Trump 42: Racist In Chief

[fraurosena]

I freaking love this.

 

[TuringMachine]

Scott Adams is a jackass

 

[Howl]

...because Trump isn't a racist, and just looooooooves free speech.  

Also, is the Jewish guy referenced in the story a real guy or a made-up guy?

[fraurosena]

This is how a real president addresses the nation.

 

[fraurosena]

He can't read. The giant letters on the teleprompter clearly say TEXAS, not Toledo. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love this one from the wonderfully snarky and sarcastic Alexandra Petri: "In alarming teleprompter slip-up, Trump condemns white supremacy instead of tacitly endorsing it"

Spoiler

The White House appeared to suffer a teleprompter mix-up on Monday when President Trump, addressing the nation after a pair of deadly shootings over the course of two days claimed more than 30 lives, briefly appeared to condemn white supremacy.

“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy," Trump said. "These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.”

This is very far from his usual tone. Trump has always been careful to avoid giving the impression that he rebuked white supremacy. He once refused to denounce David Duke, saying “You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about." He insisted, post-Charlottesville, that there were "very fine people" on both sides of the clash.

And, while the president has vacillated on many questions of substance, his fondness for dog whistles — the louder the better — is consistent.

Long before his presidential campaign, Trump once ran a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers who were accused of a brutal rape and assault — and who have since been completely exonerated. Since the dawn of his campaign, when he denounced immigrants for “not sending their best” and suggested that those coming to this country from Mexico were murderers and rapists. He has used terms such as “infestation” to describe those who come to this country seeking better lives, and “shithole countries" to describe the countries from which they come. He told four congresswomen of color, all U.S. citizens and three of them born in the United States, to go “back” where they came from — and basked in chants that said the same. At a rally in Panama Beach City, Fla., in May, Trump asked about those coming across the border, “How do you stop these people?” and when someone in the crowd shouted, “Shoot them!” Trump chuckled, “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff.”

So, it seems clear that there must have been some serious teleprompter error that has prompted such a, frankly, shocking deviation from his usual rhetoric. How embarrassing that no one on his staff bothered to get something so crucial right.

Trump also offered his condolences to shooting victims in Toledo, but given the heavy burdens he carries, such a slip is inevitable. The president was busy this past weekend making cameos at weddings and supervising games of golf, and a higher level of attention to the details of tragedy could not have been expected from him.

But to speak against white supremacy instead of offering a kind of smirking, winking, tacit approbation? No, there must have been a grave mistake.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

"Trump’s speech was like a hostage video"

Spoiler

The president called the city Toledo.

The city where, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, a shooter with an assault-style rifle gunned down nine people before getting killed by police. Nine people, who seconds earlier were spending a Saturday night with friends and loved ones in Dayton, Ohio’s entertainment district, celebrating the end of one week and the beginning of a new one.

Yes, Dayton, Mr. President. Not Toledo.

Trump spoke Monday morning to address a nation traumatized by two mass shootings over the weekend. First, there was the horror in El Paso where a alleged white supremacist opened fire at a Walmart and killed 22. The victims included Jordan Anchondo, who died shielding her two-month old baby. Her husband Andre died too.

And then, hours later, came the mass murder in Dayton. “We are sickened by this monstrous evil,” said the president on Monday. We need, he said, to “find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion and love.”

Nice sentiments. Too bad Trump said them in a flat voice, like he was recording a hostage video. And then, on the final reference, he referred to the city where the second shooting occurred as Toledo. Nothing shows how much you care more than misstating the name of the city where nine people died in a mass shooting, especially after you read it right from the teleprompter only minutes earlier.

Trump is literally the last person who can bring comfort to the grieving, never mind solve the problem of gun violence in the United States. Our president is a failure as both a human being and a leader. We’ve seen it demonstrated time and time again.

Trump has spent the better part of a decade inciting anger and hate. He’s our bully in chief. He went from pushing racist birther theories about President Barack Obama to calling Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants “rapists” and “animals” and “thugs.” He referred to migration to the United States as an “infestation” and “invasion.”

At a rally in the Florida Panhandle in May, Trump asked the crowd, “How do you stop these people?” A man in the crowd answered, “Shoot them.” Trump didn’t miss a beat. “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.” The crowd cheered widely.

This is hardly the behavior of a man concerned about the impact of his words. It’s certainly not the behavior of someone who should be taken seriously when he says “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy” and “Hate has no place in America.”

If Trump was truly concerned about the violence his rhetoric unleashed, he would apologize, and then try to do what he could to make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen again. He would, for instance, call for expanded gun control. But no. The rest of the speech was the same warmed-over pablum we always hear from the right after a mass shooting. Trump was slightly more animated as he pushed the canard that mass shootings could be solved by doing “a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs” and discussed “grisly video games” and called for a reform of “mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence.”

Please. There are mentally ill individuals who play violent video games in other countries too — people who spend too much time on the Internet imbibing violent rhetoric. There is only one country where this stuff is potentially implicated in mass shootings. The reason for this is because our nation lacks effective gun control, and the man in charge inflames the situation with dehumanizing language. That is Donald Trump, who can’t even be bothered to remember what city a mass murder occurred in. There are no words he can say to make this go away. He owns it.

 

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I love this one from the wonderfully snarky and sarcastic Alexandra Petri: "In alarming teleprompter slip-up, Trump condemns white supremacy instead of tacitly endorsing it"

  Hide contents

“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy," Trump said. "These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.”

 

Neh, some speechwriter just slipped it in, to see if he really would catch himself before it read it.

It's about like calling up a bar and saying, "I'm looking for a Mr. Butz. First name, Seymour" just to see if the bartender would shout out, "I'm looking for Seymour Butz!"

 

[mamallama]

I bet the QAnon folks will find something to take away from the Toledo slip up.

[Howl]

As I was rummaging around to see where to put this tweet, it occurred to me that we need to merge all threads into one mega thread titled   JFC: Different Day, Same Sh*t

Anyway, Donald "tariffs will be easy" Trump has created instant inflation, what will likely be a recession down the line, and has once again, stepped on his own dick, and WHOA!, who knew that tariffs against Chinese goods would backfire or that the Chinese have a history of being wily and tough. 

Or that small farmers would get screwed and lose the farm, and (again, who knew?) those farms will be scooped up by corporate farm conglomerates flush with cash from Trump's $billion bailout? 

 

and this.  We're courting disaster: 

 

Edited August 6, 2019 by Howl

[fraurosena]

The tangerine toddler is mad because Beto called out his racism and put the blame for the mass killings at squarely at his race-baiting feet. 

Wanna bet Beto's ratings go up after this?

[GreyhoundFan]

Here's Beto's response to the tangerine toddler:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Why Trump is suing California to keep his tax returns private"

Spoiler

President Trump has no intention of releasing his tax returns for the 2020 election. That much is clear after California took the extraordinary step last week of blocking presidential candidates from appearing on the state’s primary ballot unless they release their tax returns. And rather than release them, Trump is suing California.

“The effort to deny California voters the opportunity to cast a ballot for President Trump in 2020 will clearly fail,” Jay Sekulow, Trump’s lawyer, said in a statement Tuesday as Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee filed not one but two lawsuits against California over the law.

What happens next could shape an epic standoff between Trump and the most populous state in the nation. If Trump loses this lawsuit, he faces a choice: release his tax returns, or forgo running in California’s Republican presidential primary.

As evidenced by the lawsuits, he clearly doesn’t want to have to skip running in California. It almost certainly wouldn’t affect his chances at getting the nomination, because he has no credible primary challenger to take advantage of a Trump absence from the ballot in California. Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld is running against him, but he has drawn negligible support. All the Republican Party infrastructure is behind Trump. (The law does not apply to the general election.)

But it would be unprecedented to have the incumbent president of the United States not competing in a major stare primary. And campaigns don’t want to leave anything to chance. What would happen if a surprise entry got in that reshaped the Republican primary? Suddenly Trump wouldn’t be able to compete in California against that person.

Beyond Trump, experts wonder what doors a law like this could open to other states creating qualifications for presidential candidates to be on the ballot. The National Conference of State Legislatures tracks 17 other states that have considered tax return qualifications this year for getting on their primary ballots, according to the Associated Press.

“We could see a birth certificate requirement in an Obama-like situation,” theorized Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine and with the Election Law Blog.

Liron Lavi, a research fellow at UCLA who focuses on elections and democracy, said this law is problematic, in a democratic sense, because it is so overtly political. Responding to Trump’s policies by, say, making your city or state a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants is one thing. Responding to Trump’s electoral chances is another.

“It is directly aimed at a candidate, at Trump, rather than toward policies and values,” she said.

But there’s a real chance Trump could win these lawsuits, be on the ballot in California and keep his tax returns secret.

Trump’s team is arguing that the California law is unconstitutional on grounds that it violates the constitutionally mandated definition of who can be president.

The Constitution purposefully limited the restrictions on who can be president to these questions: Are you 35, and have you lived in the United States for at least 14 years? Trump’s campaign argues that California is putting another layer on top of that: Have you released your tax returns?

For the past 40 years, presidential candidates releasing their tax returns has been tradition, not law. It’s an option, one Trump chose not to take. “The issue of whether the president should release his federal tax returns was litigated in the 2016 election and the American people spoke,” Sekulow said in his statement. (Though Trump actually campaigned that his tax returns were being audited and he would release them when they were done.)

Hasen was not making any predictions, but he pointed out there are at least two cases where the courts have been circumspect about states’ authority to limit who is on the ballot — one in which the Supreme Court said states cannot impose restrictions on candidates for Congress.

Still, each state conducts its own presidential primary, and he said courts tend to give broader leeway for how states set their own rules for presidential candidates and elections.

Congress is currently suing the Internal Revenue Service to get 10 years’ worth of Trump’s tax returns. New York passed a law allowing Congress to request Trump’s state tax returns. But it’s California that has come closest of all to forcing Trump to release his returns. The legal showdown over this is going to be very revealing about whether Trump’s tax returns will ever be public.

 

[fraurosena]

I don't believe for a millisecond that Trump will ever willingly release his tax-returns, no matter what the consequences of not doing so. The consequences of releasing them are (at least in his mind, but probably in actuality) absolutely detrimental to him. 

The legal arguments that California has used to underpin their new law is that California wants to rule out any form of emoluments violations and chances of foreign and/or domestic kompromat. Releasing one's tax-returns gives valuable insight into those possibilities.

The argument that Sekulow states in @GreyhoundFan's article above, namely that the law is targeted at Trump personally, is null and void, as the law doesn't only require presidential candidates to release their tax-returns, but all politicians (IIRC) seeking public office, including the governor of California.

 

[formergothardite]

32 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I don't believe for a millisecond that Trump will ever willingly release his tax-returns, no matter what the consequences of not doing so. The consequences of releasing them are (at least in his mind, but probably in actuality) absolutely detrimental to him. 

I think he might be willing to lose rather than release his tax returns. He is super sensitive about being perceived as poor and whatever is in those tax returns is his idea of the ultimate humiliation. 

Where are all the republicans screaming about state rights now? 

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

Where are all the republicans screaming about state rights now? 

They only care about red state rights.

[47of74]

The tangerine toddler is mad because Beto called out his racism and put the blame for the mass killings at squarely at his race-baiting feet. 
Wanna bet Beto's ratings go up after this?

Drumpfry McSchnitzelnazi should drink a big ol glass of shut the fornicate up himself before telling others to be quiet.

[Dandruff]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

They only care about red state rights.

"Red state", indeed.  The term seems to mean a lot more than it used to.

[fraurosena]

Trump was being his usual tone-deaf self during his hospital visits today. That shit-eating grin is creepy as hell.

The best thing about this picture though, is the two guys flanking him. Why? Well... 

[formergothardite]

8 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

That shit-eating grin is creepy as hell.

That is such a forced smile. He looked pained. He obviously would rather be golfing. 

[thoughtful]

2 hours ago, formergothardite said:

That is such a forced smile. He looked pained

Did Jill Rodrigues take that picture?

[47of74]

That is such a forced smile. He looked pained. He obviously would rather be golfing. 

 

Or attending one of his Nazi rallies.

 

Edit: Apple kindly stop fucking autocorrecting of to if.

[GreyhoundFan]

21 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

Did Jill Rodrigues take that picture?

Can you imagine the look he'd have if forced to be in the presence of Jill?

[thoughtful]

Spoiler

Heck, for all I know, they could be related, or just being supportive of one another to survive the Orange slug's visit after surviving the shooting. It's just the idea that Trump would assume they weren't  a couple that got to me.