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NEWSCUM GOV CA
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AN 10 25
A senior prosecutor in Virginia is reportedly preparing to decline a high-stakes directive to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), raising serious questions about political interference at the Justice Department.
MSNBC reported Monday that Elizabeth Yusi, who leads major criminal prosecutions in the Norfolk office of the Eastern District of Virginia, has privately informed colleagues she finds no probable cause to charge James with mortgage fraud.
According to the report, she intends to formalize this view and present her reasoning to the newly installed acting U.S. Attorney for that district, Lindsey Halligan.
Halligan, a former White House aide and private attorney, replaced Erik Siebertafter President Donald Trump publicly called for his removal, an effort sparked by Siebert’s reluctance to bring charges against James and former FBI Director James Comey.
Within the Eastern District, prosecutors anticipate potential reprisals against Yusi for resisting political pressure to pursue the James case. According to the report, her colleagues fear she could be dismissed for insubordination.
Trump has publicly demanded that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against James, even though long-serving prosecutors have concluded there is insufficient evidence to show that she lied or intended to lie in her mortgage application for her niece’s home, per the report.
In a post on his Truth Social platform Saturday, Trump called James “SCUM” and demanded she be removed as New York’s attorney general, citing what he characterized as her “WITCH HUNT against President Donald J. Trump, and others.”
Randall Eliason, former chief public corruption prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., told MSNBC: “This supervisor clearly is doing the right and ethical thing by refusing to bend her legal conclusions to fit the president’s desire for political retribution.“
Eliason added that career prosecutors are being "forced to choose between honoring their oaths and risking their livelihood" and "forced out by the president’s politicization of the Justice Department.’”
On “Human Scum” and Trump in the Danger Zone | The New Yorker
Letter from Trump’s Washington
On “Human Scum” and Trump in the Danger Zone
After Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony, the President is freaking out about impeachment.
By Susan B. Glasser
October 24, 2019
President Donald Trump, earlier this year, on Capitol Hill, where a new political reality is taking shape, informed by the impeachment-inquiry proceedings.Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty
At 1:48 p.m. on October 23rd, Donald Trump posted a tweet that, in any other political moment, would be a strong contender for the worst public statement ever made by a President of the United States. Attacking enemies within his own party, Trump wrote, “The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!”
:{:{But, of course, this is not any other moment. The Times has tracked hundreds of insults that Trump has already made since entering public life. He has called his critics “dogs,” “losers,” and “enemies of the people”; praised racists and trafficked in casual misogyny; derided people from nations he calls “shithole countries”; and labelled American cities where he is unpopular as rat-infested hellholes.}:
This is not even the first time that Trump has used the word “scum”; in June, 2018, he referred to the lead F.B.I. officials who had investigated him as the “scum on top” of the agency. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that, with such a record, his Never Trumper tweet was not treated as major news (although a Republican House member from Illinois, Adam Kinzinger, did say on CNN that it was “beneath the office of the Presidency”). Arguably, the tweet was not even his most offensive and inflammatory of the week, a distinction that might belong to Trump’s self-pitying, racially charged, and willfully ahistorical lament, from Tuesday, that the impeachment proceedings against him in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives amounted to “a lynching.” In some ways, these Trumpisms have become so abhorrent—and frequent—that it may be easier to ignore them than to contemplate them.}:
Still, the President’s “human scum” tweet bears noting. First of all, it is quite simply the language of tyrants and those who aspire to be tyrants. Hitler called his enemies human scum, and so did Stalin. In recent years, the Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, often referred to as “the Trump of South America,” denounced refugees as “the scum of humanity,” and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, denounced Sergei Skripal, the former spy recently poisoned by Russian agents, in Britain, as a disloyal “scumbag.” The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump says he has a “love affair,” executed his uncle after a show trial in which he was called “despicable human scum . . . worse than a dog.” Kim’s regime, it should be noted, also called Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, who differed with the President on the subject of North Korea, a “bloodsucker” and “human scum.”
:{:{The other reason to consider Trump’s words this week is because of what is happening around him. In the twenty-four hours between Trump’s “lynching” tweet and his “human scum” tweet, William B. Taylor, Jr., the acting Ambassador to Ukraine, offered the most damning testimony against the President yet in the month-old congressional impeachment inquiry. Taylor, a Vietnam veteran and career Foreign Service officer, was called out of retirement by the Trump Administration to serve in Ukraine after the President fired the previous Ambassador at the behest of his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani.}:
Taylor flew in from Kiev in defiance of a State Department demand that he not coöperate with the House probe, and he brought with him a fifteen-page opening statement, which offered specific, detailed evidence of the pressure campaign waged by Trump and Giuliani to force Ukrainian officials to investigate the former Vice-President Joe Biden, and which discredited conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s role in the 2016 U.S. election. This campaign, Taylor said, included explicitly linking Ukraine’s willingness to undertake these investigations to nearly four hundred million dollars in security assistance and a Presidential meeting. Trump even personally insisted that the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, announce the probes himself, to put Zelensky “in a public box.” Committee sources told reporters that there were “gasps” in the room when Taylor testified.
The diplomat was describing not one but multiple quid pro quos, in which Trump appeared to condition American assistance to a beleaguered, war-torn ally on actions that would be taken for his personal political benefit. Even the Senate Majority Whip, the Republican John Thune, of South Dakota, called the emerging picture “not a good one” for Trump.}:
The Presidential freakout of recent days can only be understood in that context. Trump is adjusting to a new political reality, one that is taking shape in a secure conference room on Capitol Hill, and it is a dangerous one for him: he now faces the very real possibility of impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate, and just in time for the start of the 2020 election year.
For the first thousand or so days of the Trump Presidency, it has been a near-certainty in Washington that Trump might someday be impeached in the House, but he could never be convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate. And by near-certainty I mean as close to absolutely, a hundred-per-cent positive as is possible in an uncertain world. There might be one or two or five wobbly Republicans, it was believed, but never twenty—the number of votes needed to convict him, assuming all Democrats and Independents also vote for his removal. Essentially, the political world agreed with the premise of Trump’s tweet—that the Never Trump opposition to him within the Republican Party had faded to the point of political irrelevance, leaving those remaining against him within the G.O.P. an outnumbered minority, if not actually “on respirators.”
:{:{As a strict matter of numbers, that is still correct. Public polls have shown a dramatic increase in support for impeachment, but largely among Democrats and, increasingly, Independents. Most surveys now find a majority of Americans in favor of Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, but still the number is well below the percentage of Americans who disapprove of his performance as President.}:
Even more significantly, Trump’s backing among Republican voters has yet to suffer much, with fewer than ten per cent of them—so far—saying they would favor impeachment. Republican members of Congress have largely held firm with Trump, too, though each day brings more examples of isolated individuals like Thune and Kinzinger publicly expressing concern. In terms of the Senate, the jury pool that may ultimately be called on to render a verdict on Trump in the Ukraine affair, most Republicans have either stayed resolutely silent or ostentatiously demonstrated their loyalty to Trump. Mitt Romney has been the only Senate Republican to forcefully question Trump’s actions. When Trump furiously attacked Romney over it, not a single one of his Senate colleagues rose to his defense.}:
And yet something does feel different around Washington. Republicans, and not just Trump, seem visibly nervous. “This is shaping up to be a very dark moment for the Trump White House,” a Republican source close to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the National Journal Hotline’s Josh Kraushaar. Even the Senate vote in an impeachment trial shouldn’t be taken for granted, the source said. “It’s getting to be a harder choice for more people. Whether that’s enough for enough senators to take decisive action . . . every single move has been in the wrong direction” for Trump.
:{:{It’s early days yet, of course, but since Taylor testified, political operatives have openly struggled to figure out whether this time might really be it. Everyone has his or her own little anecdotal data points, like the veteran Republican who told me he now thinks “there’s about a twenty-five per cent” chance “the dam breaks in the Senate and they turn on him and convict,” or the fervent Never Trumper who, buoyed by the recent news, texted me that he was sure “DT will be CONVICTED!”}:
Although, he added, in a nod to a more likely reality, “unless, of course, that doesn’t happen.” Another Never Trumper, the former Republican senator Jeff Flake, said a couple of weeks ago that thirty-five Republican senators would probably vote to convict the President—if the vote were held in secret. “Only 7 (!) Republican Senators are ruling out removing Donald Trump” a headline on an article by the CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza read. The Senate Minority Whip, the Democrat Dick Durbin, from Illinois, claimed in a TV interview this week that Republican leaders were having second thoughts about the President.}:
:{:{But Trump’s outbursts can still produce the shows of loyalty that the insecure President craves. On the same day as his “human scum” tweet, some two dozen Trump supporters in the House stormed into the closed-door secure facility where the impeachment depositions are being taken and disrupted the planned testimony of a Pentagon official for more than five hours. The representatives complained about the unfairness to the President of taking impeachment testimony in private, which has been Trump’s constant gripe. In fact, it soon was reported that Trump had been in on the stunt before it occurred, and the President took to Twitter to thank the protesting House Republicans afterward for their vigorous defense of him. There is no room for wobbling, as far as Trump is concerned.}:
By Thursday, John Thune appeared to have got that message, and CNN reported that he “walked back concerns he raised” in the wake of Taylor’s testimony, which Thune now called, in keeping with the Party line, “secondhand information.” He joined other senators, including a number of moderates, such as Ohio’s Rob Portman and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, at an Oval Office lunch with the President, the message of which was a not-so-subtle show of “they’re still with me.” As for Trump’s hateful tweet, not a single Republican senator called him out on it, even as his press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, went on Fox News on Thursday morning to underscore the point. Those Republicans working “against” the President, she said, are in fact human scum, adding, “They deserve strong language like that.”}:
All of which is to say that Trump was crude in his tweet, but he was also right: his internal enemies in the Republican Party are weak and few in number. For now. One thing missing from all the Republican complaints about impeachment this week, however, was a robust defense of what Trump actually did. And that, in the end, is exactly what the Senate jurors will ultimately have to make up their minds about.
Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has a weekly column on life in Washington and is a host of the Political Scene podcast. She is also a co-author of “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.”
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A Word-by-Word Comparison of Campaign Coverage - The Atlantic
Let’s just say media coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows.
Not that it should be: Trump’s alleged history of sexual assault, racial discrimination, and shady tax practices are all serious matters. But the media’s tone on Trump comes largely from the man himself: His rhetoric is bombastic, he casually encourages violence, and fear-mongering is one of his default messaging tactics.
So it came as no surprise when The Atlantic’s computer assessment of more than a year’s worth of news coverage—from more than 50 newspapers and websites—suggested that coverage of Clinton was, overall, slightly “happier” than coverage of Trump. Part of that determination involved comparing the emotional sentiment of various words that cropped up more often in articles about one candidate or the other. (You can read more about that experiment here.)
There were limitations to the approach (for one, it was colored by the language of the candidates' own quotes ), but the end result was revealing and intriguing. Still, we had all this data on our hands, and I wanted to zoom in a bit closer....
NO LNX
Technology
‘Scum,’ ‘Madman,’ and Other Words Used Most in Trump Coverage
A computer analysis of 60,000 articles about the presidential race finds distinct language referring to the Republican and Democratic nominees.
By Adrienne LaFrance
Joel Page / Reuters
November 2, 2016
Let’s just say media coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows.
Not that it should be: Trump’s alleged history of sexual assault, racial discrimination, and shady tax practices are all serious matters. But the media’s tone on Trump comes largely from the man himself: His rhetoric is bombastic, he casually encourages violence, and fear-mongering is one of his default messaging tactics.
So it came as no surprise when The Atlantic’s computer assessment of more than a year’s worth of news coverage—from more than 50 newspapers and websites—suggested that coverage of Clinton was, overall, slightly “happier” than coverage of Trump. Part of that determination involved comparing the emotional sentiment of various words that cropped up more often in articles about one candidate or the other. (You can read more about that experiment here.)
There were limitations to the approach (for one, it was colored by the language of the candidates' own quotes ), but the end result was revealing and intriguing. Still, we had all this data on our hands, and I wanted to zoom in a bit closer.
Beyond identifying the most positive or negative words that were strongly associated with coverage of either candidate, I wanted to know which words pop up most overall in coverage of Clinton versus coverage of Trump. Perhaps we would see more references to “pantsuits” or gendered descriptions like “shrill” in Clinton stories. Or maybe there would be an outsized number of references to “bronzer” and “short fingers” in articles about Trump?
Using the same database of about 60,000 articles published between July 2015 and August 2016, and with help from the computer scientist Andy Reagan from the University of Vermont, a computer was able to come up with a short list.
Here are the words you’ll find most often in a year’s worth of coverage of Clinton—meaning, all of these words appear more often in stories about the Democratic nominee than they do in the overall dataset:
• Blackberry
• classified
• mishandling
• subpoenaed
• correspondence
• negligence
• carelessness
• careless
• breaches
• whistleblower
• grandmothers
• classifying
• classifications
• testify
• FBI
• secrecy
• prosecutions
• investigation
• Libya
Clearly, Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as Secretary of State was a major focus of news coverage, and that’s reflected in this list. (Clinton’s handling of the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, also came up frequently, which makes sense since the dataset includes articles from October 2015, when Congress questioned her about the incident.)
And here’s a snapshot of coverage about Donald Trump’s campaign from the words most likely to be in articles about him rather than his opponents:
• pageants
• NASCAR
• tailgate
• rapists
• internment
• madman
• illegals
• hater
• audited
• divorces
• authoritarianism
• bikes
• bile
• nativism
• blowhard
• jackass
• dummy
• sucker
• scum
As with our previous experiment, the result wasn’t completely surprising—but it does offer a word-cloud-esque portrait of what journalists have focused on in coverage of each campaign.
Others have built similar data-oriented tools for distilling campaign coverage. The Northeastern University history professor Benjamin Schmidt has a website where you can type in a word and see how often it came up in TV coverage of either candidate.
It seems that television coverage is, in at least some ways, tonally consistent with stories published online and in newspapers about the campaign. A quick crosscheck of the words from our list above illustrates as much: “Blowhard” comes up exclusively in conjunction with TV coverage of Trump, while “careless” is frequent in coverage of Clinton but near-absent in coverage of Trump.
One word that’s fairly evenly distributed across television coverage of both campaigns? “Unlikeable.” And when it comes to this election, that may be the most revealing word of them all.
Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.
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GGL 10 25
['Complete & Total Disaster': Trump Attacks 'Scum' AG Letitia James President Donald Trump launched an attack on New York Attorney General Letitia James, calling her “scum” and demanding her removal from...
.
6 hours ago](https://www.binnews.com/content/2025-10-06-complete-total-disaster-trump-attacks-scum-ag-letitia-james/)
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The Daily Beast
Trump Calls Top Blue State Official ‘Scum’ In Rambling Meltdown
The president is incensed that New York Attorney General Letitia James is still in office.
.
1 day ago](https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-calls-top-blue-state-official-letitia-james-scum-in-rambling-meltdown/)
BIN: Black Information Network
'Complete & Total Disaster': Trump Attacks 'Scum' AG Letitia James
President Donald Trump launched an attack on New York Attorney General Letitia James, calling her “scum” and demanding her removal from...
.6 hours ago
The Daily Beast
Trump Calls Top Blue State Official ‘Scum’ In Rambling Meltdown
President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to post a lengthy diatribe about one of his biggest political enemies, New York Attorney General...
.1 day ago
The Hill
Shapiro knocks ‘rhetoric of rage’ after Trump ‘scum’ remark
Shapiro knocks 'rhetoric of rage' after Trump 'scum' remark ... Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) late Sunday criticized President Trump's use of...
.3 weeks ago
Common Dreams
Opinion | By Calling More Than Half the Country ‘Scum,’ Trump Is Raising a Bright Red Flag
When Trump calls people who didn't vote for him “scum,” he's not just talking about elected officials. He's talking about more than half the country.
.May 27, 2025
Politico
Trump calls his opponents 'scum' and lawbreakers in bellicose speech at Justice Department
Trump calls his opponents 'scum' and lawbreakers in bellicose speech at Justice Department. For more than an hour, he delivered an insult-laden...
.Mar 14, 2025
Yahoo
Trump attacks left-wing 'agitators' and 'scum' after Kirk shooting
Trump attacks left-wing 'agitators' and 'scum' after Kirk shooting ... The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed...
.3 weeks ago
USA Today
Trump attacks left-wing 'agitators' and 'scum' after Kirk shooting
Trump attacks left-wing 'agitators' and 'scum' after Kirk shooting. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday (September 14) he would attend the funeral of...
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Fresno Bee
President Trump and the GOP condemn leftist hate speech but ignore their own | Opinion
The assassination of Charlie Kirk highlights hypocrisy in Republicans' defense of free speech as Donald Trump and conservatives push to...
.2 weeks ago
People.com
President Trump Calls Biden Administration ‘Scum’ in Heated Memorial Day Message
In an all-caps social media post, Trump celebrated the holiday not by recognizing veterans, but by slamming the 'monsters who want our country to go to hell'
.May 26, 2025
Central Oregon Daily
‘Morning Joe’ Reacts After Trump’s Rant About ‘Scum’ MSNBC & CNN
'Morning Joe' Reacts After Trump's Rant About 'Scum' MSNBC & CNN ... MSNBC's Morning Joe got more than it bargained for on Tuesday (June 24)...
.2 weeks ago
Reuters
Trump attacks left-wing 'agitators' and 'scum' after Kirk shooting
Trump attacks left-wing 'agitators' and 'scum' after Kirk shooting ... U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday (September 14) he would attend...
.3 weeks ago
NBC News
Trump to take over D.C. police, deploy National Guard in effort to fight crime
National Guard troops are expected to be on the ground Tuesday, a White House official told NBC News.
.Aug 11, 2025
Newsweek
Trump Takes a Swipe at Ilhan Omar in New Attack: ‘What Scum’
Network Error. A network error caused the media download to fail. ... President Donald Trump blasted Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of...
.2 weeks ago
Yahoo News
Trump attacks the 'scum' media over reporting of American strikes on Iran
The 79-year-old president gave an exclusive interview to State of the Union host Jake Tapper Sunday, but bizarrely texted his answers in at an...
.Jun 24, 2025
The Hill
Trump wishes happy Memorial Day, including to ‘scum’ that was ‘trying to destroy our country’
Trump wishes happy Memorial Day, including to 'scum' that was 'trying to destroy our country' ... President Trump sent a Memorial Day message to...
.May 26, 2025
Politico
Trump places DC police under federal control, deploys National Guard
The president called it “liberation day” for the nation's capital. President Donald Trump holds a press conference.
.Aug 11, 2025
Yahoo
Fact Check: Trump's Memorial Day message
A screenshot shared online in late May 2025 authentically showed a Truth Social post by US President Donald Trump wishing a happy Memorial Day.
.May 27, 2025
The Hill
Trump warns left groups will be investigated after Kirk’s death
President Trump warned that left-leaning groups will be investigated after the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk,...
.3 weeks ago
NBC News
Charlie Kirk's assassination tests Trump's ability to help a nation heal
After Charlie Kirk's assassination, President Donald Trump could choose to tamp down anger and try to heal the nation, but he doesn't appear...
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ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos
Trump, addressing DOJ attorneys, says that those who fight him in court are 'scum'
President Trump used the setting to repeat his now familiar accusation that the Justice Department was "weaponized" to attack him.
.Mar 14, 2025
Opinion | By Calling More Than Half the Country ‘Scum,’ Trump Is Raising a Bright Red Flag
U.S. President Donald Trump's Memorial Day attack on Democrats is a dangerous sign of authoritarianism. Learn why his dehumanizing rhetoric...
.May 27, 2025
Politico
Trump calls his opponents 'scum' and lawbreakers in bellicose speech at Justice Department
President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who...
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The Forward
This Passover, let’s retire the word ‘Zionist’ once and for all
A Zionist is a person who believes in Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement, which says Jews should have a nation state in part of the ancestral homeland.
.Apr 11, 2025
The Conversation
Umlungu: the colourful history of a word used to describe white people in South Africa
The word shows that language isn't static, it evolves to reflect developments in a society.
.Aug 7, 2023
USA Today
Trump pounces on Biden's 'garbage' comment. But he's used the same word for opponents
Trump, the Republican nominee, has made a long list of disparaging remarks himself, including labeling political opponents "garbage" and "scum."
.Oct 30, 2024
MSNBC News
Trump suggests using the military to address ‘the enemy from within’
After referring to his American opponents as "scum," Donald Trump suggested possibly using the military to respond to "the enemy from within...
.Oct 14, 2024
The New Yorker
On “Human Scum” and Trump in the Danger Zone
Susan B. Glasser on Donald Trump's tweet calling his political opponents “human scum,” the fate of the Never Trumpers within the Republican...
.Oct 24, 2019
Miami Herald
Trump calls his foes ‘vermin’ and evokes another tyrant: To Fidel Castro, we were worms | Opinion
Trump echoed Nazi Germany and Hitler when he called foes “vermin,” but to Cuban Americans, he also sounded like Fidel Castro calling...
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The Atlantic
‘Scum,’ ‘Madman,’ and Other Words Used Most in Trump Coverage
A computer analysis of 60000 articles about the presidential race finds distinct language referring to the Republican and Democratic...
.Nov 2, 2016
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