Trump 35: Still an Asshole to Everyone but Ivanka

[Cartmann99]

Prediction time:

The next time that Puerto Rico requests assistance, Trump is going to announce that all aid will be withheld until officials admit that they fraudulently increased the death toll numbers in an attempt to make Trump look bad.

 

 

 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

The more I see of this guy, the more I like him.

 

[Cartmann99]

Rick Scott is gonna get some hate mail from the Trumphumpers:

 

[fraurosena]

San Juan's mayor responding to the presiduncial tweets denying 3000 deaths in Puerto Rico.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

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[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump really hates apologizing for misogyny and racism. New reporting explains why."

Spoiler

President Trump does not believe that people — that white men like himself — should have to apologize for their public displays of misogyny or racism. But this isn’t simply because he doesn’t want to give ground to critics out of stubbornness or a fear of displaying weakness.

Rather, the refusal to apologize for these things is itself a political statement, even a statement of values. And you can bet that many of his supporters hear it in precisely this way.

The Post has a remarkable piece of reporting today that gets inside Trump’s refusal to admit error about anything, ever. Trump insists the response to Hurricane Maria was impeccable, even though nearly 3,000 people died. He asserts that firing his former FBI director in an effort to obstruct an investigation into himself was correct, even though it led to a special counsel and has put him in serious legal and/or political jeopardy.

Trump’s aides believe this is largely rooted in his penchant for nonstop salesmanship and hyperbole, and his certainty that his voters will swallow whatever he tells them. As the Post piece puts it, Trump “tells senior aides that his supporters will believe his version of events.”

This once again displays Trump’s seething contempt for his own voters’ intelligence. But beyond this, on certain occasions when this happens, something even uglier than that is at work. The Post piece contains this revelation:

He has also complained that aides publicly admitted mistakes earlier this year over their handling of allegations that former White House staff secretary Rob Porter was emotionally and physically abusive toward his two ex-wives. “You should have never apologized,” he told a group of communications aides, according to two people. “You don’t ever apologize.”

You don’t ever apologize, even for failing to perform due diligence on a very senior administration official’s repeated alleged incidents of domestic abuse. But why don’t you ever apologize?

No apology

Bob Woodward’s book, “Fear,” provides insight into Trump’s instincts in this regard. Trump’s highest profile offer of something approaching an apology came after he blamed “many sides” for the white supremacist violence and murder in Charlottesville. Under pressure from aides, Trump then gave a second speech condemning anti-black racism more directly, decrying the “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.”

But as Woodward recounts, Trump privately chafed at doing this. When a top adviser showed him a draft of that second speech, Trump said: “This doesn’t feel right to me.” The adviser concluded, as Woodward puts it, that Trump didn’t want to “bend to political correctness.”

This reluctance to bend to political correctness was also on display at another very critical moment: After the news broke during the campaign that Trump had been caught on the “Access Hollywood” video boasting of committing sexual assault with impunity. With his campaign in temporary collapse, Trump did release a video message apologizing, albeit in a tone that had the air of a forced confession.

But Woodward’s reporting suggests that this didn’t remotely reflect his real sentiments. Woodward recounts a remarkable episode in which Trump and his advisers debated whether he should do a TV interview and reiterate his apology. His advisers handed him language in which he would admit that his vile language (which included boasting about grabbing women by the “p—y”) was “not acceptable for a president.”

But Trump exploded. “I can’t do this,” he raged. “This is weak. You guys are weak.” Once elected, Trump even took to suggesting that the voice on the tape wasn’t his.

Trump will not capitulate to political correctness

Trump’s refusal to capitulate to the forces of political correctness led him to refuse to back off amid multiple other high-profile displays of racism and bigotry. Trump refused to admit error, and even doubled down, after falsely claiming that “thousands and thousands” of U.S. Muslims had celebrated 9/11.

Then there’s Trump’s birtherism. After spending years spreading the racist conspiracy theory that the nation’s first black president didn’t belong in the White House because he isn’t American, Trump finally admitted the truth. But he falsely blamed Hillary Clinton for hatching the claim and took credit for forcing Obama to reveal his birth certificate, like a sheriff who had thrown a perp against the wall and shaken loose his papers.

Trump views racial discord as a positive — the more of it, the better. The whole point is deliberate provocation, both out of genuine racist conviction and the belief that it tightens his political bond with his supporters. Trump pardoned racist Joe Arpaio as “a way of pleasing his political base.” He revived his attacks on football players for protesting racism because this “revs up his political base.” After Trump deliberately stoked racial discord after Charlottesville, Stephen K. Bannon subsequently said it would be a political winner for the president.

The refusal to capitulate to demands for contrition for the original racist or misogynist sentiment isn’t an act of stubbornness. It is active validation of the sentiment itself. The refusal to back down is itself the political statement.

The political theorist Martha Nussbaum has urged us to see the debate over “political correctness” in light of the cosmopolitanism first elaborated by the ancients, that is, the idea that through reason we can come to treat one another, regardless of background, as having equal worth by virtue of our respective “moral affiliation” with “rational humanity.” Nussbaum argues that the sneering at “political correctness” really amounts to a declaration that we do not have any “duty” to put in the intellectual, political and societal work necessary to counter or ease “racism, sexism, and other divisive passions” that militate against tolerance and humanism, in ourselves or in others.

What Trump basically declares again and again, in one form or another, is that those who demand resistance to our basest and most divisive and hateful instincts should just shut up and stop ruining all the fun. Instead, by all means, go ahead and revel in them — without apology.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The diminishing magic of Donald Trump"

Spoiler

Imagine the following magic trick: You are seated at a table. Your only prop is a lighter. You pick it up, and with a flourish of your left hand display it to the audience. With your eyes trained on the lighter, you light it, and a large flame shoots upward. You flick the lighter off, close it in a fist, and then seem to pass it across your body to your right hand with another flourish. When you open your right fist, you quickly snap the fingers of your hand, and presto, the lighter has magically disappeared.

But not really: When you turned the lighter off, and before you passed it across your chest to close it in your fist, you simply, and in plain view, dropped it into your lap. It was easy to see for anyone who bothered to look, but almost all of your audience missed it. Why? That is the question studied by a new field of science that studies what magic can teach us about neuroscience and psychology, and it has some relevance for understanding Donald Trump, particularly the question of why he has survived and even thrived with the support of almost 40 percent of the country.

In other words, the science of magic may help us answer the daily question posed by the Trump presidency: “How does he get away with it?”

The particular trick outlined above comes from a talk by Gustav Kuhn, a cognitive psychologist at the University of London. He asks, “Why do people fail to see such obvious events?” According to Kuhn, magicians don’t use sleight of hand to deceive their audiences; rather, they use “misdirection . . . to manipulate your attention so as to prevent (you) from seeing really obvious events.” How magicians do this is interesting; it has to do with how the eye is only able to focus on a narrow point in a field of vision, so as the eye follows the magician’s movements, it misses what’s happening out of field.

But that’s not all: The brain itself, in order to make sense of all the stimuli bombarding it, has become masterful at shutting out the irrelevant (in this case, the hand that supposedly no longer holds the lighter) so that it can keep track of the hand that supposedly does. Pickpocket artist Apollo Robbins, who also publishes in neuroscience journals, refers to this as “inattentional blindness,” which occurs when the brain is focusing so intently on some irrelevant thing, like a question or a movement, that it fails to see the wallet leaving the inside pocket or the watch clipped off the wrist.

Now let’s consider Trump in this context. Think of his constant tweets, rallies and press avails as misdirections. Take two recent examples: Bob Woodward’s new book and the New York Times op-ed from an unnamed “senior official” in the Trump White House.  In the former instance, Trump calls Woodward, the dean of investigative journalists, a Democratic hack; in the latter, he says he is going to have his Justice Department find and prosecute the writer(s) of the op-ed.

These kinds of comments are like a magician’s manipulations, designed to concentrate the eye and attention away from the things Trump doesn’t want you to see. What Trump wants to obscure with this trick, of course, is that many on his senior staff think he is incompetent and ill-suited to hold the office. This, of course, is the exhausting pattern of Trump’s behavior as president. As he systematically rolls back environmental protections, undermines the rule of law, diminishes our ability to have allies in the world or makes the situation in North Korea even more dangerous, we fail to see or fully appreciate their significance because he has distracted us.

There are signs, however, that more members of the audience are on to Trump’s magic. A number of recent polls have his approval ratings dropping beneath what seemed to be a solid floor of support. More people are starting to see how Trump distracts and deceives. In the example of the magician and the disappearing lighter, Kuhn performed the trick twice in front of a TEDx audience. The first time most people in the audience followed his hands and missed the drop.  The second time, however, they watched more intently, and this time they clearly saw the deception.

That kind of attentiveness could ruin Trump’s act.

 

[fraurosena]

She's no hypocrite, and she's not mincing words about her disdain for the presidunce either. 

Hispanic Caucus chair declines Trump White House invite

Quote

Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) Chair Michelle Lujan Grisham sent a letter to President Trump Thursday rejecting an invitation to a reception honoring Hispanic Heritage Month.

Lujan Grisham, who is also the Democratic nominee for governor in New Mexico, slammed some of the White House’s policies and Trump's rhetoric. 

“During your presidential campaign and as president, you demonized and dehumanized the Hispanic community and spread fear and untruths.

Members of both parties criticized Trump on Thursday for denying on Twitter that nearly 3,000 people died after two hurricanes and saying that the number.

The president said the number was done "by Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible."

Lujan Grisham criticized Trump's tweets about the hurricanes and his rhetoric about immigration.

"You have ignored and recently tweeted lies about the devastation and loss of life in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, compared immigration to an infestation, and attacked a judge because of his Hispanic heritage," she wrote. "That rhetoric is not only unbecoming of the President of the United States; it has no place in American political discourse."

“We are not a nation of fear, cruelty, division, or prejudice.  We are a nation of dignity, humanity, tolerance, and hope, and those shared, essential values transcend our political differences,” she added.

Grisham also specifically attacked the administration’s undermining of the Obama-era DACA program that granted legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to America as children.

Critics have claimed that the White House focused more on hurricanes as they struck states such as Texas and Florida than it did when they struck Puerto Rico.

Here's a link to her letter. I recommend you read it in it's entirety, as the article above does not do it justice as much as it could.

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[47of74]

On 9/14/2018 at 8:02 AM, fraurosena said:

She's no hypocrite, and she's not mincing words about her disdain for the presidunce either. 

Hispanic Caucus chair declines Trump White House invite

Here's a link to her letter. I recommend you read it in it's entirety, as the article above does not do it justice as much as it could.

That is a damn good letter.  And she managed to say all this with a few less fucks than what I would have used to that orange son of a bitch.  If it was me responding to him news networks couldn't show the letter on TV because of the various naughty words spread throughout the letter, and the fucks at Faux News would clutch the pearls so tightly they'd crush them.

[GreyhoundFan]

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 IDK what this video is but it looks like the black man purposefully avoids contaminating himself 

[fraurosena]

Wow. What a surprisingly tame reaction to Manafort’s plea deal. Nothing he hasn’t said before, no new alternatieve facts, and no all caps. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Man Not Smart 

 

 He would be so lost without Fox