Category Archives: Issues

Donald Trump is the first demagogue of the Anthropocene — he won’t be the last

Robinson Meyer writes: Lately I’ve been thinking back to something that John Kerry told The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, earlier this year. Asked about the importance of the Middle East to the United States, Kerry answered entirely about the Islamic State.

“Imagine what would happen if we don’t stand and fight [ISIS],” he said:

If we didn’t do that, you could have allies and friends of ours fall. You could have a massive migration into Europe that destroys Europe, leads to the pure destruction of Europe, ends the European project, and everyone runs for cover and you’ve got the 1930s all over again, with nationalism and fascism and other things breaking out. Of course we have an interest in this, a huge interest in this.

The 1930s all over again — Kerry was laying out a prediction in April, but it sounds a little more like description now. Even if America’s current dunderheaded demagogue loses the presidential election, the European project already falters in the United Kingdom, and Russia rumbles with revanchism. Fueled now (as then) by an ailing global economy, far-right nationalism seems ascendant worldwide. It’s hard not to think of the 1930s as the catastrophe which presaged our contemporary tragicomedy.

I write and report climate change, not a pursuit that usually encourages optimism, but watching all this unfold with the atmosphere in mind has been particularly bleak. For the past few months in particular, I’ve been thinking: Wow, this is all happening way earlier than I thought it would.

Spend enough time with some of the worst-case climate scenarios, and you may start to assume, as I did, that a major demagogue would contest the presidency in the next century. I figured that the catastrophic consequences of planetary warming would all but ensure the necessary conditions for such a leader, and I imagined their support coming from a movement motivated by ethnonationalism, economic stagnation, and hatred of immigrants and refugees. I pictured, in other words, something not so far from Trump 2016.

I just assumed it wouldn’t pop up until 2040. [Continue reading…]

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Now is not the time to go Green (Party)

Erich Pica, President of Friends of the Earth Action, writes: Friends of the Earth Action endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president a year ago but today we are encouraging our members and supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton for president. While we align with many facets of the Green Party platform, we do not support Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein for president.

We have vigorously disagreed with Sec. Clinton on many issues. We have fought over the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Trans Pacific Partnership, her interventionist foreign policy, her support for fracking, her ties to fossil fuel lobbyists and her neo-liberal economic platform. Yet without equivocation, we would rather have Hillary Clinton in the White House and push like hell for her to create better policy than fight Donald Trump to save basic human rights and centuries-old social agreements.

Urging our members and supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton does not constitute what Dr. Stein describes as being trapped in the two-party “duopoly.” Our assessment comes from a deep political and strategic analysis: Dr. Stein and the Green Party are not credible standard barriers for the progressive movement or Sen. Sanders’ Revolution. [Continue reading…]

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The climate movement has to elect Hillary Clinton — and then give her hell

Bill McKibben writes:  It’s an odd feeling to be working for the election of someone you know dislikes you and your colleagues. I’ve spent a good chunk of this month trying to register voters on campuses in Pennsylvania and Ohio — registering them to vote against Donald Trump, which means pushing for the election of Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t how I wanted to spend the fall—I’d much rather have been campaigning for Bernie Sanders.

It didn’t get any easier when Wikileaks released a tape of Clinton talking to backers in the building-trades unions about the environmental work so many of us (including much of the rest of organized labor) have been engaged in for the last few years. “They come to my rallies and they yell at me and, you know, all the rest of it. They say, ‘Will you promise never to take any fossil fuels out of the earth ever again?’ No. I won’t promise that. Get a life, you know.”

I know the young people Clinton was talking about, and they weren’t demanding she somehow wave a wand and stop the fossil-fuel age overnight. They were asking her about the scientific studies showing that we can’t actually keep mining and drilling new supplies of coal, oil, and gas if we’re going to meet the temperature targets set with such fanfare in Paris last year. They were asking her to support the “Keep It In the Ground” Act introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and endorsed by a passel of other senators, from Barbara Boxer of California to Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. (Oh yeah, and that guy Bernie.) They were also asking her to take a stand against fracking, since new studies demonstrate quite clearly that the release of methane from the use of natural gas makes climate change worse. Publicly, she hemmed and hawed. When Bernie said in a debate that he was against fracking, period, Clinton said, “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.” That was a pretty weak hedge to begin with, but we now know that privately she reassured the building trades unions: “My view is, I want to defend natural gas…. I want to defend fracking.”

Truth be told, these aren’t revelations. All of us working on climate issues have known this is how Clinton feels; she set up a whole wing of the State Department devoted to spreading fracking around the world. She’d favored the Keystone Pipeline from the start, and it was abundantly clear that only Sanders’s unexpected success in the primaries convinced her she’d have to change. (And it was only his refusal to endorse her until after the platform was agreed upon that made the platform into the fairly progressive document that it is, on climate and other issues). Still, it stings to see in black and white exactly how little regard she has for people fighting pipelines, frack wells, coal ports. Though truth be told, that was no huge surprise either: Politicians are forever saying they want people engaged in the political process, but most of them really just want people to vote and then go home.

So why are many of us out there working to beat Trump and elect her? Because Trump is truly a horror. He’s man who looks at fourth-grade girls and imagines that he’ll be dating them in ten years. He’s a racist. He knows next to nothing and lacks the intellectual curiosity to find out more. He’s a bully. He’s almost a cartoonish villain: If a writer invented a character this evil, no one would believe them. But he’s very nearly president.

Because environmentalists are not just concerned about the climate — we have allies and friends whom we support. And on some of those issues Clinton actually seems sincere: She clearly cares about women’s issues and understands that we are a nation of immigrants. [Continue reading…]

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Why inequality is the most important economic challenge facing the next president

By Steven Pressman, Colorado State University

In a recent issue of The Economist, President Barack Obama set out four major economic issues that his successor must tackle. As he put it:

“… restoring faith in an economy where hardworking Americans can get ahead requires addressing four major structural challenges: boosting productivity growth, combating rising inequality, ensuring that everyone who wants a job can get one and building a resilient economy that’s primed for future growth.”

It’s hard to quibble with the items on the president’s list. Slow productivity growth, rising inequality, inadequate employment and the lack of sustainable economic growth all are important problems that a President Clinton or Trump will have to face.

But just how important are these issues? Does one, above all, deserve to be at the top of the next president’s economic to-do list?

Rather than rank these items, it is probably better to follow the advice of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: We should courageously change what we can while accepting what we cannot.

And inequality is the only item on that list that a president can influence in a significant way. It also happens to be, in my mind, the most important one – critical for solving the other three problems as well as preventing the disappearance of the middle class.

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Trump didn’t invent the ‘rigged election’ myth. Republicans did

Elizabeth Warren writes: Cratering in the polls, besieged by sexual assault allegations and drowning in his own disgusting rhetoric, Donald Trump has been reduced to hollering that November’s election is “rigged” against him. His proof? It looks like he’s going to lose.

Senior Republican leaders are scrambling to distance themselves from this dangerous claim. But Trump’s argument didn’t spring from nowhere. It’s just one more symptom of a long-running effort by Republicans to delegitimize Democratic voters, appointees and leaders. For years, this disease has infected our politics. It cannot be cured until Republican leaders rethink their approach to modern politics.

Anyone with children knows that whining about imaginary cheating is the last refuge of the sore loser. But GOP leaders have served up such a steady diet of stories about imaginary cheating that an Economist-YouGov poll shows that 45 percent of Republican voters believe voter fraud is a “very serious problem,” and 46 percent have little or no confidence that ballots will be counted accurately. They hold these views even though there is literally no evidence — none, zero, zip — that widespread voter fraud is a factor in modern American elections. A recent study looked at around a billion ballots cast in the United States from 2000 through 2014 and found only 31 instances of impersonation fraud at the polls. [Continue reading…]

In the following interview, Al Cardenas, former Chairman of Florida Republican Party, is categorical in denying that there is any basis for Trump’s claim that this or any other election can be rigged.

 

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s isolation deepens

The Wall Street Journal reports: Ecuador’s pulling the plug on Julian Assange’s internet connection highlighted the isolation of WikiLeaks, the organization he founded to expose the inner workings of governments and other powerful institutions.

Ecuador said Tuesday that it restricted access to private communications at its embassy in the United Kingdom, where Mr. Assange lives, on concerns that he was meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

In a statement, the Foreign Relations Ministry said the decision to cut off communications at its embassy was to prevent interference in the “internal affairs of other states.”

Some former allies and observers say that after four years confined to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Mr. Assange is alienating former supporters and undermining WikiLeaks’ relevance. They cite a series of leaks that they say supported Russian efforts to disrupt the U.S. election and carelessly promoted Turkish government documents exposing the personal information of thousands of ordinary citizens.

WikiLeaks “has pioneered open government but has now gone off the rails in a way that damages the global transparency movement,” said Alex Howard, a senior analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, a group once sympathetic to Wikileaks that backs open-government efforts in the U.S.

WikiLeaks’ relationship with Russia has come under particular scrutiny lately after the release of thousands of documents from the Democratic National Committee and allies of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. U.S. government officials have accused Russia of conducting those intrusions as part of an effort to influence the U.S. election. Computer-security firm Kaspersky Labs ZAO said another set of documents published on WikiLeaks, known as the Saudi Cables, most likely came from the same hackers who breached the DNC.

There is no evidence of collusion between Russia and WikiLeaks, said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “However, Assange has made it very clear that he’s willing to be a useful idiot for any intelligence service, as long as it furthers his own agenda,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Moscow vows to hit back in row over RT TV channel’s UK bank accounts

Reuters reports: Russia has promised to retaliate against Britain after a British state-owned bank said it was withdrawing its services from Kremlin-backed Russian broadcaster RT.

RT said on Monday that NatWest, owned by Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS), had given notice it intended to withdraw its banking services from the channel’s British arm. RT accused the bank of attacking freedom of speech.

RBS responded by saying it was reviewing the situation and would contact RT to discuss the matter, which caused a furor in Russia where the Russian Foreign Ministry said it looked like a politically-motivated move to silence an inconvenient outlet. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Dmitry K. Kiselyov, the head of RT’s parent organization, was placed on the European sanctions list in 2014 over his encouragement of the annexation of Crimea. Barclays, the company’s previous bank in Britain, closed its accounts in July 2015.

In Moscow, the management of RT said on Monday that its lawyers were dealing with the banking situation and that the network would remain in operation.

“We have no idea what this is connected with, because nothing new happened to us, and we received no threats — neither yesterday, nor a day before yesterday, or a month ago,” the RBK news website quoted Ms. Simonyan, the editor in chief, as saying.

Jonathan Eyal, assistant director of Russian and European security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said that the bank’s action might have reflected concerns over RT’s links to the Kremlin. “Certain questions are being raised over the corporation and its sources of funding,” he said, “and the bank must have been aware that this is not a happy commercial transaction.”

Mr. Eyal noted that some financial institutions had recently faced large fines for handling questionable accounts, and he speculated that NatWest may “prefer the controversy of closing the bank account over dealing with a business that may have tainted money.”

Beyond that, he said, the bank may be following a lead, either directly or indirectly, from the United States, which has been weighing its response to Russian hacking of American computers and servers. The bank’s action could be a kind of “veiled sanction,” he said, aimed at “trying to convey to the propaganda sources that they are increasingly finding their life difficult in the West.” [Continue reading…]

In 2015, following the closure of Kiselyov’s Barclays account, The Independent reported: Mr Kiselyov is a leading TV personality on state-controlled Rossiya 1 television and warned last year, in the wake of the Crimean referendum on 16 March, that Russia could turn the United States into “radioactive dust”.

“Russia is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash,” Mr Kiselyov said at the time, standing in front of a large screen depicting a mushroom cloud produced by a nuclear explosion.

He added that President Vladimir Putin was a much stronger leader than Barack Obama, pointing to opinion polls on his screen. “Americans themselves consider Putin to be a stronger leader than Obama,” he said. “Why is Obama phoning Putin all the time and talking to him for hours on end?”

Crimea voted 93 per cent in favour of coming under Russian rule in the controversial referendum, while Kiev said it would not recognise the results.

Mr Kiselyov previously caused outrage when he called for tougher anti-gay laws and suggested that homosexuals should be barred from donating organs, blood and sperm because they were not fit. [Continue reading…]

In spite of numerous claims being made that the withdrawal of NatWest banking services amounts to an attack on free speech, the bank’s decision is no such thing. RT has been censured 15 times by Ofcom (Britain’s equivalent of the FCC) for breaching broadcast regulations but it hasn’t been shut down. The Russian network, funded by a government that has very little appetite for free speech, has less interest in defending freedom than it has in exploiting free speech in order to corrupt democracy through the propagation of disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Coincidental with NatWest’s decision, the Express reports: Russia’s VTB Bank has announced it will move its European headquarters out of London in the wake of Brexit.

The state-controlled bank is the first major lender to desert the UK following its historic decision to leave the European Union (EU). [Continue reading…]

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Extremist militias recruiting in fear of Clinton winning election, activists say

The Guardian reports: In the past 12 months, Jessica Campbell has had her car’s fuel line cut and its wheel nuts loosened. Late last year, she had a GPS tracker surreptitiously attached to her vehicle. She is now accustomed to being tailed by unfamiliar vehicles on Interstate 5 near her home in Cottage Grove, just outside Eugene, Oregon. Strangers have regularly come uninvited onto her property; someone even stripped the barbed wire on her fence “just to send a message”. Online, she has repeatedly been threatened with rape and death.

And last week, when she showed up at the Canyon City community hall in Grant County, she told me that someone shot at her and her entourage. They misread their GPS, took a wrong turn and stopped to get their bearings when a crack rang out with what Campbell thought was a .22 bullet whizzing by their vehicle.

Such threats are part of the pushback her work has sparked in rural Oregon.

Campbell co-directs the Rural Organizing Project, a not-for-profit group that sets out to confront the rightwing insurgency that has been bubbling away in parts of rural Oregon and throughout the west. A political organizer since high school, she now coordinates groups attempting to respond to divisive tactics from rightwing activists on immigration, race and public land ownership.

This extremist surge received national media attention during the occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge by the Bundy group, but it has continued to rise alongside Trump, with his legitimization of white nationalist politics and his apparent inspiration of insurrectionists across the country. [Continue reading…]

The SPLC identified 998 active extreme antigovernment groups in 2015: The antigovernment movement has experienced a resurgence, growing quickly since 2008, when President Obama was elected to office. Factors fueling the antigovernment movement in recent years include changing demographics driven by immigration, the struggling economy and the election of the first African-American president. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump reveals evangelical rifts that could shape politics for years

The New York Times reports: When Jen Hatmaker speaks to stadiums full of Christian women, she regales them with stories about her five children and her garden back in Austin, Tex. — and stays away from politics. But recently she took to Facebook and Instagram to blast Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” and remind her legions of followers that there are other names on the ballot in November.

“Trump has consistently normalized violence, sexual deviance, bigotry and hate speech,” she said in an email interview. “I wouldn’t accept this from my seventh-grade son, much less from a potential leader of the free world.”

In the nearly four decades since Jerry Falwell Sr. founded a group called the Moral Majority, evangelical Christians have been the Republican Party’s most unified and reliable voting bloc in November presidential elections. The leaders of what came to be known as the religious right were kingmakers and household names, like Pat Robertson, James C. Dobson, Ralph Reed.

But this year, Ms. Hatmaker’s outraged post was one small sign of the splintering of the evangelical bloc and a possible portent of the changes ahead. While most of the religious right’s aging old guard has chosen to stand by Mr. Trump, its judgment and authority are being challenged by an increasingly assertive crop of younger leaders, minorities and women such as Ms. Hatmaker.

“Those men have never spoken for me or, frankly, anyone I know,” said Ms. Hatmaker, the author of popular inspirational Christian books. “The fracture within our own Christian family may be irreparable.”

The fault lines among evangelicals that the election of 2016 has exposed — among generations, ethnic groups and sexes — are likely to reshape national politics for years to come, conservative Christian leaders and analysts said last week in interviews. Arguments that were once private are now public, and agendas are no longer clear. [Continue reading…]

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Why is the U.S. Green Party so irrelevant?

By Per Urlaub, University of Texas at Austin

Many Americans value environmental protection and want to see more of it. But Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, is drawing only 1 to 3 percent in recent polls, even in an election where many voters dislike the major candidates and are looking for alternatives.

Stein certainly has worked to differentiate herself from the two major party candidates. In July she asserted that electing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton – probably the choice of most pro-environment voters – would “fan the flames of … right-wing extremism,” and be as bad as electing Donald Trump.

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This Arabic billboard in Michigan is massively trolling Donald Trump

Mashable reports: A black billboard has appeared alongside a highway in Michigan carrying white Arabic lettering that ridicules Donald Trump and his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The sign, situated along I-94 in Dearborn, says: “Donald Trump doesn’t know what this means, but he’s scared of it anyway.” The only words in English are the Republican candidate’s name and a website, trumpisscared.org.


Behind the advert is the Nuisance Committee super PAC, a group started by the creator of the popular Cards Against Humanity card game.

“We intentionally did not put the translation on the board because I like the idea of people who do not speak Arabic have to ask their friends who do speak Arabic for them to translate the board for them,” Melissa Harris, spokeswoman for the group, told WWJ Newsradio 950.

“And I personally hope this also will generate some dialogue between Arabic speaking people and non-Arabic speaking people in Detroit and across the country.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s Afghanistan war strategy: Do ‘just enough to lose slowly’

The Washington Post reports from Camp Shorab: Earlier this month, a small district center just south of this desolate U.S. base came under attack from Taliban militants who threatened to overrun the local police. Frantic calls arrived from Afghan officials: They needed air support.

In a U.S. command center, a steel hut of plywood walls and a dozen video monitors piping in drone feeds and satellite imagery, soldiers began directing aircraft to the area. Redhanded 53, the call sign for a gun-metal-gray twin-engine propeller plane loaded with sensors, arrived overhead just in time to watch a truck loaded with explosives slam into the main police station.

Within an hour, the Americans had marshaled an armed Predator drone in the skies over the battle in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. But the commanding officer, Col. D.A. Sims, and his troops were unable to determine whether the men with guns on the ground were Taliban or Afghan soldiers. So Sims directed the Predator to fire one of its two hellfire missiles into an adjacent field — a $70,000 dollar warning shot just to let the militants know that the Americans had arrived.

The Oct. 3 battle is a microcosm of what is happening across Afghanistan: Taliban fighters that show enormous resilience despite being on the wrong side of a 15-year, $800 billion war; an Afghan army that still struggles with leadership, equipment, tactics and, in some units, an unwillingness to fight; and the world’s most sophisticated military reduced at times to pounding fields with its feared armaments.

The future of the U.S. role in Afghanistan after a decade and a half of war has received little attention in the presidential campaign and debates. But the next administration will be bequeathed a strategy that is doing “just enough to lose slowly,” said Douglas Ollivant, a senior national-security-studies fellow at the New America Foundation. [Continue reading…]

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Russian air defense raises stakes of U.S. confrontation in Syria

The Washington Post reports: Russia’s completion this month of an integrated air defense system in Syria has made an Obama administration decision to strike Syrian government installations from the air even less likely than it has been for years, and has created a substantial obstacle to the Syrian safe zones both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have advocated.

Deployment of mobile and interchangeable S-400 and S-300 missile batteries, along with other short-range systems, now gives Russia the ability to shoot down planes and cruise missiles over at least 250 miles in all directions from western Syria, covering virtually all of that country as well as significant portions of Turkey, Israel, Jordan and the eastern Mediterranean.

By placing the missiles as a threat “against military action” by other countries in Syria, Russia has raised “the stakes of confrontation,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday.

While there is some disagreement among military experts as to the capability of the Russian systems, particularly the newly deployed S-300, “the reality is, we’re very concerned anytime those are emplaced,” a U.S. Defense official said. Neither its touted ability to counter U.S. stealth technology, or to target low-flying aircraft, has ever been tested by the United States.

“It’s not like we’ve had any shoot at an F-35,” the official said of the next-generation U.S. fighter jet. “We’re not sure if any of our aircraft can defeat the S-300.” [Continue reading…]

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UK security agencies unlawfully collected data for 17 years, court rules

The Guardian reports: British security agencies have secretly and unlawfully collected massive volumes of confidential personal data, including financial information, on citizens for more than a decade, senior judges have ruled.

The investigatory powers tribunal, which is the only court that hears complaints against MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, said the security services operated an illegal regime to collect vast amounts of communications data, tracking individual phone and web use and other confidential personal information, without adequate safeguards or supervision for 17 years.

Privacy campaigners described the ruling as “one of the most significant indictments of the secret use of the government’s mass surveillance powers” since Edward Snowden first began exposing the extent of British and American state digital surveillance of citizens in 2013.

The tribunal said the regime governing the collection of bulk communications data (BCD) – the who, where, when and what of personal phone and web communications – failed to comply with article 8 protecting the right to privacy of the European convention of human rights (ECHR) between 1998, when it started, and 4 November 2015, when it was made public. [Continue reading…]

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Poll: 41 percent of voters say election could be ‘stolen’ from Trump

Politico reports: The American electorate has turned deeply skeptical about the integrity of the nation’s election apparatus, with 41 percent of voters saying November’s election could be “stolen” from Donald Trump due to widespread voter fraud.

The new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll — conducted among 1,999 registered voters Oct. 13 through Oct. 15 — shows that Trump’s repeated warnings about a “rigged” election are having effect: 73 percent of Republicans think the election could be swiped from him. Just 17 percent of Democrats agree with the prospect of massive fraud at the ballot box.

The public sentiment is beginning to reflect Trump’s campaign message. Over the last week, the GOP nominee has intensified his criticism of the U.S. electoral system, much to the chagrin of elected Republicans, who think it threatens the peaceful transfer of power. Trump calls the process rigged, and has said the media is colluding with Hillary Clinton to throw the presidential race in her favor.

Trump’s comments casting doubt upon the process have drawn a gentle rebuke from House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose spokesperson put out what would ordinarily be an unremarkable statement on Saturday: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump son-in-law makes approach on post-election TV start-up

Financial Times reports: Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has informally approached one of the media industry’s top dealmakers about the prospect of setting up a Trump television network after the presidential election in November.

Mr Kushner — an increasingly influential figure in the billionaire’s presidential campaign — contacted Aryeh Bourkoff, the founder and chief executive of LionTree, a boutique investment bank, within the past couple of months, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Their conversation was brief and has not progressed since, the people said. Mr Bourkoff and Mr Kushner both declined to comment.

However, the approach suggests Mr Kushner and the Republican candidate himself are thinking about how to capitalise on the populist movement that has sprung up around their campaign in the event of an election defeat to Democrat Hillary Clinton next month. Mr Trump has in recent days ramped up his criticism of the “dishonest and distorted” mainstream media, which he accuses of being biased against him in collusion with the Clinton campaign. [Continue reading…]

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