Hasta La Gadget!

From the very start of his campaign Donald Trump’s case for his superior qualification for the presidency has rested on his vaunted deal-making ability. Here is an excerpt from a fund-raising email his campaign sent around on August 23:

I’ve built my career…by making great deals. I’m known for it — I even wrote a book years ago called “The Art of the Deal.”

For the last 8 years, America hasn’t even been getting bad deals from the Obama-Hillary Democrats — they’ve been disastrous.

So here’s the great deal I have for you, Friend: you can count on me to make the very best deals for our country and our people — on trade, on security, on jobs and more…

How does Trump view his deal-making art? In a 1990 interview with Playboy magazine he was asked, “Is there a master plan to your deal making or is it all improvisational?” His answer: “It’s much more improvisational than people might think.”

As a politician, Trump’s improvisation has translated into his unique speaking style. Trump free-associates. When he is unbound by the likes of teleprompters (and even then in irresistible asides), Trump moves from topic A to topic B improvisationally. He often seems to have a list in front of him–topics he wants to talk about. Or better, he wants to riff about. And, via what looks like free association, one riff can lead to another. And another. And another.

What are these riffs? Where do they come from? The most fundamental fact for understanding how Trump managed to blow away sixteen politicians in the Republican primaries is that he prepared for his presidential run by immersing himself in the far-right Tea Party-infused, Michael Savage/Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity talk-radio world.

True believers in this world make up around twenty percent of the American electorate, though they vote in disproportionately high numbers in Republican primaries. It is a world most Americans have been familiar with only superficially. But Trump understood, profoundly, what was burning this constituency up.

He became supple in expressing the themes that run through their conversation day after day, and the memes that constitute the groundwork of what is constantly hammered at on kindred websites. He saw them and raised–“Build that wall!” He made their issues his own. At his convention, calling them the “forgotten people,” Trump told this following what he had already made come true: “I am your voice.” Trump is alpha-male, nostalgia-hawker and celebrity all rolled into one.

From day one–Mexicans are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists”–the rest of America could hardly believe their ears. Liberals and Democrats were appalled at what they were hearing. Republicans and conservatives were unnerved by their sense that decades of their winking at such sentiments had finally delivered them their comeuppance.

Trump’s mind-boggling collection of outrageous remarks throughout the months of the primaries (and since) consists almost entirely of the themes and memes in the daily conversation among the far-right populists he steeped himself in. It is their daily grist.

Precisely because he said those things uncensored, Trump was electrifying for this constituency, who are, finally, the largest voting bloc in the Republican base. Resentments about the Clintons, Obama, the Republican establishment and much much more were suddenly out there at the level of presidential politics, asserted in the name of smashing political correctness, no longer merely forming the agreed-upon, taken for granted reality that set the terms of everyday in-house discourse on the populist far right.

When Trump free associates, he’s diving into this bank of these memes and pulling them out one by one. Take the extraordinary series of Trumpisms that seemed to crater his campaign in the weeks following the conventions as the national audience paying attention to the presidential campaign grew. To a one, Trump’s most inciting remarks are taken-for-granted chestnuts from this extreme populist right discourse. Rigged elections? Everyone knows Obama didn’t really win. Skewed polls? Unskewing is a science in that world. Hillary the devil? An everyday topic, these days edging out Obama as the Antichrist. “Lock her up”? It’s been a certain conviction for months that her inevitable indictment was going to tank Hillary’s presidential campaign. Flirting with supporting Paul Ryan’s Tea Party opposition in the primary? The very stuff of the populist insurgency against the Republican establishment which has betrayed “real conservatism.” Attacking the gold-star Khans? That’s an easy one: they’re purveyors of Sharia law that is creeping across America. Threatening Hillary with “second amendment people”? In the daily anguish over whether to support RINO (Republican in name only) establishment candidates or to go down to electoral defeat with Tea Party challengers, “second amendment remedies” is a residual category that inevitably makes its appearance.

To some extent, Trump’s replacing Paul Manafort with Steve Bannon from Breitbart.com as at the top of his campaign has pulled back the curtain on the reservoir of themes and memes Trump has been free-associating with for the past fourteen months. There is now an ideological designation for this thinking: populist nationalism. The white supremacism that has been cheering at the sidelines of the Trump campaign all along has now come out of the shadows. So too its undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Hillary Clinton’s speech this week in Reno, Nevada citing Trump’s alt right support, has made clear to a wide audience that the most radical anti-immigrant forces in America’s political landscape have migrated from the fringes to the commanding heights of the current Republican campaign for the presidency. So too has Trump’s joint appearance in Jackson, Mississippi with Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), who succeeded at the national level, with support from the right-wing of the Conservative Party, in his Brexit campaign to remove Britain from the European Union.

In Trump’s populist right world opposition to the Republican establishment and candidates like McCain, Romney and Jeb Bush has long been in lockstep with the conviction that nominating a “real conservative”–that is, someone like them; a “real American”–is the sure route, the real route, the only route for the Republicans to win the White House. Bannon matches Trump in his contempt for the Republican establishment. He has supported the far right’s taking down former House speaker John Boehner. Before that, he mobilized Breitbart to help defeat Boehner’s number two in the House, Eric Cantor. Earlier this year, he worked hard at trying to unseat current speaker Paul Ryan.

Steve Bannon has emerged as today’s most accomplished practitioner of driving thinking from the far right into the despised mainstream press. The late founder of Breitbart.com, Andrew Breitbart, once called Bannon “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement, an oddly positive reference to Nazi Germany’s most famous filmmaker.” And, it appears, Bannon has been joined in the Trump campaign by yesterday’s most accomplished practitioner of these arts, Roger Ailes, who, in the form of Fox News, twenty years ago gave America’s radical right its very own news network. Bannon in particular, has long been a Hillary Clinton specialist, moving inquisitions like Clinton Cash, the 2015 book and 2016 movie, into mainstream outlets.

True, in Bannon’s first days on the job, the candidate has shocked some of his followers by equivocating on the hard-line immigration views that have made up the heart of his campaign. There is no doubt that Trump’s free association is going to make life as difficult for Bannon as it makes Mike Pence’s life. But there is also no doubt that Steve Bannon’s place at the head of Trump’s campaign–however long it lasts–has definitively revealed not only the ideological heart of Trumpism, but also the well of irruptions that we have been watching as Donald Trump attempts to free associate his way to the White House.

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Meet Chierika Ukogu, a rower who made history during the 2016 Olympic Games as the first person to represent Nigeria in her sport. After qualifying to compete on this world stage, Ukogu fundraised $15,000 because the Nigerian Rowing Association was unable to support her journey financially. She competed and left the games as one of the top 20 rowers in the world, accomplishing an incredible feat. She gained even more attention 6 days after she competed, however, when rapper Snoop Dog tweeted that she had won silver overall and earned Nigeria’s first Olympic medal. This mistake landed her on the front page of the BBC in addition to several other sites.

While Snoop Dog indeed messed up on a major fact, he was right about everything else. Chierika Ukogu is a woman who should be celebrated, known, and respected for her incredible history-making accomplishment. I believe everyone should be focusing more on her success, rather than Snoop Dog’s mistake and because of this, I am honored to have been able to interview her for this highlight and to share more of her story with a larger audience.

Ukogu, who graduated from Stanford University in 2014 and who just began medical school at Icahn School of Medicine, started rowing in 2006 when she decided to stop competitive cheerleading and tried out for the team at her school. She says it’s hard to put into words why she loves rowing so much, but she is grateful that it has allowed her to travel all over the world and meet amazing people, “these past ten years have been incredible” she states. When asked why she thinks there aren’t more people of color who row she said:

I think the answer is two-fold. Firstly, rowing is a sport of means. Boats, uniforms, coaching, it is all so expensive. If we can figure out a way to meet these cost barriers, the sport would definitely be more diverse. Secondly, a lot of people of color haven’t had exposure to the sport. I definitely had no idea what rowing was, before joining the team, and I was honestly a bit intimidated by my teammates that came from rowing backgrounds. My high school just happened to have a team.

She was inspired to represent Nigeria after watching a rower from Niger in the 2012 Olympic Games by the name of Isaaka. Isaaka became known as the “sculling sloth” after finishing last because he had just three months of training before competing. Ukogu says “I wanted to build off of his narrative, and just add to the representation of people of color in this sport.” She certainly accomplished this, racing her best times ever in Rio. Although she is unsure if she will try to compete in the Olympics again come 2020, I hope she chooses to do so. She has given her audience and inspirational story to follow long before Snoop Dog’s mistake and many look forward to seeing what’s in store for her next.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Can a Free Press be a Free Press Without Risk: Russia, America, The Iran/Contra/Drugs in Black Neighborhoods Scandal

By Carol Smaldino

Me: It could change everything if we begin to hold the press accountable for telling us the truth, which includes writing about things that might be inconvenient for us or for them.

*Gary Webb, 2004:
“The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, that I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.”

I had already been preoccupied by journalism in America. This is not only because major news outlets didn’t report their findings regarding Iraq. It was rather that I saw many courageous and devoted reporters of investigative stories doing their jobs while their findings, even if shocking, didn’t remain the target of more investigation or action. There were Bill Moyers, James Risen, Jane Mayer, Seymour Hirsch, and Glenn Greenwald as a few who followed up on controversial stories. There were Michael Moore and Al Gore who won Academy Awards, but the inconvenient truth in the films didn’t seem to have a lasting effect, to make a real difference.

What has also been missing is the press picking up on articles and stories and books that are news in that they bring issues to the fore, either for the first time or differently than before. I wondered if the granting of awards was just a spectacle to convince us, and the world outside, that we are the best and the greatest because we allow people to say ostensibly controversial things out loud. We could then discuss the movies or the news over dinner and go right home to bed.

When Tim Wise suggested I read “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide” by Carol Anderson I did so. Her handle on slavery, segregation, racism and white hate are particularly astute, distressing and sobering. When I found her descriptions of the Reagan Administration (yes, that would be Ronald) and its CIA funding the illegal war in Nicaragua backing the Contras, I was astounded. It was accomplished by dumping tons of crack cocaine in South Los Angeles in what would be the beginning of a systematic poisoning and in ways a genocide–, both there and in other cities.

I wondered how Anderson got to say in print abominable truths in ways that toppled myths of grandiosity about national integrity–if we are to take this stuff seriously. In particular I wondered: Was Anderson considered a non-threat to top media sources, and God forbid the government, as relatively unknown and therefore perhaps less likely to attract the fury and outrage of those in power. Ouch.

In doing some light research on these topics I found Anderson was completely on target. It was then that I discovered the work of Gary Webb. Webb was a lone white reporter who followed a common sense (and non-racist) approach to the eruption of crack cocaine in Los Angeles. He figured that people didn’t use drugs because they were black, but because the drugs were there, and he wondered how they got there. His findings implicated the CIA and its funding the clandestine and illegal war in Central America though these profits.

Webb had been a prestigious reporter with a Pulitzer under his belt) and despite this, or because of it (along with the fact that his reporting was put Online for everyone to read and was therefore available), the New York Times, the LA Times and the Washington Post put their money and their power, not behind helping to complement his research and findings but rather to demean and discredit him. The campaign they began was filled with hostility, competition, and greed–nothing that had anything to do with their responsibility to the people or the truth. It worked.

Reagan could have easily been impeached; in fact he should have been. He lied to Congress, went against their decision against a war in Nicaragua; he also went completely counter to his own well-dramatized war on drugs to become as hypocritical as any President could be.

During this inner dialogue, I happened to notice the International New York Times with the following headline, on August 28, 2016. It was by Neil MacFarquhar and read, ” A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories”. It had me at hello but not in a good way.

The article detailed a common practice of Russian media outlets, which involves basically spreading rumors that have no real truth to them, one being about the negative effects of a potential for Sweden to join NATO. At that time I was reading about egregious crimes and negligence right in our press at home. How could I indulge in self-congratulation, I thought. So I didn’t.

I stayed with the upset that the Iran Contra affair, upset also that it had seemed so dense at the time, and that I no doubt was part of the population distracted by the collusion between government and press., something Gary Webb spoke about this sorrowfully and thoughtfully. (link , THE MIGHTY WURLITZER PLAYS ON by Gary Webb)

In terms of Russia, I am not a fan of how Putin and company have decided to rewrite Stalin so the children will have good self esteem when they think of him. In terms of America, we can’t have a free press if the press stops journalists and journalism when the going gets rough, or becomes dangerous.

What can get us less scared of the truth, no matter what? And maybe even to be ready as well for hearings, actions and reparations now, for the Iran/Contra drug disasters that to this day affect our national consciousness and so many black people who have been punished, assaulted and incarcerated due to those policies.

By the way, for those of you who don’t know this, Gary Webb died in 2004, with two bullets to the head. His death was declared a suicide.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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