executive powers while at the same time ferociously subverting Congressional oversight. Not just on national security matters, but in virtually every tangible way. Employing this strategy, Trump has proven remarkably effective at ramming through an extremist agenda–one that had been developed for generations by powerful factions within the Republican party. 

Mitch McConnell: What we need is a president who, after getting sworn into the office, sworn in, goes into the Oval Office and starts undoing as many of these executive orders and regulations as he possibly can as rapidly as you can, thereby taking the foot off the break and putting it on the accelerator. That’s what the country needs.

JS: Yet, from the beginning of Trump’s presidential run, many establishment Republicans laughed at him, denounced him, and failed to take his prospects for winning the nomination of their party seriously.

Lindsey Graham: Well, I want to talk to the Trump supporters for a minute. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know why you like this guy. I think what you like about him, he appears to be strong when the rest of us are weak. He’s a very successful business man and he’s going to make everything great. He’s going to take all the problems of the world and put them in a box and make your life better. That’s what he’s selling. Here’s what you’re buying. He’s a race baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He’s the ISIL man of the year, by the way.

JS: Trump defeated the establishment elite of the Republican Party, from the dynasty candidate Jeb Bush, to popular Republican governors and senators.

DJT: The RNC told us we have all donors in the audience and the reason they’re not loving me — [audience boos.] The reason they’re not — Excuse me. The reason they’re not loving me is I don’t want their money. I’m going to do the right thing for the American public. I don’t want their money. I don’t need their money. And I’m the only one up here that can say that. Eminent domain, the keystone policy —

Allan Nairn: Trump was constantly denouncing the rigging of the system. His basic message was the system’s rigged. Our system is a killer system and it’s corrupt. All of which is true, except the rigging took place in the opposite direction, which he portrayed. But it’s uncomfortable for the establishment types to hear that, especially coming out of the mouth of their own candidate.

JS: Journalist Allan Nairn pointed out that Trump almost had to force the institutional Republican Party to recognize the incredible gift he would be giving them by seizing power.

AN: Trump dragged a rightist revolution into power. It’s the Paul Ryan agenda which could never have gotten elected in its own right because it’s anathema to most Americans. But Trump, with his genius for unleashing the beast in white America, touching these deep chords of racism, succeeded in turning a crucial number of previous white Obama voters into Trump voters, and this is a Republican Party that is one of the most radical mainstream political parties in all of American history, perhaps with the exception of the, you know, pro-secessionist Democrats at the time of the Civil War. 

And they’ve been in there, they’ve been implementing a rightist revolution, doing the massive transfer of wealth in part via the tax bill, but also an important part by systematically, agency by agency, trying to gut the constraints on large corporations and the oligarchs, regarding the environment, their treatment of labor, their ability to discriminate, their ability to commit fraud without fear of being sued by the public, increasing the rights of rich individuals to intervene in politics, decreasing the rights of collectives of working people to intervene in politics, like the Gorsuch-led Supreme Court decision. And, now, as the Republican Party has evolved to the most radical extreme, they happen to have control of Congress and the Supreme Court. 

And they’ve been going around rigging the system so that a diminishing minority can hold power and continue to govern, just as Trump was elected with a minority of the votes, they’re trying to set it up so that through a long list of tactics, including purging of voter rolls, voter suppression shortly before Election Day, gerrymandering, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, smaller and smaller numbers of people can win elections and retain power.

JS: It is probable that none of the GOP’s preferred or even more establishment candidates could have beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016. Clinton won the popular vote by three million ballots and narrowly lost a handful of states tipping the Electoral College in Trump’s favor. So sure were Democrats, media pundits — and even top Clinton campaign operatives — of Clinton’s victory that many laughed at the idea Trump could win, and only a few took the idea seriously.

Keith Ellison: All I want to say is that anybody from the Democratic side of the fence who thinks that — who is terrified of the possibility of President Trump better vote, better get active, better get involved because this man has got some momentum. And we better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket.

George Stephanopoulos: I know you don’t believe that, but I want to go on —

Maggie Haberman: Sorry to laugh.

KE: You know, George, we had Jesse Ventura in Minnesota win the governorship. Nobody thought he was going to win. I’m telling you, stranger things has happened. 

JS: For the Republican power brokers, Trump was a messiah that they chided and scorned when he first appeared.

Ted Cruz: Donald Trump alleges that my dad was involved in assassinating JFK. Now, let’s be clear. This is nuts. This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. Everything in Donald’s world is about Donald. But the man is utterly amoral. 

JS: Now most Republicans, including not so few who once laughed at him, prostrate themselves before him every minute of every day.

TC: I like Donald Trump. I think he’s terrific. I think he’s brash. I think he speaks the truth. He has a way of speaking that gets attention and I credit him for focusing on an issue that needs to be focused on. I’m not interested in Republican on Republican —

JS: It didn’t take long for the GOP to pivot to Trump. And from the beginning, he has functioned as a fixer for the most corrupt, extreme, and dangerous forces in U.S. society while personally profiting off of the presidency. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on authoritarianism, described this dynamic.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: One thing I find interesting, which recurs in the past, is Trump this charismatic figure. And they come along every so often. You’ve mentioned some of them. And they seem to coalesce the kind of anxieties and frustrations of a given historical moment, but the conservative elites — in this case, GOP — back them and not other people, because they believe that they can use them as a vehicle to do the things they’ve been wanting to do for a long time — the racists, the voter suppression, all the things that the GOP has been trying to activate and was very frustrated it couldn’t do under Obama, right? This is a kind of mutual using of the authoritarian and his backers, right? And so, many of the repressive, authoritarian-minded things going on, right now, are being introduced by the GOP.

JS: The most devastating dimension of Trump’s time in office, on a policy level, is how the Republican establishment utilized Trump as a Trojan horse for its extreme agenda. Like many of his buildings around the world, Trump did not create the agenda, but his name is emblazoned everywhere. This Trump-branded GOP quickly became a clearing house for realizing the wildest dreams of the right-wing hitmen in Washington. 

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: People ask me all the time, “Trump is such an embarrassment. Why do the Republicans put up with this?” 

JS: Princeton University scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:

KYT: If you look beyond the chaos that is generated from his Twitter account, it’s easy to see why the Republicans put up with this. Whether it’s the historic tax cut, the rapid and utterly frightening transformation of the judiciary, the tinkering with the machinery of the state is creating the kinds of changes that will far exceed the tenure of the Trump Administration. We’re witnessing a virtual coup within the confines of the Supreme Court in the ultimate validation of the strategy of dealing with the chaos, the lack of civility, the inattention to political norms, all of the things that people have said that this administration represents while missing what is actually happening under the hood.

JS: Trump has had his signature moments, often through edicts or executive orders, but much of his agenda has been outsourced to craftier and more sophisticated lobbyists, special interest groups and lawmakers. And the president has often been content to serve as the carnival barker for the masses obsessively checking his ratings and Twitter feed in between golf outings and watching the FOX News morning and evening lineups. While Trump overtly appeared incompetent and boorish, consumer advocate and former independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader warned that it was a mistake to underestimate the combination of Trump’s strengths working in concert with the radical GOP agenda.

Ralph Nader: People who think Trump is stupid may be right in terms of his understanding reality and history and the things that we would like presidents to be alert and smart about, but when it comes to street smarts and timing and the jugular? You can’t find anybody more proficient.

JS: It is difficult to overstate what has been accomplished during this presidency. The consequences of the sweeping re-molding of the federal courts with hundreds of lifetime appointments and the extreme right-wing stacking of the U.S. Supreme Court under Trump will reverberate for generations to come. 

Mitch McConnell: And working together we’re changing the federal courts forever! Nobody’s done more to change the court system in the history of our country than Donald Trump. And Mr. President, we’re going to keep on doing it. My motto is leave no vacancy behind.

JS: It will also place crucial human rights in the crosshairs and potentially play a decisive role in what Trump is virtually declaring will be an attempted theft of a presidential election.

DJT: This scam that the Democrats are pulling — it’s a scam. The scam will be before the United States Supreme Court and I think having a four-four situation is not a good situation if you get that. I don’t know that you get that. I think it should be eight-nothing or nine-nothing. But just in case it would be more political than it should be, I think it’s very important to have a ninth justice.

JS: At this moment, the most lethal aspect of Trump’s presidency has been his colossal mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

DJT: Now the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know a lot of people think that goes away in April, with the heat. It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. It will go away. You know, you know it is going away. I think that at some point that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.

JS: Beyond the mounting COVID death toll, what Trump did in these four years in power will inflict incalculable damage on tens of millions of people across the U.S. Trump’s administration has attacked workers’ rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, civil liberties and freedom of speech. He has proudly waged war on the climate and often waxed on about how proud he is of increasing the use of the most destructive sources of fuel, production, and energy.

Wade Crowfoot: If we ignore that science and sort of put out head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.

DJT: OK. It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.

WC: I wish science agreed with you.

DJT: Well, I don’t think science knows, actually. Tom, please —

JS: Trump’s financial policies and tax cuts have showered money and profits on powerful corporate interests and the wealthy, while the already abysmal U.S. healthcare system has been further gutted and simultaneously oiled up for record profits, while millions suffer from inadequate or no health coverage and massive health-related debt. In an interview in 2018 on Intercepted, famed dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky highlighted Trump’s ability to simultaneously please radical factions within the GOP and corporations while convincing his voter base that he’s their protector from the elites.

Noam Chomsky: On the domestic scene, Trump is very effectively managing both of his constituencies. There’s an authentic constituency of corporate power and private wealth and they’re being served magnificently by the executive orders, legislative programs that are being pushed through which represent the more savage wing of the traditional Republican policies — catering to private interests, private wealth, and dismissing the rest as irrelevant and easily disposed of.

At the same time, he’s managing to maintain the voting constituency by pretending, very effectively, to be the one person in the world who stands up for them against the hated elites. And this is quite an impressive con job. How long he can carry it off, I don’t know.

JS: Rutgers University professor and journalist Juan Gonzalez said that Trump had kindled a movement that was already developing within the country before his election.

Juan Gonzalez: I look at Trump as one of the biggest small businessmen in America. Because the right-wing populism always comes out of the small business community. It doesn’t come out of the globalized public corporations that understand that they need a world in which trade and goods are flowing freely without barriers.

And Trump as a protectionist represents the small business groups within the society, but except that he is a billionaire small businessman really. He was always an outcast among the capitalist class of the United States. In that sense, though, he’s tapped into the tremendous insecurity that exists among the great sectors of the American population over the impact of unfettered globalism on their lives.

So, he has wracked his form of populism and his “America first” policies, and in that sense, he’s been able to use patriotism as a way to further ensnare some sectors of the not only small business people who are obviously benefiting tremendously through his policies, but also the more well-to-do sectors of the American working class. Because there has always been a sector of the American working class that benefits from the existence of the imperial power of the country. So they have rallied to his call.

JS: But on a raw level, it is clear that a significant sector of Trump’s base was inspired by the nativist rhetoric and causes that Trump claimed to be championing, replete with all the greatest hits from locking up Hillary Clinton to the birther conspiracy to old fashioned racism. He offered a prognosis that saw America as a place that the undocumented immigrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the Black people have all ruined. Trump promised them he would end all of that and “Make America Great Again.”

DJT: The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.

Audience: Build the wall! Build the wall!

JS: On the campaign trail, even before becoming president, Trump used his substantial platform to embolden and encourage racists and xenophobes, while encouraging police and military forces to act extrajudicially. 

DJT: In the good old days, this doesn’t happen because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it again so easily. In the old days, they didn’t come back. I can tell you that. They were gone. They were taken out. They were gone.

DJT: And they — I don’t know, rough up — he should have been, maybe he should have been roughed up. 

DJT: I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will. 

DJT: We’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.

DJT: Knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Ok. Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees, I promise. I promise.

DJT: I said, “Please don’t be too nice.” Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, the way you put their hand over? Like, don’t hit their head, and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said you can take the hand away, OK? 

JS: Yale historian and fascism scholar Jason Stanley said Trump’s embrace of the police and “law enforcement” as a class, while also cultivating support among militia-type groups, is a common tactic in authoritarian political movements.

Jason Stanley: The fascist state’s refusal to condemn the extrajudicial violence has a particular linguistic role because the state licenses it by not explicitly condemning it. But at the same time, the state uses its extrajudicial nature to say, “Look, we’re not the extremists. Look, you can see the extremists — they’re out there.”

It’s important to the white nationalist movement to have the people in ties and suits in government. And they need the extrajudicial violence on the street to say, “That’s not us. Look, just look at how we’re dressed versus how they’re dressed.” But you can tell the links between them, not just because of the clear overlap in language — minus a few words. Instead of white nationalist, you just use nationalist.

Instead of adding Jew to globalist, instead of saying, you know, “It’s the Jews that control the press. It’s the Jews that are behind lax immigration laws,” you say it’s the globalists. And then you don’t denounce the extrajudicial violence. You know, you denounce it in certain extreme cases where you just have to, but you leave it crucially ambiguous at times. And then that has this licensing effect.

JS: Trump’s administration has taken a chainsaw to the very concept of rule of law. Under Jeff Sessions, and more so under William Barr, the Justice Department has simultaneously served as Trump’s private law firm and has been wielded as a judicial howitzer whose fire is aimed at weakening and ultimately destroying the notion of checks and balances that are at the core of constitutional democracy. This is how Rep. Barbara Lee described the threats when I spoke to her just days into Trump’s administration:

Barbara Lee: I’m very terrified with regard to what we see taking place. And the signs are there. When you talk about shutting down the media, putting out their alternative facts, banning dissent and opposition, criticizing people who are exercising their First Amendment rights; trying to get people to believe, really, the distortions that they’re putting out there. That, to me, is very scary. It’s very dangerous. And you see also the corporate and military consolidation of the public sector. You see efforts to privatize schools. When you just look at the nominees, you see very few people with experience in the public sector. And so when you have the corporate sector merging with the military sectors, and when you have cabinet officials who have historically said they want to dismantle the cabinets and the agencies that they’re running, that I’m very terrified that we are beginning to see an erosion of our democratic values and an erosion of the public sector.

DJT: I’m going to continue to attack the press. Look, I find the press to be extremely dishonest. I find the political press to be unbelievably dishonest. I will say that. OK, thank you all very much.

JS: Donald Trump’s war against journalism began on the 2016 campaign trail, as he railed against fake news and sought to stir up anger and potentially violence aimed at journalists. 

DJT: A lot of these guys — look at all the cameras back there. A lot of the people back there are totally dishonest people. Probably libelist stories, or certainly close. In the newspapers, and the people know the stories are false. 

DJT: The media, totally, totally, totally dishonest. But they don’t do that because these newspapers and the media are totally dishonest people, folks. Remember that. Totally dishonest.

DJT: They too are part of a rigged system. The media is totally dishonest. They’re a rigged system trying to deny people the positive change that they’re looking for and they deserve.

DJT: Such lies. Such lies. Such fabrication. Such made-up stories. Now the Times is going out of business pretty soon, that’s the good news. But such made-up stories. Such vicious, made-up stories. 

DJT: I would never kill them. But I do hate them. Some of them are such lying, disgusting people. It’s true. It’s true.

JS: Trump’s rhetoric was a dangerous escalation. At the same time, there was a tendency in media coverage of these attacks on the press, to ignore the records of Trump’s predecessors.

James Risen: The Obama administration was by far the most anti-press administration we’ve had since at least Nixon. They — as you know, they conducted more leak investigations and did more leak prosecutions — more than all the previous administrations combined. And they targeted journalists in ways that no other administration ever has.

JS: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James Risen fought a multi-year battle with the Bush and Obama Justice Departments as they sought to force him to testify against an alleged source. As Risen predicted, Trump would soon do his own weaponizing of the Espionage Act and prosecute leakers and whistleblowers with a vengeance.

JR: What Obama did makes it much easier for Trump to do what he wants on leaks. They have created an environment and have left it for Trump that makes it very easy to subpoena a reporter and then force him to testify. The only alternative right now is for a reporter to go to jail to protect their sources. When the Democrats are in power, they hate leaks; when the Republicans are in power, they hate leaks. I think Trump has just taken that language to new heights.

DJT: It’s so important to the public to get an honest press. The press — the public doesn’t believe you people anymore. Now maybe I had something to do with that, I don’t know.

JS: On questions of war and national security, Trump has often spoken in contradictory directions: On the one hand, he lambasted the Iraq war and the unending nature of the so-called war on terror. 

DJT: The Iraq war was a disaster. It was a mistake. We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, thousands of lives, wounded warriors who we love all over the place. What do we have? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Iran is taking over Iraq as sure as you’re sitting there, and that’s the way it is. We get nothing.

JS: On the other, Trump vowed to bring back torture, murder the families of suspected terrorists, steal natural resources and to ignore international law.

DJT: Bomb the oil, take the oil. Bomb the oil, take the oil. Just take it, right?

DJT: We should have kept the oil. Keep the oil. Keep the oil. Keep the oil. Don’t let somebody else get it.

JS: When he took power, Trump had inherited a multi-decade, at times bipartisan, campaign to undermine Congressional oversight of the executive branch while expanding the unilateral powers of the presidency. This was one of the major career missions of people like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Henry Kissinger. It is also true for the current attorney general, William Barr. They are extremist disciples of the theory of the unitary executive. 

Charlie Savage: Out of those notions of a presidency that’s beyond the reach of Congress to regulate come things like the torture program, like the warrantless wiretapping program.

JS: Charlie Savage reports on executive power for the New York Times. 

CS: And not just the notion that these steps were necessary as a matter of policy to deal with the threat that became apparent on 9/11, but how they chose to put those policies into place, which is to say in secret without going to Congress to ask them to change the law to make torture legal, to make warrantless wiretapping legal. But to just say the president, as commander-in-chief and head of the unitary executive, is not bound by laws that prohibit things like that and he can just secretly ignore them.

JS: Building on the programs of his predecessors, Trump soon gave the U.S. military and CIA expanded and secretive lethal authorities across the globe, while loosening or removing the minimal restraints that existed over such forces, including in the killing of civilians. And he placed at the helm of the CIA Gina Haspel, a key player in the CIA’s secret black site torture program.

Kamala Harris: Do you believe that the previous interrogation techniques were immoral?

Gina Haspel: Senator, I believe that CIA officers to whom you refer —

KH: It’s a yes or no answer. Do you believe the previous interrogation techniques were immoral? I’m not asking: Do you believe they were legal? I’m asking: Do you believe they were immoral?

GH: Senator, I believe that CIA did extraordinary work to prevent another attack on this country given the legal tools that we were authorizing.

KH: Please answer “yes” or “no.” Do you believe in hindsight that those techniques were immoral?

GH: Senator, what I believe sitting here today is that I support the higher moral standard we have decided to hold ourselves to.

KH: Can you please answer the question?

GH: Senator, I think I’ve answered the question.

KH: No, you’ve not. Do you believe the previous techniques, now armed with hindsight, do you believe they were immoral? Yes, or no?

GH: Senator, I believe that we should hold ourselves to the moral standard outlined in the Army Field Manual.

KH: OK. So, I understand that you — you’ve not answered the question, but I’m going to move on.

JS: Donald Trump largely telegraphed the type of autocratic and corrupt administration that he intended to run. No one who watched his endlessly televised campaign speeches could claim to be taken by surprise. 

Amy Goodman: And then you have the media part of this right, where you have the unending Trump TV? Not the new Trump TV but all the networks Trump TV when it came to Donald Trump they showed more footage of his empty podium waiting for him to speak than they ever played of the words —

JS: In assessing Trump’s impact and path to power, it is also important to look at the nature of political opposition to his candidacy and, ultimately, his administration. And for the institutional elite of the Democratic Party, that picture does not look good. 

Nancy Pelosi: One of my prayers is that the Republicans will take back their party. The country needs a strong Republican Party. It’s done so much for our country. And to have it be hijacked as a cult at this time is really a sad thing.

JS: Democrats have voted to give Trump sweeping powers of war and surveillance while simultaneously calling Trump the most dangerous president in history, accusing him of being a Russian asset and claiming he is destroying democracy as we know it. They have repeatedly engaged in performative resistance to Trump on cable news.

Chuck Schumer: What could possibly cause President Trump to put the interests of Russia over those of the United States. Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous behavior is the possibility that President Putin holds damaging information over President Trump.

JS: For most of Trump’s time in office, Democrats prioritized the Trump-Russia investigation over almost all else. And the New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen consistently warned that this strategy was distracting from other dangers and would likely backfire. 

Masha Gessen: My basic problem with the Russia conspiracy theory remains the same, which is that it’s like the one size fits all theory that tells us how we got Trump, which is that he’s a Russian agent, and that gets us out of the really frightening and complicated task of understanding how Americans voted for Trump, right? And it also creates this idea of how we’re gonna get rid of Trump, which is that magically — again and I keep using the word “magically” quite consciously because there is no straight line from any amount of Russia revelations to an impeachment. Not to mention that there’s no straight line from impeachment to actually getting rid of Trump. But magically, people believe that if the Russia collusion or the Russia conspiracy is proven, then that will somehow get rid of Trump, and the national nightmare will be over.

JS: The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives under Nancy Pelosi ultimately did impeach Donald Trump. But only on a narrow set of charges related to Ukraine. Her tenure as Speaker of the House under Trump ultimately led Shahid Buttar, a progressive constitutional law advocate and attorney, to challenge her for her Congressional seat.

Shahid Buttar: Nancy Pelosi affirmatively took off the table all of the strongest charges against the president. The impeachment absolutely did not address his human rights abuses, or his incitements to violence, or his lies to the public and policy makers; or his documented, unprecedented corruption, and theft from the American people — his self-enrichment at public expense. It is constitutionally prohibited and the reason Nancy Pelosi, I think, did not allow that charge to proceed is that it is a bipartisan offense.

JS: Ralph Nader is widely and often blamed by Democrats for George W. Bush’s victory in 2000. The same happened with Green Party Candidate Jill Stein in 2016. Nader, who has emerged as a tenacious critic of Trump, argues that the Democrats must also be held responsible for Trump’s ascent.

Ralph Nader: And the Democratic Party could not landslide the worst Republican Party in history since 1854? The most ignorant, the most corporate indentured, the most warlike, the most corporate welfare supportive, the most bailout-prone Republican Party, anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environment? Why don’t they look in the mirror? The Democratic Party is the main scapegoater in American politics. It’s never their fault. It’s never Hillary’s fault. It’s always a Green Party fault. It’s always an independent candidate fault. They’ve lost two presidential elections since 2000, even though they won the popular vote, because the Electoral College took it away from them. There’s a major national citizen effort to have an interstate compact to neutralize the Electoral College.

The Democratic Party is not supporting of that. The Democratic Party doesn’t want to get rid of the Electoral College. They’ve lost twice to the Republicans. And that meant George W. Bush, and that meant Donald J. Trump.

So this scapegoating is nothing more than a sickness of the Democratic Party that cannot unleash new energy. It’s a sick, decrepit party that cannot defend the United States of America against the worst Republican Party in history.

JS: It is easy, and these days accepted as common sense, to view Trump as an aberration of U.S. history. An uninvited guest who somehow cheated everyone to take power from the real adults. But it’s a mistake to divorce the ascent of Trump and the policies of his administration from the corporate dominated electoral process in the U.S. and the myths of American exceptionalism. Here is Pulitzer Prize winning historian Greg Grandin.

Greg Grandin: Well, in the history of U.S. administrations, he is exceptional. And that’s one of the things that I was also trying to get at: The argument that Donald Trump either revealed a deep racism, a deep settler colonial barbarism, or he represented something completely unique and exceptional to the United States. He is unique in the sense that he is presiding over the end of the frontier, the end of expansion, the end of the invocation of endless growth as a solution for domestic problems. I would say there is no other example that is equitable, that is comparable. A lot of people like to talk about Andrew Jackson —

DJT: Had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was — he was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that — he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, there’s no reason for this. People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War. Think about it. Why? People don’t ask that question. But why was there the Civil War? Why could, why could that one not have been worked out?

GG: Trump talks about Jackson as his favorite politician, and certainly Trump represents a settler colonial racism. By that I mean an embrace or trumpeting of the notion of freedom as freedom from restraint. But Trump is presiding over a country turned inward. Andrew Jackson came to power as the United States was moving out into the world, and that moving out into the world took place on the back of Indian removal, the expansion of chattel slavery, war with Spain and Mexico, and an enormous amount of violence. Trump is presiding over, in some ways, the end of the project. 

Trump, in some ways, is the worst of both worlds, right? He represents the racism of settler colonialism in its most extreme form. At the same time, he rejects out of hand because of the political coalition that he represents, any kind of public policy that might lead to a more solidaristic and humane policy options. So we have a really kind of a perfect storm of some of the worst trend lines in U.S. history.

JS: If we are being honest — and we must be — this presidency has its roots in the unvarnished story of the United States empire. It is, in fact, the product of that history.

As election day draws near, Trump has taken his attacks on the democratic process to unprecedented levels. He’s already calling the election results a fraud. He’s waging a voter disenfranchisement campaign and is openly encouraging violence from neo-Nazi and white supremacist paramilitaries and official law enforcement alike. 

DJT: Do you want to call them — what do you want to call them? Give me a name. Give me a name.

Chris Wallace: White supremacist —

Joe Biden: Proud Boys. 

DJT: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.

DJT: Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization. I proudly received the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Association of Police Organizations, the National Troopers Coalition, the International Union of Police Associations, and law enforcement organizations and departments in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada —

JS: Donald Trump has openly threatened to remain in office even if he loses the election. He refuses to guarantee a peaceful transition and has suggested he might even serve a third term.

DJT: And we’re going to win four more years in the White House. And then after that we’ll negotiate, right? Cause we’re probably, based on the way we were treated, we’re probably entitled to another four after that.

JS: The dire threats to the democratic process were not invented by Trump or merely the results of Russian interference. As constitutional law expert Shahid Buttar said, the groundwork for this had been laid over many years.

SB: The near-term consequence of a president refusing to leave the White House, he can steer the rest of the events to support that narrative, even if there isn’t a legal basis for him to stay in office. Another way to say this is that the coup undermining the legitimacy of our elections happened a long time ago. You don’t need a computer to hack an election. You don’t need a Russian state intelligence agency to hack an election. You can hack an election when a right-wing Supreme Court invites right-wing state legislatures around the country to start attacking voting rights and that happened years ago. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the crucial enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which were its teeth before. And in the wake of that measure being struck down, it basically opened a floodgate by right-wing state legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine democracy and the opportunities for their constituents to participate in elections.

DJT: In 78 days we’re going to stop the radical left. We’re going to win the state of Wisconsin. And we’re going to win four more years. And then after that we’ll go for another four years because, you know what, they spied on my campaign. We should get a re-do of four years.

DJT: And after we win four more years, we’ll ask for maybe another four or so. You know, whenever I say that, I watch — look at all that news back there. Look at all that fake news. When I say that their heads explode. 

JS: The threats posed by this history and Trump’s presidency cannot be overstated. It is a truly perilous situation that Trump is presiding over. We have produced this series in an effort to examine how we got here and to aid the effort to ensure that it never happens again.

This has been part one of an Intercepted limited documentary series, American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump. Over the next week we will be releasing an episode each weekday focusing on a different aspect of the Trump presidency and digging into the history and context of the actions of this administration. Make sure to tune in tomorrow to part two of this series where we’ll be taking an in-depth look at Donald Trump’s policies on immigration.

American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump is an Intercepted limited documentary series. You can follow us on Twitter @Intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Lucie Kroening. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Make sure to tell your friends and foes about this series and tune in for episode two, tomorrow. Until then, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

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