Something to Know - 23 August

There are plenty of stories running around this morning about the Unpresidential President's antics in Phoenix last night, so I won't bother you with the details.   However, there is a need to be aware of the unpresidential skirmishes and outright questionable behavior exhibited by #45 against Senate Speaker McConnell.  Trump is unabashedly bashing his allies in the Senate, who he will probably be called upon to opine on impeachment questions.   Trump is also upset with McConnell for failing to protect him from Senate committee investigations on matters of Trump and his collusion with Russians (a possible impeachable offense).   Every day, various members of Trump's stable of advisers are quitting, and his lineup of Mar-a-Lago events are bailing out on him.   It's quite a show to watch.  

McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency

By ALEXANDER BURNS and JONATHAN MARTIN

The relationship between President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks, and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.

What was once an uneasy governing alliance has curdled into a feud of mutual resentment and sometimes outright hostility, complicated by the position of Mr. McConnell's wife, Elaine L. Chao, in Mr. Trump's cabinet, according to more than a dozen people briefed on their imperiled partnership. Angry phone calls and private badmouthing have devolved into open conflict, with the president threatening to oppose Republican senators who cross him, and Mr. McConnell mobilizing to their defense.

The rupture between Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell comes at a highly perilous moment for Republicans, who face a number of urgent deadlines when they return to Washington next month. Congress must approve new spending measures and raise the statutory limit on government borrowing within weeks of reconvening, and Republicans are hoping to push through an elaborate rewrite of the federal tax code. There is scant room for legislative error on any front.

A protracted government shutdown or a default on sovereign debt could be disastrous — for the economy and for the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Yet Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell are locked in a political cold war. Neither man would comment for this article. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, noted that the senator and the president had "shared goals," and pointed to "tax reform, infrastructure, funding the government, not defaulting on the debt, passing the defense authorization bill."

Still, the back-and-forth has been dramatic.

In a series of tweets this month, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. McConnell publicly, and berated him in a phone call that quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.

During the call, which Mr. Trump initiated on Aug. 9 from his New Jersey golf club, the president accused Mr. McConnell of bungling the health care issue. He was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader's refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Republicans briefed on the conversation.

Mr. McConnell has fumed over Mr. Trump's regular threats against fellow Republicans and criticism of Senate rules, and questioned Mr. Trump's understanding of the presidency in a public speech. Mr. McConnell has made sharper comments in private, describing Mr. Trump as entirely unwilling to learn the basics of governing.

In offhand remarks, Mr. McConnell has expressed a sense of bewilderment about where Mr. Trump's presidency may be headed, and has mused about whether Mr. Trump will be in a position to lead the Republican Party into next year's elections and beyond, according to people who have spoken to him directly.

While maintaining a pose of public reserve, Mr. McConnell expressed horror to advisers last week after Mr. Trump's comments equating white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., with protesters who rallied against them. Mr. Trump's most explosive remarks came at a news conference in Manhattan, where he stood beside Ms. Chao, the transportation secretary. (Ms. Chao, deflecting a question about the tensions between her husband and the president she serves, told reporters, "I stand by my man — both of them.")

Mr. McConnell signaled to business leaders that he was deeply uncomfortable with Mr. Trump's comments: Several who resigned advisory roles in the Trump administration contacted Mr. McConnell's office after the fact, and were told that Mr. McConnell fully understood their choices, three people briefed on the conversations said.

Mr. Trump has also continued to badger and threaten Mr. McConnell's Senate colleagues, including Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose Republican primary challenger was praised by Mr. Trump last week.

"Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate," he tweeted last week. "He's toxic!"

At a campaign rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, Mr. Trump alluded to Mr. Flake unfavorably, referring to him as "weak on borders" and "weak on crime" without mentioning him by name. He referred to Mr. McConnell only in passing, calling on him to abolish the Senate filibuster.

Senior Republican officials said before the rally that they would stand up for Mr. Flake against any attacks. A Republican "super PAC" aligned with Mr. McConnell released a web ad on Tuesday assailing Ms. Ward as a fringe-dwelling conspiracy theorist.

"ChemtrailKelli," an attack ad released by a Republican "super PAC" aligned with Mr. McConnell. Video by Senate Leadership Fund

"When it comes to the Senate, there's an Article 5 understanding: An attack against one is an attack against all," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has found himself in Mr. Trump's sights many times, invoking the NATO alliance's mutual defense doctrine.

The fury among Senate Republicans toward Mr. Trump has been building since last month, even before he lashed out at Mr. McConnell. Some of them blame the president for not being able to rally the party around any version of legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, accusing him of not knowing even the basics about the policy. Senate Republicans also say strong-arm tactics from the White House backfired, making it harder to cobble together votes and have left bad feelings in the caucus.

When Mr. Trump addressed a Boy Scouts jamboree last month in West Virginia, White House aides told Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from the state whose support was in doubt, that she could only accompany him on Air Force One if she committed to voting for the health care bill. She declined the invitation, noting that she could not commit to voting for a measure she had not seen, according to a Republican briefed on the conversation.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told colleagues that when Mr. Trump's interior secretary threatened to pull back federal funding for her state, she felt boxed in and unable to vote for the health care bill.

In a show of solidarity, albeit one planned well before Mr. Trump took aim at Mr. Flake, Mr. McConnell will host a $1,000-per-person dinner on Friday in Kentucky for the Arizona senator, as well as for Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, who is also facing a Trump-inspired primary race next year, and Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska. Mr. Flake is expected to attend the event.

Former Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican who is close to Mr. McConnell, said frustration with Mr. Trump was boiling over in the chamber. Mr. Gregg blamed the president for undermining congressional leaders, and said the House and Senate would have to govern on their own if Mr. Trump "can't participate constructively."

"Failure to do things like keeping the government open and passing a tax bill is the functional equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded," Mr. Gregg said.

Others in the party divide blame between Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell. Al Hoffman, a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee who has been supportive of Mr. McConnell, said Mr. McConnell was culpable because he has failed to deliver legislative victories. "Ultimately, it's been Mitch's responsibility, and I don't think he's done much," Mr. Hoffman said.

But Mr. Hoffman predicted that Mr. McConnell would likely outlast the president.

"I think he's going to blow up, self-implode," Mr. Hoffman said of Mr. Trump. "I wouldn't be surprised if McConnell pulls back his support of Trump and tries to go it alone."

An all-out clash between Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell would play out between men whose strengths and weaknesses are very different. Mr. Trump is a political amateur, still unschooled in the ways of Washington, but he maintains a viselike grip on the affections of the Republican base. Mr. McConnell is a soft-spoken career politician, with virtuoso mastery of political fund-raising and tactics, but he had no mass following to speak of.

Mr. McConnell, while baffled at Mr. Trump's penchant for internecine attacks, is a ruthless pragmatist and has given no overt indication that he plans to seek more drastic conflict. Despite his private battles with Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has sent reassuring signals with his public conduct: On Monday, he appeared in Louisville, Ky., with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, for a discussion of tax policy.

Mr. McConnell's Senate colleagues, however, have grown bolder. The combination of the president's frontal attacks on Senate Republicans and his claim that there were "fine people" marching with white supremacists in Charlottesville has emboldened lawmakers to criticize Mr. Trump in withering terms.

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee rebuked Mr. Trump last week for failing to "demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence" required of presidents. On Monday, Senator Susan Collins of Maine said in a television interview that she was uncertain Mr. Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee in 2020.

There are few recent precedents for the rift. The last time a president turned on a legislative leader of his own party was in 2002, when allies of George W. Bush helped force Trent Lott to step down as Senate minority leader after racially charged remarks at a birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina.

For the moment, Mr. McConnell appears to be far more secure in his position, and perhaps immune to coercion from the White House. Republicans are unlikely to lose control of the Senate in 2018, and Mr. Trump has no allies in the Senate who have shown an appetite for combat with Mr. McConnell.

Still, some allies of Mr. Trump on the right — including Stephen K. Bannon, who stepped down last week as Mr. Trump's chief strategist — welcome more direct conflict with Mr. McConnell and congressional Republicans.

Roger J. Stone Jr., a Republican strategist who has advised Mr. Trump for decades, said the president needed to "take a scalp" in order to force cooperation from Republican elites who have resisted his agenda. Mr. Stone urged Mr. Trump to make an example of one or more Republicans, like Mr. Flake, who have refused to give full support to his administration.

"The president should start bumping off incumbent Republican members of Congress in primaries," Mr. Stone said. "If he did that, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would wet their pants and the rest of the Republicans would get in line."

But Mr. McConnell's allies warn that the president should be wary of doing anything that could jeopardize the Senate Republican majority.

"The quickest way for him to get impeached is for Trump to knock off Jeff Flake and Dean Heller and be faced with a Democrat-led Senate," 

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****
Juan
 

Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

- Adlai Stevenson

Something to Know - 22 August

Polarization is killing us right now.   This article by David Brooks tries to pick away at the tension created by those who live by the "My Way or the Highway" philosophy.   Also, to remind us all that in order to be fair and moderate, this applies to both sides of the political spectrum:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/opinion/trump-moderates-bipartisanship-truth.html?emc=eta1

What Moderates Believe

 David Brooks

Donald Trump is not the answer to this nation's problems, so the great questions of the moment are: If not Trump, what? What does the reaction to Trump look like?

For some people, the warriors of the populist right must be replaced by warriors of the populist left. For these people, Trump has revealed an ugly authoritarian tendency in American society that has to be fought with relentless fervor and moral clarity.

For others, it's Trump's warrior mentality itself that must be replaced. Warriors on one side inevitably call forth warriors on the other, and that just means more culture war, more barbarism, more dishonesty and more dysfunction.

The people in this camp we will call moderates. Like most of you, I dislike the word moderate. It is too milquetoast. But I've been inspired by Aurelian Craiutu's great book "Faces of Moderation" to stick with this word, at least until a better one comes along.

Moderates do not see politics as warfare. Instead, national politics is a voyage with a fractious fleet. Wisdom is finding the right formation of ships for each specific circumstance so the whole assembly can ride the waves forward for another day. Moderation is not an ideology; it's a way of coping with the complexity of the world. Moderates tend to embrace certain ideas:

The truth is plural. There is no one and correct answer to the big political questions. Instead, politics is usually a tension between two or more views, each of which possesses a piece of the truth. Sometimes immigration restrictions should be loosened to bring in new people and new dynamism; sometimes they should be tightened to ensure national cohesion. Leadership is about determining which viewpoint is more needed at that moment. Politics is a dynamic unfolding, not a debate that can ever be settled once and for all.

Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

Creativity is syncretistic. Voyagers don't just pull their ideas from the center of the ideological spectrum. They believe creativity happens when you merge galaxies of belief that seem at first blush incompatible. They might combine left-wing ideas about labor unions with right-wing ideas about local community to come up with a new conception of labor law. Because they are syncretistic, they are careful to spend time in opposing camps, always opening lines of communication. The wise moderate can hold two or more opposing ideas together in her mind at the same time.

In politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The harm government does when it screws up — wars, depressions — is larger than the benefits government produces when it does well. Therefore the moderate operates from a politics of skepticism, not a politics of faith. He understands that most of the choices are among bad options (North Korea), so he prefers steady incremental reform to sudden revolutionary change.

Truth before justice. All political movements must face inconvenient facts — thoughts and data that seem to aid their foes. If you try to suppress those facts, by banning a speaker or firing an employee, then you are putting the goals of your cause, no matter how noble, above the search for truth. This is the path to fanaticism, and it always backfires in the end.

Beware the danger of a single identity. Before they brutalize politics, warriors brutalize themselves. Instead of living out several identities — Latina/lesbian/gun-owning/Christian — that pull in different directions, they turn themselves into monads. They prioritize one identity, one narrative and one comforting distortion.

Partisanship is necessary but blinding. Partisan debate sharpens opinion, but partisans tend to justify their own sins by pointing to the other side's sins. Moderates are problematic members of their party. They tend to be hard on their peers and sympathetic to their foes.

Humility is the fundamental virtue. Humility is a radical self-awareness from a position outside yourself — a form of radical honesty. The more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding.

Moderation requires courage. Moderates don't operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons. They are unafraid to face the cross currents, detached from clan, acknowledging how little they know.

If you have elected a man who is not awed by the complexity of the world, but who filters the world to suit his own narcissism, then woe to you, because such a man is the opposite of the moderate voyager type. He will reap a whirlwind.

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****
Juan
 

Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

- Adlai Stevenson

Something for LA Times Readers to Know - 22 August

For those of you who are not in the area  or are not LA Times subscribers, sorry, but you get this any way.   Since this will not appear in this manner of detail in the LA area, this article for those who need to know from a source outside of Los Angeles;

MEDIA

Publisher and Top Editors Ousted at Los Angeles Times in Leadership Shake-Up

By SYDNEY EMBER

AUG. 21, 2017

Ross Levinsohn in Santa Monica in 2013. On Monday, he was named publisher and chief executive

Tronc, the parent company of The Los Angeles Times, abruptly replaced the newspaper's top leadership on Monday in a shake-up that stunned many in the newsroom.

Ross Levinsohn, a longtime media executive who held a senior position at Fox's digital group and was once considered a top candidate to lead Yahoo, was named publisher and chief executive of The Times. Jim Kirk, who until this month was editor and publisher of The Chicago Sun-Times, will be the interim executive editor and will run the newsroom's day-to-day operations.

Mr. Levinsohn and Mr. Kirk, who joined Tronc less than two weeks ago after the sale of The Sun-Times, will replace Davan Maharaj, who has been The Times's publisher and editor since March 2016, when Tronc combined the two roles across its newspapers. Several other leaders at the paper, including Marc Duvoisin, a managing editor; Megan Garvey, the deputy managing editor for digital; and Matt Doig, the assistant managing editor for investigations, were also fired. Lawrence Ingrassia, another managing editor and a former editor at The New York Times, recently said he was retiring.

"We're frankly not where we need to be from a digital perspective," Justin C. Dearborn, the chief executive of Tronc, said in a telephone interview on Monday. "We also think The L.A. Times over all just needs a little refresh and a little personality back."

The shake-up at one of the country's most storied newspapers occurred roughly a year and a half after Tronc's new leadership team, led by the Chicago entrepreneur Michael W. Ferro Jr., gained control and began shifting the company's focus to digital and pushing a technology-driven approach to journalism. The company, formerly called Tribune Publishing, which also owns The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun, rebuffed a takeover bid from Gannett last year after a bitter public process.

Mr. Dearborn said that The Times was not transforming itself fast enough on the digital side under its current leadership and that Mr. Levinsohn was hired to expedite that change.

Mr. Levinsohn, who has advised Tronc for roughly 14 months, said in an interview that he would focus on expanding The Times's presence "on all platforms."

"They do a great job of putting the newspaper out there day in and day out," said Mr. Levinsohn, who was interim chief executive officer at Yahoo. "I think it's important to be fast, to be accurate, to have opinions and to get that out into the world in a more aggressive fashion."

Though Monday's purge surprised some in the newsroom, internal grumbling about the newsroom's leadership had surfaced recently and some of the paper's journalists had sent letters of complaint to Tronc executives, according to several people familiar with the complaints, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Tension arose between Tronc's leadership and Mr. Maharaj over proposed budget cuts, which Mr. Maharaj was resisting, one of the people said.

Mr. Maharaj was not available for comment.

This is not the first leadership overhaul at The Times in recent years. In 2015, the paper's publisher, Austin Beutner, was fired after only a year in the job, a move that sharpened divisions between The Times and its Chicago-based parent company.

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Juan
 

Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

- Adlai Stevenson

Something to Know (Etwas zu wissen) - 21 August

A bit of an international perspective on our president.  

FIRST AMENDMENT

Der Spiegel's New Magazine Cover: The True Face Of Donald Trump

Wow. Just wow!

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****
Juan
 

Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

- Adlai Stevenson

Something to Know - 20 August

 

A very tall person and good friend pointed out an op-ed that I missed yesterday.   So, last night I read it, and boy did I ever miss something.   It still remained on my mind after I woke up this morning, and knew that you should know about it as well, which you may already know about.   Frank Bruni of the NY Times has composed the definitive statement on Trump:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/sunday/president-trump-resignation.html?mcubz=0

The Week When President Trump Resigned

 Frank Bruni

As the worst week in a cursed presidency wound down, I spotted more and more forecasts that Donald Trump would resign, including from Tony Schwartz, who wrote "The Art of the Deal" for Trump and presumably understands his tortured psyche.

They struck me not as wishful or fantastical.

They struck me as late.

Trump resigned the presidency already — if we regard the job as one of moral stewardship, if we assume that an iota of civic concern must joust with self-regard, if we expect a president's interest in legislation to rise above vacuous theatrics, if we consider a certain baseline of diplomatic etiquette to be part of the equation.

By those measures, it's arguable that Trump's presidency never really began. By those measures, it's indisputable that his presidency ended in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, when he chose — yes, chose — to litigate rather than lead, to attend to his wounded pride instead of his wounded nation and to debate the supposed fine points of white supremacy.

He abdicated his responsibilities so thoroughly and recklessly that it amounted to a letter of resignation. Then he whored for his Virginia winery on the way out the door.

Trump knew full well what he should have done, because he'd done it — grudgingly and badly — only a day earlier. But it left him feeling countermanded, corrected, submissive and weak, and those emotions just won't do for an ego as needy and skin as thin as his. So he put id before country and lashed out, in a manner so patently wrong and transcendently ruinous that TV news shows had to go begging for Republican lawmakers to defend or even try to explain what he'd said.

Those lawmakers wanted no part of him. The same went for the corporate chieftains he considers his peers. And for the generals he genuinely reveres. The heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all went out of their way to issue statements condemning the hatred that Trump wouldn't take on. A soft coup against a cuckoo: It confirmed how impotent Trump had become.

On Tuesday he "relinquished what presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan have regarded as a cardinal duty of their job: set a moral course to unify the nation," wrote The Times's Mark Landler, in what was correctly labeled a news analysis and not an opinion column. Landler's assessment, echoed by countless others, was as unassailable as it was haunting, and it was prompted in part by Trump's perverse response to a question that it's hard to imagine another president being asked: Did he place the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., on the same "moral plane" as those who showed up to push back at them?

"I'm not putting anybody on a moral plane," Trump answered.

Indeed he wasn't. And if you can't put anybody on a moral plane, you can't put yourself on Air Force One.

On Friday Trump finally dismissed his polarizing chief strategist, Steve Bannon. That's excellent. And irrelevant. A president's team doesn't matter when he himself is this lost.

In The Atlantic, under the headline "Donald Trump Is a Lame-Duck President," David Graham wrote: "For most presidents, that comes in the last few months of a term. For Trump, it appears to have arrived early, just a few months into his term. The president did always brag that he was a fast learner."

In Axios, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei noted that the president had "systematically damaged or destroyed his relationship with — well, almost every group or individual essential to success." They then listed these "methodically alienated" constituencies: "the public," "CEOs," "the intelligence community," "every Democrat who could help him do a deal," "world leaders," "Europe," "his own staff."

In The Times, Michael Shear, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush reported that several of his top advisers couldn't see how his presidency would recover. "Others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job," they added.

Striking a similar note, Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, who has not been among Trump's frequent Republican critics, told reporters, "The president has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate."

This is a question of more than competence. It's a question of basic interest, and when I look back through the lens of the present wreckage at all that's happened since Trump descended that escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015, I see clearly that he never in fact wanted or set out to be president, not as the position is conventionally or correctly defined.

He revealed that repeatedly as he rejected the traditional rules and usual etiquette, refusing to release his tax returns, bragging about his penis size, feuding with the Muslim father of a fallen American soldier and electing puerility over poetry at nearly every meaningful moment.

Because of his victories in the Republican primary and then the general election, his campaign was hailed for its tactical genius. But it was driven by, and tailored to, his emotional cravings. All that time on Twitter wasn't principally about a direct connection to voters. It was a way to stare at an odometer of approval and monitor, in real time, how broadly his sentiments were being liked and shared.

Applause. Greater brand exposure. A new layer of perks atop an existence already lavish with them. Utter saturation of Americans' consciousness. These were his foremost goals. Governing wasn't, and that was obvious in his haziness and dishonesty before Election Day and in his laziness and defiance after.

He made clear that conflicts of interest didn't trouble him, drawing constant attention to Trump properties and incessantly pointing out that nothing in the law of the land compelled him to divest his business interests.

He opened the White House door wide to unmoored and unserious people, most recently Anthony Scaramucci, who, during his nanosecond as communications director, disparaged Bannon as someone engaged primarily in a limber act of self-gratification. That was on the record. Then Bannon disparaged his administration adversaries as being so threatened by him that they were "wetting themselves." That was on the record, too.

A president is supposed to fill important posts. Trump dallied. A president is supposed to be involved in lawmaking, but members of Congress who met with Trump about the repeal-and-replace of Obamacare were aghast at his ignorance of the legislation and of the legislative process itself.

A president is supposed to safeguard the most sacred American institutions, repairing them if need be. Trump doesn't respect them. He has sought to discredit and disempower the judiciary, the free press, the F.B.I., the Congressional Budget Office. He even managed to inject politics into, and pollute, the Boy Scouts. This is the course of a tyrant.

I haven't mentioned Russia. How astonishing that it can be left out and there's still a surfeit to rue.

Trump hasn't been exercising the duties of his office. He's been excising them, one by one. The moral forfeiture of the past week was the capper.

And as I watched the Bushes and the generals and Trump's former rivals for the Republican presidential nomination step into the public square to enunciate their own principles about murderous bigots and domestic terrorists, I realized that they weren't going through any typical this-is-what-makes-us-Americans motions. They weren't preening.

They were, in the words of The Washington Post's James Hohmann, "filling the void." If Trump wasn't going to do his job, others had to.

I kept coming across variations on the verdict that he had "failed to lead," and that phraseology is off. "Fail" and "failure" imply that there was an effort, albeit unsuccessful.

Trump made none. He consciously decided that he didn't care about comforting or inspiring those Americans — a majority of them — who weren't quick and generous enough with their clapping. He was more interested in justifying himself.

So he picked division over unity, war over peace. And make no mistake: He didn't merely shortchange the presidency. He left it vacant.

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****
Juan
 

Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

- Adlai Stevenson

What Happened after Charlottesville - a view from a star fascist.

The format for this article is probably not correct for smart phone reading.  It needs to be seen as a large tablet or desktop presentation.   The reason for this is that the imbedded videos

are only affective or transferrable on this format.   What this article from the Washington Post shows is that in just one week after the horror of Charlottesville, the thugs of the alt-right have

been taken down and reduced to shambles as individuals, and the media and digital financial tools used to support them have backed away from them.   These reactionary forces may be what takes the movement down several notches.   Upon editorial review of this email, much is lost, so link to the actual WAPO story.

It is best if you can link to this actual Washington Post link to get it all:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/08/18/the-rise-and-humiliating-fall-of-charlottesvilles-starring-fascist/?undefined=&utm_term=.c8d84097d739&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

White nationalist Chris Cantwell at Charlottesville. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

The white supremacists, nationalists and far-right trolls who starred in last weekend's violent Charlottesville rallies have suffered no lack of humiliation in the days since.

Take "Millennial Matt," whose catchphrase — "Hitler did nothing wrong!" — earned him tens of thousands of fans before he went to the rally, but his Twitter account has since been deleted, his real identity publicized, and he is now begging fans for money to flee his home town because "my life is in shambles."

There are plenty of other examples, from the hot dog restaurant cook who lost his job to university students whose schools publicly renounced racism after they went to the march. There's even a Twitter feed devoted to shaming the tiki-torch-lit faces of white nationalism.

But none of the marchers soared so high or crashed so hard as Chris Cantwell, who became the ivory-skinned, gun-toting star of a documentary about Charlottesville that aired Monday on HBO — and a week later is better known as the "weeping Nazi" who got banned from OkCupid.

Act 1 — 'Heil Cantwell!'

For a few triumphant hours, Cantwell was the thick-armed embodiment of white nationalism to tens of millions of people — the star of VICE News and HBO's documentary about last weekend's rallies, which has been seen more than 30 million times.

He looked every bit the rebel leader in that footage from Friday night and Saturday, greeting other white nationalists from as far away as Canada; marching by torchlight to the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus; screaming "Jews will not replace us!"

"I carry a pistol. I go to the gym all the time," Cantwell tells the camera, muscles bulging beneath a shirt that advertises his blog, which in turn advertises Cantwell as a libertarian "fascist."

"I'm trying to make myself more capable of violence!" he says.

And there was violence. Men in Charlottesville's streets wielding Confederate flags like spears. And DeAndre Harris, a black man beaten by white men with sticks. And Heather Heyer, a white counterprotester killed when a car rammed a crowd, injuring 19 others.

Cantwell got his licks too, as seen in the documentary.

"Communists!" he yells, pouring a jug of milk over his eyes after, he says, counterprotesters hit him with tear gas. "Second time in two f—ing days!"

"They're afraid of you. You got too big," an admirer tells him.

"Heil Cantwell!" cries another.

And then the self-avowed fascist was back on his feet and leading a march shirtless, a few cans short of a six-pack gleaming in the weekend sun.

"We'll f—ing kill these people if we have to," Cantwell says.

This ad will end in 11 seconds

Days after the events in Charlottesville, several companies have withdrawn support or blocked white supremacist-affiliated groups from their services. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)

Act 2 — 'Cantwell the Coward'

Cantwell's bravado only increased over the weekend, as news of the violence spread across the country.

He invited the VICE reporter to his hotel room after the marches, where he showed off his high-powered rifles and the 9mm pistol strapped to his ankle.

The fatal car strike was justified, Cantwell insisted. The protesters had been "stupid animals."

"Someone died," the reporter reminded him.

"I think a lot more people are going to die before we're done, frankly," Cantwell said.

End film. Tens of millions of people have since watched it, and Cantwell would freshen his Facebook profile with photos of himself in the thick of the violence.

But as the weekend faded, other footage began to circulate. Cantwell had apparently recorded it during the rally, in what appeared to be the privacy of a hotel room.

And the famed white separatist appeared to be at the point of tears.

"I've been told there's a warrant out for my arrest," Cantwell pleads to the camera, through sniffles and a trembling voice. "I don't know what to do!"

There were, in fact, felony warrants out for him, the Boston Globe would later report: for the use of illegal gas, and injury by chemical or explosive. (University of Virginia police didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.)

In his confessional, Cantwell told the camera he was too scared to go to the courthouse or meet police. He complained that Chelsea Manning had been threatening to "curb-stomp Nazis."

"I know we talk a lot of s— on the Internet," Cantwell said. But: "Every step of the way we've tried to do the right thing and they just won't stop. … Our enemies just will not stop."

It's unclear where the video was first posted, but copies quickly spread across YouTube — mocked on the political left and right alike.

"White Supremacist Cries After Realizing He Could Be Arrested," wrote Mother Jones.

"MUH MASTER RACE HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH," a user added on 4Chan's /pol message board, which is something of a hotbed of racism itself.

And Cantwell's week would only get worse.

Act 3 — 'Straight, Man, Single'

An image of a deleted OkCupid profile.

By midweek, Cantwell's name was as well known in the mainstream media as the fringes of the Internet.

But who was he, really?

As the Boston Globe told it, Cantwell was a former comedian from Keene, N.H. Several years ago, RawStory reported with evident delight, Cantwell and two friends used to run around Keene, armed, harassing parking meter attendants in the name of freedom — which the group called "Robin Hooding."

More recently, he is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "an unapologetic fascist, who spews white nationalist propaganda with a libertarian spin on his live-streamed call-in show" and seeks a whites-only state.

Or — per an OkCupid profile leaked online — he is 6 feet tall, single, and "interested in getting married and having children" with the right woman.

"Ideally I'd like to talk on here briefly, move quickly to the phone, and then we can go out on a date and see what happens," wrote the user "ItsChris603," beneath what appears to be a gym-mirror selfie of Cantwell, which ArsTechnica reported was his account.

He described himself not as a fascist, but a podcaster "specializing in controversial political satire."

"It's great because I have a very flexible schedule," he wrote. A typical Friday night would find him not, say, screaming about Jews at a white nationalist march, but rather "doing date nights. Bowling, live shows, movies, travel, all types of things."

OkCupid, remarkably, announced in a tweet that Cantwell did have an account, and had just been banned for life.

Tinder booted him too, Cantwell confirmed in a slur-filled blog post Thursday, explaining that "these [Jews] will stop at nothing."

Likewise, his YouTube channel, Facebook page and Twitter account have all been deleted as tech companies rush to purge extremists of all kinds from their platforms since Charlottesville.

So there it is. The man who on Monday was an HBO-famous swaggering racist had been reduced by the end of the week to broadcasting from an undisclosed location via a Tumblr account and his personal blog.

Cantwell had hired a lawyer, he wrote Thursday, and was preparing to turn himself in to police.

"Depending on who you listen to, I'm either a hero, a terrorist, or a crybaby, " he wrote, "which should tell you something about the reliability of the media."

This article has been updated since publication, and corrected to note that marchers on Friday night went to a statue of Thomas Jefferson — not the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee they had come to protect.

 Play Video 3:21

Why white supremacists chose liberal Charlottesville to protest

One person was killed and 19 were injured amid protests of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12. Here's how the city became the scene of violence. (Video: Elyse Samuels, Zoeann Murphy/Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/The Washington Post)