Doyle McManus: Why is Trump running for president again? To stay out of jail

A House committee is examining his attempts to overturn last year’s presidential election, including his actions when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A prosecutor in Georgia is investigating whether he violated state law against soliciting election fraud when he demanded that officials “find 11,780 votes” — the number he needed to undo Joe Biden’s victory in that state.

And prosecutors in New York are looking into allegations that Trump, or at least the closely held family business he runs, committed tax and bank fraud.

But don’t count him out.

“His life has been a series of lessons showing that with aggressive lawyering and a lot of chutzpah, you can achieve almost total immunity,” Norman Eisen, a counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, told me.

He’s used the investigation to raise money for his political action committee, which has collected millions.

“The Left will never stop coming after me,” he wrote in an email to donors last week. “Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to make a statement to the Left that you’ll ALWAYS stand with YOUR President.”

And there, no matter how the legal wrangles turn out, lies the answer to a persistent question about Trump: What makes him run?

One is money. Political contributions may be the most reliable revenue stream the Trump family enterprise has at the moment.

The other, equally important, is to bolster his legal defense. As long as he’s running (or even sort of running), Trump can denounce every inquest and subpoena as just another part of a political vendetta. It’s a way to hold his troops together — and to make every prosecutor think twice.

He’s notching up another presidential first: He’s running for reelection to stay out of jail. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-24/why-is-trump-running-for-president-again-to-stay-out-of-jail

Catherine Rampell: The GOP rebrands itself as the party of tax cheats

Once upon a time, Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of small government and family values. Recently, though, GOP leaders have been cobbling together a new coalition, welcoming insurrectionists, white-nationalist tiki-torchers and people who think Bill Gates is trying to microchip them.

The latest recruit to the Big Tent? Tax cheats.

Here’s the backstory. Each year, about $600 billion in taxes legally owed are not paid. For scale, that’s roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers, according to Treasury Department data.

These unpaid taxes — often called the “tax gap” — are predominantly owed by wealthy individuals. The richest 1 percent alone duck an estimated $163 billion in income taxes each year.

Tax cheating is not a victimless crime. When (disproportionately high-income) people don’t pay their bills, everyone else must pay more to fill the shortfall.

More reporting would also deter would-be tax cheats from fudging in the first place, because they’d know they’re more likely to get caught.

The reporting proposal is estimated to bring in $200 billion to $250 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to Treasury.

This is revenue that would be collected without having to raise a single tax rate, which you’d think Republicans would applaud. Instead, the GOP, backed by the bank lobby, has fought every version of the reporting policy tooth and nail.

Republicans also presumably have another shameful aim: communicating to tax cheats that, now and in the future, the GOP has their backs. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/21/gop-rebrands-itself-party-tax-cheats/

Dana Milbank: Why is Anthony Fauci trying to kill my puppy?

My family recently got a new puppy, a strong-willed and mouthy but ultimately lovable little nipper. We named him Bernie Sanders.

Unfortunately, though, I can’t take Bernie out on walks. Here in the capital, we have a puppy killer on the loose, a murderous psychopath known as Anthony S. Fauci.

“Dr. Anthony Fauci is facing calls from a bipartisan group of legislators to respond to allegations that his National Institutes of Health division provided a grant to a lab in Tunisia to torture and kill dozens of beagle puppies for twisted scientific experiments,” Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post reported Sunday afternoon.

“HORROR ‘EXPERIMENTS’: #ArrestFauci trending after doc ‘funded research that saw beagles eaten alive & stripped of vocal cords in testing’” Murdoch’s Sun reported.

“'Cruel' Fauci is condemned for … experiments which saw beagles ‘de-barked’ and trapped in cages so flies could eat them alive,” added Britain’s Daily Mail, mentioning “a Tunisian research lab where beagle puppies were force-fed a new drug.”

The monster! What next, Fauci? Setting kittens’ tails on fire? Pulling appendages off daddy long legs while watching cock fights?

Unlikely. As it turns out, the only thing being tortured here is the truth. The episode says more about the right-wing disinformation machine and its crusade against Fauci than it does about research funded by Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/25/fauci-puppy-experiments-conspiracy-republicans/

Bess Levin: Trump’s New Social Media Company Is His Biggest Scam Yet

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Donald Trump announced Wednesday night that he will be launching his own social media network, the embarrassingly named TRUTH Social. For those of you scratching your heads and wondering, But wait, didn’t Trump already launch a new social media company? you are likely thinking of (1) one of the right-wing networks tangentially associated with the ex-president, like Gab, Parler, or Gettr, or (2) something called “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” the blog that published Trump’s comments and was shut down after just a month because it had almost no readers.

Obviously, the lack of readers was upsetting to the former president, who spent much of the last decade tweeting every deranged thought that came into his head, from “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th” to “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE” to “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” Unfortunately for Trump, his ban from Twitter, on account of inciting an insurrection, remains in effect. Hence, TRUTH Social.

Like most Trump initiatives, TRUTH Social is incredibly cringeworthy and embarrassing. For one thing, before it even launched, per The Washington Post, patriotic pranksters were able to find a seemingly unreleased version and post “a picture of a defecating pig to the  ‘donaldjtrump’ account,” causing it to be pulled offline. For another, the network’s terms of service dictate that users must refrain from “excessive use of capital letters,” i.e., the only way Donald Trump knows how to type. Then there’s also the fact that TRUTH Social, billed as a vehicle for “stand[ing] up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” which conservatives claim hates free speech, prohibits users from saying anything to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.” Meanwhile, the whole thing is basically a crappier version of Twitter. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/donald-trump-truth-social-spac-scam

Bess Levin: Trump’s Family Business Is Under Yet Another Criminal Investigation

The New York Times reports that the Trump Organization, already under indictment by the office of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., is now facing a separate criminal investigation being conducted by the district attorney’s office in Westchester County, New York, which has subpoenaed records from the Trump National Golf Club located there and from the town of Ossining, which sets property taxes for the course. While the full breadth of the investigation is not clear at this time, the Times reports that it appears that district attorney Mimi Rocah is focused in part on whether Trump’s family business misled local officials about the property’s value with the express purpose of lowering its tax bill.

Of course, for those of you keeping up at home, the notion that a company run by Donald Trump would claim the value of a property was less than one tenth of what local officials said it was actually worth should come as…no surprise whatsoever. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/donald-trump-trump-organization-westchester-criminal-investigation

Eugene Robinson: Criticism of Democrats’ negotiations misses a bigger issue: Republicans’ absence from governing

Nobody said life was fair, but this is ridiculous: Democrats are getting pilloried for struggling to do big and important things, while Republicans are being given a free pass for behaving like a horde of vandals.

This isn’t the way our government is supposed to work. Yes, the Democratic Party controls the White House and has the slimmest of majorities in the Senate and the House. But that doesn’t absolve Republicans from the duty to try to do what’s best for the country. It doesn’t give any of our elected representatives the right to simply ignore the work they were elected to do — and the GOP should be called out for putting political gamesmanship ahead of the nation’s well-being.

Wednesday’s vote by GOP senators to block debate — not passage, mind you, but mere debate — of watered-down legislation to guarantee basic voting rights is just the latest example. Securing universal access to the ballot box used to be a bipartisan cause. In blocking the bill, Republicans are “hurting their own constituents,” as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) noted Thursday. But apparently that doesn’t matter.

I get it. The voter-suppression laws passed by GOP-controlled state legislatures across the country are crafted to give an advantage to Republican candidates. The proposed Freedom to Vote Act, already watered down in a vain quest for Republican support, would have somewhat leveled the playing field. Yet even the few GOP senators who occasionally show a glimmer of conscience — Mitt Romney (Utah), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) — voted the party line, which was against allowing the Senate even to debate the bill.

The many Republicans who helped pass the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 — giants such as Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine and Jacob Javits of New York — would weep if they could witness what has happened to their party.

The problem is that one of our two major parties — the GOP — is doing nothing but throwing rocks and bottles from the sidelines. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/21/criticism-democrats-negotiations-misses-bigger-issue-republicans-absence-governing/

Maureen Dowd: Colin Powell and ‘Guernica’

If we could unlock the puzzle of Colin Powell, maybe we could understand why America cracked up.

Back in 1995, I wrote a column about the needlepoint-pillow rules Powell laid out in his memoir. It is sad to read them now because he broke so many of them when he drove his tank off the cliff known as Iraq. Like Rule No. 7: “You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.”

Rule No. 1 was: “It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.”

But there will be no morning from here to eternity when the decision to invade Iraq will look better.

The Shakespearean tragedy of Powell is that he knew it was a rotten decision. And, unlike the draft dodgers in the Bush White House, he knew the real cost of war. He knew they weren’t playing with toy soldiers.

We’re still living in a world warped by the fakery of W. and Cheney. We’re still shattered because W. and Condi Rice ignored that intelligence report titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” W. was too busy mountain biking to pay attention.

If our leaders could trick us into the Iraq misadventure, how could we trust government again? And when government is not trusted, it creates fertile ground for charlatans.

Donald Trump fed off — and is still feeding off — those severed ties of trust between Americans and their government. A substantial chunk of the public believes Trump’s lies and conspiracies.

And most of those craven House Republicans are still so frightened of Trump’s power, as he ramps up for another run, that they refused to stand up for their own institution and hold Steve Bannon in contempt.

Powell is a cautionary tale for another reason. He was supposed to be the “grown-up in the room,” a counterweight to W.’s callowness. It didn’t work. Powell folded and hundreds of thousands, and counting, died.

When U.N. officials covered up a tapestry of Picasso’s antiwar masterpiece, “Guernica,” before his speech, Powell should have checked that small thing. The discordance of the secretary of state selling the bombing of Iraq in front of the shrouded image of shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses spoke volumes. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/opinion/colin-powell-legacy.html

Elisabeth Zerofsky: How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary

For one week this summer, Fox News beamed the face of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary into the homes of Tucker Carlson’s 3.2 million viewers. In a two-tiered library adorned with dark wood and the Hungarian flag, Carlson sat across from the prime minister in Budapest with an expression of intense concentration, though he evinced little familiarity with the internal affairs of Hungary. The trip was hastily arranged after Orban agreed to the interview: Carlson dined at the prime minister’s office the evening before the broadcast, and earlier in the week, he was taken in a military helicopter to a tightly controlled area along the country’s southern border, generally off limits to journalists, in the presence of a Hungarian minister. There, Hungary became the idealized backdrop for Carlson’s habitual preoccupations: Thanks to a barbed-wire fence, Hungary’s border area was “perfectly clean and orderly,” free of the “trash” and “chaos” that mark other borders of the world. Consequently, “There weren’t scenes of human suffering.” He did not bring up the fact that civic groups have repeatedly taken the Hungarian government to court for denying food to families held in immigration detention centers.

Bringing Carlson to Budapest was meant to persuade Americans to pay attention to Orban’s Hungary. The effort appeared to be successful: The following week, several Republican senators told Insider, an online news publication, that Carlson’s broadcasts from Budapest had given them a favorable opinion of Orban. In September, Jeff Sessions, the former U.S. attorney general, went to Budapest for a panel discussion on immigration, and Mike Pence traveled there to address a meeting on family and demographic decline, with Orban in the audience. Next year, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an influential annual gathering of conservatives in America, will be held in Budapest. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/magazine/viktor-orban-rod-dreher.htm

Isaac Dovere and Jeremy Herb: 'It's absolutely getting worse': Secretaries of state targeted by Trump election lies live in fear for their safety and are desperate for protection

"I am a hunter -- and I think you should be hunted," a woman can Officials and aides in secretary of state offices in Arizona and other states targeted by former President Donald Trump in his attack on last year's election results told CNN about living in constant terror -- nervously watching the people around them at events, checking in their rearview mirrors for cars following them home and sitting up at night wondering what might happen next.

They defended the 2020 election against Trump's lies. Now they are running for higher office in states that could decide 2024

Law enforcement has never had to think much about protecting secretaries of state, let alone allocating hundreds of thousands of dollars in security, tracking and follow-up. Their jobs used to be mundane, unexciting, bureaucratic. These are small offices in a handful of states with enormous power in administering elections, from mailing ballots to overseeing voting machines to keeping track of counted votes.

None were prepared to be publicly attacked. They don't have the budgets to monitor threats, and certainly not to suddenly protect officials who never had to be protected before. No systems were in place on the state or federal level to back them up, and the Department of Justice admits that the federal government doesn't yet have the infrastructure to handle the situation.

Staff members in the offices say they're dealing with long-term emotional and psychological trauma after a year of constant threats -- in person and virtually -- to the secretaries and to themselves.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/26/politics/secretaries-of-state-personal-threats-trump-election-lies/index.html

Greg Sargent: Elon Musk reveals exactly why we need the Democrats’ new tax on billionaires

Musk appears to harbor a strange dichotomy. On one side, there’s using taxpayer money to enable entrepreneurs to realize grand visions, a good form of socially beneficial government investment (which benefited him spectacularly).

On the other, there’s curbing billionaire tax avoidance to fund taxpayer spending on other public goods that don’t immediately fuel glorious entrepreneurial visions, multi-planetary or otherwise. This is apparently a bad and inefficient taking.

But that’s a wrongheaded frame. The Democratic agenda would tax the ultrawealthy to fund massive investments in child care, early education, health care and the transition to a decarbonized economy, and those investments will bring long-term social benefits for all of us.

Making Musk’s frame worse, the structure of the tax code that protects extreme wealth from taxation is itself a social product. The rich have benefited from government-restructured market rules that channeled income, wealth and rents upward for decades.

One is preferential treatment of wealth. As Ryan Cooper notes, the very distinction between income and wealth that shields the latter from taxation is not “natural”; it’s the product of “government choices." We can choose to reverse them.

The insistence by billionaires that those choices are sacrosanct is at bottom an insistence that we must maintain their privileged status. That assumed privilege, and the superrich’s power to maintain it, are exactly what the billionaires’ tax would target. And that’s why we need it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/27/musk-billionaires-tax-reconciliation-bill/

David Rohde: Garland vs. Bannon Is Bidenism vs. Trumpism

Until now, the Justice Department has generally declined to prosecute former Administration officials who defied Congressional subpoenas, such as George W. Bush’s White House counsel Harriet Miers and Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder. But the allegations against Trump and Bannon are unprecedented. No Attorney General in American history has faced such a case: a former President, his onetime White House strategist, and their allies stand accused of inciting a mob to storm the Capitol and prevent Congress from certifying that President’s electoral defeat.

David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official, thinks that if career prosecutors in Washington recommend that Bannon be charged, Garland should promptly approve an indictment and prosecution. “There is a particular urgency to this congressional investigation, given the threat to democracy that was manifested on January 6th and continues today,” he said. Garland, too, is subject to our current hyper-politicized era. Whatever his decision, he will be criticized by one side or the other: one will see Bannon as a right-wing provocateur brought to justice; the other will see him as a victim of tyrannical leftists. Our domestic cold war will rage on. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/garland-vs-bannon-is-bidenism-vs-trumpism