We are witnessing the making of a fascist president in real time | Sidney Blumenthal

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

83% : Trump tweeted: "WOW!
71% : Trump tweeted: "Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.
70% : Trump had already got whatever he wanted from Barr up to the last minute, when Barr's instinct for personal self-preservation asserted itself.
56% : You hadn't noticed," Trump remarked.
51% : Now do you begin to understand me?"On 24 October of this month, Trump boasted about the unlimited power that he would possess once he is back in the White House.
51% : "We got immunity at the supreme court," Trump said.
50% : An essential element in the normalization of Trump and his fascism is the erasure of his crimes and transgressions when he was president - his "first term", as the Journal disingenuously describes it, as though he's already elected to his second.
48% : Trump sneered: "Wow!
46% : "At the very moment Trump delivered his remarks highlighting his campaign for a dictatorship, the Atlantic published an article by Jeffrey Goldberg confirming his motive.
41% : He reported that Trump, as president, had rebuked the US military command, stating: "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.
40% : The next day Trump tweeted a long list of his people he designated as enemies whom he demanded Session should investigate.
38% : Just before leaving office Trump would commute Stone's sentence.
36% : But it was not until two years later that the case was closed without any charges on 15 January 2021, five days before Trump left office.
36% : Trump would then have 86,398 seconds left to be a dictator on "day one".
32% : "After publicly attacking the Justice Department for not investigating "Crooked Hillary", Trump succeeded in intimidating Sessions into naming a special counsel to investigate the already debunked conspiracy theory that Uranium One, a Canadian company, made a deal with the Russians in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.
31% : In any case "the public isn't buying this Democratic claim about Trump".
31% : The report identified 272 contacts between Trump agents and Russian operatives, not one of which Trump reported to the FBI.
31% : "The conservative majority on the US supreme court, three of whose members Trump appointed, rescued him from facing trial for January 6 before the 2024 election.
31% : Because the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority, Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.
29% : Quite apart from his record of kleptocracy, allegedly pervasive corruption and obstructions of justice, pardons of criminal associates and dangling of pardons to insure their silence, contempt for the law, maniacal obsession with Hitler, who "did come good things", scorn for military service ("suckers" and "losers"), worship of foreign tyrants, congenital lying, paranoid conspiracy mongering, disdain for climate science, willful neglect of public health, ignoring warnings and spreading falsehoods in the Covid-19 pandemic resulting in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands, the organization and incitement of the January 6 insurrection, and indifference to the near-assassination of his vice-president by a mob he had unleashed ("So what?"), Trump systematically abused the Department of Justice to investigate, harass and prosecute his "enemies within".
29% : Trump was done with the disloyal consigliere.
28% : In a case of exquisitely poor timing, two days before the latest revelations of Trump's despotic intent and his own insistent bellicose demands for absolute power to use against his "enemies", the Wall Street Journal editorial board assured its readers that Trump doesn't mean it.
28% : Yet this past April, Barr endorsed Trump for re-election, explaining that "the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left."
26% : Trump used his presidency to harass and prosecute 'enemies within'.
25% : "The saddest thing is that because I'm the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the justice department," Trump said on 2 November 2017.
25% : Trump blamed the FBI for the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.
25% : More importantly, Trump was the useful idiot to stock the federal bench with Federalist Society-stamped judges.
24% : Trump was enticing them not to testify.
21% : The Just Security website of the New York University School of Law reports: "The cascade of election coverage, commentary and speculation about how Donald Trump might use the power of the presidency to retaliate against his perceived political enemies has overlooked important context: Trump has done just that, while he was president."
19% : Trump clearly appeared in the indictment as Unindicted Co-Conspirator No 1.
18% : "On 23 August 2018, Trump declared that his appointment of Sessions was a terrible mistake.
18% : Meanwhile, as soon as Barr assumed his post he revived the "Spygate" conspiracy theory, declared "spying did occur" and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate what Trump called an "attempted coup" against him.
17% : In other words, the American Public was scammed ... "For two years, Barr waged a war against Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, a Republican, who indicted Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen on campaign finance charges for paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels to silence her about a sexual relationship with Trump.
15% : The former chairman of the joint chiefs, retired general Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward, in his new book War, that Trump is "fascist to the core".
15% : Then, Trump fired him.
11% : On 20 May 2018, Trump demanded a justice department investigation into a "deep state" conspiracy theory going all the way up to President Barack Obama, in which Trump stated that "the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes" - "Spygate" .An
9% : He wrote that Trump's campaign had not "conspired or coordinated" with the Russians, that Trump had fully cooperated with the investigation and that Trump had not committed obstruction of justice.
8% : It revealed that Trump had committed 10 indictable obstructions of justice to keep evidence and witnesses from investigators, which neither Barr nor his Biden-appointed successor, Merrick Garland, ever prosecuted.
8% : After Roger Stone, Trump's longtime dirty trickster, was convicted of lying to the Congress and obstructing justice about acting as a conduit for Russian intelligence through WikiLeaks on hacked Clinton campaign documents, among other murky things, and sentenced to nine years in prison, Trump expressed outrage: "The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them."
7% : Trump's secretary of defense, former general James Mattis, emailed Woodward to express his agreement with Milley that Trump is "the most dangerous person ever", and "Let's make sure we don't try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high."
7% : Trump was frustrated that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself so that he could not kill former FBI director Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign connections to the Russians.
7% : After Trump lost the election of 2020, Barr was on board with Trump's claim it was stolen, sending a memo to DOJ prosecutors to investigate "vote tabulation irregularities".
7% : After the January 6 insurrection, Barr accused Trump of a "betrayal of his office".
6% : Trump denounced the Mueller probe as "illegal": "Everything about it was crooked - every single thing about it.
5% : "Barr appointed John Durham, the former US attorney for Connecticut, who spent four years trying to prove Trump's accusation that the FBI's "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation into Russian interference was a "hoax," as Trump claimed.
5% : On 14 December 2020, Trump attempted to get Barr's involvement in the fake electors scheme.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.