May 17, 2018
The last twenty four hours have seen a flurry of developments relating to the Russian investigation and concurrent Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit, none of it good for Trump. In rapid succession, we learned that the Suspicious Activity Report (“SAR”) relating to Michael Cohen’s bank account was one of three and that an anonymous official had leaked it because the other two SARs were missing from the FinCEN database.
Trump then filed a financial disclosure form that confirmed what we already suspected, that he had reimbursed Michael Cohen for his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. The Office of Government Ethics reacted to that disclosure by sending a letter to the Justice Department asserting its view that the disclosure was “relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing regarding the president’s prior report that was signed on June 14, 2017 (Source: “Trump Discloses Cohen Payment, Raising Questions About Previous Omission,” by Steve Eder, Eric Lipton and Ben Protess, The New York Times, 5/16/18).As if that weren’t enough, North Korea threw the plans for the Kim Jong Un/Trump summit into disarray by suddenly threatening to cancel the talks if the United States insisted that North Korea dismantle its nuclear capabilities (Source: “North Korea expands threat to cancel Trump Kim summit, saying it won’t be pushed to abandon its nukes,” by Anna Fifield, The Washington Post, 5/16/18).
The speed with which news breaks relating to the Special Counsel investigation or Trump’s “reality show” diplomacy is enough to give one whiplash, but passively watching our national John Le Carre mini-series may blind us to darker and more ominous developments that we can actually do something about. Yesterday, at a White House roundtable on California’s sanctuary laws, Trump ranted that undocumented immigrants attempting to cross the border were “animals”. He excoriated the United States immigration laws as “the dumbest laws in the world.” This chilling rhetoric is disturbingly familiar. We have seen this playbook in Rwanda and Nazi Germany and we ignore it at our peril. We already know that DHS lost track of nearly 1500 migrant children seized from their parents at the border. In the last week, we learned that not only that it would be the official policy of the United States to separate children from parents at the border, but that the U.S. government plans to imprison children on military bases. There is no room for equivocation. This is what laying the groundwork for genocide looks like. We should know that the more cornered Trump becomes, the more he will default to inciting hatred, which he sees as his path to retaining power.For evidence that Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric is having the desired effect, we need only look at the incident that occurred here in a New York City fast casual restaurant. Manhattan lawyer, Aaron Schlossberg, was caught on video berating a worker and customers for speaking Spanish (Source:”Disgusted Officials File Complaint Against Man in Anti-Immigrant Rant,” by Liz Robbins, The New York Times, 5/17/18). Although it was jarring to see someone objecting to Spanish in cosmopolitan New York City, the repercussions were swift, from bombarding Yelp with negative reviews to kicking him out of his office. We will all need to be vigilant to stop the contagion. We must aggressively rebuke dehumanization wherever it rears its ugly head. Timothy Snyder, in his essential book, “On Tyranny,” said it best: “The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others….”
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