Monday, July 07, 2025
Sunday, July 06, 2025
Saturday, July 05, 2025
WELCOME TO THE MAFIA PRESIDENCY
Welcome to the Mafia Presidency
That’s a nice business you’ve got there.
By David
Frum
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source:
Getty.
July 4, 2025, 6:30 AM ET
Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on July 4,
2025
Theoretically, it’s illegal for the
president to accept or solicit bribes. The plain
language of the statute is perfectly clear: It is a crime for a
public official to seek or receive “anything of value” in return for “being
influenced in the performance of any official act.” The prohibition applies whether
the public official seeks or receives the bribe personally or on behalf of “any
other person or entity.”
As I said: theoretically. On Tuesday,
the media-and-entertainment conglomerate Paramount announced
a $16 million payment to President Donald Trump’s future presidential library.
The payment settled a lawsuit that Trump had filed against the Paramount-owned
broadcaster CBS because he was unhappy with the way the network had edited an
election-season interview with then–Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s lawsuit was about as meritless
as a lawsuit can be, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. If CBS were a
freestanding news organization, it would have fought the case and won. But like
the Disney-owned network ABC, which also paid off Trump for an almost equally
frivolous lawsuit, CBS belongs to a parent corporation with regulatory business
before Trump-appointed agencies. Paramount is pursuing an $8 billion merger
that requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission. In November
2024, then-incoming FCC Chair Brendan Carr warned that merger
approval would depend on satisfying Trump’s claims against CBS. Carr told the
Fox News interviewer Dana Perino, “I’m pretty confident that that
news-distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is
something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that
transaction.”
“News-distortion complaint?” What’s
that? Nearly a century ago, in 1927, Congress empowered a new Federal Radio Commission to
police the accuracy of news broadcasts. In the preceding decades, the airwaves
had become a chaos of transmissions interfering with one another. The right to
use any particular frequency was a valuable concession from the federal
government, the owner on the public’s behalf of the nation’s airwaves. Congress
felt that it could impose conditions in return for such concessions. One condition was a duty to meet public-interest standards in
broadcast content, which included giving equal time to opposing political
candidates in an election. In 1934, the Federal Radio Commission evolved into
the Federal Communications Commission. As television technology spread, so did
the FCC’s ambition to police the new medium, resulting in 1949 with its power
to compel the fairness doctrine on “all discussion of issues of importance to the public.”
The fact that opinions can differ
about what counts as “accuracy” and what counts as “distortion” rapidly became
obvious. Government efforts to police the boundary between fair reporting and
unfair scurrility create conflicts with First Amendment rights. For print
media, the courts have been very clear: Editing, even
arguably unfair editing, is protected free speech, subject only to the laws of
defamation. In the 1960s and ’70s, the FCC groped its way toward a similar rule
for broadcast media. Interestingly, some of the crucial milestones involved CBS
News.
In the early days of color television,
CBS News pioneered the use of aggressive editing to tell powerful stories in
dramatic ways. In 1971, for example, CBS broadcast a documentary, The Selling of the Pentagon, that accused
the Department of Defense of manipulating public opinion. To amplify the
argument, the producers cut and reassembled questions and answers. Some of the
affected individuals filed complaints against CBS, and the matter was taken up
by members of Congress. Yet the FCC declined to get involved in the case on
free-speech grounds.
Read: Trump targets Google after Meta and X payouts
Before the end of the first Nixon
administration, the FCC had generated a series of precedents that more or less
nullified the agency’s Calvin Coolidge–era status as a monitor of broadcast
accuracy and a potential censor. The whole issue soon became moot, because
the FCC had no jurisdiction over cable
television or the internet. As Americans drew more of their information from
sources outside the FCC’s domain, the very idea of content regulation by the
agency came to seem absurd to all parties, including the FCC itself. Who would
think of invoking a doctrine that originated in 1927 to police speech in the
21st century?
Then came Trump and the
loyalty-above-law appointees of his second term. Evident from the Trump legal filing against CBS is that not
even the president’s own lawyers took his complaint seriously. Three whopping
clues give away the game about the filing’s farcicality.
The first is where the lawsuit was
brought: the Amarillo division of the U.S. district court for the northern
district of Texas. CBS is not domiciled in Amarillo. Neither is Trump or Harris
or any person significantly connected with the 60 Minutes segment.
What is located in Amarillo is America’s premier pick for right-wing forum-shopping, a practice criticized
not only by liberal counterparties but also, at least implicitly, by The Wall Street Journal and National Review. Amarillo is the court where
a partisan-conservative plaintiff goes with a case that would be summarily
thrown out elsewhere.
The next clue is the language of the
filing, which reads like direct dictation from the president:
As President Trump stated, and as made crystal clear in the
video he referenced and attached, “A giant Fake News Scam by 60 Minutes &
CBS. Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with
another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better. A FAKE
NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election
interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact.
AN UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced
to concede the election? WOW!” See President Donald J. Trump,
TRUTH SOCIAL (Oct. 10, 2024).
And so on, through 65 paragraphs of
irrelevant name-calling and Trump-quoting obsequiousness.
Also striking is the carelessness of
the complaint’s use of legal authority. Two of Trump’s few quoted sources
actually argue against the Trump claim. A cited law-review article concluded that “the
reinvented news distortion doctrine would undermine the very democratic norms
marshaled in its defense.” Similarly, an FCC decision referenced found against
taking action (in another case involving CBS)—explicitly on free-speech
grounds: “In this democracy, no government agency can authenticate the news, or
should try to do so.”
One has to wonder whether Trump’s
lawyers even read the texts they cited. In a complaint about “distortion,”
Trump’s lawyers themselves grossly distorted the legal authorities they invoked
to support their otherwise absurd claim. Even flimsier is Trump’s basis for
claiming standing, and thus the right to sue. Past FCC decisions about
“distortion” were filed by the person or persons who spoke the word allegedly
wrongly edited. Trump bizarrely complained about the way someone else was
quoted—on the basis, of all crazy things, of a Texas consumer-protection law so
that he could sue in friendly Amarillo. And yet, Paramount paid $16 million to
settle a case that it could almost certainly have won for a fraction of the
price.
U.S. law forbids both accepting a
bribe and soliciting a bribe, yet they’re not exactly the same offense. There
is an important difference between a police officer who takes money to let a
criminal escape and a police officer who uses the threat of arrest to extort
money from an innocent citizen. Paramount did not come up with the idea to pay
Trump $16 million; Trump decided to squeeze Paramount for the money. What’s
going on here is extortion—and it does not get any less extortionate for being
laundered through Trump’s hypothetical future library. A systematic pattern has
emerged: shakedowns of law firms, business corporations, and media companies for
the enrichment of Trump, his family, and his political allies. Every time
targets yield, they create an incentive for Trump to repeat the shakedown on
another victim.
This time, it was Paramount’s turn.
Who will be the next target of an administration that governs by mafia methods?
Friday, July 04, 2025
SHAME AND COWARDICE
I’ve had trouble describing the
anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of
hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame:
To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.
Thursday, July 03, 2025
Trump’s Team Is Lying About Iran’s WM
The only thing lower
than lying about what you accomplished in a war is hiding behind the people who
actually accomplished it.
Trump’s Team Is Lying About Iran’s WMD
He
savaged Bush for distorting intelligence and overselling the military’s initial
success in Iraq. Now Trump and his team are doing the same in Iran.
Jul 02, 2025
IN
2016, DONALD TRUMP REBUKED George W. Bush for peddling erroneous intelligence
and false assurances about the war in Iraq. He accused Bush of deliberately
misrepresenting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, and he mocked Bush’s premature
“Mission
Accomplished” speech.
Bush
and his administration “lied,” Trump charged at a Republican presidential
debate in February 2016. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction.
There were none. And they knew there were none.”
Two
days after that debate, Trump derided the May 2003 speech in which Bush
infamously proclaimed that “major combat operations
in Iraq have ended” and “the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
Trump recalled that Bush had stood on an
“aircraft carrier saying all sorts of wonderful things, how the war was
essentially over. Guess what? Not over.”
Nine
years later, Trump is doing what he accused Bush of doing. He has launched a
preemptive military strike, this time in Iran. He has defended the strike by
misrepresenting intelligence. He has prematurely declared the mission a total
victory. And he is impugning the patriotism of anyone who challenges his lies.
ON
JUNE 21, AFTER A WEEK of war between Israel and Iran, the United States bombed
three Iranian nuclear sites. Three hours later, Trump went on TV and announced that
“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally
obliterated.” The claim was absurd—the damage couldn’t have been assessed that
quickly, and the operation hadn’t even targeted most of Iran’s enriched
uranium—but Trump repeated it on June 22, June
25, June 26, June
27, and June 29.
Trump’s
senior officials joined him in the lie. “Iran’s nuclear program is
obliterated,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on
June 25. “This was complete and total obliteration,” said Secretary
of State Marco Rubio. “There’s no doubt that it was obliterated,” said Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East
envoy, referring to Iran’s underground nuclear site at Fordo.
“Obliterate”
wasn’t just rhetoric. Trump was literally insisting that the three sites and
Iran’s whole program had been annihilated. “It was my great honor to Destroy
All Nuclear facilities & capability,” he wrote in a Truth Social post on June 24.
At the White House, he said of
Fordo: “That place is gone. . . . That place is gone.”
The
myth of total destruction was important because it underpinned Trump’s second
lie: that no further negotiations or military operations were necessary to
curtail the nuclear program. “I don't care if I have an agreement or not” with
Iran, the president told reporters at a NATO meeting on June
25. “We destroyed the nuclear,” he explained. “We blew it up. It’s blown up to
kingdom come.”
Nor
would America have to bomb Iran again. At a June 25 press conference with NATO
Secretary General Mark Rutte, a reporter asked Trump:
“If the Iranians do rebuild, would the United States strike again?” Trump
dismissed the question. “Sure,” he scoffed, “but I’m not going to have to worry
about that. It’s gone for years.”
The
basis of these assurances, Trump explained, wasn’t just the totality of the
destruction. It was that Iran, according to Trump, was so devastated,
exhausted, and demoralized that it no longer wanted to develop nuclear weapons.
“They don’t even want to think about nuclear,” he told reporters
aboard Air Force One on June 24. At the press conference with Rutte, the
president added: “I don’t think they’ll ever do it again. . . . I think they’ve
had it. The last thing they want to do is enrich.”
IN ONE
VENUE AFTER ANOTHER, reporters pressed Trump about evidence that his assurances
were false or baseless. He refused to listen. For example, after the bombing,
Iran’s foreign ministry reaffirmed that its nuclear enrichment
program would continue. But on June 25, when a reporter
asked Trump about those statements, he dismissed them. “The last thing they
want to do is enrich anything right now,” he repeated.
“No, they won’t do that.”
On
June 27, in a Fox News interview, Maria Bartiromo questioned Trump about
reports, apparently sourced to Israeli intelligence, that Iran had moved nearly 900 pounds of enriched
uranium out of Fordo before the bombing. Trump waved off that possibility.
“They didn’t move anything,” he insisted.
Two days later, when a reporter asked about Pickaxe Mountain, another of the
sites where satellite imagery suggested enriched uranium might be stored, Trump returned
to his mantra that Iran had no interest in continuing such
work: “The last thing they’re thinking about right now is enriched uranium.
They’re not thinking about it.”
Meanwhile,
the president made up stories about various damage assessments. On June 25, at
a press conference with Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Trump declared that
“the high commission of Iran just said it [Fordo] was totally demolished.” No
such commission exists, and statements from Iran’s government
have said no such thing.
On
Truth Social, Trump announced, “Israel just stated that the
Nuclear Sites were OBLITERATED!” But Israel’s actual assessments, quoted in a
White House fact sheet, made no such boast. Officially,
the Israel Atomic Energy Commission said Israeli and American strikes had “set
back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” Unofficially,
Israeli officials told reporters that the extent of damage at the three
targeted sites was unknown.
As
Trump spewed his fictions and embellishments, he blithely contradicted himself.
In the press conference with Rutte, he said of Fordo: “Iran went down to the
site afterwards. They said it’s so devastated. . . . Two Iranians went down to
see it, and they called back, and they said, ‘This place is gone.’” But two
minutes later, Trump mentioned that “nobody can get in to see” the facility’s
underground chambers, because “the tunnels are totally collapsed.”
In his
interview with Bartiromo, Trump said Iran wouldn’t have moved enriched uranium
out of Fordo before the bombing, because it hadn’t expected the site to be
attacked. “Nobody thought we’d go after that site, because everybody said that
site is impenetrable,” he explained. But seconds later—apparently forgetting or
not caring that he had just brushed off the idea of Iranian preparations—he
claimed that vehicles spotted at Fordo in the days before the strike were there
“to seal up the entrance” with concrete.
Trump
also alluded to unspecified intelligence that supposedly vindicated his boasts.
At the NATO meeting, he said of Fordo: “We’ve collected additional
intelligence. We’ve also spoken to people [who] have seen the site. And the
site is obliterated.” He posted the same statement, again without
evidence, on Truth Social. The next day, at a White House event, he asserted that
“the target has now been proven to be obliterated, just as we said.”
TRUMP
IS LYING. A week and a half after the bombing, he has offered no such proof.
Instead, his flunkies have issued empty statements claiming, with zero
discernible evidence, that “new intelligence” or “credible intelligence” backs him up. The
charlatan who accused Bush of politicizing intelligence and lying about weapons
of mass destruction is politicizing intelligence and lying about weapons of
mass destruction.
But
that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is that Trump, like Bush, is
suggesting that anyone who disputes the president’s statements about a war is
sabotaging America’s armed forces.
In
2005, as the Iraq war soured and the purported Iraqi nukes failed to turn up,
Democrats accused Bush of having manipulated intelligence to justify the
war. Bush responded by challenging his opponents’ patriotism. Their accusations
of manipulation “send the wrong signal to our troops,” the president warned. “As our troops fight a ruthless enemy
determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected
leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them.”
Vice
President Dick Cheney joined Bush in this flag-waving counterattack. “American
soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions,” he fumed, while “back home, a few opportunists
are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie.” One could argue, said Cheney—pretending not to endorse
this argument himself—that the “untruthful charges against the
commander-in-chief have an insidious effect on the war effort.”
Trump,
having rebuked Bush and Cheney, is now copying their tactic of hiding behind
the troops. At the NATO meeting, he called journalists “scum”
for reporting, accurately, that according to a
preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment, the damage from the Iran strike
was limited. He accused the press of “hurting” the
mission’s pilots by “trying to minimize the attack.” And he said CNN’s Natasha
Bertrand, one of the first reporters to reveal the assessment, “should be FIRED” for denying the truth—“TOTAL
OBLITERATION!”—and for “attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making
them look bad.”
Hegseth
went further. At a Pentagon briefing, he lambasted journalists
for challenging Trump’s tale of obliteration. “You, the press corps . . . It’s
like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump,” the defense
secretary raged. He accused reporters of trying “to
cause doubt and manipulate the mind, the public mind, over whether or not our
brave pilots were successful. . . . You’re undermining the success of
incredible B-2 pilots.”
Spare
us the sanctimony. These lectures about undermining America’s warriors aren’t
patriotic. They’re cynical and dishonest. The only thing lower than lying about
what you accomplished in a war is hiding behind the people who actually
accomplished it.
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