Too Many Donald Trump Disasters to Count

[babylonsister]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/05/too-many-donald-trump-disasters-to-count.html


Too Many Donald Trump Disasters to Count
Any one of these would be a Benghazi-level disaster for a president who hadn’t won the office by defining disgusting down.
Michael Tomasky
04.05.17 1:00 AM ET


It happened again this week. In fact it happens nearly every day, and it’s one of the most infuriating things about this infuriating era.

On Monday, three stories came out that under any other president, certainly under Barack Obama, would have been three-day mini-scandals—at least. But under Trump, they’re either so dwarfed by the running narratives (Russia; shambolic White House; tweets) or so unsurprising coming from him that it’s hard not to just shake our heads and move on.

These little scandals drive home to me what may be the single starkest lesson of these first 70-whatever days of Trump: that the right-wing media has enormous agenda-setting power in this country.

Item one: Trump welcomes to the White House one of the biggest human-rights abusers in the world and says he’s done a “fantastic job.” Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has put tens of thousands of people in prison. Whatever Egypt was under Mubarak and then under Morsi, which was bad enough, it’s now worse.

Now, I’m not going to get on too high a horse here. Presidents from both parties have tolerated Egyptian authoritarianism for decades, and while Obama did suspend military aid to the country for a time after al-Sisi overthrew Morsi, it was restored in 2015. So no American president has exactly come down hard on Egypt.

But inviting a thug like that to the Oval Office, and praising him to the stars, is sending a signal. Remember the circumstances under which al-Sisi gained power. There was the initial uprising against Mubarak in Tahrir Square. Out he went. There were actual elections, and in came Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Then the people said, “No, this is not what we had in mind,” and they gathered in Tahrir Square again. In other words, the people of Egypt were exercising what meager power they had to say, “We are desperate for reform and real democracy.” And then in comes this guy to pulverize it.

Item two: The Forward reveals that Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s chief counterterrorism adviser, once praised a very far-right—and anti-Semitic—Hungarian militia. I won’t dive too deep on the details here; you should read them from the reporter who unearthed them, Lili Bayer. A little morsel: One captain in the militia referred to Jews as “Zionist rats” and “locusts.” This is far from being Gorka’s first controversy.

Item three: Records released over the weekend and first spotted by Pro Publica showed that Trump can pull money out of his businesses any time he wants—with zero public disclosure. A “Trust Certification Change” was made to the documents governing the status of Trump’s finances on Feb. 10, after he took office, stipulating that the trust “shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request.” He owns more than 400 businesses, and according to Pro Publica, Trump can take profits or the businesses themselves anytime he pleases. Imagine the potential for corruption that sets up.

In the pre-Trump world, any of these three would have ignited huge fireworks.

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The Trump administration already has racked up so many scandals, failures, and sleazy deals that I guess it’s inevitable that some of them slip by. But just keep this propaganda imbalance in your mind. It explains why these near-daily controversies just fade away. Imagine where he’d be in the polls if all of these got the attention they deserve!