President wants a promotion
MAY 24, 2019 5:43PM ET
... being the “leader of the free world” isn’t enough ... So .. when does patience turn into submission?
By JAMIL SMITH
... On Tyranny, a 2017 book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder .. is so small that it can nearly fit in the palm of my hand ...
One of Snyder’s most poignant and subtle recommendations, arriving in chapter 17, is to listen for dangerous words. “Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary,” he writes, rather lyrically. That resonated as I listened Thursday to President Trump, after a reporter reminded him that the treason of which he’d been accusing his many adversaries is an actual crime punishable by death, and he merely nodded. When asked who might suffer that penalty, he named the former head of the FBI, his ex-deputy, and “people probably higher than that.” There aren’t too many people higher than that ...
Hours later, that dystopian rhetoric began transforming into authoritarian reality. Trump signed a directive allowing attorney general William Barr broad, unprecedented powers to conduct a review of the intelligence community’s investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign, ordering the CIA and the other 15 federal intelligence agencies to essentially to give Barr everything he needs. Whatever Barr wants declassified, he’ll declassify — which we can anticipate, given our experience with the Mueller report, to be a nightmare of misinformation tailored to the president’s narrative.
It is carte blanche for his attack dog to comb through a mountain of intelligence and craft a story to punish whomever Trump wants punished. Without any restraints, we can expect mockeries of justice unlike things we’ve seen since, well, trials of police officers for killing black people. It will almost certainly be disgraceful. Trump lackey Corey Lewandowski already was on the airwaves Friday alleging that former Vice President (and potential general election rival) Joe Biden was behind the Steele dossier and that Comey, McCabe and others would all be on trial by “March or April of the next year” ...
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/president-trump-wants-a-promotion-840224/
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