Suzanne Rowan Kelleher , Forbes; Trump Wants His Name Trademarked For Airports—Raising Questions About Profiteering
"President Trump’s private company has filed for trademarks for airports using his name—setting up the possibility he could profit from what has historically been an honor in name only—just as plans take flight for an airport near his Florida home to be renamed after him."
Ed Pilkington and Jeremy Barr, The Guardian; As goes the Washington Post: US democracy takes another hit under Trump
Jeff Bezos’s axing of more than 300 jobs at the storied newspaper has renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Trump’s attacks
"The email landed in Lizzie Johnson’s in-tray in Ukraine just before 4pm local time. It came at a tough time for the reporter: Russia had been repeatedly striking the country’s power grid, and just days before she had been forced to work out of her car without heat, power or running water, writing in pencil because pen ink freezes too readily.
“Difficult news,” was the subject line. The body text said: “Your position is eliminated as part of today’s organizational changes,” explaining that it was necessary to get rid of her to meet the “evolving needs of our business”.
Johnson’s response may go down in the annals of American media history. “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone,” she wrote on X. “I have no words.”
The Washington Post’s Ukraine correspondent may have been rendered speechless over Wednesday’s move by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire and Post owner, to cut more than 300 newsroom jobs. The bloodletting, which has raised renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Donald Trump’s attacks, swept away the paper’s entire sports department, much of its culture and local staff and all of its journalists in such arid news zones as Ukraine and the Middle East.
Others, though, managed to find their tongues. “It’s a bad day,” said Don Graham, son of the Post’s legendary Watergate-era owner Katharine Graham, breaking the silence he has maintained since selling the paper to Bezos for $250m in 2013.
“I am crushed,” was the lament of Bob Woodward, one-half of the paper’s double act with Carl Bernstein that exposed Watergate.
“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” said Marty Baron, the Post’s lionised former executive editor. Not one to mince his words, Baron castigated Bezos for his “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump”, saying it left an especially “ugly stain” on the paper’s standing...
The cumulative malaise that is descending over US media leaves the country’s democratic institutions vulnerable to attack. It can’t be exclusively blamed for Trump’s excesses.
There are plenty of other willing accomplices and capitulators, including universities like Columbia, corporate law firms and the gung-ho conservative activists who now control the supreme court.
But from Trump’s perspective, a media on its knees surely helps. The results are present everywhere you look.
Trump is unleashed, unchained. He feels so comfortable in his regal skin that he can berate a respected female CNN reporter questioning him on the Epstein files for never smiling.
He can peddle unashamedly in racism, posting a video depicting the first Black president and his first lady as monkeys.
He can send a masked paramilitary into the streets of Minneapolis, resulting in Americans getting killed for exercising their first amendment rights. And when the polls for November’s midterm elections look challenging for him, he can prepare for another blitzkrieg on the very foundations of American democracy: the ballot box.
There’s a paradox in all this. Many of the democratic norms that Trump is obliterating – take for example his destruction of the norm of Department of Justice independence in his persecution of his political opponents – were laid down in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
That’s the same Watergate scandal that was brought into the light by that pair of courageous reporters at a newspaper called the Washington Post."
Sam Kessler, Rebecca Ballhaus, Eliot Brown, and Angus Berwick, Wall Street Journal; 'Spy Sheikh’ Bought Secret Stake in Trump Company
"Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities."
The Editorial Board , The New York Times; TRUMP’S STIFLING OF DISSENT REACHES A NEW LEVEL
"THE CRACKDOWN ON dissent and speech in Minnesota this winter follows a pattern that is common in countries that slide from democracy to autocracy: A leader enacts a legally dubious policy. Citizens protest that policy. The government responds with intimidation and force. When people are hurt, the government blames them and lies about what happened.
The New York Times editorial board published an index in October tracking 12 categories of democratic erosion, based on historical patterns and interviews with experts. Our index places the United States on a scale of 0 to 10 for each category. Zero represents the United States before President Trump began his second term — not perfect, surely, but one of the world’s healthiest democracies. Ten represents the condition in a true autocracy, such as China, Iran or Russia.
Based on recent events, we are moving our assessment of one of the categories — stifling speech and dissent — up one notch, to level four:.."
Erica L. Green and Isabella Kwai, The New York Times; Trump Deletes Racist Video of Obamas After Outcry
"President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, then deleted it after an outcry, including from members of his own party.
The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election. It was the latest in a long pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive imagery and slurs about Black Americans and others.
The decision to delete the link from his social media site was an unusual walk-back by the president, whose own press secretary just hours earlier had brushed off criticism of the video.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, before Mr. Trump deleted the clip. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”"
Anna Betts , The Guardian; Newly released Jeffrey Epstein files: 10 key takeaways so far
"A new trove of about 3m files related to the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was released on Friday, offering new details about his network and interactions with wealthy and powerful figures and the federal investigations into his crimes.
The release follows legislation passed in November by US lawmakers that mandated the disclosure of all Epstein-related documents.
As Guardian reporters continue to review the files, here are some of the key findings so far...
Lora Kolodny, CNBC; Epstein files show Elon Musk apparently discussed plans to visit sex offender’s island, host him at SpaceX
"A cache of newly released documents from the Epstein files on Friday showed Elon Musk apparently corresponded with the convicted sex offender in 2012 and 2013, as they discussed meeting at Jeffrey Epstein’s private island and at Musk’s SpaceX facility in Southern California.
The emails indicate Musk asked about attending the “wildest party,” hosted by Epstein at his island.
Musk, who serves as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has for years downplayed his connection to Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while in federal custody...
In June of last year, Musk wrote in a post on X, that he thought President Donald Trump and his administration were withholding Epstein-related files from the public view in order to protect the president’s reputation.
“Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files,” Musk, who was in the midst of a public spat with the president, wrote at the time. “That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”
Marc Elias, Democracy Docket; Lies, violence and the American state
"In early 1974, as he awaited his fate for writing about the horrors of the Soviet penal system, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn decided to take on the authoritarian regime’s most potent tool: lies. “In our country,” he wrote to Western journalists, “the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state. In breaking with the lie, we are performing a moral act, not a political one.”
Several weeks later, on the day he was exiled from his country, he explained the connection between government lies and state-sponsored violence against citizens:
When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance. It displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly. A few years pass — and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally —Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence...
Donald Trump is an infamous liar. He has lied his way through business, law and politics. The movement he built is based on lies — lies about the economy, immigration and crime. But its most important lie — the Big Lie — is about democracy itself.
Trump abhors democracy because it allows ordinary Americans to reject his lies. Even worse for Trump, it allows us to reject him.
When voters did exactly that in 2020, he responded with more lies — lies in court, lies in the media, and lies to his supporters. On Jan. 6, 2021, those lies turned into violence.
Yet, as Solzhenitsyn suggests, that was not the end of the story. The violence itself then required more lies — about the Capitol Police, the Department of Justice, election workers, judges and his political enemies.
But something has changed in recent weeks. The lies are no longer about shadowy figures wielding great power and influence. They are now targeting everyday citizens — people standing in their own communities, in front of their homes, protecting their neighbors."
Jeffrey Gettleman and , The New York Times; Trump Links His Push for Greenland to Not Winning Nobel Peace Prize
In a text, President Trump told Norway’s prime minister that he no longer felt obliged to “think purely of Peace” and that the U.S. needed the island for global security.
"President Trump is now claiming that one reason he is pushing to acquire Greenland is that he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, according to a text message he sent to Norway’s prime minister over the weekend.
Jonas Gahr Store, Norway’s leader, received the text message on Sunday, an official in the prime minister’s office said on Monday.
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Mr. Trump wrote in the message, which was first published by PBS.
In the message, Mr. Trump also questioned Denmark’s claim to Greenland, saying, “There are no written documents,” and adding, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you!”"
ANDY GREENE, Rolling Stone; BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN BLASTS TRUMP AT SURPRISE BENEFIT GIG: ‘ICE SHOULD GET THE F-CK OUT OF MINNEAPOLIS’
"Springsteen had no such concerns, and shortly before playing “The Promised Land” with Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers, he delivered some frank remarks. “I wrote this song as an ode to American possibility,” he said. “Right now we are living through incredibly critical times. The United States, the ideals and the value for which it stood for the past 250 years, is being tested like it has never been in modern times. Those values and those ideals have never been as endangered as they are right now.”
He continued, “If you believe in the power of law and that no one stands above it, if you stand against heavily-armed masked federal troops invading an American city, using gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens, if you believe you don’t deserve to be murdered for exercising your American right to protest, then send a message to this president, as the mayor of the city said: ICE should get the fuck out of Minneapolis. This song is for you and the memory of the mother of three and an American citizen, Renee Good.”"
