We Resist: Day 561

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Earlier today by me: The Privatization of Compassion and Suspected Russian Spy Discovered Working at U.S. Embassy in Moscow. And late yesterday ICYMI: Sarah Huckabee Sanders Is a Propagandist.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Nativism; dehumanization; disablism] Aaron Rupar at ThinkProgress: During [Vile] Speech, Trump Suggests He May Still Lock up Hillary and Mimics MS-13 Stabbings.

[Donald] Trump delivered a nearly 90-minute-long speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on Thursday night in which he suggested he may yet lock up Hillary Clinton and smeared immigrants as violent murderers.

When Trump mentioned Clinton, the crowd broke out in "Lock her up!" chants. Trump responded by saying, "Some things just take a little bit longer." He then complained that his Justice Department "only wants to go after Republicans. You look at the kind of criminal actions and crime — they only want to go after the Republicans."

Trump focused much of his speech at Thursday's campaign-style rally on immigration, touting his border wall and taking his familiar fearmongering about supposedly criminal immigrants to the extreme.

Trump disclosed that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have been advising him to shut down the government unless he gets more than $20 billion in funding for his border wall before the 2018 midterm election.

Trump then lied about the wall, falsely claiming "we're building it." In reality, Trump hasn't received any money to build the structure, which he promised during his campaign that Mexico would fund.

Alluding to a possible shut down, Trump said, "We are going to start to get very nasty over the wall."

At another point, Trump sought to scare people about the risks posed by immigrants by referring to MS-13 as "slicers" and "animals" and mimicking the motions of a person being stabbed.

He is a disgusting human being, and I am relentlessly angry all day every day that he is this nation's president.

Susan B. Glasser at the New Yorker: It's True: Trump Is Lying More, and He's Doing It on Purpose. "The recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump's increasingly unbound presidency and a signal attribute of it. The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to. The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than eighty per cent of Republicans — the group at which his lies seem to be aimed — means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the 'Make America Great Again' slogan."

Camila Domonoske at NPR: China Announces Retaliatory Tariffs on $60 Billion in U.S. Goods. "China has announced a plan to impose new tariffs on $60 billion of American goods, in retaliation for the latest tariff threats from the Trump administration. Earlier this week, the White House said it was considering boosting tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, raising those tariffs to 25 percent from 10 percent. That particular set of tariffs has not yet taken effect. China promptly promised it would take countermeasures of its own. On Friday, the Ministry of Commerce described its planned response: Four different types of tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods. The Chinese government did not specify what types of American products would be affected or when those tariffs would take effect."

Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post: We've Finally Learned Trump's Grand Plan for Fixing Health Care. "During his presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump promised to replace Obamacare with 'something terrific.' For a long time, that 'something terrific' was left unspecified. Now, more than a year and a half into Trump's presidency, we have finally learned his grand plan for reducing Americans' health-care costs. It is: Don't get sick. Ever. That, at least, was the message of the administration's new rule expanding the availability of junk insurance plans, finalized Wednesday."

Sophie Weiner at Splinter: Trump Donor Promised Michael Cohen $10 Million to Push for Nuclear Power Plant. "In April, Trump donor Franklin L. Haney apparently agreed to pay Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen a $10 million fee for successfully lobbying for the building of an unfinished nuclear power plant in Alabama, according to the Wall Street Journal. The contract also asked Cohen to secure a $5 billion loan from the government for the project. This new information is part of the investigation into Cohen’s unregistered lobbying efforts which he undertook after Trump took office."

[CN: Image of gun at link] Nicole Lafond at TPM: Butina Bragged She Was a Spy When Drunk. "According to people who knew her at American University where she attended graduate school, on at least two occasions [alleged Russian spy Mariia Butina] bragged about her Russian government connections after she had imbibed and even said the Russian government was connected to her Moscow gun rights group. According to CNN, classmates were unnerved by her comments and reported her to law enforcement twice. Other classmates told CNN that in classes she was a constant defender of Vladimir Putin and claimed that she was a middleman between [Donald] Trump's campaign and the Russian government."

❗️❗️❗️"With the midterm elections just three months away, campaigns are largely on their own in the increasingly challenging task of protecting sensitive information and countering false or misleading content on social media." https://t.co/iuewdt1UEN

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) August 3, 2018

[CN: Nativism; sex abuse of children; descriptions of sexual assault] Topher Sanders and Michael Grabell at ProPublica: Worker Charged with Sexually Molesting Eight Children at Immigrant Shelter. "A youth care worker for Southwest Key has been charged with 11 sex offenses after authorities accused him of molesting at least eight unaccompanied immigrant boys over nearly a year at one of the company's shelters in Mesa, Arizona, federal court records show. The allegations against Levian D. Pacheco, who is HIV-positive, include [assaults which] are alleged to have taken place between August 2016 and July 2017, according to a court filing last week that laid out the government's case."

[CN: Misogynoir; violence] Sam Levin at the Guardian: 'Justice Is Never Served': Nia Wilson and the Fear of Racial Violence. "'It's impossible and unreasonable for people to expect black folks to take the murder of Nia Wilson outside of white on black violence dynamic,' said Cat Brooks, a longtime Oakland activist and mayoral candidate who helped organize a vigil the day after the murder. 'Black bodies have been under attack by agents of white supremacy for over 400 years.' Diamond Rogers, a 19-year-old cousin of Wilson, said it was important to 'call it what it is ... a hate crime to black women.'"

[CN: White supremacy; class warfare]

"Despite all the ways that the government provided welfare programs to help them, white Americans are willing to cut such programs if they believe that African-Americans and other nonwhites may benefit." A must-read by @chaunceydevega. https://t.co/Ax0yOYbSQm

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) August 3, 2018

[CN: Violent anti-Blackness] Sameer Rao at Colorlines: See Trayvon Martin's Parents Get Real on Resilience. "Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin survived the 2012 killing of their teenage son, Trayvon Martin, by George Zimmerman — only to see their child's name dragged through the press and the trial that exonerated his the killer. His death and the legal aftermath pushed the pair into the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement. Speaking at actions around the country allowed them to build solidarity with other parents of Black children slain by police or vigilantes, as well as with the thousands of demonstrators demanding accountability for such violence. As Fulton told the hosts of 'Ebro in the Morning' radio show [on July 31], their activism remains inextricably tied to their grief and healing."

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?