Raw Story: ‘He has some issue’: Trump biographer reveals depths of the president’s racism

The first time Donald Trump appeared in the New York Times, back in 1973, was an article on a Department of Justice lawsuit accusing him and his father of anti-Black bias, and one of his biographers says he’s seen the president’s racism up close.

The president has appeared in the pages of his hometown paper thousands of times since then, including numerous articles accusing him of being racist – such as one from February titled, “As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces” – and author Michael Wolff provided some new insight on that bigotry to The Daily Beast Podcast.

“Clearly, he has some issue with Black people,” Wolff told the podcast on Thursday. “The world is a better place to him without Black people, or without having to be aware of Black people, without Black people somehow in what he considers a zero sum game with white people.”

The president made his entrance into national politics with racist “birther” conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and has for decades maintained the mostly Black teenagers known as the “Central Park Five” were responsible for the rape of a white woman in 1989, although all five were exonerated in 2002, and slurred Latin American immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists” and referred to Haiti and African nations as “s—hole countries,” according to reports.

“Trump certainly regards Black people as profoundly different from white people,” Wolff said. “I mean the word racist now becomes in the Trump world a kind of high praise, because it’s meant to suggest the liberal overreach and the liberals call anybody racist.”

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-racist-2672229097

Raw Story: Furious judge mulls criminal contempt as Trump admin found to have blatantly ignored order

A federal judge found the Trump administration violated his order from last month blocking officials from deporting foreign nationals to countries that aren’t their own without giving them a chance to challenge their removal.

Boston-based federal judge Brian E. Murphy strongly rebuked the administration Wednesday when he ruled on an emergency motion filed by men who may have been deported to South Sudan, a violence-plagued nation they had never visited. It’s not clear whether the court will impose any punishment on Donald Trump’s officials, reported the New York Times.

“The department’s actions in this case are unquestionably violative of this court’s order,” Murphy said.

Homeland security officials told the judge that eight migrants had been deported Tuesday on a flight to a third country but refused to say where they were sent, and Murphy noted the government had given them less than 24 hours notice that they were being removed, which the judge said was “plainly insufficient.”

Two sources told the Times the flight carrying the men – who DHS said are were citizens of Burma, Cuba, Laos, Mexico, South Sudan and Vietnam – had landed in east African nation of Djibouti and that U.S. military personnel were standing by to assist in their detention, if necessary.

https://www.rawstory.com/south-sudan-trump

Raw Story: Trump’s henchmen are driving him to Supreme Court clash that he doesn’t care about: expert

President Donald Trump seems likely to stage a major showdown with the U.S. Supreme Court that a legal expert believes is an intentional effort to gather up authoritarian powers.

The president has been attacking judges who rule against him in legal challenges to his executive orders, and Stanford Law School’s Matthew Seligman told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that Vice President JD [“Dunce”] Vance and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen [“Goebbels”] Miller were even more eager than Trump to break the courts.

“This implicates an important distinction between Trump as an optical authoritarian versus [“Dunce”] Vance and [“Goebbels”] Miller as substantive authoritarians,” Seligman said. “Trump wants the trappings of authoritarianism. He wants everybody to talk about how he’s the most powerful person, and he wants it to look like he’s in charge.”

He wants the big parade,” …

But:

The vice president and Trump’s deputy chief of staff want to break the court’s opposition to Trump so the president carry out the “pure will of the people,” meaning the MAGA base, without bureaucratic obstacles, as Sargent put it.

“[“Goebbels”] Miller and [“Dunce”] Vance, I think, are much more committed to substantive authoritarianism,” Seligman agreed. “They actually want to exercise the power. They actually want to degrade the rule of law because they actually want to impose this particular vision — very dark vision — of America’s future on the country. 

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-supreme-court-2672130148

Raw Story: ‘Trump humiliates Musk’: President mocks richest man in meandering graduation speech

President Donald Trump took a shot at his billionaire benefactor Elon Musk during a commencement address at the University of Alabama.

The president spoke Thursday night to graduating students, where he aired grievances about the 2020 election, offered advice – “think of yourself as a winner,” “be an original” and “never, ever give up” – and jabbed “internet people” like Musk and other tech mogulsreported The Daily Beast, which framed it as “Trump humiliates Musk.”

“They all hated me in my first term,” the president told students and their families, “and now they’re kissing my a–.”

“It’s true,” he added. “It’s amazing. It’s nicer this way now.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-humiliates-musk-president-mocks-richest-man-in-meandering-graduation-speech/ar-AA1E2I3Z

Original Daily Beast story here:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-takes-a-surprise-dig-at-elon-musk-after-tesla-ceos-white-house-exit

Raw Story: ‘What the hell?’ Protester’s lawyer grilled by feds as he flies home from spring break

A Michigan lawyer who’s representing a pro-Palestinian demonstrator arrested at a campus protest says he was detained, interrogated and ordered to hand over his phone for inspection after returning from a spring break trip to the Dominican Republic with his family.

Dearborn attorney Amir Makled, whose client Samantha Lewis was among seven arrested last year following a protest at the University of Michigan, was grabbed after landing along with his wife and two daughters as they went through a passport screening. An agent notified the Tactical Terrorism Response Team after he was screened, reported the Detroit Free Press.

“I don’t know what triggered this,” Makled told the newspaper. “I don’t know if it’s a result of civil rights cases, or First Amendment issues involving student protesters. They wouldn’t tell me what it is.”

Two federal agents questioned the 38-year-old civil rights and criminal defense attorney for 90 minutes, and he agreed the law permitted them to briefly confiscate his phone, but he refused to let them have it because it contained privileged information regarding his clients. Ultimately he allowed them to view his contact list.

“I’m an American citizen, I’m not worried about being deported,” Makled said, recalling what he thought in the interrogation room. “So, I tell them, ‘I know you can take my phone. I’m not going to give you my phone, however … 90 percent of my work is on my phone. You’re not getting unfettered access to (it).’ “

“This current administration is doing something that no administration has done — they are attacking attorneys,” Makled said. “This is a different type of threat to the rule of law that I see. They are now challenging the judiciary, or lawyers, they’re putting pressure (on them) to dissuade attorneys from taking on issues that are against the government’s issues. We have an obligation as lawyers to stand up to this stuff.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/what-the-hell-protester-s-lawyer-grilled-by-feds-as-he-flies-home-from-spring-break/ar-AA1CwhPw

Raw Story: ‘Worst of the lot’: Veteran columnist heaps scorn on ‘revolting’ Marco Rubio

“I think he’s the worst of the lot,” Rubin said of Rubio. “The rest of them are so stupid and so ignorant that they really don’t get it; they’re just playing a game or they’re following Trump or they’re trying to be with the cool kids. Rubio knows better. First of all, he was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. If anyone should know about preserving security, it’s he — and he was on that same Signal chain.”

“He also has spent his entire life fighting communism, fighting oppression, fighting Cuba,” she said. “You know what they do in Cuba? They disappear people and they throw them into a hellhole of a jail. He has become the very thing that he has spent his entire career railing against. He used to be a great defender of Ukraine; now he’s instrumental in turning it over to Russia. So the glaring hypocrisy, the soullessness, the willingness to sell down the river all of the dissidents, all of the freedoms, all of the besieged countries that he once defended is really beyond the pale.”

‘Worst of the lot’: Veteran columnist heaps scorn on ‘revolting’ Marco Rubio