Majorityrights News > Category: Journalism

Slovak PM Fico called some journalists “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes.”

Visigrad Post, 26 Nov 2016:

lovakia, Bratislava – Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said some journalists are “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes” as he was questioned about allegations made on Sunday by a former employee of the MFA and the anti-corruption NGO Transparency International.

Zuzana Hlávková was part of a team of the Slovak MFA in charge of organizing cultural events related to the Slovak presidency of the EU. At a news conference on Monday held in conjunction with Transparency International, she accused her superiors of pressuring her into sidestepping public procurement for the ceremony, and working instead with an events agency close to Fico’s leftwing Smer party, wrote Reuters.

She also alleged that a concert marking the start of the presidency in July was organised without public procurement, and that the cost of organizing the event had been set higher than required. Transparency International, an NGO supported by Soros’ Open Society Foundation, leads this attack on the Slovak Prime minister which is well-known for his statements against Soros and some NGOs.

Asked by journalists on Wednesday, November 23, about these allegations, the Slovak PM Robert Fico spoke harshly to journalists. “Some of you are dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes, and I stand by my words,” Fico told journalists. “You don’t inform, you fight with the government.”

Speaking at the same news conference as Fico, the foreign minister, Miroslav Lajčák, also rejected the accusations. “Everything was in line with the law, and the budget allocated for the presidency won’t be even fully spent,” he said.

Visigrad Post, “Visegrád Countries To Launch Radio Station Early 2017”, 17 Nov 2016:

       

Visegrád countries – The four Visegrád Group countries are planning to launch a radio station at the start of next year, the head of Radio Poland told Hungarian public television M1 on Tuesday.

Barbara Stanislawczyk said the programmes to be broadcast in Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian would be aimed at presenting the cultures of the member countries and focusing on topical political issues. She said that the region’s importance was gaining weight in Europe and highlighted the importance of the media in that tendency. The new station would also promote cooperation between radio people in the four countries, Stanislawczyk added.

Source : Daily News Hungary

During an on-the-record editorial board meeting with the New York Times today

“‘I Condemn Them’: Trump Tells NY Times He Disavows Alt-Right Conference”

During an on-the-record editorial board meeting with the New York Times today — a meeting he canceled at one point — President-elect Donald Trump hit on a number of topics and issues that were tossed at him from reporters.

One of the pressing subjects on the journalists’ minds was how Trump viewed the support he’s received from those in the alt-right. Specifically, they wanted to know how the incoming POTUS felt about the recent conference alt-right leaders held in Washington over the weekend in which attendees were seen giving Nazi salutes as Richard Spencer exclaimed “Hail Trump!”

                     

When first asked about whether he felt he did anything to “energize” the alt-right, Trump said he didn’t think so.

Source: Media.com, 22 Nov 2016

Daily News, “President-elect Donald Trump’s disavowal of his support among white nationalists didn’t sit right with the alt-right, 23 Nov 2016:

In one of his most direct repudiations of the once-fringe movement’s proximity to his bid for the presidency, Trump finally said Tuesday that he doesn’t “want to energize the group and I disavow the group,” during an on-the-record sit-down with the New York Times.

Alt-right members took to Reddit forums to express dismay over the president-elect’s comments, some saying they’ve been “fooled” into thinking Trump had truly taken up their white supremacist vision.

Donald Trump disavowed the support of the alt-right movement during a sit-down with the New York Times on Tuesday.

“Trump’s a civic nationalist which is a step in the right direction,” one Reddit commenter wrote. “His election was all about buying time, securing the Supreme Court and stopping illegal immigration. His victory is important but I hope no one deluded themselves into thinking that he was the second coming.”

Trump’s comments on Tuesday came days after white nationalists gathered at a conference in Washington D.C. organized by the far-right think tank National Policy Institute and its founder, Richard Spencer, in celebration of the “year of Donald Trump.”

Video of Spencer speaking showed scores of alt-right members raising their arms in a Nazi salute. Message board commenters said Trump wouldn’t stand by their cause after footage of the Neo-Nazis emerged.

“Certainly not after Richard Spencer saying ‘Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!’ and people in the audience doing the Nazi salute,” one post read.

The Anti-Defamation League, a leading advocacy group fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, praised Trump’s condemnation of his white supremacist supporters, specifically citing the NPI conference in D.C.

“We welcome President-elect Trump’s denunciation of the National Policy Institute convention just blocks from the White House,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt in an emailed statement. “Racist and anti-Semitic groups have absolutely no place in our politics or society.”

Trump was criticized during his campaign for being sluggish about condemning the support of white supremacists, most notably after receiving an endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

His forthcoming administration continues to be associated with the alt-right movement due to the prominent role of Stephen Bannon, who was recently tapped to be Trump’s chief strategist.

Before becoming Trump’s campaign manager, Bannon was the chairman of Breitbart News, a haven for white nationalist news and anti-Semitism.

Daily Caller, “Politico Editor Resigns After Publishing Home Addresses Of Alt-Right Icon Richard Spencer, Advocating For ‘Baseball Bats”, 22 Nov 2016:

National editor at Politico Michael Hirsh resigned after publishing the home addresses of alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer Tuesday morning and advocating for serious violence.

Politico confirmed his resignation following requests for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Stop whining about Richard B. Spencer, Nazi, and exercise your rights as decent Americans,” Hirsh wrote in a public Facebook post. “Here are his two addresses.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation redacted the home addresses.

Michael Hirsh publishes the addresses of alt-right figure Richard Spencer, who runs the National Policy Institute. (Screengrab/Facebook).

“These posts were clearly outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and POLITICO editors regard them as a serious lapse of newsroom standards,” Politico Editor-In-Chief John Harris and Editor Carrie Budoff Brown told TheDCNF. “They crossed a line in ways that the publication will not defend, and editors are taking steps to ensure that such a lapse does not occur again.”

While Hirsh’s initial post could have been charitably interpreted to imply advocacy of a non-violent protest outside of Spencer’s home or other similar non-violent actions, a subsequent question and answer clarified Hirsh’s intentions.

“Completely agree we should mobilize against his hateful ideas, but what does knowing his home addresses do?” one Facebook user asked Hirsh. “Send a letter? Confront him in person? Seems like counter-speech is the main thing we can do. You can call it ‘whining’ but I’m not sure that’s fair or constructive. Side note: Apparently the GSA-owned Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in DC felt obligated to host his organization’s event because it can’t discriminate against speech under the First Amendment, so there’s that problem, too.”

Hirsh responded in an unhinged manner: “I wasn’t thinking of a fucking letter, Doug. He lives part of the time next door to me in Arlington. Our grandfathers brought baseball bats to Bund meetings. Want to join me?”

Perhaps knowing it wasn’t such a good idea to advocate openly for serious violence against Spencer in a public format, Hirsh deleted the post, but not before TheDCNF grabbed a screenshot.

A now-deleted Facebook post by Michael Hirsh urging violence against Richard Spencer. (Screengrab/Facebook).

Hirsh’s mention of Bund meetings is a reference to the German-American Bund, a Nazi organization in the United States active in the mid-to-late 1930s, which promoted National Socialist ideology and was often subject to violent attacks by Jewish mobsters in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, using baseball bats.

Hirsh’s post comes just days after Spencer’s alt-right organization, the National Policy Institute, held a conference at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., to celebrate GOP President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory as a “step towards identity politics” and remind the audience that “The alt-right is here, the alt-right is not going anywhere, the alt-right is going to change the world.”

The NPI conference has attracted considerable controversy after numerous conference-goers threw up the Nazi salute following a rousing speech. Spencer also referred to the press using the German word “Lügenpresse,” which translates to “lying press.” The National Socialist German Workers’ Party often employed the term to attack critics in the press.

       

NPI Conference Washington D.C. 19 November 2016.

Part 2

       
Speakers taking questions from the press included alt-right supporters (left to right) Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald, Jason Jorjani, and Jared Taylor.

       
Protesters gather along 14th Street outside of the Reagan Building before the start of the press conference.

Millennial Woes interviews Matt Tate, Richard Spencer and Nathan Damico about protestors:

Pre-NPI conference protested by anti-fa

       

       

...outside Trump International Hotel afterward.

NPR, “Could Trump ‘Undermine The Legacy Of The Obama Presidency’ With The Stroke Of A Pen?” 15 Nov 2016:

New Yorker writer Evan Osnos talks about the executive orders and other actions that Trump can use to undo existing agreements on climate change, immigration and foreign policy.

[...]

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Evan Osnos, welcome back to FRESH AIR. How reliable are campaign promises as a predictor of a president’s agenda in office, and will Trump be different?

EVAN OSNOS: I assumed that, like, I think like a lot of Americans, that campaign promises are not very valuable in terms of actually predicting the course of a presidency. We - you know, we tend to remember when campaigns say things that they don’t then fulfill. But actually, the political science on this is pretty clear, and it tells a very different story, which is that if you go back over the history of the presidency, you find that presidents tend to achieve the majority - the overwhelming majority of the things that they set out to accomplish when they were candidates.

[...]

DAVIES: Now, when people look at Donald Trump, some would say it’s not clear that he has any deeply held political beliefs. I mean, he used to be pro-choice. He used to be a Democrat. He’s kind of been all over the place over the course of his business career, and a lot of what he says seems kind of improvised, but we have some clues. I mean, there are two big appointments just announced. The Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, will be Trump’s chief of staff, and at the same time, his campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, who is from the right wing Breitbart News, will be a senior adviser with equal status to Reince Priebus. What does this tell us about Trump’s likely agenda?

OSNOS: Right. Well, I think a lot of us were very wary of the idea that Trump as president would actually do a lot of the things that he said as a candidate partly because he was, you know, obviously from way outside the mainstream and - of previous presidents. So perhaps the political science was useless. But there are a couple of things that I think are important to keep in mind. One is that the appointment of Steve Bannon as chief strategist and a counselor to the president is an extension of something that was very clear when this piece was written, which was that Donald Trump will move around on a lot of issues. He’s fluid, for instance, on what he would do on the technical basis of an H-1B visa, for instance, or whether or not he would allow school teachers to carry guns in the classroom.

But on three core ideas, he has stayed completely consistent. One of them is his belief that the United States is fundamentally being damaged by immigration. Number two is his belief that trade deals have done more damage to the United States than they have helped. And number three is his belief that the United States does too much for the world. As he said in 2015, I want to take back everything that the United States has given the world.

Steve Bannon, in his career at Breitbart, really transformed that organization into the principal exponent of those three ideas. So what you see today is Donald Trump is trying to balance the strategic objectives that his campaign road to victory in the form of Steve Bannon with the practical necessity of how do you actually operate within Washington. And for that, Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, is the ultimate Washington professional. He has been here for his professional life. He has really risen to the top ranks of the Republican establishment, and he’s now in the position to be able to try to help Donald Trump achieve his objectives.

DAVIES: You know, there’s a point of view that says, yeah, ideologues can have their say, but it’s the chief of staff who controls the president’s schedule that really moves the levers of power. Do you have an opinion about whether one will be more important than the other?

OSNOS: I think if you look at the way that those two roles have been used in recent history, you find that they are both important, and in many ways, that’s the design here. Steve Bannon has called Breitbart, which was his media organization, quote, “the platform of the alt right,” unquote. And that is the previously fringe movement on the conservative far-right edge, which was founded by Richard Spencer who lives in Montana and believes in the separation of the races. And that has now moved sort of further into the mainstream as a result of Steve Bannon’s rise within the Trump campaign and now his installation in the White House. But in order to get those ideas accomplished, you need somebody who really is just as skilled as anyone in sort of managing the levers of inside power in Washington, and that’s where Reince Priebus comes in.

DAVIES: OK, I want to talk about some of the areas of policy that will matter here. And we’ll try and figure out, you know, what Trump has said, what he believes, what he is really committed to and what he can actually accomplish by himself and what he needs congressional action for. One thing that people have talked about is that President Obama has done a lot with executive orders because of the gridlock in Congress and that President Trump, once he is inaugurated, can immediately undo a bunch of stuff simply by signing executive orders, repealing President Obama’s initiatives. Is that true?

OSNOS: Yeah, that’s true, and that’s an explicit part of the incoming Trump administration’s plan. Campaign advisers described it to me as a first-day project, by which they meant that on the first day or within a few days Donald Trump would seek to sign as many as 25 executive orders, or uses of executive power in other forms, that would, in the words of one adviser, erase the Obama presidency.

I should point out that every president when they come in uses executive powers in one form or another. Barack Obama, for instance, signed nine executive orders in the first 10 days. Doing 25 would be ambitious. People who have been through transitions before tell me that’s not realistic. But he could do several things that would significantly undermine the legacy of the Obama presidency. His team has talked about this since Election Day, that one of the things that’s important to them is to restart exploration of the Keystone Pipeline.

They will significantly expand the pace and intensity of deportations. They will seek to, if not formally remove the United States from the Paris climate agreement, then they will be able to take steps that basically undermine it so they can make sure the United States is not enforcing restrictions on carbon output. They can restrict funding and so on. So they can do things right away with the stroke of a pen that would pretty significantly undermine the legacy of the Obama presidency.

DAVIES: Is there some fine print here? I mean, I believe I’ve read that when some executive orders have gone past the rulemaking stage…

OSNOS: That’s right.

DAVIES: ...There’s a process. What does that mean?

OSNOS: Yeah, that’s right. The hyperbole in saying that they would undermine the Obama presidency is that once an executive order has gone beyond what’s known as the rulemaking stage, then that means that in order to undo it there has to be, for instance, a period of public comment. There has to be other bureaucratic steps. And that can take as much as a year or more depending on how efficiently the bureaucracy goes about it. And that’s meaningful because I think the question of how civil servants will interpret efforts to try to undermine previous initiatives matters. But the relevant point is that by issuing the executive order the clock on that process begins.

DAVIES: OK. Well, let’s look at some specific policy areas and figure out what might happen. Let’s start with climate change. You just mentioned that. Do we - what do we know about his views on climate change and the extent to which he is committed to them based on his appointments so far?

OSNOS: Well, as a candidate and before, Donald Trump has expressed a lot of skepticism about climate change. He’s called it a hoax. At one point, he described it as a hoax that was perpetrated by the Chinese in order to try to undermine American competitiveness. He later said that was a joke. Since Election Day, some of the appointments that he’s made have made clear that he’s going to make good on his belief that American energy policy and attempts to combat climate change are going in the wrong direction. So, for instance, Donald Trump’s transition team for the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency is run by somebody named Myron Ebell who has been really one of the most outspoken skeptics of climate change, runs a program here called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and it opposes regulation. It’s not clear exactly who funds it, but in the past, it was funded by fossil fuel companies including Exxon Mobil and others.

So this would be, I think, safe to say a radical change in the way the United States has talked and thought about climate change. One of the people that he has also indicated could be powerful in terms of shaping energy policy is Harold Hamm who was a billionaire who founded the shale oil company Continental Resources. He’s been a big contributor to the Koch brothers fundraising network, and there is so far no indication that Donald Trump did not mean what he said when he talked about climate change being a hoax that has damaged American competitiveness.

DAVIES: Are there some specific things President Trump could do immediately to change the direction of climate policy?

OSNOS: Yeah, he could. The Paris climate deal is a formal matter, requires four years to unwind. So in the interim, he could immediately suspend American payments to the deal in effect. These are the payments that the United States would make to U.N.-affiliated agencies that would be in charge of both implementing the deal and then also helping developing countries pay for making some of the concessions and transitions that are required in order to implement it.

[...]

DAVIES: You talk to some experienced people in immigration for your piece in The New Yorker about what it would take to affirmatively go out and find millions of undocumented workers and get them out of the country. You want to share a bit of that with us?

OSNOS: Yeah. I spoke to Julie Myers Wood, for instance, who was the head of Immigration Customs and Enforcement under George W. Bush, and she is opposed to Donald Trump-stated policies on immigration in many ways. But she also said that it’s a big mistake to assume that his ideas are so radical as to therefore be impossible, and that was her major point to me was that there are tools that are at the disposal of a president that would allow them to do this dramatic escalation of deportation. For instance, a president could give the IRS files to ICE, to Immigrations Customs Enforcement. So IRS files are considered to be the most reliable source of home addresses because a lot of undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, for instance, put in a reliable home address so that they can receive their refund.

If the president allowed it, that would then make it much easier for enforcement agents to be able to go out and find people. Another thing that would be at the disposal of a President is what’s known as 287-G of the Immigration Act which would allow the local and state agents, basically cops of one kind or another, to be enlisted in service of the deportation project. So that’s how you begin to see, for instance, local police being brought in for the purposes of raiding farms or factories and beginning to achieve the deportation numbers that he’s talked about.

But in order to do so, it would take a significant escalation of manpower and also of resources. But what came clear from my reporting on the subject was that it’s a big mistake to assume that it’s - this is binary that you either will have the system as it exists today or you would have some completely unimaginable system that Donald Trump has talked about. There is in fact a spectrum in between that Trump could move fairly substantially down the road to achieving his objectives on immigration.

[...]

DAVIES: Let’s talk about trade and the economy. You know, one of his core principles you said is the belief that trade deals have harmed America’s economy and killed jobs. What authority would he have immediately to remake or undo American trade policy?

OSNOS: The president has broad authority on trade. So, for instance, right away, the president could end American participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I think it’s fair to assume that the TPP as it’s known is now dead. But beyond that, he could also force Canada and Mexico to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from it eventually.

There is a process in the case of NAFTA. He couldn’t just do it immediately. But when it comes to slapping tariffs, for instance, on other countries, there’s two ways to do it. One requires Congress and one doesn’t. If he goes after specific categories of goods - so if he says, for instance, that, you know, Chinese exports of one specific type, let’s call it, you know, chicken or tires or something like that, then he can use his own presidential power to do that sort of on an emergency basis. But if he’s going to try to impose a broad-based tariff against a country, that would actually require the consent of Congress.

But I think the important point is that he has the ability to change the tenor of the trade relationship with a country by talking about it in other ways. And as we all know, you know, he talked about China in very harsh terms during this campaign. My own sense based on talking to his trade advisers and his China specialists was that that was a kind of theater. I don’t believe that Donald Trump is prepared actually in any way to go to a trade war with China, I think, meaning that, you know, one of the things that his advisers said to me was that Donald Trump’s persona that he - you know, he’s confrontational, he says outrageous things, that that would have a chilling effect on the other side and that China would then fall in line. That’s their theory. They’re not actually prepared for the full economic consequences, which would be severe and profound, of a trade war with the world’s second-largest economy.

DAVIES: Well, this is an interesting and important question. And you can’t predict the future, but if, in fact, one of his core beliefs is that this is a big problem, we have to fix this to rebuild the American economy, what do the economists you talk to expect to happen? Are we going to have a trade war? What would it do?

OSNOS: A trade war could be a really dramatic turn in American economic history. If you talk to independent analysts, people who are not involved in either campaign, somebody - there’s a guy, for instance, named Mark Zandi, who’s an economist at Moody’s Analytics. And he’s worked for Republicans and he’s worked for Democrats in the past. And what he says is that Trump’s plan, if he actually did the things that he said he would and triggered a trade war with China that that would put probably somewhere around 4 million Americans out of work. And then over the ensuing recession that it would also cost the economy another 3 million jobs that would have been created otherwise.

Most economists broadly agree that a trade war would be hugely damaging to the United States.

[...]

DAVIES: One of the things he also says he wants to do is immediately cut the regulatory burdens on businesses on Wall Street. Can he do that himself?

OSNOS: He can. The president has authority, ultimate authority over 15 executive agencies. And he would be able to direct them to change the pace and spirit in which they are issuing regulations. He has said - I’m not clear on whether this is legally possible - that he wants to do a version of what Vice President-elect Mike Pence did in Indiana.

Pence created an agency that was dedicated to suspending the creation of all new regulations except for public health and safety.

[...]

DAVIES: He’s promised big tax cuts. Will they really happen?

OSNOS: That, I think, is one of his better bets. He’s got a Republican Congress on his side. And at this point, it’s hard to see them not doing it.

DAVIES: And what kind of tax cuts are we talking about? I mean, for those of us who haven’t carefully followed his campaign positions, are they upper income, middle income, everybody?

OSNOS: They provide the greatest relief to the upper stratum of the tax base, so the highest earners will do best. There is also tax relief for the sort of upper-middle-class. Then corporate tax rates will be substantially relieved.

[...]

DAVIES: Let’s talk about foreign and military policy. He’s criticized the deal with Iran. Can he scuttle that deal by himself?

OSNOS: Yes, he can. What he has said he wants to do is renegotiate the deal with Iran, and renegotiate is a sort of a flexible word. It’s not clear what he means entirely. But were he to try to reopen that deal, that could actually - that could really change the course of things more broadly beyond just the Iran deal because at that point what happens is that Iran - and Iran specialists told me as much months ago - would regard the United States seeking to renegotiate the deal as an abrogation of the deal.

At that point, they would say that the United States has basically not held up its end of the bargain, and they would have the right - the legal authority and the right - to restart the development of nuclear energy. So I think he’s going to find once he begins to get into the details of this that by simply announcing that he’s going to renegotiate that might not achieve the effect he has in mind. It might actually hasten the restart of the Iranian nuclear program.

[...]

DAVIES: When you wrote about Donald Trump and his policies towards the military and towards foreign affairs, the issue of temperament comes up. This is a loaded word. He hated being criticized for his temperament. But you have - you found a quote from his book “Think Like A Billionaire.” It can be smart to be shallow, that he has a penchant for making big decisions quickly, that he trusts his gut. Share what - some of what you learned about what that might mean from your conversations with military and intelligence officials.

OSNOS: Yeah. When you talk to a broad range of people who have been involved in the most sensitive national security questions, you know - these are the people who’ve been in the Situation Room at crucial moments particularly from Republican administrations what they’ll tell you is that the crucial ingredient is whether or not a president is impetuous, whether or not the president makes decisions before they have as much information and as many competing points of view as possible. And often as one - James Woolsey who is a former director of the CIA is now an adviser to the Trump administration - before he became an adviser to Trump, he said to me in an interview that very often the first information that a president receives is wrong. And we’ve seen that beginning all the way from Vietnam up to the present day. And part of the sort of crucial patience that’s required is the ability to both wait until you have a fuller picture and then also be prepared to act. But if you act on the basis of limited information, history suggests to us that we would have made a lot of catastrophic choices.

[...]

DAVIES: You know, last year, you wrote about white nationalist groups that have embraced Trump, and they feel he’s expanded their reach, given them some legitimacy and, of course, since the election there have been some very troubling cases of swastikas, racist graffiti, some assaults racist hate speech. You know, some would see this as just a fringe that is an embarrassment to most Republicans and conservatives I’m wondering what you make of this and what the impact will be of Trump being in the White House?

OSNOS: Well, in some ways, this was a storyline that I think people who generally covered politics didn’t initially embrace, you know, the idea that somehow the alt-right or the white nationalist world would be even talked about in a discussion of an incoming presidential. It was so ludicrous that we didn’t even really do it. And then it just became very clear early on in the Trump campaign that they were a part of this phenomenon. The neo-Nazi website endorsed him for president 12 days after he announced. And later you follow it all the way through 20 months later. He was endorsed by the newspaper the KKK. Steve Bannon has been - who is now chief strategist in the White House - has been really the sort of principal thinker in terms of how do you take ideas that exist way out on the far right and get them in front of people’s eyes that are more conventional readers?

And at Breitbart, that’s really what he did. He sort of - it became the platform for the alt-right. When I spoke on Election Day to a white nationalist leader named Matthew Heimbach as the sort of results became clear, I said, you know, how are you feeling? And he said vindicated. And what he said was that this campaign and that the victory of Donald Trump has shown that there is an appetite out there for his ideas, even if people can’t quite bring themselves to say so.

You know, I just have to say, I mean, this was so preposterous that we’d be talking about this a couple of years ago, that it’s a reminder of how much politics have changed and been changed by the candidacy of Donald Trump. Now, look, how that actually translates into a White House, we don’t yet know. But Steve Bannon is now a couple of steps from the Oval Office, and that’s - we’re in uncharted territory there.

DAVIES: Evan Osnos, thanks so much for speaking with us.

OSNOS: Thanks for having me, Dave.

Former Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton listens as rival and US Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a presidential primary debate in Flint, Michigan, March 6, 2016. (Photo by Reuters)

That such a lame and Red Leftist candidate as (((Bernie Sanders))) could have been a viable candidate - viz., the issue being raised through one credible poll that he would have beaten Trump handily - goes to show that there could be popular support for a White Left platform. It further indicates that there was a game being played with Hillary-Sanders-Trump to preclude the emergence of the White Left.

Press TV

“US Senator Bernie Sanders could have defeated Trump: Poll”, 13 Nov 2016:

Bernie Sanders would have defeated Donald Trump in the presidential election by a large margin if he had been the Democratic presidential nominee instead of Hillary Clinton, according to a pre-election poll.

Sanders, one of the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, would have received 56 percent of the vote for the White House, while Trump would have won 44 percent, according to a national survey conducted by Gravis Marketing two days before the November 8 presidential election.

Moreover, independent voters, who made up about 30 percent of American voters this year, favored Sanders over Trump, 55 percent to 45 percent, the poll found.

Clinton, by contrast, lost independent voters to Trump by six percentage points, according to exit polls.

According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls from May 6 to June 5, Sanders was supported by 50 percent of voters, compared to Trump’s 39 percent, an 11-point advantage.

During an interview in May, Sanders acknowledged his advantage over Trump: “Right now, in every major poll, national poll and statewide poll done in the last month, six weeks, we are defeating Trump often by big numbers, and always at a larger margin than secretary Clinton is.”

Those polls were of course based on a hypothetical scenario, five months from Election Day. However, Sanders’ popularity among young and working-class voters might have led to an election victory; voters that Trump ultimately won.

Emails released by Wikileaks have revealed that officials from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) sought to undermine Sanders’ bid to win the party’s 2016 presidential nomination.

Sanders’ supporters argue that Clinton’s loss could be attributed to her reluctance to fully focus on America’s vast economic inequality and tougher regulations on US financial markets.

Sanders, 75, has not ruled out the possibility of another presidential bid.

Numerous polls taken before the presidential election showed that Clinton and Trump were deeply unpopular politicians, while Sanders enjoyed very high popularity.

Clinton, a former first lady, US senator and secretary of state, was viewed by many voters as a corrupt member of the elite Washington establishment

Independent, “How does the electoral college work in the US election? And is it really the best system?”, 8 Nov 2016:

A run-down of how the American president will be elected and why it matters

Map of how many electoral votes each state has to cast. 270 to Win

With polling showing the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is tight, the way in which the votes are counted is crucial.

Here is a run-down of the US Electoral College voting system and why it matters so much.

How does the Electoral College system work?

The US president is not directly chosen by voters, but by ‘electors’ that people in a state vote for.

The more people in a state, the more electors an area has. For example, Texas has a population of 25 million and is afforded 38 Electoral College votes, while Delaware has a population of 936,000 and has only three votes.

There are 538 electors in total, corresponding to 435 members of Congress, 100 Senators and three additional electors for the District of Columbia. They will meet in their respective states on 19 December to ultimately elect the President.

Why is the Electoral College in place?

The system was established to ensure regional balance — it makes it mathematically impossible for a candidate with large amounts of support in just one region to overwhelm the vote.

What are the criticisms of the Electoral College?

It renders safe states almost irrelevant to the result of the election: for example it does not matter if Ms Clinton wins a state by five or 40 per cent, she will still get the same number of Electoral College votes.

Five states can vote to legalize marijuana on Election Day

Instead, the result hinges on a handful of states that are politically divided, which some say is undemocratic.

The swing states have a lot of power because most of them choose to elect whoever is the state-wide winner, regardless of the margin they won by.

If Mr Trump wins or loses by a tiny fraction in Florida, for example, all 29 votes flip depending on it.

Analysts also say the system favours smaller and more rural states, since the minimum number of electors a state can have is three — so states with very small populations are over-represented.

And the system technically allows the electors to hijack the result, since it is not certain the electors will vote the way their state does.

Although around 30 of the 50 states have passed laws – meaning their electors must vote according to the popular vote in their state – the punishment for not doing so can merely be a fine. This means they could potentially defy the electorate’s choice.

Almost every state chooses to allocate all its Electoral College votes to whoever comes in first place statewide, regardless of their margin of victory.

Whoever gets to 270 electoral votes first – the majority of the 578 total votes – will win the election.

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