No Q&A; Public Art and Democracy; Why Trump Loves Xi Jinping
As always with autocrats, it's all about money and power
Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Thank you for your support. Lucid is now read in all 50 U.S. states and in 148 countries. Onward with the fight against autocracy!
A reminder that there will be no Q&A today because I am traveling to England to visit my mother. We'll gather on Jan. 12, 1-2pmET, and our guest will be Mohamad Bazzi. A former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday, he has covered Middle East conflicts such as the Iraq war, the Intifada, and the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. He is now Director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and an associate professor of journalism at NYU. We will discuss the Israel-Hamas war and the crisis in Gaza. If you’d like to join these weekly Q&As, you can sign up as a paying subscriber or upgrade to paid here:
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The new revelations about the $7.8 million Donald Trump’s business entities received from 20 foreign countries, over $5 million of that coming from Chinese government and state-controlled companies, should be at the center of Democratic messaging.
As I pointed out in this video I released a few days earlier, Trump doesn’t just hold up dictatorship in general as a model form of governance for Americans: he has repeatedly praised Communist dictators such as Xi Jinping (and post-Communists such as Vladimir Putin, who is busy putting up statues to his hero Stalin), despite marketing himself as the savior of America from…Communism and socialism.
Trump truly admires autocrats for their abilities to get away with crime —getting away with crime has been Trump’s life mission— but, as we see from the millions China has invested in him, there is another reason he is so openly admiring of Xi. And this is wholly in keeping with the autocrat’s transactional mentality: it is not about left or right, but about accumulating money and power.
The foreign payments story makes this 2017 work by artist Robin Bell, “Pay Bribes Here,” projected on the facade of Trump International Hotel, newly relevant. Here is an NPR article about Bell, and here is my spring 2021 interview with Bell on the importance of public art in protecting democratic values and denouncing corruption.
If you missed this week’s essay about the role of sons-in-law in autocratic corruption operations, here it is. It covers Mussolini, Orban, Erdogan, Mobutu, and Trump.
I’m off to the airport soon, but will be back in the following days with a post about the anniversary of Jan. 6 and Biden’s speech on democracy.
Stay safe and stay lucid,
Ruth
Safe travel and thank you for all you do.
Ruth,
Travel safely and come back soon! Many are counting on you to help us thru this nightmare.