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Trump 42: Racist In Chief


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"‘He always doubles down’: Inside the political crisis caused by Trump’s racist tweets"

Spoiler

President Trump’s own top aides didn’t think he fully understood what he had done last Sunday, when he fired off a trio of racist tweets before a trip to his golf course.

After he returned to the White House, senior adviser Kellyanne Conway felt compelled to tell him why the missives were leading newscasts around the country, upsetting allies and enraging opponents. Calling on four minority congresswomen — all citizens, three born in the United States ­­— to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” had hit a painful historical nerve.

Trump defended himself. He had been watching “Fox & Friends” after waking up. He wanted to elevate the congresswomen, as he had previously discussed with aides. The Democratic lawmakers — Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — were good foils, he had told his advisers, including campaign manager Brad Parscale. The president said he thought he was interjecting himself into Democratic Party politics in a good way. 

As is often the case, Trump acted alone — impulsively following his gut to the dark side of American politics, and now the country would have to pick up the pieces. The day before, on the golf course, he hadn’t brought it up. Over the coming days, dozens of friends, advisers and political allies would work behind the scenes to try to fix the mess without any public admission of error because that was not the Trump way.

“He realized that part of it was not playing well,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump confidant, who golfed Saturday with the president and spoke to him about it on Monday. “Well, he always doubles down. Then he adjusts.”

Like others, Graham urged Trump to reframe away from the racist notion at the core of the tweets — that only European immigrants or their descendants are entitled to criticize the country. Advisers wrote new talking points and handed him reams of opposition research on the four congresswomen. Pivot to patriotism. Focus on their ideas and behavior, not identity. Some would still see a racist agenda, the argument went, but at least it would not be so explicit. 

“The goal is to push back against them and make it not about you,” Graham said. 

The damage control did not save elected Republicans from their chronic struggle to navigate Trump’s excesses. Democrats were demanding a reckoning, a vote on the floor of the House condemning his racist remarks that would showcase their own unity and moral vision. The White House would mobilize an intense whip operation, putting Trump repeatedly on the phone, to keep his members in line. 

Then, just as many felt the firestorm was coming under control, Trump’s own supporters would set it ablaze again, with a “Send her back!” chant at a Wednesday night rally in Greenville, N.C., inspired by the president’s own words.

This account of Trump’s tweets and their aftermath is based on interviews with 26 White House aides, advisers, lawmakers and others involved in the response — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share behind-the-scenes details.

The political crisis was both familiar and extraordinary — engulfing every aspect of American politics, from the presidential campaign to the White House to Capitol Hill. Many in both parties, well acquainted with Trump’s history of racially charged rhetoric, were stunned at how far he had gone this time. Republicans were fearful of the potential damage but reluctant to confront or contradict Trump. The White House and the Trump campaign sought to contain the furor without alienating key supporters. Democrats finally unified after a week of squabbling to roundly condemn the president.

And at key moments, there were attempts to pretend it hadn’t happened at all. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) talked to Trump early in the week about ongoing budget negotiations, the tweets never even came up, according to two people familiar with the communication.

In the end, Trump succeeded in at least one respect. Just a few days earlier, he had publicly pined for the days when he could put out a tweet that took off “like a rocket.” Now he had done it again. Americans had to choose sides, and he had drawn the dividing line. 

'Making America white again'

When Trump woke up to tweet on July 14, the nation’s leadership was scattered, its attention focused elsewhere.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was out of state. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had flown back home to San Francisco. The leaders of the House Republican Caucus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Steve Scalise (La.), were at a fundraising retreat at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Pennsylvania.

Of the group, only Pelosi, who sleeps just a handful of hours most nights, acted quickly. Trump’s tweets landed about 4:30 a.m. on the West Coast. Within three hours, just as Trump was arriving at his Virginia golf club, she had condemned his words on Twitter, calling out the racial tone directly, saying Trump’s “plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”  

Trump’s eruption gave her a chance to move beyond an irritating, and increasingly personal, split with the four congresswomen. They had been furious when Pelosi and the rest of the House Democratic Caucus declined to follow their guidance on a recent immigration funding vote. Now they were united.

At a joint news conference by the four lawmakers late Monday, Omar said Trump’s tweets represented “the agenda of white nationalists.”

Democratic candidates for president reacted quickly with outrage and offered support for the embattled House lawmakers.

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), the child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, told her campaign staff that she had been targeted by the same “go home” attack. In an emotional response at an Iowa event Tuesday, Harris said Trump had “defiled” his office and “it has to stop.”

“I am going to tell you what my mother told me: ‘Don’t you ever let anyone tell you who you are. You tell them who you are. Period,’ ” Harris said, growing visibly angry as she spoke. “We are Americans, and we will speak with the authority of that voice.”

Trump’s own campaign, by contrast, was caught off guard by the tweets and didn’t know initially how to respond. Top aides had been bragging about their ability to fundraise and capitalize on social media advertising when the president blew up the news cycle. But they placed no Facebook ads to ride this wave. The Republican National Committee was silent for more than a day. No one wanted to touch it, advisers said.

“People have been through so many of these with him,” said one Republican involved in the fight.

Cliff Sims, a former West Wing aide to Trump, explained the mentality that still governs the building. “The people who thrive and survive over the long term are the ones who are okay with going where the president leads,” he said.

But as the workweek began, it became clear that the uproar could not be ignored. A person involved in the president’s fundraising effort said many donors were dismayed by the comments — but that there was scant desire to back away from the president publicly. 

“You put your head up, and you get it cut off,” this person said. “And then everyone remembers you weren’t loyal when this blows over.” 

Many Republican lawmakers demurred or tried to find a middle ground, avoiding direct criticism of Trump while nonetheless expressing face-saving dissatisfaction. “We should focus on ways to bring people together,” said Sen. Cory Gardner, who faces a tough reelection race next year in Colorado.

Inside the weekly Republican lunch on Tuesday, GOP leaders tried to avoid direct references to Trump’s racist comments. McConnell repeated a phrase famously uttered by the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a figure he reveres: “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people.”

One effusive Trump ally, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), spoke up in defense of Trump inside the lunch, ticking off a litany of conservative grievances against the left, such as their attacks against immigration enforcement and comments perceived as anti-Semitic. 

“Let’s not lose sight of, frankly, the radical views that are coming out of the House,” Daines said in an interview, describing his message to the other Republican senators. 

Still, other GOP senators were uneasy. At a minimum, it was “dumb politics,” said one senior GOP senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the president’s tweet. 

Two of the harshest Republican pushbacks came, tellingly, from the only two elected black Republicans serving in Congress. Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) called the tweets “racially offensive.” 

“There is no room in America for racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and hate,” said Rep. Will Hurd (Tex.). 

'Stay there and fight'

By midday Monday, the Republican battle to minimize the damage was unfolding on two fronts. The first was an effort to get Trump to shift his message, without admitting a mistake. The goal, said one senior White House aide, was to “get the message back to a place where we could defend the president.”

The idea was to argue that the four congresswomen hated America and were welcome to leave for that reason. There were other lines of attack as well. Omar had been condemned earlier in the year for comments criticizing support for Israel that many Democrats considered anti-Semitic. Pressley had seemed to suggest a racial litmus test for politics, saying Democrats don’t need “any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” 

Privately, allies of the president said there was advantage in elevating “the Squad,” a term the lawmakers had adopted for themselves that Republicans have derided. They hoped to use the feud to portray reelecting the president as the patriotic thing to do.

“We’re talking about four congresswomen that have pretty extreme views,” Graham said. “If that’s the face of the Democratic Party, we’re in pretty good shape.”

On Capitol Hill, Republican leaders settled on a similar way to frame the disaster. 

“I want to make absolutely clear that our opposition to our socialist colleagues has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion or with their race,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), chair of the House Republican Conference. 

Democrats, by now, were focused on making sure the nation did not forget Trump’s original message. Pelosi had begun working on a resolution of disapproval Sunday night in conversations with Reps. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.) and Tom Malinowski (N.J.). They had already introduced a resolution in April condemning white-supremacist terrorism, which was now repurposed.

But first they had to manage an unruly caucus, which began to jockey over the resolution’s language. At least one member pushed for a more aggressive resolution that would censure Trump. Another proposed inserting language commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. 

The White House vote-counters initially feared as many as 50 Republicans might defect to support the resolution, and Trump ordered an all-hands White House effort to keep the GOP caucus together. White House aides told allies on the Hill that it was okay to criticize Trump, as long as they didn’t vote with Democrats.

Trump was obsessed with the vote tally and received regular briefings. Aides fed him a constant stream of lawmaker reactions and put him on the phone with several lawmakers. He told his team to tell any wafflers that he loves America and that they needed to pick sides. Trump called McCarthy to cancel an immigration meeting planned at the White House on Tuesday. 

“Stay there and fight,” he told McCarthy.

Vice President Pence also worked the phones, telling Republican members not to fall for a Democratic trap.

In the end, only four Republicans broke ranks, including Hurd. Key members from districts where Trump’s “go back” message would play terribly stuck with the president. They included two members from New York, John Katko and Elise Stefanik, and Mario Diaz-Balart, the son of Cuban immigrants, whose Florida district is 76 percent Hispanic. 

“A statement does not make one racist,” he told reporters.

'I'm sick of this mess'

While they lobbied in private, Republican leaders also began looking for a way to regain the narrative in public, at least in a way that could play with the conservative base.

When Pelosi came to the floor to read the words of the resolution, calling Trump’s comments racist — not Trump himself, despite what Diaz-Balart argued — Republicans saw an opening. 

Their vehicle was an obscure text, Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, a rule book that had governed the House floor since 1837. Based on old British traditions of respecting the king, an updated version of the manual specifically said the president could not be accused of making a racist statement, regardless of the accuracy of the allegation.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) — a United Methodist pastor and respected figure in the caucus — was up on the dais, tasked specifically by Pelosi to manage the debate. The chamber seemed close to finishing without incident when Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.) stood up to ask that Pelosi’s words be struck from the record by the parliamentarian.

Flashing through the Missouri congressman’s mind as he grew frustrated with Republican maneuvers were times he had been subjected to the same racist trope the president had tweeted, he said in an interview.

“I’m sick of this mess,” Cleaver recalled thinking. “In theology, we say the devil has two favorite tools: disunity and division. . . . I see people running around, the devil running around here, having fun. . . . I’m just thinking he’s just having a ball and using people to get delight.”

So, Cleaver announced, “I abandon the chair,” dropped the gavel and abruptly left the dais. 

It didn’t matter that the president himself had said Pelosi’s response to him was “racist” just a day earlier, or that House rules still allowed the sentiment to be passed into law. Republicans finally had a way to cast themselves as the victims of an out-of-control Democratic leadership.

“Democrats are just so blinded by their hatred of the president that they use every single tool at their disposal to harass him,” said Chris Pack, communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “And it’s getting really pathetic.” 

'We find a way'

By the time Trump landed in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday evening, the mood had lifted in the White House, and Republicans believed the worst was behind them. A White House aide urged the traveling press pool to be sure to “tune in” to the rally, implying it was not something they would want to miss. 

“You can take issue with his tactics,” said Josh Holmes, a close adviser to McConnell. “But the reality is that there is no political figure in memory who consistently saddles his opponents with unwinnable arguments quite like President Trump.” 

But the nuance of Trump’s shifts all week had been lost on many in the crowd of thousands at the East Carolina University auditorium. Midway through his speech, as he recounted his denunciation of Omar’s record, the crowd began to chant “Send her back!” — a paraphrase of his own tweeted “go back.”

He paused for about 13 seconds to let the chants wash over him. 

Back in Washington, and even for some Republicans in the room, it was a nightmare scenario suggesting that the nativism at the heart of Trump’s Sunday tweet — that nonwhite citizens had less claim on the country — would soon become a fixture of the campaign. 

The following morning, Republican leaders, including McCarthy and Cheney, huddled at the vice president’s residence to figure out how to deal with the danger of the chant catching on. Pence agreed to take the matter to the president.  

Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group that had hosted Trump at its convention in April, also spoke out. The chants, he wrote on Twitter, were “vile” and “have no place in our society.”

Others in the White House began to reconsider the emerging strategy of using Omar’s record as a rallying cry for the base.

Trump agreed to say the chants were wrong — but few thought that would be the end of it.

Indeed, by Friday, he was attacking the four lawmakers again, suggesting that no criticism of the country should be tolerated and praising the rally chanters he had distanced himself from just a day earlier. “Those are incredible people. Those are incredible patriots,” he said.

There was little sign, in other words, that Trump had been cowed by the week’s experience.

At one point during the North Carolina rally, the president mused about Pressley’s remarks on race, which he characterized as thinking “that people with the same skin color all need to think the same.”

“And just this week — can you imagine if I said that? It would be over, right?” Trump continued. “. . . But we would find a way to survive, right? We always do. Here we are. Here we are. We find a way. Got to always find a way.”

 

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Misogynist-in-Chief: "What do ‘Lock her up’ and ‘Send her back’ have in common? It’s pretty obvious."

Spoiler

Send her back.

For the past three days, the phrase has been repeated so much on the news that it can sound divorced of meaning. We could be talking about an irate customer who has demanded to be escorted to a manager; we could be talking about a poorly cooked lobster. Send her back, bring more clarified butter while I wait .

It’s so plausibly innocuous — there’s not a naughty word in the bunch — which is what ultimately makes it so cunning. You can utter the sentence without sounding like you’re directly slandering someone and yet, in doing so, slander many people.

What made “Send her back” such a horrifying chant was not how specific it was but how generic. It was not only that it targeted a sitting member of Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is an American citizen. It was that, at President Trump’s rally this week, we saw the dramatic unveiling of a castigation that could now be used against any woman not behaving as she should.

Send who? Send her.

“Send her back” is the granddaughter of “Lock her up,” the chant that populated Trump rallies in 2016 and beyond. For awhile, that phrase also seemed specific and personal, uniquely designed for Hillary Clinton, who, as had been recently revealed, ill-advisedly used a private server for official government business.

In that context, “Lock her up” seemed to be about that woman and that incident, at that moment in time.

But then the chant resurfaced, and it wasn’t in reference to Clinton. It was in reference to Christine Blasey Ford, the professor who accused then-Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were teenagers. From another rally podium, the president mocked her testimony and reprimanded her for leaving Kavanaugh’s life in “tatters.” “Lock her up,” the crowd chanted in response.

At another rally a week later, the chant morphed into an attack on Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whom the president accused of leaking documents to the media. “That’s another beauty,” the president sardonically said of Feinstein, and his fans called back, “Lock her up!”

Lock up who? Lock up her.

The “her” had become fungible. Any woman could become a woman who should be locked up; it required only running afoul of what Trump thought she should be doing.

“It’s meant as a deterrent to all women,” said Linda Hirshman, author of “Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment,” when I asked how she thought these slogans worked. “You’re intended to feel vulnerable and be deterred from the...behavior of disagreeing with him.”

I took the same question to a cognitive linguist/philosopher, George Lakoff. “ ‘Send her back’ has the same grammatical structure as ‘Lock her up,’ and the same sound structure — it’s very straightforward,” he said. “And it has virtually the same meaning.”

Lakoff said there was significance in the fact that both chants dispensed with names in favor of pronouns. The pronouns make these women into “not a person,” he said. “She’s this thing that’s out there that should not be paid attention to — that should be gotten rid of.”

On Thursday, the president said he had been unhappy with the chant — though if he’d truly disapproved, it would have been easy to correct on the spot, as Sen. John McCain did when one of his supporters referred to Barack Obama as “an Arab” at a town hall. Instead, Trump “paused to savor it for several seconds before continuing his speech,” noted Jennifer Sclafani, a linguist who studies political discourse and gender. “He even thrice nodded his head back and forth in time with the chant, as if to prod the audience on.”

And, of course, the wording of the chant was cribbed from one of the president’s tweets: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he’d written.

“They” weren’t named in the tweet, just as they weren’t named in the chants. He had shorthanded his targets as “ ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen,” leaving followers to determine that he was likely referring to four women known colloquially as “the Squad” — a whole bunch of hers who had made it their business to criticize him. It’s worth noting, as many have, that these were all women of color and that the chant reserved for Omar was even more antagonistic than the one used for Hillary Clinton. “Lock her up” implies she should be prosecuted under the American legal system; “Send her back” implies she’s not even deserving of due process, that she doesn’t belong here anyway.

On the same day that an arena full of North Carolinians were screaming, “Send her back!” video footage surfaced of the president attending a 1992 party with Jeffrey Epstein, surrounded by cheerleaders for the Buffalo Bills. He laughed, he danced, he flirted with clusters of partying blondes.

At first blush, the two events seemed like opposite ends of the spectrum. Here was the president on stage, basking in the hatred flung toward one group of women. Here was the president on the dance floor, bestowing affection on another.

At one point in the short clip, he posed for a photograph with a cluster of women and then patted one of them on the butt with the same absentmindedness one might use on the rump of a dairy cow before sending her along.

It was a quick pat, barely notable. But it’s what I was thinking of, a few hours later, while watching footage of the rally. The pat had the same kind of dehumanization as did the chants about Ilhan Omar or Hillary Clinton or Christine Blasey Ford. The “good” women, in his book, are rewarded with pats, like pets. The bad ones are punished with prison or deportation, like criminals.

We could think of exceptions to this brutal dichotomy, of course. His daughter Ivanka, or Kellyanne Conway, or Nikki Haley, or Jeanine Pirro, the reality TV judge who has joined the president in maligning Omar. But, in general, his relationships with women are three-syllable ones, easily distilled into chants.

Send her back.

Lock her up.

Pat her butt.

They’re all part of the same world, where women are either cheerleaders to grab or insolent shrews to be put in their place. What they don’t often seem to be, in his mind, is real people.

 

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:laughing-rofl: 

We all know he’s going to be glued to the television, live-tweeting his comments!

 

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[mention=20845]GreyhoundFan[/mention], sorry to nitpick, but I think this is #42.


Yeah I noticed too but then again there’s so much fuckery that orange SOB causes it’s easy to loose track.

Speaking of fuck face someone had a perfect response to him.



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GIF placed under spoiler. Warning: it's the most recent nauseating crap from McNaughton.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited by GreyhoundFan
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5 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

GIF placed under spoiler. Warning: it's the most recent nauseating crap from McNaughton.

  Hide contents

 

 

WTF is he doing to that flag? It looks rather... ?

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Sweet Rufus.

 

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Apparently, WaPo hit a raw nerve there.

Because yes, Trump, it most certainly does sound like you!

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4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Apparently, WaPo hit a raw nerve there.

Because yes, Trump, it most certainly does sound like you!

I'm sure they wrote new talking points, but I'm inclined to think he may be telling an exceptionally rare truth in regard to the reams of opposition research. A board book, with lots of pictures, maybe? But "reams of research" would be an absolute waste of time. He doesn't read anything longer than a tweet. I doubt he actually read the whole article in the paper, actually - more likely it was read to him or he was given a one-sentence summary.

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Racist in Chief indeed.

Donald Trump proposed a ‘blacks against whites’ season of The Apprentice in radio interview

Quote

[audio]

For the fourth season of “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump searched for a gimmick to bolster ratings. His idea was simple if explosive — pit an all-white team against an all-black team.

“Do you like it?” he asked, previewing the concept on Howard Stern’s radio show in April 2005.

“Yes,” Mr. Stern said.

“Do you like it?” Mr. Trump asked Robin Quivers, the African-American co-host.

“Well,” she said, “I think you’re going to have a riot.”

That gave Mr. Trump no pause. “It would be the highest-rated show on television,” he exulted.

Long before he ignited a firestorm by telling four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries, even though three were born in the United States and all are citizens, Mr. Trump sought to pit Americans against one another along racial lines.

Over decades in business, entertainment and now politics, Mr. Trump has approached America’s racial, ethnic and religious divisions opportunistically, not as the nation’s wounds to be healed but as openings to achieve his goals, whether they be ratings, fame, money or power, without regard for adverse consequences.

He was accused by government investigators in the 1970s of refusing to rent apartments to black tenants (he denied it but settled the case) and made a name for himself in the 1980s by championing the return of the death penalty when five black and Hispanic teenagers were charged with raping a jogger. They were later exonerated. He threatened to sell his Mar-a-Lago estate to the Unification Church in 1991 and unleash “thousands of Moonies” if city officials in Palm Beach, Fla., did not allow him to carve up his property.

Taking on competitors of his Atlantic City casinos, he questioned whether rival owners were really Native Americans entitled to federal recognition — then later teamed up with another tribe when there was money to be made. With his eye on the White House, he opened a yearslong drive to convince Americans that President Barack Obama was really born in Africa.

His own campaign in 2016 was marked by slurs against Mexicans, a proposed Muslim ban and other furors. To deflect criticism, two campaign officials said they regularly positioned a supporter nicknamed “Michael the Black Man” so cameras would show him behind Mr. Trump at his rallies.

In the White House, Mr. Trump equated “both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., referred to African nations as “shithole countries” and said Nigerian visitors to the United States would never “go back to their huts.”

Mr. Trump has insisted he is the “least racist person you have ever met” and over the years he has made friends with prominent African-Americans, particularly sports and hip-hop stars. Just Friday, Mr. Trump spoke with the rapper Kanye West and promised to intervene in the case of his fellow artist ASAP Rocky, who is being held in Sweden on an assault charge, and followed up by calling the Swedish prime minister on Saturday.

Some of Mr. Trump’s black friends defended him in recent days, saying his raw, politically incorrect approach was just bracing honesty about the reality of America, and not motivated by hate.

“I have an advantage of knowing the president very well, and he’s not a racist and his comments are not racist,” Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development and only black member of the cabinet, said on Fox News. “But he loves the country very much and, you know, he has a feeling that those who represent the country should love it as well.”

Lynne Patton, a Trump family event planner now working in the administration, rejected accusations of racism.

“Trump sees success and failure, not color not race, not gender not religion,” said Ms. Patton, who is African-American. “I’ve traveled the country with this family, I’ve had drinks with this family, I’ve been at their weddings, their baby showers, their bachelorette parties. I’ve never heard anyone say anything bigoted or racist in my life.”

And White House officials argue that actions speak louder than words. Unemployment among Hispanics and African-Americans has fallen to record lows on Mr. Trump’s watch, they say, and the president signed legislation overhauling a criminal justice system tilted against people of color.

But the longer Mr. Trump spends on the stage, the more friends and former employees, like Michael D. Cohen, Omarosa Manigault Newman and Anthony Scaramucci, have concluded that he is more racist than they had admitted.

“Let me be clear: Donald Trump is a disgusting, filthy, petty racist and he is trying to start a race war in this country and what we saw this week is just the beginning,” said Ms. Manigault Newman, a former “Apprentice” star fired after a stint in the White House.

Mr. Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Trump would never have told a white immigrant to go back to his country. “That’s why the comments were racist and unacceptable,” he said, remarks that got him disinvited from a Republican fund-raiser.

For some who defended Mr. Trump against charges of racism in the past, this was a turning point. “As much as I have denied it and averted my eyes from it, this latest incident made it impossible,” Geraldo Rivera, a roaming correspondent at large for Fox News and longtime friend, said in an interview.

“My friendship with the president has cost me friendships, it has cost me schisms in the family, my wife and I are constantly at odds about the president,” he added. “I do insist that he’s been treated unfairly. But the unmistakable words, the literal words he said, is an indication that the critics were much more right than I.”

‘The City Was a Caldron’

Mr. Trump is a product of his place and time, born and raised in the Queens of another era. As he sought to make his mark in Manhattan real estate in the 1980s and 1990s, New York was struggling with a string of racial episodes, including the Bernhard H. Goetz subway shooting, the Howard Beach racial killing, the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and the Crown Heights riots.

In a city rived by tribal politics, elections were about assembling coalitions — white ethnic groups in Queens and Brooklyn, Hispanics in the Bronx, African-Americans in Harlem and, later, central Brooklyn. Race was a part of every citywide campaign every four years. That shaped the outlook of many rising stars of the moment.

“It was a period of enormous tension and the city was a caldron for those kind of emotions and very strong passions and feelings, and they spilled over,” said Robert Abrams, the special prosecutor in the Brawley case. “And unfortunately, I think Donald Trump was helping to fan some of those flames.”

The Justice Department housing discrimination lawsuit against him and his father and the case of the Central Park Five accused of rape were early milemarkers on Mr. Trump’s path. But he was a Democrat then operating in a diverse city and he showed a different side to many he met.

Charles B. Rangel, then a powerful African-American Democratic congressman from New York, saw Mr. Trump regularly when the developer would drop off checks for the party. What defined him was his “giant ego,” Mr. Rangel said the other day, but he never heard him make a racial remark.

“I don’t remember any remarks he ever made that was not sharing with me how much he thought about himself,” he said. “It was always the same story.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who has grown more publicly critical of Mr. Trump in recent years, likewise recalled nothing overt. “I’ve never heard him say anything racial,” he said. But, he added, “I always sensed he was not comfortable being around us. He reminded me what he was — a Queens guy. He saw us as entertainers or athletes that he had to do business with.”

When Mr. Trump opened Mar-a-Lago as a club in the 1990s, he welcomed African-American and Jewish members. Still, he did not mind turning societal divisions to his advantage, at one point claiming Palm Beach was anti-Semitic in a zoning dispute because his members would be Jewish.

‘Put People in These Boxes’

Some who worked for Mr. Trump said he showed his true colors after growing comfortable with people. Jack O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino and later wrote a scathing book about Mr. Trump, said the mogul would come into the casino and notice many African-Americans. “It’s a little dark tonight,” he would say.

According to Mr. O’Donnell, Mr. Trump said “laziness is a trait in blacks” and complained about an African-American accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

In an interview, Mr. O’Donnell said Mr. Trump trafficked in stereotypes. “He genuinely believes things like white people are smarter. And black people don’t want to live next to white, and white people don’t want to live next to black people,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “And he rationalizes that as, everybody thinks that, so it’s not racist.”

Mr. Trump has dismissed Mr. O’Donnell as “a loser” but at one point accepted the book’s description. “The stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true,” he told Playboy. Later he disputed Mr. O’Donnell’s account, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “he made up stuff.”

Mr. Trump’s assumptions about people are based on what his biographer, Michael D’Antonio, called his “racehorse theory of human development.” Mr. D’Antonio said Mr. Trump told him a person’s genetic traits at birth were more important than anything learned over life.

“He likes to put people in these boxes and deal with them accordingly,” Mr. D’Antonio said. “It’s not universal and you can work your way out of the box. But working your way out of it is always personal. So one by one, black people can gain his confidence, but he does have this mentality about people as members of a group.”

‘The Blacks Love Me’

That helped shape Mr. Trump’s time on “The Apprentice,” where he was accused of giving short shrift to an African-American contestant, Randal Pinkett, who won the fourth season. During the finale, Mr. Pinkett said he was stunned when Mr. Trump, upon declaring him the winner, suggested he share the honor with the white woman he had just beaten.

“I would describe it as racist,” Mr. Pinkett said in an interview. “Not even racist overtones — racist.”

“Donald,” he said, “has constructed a world around him that reflects his identity and reflects his values. People who agree with him, people who celebrate him, people who he would consider to be his peers — wealthy white men.”

Mr. Pinkett added: “He’s completely out of touch with the realities of people not like him. Whether that’s people of color, ethnic minorities, immigrants — I mean, take your pick.”

Over the years, Mr. Trump has deflected criticism by citing friendships with black celebrities. In the 1980s, he became a fixture ringside in Atlantic City, befriending the boxing legends Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson and the promoter Don King. He briefly owned a United States Football League team, leading to friendship with its star player, Herschel Walker.

As the hip-hop industry flourished in the 1990s and 2000s, rappers often used Mr. Trump’s name in lyrics as a symbol of wealth and flash. Along the way, he became friendly with Sean Combs, Snoop Dogg and Russell Simmons.

Mr. Trump boasted about the mention of his name in rap videos, asking one of the secretaries to find examples on YouTube and play them for guests. “The blacks love me,” he said proudly.

By 2015, now running for president, he stopped using “the” before describing ethnic groups. While some black celebrities stood by Mr. Trump, other relationships have soured because of his politics. Mr. Simmons, in an open letter that year, told his estranged friend to “stop fueling fires of hate.”

‘This Is Just Politics’

The foundation of Mr. Trump’s campaign was built on questioning the birth of the first African-American president. To Ms. Manigault Newman, a conversation she had with Mr. Trump about the “birther” campaign during a break in taping of “The Apprentice,” was the first time she saw him as overtly racial.

“He was bragging about it,” she said in an interview. “I asked him, ‘Why would you do this?’ He said, ‘This is just politics. This is what happens in politics, you do opposition research.’”

And yet like others in Mr. Trump’s orbit, Ms. Manigault Newman did not find it so objectionable that she broke with him at the time. She spoke out about what she considered Mr. Trump’s racism only after she followed him to the White House and was subsequently fired.

In a campaign filled with racial controversy, Mr. Trump’s team sought to prevent a backlash. An ally in their efforts was the one they called Michael the Black Man.

Michael is Maurice Symonette, a man from Florida who once belonged to a violent religious cult and was charged but acquitted of two murders in the 1990s. During the campaign, he traveled the country to appear at Mr. Trump’s rallies holding a sign saying, “Blacks for Trump.”

Campaign officials said they made sure to position him behind the candidate. In October 2016, Mr. Trump noticed his sign. “Blacks for Trump,” he said. “Those signs are great. Thank you.”

Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, internet stars better known as Diamond and Silk, came to Mr. Trump’s attention after one of their videos went viral attacking Megyn Kelly, then a Fox host, for her aggressive questioning during a debate. They met Mr. Trump in December 2015 when he brought them onstage at a rally in Raleigh.

“I turn on my television one night and I see these two on television,” he told the crowd. He called them an “internet sensation” and implored them to entertain the crowd. “Do a little routine; come on,” he said. From then on, they became a regular opening act at his rallies.

Mr. Trump’s presidency has been filled with so many racial conflicts that many in Washington have become numb. After he made his “shithole countries” remark to lawmakers, some just shook their heads. “It wasn’t too much of a surprise,” said former Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and outspoken critic. “He had been consistently coming from this.”

By the time of Mr. Trump’s “go back” taunt and the “send her home” chants of a rally crowd a few days later, congressional Republicans were clearly discomfited but unwilling to publicly repudiate him.

“The president,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, “is not a racist.”

‘When the Riot Starts’

Mr. Trump’s vision of a black-against-white season of “The Apprentice” never came to pass. He pitched it to NBC executives, prompting a series of can-you-believe-this conversations inside the network, according to two executives involved. It was quickly rejected.

One former executive described his reaction as, “Uh, I don’t think so!”

The concept later came to fruition on a rival network, CBS, which aired a season of “Survivor” in 2006 in which contestants were initially grouped by ethnicity. The idea generated protests but was defended by the producer: Mark Burnett, who also created “The Apprentice.”

“He always told me that was Mark Burnett’s idea,” Ms. Manigault Newman recalled. “But Donald Trump was champing at the bit to do that.”

He sounded enthusiastic during his appearance on Mr. Stern’s show in 2005. Mr. Stern asked if there would be both light-skinned and dark-skinned contestants on the black team and Mr. Trump said it would be an “assortment.” As for the white team, Mr. Trump said it should include all blonds.

Even as he egged him on, Mr. Stern expressed more concern about the ramifications than Mr. Trump. “Wouldn’t that set off a racial war in this country?” he asked.

“See, actually, I don’t think it would,” Mr. Trump replied. “I think that it would be handled very beautifully by me. Because, as you know, I’m very diplomatic.”

Mr. Stern agreed. “I gotta tell you something, on some level it’s wrong,” he went on. “But I like it. I like it. I would watch.”

“You’d have to,” Ms. Quivers replied, “because you’d want to know when the riot starts.”

 

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I know it's The Onion, but this is so very true:

 

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 We know Omarosa has an ax to grind for getting thrown out of the administration, but I am inclined to believe this.

[there are links embedded in this report to the articles referenced]

Omarosa just revealed how Trump team secretly organizes racist chants at his rallies

Quote

Trump’s reality TV techniques just got exposed by the former White House aide he made famous on NBC‘s The Apprentice. Omarosa Manigault Newman spilled the beans on how Trump rallies really work this past weekend on two MSNBC programs.

First, she went on to Saturday Night Politics and revealed that Trump’s rallies deploy “section leaders” from the campaign, whose jobs it is to start the chants.

Then, Omarosa stunningly revealed exactly who is coordinating the staging, choreography, and chants at Trump rallies, someone connected to the highest levels of the Trump Administration.

She says that Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence is a key cog in driving the “crowd narrative” inside a typical Trump hate rally.

Ironically, Omarosa Maginault entered the Trump Administration as one of its staffers with the most federal experience, having worked for Vice President Gore’s office and in the Department of Commerce, which fired her.

However, she put that experience to good use when it came to secretly recording what Trump Administration officials were up to in the White House. That is probably why not a single story of hers in her book “Unhinged” has been debunked, even though it contained lots of “explosive allegations.”

Trump’s campaign welcomes the former member of a murderous cult nicknamed “Michael the Black Man,” who is nearly always given front row seats when in attendance so he can hold his “Blacks for Trump” sign high for the cameras to spot.

The results are tragic.

For example, a south Florida man is now best known as the MAGA Bomber after being radicalized at Trump’s hate rallies. Last year, the president won a court appeal of the civil lawsuitthat tried to hold him accountable for inciting violence at his rallies.

But ABC News found there are at least seventeen credible claims that Trump incited violence at a political rally, and sixteen of those were “striking” in their direct use of his white nationalist and/or fascist political rhetoric.

Last week, even die-hard right-wing bloviator Piers Morgan admitted that Trumpism is “bordering” on fascism.

Manigault attended many Trump rallies in 2016, and her revelation of their utterly contrived nature shouldn’t surprise anyone since even the dictionary noted back then that searches for stochastic terrorism spiked after he incited violence during the last presidential campaign.

But what is surprising is the high degree of top-level coordination between Donald Trump’s incendiary remarks, and his handlers in the crowd who are in charge of whipping up racist chants.

 

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Sweet Rufus, he's signalling to white-supremacists during an official speech. :pb_eek:

 

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Let's never pass up an opportunity to grift:

 

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@Dandruff he's such a narcissist, I don't think he'd even notice.

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The fascist authoritarian state has arrived.

 

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15 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

The fascist authoritarian state has arrived.

 

Does this mean that citizens may need to carry some sort of additional documentation, just in case?

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13 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

Does this mean that citizens may need to carry some sort of additional documentation, just in case?

It would seem wise to do so, although it would have to be very clear what kind of documentation they would find acceptable. @GreyhoundFan posted an awful incident in the Border Patrol thread, where ICE picked up an American born citizen and now detains him, even though his family have shown them his birth certificate. 

This is absolutely frightening. It's exactly how things began in Nazi Germany.  

 

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Of course he did: "Trump falsely tells auditorium full of teens the Constitution gives him ‘the right to do whatever I want’"

Spoiler

President Trump believes the Constitution gives him a wide breadth of power. That’s the message he delivered ― not for the first time — on Tuesday while addressing a crowd of teenagers and young adults at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit in Washington.

There are numerous viral video clips from Trump’s 80-minute speech at the conference, but one of the most controversial moments came as he discussed Article II of the Constitution, which describes the powers of the president.

Trump lamented the duration and cost of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which he has repeatedly said found “no collusion, no obstruction.”

“Then, I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president,” he said. “But, I don’t even talk about that.”

Political pundits flooded social media with that clip, though most of the videos didn’t include the Mueller-probe context. Trump in his Tuesday speech also attacked “the Squad” and falsely claimed Democrats saw wins in the 2018 elections because undocumented immigrants voted “many times — not just twice.”

Article II grants the president “executive power.” It does not indicate the president has total power. Article II is the same part of the Constitution that describes some of Congress’s oversight responsibilities, including over the office of the presidency. It also details how the president may be removed from office via impeachment.

Trump’s remarks come as Democratic lawmakers are facing mounting pressure from the left to launch impeachment hearings on the president. Republicans and the majority of House Democrats voted down an impeachment resolution against the president last week.

As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes, this is not the first time Trump has made such an assertion about “Article 2,” with previous references typically in the context of Mueller’s probe.

Speaking to ABC in June about allegations that Trump wanted to fire Mueller, the president said: “Article II allows me to do whatever I want. Article II would have allowed me to fire him.”

Earlier this month, Trump again mentioned “a thing called Article II" as he spoke to reporters about Mueller’s collusion and obstruction findings.

“Nobody ever mentions Article II,” he said. “It gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before. We don’t even talk about Article II.”

 

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Newt inadvertently told the truth about the toxic orange megacolon: "Newt Gingrich just gave away the game"

Spoiler

It is now beyond obvious that the populist economic nationalism that President Trump ran on in 2016 was a big scam — that in office, Trump has embraced conventional GOP plutocracy on most economic matters, while pursuing a nationalism on immigration that at its core is reactionary nativism.

That’s the context in which Trump’s attacks on four nonwhite female lawmakers are now unfolding, and the New York Times has some good new reporting that fleshes this out, demonstrating that these attacks are meant to thrill working-class whites — even as his actual economic agenda is doing little to nothing for them.

I want to highlight a quote from Newt Gingrich in the piece, because it illustrates what’s really going on here with unusual clarity — particularly given that Gingrich is a staunch Trump ally.

The background is a discussion of the type of populist legislation that Trump could theoretically sign to bolster his reelection chances, such as a minimum wage hike or a big infrastructure spending bill:

The president’s allies say that his talent is in scorching the opposition, and he is unlikely to deviate much from that task.

“I think he doesn’t mind if it happens, but it’s not his primary focus,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said of racking up policy accomplishments. “His primary focus is to so thoroughly define Democrats as the party of the radical left. I think that matters much more to him than any particular bill.”

I’m pretty sure Gingrich just basically let it slip that Trump is more interested in attacking Democrats as radical than he is in working on proposals that would lift the fortunes of working-class Americans, including the working-class whites in his base.

In one sense, of course, Gingrich’s observation is just obviously true. Trump isn’t interested in governing, and he plainly derives enjoyment from abusing people, a pleasure that often seems particularly evident when he’s directing that abuse at minorities, particularly minority women.

Beyond this, it’s also obviously true that Trump isn’t interested in signing legislation such as a minimum wage hike or an infrastructure package. The Times piece digs into the deeper reasons for this: Trump is surrounded by conservatives who are exploiting his disinterest in policy to push a hard-right agenda; the “moderates” around him, such as Jared Kushner, are more interested in things like criminal justice reform than in populist economic policies.

Then there’s the fact that the Republican Party opposes such policies. Trump has largely outsourced his economic agenda to the GOP, signing a massive corporate tax cut that lavished enormous benefits on the highest earners. Trump has also gone all in with the GOP’s drives to get rid of environmental regulations and roll back Obamacare’s protections for millions, perhaps out of zeal to destroy his predecessor’s legacy.

In sum, Trump completely abandoned the economic populism that former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon once boasted would create a durable transracial working-class majority. Gingrich is right that Trump isn’t interested in economic populist policy. (Trade is an exception, but this largely appeals to Trump because it allows him to rage at foreign and “globalist” elites and absurdly claim he’s shaking down foreign countries for tariffs.)

But Gingrich’s quote also captures a deeper truth, as well.

Trump is vulnerable in 2020 because both sides of the Trumpist equation — the plutocracy and the reactionary nationalism — are unpopular. Democrats won the House by campaigning against the GOP on health care and taxes, and Trump’s hate-campaign against migrants and his immigration cruelties no doubt helped.

The Trumpist agenda drove away enormous numbers of suburban and college-educated whites and allowed Democrats to make (much smaller) inroads with non-college educated and rural whites. (Remember, in 2018, the bottom fell out for the GOP even in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the “blue wall” states Trump cracked.)

A saner health-care agenda and legislation pitched at the working class probably would help Trump with both of those constituencies. But they aren’t going to happen. Which leaves another option for Trump to try to win reelection: To “thoroughly define Democrats as the party of the radical left,” as Gingrich puts it.

That, of course, is what the attacks on the four nonwhite lawmakers are really about. They are meant to scare college-educated whites, particularly women, out of voting Democratic (which seems risky, since overt racism and white nationalism could further alienate them), and supercharge Trump’s working-class white base in those blue-wall states, making an electoral college victory possible even if Trump loses the national popular vote by a bigger margin (which actually could work).

Gingrich’s quote, unpacked, basically concedes that Trump would rather spend his time on racist and white nationalist attacks on minority lawmakers than on legislating for that transracial working class Bannon waxed eloquent about — and that for reelection purposes, the former is the substitute for the latter.

 

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