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belated 11/16

bak 1019

see radio and satellite

9/20 aha congrats neg, amplify and polarizing --> trump  see fascism auth 4

{{

ggl 4 25 2016 election

Sean Hannity}:

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Sean_Hannity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Hannity)

Sean Patrick Hannity (born December 30, 1961) is an American conservative television presenter, broadcaster and writer. He hosts The Sean Hannity Show, ...

The Sean Hannity Show · ‎Hannity & Colmes · ‎Ainsley Earhardt · ‎Alan Colmes

[### Sean Hannity: I'm not Donald Trump's foil

Politico

https://www.politico.com › story › 2016/04 › sean-han...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/sean-hannity-donald-trump-221923)

Apr 13, 2016 — Sean Hannity wants to make one thing clear: He's not propping up Donald Trump. The conservative media host shot down a recent ThinkProgress story.

[### Hannity apparently asked what to say on Election Day. ...

The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2022/04/25](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/25/hannity-apparently-asked-what-say-election-day-then-he-said-it/)

Apr 25, 2022 — ... Fox News host Sean Hannity on the day of the 2020 election. ... Hannity had endorsed Trump before the 2016 election, an odd act for ...

[### Has Sean Hannity's Trump support crossed the line?

The Christian Science Monitor

https://www.csmonitor.com › USA › Politics › 2016](https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/0921/Has-Sean-Hannity-s-Trump-support-crossed-the-line)

Sep 23, 2016 — Conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has been a vocal supporter of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, but critics, ...

[### Sean Hannity cites misleading Obama quote in coverage ...

PolitiFact

https://www.politifact.com › factchecks › jul › sean-han...](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/jul/17/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-cites-misleading-obama-quote-coverage/)

Claim: "In 2016, when Hillary Clinton appeared to have a firm lead in the polls — oh, just before the election, it was President Obama who laughed off any notion...

Claimed by: Sean Hannity

Fact check by PolitiFact: Mostly False

[### Hannity: I'm voting for Trump

Politico

https://www.politico.com › story › 2016/06 › sean-han...](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/sean-hannity-supports-trump-223763)

Jun 1, 2016 — Donald Trump on Tuesday sat down for an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, who made his support of Trump explicit.

[### US election 2016 daily briefing: Fox News stars in feud ...

BBC

https://www.bbc.com › election-us-2016-37570387](https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37570387)

Oct 6, 2016 — Two of the conservative news channel's biggest stars have turned their sharp tongues on one another after Sean Hannity accused Megyn Kelly of being in league ...

[### Trump and Sean Hannity Promote Ukraine-Clinton Theory

Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com › donald-trump-sean-hanni...](https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-sean-hannity-theory-ukraine-colluded-hillary-clinton-1376867)

Mar 27, 2019 — How Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Are Promoting Theory Ukraine Interfered in 2016 Election to Help Hillary Clinton. Published Mar 27, 2019 at ...

[### Sean Hannity campaigns on stage at Trump's Missouri rally ...

CNN

https://www.cnn.com › 2018/11/06 › media › trump-ral...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/06/media/trump-rally-missouri-hannity/index.html)

Nov 6, 2018 — Sean Hannity defied his own words on Monday, appearing on stage at President Donald Trump's final election rally after having said he ...

[### How Sean Hannity Became Influential In Conservative ...

Texas Public Radio | TPR

https://www.tpr.org › 2016-12-19 › how-sean-hannity-...](https://www.tpr.org/2016-12-19/how-sean-hannity-became-influential-in-conservative-media-and-politics)

Dec 19, 2016 — Sean Hannity, host of the Fox News show “Hannity” and a syndicated talk radio show, helped rally conservative support for Donald Trump.

How Sean Hannity Became Influential In Conservative Media And Politics

During the presidential campaign, Sean Hannity, host of the Fox News show “Hannity” and a syndicated talk radio show, helped rally conservative support for Donald Trump. That trend will most likely continue throughout the Trump presidency.

But how did Hannity become so influential in conservative media and Republican politics? Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson speaks with Brian Rosenwald ( @brianros1), a media historian and fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who is writing a book about the rise of talk radio and its influence on public policy.

Interview Highlights

On Hannity’s talk radio background

“One thing that people sometimes forget in the political world is, TV might be sexier, but radio can often reach more listeners, and the audiences are intensely loyal. And Sean Hannity, his background is radio. Before he was doing TV, he was doing radio in Huntsville, Alabama, in Atlanta, Georgia, and a lot of these guys who do both will tell you they like radio more, they reach more people, they have more time, they like the medium better.

:{:{“He started out, he actually flopped on a college radio station in Santa Barbara, that was way to the left, where he went out there after he dropped out of college, and he admittedly says, ‘Look, I was terrible.’ And then he ended up starting his rise in Huntsville, Alabama, and he migrated to Atlanta, and he was doing morning drive on a talk station down there, and then he did some TV work, and Roger Ailes discovered him. And he comes to New York to do ‘Hannity & Colmes,’ and joins the powerhouse station on WABC.}:

And he’s there for a few years, and they decide in 2001… they’re looking for syndicated stars, especially conservative ones. ABC Radio decided to syndicate Hannity, and they have him set up to go in a bunch of major markets, and he has the, sort of, fortune to have his national debut be Sept. 10, 2001. And obviously the next day, sort of changes the face of the country, and the ratings for talk radio across the board skyrocket — people want to talk about it, they want to hear what other people are saying, it becomes kind of a virtual community, and people who had never heard Sean Hannity start to hear him, they like what they’re hearing, and he sort of goes from there to become the No. 2 guy in talk radio.”}:

Array

On Hannity’s relationship with his radio listeners

“I’ve heard callers say, ‘Thank God you’re out there Sean, we have a voice now.’ There are some people who spend more time with their favorite talk radio host than they do with their spouses. People who were driving a truck all day, or out on a tractor, or doing some other job where they can listen three hours a day, five days a week, 48, 50 weeks a year, to the same person, they feel like they get to know that person, and that person reflects their views. And then in a lot of cases, for conservatives, that person punches back at people who they feel like are maligning them and scorning them and mistreating them.”

On Hannity’s impact on the 2016 presidential election

“I think that, in the primary election, had people like Sean Hannity really been hardcore against Donald Trump, from day one — we’re going back to 2015 here — they might have been able to knock him off in the primary. In terms of a general election, people were bombarded on all sides with information, and usually, I don’t think talk radio has a huge influence in presidential general elections for that reason, but in this case, insomuch as the key to the election, or one of the keys, was getting conservatives who had misgivings about either Trump’s morals or his qualifications, or some of what he said, or some of the policies he supported, to go out and vote for him.

“I think talk radio’s kind of drumbeat of, ‘Hillary is worse,’ and attacking her and keeping her emails front and center from day one for a year and a half, that helped drive those conservatives with misgivings back onto the reservation, and this is what Hannity and other talk radio hosts do at election time, which is, they frame tings in such a way, and they keep their audience kind of understanding the stakes, and why Republicans — whatever misgivings you might have — Republicans are still the best way to go.”

2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

---}}

david n

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-fascism-ascends-2020-election-may-be-the-crisis-of-democracy-that-opens-the-door-to-a-coup/

...trump] refused to say that he would make a peaceful transition, and threatened to “get rid of the ballots”—loses the popular vote on Nov. 3 to Joe Biden, as polls currently indicate, he appears poised to dismiss millions of mail-in votes. He would likely do this through the courts that he has assiduously packed over the past three years, particularly via the Supreme Court seat he and his fellow Republicans are intent on seizing just prior to the vote. The legitimacy of both our system of elections and the foundational courts that embody the rule of law will have been not just undermined, but potentially destroyed.

Fascism, historians tell us, has only ever arisen in mature democratic states, and the main condition that permits it to seize power is a crisis of legitimacy for its major democratic institutions. The election of 2020 may well bring the crisis that does the trick for America.

Many observers—notably including authors Jason Stanley and Jared Yates Sexton—have remarked that the nation’s path under a Trump presidency has much more than a passing resemblance to the descent into fascism that has befallen other societies, the best-known examples being prewar Germany and Italy. The correlations are powerful:

Some of have argued—myself included—that Trump is not a fascist ideologue in the classic mold, but rather a living model of a right-wing-populist demagogue. But fascism, properly understood, is itself a species of right-wing populism: one that has simply turned metastatic, a cancer raging out of control in the body politic. If, as it seems, he is nonetheless leading America into fascism, it would be a distinction without a significant difference.

But, as one Twitter wag adroitly observed recently: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.” Conservatives (see, for example, claims byFox News’ Tucker Carlson and right-wing punditCandace Owensthat the threat of white nationalism is a hoax concocted by Democrats) and centrists have unsurprisingly dismissed such observations as undue alarmism and hyperbolic exaggeration. But then, movement conservatism, as I explored in some depth more than 15 years ago, is in many regards the source of the problem, as it has been the all-too-hospitable host for the fascist cancer. Centrists and some liberals, meanwhile, seem so emotionally wedded to a belief that underneath our ongoing chaos all these things are still normalthat they’re incapable of comprehending that there is nothing remotely normal at all about them.

...

The primary impetus has been the change under which conservatism became a discrete movement intent on seizing the reins of power. In the process, the means—that is, the obtaining of power—became the end. And once the movement became centered around obtaining power, by any means necessary, then ideology became fungible according to the needs of its drive to acquire power, just as it was with fascism. This virtually guaranteed it would become a travesty of its original purpose. The nature of today’s “conservative movement” is no more apparent than in how distinctly un-conservative its actual conduct has been: busting budgets, falling asleep at the wheel of national security, engaging wars recklessly and without adequate planning.

Two things occurred to the conservative movement in this drive for power:

It increasingly viewed liberals not merely as competitors but as unacceptable partners in the liberal-conservative power-sharing agreement that has been in place since at least the New Deal and the rise of modern consumer society. Ultimately, this view metastacizes into seeing liberals as objects to be eliminated.

It became increasingly willing to countenance ideological and practical bridges with certain factions of the extremist right. This ranged from anti-abortion and religious-right extremists to the neo-Confederates who dominate Republican politics in the South to factions of the Patriot/militia movement.

The combination of these two forces exerted a powerful rightward pull on the movement, to the point where extremist ideas and agendas have increasingly been adopted by the mainstream right, flowing into an eliminationist hatred of liberalism. In the process, their own rhetoric has come to sound like that on the far right. A lot of the dabbling in far-right memes has been gratuitous, intended to “push the envelope” for talk-radioaudiences in constant need of fresh outrageousness. [AMPL]...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/american-rage-is-fueling-political-campaigns-and-tearing-us-apart/

as  the 2020 presidential election draws near, one thing is clear: America is an angry nation. From protests over persistent racial injustice to white nationalist-linked counterprotests, anger is on display across the country.

:{

}:

The national ire relates to inequality, the government’s coronavirus response, economic concerns, race and policing. It’s also due, in large part, to deliberate and strategic choices made by American politicians to stoke voter anger for their own electoral advantage.

Donald Trump’s attempts to enrage his base are so plentiful that progressive magazine The Nation called him a “merchant of anger.” Meanwhile, his opponent, Joe Biden, elicits anger toward the president, calling Trump a “toxic presence” who has “cloaked America in darkness."

anger-filled political rhetoric is nothing new. From Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon to Newt Gingrich, politicians have long known that angry voters are loyal voters. People will support their party’s candidates locally and nationally so long as they remain sufficiently outraged at the opposing party.

While inciting voter anger helps candidates win elections, research from my book, “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics,” shows that the effects of anger outlast elections. And that can have serious consequences for American democracy’s long-term health.

Trust in government

Political anger lowers citizens’ trust in the national government, causing people to view it with hostility, skepticism and outright contempt. Due to the increasingly national focus of politics, that anger is often directed squarely at the federal government, not state or local officials.

That creates a governance problem. As previous scholars have demonstrated, trust facilitates bipartisan lawmaking and support for social welfare programs that seek to make society more equitable, among other policies.

Americans’ trust in government has been declining for six decades.

Scholars have argued that party affiliation determines trust in government. When one’s preferred party controls government, that trust is high; when the opposing party has power, it’s low.

While partisanship does affect people’s trust in various political institutions, it cannot explain why overall faith in the U.S. government has been dropping for decades. After all, party control of Washington switches frequently.

My research finds sustained anger is a more likely suspect for Americans’ diminished trust in government.

Though American political anger has many sources, it was Ronald Reagan’s 1981 assertion that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” that really began to solidify Republicans’ anger at the federal government.

This statement, rooted in the conservative preference for individualism and free markets over government intervention, crystallized latent Republican anger with what many considered to be an activist federal government. That anger is in full bloom today.

Anger with the government is not simply a conservative phenomenon. Liberals are mad, too – usually because they believe the government is not doing enough to address racial and social inequalities. That anger, too, is in full bloom today.

Angry people tend to negatively judge the source of their anger. So when politicians continually label each other with crude epithets and infuriate people by taking – or not taking – certain actions, the public responds by lowering their evaluations of Washington.

Eventually, they question what government is even capable of.

Health of American democracy

Anger causes Americans to adopt attitudes that run contrary to the democratic ideals of the nation, my research shows.

It makes Americans see supporters of the opposing political party as less intelligent than themselves. Arguably more harmful for democracy, anger also makes people see supporters of the opposing political party as a threat to the country’s well-being.

These findings help explain why both Democrats and Republicans tend to hold a dim view of each other. Recent polling data finds that nearly two-thirds of Republicans see Democrats as “closed-minded,” while approximately half of Democrats see Republicans as “immoral.” In 2016 only half of Republicans and a third of Democrats held these views. Partisan antipathy is rising.

Angry people generally want to blame somebody – or some group – for their problems, whether they are the real or perceived cause. Political campaigns, logically, work to elicit anger at the opposing party. This means that their supporters are quick to blame those who disagree with them for the country’s shortcomings.

Consequently, voter anger causes politics to move beyond a competition of ideas and philosophies and into a zero-sum game in which each side’s gain is the other’s loss. That weakens people’s commitment to the democratic norms and values that have long been the linchpin of the U.S. political system, such as tolerance and a respect for minority opinions.

In 2018 the Pew Research Center found that 40% of Americans believed democracy was working “not too well” or “not at all well.” This year 62% of Americans surveyed by Pew agreed that the structure of the U.S. government needs “significant changes.”

Democracy may not disappear because candidates keep stoking Americans’ ire at each other and at the political system. My work finds that discontented Americans don’t want an entirely different form of government, despite global concerns that the U.S. is “backsliding” toward authoritarianism.

But anger is corrosive. It diminishes the quality of American democracy well after the politicians who used anger as a campaign strategy have won and left office.

Steven Webster, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Indiana University

320 aha lt gov dan patrick sportscaster career revived by talk radio one of the 1st to sign up rush; do we need a tag? poster?

it's the petri dish of the fever swamp ? [freepers?] the bottom of the escalator, unheard in flyover country? an older tech that older ppl use/trust?  on some rural hiway the only signal?

AHA: TALK RADIO + POL-OP + TWITTER = DJT

trump trolls soc med  TV etc for odd story, repkg retweet amplify, seeking retweets, constant instant feedback via crude stats

TWITTER is reductionistic, it's "killer app" attraction is 140 character, why?

==

https://theintercept.com/**2015/12**/09/donald-trumps-anti-muslim-rhetoric-amplified-on-local-talk-radio/

lee f

Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigrants is being amplified by media programs millions of Americans listen to every day: talk radio.

“My only problem with Trump’s comments is that they don’t go far enough,” Dale Jackson of 1070WAPI said during his morning talk radio program in Birmingham and Huntsville on Tuesday. Jackson called for an end to all immigration. “We are not the world’s garbage can.”

Nick Reed, a talk radio host with Missouri’s KSGF, spent much of his morning program Tuesday praising Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigration. “What is there not to like about Donald Trump’s plan?” he asked.

As Buzzfeed reported Tuesday, the biggest names in talk radio — Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin — “showed different levels of sympathy for Trump’s idea.”

Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, the anti-Muslim advocacy group that sponsored the poll Trump cited in his announcement on Monday, has been taking a victory lap.

“Everything you’ve been saying has come true, and now with Trump, do you think it’s time to have a frank and full conversation about what this issue is?” Breitbart News’ Stephen Bannon asked Gaffney on SiriusXM. Gaffney replied that he hoped the country would focus on discussing “sharia,” which he described as “a toxic ideology that seeks the destruction of this country and everything it stands for.”

Gaffney warned that Muslims abroad and Muslims here at home share dangerous beliefs in Islamic law, and expressed pleasure that discourse has shifted toward a greater focus on this alleged threat. “I hope Donald Trump is going to be able to catalyze that,” he said.

On his own Secure Freedom Radio program, which airs in the Washington, D.C. area, Gaffney hosted former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist Andy McCarthy, who argued that a ban on Muslim immigration does not violate the Constitution. McCarthy said that Islam is an “ideological system,” not a religion “as the Framers were conceiving religion when they put religious freedom in the Constitution.”

Indiana News/Talk 95.3 host Casey Hendrickson discussed Trump’s idea with mostly supportive callers. He also tried to rationalize the plan. “Well, I think because we’re dealing with a unique situation. We’re dealing with radical Islamists who are coming over in the name of their religion,” Hendrickson said.

Inside Radio, a trade publication, notes that Trump has been “cozying up to conservative talk radio.” He sometimes calls in unexpectedly, and spent $300,000 advertising on talk radio in early primary states, his only advertising buy of the election so far.

==

==

https://theintercept.com/**2015/12**/09/donald-trumps-anti-muslim-rhetoric-amplified-on-local-talk-radio/

lee f

Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigrants is being amplified by media programs millions of Americans listen to every day: talk radio.

“My only problem with Trump’s comments is that they don’t go far enough,” Dale Jackson of 1070WAPI said during his morning talk radio program in Birmingham and Huntsville on Tuesday. Jackson called for an end to all immigration. “We are not the world’s garbage can.”

Nick Reed, a talk radio host with Missouri’s KSGF, spent much of his morning program Tuesday praising Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigration. “What is there not to like about Donald Trump’s plan?” he asked.

As Buzzfeed reported Tuesday, the biggest names in talk radio — Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin — “showed different levels of sympathy for Trump’s idea.”

Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, the anti-Muslim advocacy group that sponsored the poll Trump cited in his announcement on Monday, has been taking a victory lap.

“Everything you’ve been saying has come true, and now with Trump, do you think it’s time to have a frank and full conversation about what this issue is?” Breitbart News’ Stephen Bannon asked Gaffney on SiriusXM. Gaffney replied that he hoped the country would focus on discussing “sharia,” which he described as “a toxic ideology that seeks the destruction of this country and everything it stands for.”

Gaffney warned that Muslims abroad and Muslims here at home share dangerous beliefs in Islamic law, and expressed pleasure that discourse has shifted toward a greater focus on this alleged threat. “I hope Donald Trump is going to be able to catalyze that,” he said.

On his own Secure Freedom Radio program, which airs in the Washington, D.C. area, Gaffney hosted former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist Andy McCarthy, who argued that a ban on Muslim immigration does not violate the Constitution. McCarthy said that Islam is an “ideological system,” not a religion “as the Framers were conceiving religion when they put religious freedom in the Constitution.”

Indiana News/Talk 95.3 host Casey Hendrickson discussed Trump’s idea with mostly supportive callers. He also tried to rationalize the plan. “Well, I think because we’re dealing with a unique situation. We’re dealing with radical Islamists who are coming over in the name of their religion,” Hendrickson said.

Inside Radio, a trade publication, notes that Trump has been “cozying up to conservative talk radio.” He sometimes calls in unexpectedly, and spent $300,000 advertising on talk radio in early primary states, his only advertising buy of the election so far.

==

==

mma

Sinclair personalities push anti-impeachment propaganda

10/04/19 11:20 AM EDT

Right-wing media label impeachment inquiry a “coup” driven by Democrats

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trumps-false-and-dangerous-coup-claim-comes-fox-news-and-conservative-talk-radio

==

:{Mainstream media uncritically quote Trump’s false “coup” label for impeachment inquiry:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

==

mma 1019

Over the past week, Fox News and conservative talk radio have relentlessly characterized the House of Representatives’ formal impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump as a “coup d’etat” by Democrats “to try and take our votes away from us.”

Right-wing talk radio hosts have claimed Trump “is not going down without a fight” and questioned “how much longer are we going to endure” the House investigations.

In an October 1 tweet, Trump repeated the dangerous and false rhetoric that the constitutionally protected inquiry “is a COUP” to “take away the Power of the … People.”

Click for more on how this rhetoric made its way to the White House. video compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkv9_B6Gk04&feature=youtu.be

==

big booster islamophobe

zach b vox:

...All of this, combined with Trump’s much more overt anti-Islam rhetoric, has helped turn the Muslim religion into a partisan issue:

Right-wing media, recognizing the appeal of the counter-jihadist message among their audience, has embraced this extreme anti-Islam narrative the counter-jihadists are peddling. A study published by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center found that guests with extreme anti-Muslim views made up 11 percent of all guests on prominent conservative talk radio during a period they studied in 2010. Two prominent counter-jihadists appeared on Fox News 15 times between September 2015 and February 2016, according to a count by Media Matters. Prominent televangelists spread the anti-Islam gospel to yet another group of reliable conservatives. Pat Robertson, the host of the widely broadcast 700 Club, once said on air that “Islam is a political system that is bent on world domination.”

All of this is supplemented by a vast grassroots network, centering on a group called ACT for America. Billing itself as the “the NRA of National Security,” it claims to have a membership of 500,000 nationwide, clustered in 1,000 chapters around the country.

Its president, Brigitte Gabriel, is the author of one of those mid-2000s counter-jihadist bestsellers (Because They Hate). A Lebanese Christian immigrant who calls herself “one of the leading terrorism experts in the world,” Gabriel has no formal background in terrorism, either through working in government or academia. According to her book, the highest level of education she received was a one-year course in business administration at a YWCA. Her claim to authority stems, allegedly, from experiences of persecution at the hands of Muslims during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s — a historically dubious story that Lebanese-American journalist Michael Young once labeled a “con act.”

In a speech inMay 2016 at the Oasis Church in Middletown, Ohio, Gabriel delivered an accessible and entertaining speech on the counter-jihadist view of Islam. In her telling, the history of Islam is a history of bloodshed.Between Islam’s founding in the seventh century and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, she says, “Islam was responsible for 270 million people across the globe — killed by the sword.”

This violence was not accidental, Gabriel told the rapt crowd. It was the core of Islam itself.

Gabriel believes that for 12 years, Mohammed attempted to peacefully proselytize — and failed, miserably. Only when he turned to violence, to conversion at the point of the sword, did he begin to win success.

“Islam went from being strictly a spiritual movement, after 12 years, to becoming a political movement cloaked in religion,” she says. “Jihad is mentioned in the Quran 40 times — 36 times out of 40 as a holy war against the infidels, to either kill them or subjugate them.”

These are all historically inaccurate claims. Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the New America Foundation, writes that they “play loose and fast with very different eras, places and peoples,” in order to put together a narrative of a uniformly aggressive Islam. Yet Gabriel’s group has been profoundly influential.

[twt mar  lago sec breifing look who i ran into djt]

Her activists have worked tirelessly to pass legislation, based on a template constructed by Gaffney and CSP in-house counsel David Yerushalmi, that would ban state courts from considering sharia a valid source of law.By 2016, they had succeeded in nine states: Alabama, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, South Dakota, Arizona, and Tennessee.

“No court, administrative agency, or other governmental agency may enforce any provisions of any religious code,” the South Dakota version reads, neutral language obscuring the clear intent.

More alarmingly, the ideas pushed by Gabriel and CSP have been embraced by the most important members of the Trump White House.

“Most people in the Middle East, or at least 50 percent, believe in being sharia-compliant,”Bannon said on theBreitbart Daily News radio show in 2015. “Sharia-compliant” is an innocuous phrase commonly used by Muslims to denote that something is in line with Islamic law: For instance, you can find sharia-compliant home mortgage companies in the US that cater primarily (but not exclusively) to Muslims, because Islamic law forbids Muslims from collecting or paying interest on loans.

The Team B II report’s authors sees things like sharia-compliant financial institutions as an insidious threat to the US Constitution (they never really explain how a home mortgage company that doesn’t charge interest threatens the Constitution).

It’s not just Bannon.But the Team B II report also frequently uses the term “sharia-compliant” to describe not institutions or practices, but people: specifically, Muslims with dangerous, anti-American beliefs, anti-constitutional beliefs. And this is exactly the way Bannon is using the term. “If you're sharia-compliant or want to impose sharia law, the United States is the wrong place for you,” Bannon proclaimed.

In his 2016 book*The Field of Fight*, Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, wrote that Islamic scholars are attempting to trick the West to obscure the true nature of sharia.

“These so-called Islamic scholars keep their message so complicated so as to create chaos, to confuse in order to control,” Flynn writes. “Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mussolini were more transparent. Sharia is a violent law that is buried in barbaric convictions.”

Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, said more or less the same thing — in an official Senate press release. “Once again we face a totalitarian threat to the free world. This time it’s from ideological and apocalyptic Islam,” Sessions said.

“Theologically-based sharia law,” Sessions argued, “fundamentally conflicts with our magnificent constitutional order that separates church and state, and that considers free debate and dissent the way to a better world.”

That these individuals all espouse the same weirdly specific interpretation of sharia is not a coincidence. Each one of them is deeply connected to the counter-jihadist world.

Bannon hosted counter-jihadists on his Breitbart radio show 41 times,according to a count by Mother Jones’s Josh Harkinson. Flynn is an adviser to the board of Gabriel’s ACT for America, and local ACT chapters organized many of the stops on the speaking tour for Flynn’s book. In 2015, Sessions received CSP’sKeeper of the Flame award, in honor of “his leadership on issues of great importance to the national security.”

...

==

gorka demoted from fox tv to radio?

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/432450-gorka-fox-part-ways

hmmn

gorka...parted ways with Fox News and has joined Sinclair Broadcasting.

Gorka, who joined Fox News as a national security strategist in November 2017 following a seven-month stint in President Trump's White House, will serve as a national contributor at Sinclair.

"I'm very excited to be one of Sinclair's national contributors," Gorka told the Hill by email. "Fox News and Fox Business Network have both been very good to be before I joined the Trump Administration and after I left the White House.

"I am especially grateful to Sean Hannity," he continues. "My new nationally syndicated radio show with Salem Radio and position with Sinclairwill allow me to go deeper on the key issues of the Trump era."

The 48-year-old British, Hungarian and U.S. citizen told The Hill that his Fox News contract had expired. A Fox News spokesperson confirmed the exit and said the the parting of ways was mutual.

Gorka launched his syndicated talk radio show, "America First," in November.

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Scheuer

:{

}:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/kill-them-all-right-wing-extremists-violent-rhetoric-features-trump-endorsed-radio

:{

}:

Suppose there were a best-selling author, historian, essayist, public speaker, TV commentator, adviser to Ron Paul, secessionist advocate, Christian nationalist, Vladimir Putin apologist and expert on terrorism who was married to a senior intelligence official. Suppose he were a frequent commentator on an influential radio show with close ties to President Donald Trump, his family and his administration.

Suppose this Trump-connected radio show routinely directed its listeners to this person’s blog, on which he wrote that it was “quite near time” for “well-armed citizens who voted for Trump” to “kill those seeking to impose tyranny,” of whom there was a “long and very precise list” that included journalists, activists, pundits, abortion providers, Republican and Democratic elected officials, federal judges, law professors, FBI agents, intelligence officials and Justice Department officials, along with “all who support them.”

There is such a man, and such a show, on which he has declared that former President Barack Obama “deserves to be hung.” The broadcast promotes his blog (archived here), where for years, he has advocated the right of, and the approaching “necessity” for, “armed rebellion” by citizens seeking to “end the tyranny of their elected representatives,” and listed people cast as “tyrants” and “expendables” whom Trump voters should prepare to “eliminate” by stockpiling arms and ammunition.  Michael Frank Scheuer, 66, of McLean, Virginia, a former CIA intelligence official and the author of four books, is the man. And John Fredericks Radio is the influential, nationally syndicated talk radio show that provides Scheuer a platform as a regular commentator and occasional host. In many ways, the show is a favored voice of Team Trump, as evidenced by its preferential access to Trump family members and White House officials, its payments from the Trump campaign, and “testimonials” from the president and people close to him. So it would appear significant that Scheuer has appeared on the show with increasing frequency for the last four years, including more than 25 times since January 2017. Each time, the show promotes his blog, where his violent rhetoric has been escalating.

“He’s earned our trust and support”

John Fredericks, 60, whoco-chaired Trump’s 2016 Virginia campaign, is a commentator on CNN, which describes him as a member of Trump’s 2020 presidential advisory board. Although Fredericks has interviewed elected officials and candidates from both parties, Team Trump demonstrates its conspicuous support for the show in various ways. For example, with a nod from Ivanka Trump, Team Trump approved the Fredericks show as the “exclusive” media outlet allowed to broadcast live from the war room in Trump Tower on election night in 2016.

Recently, the White House included Fredericks at a press briefing. He live-tweeted a lament: “At WH presser with @PressSec All Russia. Again.” Then Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called on him for the final question. Fredericks said he was using the opportunity to change the topic” from the Russia investigation to Mexico. Sanders smiled and said, “Sure, I think that would be fine.” She has been a guest on his show.

Fredericks’ show has featured numerous exclusive interviews with Trump family members, White House officials and Trump campaign advisers. Donald Trump has been interviewed eight times, most recently in July 2016. Others have included Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, as well as Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway, Marc Short, Corey Lewandowski, Sean Spicer, Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, Larry Kudlow, Nikki Haley, Ben Carson, Tom Price, Tom Ridge, Sebastian Gorka and Carl Higbie (a Trump appointee who went on the show in May to defend his racist, sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ comments just after his resignation).

...

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Stone had also worked with Trump on his earlier aborted presidential runs in 2000 and 2012. By 2014, he'd been working with Trump for some time, preparing for what both men saw as his big chance. By then Stone had brought in a helper named Sam Nunberg to school the candidate on the issues the GOP base cared about. According to journalist Gabriel Sherman, Nunberg taught Trump a lot:

“I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.

Trump fired Nunberg that year for setting up an interview that didn't go well and then hired him back in 2015. He fired him again over some racist Facebook posts and later sued him for $10 million for violating a non-disclosure agreement. (That case was settled "amicably.") Nunberg is yet another example of the top-notch talent Trump always seems to attract.

On Monday, Nunberg had a meltdown on national TV

also politico

If you’re a regular listener of Glenn Beck’s radio show and you wanted to contribute to a political group that would advance the populist conservative ideals he touts on his show, you’d have plenty of reason to think that FreedomWorks was your best investment.

But if you’re a fan of Mark Levin’s radio show, you’d have just as much cause to believe that Americans for Prosperity, a FreedomWorks rival, was the most effective conservative advocacy group. And, if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity are who you listen to, you’d be hearing a steady stream of entreaties to support the important work of the Heritage Foundation.

“The point that people don’t realize,” said Michael Harrison, founder and publisher of the talk media trade publication TALKERS Magazine, “is that (big time political talk show hosts) are radio personalities – they are in the same business that people like Casey Kasem are in – and what they do is no different than people who broadcast from used car lots or restaurants or who endorse the local roofer or gardener.”That’s not coincidence. In search of donations and influence, the three prominent conservative groups are paying hefty sponsorship fees to the popular talk show hosts. Those fees buy them a variety of promotional tie-ins, as well as regular on-air plugs – praising or sometimes defending the groups, while urging listeners to donate – often woven seamlessly into programming in ways that do not seem like paid advertising.

The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s – and considers it money well spent.

“We approach it the way anyone approaches advertising: where is our audience that wants to buy what you sell?” Genevieve Wood, Heritage’s vice president for operations and marketing. “And their audiences obviously fit that model for us. They promote conservative ideas and that’s what we do.”

Last month, in the midst of a flurry of scrutiny of GOP presidential candidates’ stances on health insurance mandates similar to one included in the 2010 Democratic healthcare overhaul, Limbaugh took to the airwaves to defend Heritage’s past support for such a proposal.

“The Heritage Foundation to this day says they are being impugned and misrepresented in terms of their advocacy for such a thing,” Limbaugh said, explaining that the venerable think tank “abandoned the idea once they saw it implemented” and realized “it doesn’t work.”

Limbaugh, who has been a paid Heritage endorser since 2009, said the reversal did nothing to detract from the “profound … respect for Heritage. Heritage is the gold standard. Heritage was every bit as involved in Reaganism as Reagan was, and nothing’s changed.”

Levin, whose endorsement deal with the tea party organizing group Americans for Prosperity started last summer, was similarly protective of his sponsor last year after President Barack Obama singled out the group in making the case that anonymously funded attack ads were distorting the midterm elections.

“Americans for Prosperity is a magnificent organization that people join voluntarily. You. Me,” Levin saidon his syndicated radio show. Obama, Levin continued, “wants you to hate Americans for Prosperity. So if he wants you to hate it, then you should embrace it, and promote it, and support it and join it, because it’s effective.”

==

...Beck, lavishing praise on FreedomWorks’s new social network website this year, seemed to acknowledge the blurriness of the line between his show’s content and messages paid for by advertisers.

“This is a new thing from FreedomWorks and by the way, they are sponsor of this program and I have a commercial to do for them in, well, in just a few minutes. I don’t think they’re going to get one because this is pretty much it,” he said on his show, in a clip that’s posted on his personal website. “But it is something that I believe in, I’m not saying this because they’re paying me to do a commercial in a couple of minutes. This is something that I think is absolutely critical.”

To be sure, the hosts’ political perspectives dovetail with those of their endorsees and their paid sponsorships do not preclude them from discussing – or even praising – other groups.

And theintegration of sponsors and their causes into the content of conservative talkers’ shows is not unique to advocacy groups and think tanks, as Beck demonstrated in 2009 when he melded his frequent warnings of impending economic collapse with his promotion of gold, generally, and the precious metals retailer that sponsored his show, Goldline, specifically.

That prompted liberals – led by now-embattled Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner – to accuse Beck and, to a lesser extent, other conservative talk show hosts sponsored by gold retailers, of using misleading fear-mongering tactics “to cheat consumers.”

The increased willingness of non-profits to write big checks for such radio endorsements – which appears to have started in 2008, when Heritage paid $1.2 million to sponsor the talk shows hosted by Hannity and Laura Ingraham – seems to be a primarily, if not entirely, a conservative phenomenon.

That’s perhaps attributable to the enduring power of talk radio on the right, as well as a newer development, the explosion of grassroots engagement by tea partiers and other newly mobilized Republican activists, which has spurred a competition for grass roots support – and contributions - among conservative groups.

Heritage estimates that it in each of the past two years, its sponsorships with Limbaugh and Hannity brought in more than 40,000 new memberships starting at the $25 level, while FreedomWorks said that in the three months after its Beck sponsorship started in April 2010, the group saw a huge spike in traffic to its website (which featured a photo of Beck linked to a fundraising appeal), resulting in 50,000 new email sign-ups.

Americans for Prosperity wouldn’t divulge any details about its sponsorship of Levin, but board member Art Pope said the endorsement “makes AfP’s position on issues and policies more widely known and it also does attract grassroots activists or potential donors to AfP.”

The groups pay the companies that distribute the hosts’ shows, and not the hosts directly, for the endorsements.

While the deals differ, most provide the sponsoring group a certain number of messages or so called “live-reads,” in which the host will use a script, outline or set of talking points to deliver an advertisement touting the group and encouraging listeners to visit its website or contribute to it.

==

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck sell endorsements to ...

www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56997_Page2.html

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Missing: seed ‎sam ‎crime

Top radio talkers sell endorsements - POLITICO

https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/top-radio-talkers-sell-endorsements-056997

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1.

:{Jun 15, 2011 - From left: :{Glenn Beck:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Sean Hannity and Rush :{Limbaugh:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: are shown in this composite.:{Glenn Beck:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... In search of donations and influence, the three prominent conservative groups are paying hefty :{sponsorship:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: fees to the popular talk show hosts. Those fees ... Heritage is the :{gold:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:standard. Heritage was ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: seed ‎sam

Conservative Groups Paying Up for Talk Show Endorsements – Adweek

www.adweek.com/.../conservative-groups-paying-talk-show-endorsements-132573/

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1.

:{Jun 15, 2011 - For the past few years, conservative radio hosts like :{Glenn Beck:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Rush :{Limbaugh:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin have been preaching the messages of ... According to Politico, that's because these groups, whether listeners know it or not, are paying high :{sponsorship:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: fees to these programs for on-air plugs ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

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**Some local talk radio shows and fake news websites are pushing a new conspiracy theory from Infowars that the CIA hacked into a Hawaii state government database to forge former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.**One of the radio hosts pushing the conspiracy theory has previously been cited as an analyst on a local ABC affiliate.

On December 12, Jerome Corsi [phd?!]of theconspiracy theory outlet Infowars claimed that investigators for former Maricopa County, AZ, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, headed by his chief investigator Michael Zullo, had found “evidence that the CIA and or other government entities illegally hacked into Hawaii Department of Health records searching for” Obama’s records. (President Donald Trump pardoned Arpaio in August after he was charged with criminal contempt because of his treatment of undocumented immigrants.) Corsi, who has been a chief figure of the birther movement, added that the “evidence” “strongly suggests the CIA played a role in the forgery” of Obama’s birth certificate.

Some local talk radio stations have hyped Infowars’ report. New Orleans talk radio host Jeff Crouere -- a Townhall writer who has been featured as a “political analyst” on ABC’s New Orleans affiliate WGNO -- calledCorsi’s report a “bombshell” on his radio program (which is carried by a station affiliated with Louisiana Public Broadcasting) and said, “I’ve said from the beginning that birth certificate [Obama] released was a fraud.”

[vid]

Some stations have invited Corsi and Zullo as guests on different radio shows and allowed them to push the extremely dubious allegation. Corsi hyped his report on Weekend Wake Up with Chuck and Julie on Denver, CO, radio station KNUS, where Corsi said that the “CIA played a major role in, I believe, creating” Obama’s long-form birth certificate that was released in 2011. Corsi also promoted the conspiracy theory on The Peter Boyles Show, which also airs on KNUS. In response to Corsi’s “report,” Boyles said that Obama’s “social security number is fraudulent” (Boyles has previously allowed guests to push birtherism on his program). Zullo spoke about the article on the showYour Turnon Northwest Florida radio station WEBY, where the host called the report a “bombshell” that’s “shaking the Earth” and lauded Infowars.

Additionally, multiple fake news websites have lauded the report, with some of them also calling it a “bombshell” and claiming that it showed the CIA, “possibly with the help of other government agencies, forged Obama’s documentation.” Some of these fake news websites also used their verified Facebook pages to push the conspiracy theory. The Infowars report was also hyped on the pro-Trump subreddit “/r/The_Donald,” a conduit for conspiracy theories.

This is not the first time this year that an Infowars conspiracy theory citing Arpaio has reverberated in the right-wing echo chamber with the help of fake news websites. In March, the outlet, trying to back Trump’s false claimthat Obama illegally wiretapped Trump Tower, asserted that Arpaio had documents showing that Trump and his family had been surveilled by the National Security Agency (NSA) for years. That report subsequently spreadto other far-right outlets and fake news websites, along with The Drudge Report.

Alex Kaplan is a Research Coordinator at Media Matters.

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hannity

bs

http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/11/28/sean-hannity-people-dont-need-fake-news-shifting-breitbart-drudge-talk-radio/

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-trump-campaigns-latest-tactic-is-straight-from-the-conservative-echo-chamber/

NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, in an effort to regain momentum following the candidate’s poor performance in Monday night’s debate, has begun distributing talking points to surrogates encouraging them to talk about ‘90s era sex scandals.

Putting aside Donald Trump’s own philandering history, these new attacks demonstrate the GOP’s inability to pull themselves out of the right-wing echo chamber and have a broader conversation with voters.

In 2012, Mitt Romney fell victim to conservative insistence that the polls were skewed and that he was therefore all but certain to win the presidency. This belief was ultimately contradicted by voters, who it turned out did not need to be unskewed.  Now, Trump and his allies in the conservative media are doing something similar, pretending that unscientific online polls are the real authoritative sources on public opinion.

Trump’s campaign was born in the far-right media. His ascent to the top of the Republican Party was driven by birtherism and seeded in the deepest, dankest of fever swamps. Then in 2014, while he was preparing to run for president, it has been widely reported that Trump received daily memos outlining the issues and views raised by callers to conservative radio shows. Thus, harsh and often racist anti-immigrant rhetoric became a central tenet of his campaign.

From Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter to Michael Savage, many of the leading conservatives now supporting the Trump campaign built their careers on the impeachment of Bill Clinton and spent years attempting to use sex to toxify the president’s public image.

What seems to be forgotten by many in the media and the conservative movement is what a miserable failure their efforts were. Clinton was reelected in 1996 and Democrats gained seats in Congress that year and again in 1998. Republicans lost two House speakers, Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, and completely extinguished the flame of their 1994 “revolution” in pursuit of prurient details that would take down the president. And the cumulative effect of this entire period was the elevation of Bill Clinton’s approval ratings.

Despite this failure, two decades later conservatives are once against returning to this same old playbook, but with a new twist. Now they would like to blame Hillary Clinton for the alleged foibles of her husband and use them to convince the American people that she is not suited to hold public office.

Along with the obvious strategic shortcomings of this plan, there is an even more obvious dose of sexism behind these latest attacks—blaming a wife for the actions of her husband. Yet the Trump campaign presses forward, beginning the week with the too-cute-by-half notion that their candidate was courageous for not raising these issues during the debate.

The right-wing echo chamber has been demanding for months that these issues be discussed and Trump is happy to once again oblige, now through his surrogates in the media.

While the symbiotic relationship between Trump and the right-wing media is perhaps greater than with any other Republican candidate in history, it is not wholly unique. That’s why it’s no surprise that in the seven presidential elections since Rush Limbaugh’s radio program was syndicated nationally, the Republican candidate has only been able to win a plurality of the popular vote twice.

ref

Ari Rabin-Havt | April 26, 2016 5:03 pm

“Donald Trump is campaigning as a general election candidate at this point,” wrote Callum Borchers on the Washington Post’s Fix blog.

NBC News’ Lester Holt said, “Trump’s comments appear to signal a more moderate shift, and some are asking if it a sign of things to come,” after the Republican Presidential candidate appeared to oppose — albeit briefly — North Carolina’s new anti-LGBT law.

Expect to hear this meme repeated in the media following a foreign policy speech Trump is scheduled to deliver on Wednesday.

The concept of a general election pivot — that candidates can shed extreme and divisive statements and policies as they move from partisan primaries into the general election in order to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate — is at best an exaggerated phenomenon. In the case of Donald Trump, it is an impossibility.

Trump’s conservatism is not based on a set of policy positions that can be slightly modified or added to in order to make them more palatable. His campaign was born in the fringes of the conservative movement.

The American public’s memory might be short, but they will not forget that Trump’s presidential campaign is rooted in the birther movement and his doubts about the validity of President Obama’s birth certificate.

Trump launched his campaign with a racist attack on Mexican immigrants claiming they are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

He cannot moderate his proposal “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

And Trump cannot force the public to unremember the plethora of sexist statements he has made, from denigrating Carly Fiorina by stating, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” to his sexist attacks Megyn Kelly.

Trump’s controversial statements were not random or an accident. They were designed to curry favor with the far right. In early April Gabe Sherman reported in New York magazinethat the Trump campaign’s communications efforts began with a study of what appealed to the conservative radio audience.

Throughout 2014, the three fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence. “I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” [former Trump aide Sam] Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.

A campaign born from the talking points of conservative talk radio hosts can only pivot to the mainstream if the American people develop a collective case of amnesia. That is unlikely to happen in 2016.

==

gabe sherman ref

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/inside-the-donald-trump-presidential-campaign.html

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/inside-the-donald-trump-presidential-campaign.html

...

As early as 1987, Trump talked publicly about his desire to run for president. He toyed with mounting a campaign in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket, and again in 2012 as a Republican (this was at the height of his Obama birtherism). Two years later, Trump briefly explored running for governor of New York as a springboard to the White House. “I have much bigger plans in mind — stay tuned,” he tweeted in March 2014.

Trump taped another season of The Apprenticethat year, but he kept a political organization intact. His team at the time consisted of three advisers: Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Sam Nunberg. Stone is a veteran operative, known for his gleeful use of dirty tricks and for ending Eliot Spitzer’s political career by leaking his patronage of prostitutes to the FBI. Cohen is Trump’s longtime in-house attorney. AndNunberg is a lawyer wired into right-wing politics who has long looked up to “Mr. Trump,” as he calls him. “I first met him at Wrestle­Mania when I was like 5 years old,” Nunberg told me.

Throughout 2014, the three fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence.“I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.

Meanwhile, Trump used his wealth as a strategic tool to gather his own intelligence. When Citizens United president David Bossie or GOP chairman Reince Priebus called Trump for contributions, Trump used the conversations as opportunities to talk about 2016. “Reince called Trump thinking they were talking about donations, but Trump was asking him hard questions,” recalled Nunberg.From his conversations with Priebus, Trump learned that the 2016 field was likely to be crowded. “We knew it was going to be like a parliamentary election,” Nunberg said.

Which is how Trump’s scorched-earth strategy coalesced. To break out of the pack, he made what appears to be a deliberate decision to be provocative, even outrageous. “If I were totally presidential, I’d be one of the many people who are already out of the race,” Trump told me. And so, Trump openly stoked racial tensions and appealed to the latent misogyny of a base that thinks of Hillary as the world’s most horrible ballbuster.

It was also thanks to some information he had gathered that Trump was able to do something that no other Republican has done before: take on Fox News. An odd bit of coincidence had given him a card to play against Fox founder Roger Ailes. In 2014, I published a biography of Ailes, which upset the famously paranoid executive. Several months before it landed in stores, Ailes fired his longtime PR adviser Brian Lewis, accusing him of being a source. During Lewis’s severance negotiations, Lewis hired Judd Burstein, a powerhouse litigator, and claimed he had “bombs” that would destroy Ailes and Fox News. That’s when Trump got involved.

“When Roger was having problems, he didn’t call 97 people, he called me,” Trump said. Burstein, it turned out, had worked for Trump briefly in the ’90s, and Ailes asked Trump to mediate. Trump ran the negotiations out of his office at Trump Tower. “Roger had lawyers, very expensive lawyers, and they couldn’t do anything. I solved the problem.” Fox paid Lewis millions to go away quietly, and Trump, I’m told, learned everything Lewis had planned to leak. If Ailes ever truly went to war against Trump, Trump would have the arsenal to launch a retaliatory strike.

In January 2015, Trump hired Corey Lewandowski as campaign manager at the recommendation of Citizen United’s Bossie. On paper, Lewandowski’s credentials didn’t shine, but what he lacked in pedigree he made up for in raw ambition and ruthlessness. Lewandowski grew up poor in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts. As an undergraduate at the local UMass branch, he ran unsuccessfully for state representative. After graduating in 1995, he moved to Washington, D.C., got a master’s in politics at American University, and worked as a House aide on Capitol Hill. In 2001,he got a job with the Republican National Committee. But Lewandowski’s time as a member of the GOP Establishment was short-lived.

In 2002, he managed the reelection campaign of New Hampshire Republican senator Bob Smith, who was loathed by George W. Bush’s White House for briefly leaving the party in 1999 to launch an independent run for president. Against Smith, the Bushes backed John Sununu Jr., the son of George H. W. Bush’s former chief of staff. “I told Corey that the Establishment is coming after me, even the president of the United States,” Smith said, recalling his interview with Lewandowski for the job. “I said, ‘If that bothers you in any way, if you don’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole because of your political career, I understand.’ He just said, ‘No problem.’ ”

Smith lost, and Lewandowski, as Smith had warned, found himself cast into the political wilderness. He settled in New Hampshire, got married, and raised four children while bouncing around a series of jobs, at one point selling real estate and serving as a police officer. In 2008, he landed a position with Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-brothers-backed free-market group. Lewandowski rose through the ranks at AFP to become national director of voter registration but stalled after a voter-recruitment project he spearheaded failed to yield results in 2014. Politico also reported that Lewandowski once threatened to “blow up” a colleague’s car and even called a female co-worker a “cunt.” One former Koch executive told me he was going to be fired. (Lewandowski denies this.)

Luckily, Trump came calling. He hired Lewandowski thinking that the 42-year-old operative had two crucial assets: his Koch connections and an intimate knowledge of New Hampshire’s quirky political terrain. The first assumption was wrong, but on the second, Lewandowski proved his worth. And he gained Trump’s trust by demonstrating he possessed the quality Trump values most: loyalty. “This campaign, above all other things, is about loyalty,” Lewandowski said. In what’s been said to be a unique arrangement for a campaign manager, Lewandowski travels everywhere with Trump, a role normally reserved for the campaign’s “body man.”

Trump turned to an equally unlikely candidate to handle communications. One day in January 2015, Hope Hicks got a call from Trump’s office asking her to come in. At the time, she was working on the 25th floor with Ivanka. “Mr. Trump looked at me and said, ‘I’m thinking about running for president, and you’re going to be my press secretary,’ ” Hicks said. “I think it’s ‘the year of the outsider.’ It helps to have people with outsider perspective.” Her mother told her she should write a book about this experience someday. “She said it would be like Primary Colors, and I told her, ‘You don’t even know.’ ”

Six months later, Lewandowski and Hicks worked into the early hours of the morning prepping for Trump’s campaign announcement in the lobby of Trump Tower. “It had to be perfect,” Lewandowski said. “We had to build the stage, make sure the flags hung perfectly; the eagles faced out; the carpet was red, and he would wear a red tie.” And hire plants. The campaign paid actors $50 each to wear Trump T-shirts and wave placards.

Later that morning, they watched from the wings as Ivanka introduced her father in front of reporters and photographers and the manufactured crowd. “It looked like the Academy Awards!” Trump recalled. “You saw the cameras, forget it. You couldn’t get another person in.”

Trump didn’t read a prepared speech, but he knew what he wanted to say, which hardly mattered anyway because hardly anyone took his candidacy seriously at the time. “Nobody said anything,” Trump said about the fact that he had accused Mexico of sending “rapists” over the border into the U.S. “Then two weeks later, they started saying, ‘Wait a minute! Did he really say that?’ ”

He hadn’t tested the line, but Nunberg’s deep dive into talk radio had shown him that this was the sort of thing that would resonate with a certain segment of the Republican base. He also knew that this kind of outrageous statement would earn him the free media attention ($1.9 billion worth and counting, according to the New York Times) that would propel his campaign.

This strategy did not go over well in all corners of the Trump empire. Ivanka, Trump’s 34-year-old daughter, had carefully tended her public image as the softer, more refined face of the Trump empire. Now her father’s hard-edged nativist rhetoric risked damaging not only her brand but her business. A few days after the announcement speech, Ivanka received a terse email from Kimberly Grant, the CEO of ThinkFood Group, the holding company behind celebrity chef José Andrés, whose restaurant was supposed to be the anchor tenant in one of Ivanka’s biggest projects: the $200 million redevelopment of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., into a luxury hotel.

“We need to talk. Getting crushed over DJT comments about Latinos and Mexicans,” Grant wrote her, according to legal filings.

Ivanka forwarded Grant’s email to her executives.

“Ugh,” one responded. “This is not surprising and would expect that this will not be the last that we hear of it. At least for formal, prepared speeches, can someone vet going forward? Hopefully the Latino community does not organize against us more broadly in DC / across Trump properties.”

Ivanka’s older brother, Donald Jr., also weighed in. “Yea I was waiting for that one. Let’s discuss in the am.”

Ivanka did her best to salvage the partnership. She asked her father to issue an apology, even submitting several drafts for him to release to the press. But he refused. “Rapists are coming into the country! You know I was right,” Trump later told me.

On July 8, Andrés backed out of the restaurant deal, citing Trump’s immigration comments. The two sides are now battling in court.

Despite any differences of opinion, Ivanka is by all accounts thrilled at the possibility of her dad becoming president. She managed to persuade him to support Planned Parenthood—at least the part of the organization that doesn’t provide abortions—an extreme position for a Republican to take. “She’s very much into the concept of women’s health issues,” Trump said. (He no doubt embarrassed her last week by saying that women should be punished for getting abortions if the procedure were outlawed, a position held by almost no one even in the pro-life community, and one Trump recanted several hours later.)

Ivanka also pushed him to act more “presidential,” but in one of our conversations, Trump said he disagrees: “You know, there’s a difference between being presidential when you’re now president of the United States than being presidential when you’re running against 17 other people.”

“No one can control him,” said Nunberg. Not even his family.

Ivanka’s husband, the real-estate scion and Observer owner Jared Kushner, has also gotten involved in the campaign, serving as an emissary to the Jewish community. He helped plan Trump’s trip to Israel last December, though it didn’t go exactly as planned. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized Trump’s proposal to halt Muslim immigration, Trump canceled the trip. “This was all your idea!” Trump scolded his son-in-law, according to a source. He fared better with Trump’s AIPAC speech, which Kushner wrote with input from Observereditor Ken Kurson. It was one of the most subdued of his public statements so far, perhaps because it was the only one he has read from a Teleprompter.

Kushner has tapped his network in an attempt to help his father-in-law. He reached out to hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singerto introduce him to Trump (Singer declined), and during Trump’s feud with Fox, he called Rupert Murdoch to try to make peace (Murdoch told him to deal directly with Roger Ailes). But this is where Kushner’s involvement makes for the strangest of bedfellows. One of Trump’s most prominent endorsers, Chris Christie, happens to be the man who, as U.S. attorney, sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to federal prison for tax fraud, among other felonies, in 2004.

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