Trump 42: Racist In Chief

[fraurosena]

1. Fuck off with your thoughts. 

2. Nobody believes you pray.

3. You did not write these tweets. They are too well written to have ever sprouted from your twiddling thumbs.

[thoughtful]

Sure, Donald. I'm sure what you were really thinking was "All the people he shot were Mexican, right?"

 

[AmazonGrace]

As if Trump has a heart

[Jana814]

6 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

As if Trump has a heart

He does not!! 

[fraurosena]

Word.

 

[fraurosena]

Case in point ⬆️

 

[fraurosena]

Great op-ed by Jennifer Rubin.

There is no excuse for supporting this president

Quote

On Sunday morning, former congressman Beto O’Rourke spoke for millions of Americans.

O’Rourke is a native of El Paso, Tex., one of two sites of mass murder in the past 24 hours. The alleged killer had regurgitated white nationalist bile and hatred of immigrants. If a Muslim preacher’s words were repeated nearly verbatim by Islamic mass murderers, we’d consider him a threat to national security. And yet, when venom drawn from President Trump’s vicious attacks on immigrants, his channeling of “replacement” conspiracy theories, his dehumanization of immigrants and his demonization of the media show up in the ramblings of serial mail bomber Cesar Sayoc, the Tree of Life synagogue and Christchurch mosque mass murderers and now the slaughterer of innocents in El Paso, we don’t collectively hold him morally accountable, insist his recant his views and demand an end to his presidency.

South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg observed that white nationalist terrorists “feel validated” by Trump.

For decades now, Republicans have insisted mass murders with semiautomatic weapons are not reflective of a gun problem. I can no longer comprehend how such a ludicrous assertion is remotely acceptable. But in one sense they are right: It’s not merely Republicans’ indulgence of the National Rifle Association that puts Americans’ lives in jeopardy; it is the support and enabling of a president that inspires white nationalist terrorists — and even denies white nationalism is a problem.

The Dayton, Ohio, mass killing is the 32nd “mass killing by firearms” this year. And while Trump continues to demonize Muslims and foreigners, the facts indicate white nationalists are responsible for more deaths than Islamic fundamentalist-inspired killings under this president. The Anti-Defamation League reported:

In 2018, domestic extremists killed at least 50 people in the U.S., a sharp increase from the 37 extremist-related murders documented in 2017, though still lower than the totals for 2015 (70) and 2016 (72). The 50 deaths make 2018 the fourth-deadliest year on record for domestic extremist-related killings since 1970.

The extremist-related murders in 2018 were overwhelmingly linked to right-wing extremists. Every one of the perpetrators had ties to at least one right-wing extremist movement, although one had recently switched to supporting Islamist extremism. White supremacists were responsible for the great majority of the killings, which is typically the case.

The rise in hate crimes under this president also has been dramatic. The Anti-Defamation League documented, “Right-wing extremists were linked to at least 50 extremist-related murders in the United States in 2018, making them responsible for more deaths than in any year since 1995. . . . Right-wing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since 1995, the year of Timothy McVeigh’s bomb attack on the Oklahoma City federal building.”

Likewise, just a few days ago, a new report explained the magnitude of the problem in cities (which Trump demonizes as “infested” and unlivable):

Hate crimes in thirty of America’s largest cities rose nine percent in 2018 to a decade high of 2,009, according to police data analyzed by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino (CSHE). Last year marked the fifth consecutive increase in hate crimes, and the steepest rise since 2015. Seventy percent, or 21 police departments, reported increases, with just under half (47 percent), or 14 agencies, hitting or tying decade highs. 2018 was the only year this decade the cities exceeded 2,000. Partial year 2019 data from 18 cities also shows an overall rise. If forthcoming Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 2018 hate crime totals replicate this nine percent rise, it will be the fourth consecutive increase and the highest total since the FBI’s 2001’s record.

This rise comes even as the overall rate of crime decreases. (“In contrast to a 3.5 percent decline in crime overall in major U.S. Cities in 2018 (source), these latest hate crime data mirror a multiyear rise across myriad other representative crime, social science, and digital datasets on prejudice and fragmented intergroup cohesion.”)

In sum, we are awash in hate crimes and white nationalist-inspired mass murders. We have a president whose words inspire and bolster perpetrators of these heinous acts. That makes Trump not only a moral abomination, which no policy outcome can offset, but a threat to national security. Those encouraged by his words in recent years kill more Americans than Islamist terrorists. If that is not justification for bipartisan repudiation of this president and removal from office at the earliest possible moment I don’t know what is. Those who countenance and support this president for his white-grievance mongering are not merely “deplorable” but dangerous.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From conservative columnist Max Boot: "Anything (real) to say about the shootings, Mr. President?"

Spoiler

We are experiencing “Groundhog Day” in America — but the result isn’t sweet and funny as in the 1993 Bill Murray film. It’s sick and psychopathic.

We have long had mass shootings in the United States because of the ready availability of guns. All the way back in 1966 a former Marine and student mounted the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin and killed 14 people with a rifle. Americans were horrified, and rightly so, but things have gotten a whole lot worse since. The 1966 attack is now tied for 11th place in the list of mass shootings here. Eight of the 10 worst modern mass shootings have occurred in the past decade, with Saturday’s attack at a Walmart in El Paso, which killed 20 people, is now the eighth worst in U.S. history. The deadliest mass shooting — which left 58 people dead in Las Vegas — came less than two years ago. The second deadliest — 50 dead at a nightclub in Orlando — was just three years ago.

This trend of mass shootings has intersected with another trend: the rise of white-supremacist ideology. Nine people shot to death in an African American church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. One killed with a car and 19 injured at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, in 2017. Eleven shot to death at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, and two more killed that year at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Fla. One killed and three wounded at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., this year. Three killed just last week at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif. (although there is a dispute over whether that shooting was motivated by white supremacist ideology). In El Paso, a city with an 80 percent Hispanic population, the suspect is believed to have released a manifesto online in which he announced: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

We are actually lucky in a way — although this is faint comfort to grieving families in El Paso — because the far-right attacks could have been far worse. A Florida man mailed bombs to prominent critics of President Trump but none exploded, and a Coast Guard officer is alleged to have been arming himself for a killing spree when he was arrested. It was certainly worse in New Zealand, where a white-supremacist fanatic murdered 51 people in March; his manifesto continues to inspire copycat killers such as the one in El Paso. (I am not using the names of these monsters so as to deny them the publicity they seek.)

After an earlier terrorist attack — this one carried out by two Muslims who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., on Dec. 2, 2015 — President Trump, then a candidate, notoriously called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” Compare that with his reaction to the El Paso shooting, which was to send “thoughts and prayers” and condemn “today’s hateful act” but without suggesting any action in response.

Let me help you out, Mr. President. I suggest that, until we figure out what the hell is going on, you institute a total and complete shutdown of your inciting, racist rhetoric. I also suggest that, until we figure out what the hell is going on, you call for a total and complete shutdown of sales of assault weapons such as the one used by the El Paso killer and for a total and complete regulation of the sale of handguns in America.

That’s what you need to do, Mr. President, if you care at all about the well-being of the people of America. Yet you continue to spew hatred. On the very morning of the El Paso attack, you twice retweeted the notorious British hate-monger Katie Hopkins spewing venom against Muslims. Last month, you told congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they come from. And in May, at a rally in Florida, you demanded, “How do you stop these people?” — meaning undocumented immigrants. Someone shouted, “Shoot them.” Instead of chastising this hate-monger, you chuckled and said, to loud cheers, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff.”

Whether you know it or not, Mr. President, you are recklessly enflaming the sickos of America. The very last line of the manifesto attributed to the alleged El Paso gunman could have come straight out of one of your speeches: “I am honored to head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.”

You also refuse, Mr. President, to address the easy availability of weapons of war in America. Assault rifles are the preferred weapons of mass shooters, and yet you refuse to ask Congress to ban their sale — or, even better, to buy back all of the existing assault weapons, as was done in Australia in 1996 after the worst mass shooting in that country’s history. Australia hasn’t seen such a massacre since. The United States, by contrast, has had 249 mass shootings just this year.

You will lead our country to destruction, Mr. President, unless you act to curb gun violence — and your own hateful rhetoric.

 

[fraurosena]

Trump doesn't understand that the internet is forever.

His scrubbing of these tweets show a consciousness of guilt. Well, maybe not guilt (he might be quite incapable of that sentiment) but at the bare minimum he knows that they make him look bad.

[thoughtful]

18 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

he knows that they make him look bad.

I believe this is the only possible choice. I don't think that slug has a conscience.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I don't know if Fj readers saw the news this week about the revelation of tapes of Repug Saint Ronnie Reagan using ugly racist language. No big surprise. This is a good piece about how the mango moron is tied to Reagan and other repugs: "Why Donald Trump is just following in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps on race"

Spoiler

Since his campaign, President Trump has pushed race to the center of American politics. It started with his stance on immigration and intensified with his response to the violence in Charlottesville. Over the past few weeks, he has sharpened the focus through attacks on minority members of Congress dubbed “the Squad,” as well as Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) and the city of Baltimore.

It is easy for some to see Trump’s blatant and openly racist statements as an aberration for GOP politics. But the recent disclosure of a phone call between President Richard M. Nixon and California Gov. Ronald Reagan in October 1971 — during which Reagan referred to African leaders as “monkeys” who are “still uncomfortable wearing shoes” — challenges that narrative.

For Reagan, such rhetoric wasn’t an aberration, either, especially when you look at his long record. Along with advisers such as Pat Buchanan, he understood how to use racially coded language, derived from staunch segregationists such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace and deployed successfully by figures including Nixon to bring Southern voters and working-class urban whites in the Midwest into the Republican Party.

It didn’t stop with such coded language. His policy record on civil rights and racial issues explains why many African Americans continue to view the former president with great disdain. Although he is remembered fondly by the GOP, racist politics played a significant role in Reagan’s political success. The same is true of Trump.

Racial issues were central to Reagan’s political success during the 1966 California gubernatorial election. He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while running radio ads referring to urban areas as “jungles.” Regarding fair housing, he emphasized: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” This resonated well with white conservative suburban voters in places such as Orange County, Calif.

As governor, he targeted African Americans to condemn, particularly activists such as Angela Davis. He joked publicly about Africans and cannibalism, and he verbally accosted an African American protester in 1968 at the Republican National Convention.

This boosted his national reputation as he became a darling of the conservative movement and crisscrossed the South and white working-class and suburban enclaves all over the country. Nixon understood racial politics as the root of Reagan’s appeal, noting how he played on the “emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place.’ ”

But as scholar Jeremy D. Mayer notes, Reagan’s anti-federalism gave him a “plausible deniability on race” that was “perhaps Reagan’s greatest appeal to many racist whites.” He understood how to frame race in terms of states’ rights rather than the blatant racist rhetoric of segregationists such as Thurmond and Wallace.

The goal, however, was the same: to appeal to white Southerners and other working-class whites, bringing this demographic into the GOP. During Reagan’s effort to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, this became apparent when he supported a constitutional amendment to end busing and denounced affirmative action.

That year, he also coined the term “welfare queen,” borrowing heavily from Wallace’s playbook to frame people of color as abusers of government programs. Without directly mentioning race, his campaign used the story of a Chicago welfare cheat to imply that whites were forced to turn over their hard-earned money to the government to subsidize the lazy lifestyles of people of color.

The race-baiting caused some backlash, however. One of Reagan’s few African American friends, Robert Keyes, backed Gerald R. Ford because of these race issues (on his deathbed in 1978, Keyes called Reagan, who refused to answer).

Although Reagan tempered his rhetoric somewhat in 1980, his actions continued to speak loudly. In one of his first general election campaign stops, he visited the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from Philadelphia, Miss., where racists killed three civil rights workers in 1964. There, he preached states’ rights, which his audience understood as a call to undermine civil rights protected by federal legislation.

During the campaign, Reagan also denounced the Voting Rights Act for humiliating the South. When it came up for renewal in 1982, he hoped to weaken it by granting an extension of 10 rather than 25 years. Only after the Senate passed the full extension 85 to 8 did Reagan reluctantly sign it.

He further alienated the African American community by supporting tax exemptions for “seg” academies (whites-only private schools that popped up after the Brown v. Board of Education decision) and questioning the creation of a national holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In private, the president wrote to a colleague who railed against King for being leftist and immoral that “I have the reservations that you have but there the perception of too many people is based on an image not reality. . . . We hope some modifications might still take place in Congress.” Despite Reagan’s tepid support, the holiday was approved.

These attitudes shaped foreign policy, too. Reagan supported the apartheid government in Rhodesia, and as president strongly backed the brutally repressive white minority South African government of P.W. Botha. By 1986, his position was so unpopular that Congress overrode his veto of a sanctions bill by a 3-to-1 margin.

Though some segregationists, including Wallace, eventually apologized for their racist records, Reagan never did. Wallace told an African American congregation in 1979: “I have learned what suffering means. . . . I think I can understand something of the pain black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask for your forgiveness.”

But Reagan remained convinced he was not a racist, even though his actions showed otherwise. The recent release of the tape recordings featuring his blunt comments about Africans affirm this reality.

The link between Reagan and Trump is clear. As Buchanan recently emphasized, “Donald Trump is a conservative populist and direct descendant and rightful heir to Ronald Reagan.”

Trump may be more vocal and vindictive than Reagan ever was in his public comments. As historian Timothy Naftali highlights: “The most novel aspect of President Donald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in public.”

The taped conversation may shock us, but it shouldn’t. It reveals a fundamental if uncomfortable truth about Reagan and the shifts he and his allies triggered in the Republican Party. Far from an aberration, Trump is following in Reagan’s footsteps on racial politics.

 

[fraurosena]

He is an imbecile. "I want to congratulate [the first responders]." What? People are dead, and he's congratulating first responders?

Note that he starts to say how much damage was done in under a minute... then he catches himself and tries (unsuccessfully) to spin it into how quickly the police took him down.

Off topic: Why is Melania gasping like a fish out of water all the time?

[Smoochie]

23 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

He is an imbecile. "I want to congratulate [the first responders]." What? People are dead, and he's congratulating first responders?

Note that he starts to say how much damage was done in under a minute... then he catches himself and tries (unsuccessfully) to spin it into how quickly the police took him down.

Off topic: Why is Melania gasping like a fish out of water all the time?

So he's finally off the golf course ...

[thoughtful]

Donald, you orange slug, it could have been so much worse because people like you think it's OK for private citizens to own guns that fire huge numbers of bullets in a short time.

[47of74]

He needs to go fuck himself. He and Moscow Mitch both had numerous opportunities to fix this but didn’t do a fucking thing.

[Dandruff]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Well, maybe not guilt (he might be quite incapable of that sentiment) but at the bare minimum he knows that they make him look bad.

My guess is Ivanka and/or some recent polling data.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

15 hours ago, fraurosena said:

His scrubbing of these tweets show a consciousness of guilt. Well, maybe not guilt (he might be quite incapable of that sentiment) but at the bare minimum he knows that they make him look bad.

Except I suspect Trump didn't scrub his tweets; his aides enablers did, at the recommendation/insistence of GOP strategists.  They are snapping to the fact that Trump's racist twitter screeds are perfect fodder for Democrats to use in the run up to 2020, because they are getting people slaughtered and that link is being made in the public consciousness. 

That said, I'm surprised that scrubbing is allowed.  His real Donald Trump twitter account is part of the public record; that's why he can't block followers. 

Edited August 5, 2019 by Howl

[fraurosena]

Huh. His account (not Trump himself) tweeted this. Suddenly they're aware that not endorsing background-checks will reflect badly on them. 

Nice words. Still don't think anything will be done.

[fraurosena]

Just to balance off the previous tweet, there has to be the message that it’s the media’s fault.

If only they would shut up...

Edited August 5, 2019 by fraurosena

[formergothardite]

1 hour ago, Howl said:

That said, I'm surprised that scrubbing is allowed.  His real Donald Trump twitter account is part of the public record; that's why he can't block followers. 

It probably isn't, but that really doesn't stop them from doing it. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

What a moron.

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm so glad he didn't let massacres get in the way of his playing and socializing. /sarcasm

 

[fraurosena]

Proof he really is a presidunce.

And what the heck is up with his mouth? Why is he smacking his lips like his mouth is extremely dry? A side-effect of meds?

Edited August 5, 2019 by fraurosena