
The Phone Call

Baldknobber123 wrote on Reddit…
I always find looking at the economic condition of millennials (those under 40) vs baby boomers at that age useful.
The overall economic growth rate for first 15 years in the workforce for millenials is the worst on record, going back to 1792. Millennials in the US have had the worst GDP growth per capita of any generation, and about half that of boomers and Gen X. “When boomers were roughly the same age as millennials are now, they owned about 21% of America’s wealth, compared to millennials’ 3% share today, according to recent Fed data.”
This combined with various changes since the 70s that have significantly reduced labor power, and thus helped reduced the amount of income going to the working class. So, not only is overall growth lower, but in 1980 the working class was seeing the most income growth, while now the richest see the largest growth by far. Hence average hourly wages being lower now (inflation adjusted) than in 1973. Not even getting into some other issues: multiple financial crises, education costs, healthcare, housing costs, increased levels of job competition due in part to a global workforce (general capital mobility), financialization, union busting, increased educational competition (even since 2001 colleges like Stanford have seen their acceptance rates drop from ~15-20% to ~5%), mass incarceration, all the general problems with wealth and income inequality (such as power dynamics and opportunity differences), etc.
From 2017:
The recession sliced nearly 40 percent off the typical household’s net worth, and even after the recent rebound, median net worth remains more than 30 percent below its 2007 level.
Younger, less-educated and lower-income workers have experienced relatively strong income gains in recent years, but remain far short of their prerecession level in both income and wealth. Only for the richest 10 percent of Americans does net worth surpass the 2007 level.
From 2018:
Data from the Federal Reserve show that over the last decade and a half, the proportion of family income from wages has dropped from nearly 70 percent to just under 61 percent. It’s an extraordinary shift, driven largely by the investment profits of the very wealthy. In short, the people who possess tradable assets, especially stocks, have enjoyed a recovery that Americans dependent on savings or income from their weekly paycheck have yet to see. Ten years after the financial crisis, getting ahead by going to work every day seems quaint, akin to using the phone book to find a number or renting a video at Blockbuster.
A decade after this debacle, the typical middle-class family’s net worth is still more than $40,000 below where it was in 2007, according to the Federal Reserve. The damage done to the middle-class psyche is impossible to price, of course, but no one doubts that it was vast.
A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that while all birth cohorts lost wealth during the Great Recession, Americans born in the 1980s were at the “greatest risk for becoming a lost generation for wealth accumulation.”
In 2016, net worth among white middle-income families was 19 percent below 2007 levels, adjusted for inflation. But among blacks, it was down 40 percent, and Hispanics saw a drop of 46 percent.
In a new report, Data for Progress found that a staggering 52 percent of people under the age of 45 have lost a job, been put on leave, or had their hours reduced due to the pandemic, compared with 26 percent of people over the age of 45. Nearly half said that the cash payments the federal government is sending to lower- and middle-income individuals would cover just a week or two of expenses, compared with a third of older adults. This means skipped meals, scuppered start-ups, and lost homes. It means Great Depression–type precarity for prime-age workers in the richest country on earth.
Studies have shown that young workers entering the labor force in a recession—as millions of Millennials did—absorb large initial earnings losses that take years and years to fade. Every 1-percentage-point bump in the unemployment rate costs new graduates 7 percent of their earnings at the start of their careers, and 2 percent of their earnings nearly two decades later. The effects are particularly acute for workers with less educational attainment; those who are least advantaged to begin with are consigned to permanently lower wages.
A major Pew study found that Millennials with a college degree and a full-time job were earning by 2018 roughly what Gen Xers were earning in 2001. But Millennials who did not finish their post-secondary education or never went to college were poorer than their counterparts in Generation X or the Baby Boom generation.
The cost of higher education grew by 7 percent per year through the 1980s, 1990s, and much of the 2000s, far faster than the overall rate of inflation, leaving Millennial borrowers with an average of $33,000 in debt. Worse: The return on that investment has proved dubious, particularly for black Millennials. The college wage premium has eroded, and for black students the college wealth premium has disappeared entirely.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/millennials-are-new-lost-generation/609832/
Some more data, such as the source for economic growth by generation and how younger people did not recover nearly as well from the financial crises, can be found here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/27/millennial-recession-covid/
Of course – this is not limited to millennials. Inequality has risen across the board, and the working conditions in the United States are rampant with insecurity. The working class struggles in every age group. Our overall physical, educational, and financial health are severely lacking. Millennials, due to how insecure their situation is (as seen above), do provide a great example of how the lower income groups and least powerful worker groups face the brunt of economic catastrophe while the rich gain.
A good intro book to check out on some of the political causes of inequality in the US, such as major tax cuts and corporate lobbying, is Winner Take All Politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-Take-All_Politics
Additionally, a great intro book on labor history in the US is From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: https://thenewpress.com/books/from-folks-who-brought-you-weekend
Conservatives, FFS. I already know the answer to this but: Where is your dignity?
…Is all it takes in this country to get 42% support an anti-abortion stance and an R next to your name? Is Fox News and hyper-partisanship really this powerful?
For the life of me, I can’t think of someone further from the people that support him.
How embarrassing it is to have been conned so hard. If only they knew.
The Trump/Barr problem is worse than you think – once you realize they have deliberately conspired to create an environment where children can be abducted from parents and trafficked with impunity – many to Russian financial backers of Barr, Trump and other prominent Republicans.
Ever wonder just why so many Russian Oligarchs are so willing to provide Trump and other Republicans so much money?
And the cover provided by Republican’s deliberately botched response to the Pandemic has worked amazingly well.
Barr has ties to convicted child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that goes back even farther than Trump’s by at least a decade. His father, Donald Barr – while Headmaster at Dalton – hired Epstein in 1974 as a teacher notwithstanding his complete lack of qualifications. Barr also published a science fiction book where the dominant theme was teen sex slavery.
William Barr continued his association with Jeffrey Epstein and his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Barr, represented the child trafficker and pedophile
Wake Up Call: Kirkland Lawyers Facing Glare in Epstein Sex Trafficking Case
Donald Barr was a pedophile. Epstein was a child trafficker and pedophile. Bill Barr is a pedophile. Trump is a pedophile and unrepentant rapist. They are all part of a large international network of child abusers and traffickers.
And Republican persistence in obstructing oversight of ICE has made it easy to disappear kids into the system – to be distributed to GOP pedophiles and their financial backers at home and abroad. Fish in a barrel. No records of the kids. Parents have no rights, no recourse, and no access to legal help in America.
The GOP is lousy with child rapists and sex abusers – all with unfettered access to kids in ICE custody.
This is a horror like the concentration camps in Nazi Germany – where most German citizens either did not know or refused to believe it was happening right under their noses. Thousands of kids have been deliberately ‘lost’. Trump, Barr and ICE have been running the world’s largest child-trafficking ring in history for the last four years.
Trump, Barr, and many other members of the GOP are implicated in child sex crimes by evidence provided by Maxwell. I’m looking for a headline any day now where she has contracted a ‘mysterious illness’.
QAnon’s recent firehose of virtue-signaling anti-CP propaganda on Facebook is an attempt to dilute the revelation of decades of trafficking of children to Trump and his associates – including his AG and personal fixer Bill Barr.
It isn’t hard to put the pieces together. Its all widely documented and out in the open – like the smoke coming from the chimneys at Treblinka. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And in the case of the conspiracy by Republicans to traffic children taken at the border, its a raging inferno.
Again:
Attorney General William Barr, and his father, were and are pedophiles who were supplied kids by Epstein for decades. More recently – children taken from parents by ICE and BORTAC at the border who have been ‘disappeared’ into the system are being trafficked to powerful people in America and abroad.
And when a State Prosecutor in Florida, Alex Acosta, later Trump’s Labor Secretary, let Epstein off scott-free after being convicted for child sex crimes.
And recently there was a hit on the family of a Federal Judge who was presiding over Epstein’s case – and the gunman was also conveniently ‘found dead’.
This goes far beyond Trump. At the top of our Federal Government is a ring of men who have been pedophiles and child-traffickers for decades – all connected by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell. They have been engaged in conspiracy to murder witnesses in custody and Federal judges involved with the case. They have continuously obstructed justice and any investigations into crimes committed by the Trump Administration.
They are pure evil.
Sources
Only once in the New Testament did Jesus advocate for putting someone to death and it was those who would abuse children:
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
(Matthew 18:6)
Steve Bannon bragging about these tactics:
the power of what he called “rootless white males” who spend all their time online and they could be radicalized in a kind of populist, nationalist way
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-bannon-white-gamers-seinfeld-joshua-green-donald-trump-devils-bargain-sarah-palin-world-warcraft-gamergate-2017-7
Bannon: “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/
r/Gamingcirclejerk captures them doing their thing.
These tactics have been successful for a while:
John Ehrlichman, who partnered with Fox News cofounder Roger Ailes since 1968 on the Republican “Southern Strategy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
[We] had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
“He was the premier guy in the business,” says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. “He was our Michelangelo.”
Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993.
Hillarycare was to have been funded, in part, by a $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes. To block the proposal, Big Tobacco paid Ailes to produce ads highlighting “real people affected by taxes.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525
Adam McKay:
Every day I have to marvel at what the billionaires and FOX News pulled off. They got working whites to hate the very people that want them to have more pay, clean air, water, free healthcare and the power to fight back against big banks & big corps. It’s truly remarkable.
Lyndon Johnson in 1960 calling out their tactics:
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/11/13/what-a-real-president-was-like/d483c1be-d0da-43b7-bde6-04e10106ff6c/
Screenshots of how they coordinate their bad faith arguing to “control the narrative”:
View post on imgur.com
View post on imgur.com
2. After the call went out on 4chan, a network of new Twitter accounts run by white supremacists pretending to be Jews popped up. Often, they masquerade as Orthodox Jews, Israelis and/or Jewish leftists. They all follow each other and promote anti-Semitic and anti-Israel content. pic.twitter.com/rA2cFBm8jW
— (((Yair Rosenberg))) (@Yair_Rosenberg) August 19, 2019
Fake Twitter accounts are impersonating Jews to promote anti-Semitism
PSA: 4chan is planning an attack on the LGBTQ+ community during pride month. They plan on spamming homophobic and transphobic propaganda on all social media sites constantly, in an effort to turn people into raging homophobes and transphobes. Be careful. pic.twitter.com/Krr0m40cot
— samantha/שֵׁײנָא✡️🏳️🌈🏴🚩 (@koshersemite) May 24, 2020
White Nationalists on 4chan start a fake social media campaign to smear #Antifa as promoting the targeting of white women for violence pic.twitter.com/xIsHzDWg4O
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) August 24, 2017
Nazi strategy: "Leftists will recognize dog whistles and know we're crypto, but normies won't listen to them." pic.twitter.com/YSkLp1J95C
— Natalie Wynn (@ContraPoints) August 13, 2017
https://i.redd.it/k4rsav2ov1pz.jpg
https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5txz03/michael_flynn_resigns_trumps_national_security/ddpyyb6/?context=1
https://np.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/7jkybf/t_d_user_suggests_infiltrating_minnesota/dr7m56j/
https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-and-tactics-of-white-nationalism-b0bca3caeb84
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/10/4-key-takeaways-from-the-monster-milo-yiannopoulos-leak.html
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/alt-rights-newest-ploy-trolling-false-symbols/
Everybody works for somebody; we all know who Donald works for now. There is no benefit for him in this behavior because it doesn’t help his base or his donors, so he must owe Putin big time for something else. He’s been funded by Russian money since 1984:
Trump was over a billion in debt and the Russians bailed him out.
► Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money. In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider possible business prospects. Only seven weeks after his trip, Trump ran full-page ads in the Boston Globe, the NYT and WaPO calling for, in effect, the dismantling of the postwar Western foreign policy alliance. The whole Trump/Russian connection started out as laundering money for the Russian mob through Trump’s real estate, but evolved into something far bigger.
► In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob. (NY Times, Apr 30, 1992)
► Felix Sater is a Russian-born former mobster, and former managing director of NY real estate conglomerate Bayrock Group LLC located on the 24th floor of Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Michael Cohen–Trump’s former “fixer” attorney. Cohen’s family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother’s in-laws. Felix Sater’s father had ties to the Russian mob. This goes back more than 30 years.
► Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Bayrock (mentioned above). Bayrock was run by two investors: Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who had pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and poured money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management.
► In July 2008, the height of the housing bust, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. Again, this was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value.
► Semion Mogilevich was the brains behind the Russian Mafia. Mogilevich operatives have been using Trump real estate for decades to launder money. That means Russian Mafia operatives have been part of his fortune for years. Many of them owned condos in Trump Towers and other properties. They were running operations out of Trump’s crown jewel.
► From Craig Unger’s AMA: “Early on, a source told me that all this was tied to Semion Mogilevich, the powerful Russian mobster. I had never even heard of him, but I immediately went to a database that listed the owners of all properties in NY state and looked up all the Trump properties. Every time I found a Russian sounding name, I would Google, and add Mogilevich. When you do investigative reporting, you anticipate drilling a number of dry holes, but almost everyone I googled turned out to be a Russian mobster. Again and again. If you know New York you don’t expect Trump Tower to be a high crime neighborhood, but there were far too many Russian mobsters in Trump properties for it to be a coincidence.”
► So many Russians bought Trump apartments at his developments in Florida that the area became known as Little Moscow. The developers of two of his hotels were Russians with significant links to the Russian mob. The late leader of that mob in the United States, Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov, was living at Trump Tower
► According to a Bloomberg investigation (3/16/2017) into Trump World Tower, “a third of units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability companies connected to Russia and neighboring states.”
► In 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich.
► The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. that is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have been operating out of the home of the president of the United States is deeply disturbing.
► Rudy Giuliani famously prosecuted the Italian mob while he was a federal prosecutor, yet the Russian mob was allowed to thrive. Now he’s deeply entwined in the business of Trump and Russian oligarchs. Giuiani appointed Semyon Kislin to the NYC Economic Development Council in 1990, and the FBI described Kislin as having ties tot he Russian mob. Of course, it made good political sense for Giuliani to get headlines for smashing the Italian mob.
► A lot of Republicans in Washington are implicated. Boatloads of Russian money went to the GOP–often in legal ways. The NRA got as much as $70M from Russia, then funneled it to the GOP. The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee lead by McConnel got millions from Leonard Blavatnik. In the 90s, the Russians began sending money to top GOP leaders, like Speaker of the House Tom Delay. Unger’s book alleges that most of the GOP leadership has been compromised by RU money.
► At the Cityscape USA’s Bridging US and the Emerging Real Estate Markets Conference held in Manhattan, on September 9, 10, and 11, 2008, Trump Jr. was frank about the tide of Russian money supporting the family business, saying “…And in terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
► Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson in 2014 that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
► Russian oligarchs co-signed Trump’s Deutsche bank loans.
Trump now gleefully takes cues from Putin:
► At the end of 2018, Putin and his allies started making a strong push for a resolution that would justify their country’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and reverse an 1989 vote backed by Mikhail Gorbachev that condemned it. The Putinists’ goal was to pass the resolution by Feb. There is no one on this side of the Atlantic who thinks the USSR was justified in invading Afghanistan. And out of nowhere, on January 2nd, Trump came out strongly supporting Russia’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
► Trump went against American intelligence on North Korean missiles. He told the FBI he didn’t believe their intelligence because Putin told him otherwise. “I don’t care, I believe Putin”
► Trump met in secret with Putin the G20 summit in November 2018, without note takers. 19 days later, he announced a withdrawal from Syria. As a note, Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed.
► Trump refused to enforce sanctions legally codified into law – and in some cases reversed standing sanctions on Russian companies.
► He has denounced his own intelligence agencies in a press conference with Putin on election meddling – and publicly endorsed Putin’s version of events.
► Trump pulled out of the INF treaty with no explanation, which allows Putin to create long-range hypersonic missiles that threaten Europe with impunity. The US already has all the weaponry that the INF would ban the development of, so this offers us literally nothing, while allowing Russia to develop powerful new weapons to challenge our allies.
► Demanded Russia get invited back into G7
► Pushed the CIA to give American intelligence to the Kremlin.
► Withdrew from the Open Skies treaty
► Received intelligence in 2019 that Russia was paying bounties for dead American soldiers, and hasn’t done anything about it by the time of this writing.
► Announced troop withdrawal from Germany (America’s missile defense from Russia and forward operating base against Russian aggression)
► And of course, Trump continues to threaten to pull out of NATO, a move so catastrophically stupid, so inconceivably cosmically myopic, I truly can’t express the profundity of the idiocy. Suffice to say, pulling out of NATO would be like the only guy in a prison yard with a shotgun just throwing it over the fence for absolutely no reason, suddenly giving the people with crude homemade shivs complete power.
It’s not the only time he’s disrespected them:
• In May 2020, the White House ended National Guard deployments one day before they could claim benefits
• The Trump admin seized 5 million masks intended for VA hospitals. Kushner distributes these masks to private entities for a fee, who then sells the masks to the government
• Trump fired the captain of the USS
Theodore Roosevelt after he warned superiors that COVID19 was spreading among his crew. The virus subsequently spread amongst the crew.
• After Iran’s retaliatory strike, 109 US troops suffered brain injuries. Trump dismissed these as “headaches”
• On July 20, 2017, in room 2E924 of the Pentagon, Trump told a room full of Generals, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies”
• Pardoned multiple war criminals, which stomped on long standing military values, discipline, and command. Trump has no military experience (May&Nov, 2019)
• Trump mocked Lt. Col. Vindman for his rank and uniform. He threatened said purple heart officer, resulting in the Army providing him protection
• Trump’s Chief of Staff worked—in secret—to deny comprehensive health coverage to Vietnam Vets who suffered from Agent Orange.
• There is a facility in Tijuana for US veterans that Trump deported. Wounded war vet, Sen Duckworth (D) marked Veterans Day 2019 by visiting this facility
• Russia took control of the main U.S. military facility in Syria abandoned on Trump’s orders. Russia now owns the airstrip we built
• On Oct 7, 2019, Trump abruptly withdrew support from America’s allies in Syria after a phone call with Turkey’s president (Erdogan). Turkey subsequently bombed US Special Forces.
• Trump sent thousands of American troops to defend the oil assets of the country that perpetrated 9/11
• In Sept 2019, he made an Air Force cargo crew, flying from the U.S. to Kuwait stop in Scotland (where there’s no U.S. base) to refuel at a commercial airport (where it costs more), so they could stay overnight at a Trump property (which isn’t close to the airport). Trump’s golf courses are losing money, so he’s forcing the military to pay for 5-star nights there.
• In Sept, 2019, Pentagon pulled funds for military schools, military housing funds, and daycare to pay for Trump’s border wall.
• In Aug, 2019, emails revealed that three of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago pals, who are now running Veterans Affairs, are rampant with meddling. “They had no experience in veterans affairs (none of them even served in the military) nor underwent any kind of approval process to serve as de facto managers. Yet, with Trump’s approval, they directed actions and criticized operations without any oversight. They wasted valuable staff time in hundreds of pages of communications and meetings, emails show. Emails reveal disdainful attitudes within the department to the trio’s meddling.”
• Veterans graves will be “dug up” for the border wall, after Trump instructed aides to seize private property. Trump told officials he would pardon them if they break the law by illegally seizing property
• Children of deployed US troops are no longer guaranteed citizenship. This includes US troops posted abroad for years at a time (August 28, 2019)
• On Aug 2, 2019, Trump requisitioned military retirement funds towards border wall
• On July 31, 2019, Trump ordered the Navy rescind medals to prosecutors who were prosecuted war criminals
• Trump denied a U.S. Marine of 6 years entry into the United States for his citizenship interview (Reported July 17, 2019)
• Trump made the U.S. Navy Blue Angels violate ethics rules by having them fly at his July 4th political campaign event (July 4, 2019)
• Trump demanded US military chiefs stand next to him at 4th of July parade (reported July 2, 2019)
• In June, 2019, Trump sent troops to the border to paint the fence for a better “aesthetic appearance”
• Trump used his D-Day interview at a cemetery commemorating fallen US soldiers to attack a Vietnam veteran (June 6, 2019)
• Trump started his D-Day commemoration speech by attacking a private citizen (Bette Midler, of all people) (reported on June 4th, 2019)
• Trump made his 2nd wife, Marla Maples, sign a prenup that would have cut off all child support if Tiffany joined the military (reported June 4th, 2019)
• On May 27, 2019, Trump turned away US military from his Memorial Day speech because they were from the destroyer USS John S. McCain
• Trump ordered the USS John McCain out of sight during his visit to Japan (May 15, 2019). The ship’s name was subsequently covered. (May 27, 2019)
• Trump purged 200,000 vets’ healthcare applications (due to known administrative errors within VA’s enrollment system) (reported on May 13, 2019)
• Trump deported a spouse of fallen Army soldier killed in Afghanistan, leaving their daughter parentless (April 16, 2019)
• On March 20, 2019, Trump complained that a deceased war hero didn’t thank him for his funeral
• Between 12/22/2018, and 1/25/2019, Trump refused to sign his party’s funding bill, which shut down the government, forcing the Coast Guard to go without pay, which made service members rely on food pantries. However, his appointees got a $10,000 pay raise
• He banned service members from serving based on gender identity (1/22/2019)
• He denied female troops access to birth control to limit sexual activity (on-going. Published Jan 18, 2019)
• He tried to deport a marine vet who is a U.S.-born citizen (Jan 16, 2019)
• When a man was caught swindling veterans pensions for high-interest “cash advances,” Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined him $1 (Jan 26, 2019)
• He called a retired general a ‘dog’ with a ‘big, dumb mouth’ (Jan 1, 2019)
• He increased privatization of the VA, leading to longer waits and higher taxpayer cost (2018)
• He finally visited troops 2 years after taking office, but only after 154 vacation days at his properties (Dec 26, 2018)
• He revealed a covert Seal Team 5 deployment, including names and faces, on Twitter during his visit to Iraq (Dec 26, 2018)
• Trump lied to deployed troops that he gave them a 10% raise (12/26/2018). He tried giving the military a raise that was lower than the standard living adjustment. Congress told him that idea wasn’t going to work. Then after giving them the raise that Congress made him, he lied about it pretending that it was larger than Obama’s. It wasn’t.
• He fired service members living with HIV just before the 2018 holidays
• He tried to slash disability and unemployment benefits for Veterans to $0, and eliminate the unemployability extrascheduler rating (Dec 17, 2018)
• He called troops on Thanksgiving and told them he’s most thankful for himself (Thanksgiving, 2018)
• He urged Florida to not count deployed military votes (Nov 12, 2018)
• He canceled an Arlington Cemetery visit on Veterans Day due to light rain (Nov 12, 2018)
• While in Europe commemorating the end of WWI, he didn’t attend the ceremony at a US cemetery due to the rain — other world leaders went anyway (Nov 10, 2018)
• He used troops as a political prop by sending them on a phantom mission to the border and made them miss Thanksgiving with their families (Oct-Dec, 2018)
• He stopped using troops as a political prop immediately after the election. However, the troops remained in muddy camps on the border (Nov 7, 2018)
• Trump changed the GI Bill through his Forever GI Act, causing the VA to miss veteran benefits, including housing allowances. This caused many vets to run out of food and rent. (reported October 7, 2018)
• Trump doubled the rejection rate for veterans requesting family deportation protections (July 5, 2018)
• Trump deported active-duty spouses (11,800 military families face this problem as of April 2018)
• He forgot a fallen soldier’s name (below) during a call to his pregnant widow, then attacked her the next day (Oct 23-24, 2017)
• He sent commandos into an ambush due to a lack of intel, and sends contractors to pick them up, resulting in a commando being left behind, tortured, and executed. (Trump approved the mission because Bannon told him Obama didn’t have the guts to do it) (Oct 4, 2017)
• He blocked a veteran group on Twitter (June 2017)
• He ordered the discharge of active-duty immigrant troops with good records (2017-present)
• He deported veterans (2017-present)
• He said he knows more about ISIS than American generals (Oct 2016)
• On Oct 3, 2016, Trump said vets get PTSD because they aren’t strong (note: yes, he said it’s ‘because they aren’t strong.’ He didn’t say it’s ‘because they’re weak.’ This distinction is important because of Snopes)
• Trump accepted a Purple Heart from a fan at one of his rallies and said: “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” (Aug 2, 2016)
• Trump attacks Gold Star families: Myeshia Johnson (gold star widow), Khan family (gold star parents) etc. (2016-present)
• Trump sent funds raised from a Jan 2016 veterans benefit to the Donald J Trump Foundation instead of veterans charities (the foundation has since been ordered shut because of fraud) (Jan, 2016)
• Trump said he has “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military” because he went to a military-style academy (2015 biography)
• Trump said he doesn’t consider POWs heroes because they were caught. He said he prefers people who were not caught (July 18, 2015)
• Trump said having unprotected sex was his own personal Vietnam (1998)
• For a decade, Trump sought to kick veterans off of Fifth Avenue because he found them unsightly nuisances outside of Trump Tower. 1991
• Trump dodged the draft 5 times by having a doctor diagnose him with bone spurs.
• No Trump in America has ever served in the military; this spans 5 generations, and every branch of the family tree. In fact, the reason his grandfather immigrated to America was to avoid military service
Nazi’s Caught Dressing As BLM Protestors To Instigate Riots
https://bipartisanreport.com/2020/07/27/nazis-caught-dressing-as-blm-protestors-to-instigate-riots/
White supremacists pose as Antifa online and instigate violence
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/george-floyd-protests-antifa-twitter-white-supremacists-far-right-racist-a9544276.html
Gov Walz: Organized Groups Now Using Protests to ‘Break the Back of Civil Society’
Gov Walz: Organized Groups Now Using Protests to ‘Break the Back of Civil Society’
Police: Richmond riots instigated by white supremacists disguised as Black Lives Matter
https: //www.wsls.com/news/virginia/2020/07/27/police-richmond-riots-instigated-by-white-supremacists-disguised-as-black-lives-matter/
Mystery ‘Umbrella Man’ Vandal From Minnesota: Police Say He’s A White Supremacist Instigator
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/07/28/mystery-umbrella-man-vandal-from-minnesota-police-say-hes-a-white-supremacist-instigator/#1b39787f48ee
Trump’s words show that yes, he has encouraged violence
https://www.ajc.com/news/national-govt–politics/trump-words-show-that-yes-has-encouraged-violence/7sIekwrBayVArwRRmZf6HI/
‘No Blame?’ ABC News finds 54 cases invoking ‘Trump’ in connection with violence, threats, alleged assaults.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blame-abc-news-finds-17-cases-invoking-trump/story?id=58912889
Were white supremacists following Trump’s advice about dealing with protesters?
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-told-white-supremacists-attack-protesters-so-they-did-65062