Tag: Donald J. Trump

Politics & Public Policy, Uncategorized

For the Swag: Donald J. Trump’s Path from Brand Magnate to Firebrand, from President to Pariah

gretchenapeck

It is the final full day of the 45th President’s Presidency. Retired Presidents go on to any number of new passions and pastimes. In his 90s, Jimmy Carter is still building homes for the poor. Bill Clinton started a philanthropic foundation – in his own name, of course. George W. Bush took up painting, and Obama reinvented himself as a film producer.

Donald J. Trump’s post-Presidency may be a bit more complicated, and – considering the number of legal defenses he may need to mount – quite expensive. 

Sculpting the image
Prior to his candidacy, many Americans were more familiar with Donald J. Trump the TV personality/Mark Burnett-created persona – or Trump, the serial philanderer – than they were with Trump, the real estate guy or, later, Trump, the brand guy. To hear the President recount his career, it was lucrative and luxurious. Leveraging his friends in the media – and his sometimes PR rep, “John Baron” – he regaled us with name-dropping anecdotes, sexual scandal, and gold glitz.

As the final days of his Presidency wane – and thanks to David Enrich’s deep reporting – we now know that image was crafted on credit. 

Brand image has always been paramount to Donald Trump. He slapped his name across buildings and casinos, board games, boxes of butchered meat, bottles of beer, wine and water, a model agency, ghost-written titles, and even a sham of a “university.” These were the Trump business brands. They tend to come and go. 

But Donald J. Trump is also a political brand – a brand he’s been cultivating for decades, long before the infamous escalator descent.

Here’s a clip of the President being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, who prompted him to flirt aloud with the idea of a Presidential bid, way back in 1988. 

Though the President is fond of telling his rally crowds that he isn’t, by nature, a politician, Trump has been honing his political image for decades.

His donations to local, State and national political candidates were spread across progressive and conservative ideologies. He’s given modest donations to Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush and his brother, Jeb, and John McCain. He also gave money to Andrew Cuomo, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and the man who bested him in the 2020 election, the 46th President, Joseph R. Biden.

Trump seemed less to have political principle and more to desire political access and sway. He didn’t want to drain the swamp; he wanted to lord over it. 

As his one-term Presidency comes to an end, gone are the easy grifts, gone are the Trump steaks, the failed casinos, the fraudulent university, and the PGA tournaments held at Trump clubs. 

Gone now is the Presidency, and should he be impeached a second time, gone is the opportunity to run again. 

But the images of the Capitol under siege – a writhing sea of Trump- and MAGA-paraphernalia on display – prove that Trump’s political image somehow still sells.  

The Presidency as profit center

There are theorists who’ve suggested that Trump didn’t really want to be President and that he didn’t expect to win. Rather, they surmise, his ego led him to the campaign, and his eye for opportunism got him vested in the idea.

Though candidate Trump promised the nation that he’d divest from his businesses and put his adult children in charge of the Trump Organization, there’s no evidence that he ever did that, and his children appear to have their own political aspirations.

Some of Trump’s properties hit the jackpot after he took his inaugural Oath. In the first year of his Presidency alone, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, reportedly raked in $40 million. 

Some of that money didn’t just buy accommodations; it bought access to the President. 

Every time the President went to play golf at one of his courses – reportedly, nearly 300 trips from the start of his Presidency to the end of 2020 – taxpayer monies were automatically dumped into his coffers. 

Mar-a-Lago proved politically lucrative for the Trumps. As recently as New Year’s Eve – while the world wrestled with a global pandemic – Mar-a-Lago hosted a maskless gala at upwards of $1,000/plate, with the promise of rubbing elbows with the President on the dance floor, to the tune of aging 1990s pop stars. 

He stood them up. 

But not all of the Trump properties reaped this good fortune, especially those that didn’t afford access to the Trump family. The Doral Golf Club, for example, was hobbled even before the pandemic hit, and last year, the club laid off approximately 500 employees.

When one door closes …

Two years into the Trump Presidency, during a long weekend in New York City, I saw firsthand the waning popularity of the Trump brand. I walked around Trump Parc, which occupies prime real estate on the edge of Central Park. The ground floor of the building – formerly occupied by retailers – mostly sat empty. FOR RENT signs were perched in some of the windows.

Trump Parc

One of the few occupying businesses – an Asian antiquities dealer – was closed, on a bustling springtime weekend. 

The skyscraper at Columbus Circle that bears Trump’s name stood tall over the crowded, perpetually-in-motion intersection. At dusk, the building was cast in shadows, the lights inside softly illuminating the rooms behind the tinted glass. Most of the building was dark, with fewer than a dozen rooms seemingly occupied. I stopped and watched it for a while. A few levels up from the street, I observed a man sitting in a chair, pulled up close to the glass, looking out over the relative chaos below. His legs were crossed, and he leaned back into the chair, taking it all in, alone and still. It felt … prophetic.

Some formerly Trump-branded buildings and businesses have removed reference to his name altogether.

The Trump Plaza condo board in West Palm Beach voted unanimously to remove the Trump name from the complex.

New York City severed concessions ties with its native son.

Americans have long had an affinity for celebrity and power. Places where Presidents walked are hallowed ground. This is the land where we erect placards and charge admission to see historic provenance – think, “George Washington slept here.”

If you were to browse the marketing copy of Trump’s former estate in Fairfield County, Connecticut – listed for sale by its current owners for years – you’d find no mention at all of the property’s past affiliation with an American President.

It would appear that Donald J. Trump’s personal and business brands have been greatly diminished by his controversial Presidency – particularly its seditious conclusion. However, his political brand endures. And Trump’s most committed fans buy his swag like tweens buy boy-band merch. 

Banners. Flags. Bumper stickers.

MAGA hats. T-shirts.

Hoodies. Leggings. Puzzles.

Car, truck and boat wraps.


Even flagrantly hazardous plastic straws – to simultaneously sip and own the libs.

What is the value of the Trump-family political brand? It’s hard to say. How much of a cut does the Trump family get through official licensing? How much of it represents others now profiteering off the Trump brand?

How much did the President raise with fundraising campaigns like “Stop the Steal?”

How enriched have the Trumps become?

It must be a sizable sum of wealth – a money grab so attractive the President deemed it worthy of destabilizing democracy. 

News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy

What’s “Section 230,” and why should you care?

gretchenapeck

Yesterday, the Giants of Social Media stomped their feet down on the President of the United States, who’d abused their platforms all along, leveraging them to spread disinformation, launch attacks, paint targets, fire people, lament TV ratings, race bait, and – his most egregious offenses – to discredit the 2020 election, grift people of their hard-earned cash with promises of an overturn, inciting the most gullible among them to disrupt governance, trash and pillage the U.S. Capitol, plant bombs in the nation’s capital, murder a Capitol Police officer, and attempt to install Donald J. Trump as a second-term President via violent insurrection against their own country.

Whew.

Indeed, social media had tolerated much from the digitally prolific President, but as conversations of an armed terrorist attack on the nation’s capital began to simmer, they’d had enough. 

Immediately came the decries of a “First Amendment infringement” (it’s not), and Trump’s most loyal lawmaker friends calling for a repeal of “Section 230” – a pet peeve for the outgoing Commander in Chief.

What is Section 230?

“Section 230” – more formally known as Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 at 47 U.S.C. § 230, and colloquially as “the 26 words that created the Internet” – was born out of two 1990s lawsuits against ISPs and challenged in the Courts several times since. Each time, it was upheld. 

It is fair to say that Section 230 is perhaps the single most important legislation applicable to social media. It is what enabled platforms like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and others to grow, flourish, and become a huge, integral part of the American economy and culture.

President Trump’s interest in Section 230 appears to coincide with Twitter’s first fact-checking of the President’s potentially harmful tweets, back in the spring of 2020. At the time, he was undermining his own taskforce with COVID-19 disinformation, and already sowing the seeds of election chaos. 

Twitter justified the tags it placed on the President’s tweets by suggesting that virus disinformation could kill people – and it has – and that his election discrediting jeopardized democracy itself. The rest of the President’s political gamesmanship was all fair game, Twitter and Facebook concluded. 

From then on, the President became hyper-focused on a Section 230 repeal. He would like to be able to sue the tech companies for denying him a platform and megaphone. He wants to criminalize fact-checking. He has been so intent on this goal, that he was willing to tank two major pieces of legislation – the NDAA and a second sweeping COVID relief Bill – if he couldn’t get his way on Section 230. 

For Democrats, this repeal is a non-negotiable dealbreaker, perhaps because they have a better grasp of what’s at stake. 

In Congress, some of President Trump’s most lock-step Republicans now champion the repeal in his stead. 

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) sponsored a 2020 bill, known as H.R. 8896 – the AOC Act, which conveniently shares the acronym with a certain Congresswoman perpetually under the skins of her Republican colleagues and its actual title, “the Abandoning Online Censorship Act.” Gohmert was able to get seven co-sponsors to sign on, all Republicans.

It was “dead in the [swamp] water.”

In 2021, and in the wake of the de-platforming of an American President who would not follow the rules, Republicans will make this case: When the platforms began to fact-check, censor, and now ban content from the President and others, they have ceased to be a platform and are instead a publisher, with an editorial due diligence and subjective control over what users see or don’t see. 

The tech platforms will argue: As private companies, with clear terms of service (that users agree to when they open their accounts and create their avatars), they should be able to enforce those rules and codes of conduct, which clearly state that users are prohibited from sharing content that will harm or threaten people (other users or otherwise). 

It’s worth mentioning that the federal government already has some control over platforms and their users. For example, it is criminal act to distribute certain types of content across the Internet or any platform. Section 230 does not give social media platforms blanket immunity from all forms of civil or criminal prosecutions. 

If Section 230 goes away, what happens?

Without Section 230, the platforms, like publishers, would be subjected to defamation and libel laws. The distinction, however, is that publishers own their content. Publishers create, edit, verify and challenge, run it by lawyers, decide what and what not to publish, and then take whatever fallout there is from those choices; they wholly own the content they share. 

Conversely, platforms are just that – a technological foundation for users to share the content they and others produce. Without Section 230 shields, platforms could then be held liable for content they do not create and merely host. 

President Trump and his Congressional allies vow this repeal will force the tech companies to take an apolitical hands-off approach to users; that it will force them to enable more free expression; and force the platforms to be tolerant of a broader spectrum of ideas and alt-facts. 

They feel social media has been unfair to conservative voices and ideas. A simple glance at what trends on Facebook defies this assertion. On any given day, the top 10 trending posts on Facebook are often from Right-leaning media and personalities, or topics deemed of import to conservative-minded users.

I know you’re surprised that politicians would sell you poppycock, right?

Instead, a repeal would likely have a chilling, constricting effect on users most of all. 

Now, liable for content they do not create, platforms will be forced to more protective and less likely to tolerate content that could be controversial, debatable or have merit in a Court of law. 

Users would have less opportunity for free expression, not more. 

It’s a bottomless pit of liability for the social media platforms, which could be named as a Party in every single lawsuit in which a social media comment somehow plays a role – big-dollar cases to petty ones. 

The only real winners will be lawyers. 

Ultimately, it would hobble the tech companies, just as one notoriously vindictive President hopes. The tech market would be destabilized, fractured. Users would find themselves with fewer options and tighter restrictions on what they can post and share. Online communities will be more insular and more echo-chamber like. 

Businesses – especially small businesses that rely heavily on the mostly free marketing perks of platforms like Twitter and Facebook – would be hobbled, too. It doesn’t seem the Republicans like Lindsay Graham and Louie Gohmert have really thought this through. 

None of this is to say that social media execs don’t have plenty of atoning to do. There is no shortage of Silicon Valley sin, but repealing Section 230 will not address those in a surgical, effective way. 

News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy

A Tale of Two Patriots

gretchenapeck

I, like so many other Americans, am still trying to process the assault on our Nation’s Capitol. I am grateful to the many journalists and photojournalists who were the People’s eyes and ears, our witnesses and documentarians to this tragic day in American history. 

Thanks to their continued reporting, we’re all able to assess the physical aftermath. The emotional toll, the structural damage to our democracy may take some time to discern and measure.

It was during my digital assessment of the damage that I came upon a tweet from William Turton, a Bloomberg reporter who captured some video as he strolled through a fairly opulent and pricey DC hotel, documenting scores of guests fresh off their storm-the-Capitol tour of Washington, DC. 

In the video, they sit casually in groups, chatting and enjoying refreshments, as if they haven’t a care in the world.  

Turton, who was also a hotel guest, reported that some of these people followed him, harassed him, and demanded that he erase this footage. The hotel staff had to intervene to protect him.   

I knew that hotel, because it was just a couple of years ago when I stayed there with four of my favorite fellas. My husband and I, my brother-in-law, my father-in-law and uncle-in-law all traveled by Amtrak to DC, to attend the beautifully solemn “Evening Parade.” 

Every American should make the trip to Washington, DC and attend this seasonal, weekly Friday night event, held on the grounds of the oldest Marine Corps barracks in the United States. 

In my case, I had the honor of accompanying two unimpeachable patriots to this particular Friday-night parade: My father-in-law, a WWII Marine Corps vet who served in the South Pacific, and my uncle-in-law, who spent WWII at sea with the U.S. Navy – the two surviving brothers out of the five Peck “boys,” who all enlisted and served their Nation with honor. 

Aboard Amtrak, they passed the time playing cards and talking about the last time they’d been to Washington, DC – a seniors’ bus trip that included a stop at the WWII Memorial. Neither had been on a train in years, and they relished the experience – even more so when we arrived at Washington, DC’s famous Union Station and got “first-class golf-cart transportation” from the train to the taxi line outside. 

We checked in to our hotel and everyone freshened up before we had to dash off to the Marine Corps event. Arriving at the historic barracks, we saw a long line of people waiting to get in. The USMC estimates that each Evening Parade brings out thousands of spectators. My husband and I looked at each other, silently conveying our worry that his father and uncle – both in their 90s by then – would have to navigate the line and be on their feet for an untold amount of time.

But no sooner had we exited the cab and taken our spot at the back of the line when a fine-looking Marine in full dress blues approached us. My father-in-law was wearing a crisp new USMC Veteran cap we’d bought him at an army-navy store. It only took that sighting of that hat and perhaps the mileage on our men to grab his attention. “Would you do me the honor of being my guest at the Officers’ Club,” he said to my father-in-law, who accepted the invitation with a curious spirit and a little spring in his step. 

The handsome Marine led us across the barracks lawns and into a nondescript building, up an impossibly steep set of stairs to the second-story lounge. Soldiers of various officer ranks and attire mingled and imbibed. This, too, seemed like a Friday-night ritual. 

We were led to a comfy sectional, and other Marines swooped in to ask what we were drinking. My father-in-law and uncle order glasses of red wine. Neither was ever much of a drinker. Marines came over and introduced themselves and marveled at our Marine’s and Sailor’s ages and at what they must’ve seen and endured during their time at War. 

It became obvious to us that one of the Marines in the room was running the show, getting invited guests stoked for the parade to come, and boosting the morale for the in-service men and women present. He came over and introduced himself to our family and asked “the boys” about where and when they served. They exchanged some military quips and inside soldier jokes, and our host turned to the room and called his soldiers to attention, formally introducing their military brothers in the house. 

The room erupted in applause and ooh-rahs. 

The parade was about to start, so we were told to head on down to the parade grounds and get a good seat. Before we left, one of the Marines came up and pulled me aside and pleaded with me to bring “the boys” back to the Club after the parade. He had something special planned for them, he said, and swore me to secrecy. 

It was a perfect late-summer night. It was still hot, but the bugs were gone. The sky was clear, moving from a silky dusk-blue to midnight black, a heavenly made scrim for the performance. 

For nearly two hours, we were captivated by the drill demonstrations, historic anecdotes, marching, music, drum lines and trumpets. At the conclusion, we all headed back to the Club, none of us really knowing what to expect. 

The Marines who’d spoken with my father-in-law and uncle had listened so astutely to the tales they told of their family, their upbringing, their wartime. They recounted these stories to the quieted crowd of lively Marines and officers from other branches of the service, who applauded and cheered and brought tears to my eyes. 

It was recognition hard-fought and long overdue. The sense of camaraderie, brotherhood, and pride was palpable. 

While we’d been enjoying the parade, the Officers had printed up certificates and bound them in red silk, acknowledging each of the Peck brothers for their service to the nation. They called my father-in-law up to the front of the room, and he shuffled his way there to accept it. He was asked if he’d like to say a few words. He didn’t hesitate. He’d rehearsed this story on us a thousand times already. 

“I told my father that I was thinking about enlisting in the Marine Corps,” he began. “My father said, ‘Why the Marine Corps?’” My father-in-law shrugged for effect.

The crowd chuckled, and he continued. “So, my father said to me, ‘Go down the street and see our neighbor. He was a Marine. Ask him what it’s like before you enlist.’ So I did, and he gave me this advice: ‘Keep your eyes open, your mouth closed, and never volunteer for anything.’” 

I never entirely appreciated that last part about volunteering, but all those Marines in the room got the drift, and they burst out into laughter and cheers. I was so happy for my father-in-law. He always loved an audience for his stories. 

Next up, our uncle made his way to the front to accept his award. He was the only Navy man in the room. He was given his certificate, saluted, and invited to say a few words to the crowd. You could see his chest rise and his back straighten as he thought of what to say. 

In his best loud and authoritative voice, he gave them a good old-fashioned Navy-vs-Marine ribbing: “The Marines wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the Navy,” he declared. 

And they adored him for it. The room erupted in cheers and hollers and applause. 

We were so proud of “our boys,” and so very glad we’d made the trip – no easy feat for 90-year-old bodies. 

It was months after the trip, and the two brothers were still talking about it. They marveled at the parade, their time in the Officers Club. They displayed their certificates in a curio cabinet, next to the medals and dog tags of their other brothers.

They spoke of the pleasures of train travel and often repeated how magnificent the hotel and their hotel room had been.  

Today, I watched the video footage of that hotel’s guests, who’d come to DC to support a President who doesn’t even respect them enough to tell them the truth, who took part, either passively or actively, in storming the Capitol, trespassing, vandalism, a violent insurrection. They’re just sitting there, sprawled around the lobby, chatting, having refreshments, rewarding themselves, having been convinced that their actions are somehow patriotic. 

And I think of those five Peck brothers, their family’s sacrifice. I think of the moments each of them enlisted, that dilemma they each faced, that choice they made. I think of the men they became and the values they held so dear. I think of how proud my father-in-law was to be an American and of his time as a United States Marine, and later, in the U.S. Army Air Corps, where he re-enlisted to learn to fly planes. I think of the men they became and how they lived their lives after the service – with humility, perspective, gratitude, frugality, and unwavering honor.

I think of the two Peck brothers walking into that fancy hotel lobby for the first time, looking up and marveling at its architecture, in awe of the experience, grateful to be alive to see it.

And I look at those hotel guests, and I want to tell them: Real, true patriots walked these halls. 

News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Uncategorized

Billie’s Reality

gretchenapeck

Reality Winner’s mother and stalwart advocate, Billie Winner-Davis, talks about her daughter’s ongoing imprisonment, the Espionage Act, a Presidential tweet, and the disturbing lack of Press attention

By Gretchen A. Peck

Billie Winner-Davis’ Twitter followers know her to be a near-tireless digital advocate for her daughter, Reality. With only hashtags – #FreeRealityWinner, #CompassionateRelease4Reality, #ProtectWhistleblowers – in her quiver, she’s on a quest to see that her daughter is released from the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Medical Center in Carswell, Texas – and that Reality’s incarceration hasn’t been in vain.

With a memorable name like Reality Winner, you’d think it would be “household,” part of the pop vernacular. Yet, many Americans still don’t know her name, nor the action she took – she contends, on their behalf.

Reality Winner, USAF veteran

At 18, Winner enlisted in the United States Air Force (USAF), and her natural aptitude for languages carved her path the military. She served as a cryptologic linguist, a marketable skill beyond her six years of service. 

Winner was in her mid-twenties and fresh out of the service when National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Pluribus International hired her to be a translator. It was during the course of her work there that she obtained a classified document that outlined Russia’s sustained campaign to undermine the 2016 U.S. election that pitted Hillary Clinton against Donald J. Trump for the Presidency. 

The classified report detailed Russian hackers’ objective to compromise local election and voter registration systems across the country. Winner copied the report, hiding it in her pantyhose to get it off site, she later told investigators. She sent the document to Glenn Greenwald’s former outlet, The Intercept. 

Winner was arrested in June 2017, two days before The Intercept published its story.

Now, three years and another Presidential election later, the information Winner disclosed seems somehow quaint. Volumes have been written on Russia’s meddling, including the thick tome Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team produced, but few read. 

The United States of America charged Winner under the Espionage Act, law intended to prosecute the nation’s most insidious traitors. Prosecuting counsel portrayed Winner as an existential threat to the nation, suggesting she’d caused “grave damage” and compromised national security. 

For any objective observer, it’s hard to quantify those damages; certainly, the Federal Government was embarrassed by the disclosure – caught on its heels, slow to mount a defense against Russian aggression, and intent on keeping that failure hidden from the American people. 

In June 2018 – after a year in prison – Winner pleaded guilty to a single felony count of unauthorized transmission of classified information. She was sentenced to five years and three months and has been incarcerated since.

Billie Winner-Davis, with her daughter, Reality Winner

Reality’s mother hasn’t seen her daughter, in person, since February 2020. On March 13th, the Federal facility halted all in-person visitation to mitigate the COVID-19 virus. 

“She calls when she can. It’s a little hard with my work schedule, but she tries before I go to work. She also has to fight for the phone, because she’s in a large unit, and there are only so many phones. That means standing in line and waiting,” Winner-Davis said. Some weekends, she has the good fortune to connect with Reality through video chat. “It’s good to lay eyes on her, to know she’s okay.”

Despite the prison’s attempts to keep the virus at bay, Winner tested positive in July. She reported to her mother that she had telltale symptoms – body aches, severe headache and muscle cramps. Several months later, her mother was comforted to know that she was doing well and seemingly “over it.” 

Winner is scheduled for release on November 24, 2021. In May 2021, she’ll be eligible for a supervised early-release program. Naturally, Winner’s legal team sought clemency for their client, a pardon that can only come from one person in all of the land – the President of the United States. 

“It could be this President. It could be the next President,” Winner-Davis said. “She really doesn’t have very high hopes of getting out. She feels like she’s going to be there until her release date.”

President Trump appeared to take a passing interest in Winner’s conviction when he tweeted about her on August 24, 2018: 

“I always look back at the tweet, and I use it out there on Twitter, to remind [President Trump] that it’s still very unfair. It was really cool to see that tweet, and it was good, because during her pre-trial phase, her attorneys told us not to use the word ‘unfair,’ because it might upset the Courts; and so, for Trump to use that word was amazing for us. This process has been unfair from the beginning. 

“But when you look at the tweet, you see that his intent was to get back at Jeff Sessions, who he was angry with at the time. And he was trying to say something disparaging about Hillary Clinton. He was using Reality to get at them,” she said.

As Reality’s chief champion, her mother spends untold afterwork hours writing letters, emails, and making calls to the White House and members of Congress. At best, she receives boilerplate letters in response. Worse yet, she says, is the silence. 

“That’s one of the things that has been difficult for me — feeling like Reality doesn’t have support, even from my officials here in Texas,” she said. “I write to them, and I get form letters back saying that they don’t have the authority to intervene. I’m not asking them to intervene. I’m asking them to support her. When we were going to Washington, DC for the second-year anniversary of her arrest, I wrote to a number of Senators, asking if I could have a meeting with them while I was there – and to Nancy Pelosi, as well — but I never heard from anyone.” 

She is heartened, however, by the number of people who have expressed support and empathy for her daughter, including some of those famous whistleblowers – Thomas A. Drake, Lisa Ling, Edward Snowden, and others.

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen reached out with interest in advocating for Winner’s compassionate early release – a privilege he was afforded while serving time for his own 2018 conviction. 

Hollywood came calling, too. Winner’s mother said that a documentary is planned for early 2021. There’s also a greenlit feature film in the works.

Reality Winner appealed for compassionate release on November 16, 2020 hearing. Chief U.S. District Judge Randal Hall said that Winner had not provided the prison warden 30 days to consider a compassionate release appeal, and that her attorneys failed to present a compelling case. 

Beyond a handful of legal publishers, few news organizations covered the hearing. 

“The media just isn’t there,” Winner-Davis said. 

When Reality and her mother have the opportunity to speak, they talk about lots of things – about her daughter’s health, her perspective on prison and the law, and what the future might hold. Winner is working on a degree in sociology. She’s become a certified instructor in yoga and spin-cycling. 

Her mother expects that she’ll leverage this experience and become an advocate for criminal justice and social justice reform. She’s expressed interest in working with at-risk youths. 

What the pair haven’t spoken about is the former government contractor’s decision to disclose the information – the risk-benefit analysis she considered before she sent the classified report to The Intercept.

 “She and I have never been able to have a real conversation about this. All of our conversations are monitored,” Winner-Davis said. “There have been times when she’s mentioned that she hopes that what she did paid off in some way, you know – that it made a difference, that it made some sort of a difference.”

Winner-Davis expressed frustration that the very information Reality disclosed is still being used as political fodder, and that its veracity is being undermined by members of the United States Congress. 

“We seem to have come full circle,” she said, exasperated. “Now, they’re trying to disprove it again, trying to say that there was something malicious about the investigation itself. And I sit here, and I want to scream, ‘But the Russians did it!’ It warranted an investigation, but now they’re trying to say that the investigation itself was wrong.” 

In the meantime, her daughter serves time. 

“The only thing I’ve been fighting for this whole time is to keep her name out there, and for people to learn who she is. She really is a remarkable young woman. Her service in the Air Force, her volunteerism? You’re not going to find someone that young who has given so much. I just want people to see her for who she is,” Winner-Davis said.

“I also want people to recognize that she didn’t do any harm to her country, and to press our nation into reforming the Espionage Act. It should only be used for people who actually damage us, who trade secrets, sell secrets, and work against our country. It should not be used on people like Reality, like Edward Snowden, like Chelsea Manning. There has got to be a line where we say, ‘No, this doesn’t fit.’ Reality did not conspire against the United States of America.”

News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy

Consider the source

gretchenapeck

The Hunter Biden laptop story was so full of holes it’s hard to imagine why the NY Post — a tabloid — made an editorial decision to pick it up. This NY Times column explores why other outlets didn’t buy into it, including another Murdoch-owned paper, the non-tabloid WSJ.

It’s interesting to look at this from a 40,000-foot level and to study how news perpetuates in an economically disparate way. If you get your news largely from free sources or social media — or if you only watch Fox News and listen to freely accessible radio pundits — you likely don’t know the problems with the story and the diligence media outlets must use to determine its veracity. But if you’re a bit more well off — enough to afford a relatively expensive subscription to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, for example — you get the bigger picture, the more complete story, the truer version of events, and access to information that has been put through a meat grinder of editorial challenges and adjudication.

News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Uncategorized

The AXIOS Interview: Observations on the President and the Press

gretchenapeck

This AXIOS on HBO interview with the President is generating a lot of social media buzz this week. If you’re like me and out of the HBO loop, AXIOS kindly published it online, free of charge. Here’s the link:

https://www.axios.com/full-axios-hbo-interview-donald-trump-cd5a67e1-6ba1-46c8-bb3d-8717ab9f3cc5.html

I watched it pre-dawn, with my first three cups of coffee and a notepad for visceral scribbling. I was most interested to see how Jonathan Swan formulated his questions and delivered them, and how he “managed” the President – prone to ramblings and deflections – in order to keep the interview productive and moving forward.

At least twice, the President broke the cadence of the interview to comment on Swan’s facial expressions, accusing him of smiling or smirking. This, too, is a rhetorical trick of the President’s – to redirect attention to the questioner, often disparaging the reporter in some way. Here, he seems to imply that Swan is unserious or being cheeky. What he did not do is call Swan “nasty,” or dumb or any of his other favorite insults he seems to reserve for women journalists who ask tough questions.

Swan didn’t hesitate to wade into some turbulent waters: the Federal response to COVID-19; Ghislaine Maxwell; the President’s plans to leverage the Courts to contest the election; Federal forces descending on an American city and usurping due process by essentially kidnapping protesters and holding them without charges; Black Lives Matter and civil unrest; and about his lack of regard for the late John Lewis.

Swan even asked about the intelligence reports that suggest Russia has taken out bounties on Allied troops’ heads. The President demonstrated his incuriosity about the intel. “If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it,” he proclaimed.

“This one didn’t reach my desk,” he insisted. And yet it’s on his desk; it’s in his briefing, and the President didn’t even bother to bring it up for discussion during his call with Putin last week (per the White House).

Swan then probed the President about widely circulated and publicized intelligence that ties Russia to supplying weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. In a shocking “whataboutism” response, the President replied, “We supplied weapons to the Taliban when they were fighting Russia. … We did that, too.”

It is stunning to see a President of the United States equivocating American troops – presumably sent to the Afghanistan mountains to combat terrorism and nation build – with Russia’s aggressive, invading forces the Taliban caused to retreat long ago.

Pressed on troop levels in Afghanistan, the President acknowledged that the numbers have gone up and gone down during his Presidency, but he insists that his mission is to nearly halve the level with which the Administration began. Swan, wanting a number and a timetable on the promise, gets the President to say the U.S. will have between 4,000 and 5,000 troops in Afghanistan on election day 2020.

Swan is particularly effective at getting the President to eventually answer a question. Someone on Twitter suggested that it’s because of the Aussie accent, but it’s really because he fires follow-up questions and real-time fact checks at the President. The White House Press Corps, often kept to one or two questions, don’t have that luxury. It’s too easy for the President or McEnany to just point to someone else and move on.

Throughout the interview, the President makes relentless attempts to stonewall Swan. He interrupts. He talks in circles. He deflects and heads off in tangents – often leading to topics within his comfort zone: Crowd sizes. TV ratings. And why he doesn’t get enough “credit” – from whom, he doesn’t say.

In a line of questioning may be more uncomfortable for the audience than it is for the President, Swan asked the question about his “I wish her well” remarks about Ghislaine Maxwell, the accused pimp and pedo-buddy of the late Jeffrey Epstein – both, long-time friends of the President. In response, the President suggested that Epstein may have been murdered in prison, citing no evidence to support his assertion.

What the President doesn’t want to talk about is the pandemic and the more than 159,000 dead Americans. When Swan does manage to steer the President to the topic, the President flippantly dismisses statistics, including the measurably important death-per-capita data from the United States and other developed nations. The President suggests that data is flawed.

The duo’s conversation about testing is revealing, in an emperor-lacks-clothes kind of way. The President’s obstinance about testing continues. Swan points out that test results take too long – that a test result, sometimes 10 days after the swabbing, doesn’t help the patient and it doesn’t help quell the transmission of the virus.

Weeks before the Swan interview, the Trump Administration “defunded” federal testing sites they’d set up around the country. They folded the tents, pulled the personnel, and said to those communities, “You’re on your own now.”

One of so many unforced errors made by the President during the interview, he asserted, “You can test too much,” citing unnamed sources, “the manuals” and “the books.” To his credit, Swan followed up with a question about which manuals and books he was citing – knowing, of course, that the President cannot answer the question.

The part of the interview about COVID-19 and testing will now be added to the library of videos of the President’s half-year campaign to diminish the virus, to give Americans some false sense of security, to fuel conspiracy theories about it, to play wannabe doctor and pharmacist, to endanger lives.

The national lack of ambition on testing – despite the volume of tests already performed the President prefers to cite – may be our undoing. It should go without saying that the more rapid-result testing we do, the easier it becomes to isolate the virus, identify risks, to help on-the-front lines healthcare workers and facilities be proactive rather than reactive. The path to any sort of normalcy – schools reopening, businesses bouncing back, seeing each other, touching each other, encouraging the kids to play together again, going to a restaurant, going on a date, seeing live music, attending a funeral – is paved in testing.

And we’ve blown it.

About those nearly 160,000 American deaths? The President tells Swan, “It is what it is.”

Book Publishing, News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Uncategorized

Mary L. Trump’s Book: A Review

gretchenapeck

I bought Mary L. Trump, PhD’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough” not so much because I was interested in the family dynamics of the Trump clan, but because I have an (confessed) staunch disdain for men who try to silence women, and for Presidents who make people around them sign NDAs and file frivolous lawsuits to delay and degrade every publication or opinion about him. So, when I heard that the Trump family had tied the book up in court, I pre-ordered it.

It’s a thin hardback and an easy read.

In the early chapters, she struggles with voice.

At times, Trump reminds the reader that she is a clinician, highly educated in and informed about mental health and mental disease. Occasionally, she breaks from that serious tone, injecting editorial that is biting or snarky. I’m not sure those work in her favor.

A few chapters in, she hits her stride, and the book transitions into what it wanted to be from the beginning: A highly personal memoir, with decades worth of cringe-inducing memories of sadism and cruelty that runs like sap in the Trump family tree. Knowing that, you might tend to believe that this is purely “a hit piece,” written for retribution or revenge. She is wounded – and who wouldn’t be – but it becomes evident that malice isn’t her motivation. Rather, the narrative seems to indicate a patently private person’s strange sense of duty to the public, to correct the record on her family’s biography and image, including the curated and fabricated story of her Uncle’s business acumen.

The stories of family “black sheeps,” of dramatic dis-ownings, or siblings who turn against one another for their parents’ affection or post-mortem spoils, are nothing new. But the story of the Trump family is particularly tragic, because the repercussions of their greed, cruelty, and tumult have trickled down to all of us now. They’re global.

The saddest part of this story, it seems to me, is the acknowledgement that family can be so easily fractured, and that sometimes a person can spend a lifetime thinking they play a certain role in the family – thinking they are (if not well liked, then) well-loved by other members of the family. They can carry on blindly under those assumptions for years, decades even, until one day they come to realize that they didn’t have that firm standing at all, that the affection they felt for others was not reciprocated – the unsteadying realization that “I am on my own.”

I think that must’ve been how it felt in the moment Mary Trump recounts near the end of the book – a fateful phone conversation with her grandmother, the President’s mother. It’s a gut punch.

By the end, I was surprised at how viciously the President’s immediate family and inner circle denounced his niece’s recounting of her life to date. Donald, his siblings, their children? They were raised in a culture of abuse. You’ll close this book and think, “That explains so much.” It almost makes a person feel pity for the President, for the man he came to be. Almost.

News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Uncategorized

The Roof, the Roof, the Roof Is On Fire

gretchenapeck

Unlike George Floyd, who literally choked out his last words …

“Don’t kill me.”

“Momma.”

“I can’t breathe.”

… I only figuratively choke on words to chronicle this moment in our nation’s history. I feel inadequate and inarticulate. Nothing I can put to paper is profound enough. What can I write that I haven’t said before, after each injustice I’ve paid witness to in my lifetime — this life of mine that tonight feels privileged and impossibly long?

What have I not already said about the racial disparities that plague our culture? How can I, an inept bystander really, somehow define and encapsulate the festering wounds of racism and our pathetic inability to destroy it, once and for all?

I think I choke on these words because it’s not my story to tell. I think on these matters, as a white person who knows that I can go about my days — somedays even myself breaking laws — without that omnipresent fear that others will inherently aim to target me, harass me, disparage me, or even kill me, I might be best to shut the fuck up and listen, or better yet, to act as a conduit, a megaphone for others who know these atrocities firsthand.

I need to do a better job at making sure those stories are told. That is my mission and vow.

I may be better equipped to speak about protests. A child of the 60s and 70s, I have been witness to Vietnam-era rebellions, Los Angeles, Ferguson, and all the modern-era injustices that have led people to the streets to speak to their rage, to show the world their anguish.

I have myself marched, when there seemed like no other way to break through. This is all too familiar to me.

Tragically, rather than acknowledging their numbers and hearing their cries – rather than listening to their plight and empathizing with their anger – too many in this country will look at anecdotal property destruction and discount these protesters’ voices, wholesale. They will criticize them, or worse, tsk-tsk them and just move on about their days.

I sat up all night again, watching live feeds of fires burning in businesses, a news network under siege, tear gas canisters flying, and I think back to a demonstration I took part in years ago. I found myself side-by-side with a perfectly mild-mannered and otherwise peaceful, law-abiding person, who was so caught up in the moment, so unable to tamp down his rage, that he screamed out, “Burn it all down!”

That’s what rage does to human beings. That’s what being unheard, for years, decades, centuries, does to us.

As the day breaks, American cities will awaken to carnage today. They will find their neighbors and friends nursing wounds, glass on the streets, fires still smoldering. Talking heads on TV and social-media commenters will ponder, “Why have they done this? What purpose does it serve?”

They don’t understand it, because they haven’t tried to understand it.

I think about erupting rage and wonder how this anger is any less valid than the grievances that inspired this nation to elect Donald J. Trump as our 45th President? So often I’ve heard from Trump voters who say they voted for him to “drain the swamp,” to “shake things up.”

What they really meant was, “Burn it all down.”

The thing is, when you have that level of power – as a member of Congress or as President – burning it down proves rather easy and clean. No muss, no fuss. You don’t need to take the streets. K Street comes to you. You meet in chambers at the Capitol and with pen strokes, you dismantle it. You exploit that rage that sent you there to undermine law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the very system of justice that governs our land. You quietly leverage the courts to take mere access to healthcare away from millions who desperately need it. You slickly undermine public education. You put a price tag on the environment and sell it to the highest bidder. You champion war criminals and demote military heroes. You strike down laws intended to protect workers and people from businesses that will harm them and make them sick. You enrich your friends and starve the rest.

You challenge long-established Constitutional laws, because you can, and because you feel it’s what you were elected and emboldened to do.

You see a plague coming and you shrug it off, knowing that it might kill millions, especially in the cities for which you have disdain, cities that didn’t vote for you.

You burn it all down while surrounding yourself with blue-suited middle-aged white men cheering you on, never getting any grime on your hands at all. It’s all disgustingly dignified.

But the People don’t have that power. They’ve got to get their hands dirty.

The People don’t have those commemorative Executive Order-signing pens. They only have the streets. They only have their rage. They have only year after year of screaming into a void. And, so, they want to burn it all down the only way they know how, until the powerful listen, until they command their attention, until the change they demand comes.

News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Uncategorized

The President’s “Keyboard Warriors” Take to the Streets

gretchenapeck

I saw this clip when the reporter first posted it — taken at some of sort of a rally. I can’t be sure whether it was a gathering just to celebrate the President or to make some sort of statement about the state of affairs on Long Island, within reach of the COVID-19 hotbed zone, New York City.

I’ve come to expect this kind of vitriol. It’s not new. Some years ago when I was dispatched to photograph a protest/counter-protest of Trump’s speech at the Coast Guard Academy commencement, I took some of this kind of flack myself from several individuals who walked alongside the protest marchers and screamed at the group. To me, they yelled “fake news” and some misogynistic nonsense that I shrugged off at the time. It’s gotten much worse in the years since, with reporters harassed, doxxed, physically assaulted, their gear ripped from their hands and destroyed.

The Constitutionally protected Free Press no longer feels very free. It feels like targets have been painted on their backs.

When this clip first published on Twitter, I had a couple of thoughts: First, note how brave the local TV reporter is as he walks through the frothy-mouthed crowd. See his calm as he navigates individuals/superspreaders yelling in his face and refusing to respect any physical distancing.

I thought, look at how they scream at him, even in front of their young, impressionable children. Look at how they seem to have lost their damned minds, becoming people I doubt they are in everyday situations. I bet they don’t behave like this at family reunions, nor at the workplace, nor in their neighborhoods, nor in their PTA meetings.

I was also hyperaware of the irony of this. Here, we have a reporter dispatched by the local Long Island TV station, to report on their event. Had he and others not been there, they would have been accused of ignoring their plights, blackballing their voices. How many times have you heard from the President’s most ardent supporters, “You won’t hear this on the mainstream media …”

And yet, this is about as MSM as you can get, the guy I bet everyone in the crowd knew by name and face, because he’s on their TV screens every weeknight. Local TV news is about as close to the community as you can get outside of a small-town paper. It’s not just “mainstream,” it’s “Main Street.”

Here he was to capture their moment, to take their story to the airwaves, to interview them and get their perspectives.

And what do they do? They threaten him, scold him, verbally shit all over the guy. They terrorize him.

I shared the clip on social media, and I blamed the President for this vitriol and hate. After all, it’s his words, verbatim, that they practically spit at the TV newsman. Listen carefully, and you can hear them parrot our President.

Turns out, I was right to put the blame at the President’s feet, because in the middle of the night — when the President should either be sleeping, meeting with his entourage at Camp David, or thinking long and hard about how to save lives in the throes of pandemic — the President shared this clip, too. Not once, but twice. That tells me he’s quite proud of these people, this behavior, and his ability to manipulate masses of his “keyboard warriors,” to the point that they have become something other than themselves.

News & Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Uncategorized

The White House Task Force Briefings Should No Longer Be Televised

gretchenapeck

Since the creation of the White House task force, and the President’s naming of his Vice President, Mike Pence, as its mealymouthed leader, there has been a steady drumbeat from media critics who think the Press should tune out.

They’ve argued that the President has done more harm than good by holding these nearly daily on-camera events. I wholeheartedly disagreed, primarily because he’s the President, and without a functioning Press Secretary – the new one refuses to work with us, like her predecessor – these are precious opportunities to carry the President’s messages to the American people, allowing them to judge for themselves the content, and to question him, challenge him, and speak truth to power, as is our role and responsibility.

I have held that belief for all these exhausting weeks, even when the President missed every opportunity to express genuine, sincere empathy for those who are sick, the tens of thousands who have died horrific deaths, or to their families who are forced to grieve in silence, alone.

I believed we had to cover the briefings even when it became clear that the President’s posturing would always be to deflect criticism, to shirk responsibility, and to pick petty fights with Governors who have been desperate for information, gear, equipment and financial aid – desperate to try to save their constituents lives.

I felt we should still cover the briefings even when the President would openly question his own appointees to the task force – infectious-disease experts who come equipped with data and analyses that he flippantly disregards in real time.

Even when critics cried, “He’s using these as substitute campaign rallies,” I still felt we have to cover them. To ignore them would be irresponsible and a dereliction of our duty, right?

I, along with so many of my colleagues in news, have cringed when he’s used the precious time to admonish journalists, especially women reporters, accusing anyone who asks a pointed, legitimate question of being “fake news” or worse. The tough-guy act feels like a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, it’s textbook Orwellian; if you can convince people not to believe anything, they won’t believe the truth about you. The other purpose, I believe, is to create audio and video clips for conservative media outlets to run, showing the President “fighting back” – macho and chest thumping.

I suppose with some people who are firmly planted in the President’s corner, no matter his egregious unforced errors, it works to get their blood boiling, their anger stoked. It juices up the base.

A hard-boiled German who’s been around, even I welled up the day the President boasted about how great the ratings were for his briefings, as New York City and other communities across the nation zipped up hundreds of body bags in that single day. The lack of empathy was shocking, gutting really. It made me question if we’ll live through this – as individuals and as a nation.

Admittedly, as the time has passed, I have questioned the approach of the Press sitting before him. I believed that if they could simply target their questions to the experts and keep them keenly focused on the public health and safety information Americans need to know, that it would somehow keep these briefings from veering off course.

I suggested to broadcasters that they factor in a longer delay so that they could digitally filter out anything that was overtly false or potentially harmful to the viewing public. None of that has worked.

The President went on to use the briefings to recklessly promote a drug that hadn’t been rigorously tested through clinical trials as a treatment for COVID-19 infection. Despite warnings across the globe that its use was linked to heart failure and stroke in these cases, he continued to promote it. Lupus patients suddenly couldn’t get their prescriptions filled for the drug, putting their very lives at risk while the President continued to promote it. We later learned that he has a financial stake in the pharmaceutical company that makes it.

Donald J. Trump also used taxpayer dollars to produce a campaign video, which he shamelessly played during one notorious briefing, perking up the ears of watchdog agencies. He’s defied social/physical distance rules established by the White House Correspondents Association, designed to keep the Press and the President himself safe from infection during these daily meetings. He’s repeatedly invited pet network OANN into the room in defiance of these very rules, allowing its “reporters” to pitch him softball, seemingly planned and scripted questions designed to stroke the President’s ego and disparage political opponents. It’s right out of the Authoritarian Playbook.

I have been hyperaware of the lack of real leadership on display here. A leader, even in cases of notable accomplishments and success, reflects back and thinks: “How could we have done even better?” There’s no introspection by the President of the United States. He is incapable of it.

And still – even with all this in our wake – I was of the mind that the Press had to broadcast and cover these briefings, because he’s the President of the United States, and it is our duty to shine lights on him whenever we have access, and especially when we don’t.

But that’s all changed for me now. I have come around to the position the critics have taken – that we should no longer broadcast these briefings in real time. My professional opinion changed when the President used last weeks’ time before the American people to encourage the protesters who have taken the streets – some dressed as if they’re going to war, some sporting swastika and other antisemitic symbols, others with Confederate flags – to defy the very orders his own task force established. For weeks, the President, the Vice President, the doctors, and other members of the Administration have stood before us preaching the importance of following the guidelines and reading from lists of things that the President said we should all be grateful for – Federally supplied personal protection equipment, respirators, financial aid, military vessels and personnel, field hospitals, short-lived testing sites, and more.

Now, the President and the Vice President are lauding the protesters, empathizing with their “cabin fever,” and refusing to admonish their reckless disregard for the health and safety of not just “the others” – their fellow American citizens – but their own health and that of their own families. It overtly demonstrates that the President and the Vice President have not taken their roles seriously, that they haven’t even bought into the guidelines they’ve established, and that they do not care how many Americans will die as a result of their politicking.

There’s a Willie Nelson song that goes, “Turn out the lights; the party’s over. They say that all good things must end.” The White House Task Force briefings had the potential to do some really good things – to inform the public, to help keep us all safe. They haven’t risen to the occasion.

Legitimate news organizations should shut off the lights and remove the cameras from the briefing room. Send in your reporters, but cover the briefings straight, giving no room for the President to make an on-camera mockery out of them and us.

The public-servant doctors on the task force should take a different approach, too. It’s time to “go rogue” and speak directly to the American people without the President’s political filter. It’s long overdue. Our nation is depending on you.