Trump 47: The Covidiot's Traveling Circus Is Back On The Road

[GreyhoundFan]

"Historians question Trump’s choice of ‘heroes’ for national garden monument"

Spoiler

Among the combative and unusual ways President Trump chose to celebrate Independence Day, some historians were particularly puzzled Saturday by his announcement for a new monument called the “National Garden of American Heroes” populated by a grab bag of historical figures chosen by his administration.

The garden, Trump explained in a Friday night speech at Mount Rushmore, was part of his response to the movement to remove Confederate statues and racially charged iconography across the country.

“Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” Trump said. “This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped.”

In response, Trump said he plans to build “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.” Among the statues to be erected in the garden — spelled out in an executive order — are evangelical leader Billy Graham, 19th-century politician Henry Clay, frontiersman Davy Crockett, first lady Dolley Madison and conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

“The choices vary from odd to probably inappropriate to provocative,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.

“It’s just so random. It’s like they threw a bunch of stuff on the wall and just went with whatever stuck,” said Karen Cox, a history professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, after struggling for several minutes to describe the order outlining the proposed monument. “Nothing about this suggests it’s thoughtful.”

Perhaps worse than the scattershot nature of the selected heroes is the apparent political motivations behind the monument, said Cox, who is writing a book on Confederate monuments. “It doesn’t address the reality on the ground, the real debate and turmoil going on in this country,” she said, including the anger and ongoing protests about systemic racism and inequality.

In his executive order, Trump rails against those who have pulled down or vandalized some statues as well as localities that have removed others. Several cities and states have decided not to honor the Confederate leaders who fought against the United States to preserve slavery.

“My administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory,” Trump says in the order that stipulates that the garden should include “historically significant Americans.” Among them would be presidents, Founding Fathers, religious leaders and “opponents of national socialism or international socialism.”

“It seems like a pretty naked attempt to seize on a cultural conflict to distract from other issues,” said Grossman. He noted Trump’s executive order establishes a task force and gives it 60 days to submit a report detailing locations and options for building the new garden monument.

“There’s no rush here. The only real emergency is that there’s an election coming up,” Grossman said.

To hurry such work defeats the whole purpose of erecting statues, he said. Monuments are exercises in reflection, he said, a chance to plumb our collective memory and reflect on who we are as a country, what we value most and want to honor and pass down to future generations.

“For starters, you might want to consult different communities about who their heroes are and not just choose your own,” Grossman said. “You might also want to consult professionals, like actual historians.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday night.

Trump’s list of “heroes” includes five African Americans, but no Latino and Hispanic figures such as labor leader and civil rights activist César Chávez.

While Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — well represented by existing monuments — and Republican heroes Ronald Reagan and Scalia made the cut, the list doesn’t include a single Democratic president such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson.

Adam Domby, a historian at the College of Charleston, noted the lack of any Native Americans on Trump’s list, even noncontroversial ones such as Sitting Bull or Sacagawea. The oversight is particularly galling, Domby said, given Trump announced it at Mount Rushmore — a monument that sits on land considered sacred to Native Americans and found by the Supreme Court to have been taken illegally from them.

One hero who made it onto Trump’s hero list, however, was frontiersman Daniel Boone, who fought Native Americans in wars and skirmishes throughout his life.

“This list they put together, it raises so many odd historical questions,” Domby said. “Why did they choose Gen. [George S.] Patton but not [Dwight D.] Eisenhower — because of the movie ‘Patton’? They include some African Americans, but only ones that might be considered ‘safe’ or ‘comfortable’ like Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. Where’s W.E.B. Dubois? Where’s Malcolm X?”

One of the more puzzling selections is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Union officer in the Civil War. Domby suspects Chamberlain was included because his character appears in the 1993 movie “Gettysburg,” or maybe perhaps because Chamberlain ordered his Union soldiers to come to attention and show respect to Confederate soldiers as they surrendered.

Other figures named in the executive order include: John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, Betsy Ross, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and Orville and Wilbur Wright.

The proposed monument drew derision from critics, who saw it as an attempt to capitalize politically on the divisive cultural debate over Confederate monuments.

“Trump, your Garden of Heroes is sleight of hand. You want to focus on monuments, but your policies have undermined voting rights, health care, immigrant justice & protections for the American people, esp poor & low wealth,” William Barber, a reverend, political activist and member of the NAACP, said in a tweet.

If Trump believes so strongly in history, “how about a national monument to opponents of southern secession? And to abolitionists?” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Douglas Blackmon said on Twitter. “There are no Asian American heroes. Like Sadao Munemori who attacked two machine gun emplacements in Italy, then gave his life diving on a grenade to save his unit. He’s not a hero? Wrong color?”

“The tragedy is an undertaking like this could actually be a good idea if serious,” said Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University. “You could engage artists who are hurting for work right now. You could be innovative and really rethink the idea of what it means to memorialize things and how we do that. You could even break out of the whole classical/neoclassical forms we’ve been stuck in when it come statues. But I don’t think that’s what Trump has in mind.”

In the executive order, Trump says all statues will be lifelike or realistic, “not abstract or modernist representations.”

The order calls such statues “silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal.”

But that misunderstands the nature and function of such statues, said Cox, the historian in North Carolina. “Monuments are much more a reflection of those who put them up. They aren’t so much about the past as they are a reflection of our values and ideals in the present,” she said. “That’s why they’re often so problematic.”

 

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Historians question Trump’s choice of ‘heroes’ for national garden monument"

  Hide contents

Among the combative and unusual ways President Trump chose to celebrate Independence Day, some historians were particularly puzzled Saturday by his announcement for a new monument called the “National Garden of American Heroes” populated by a grab bag of historical figures chosen by his administration.

The garden, Trump explained in a Friday night speech at Mount Rushmore, was part of his response to the movement to remove Confederate statues and racially charged iconography across the country.

“Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” Trump said. “This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped.”

In response, Trump said he plans to build “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.” Among the statues to be erected in the garden — spelled out in an executive order — are evangelical leader Billy Graham, 19th-century politician Henry Clay, frontiersman Davy Crockett, first lady Dolley Madison and conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

“The choices vary from odd to probably inappropriate to provocative,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.

“It’s just so random. It’s like they threw a bunch of stuff on the wall and just went with whatever stuck,” said Karen Cox, a history professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, after struggling for several minutes to describe the order outlining the proposed monument. “Nothing about this suggests it’s thoughtful.”

Perhaps worse than the scattershot nature of the selected heroes is the apparent political motivations behind the monument, said Cox, who is writing a book on Confederate monuments. “It doesn’t address the reality on the ground, the real debate and turmoil going on in this country,” she said, including the anger and ongoing protests about systemic racism and inequality.

In his executive order, Trump rails against those who have pulled down or vandalized some statues as well as localities that have removed others. Several cities and states have decided not to honor the Confederate leaders who fought against the United States to preserve slavery.

“My administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory,” Trump says in the order that stipulates that the garden should include “historically significant Americans.” Among them would be presidents, Founding Fathers, religious leaders and “opponents of national socialism or international socialism.”

“It seems like a pretty naked attempt to seize on a cultural conflict to distract from other issues,” said Grossman. He noted Trump’s executive order establishes a task force and gives it 60 days to submit a report detailing locations and options for building the new garden monument.

“There’s no rush here. The only real emergency is that there’s an election coming up,” Grossman said.

To hurry such work defeats the whole purpose of erecting statues, he said. Monuments are exercises in reflection, he said, a chance to plumb our collective memory and reflect on who we are as a country, what we value most and want to honor and pass down to future generations.

“For starters, you might want to consult different communities about who their heroes are and not just choose your own,” Grossman said. “You might also want to consult professionals, like actual historians.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday night.

Trump’s list of “heroes” includes five African Americans, but no Latino and Hispanic figures such as labor leader and civil rights activist César Chávez.

While Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — well represented by existing monuments — and Republican heroes Ronald Reagan and Scalia made the cut, the list doesn’t include a single Democratic president such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson.

Adam Domby, a historian at the College of Charleston, noted the lack of any Native Americans on Trump’s list, even noncontroversial ones such as Sitting Bull or Sacagawea. The oversight is particularly galling, Domby said, given Trump announced it at Mount Rushmore — a monument that sits on land considered sacred to Native Americans and found by the Supreme Court to have been taken illegally from them.

One hero who made it onto Trump’s hero list, however, was frontiersman Daniel Boone, who fought Native Americans in wars and skirmishes throughout his life.

“This list they put together, it raises so many odd historical questions,” Domby said. “Why did they choose Gen. [George S.] Patton but not [Dwight D.] Eisenhower — because of the movie ‘Patton’? They include some African Americans, but only ones that might be considered ‘safe’ or ‘comfortable’ like Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. Where’s W.E.B. Dubois? Where’s Malcolm X?”

One of the more puzzling selections is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Union officer in the Civil War. Domby suspects Chamberlain was included because his character appears in the 1993 movie “Gettysburg,” or maybe perhaps because Chamberlain ordered his Union soldiers to come to attention and show respect to Confederate soldiers as they surrendered.

Other figures named in the executive order include: John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, Betsy Ross, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and Orville and Wilbur Wright.

The proposed monument drew derision from critics, who saw it as an attempt to capitalize politically on the divisive cultural debate over Confederate monuments.

“Trump, your Garden of Heroes is sleight of hand. You want to focus on monuments, but your policies have undermined voting rights, health care, immigrant justice & protections for the American people, esp poor & low wealth,” William Barber, a reverend, political activist and member of the NAACP, said in a tweet.

If Trump believes so strongly in history, “how about a national monument to opponents of southern secession? And to abolitionists?” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Douglas Blackmon said on Twitter. “There are no Asian American heroes. Like Sadao Munemori who attacked two machine gun emplacements in Italy, then gave his life diving on a grenade to save his unit. He’s not a hero? Wrong color?”

“The tragedy is an undertaking like this could actually be a good idea if serious,” said Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University. “You could engage artists who are hurting for work right now. You could be innovative and really rethink the idea of what it means to memorialize things and how we do that. You could even break out of the whole classical/neoclassical forms we’ve been stuck in when it come statues. But I don’t think that’s what Trump has in mind.”

In the executive order, Trump says all statues will be lifelike or realistic, “not abstract or modernist representations.”

The order calls such statues “silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal.”

But that misunderstands the nature and function of such statues, said Cox, the historian in North Carolina. “Monuments are much more a reflection of those who put them up. They aren’t so much about the past as they are a reflection of our values and ideals in the present,” she said. “That’s why they’re often so problematic.”

 

I think someone needs to control the narrative.  He knows what history will have to say about him.

[fraurosena]

Trump is done with Faux and had two new propaganda mistresses:

What’s this newsmax? Never heard of it before.

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Trump is done with Faux and had two new propaganda mistresses:

What’s this newsmax? Never heard of it before.

Newsmax is a cable channel owned by his buddy Christopher Ruddy. They show lots of alt-right crap.

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Trump is done with Faux and had two new propaganda mistresses:

What’s this newsmax? Never heard of it before.

 This article below is from 2017 so some things are out of date, but it's still helpful:

Newsmax and the Rise of Trump

Quote

Chris Ruddy is the Zelig of the Trump administration.  

He’s on CNN, blasting the White House chief of staff. He’s in The New York Times, discussing turmoil inside the White House. He’s tweeting from the Oval Office the day after President Trump’s first speech to a joint session of Congress. He’s offering a readout from an after-hours conversation with the president at Mar-a-Lago. He’s calling repealing Obamacare a “big quagmire,” and saying that tax reform should have come first.

Ruddy, the CEO of the conservative-media organization Newsmax, has emerged during the early weeks of President Donald Trump’s administration as an unofficial conduit from the official inner sanctum of the presidency to the outside world. Ruddy sees and speaks to the president frequently, and has popped up repeatedly on cable shows and in news stories as a sort of character witness for and explainer of Trump, who is a personal friend. He’s even inserted himself into internal White House conflicts.

Ruddy’s display of access shows the unusual degree to which Trump relies on informal outside advisers and on familiar faces from his former life, even now as president. It’s also put Newsmax in the spotlight. Because Ruddy isn’t just a friend of the president’s—he’s also in control of a media organization that played a crucial, and largely unheralded, role in Trump’s ascent.

On the evening of Friday, February 10, Ruddy shared a drink with the president at Mar-a-Lago. Two days later, he went on Brian Stelter’s CNN show and delivered a shot across the bow to the president’s chief of staff. "I think Reince Priebus, good guy, well-intentioned, but he clearly doesn't know how the federal agencies work,” he said. “He doesn't have a real good system. He doesn't know how the communications flow."

Ruddy’s comments sparked a media frenzy. Was he speaking for the president? Had Trump said this to him?

The walk-back came later that same day, with Ruddy tweeting “Reince just briefed me on new WH plans. Impressive! CNN today my personal view. Told him I have 'open mind' based on his results.”

Ruddy told me the president had not spoken to him about Priebus at Mar-a-Lago. “The president I’d seen on Friday night after the Abe dinner, we had a drink together,” Ruddy said. “It was never raised, Reince.”  

“I was just giving my opinion, I’ve done that always,” Ruddy said. And the incident hasn’t discouraged him from doing so; in my interview with him, Ruddy speculated that Trump might not run for a second term, arguing that “certain people need it emotionally. I don’t think he needs it emotionally.”

According to Ruddy, Trump appreciates his media efforts on his behalf. After a CNN appearance in December, he said, Trump “called me a few days later during my Christmas party and said ‘Thank you, I can’t always go on these shows and defend myself.’”  

And the weekend after the controversy over Priebus, Ruddy was spotted having dinner with Trump, Priebus, and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in Palm Beach.

Newsmax took Trump seriously early on, well before he finally followed through with his oft-repeated threats to run for president. “No disrespect to Breitbart—before there was Breitbart, there was Newsmax,” said the Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, who is friends with Ruddy and worked on Trump’s campaign. “Before the president was probably an avid reader of Breitbart he was an avid reader of Newsmax. Chris and the president developed a relationship several years ago primarily through and with Newsmax.”

“The only outlets who took us seriously were Newsmax, Breitbart, and Fox News,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser. “And even Fox News wasn’t that serious about him running, they would just have him on out of ratings. Our two major outlets were Newsmax and Breitbart.”

For Nunberg, Breitbart was useful as the ideological messenger that would fight for Trump’s agenda. But Newsmax was where Trump was able to refine his political image as an outsider, entrepreneur, and independent Republican over the course of several years.

“Breitbart was stronger on immigration but Newsmax overall—I thought it was more helpful for shaping [Trump’s] overall political profile,” Nunberg said.

“Newsmax is one of the earliest promoters of Trump,” said Roger Stone, the Republican operative and informal Trump adviser. “They were in fact promoting Trump for president in 2012. Ruddy has always been a Trump promoter when others were not yet taking his candidacy seriously or his potential candidacy seriously.”

Ruddy launched Newsmax in 1998 with $300,000 in investments, according to a 2014 profile in Bloomberg Businessweek. At the time, Businessweek reported that the organization, which was then launching its TV channel, had 260 employees; Ruddy told me this week that it currently has 225.

The business today is built around the website, 17 print publications, a TV channel (which is on Verizon and Fios but has not yet been picked up by major cable systems like Comcast and Time Warner), and a set of large email lists which are significant money-makers for Newsmax. Its lists cover a broad range of topics, and according to Ruddy, it has over 6 million individual email subscriptions.

The size of Newsmax’s email lists help account for some of its influence in Republican politics, as campaigns and advocacy groups buy the lists in order to reach Republican voters. The Trump campaign used Newsmax’s list for fundraising, raising $800,000 using it, Nunberg said. “They advertised with us as did many other campaigns,” Ruddy said in an email. “I think their total spend was around $100K to $200K, some super pacs did buys in 2016, not a huge amount.”

According to one Republican operative with knowledge of Newsmax’s lists, a “send”—the opportunity to send an email through one of the lists—costs “anywhere between $3000 (for testing purposes) and $15,000.”

“They have a price sheet of the cost of the send per thousand addresses. Sometimes, there is a profit sharing arrangement instead of a fixed cost, or a combination,” the operative said. “Tea Party groups and failed presidential candidates were popular.”

Ruddy said he wouldn’t disclose the company’s exact finances but said the business is profitable, apart from the TV channel, which “has been losing some money but we like the progress we’re making.”

It’s not just Trump who has seen Newsmax’s potential to reach the Republican base. A New York Times story from 2011 described how Republican candidates ritualistically visited Newsmax’s Florida headquarters. But Ruddy’s personal connection to Trump combined with his role running a conservative outlet with wide reach made him a key contact for the Trump campaign, though Ruddy says he “wasn’t close to the campaign.”

“Chris was high on my list of somebody I would talk to for guidance when I worked for Trump and in the rest of the political cycle,” Nunberg said.

Ruddy says he first met Trump about 20 years ago. Both men split their time between New York and Palm Beach, where they are part of an established Republican social milieu. South Florida is home to some of the most important figures in Republican politics, including Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh. Ruddy is a member of Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, where entry fees now reportedly start at $200,000 a year and where Trump has been spending nearly every weekend since being sworn into the presidency in January.

“He’s been very social and active,” Ruddy said. “He meets a lot of people, including myself, down there pretty frequently.”

That’s something else Ruddy shares with Trump; both men are avid socializers. “He loves dinners, he loves to talk, he loves to meet people,” said the conservative commentator Larry Kudlow, a Ruddy friend whom Ruddy floated for an administration job last year. Kudlow described how Ruddy, a practicing Catholic, brought Kudlow and other friends to Rome for the canonization of Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII in 2014.

Ruddy dines at Mar-a-Lago frequently “in season,” he said, visiting the club on Friday or Saturday nights. Ruddy said he does not see the president every night Trump is there. Over the years, the two men have had contact in Florida, sometimes in New York, and “occasionally” talked on the phone, Ruddy said.

“Obviously I do have a relationship where I do understand the president,” Ruddy said. “I don’t know his thinking on every major issue but I sometimes understand how he approaches things.”

And he has taken it upon himself to offer that understanding of the president to the press. “I think there’s a lot of people close to him and friendly with him who are afraid of talking to the press because they think press is so hostile to him,” Ruddy said. “I felt I had a comfort level with many in the press and understand the press so I figured it might be a good thing for me to go out and talk about my relationship with the president and his ideas.”

Ruddy said he’d made his visit to the Oval Office last week to take Nancy Brinker, a “longtime friend of mine and Donald’s” and the founder of breast-cancer charity Susan G. Komen, “to talk to the president about cancer priorities.”*

Ruddy, 52, founded Newsmax in 1998. His media career began as a journalist; he worked for the New York Post and later for the Richard Mellon Scaife-backed Pittsburgh Tribune-Review during the 1990s. During this time Ruddy played a key role in the conservative media’s war against the Clinton administration—and in the conspiracy theories that blossomed around the Clintons.

His book The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation, published in 1997, explored the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster in 1993. Foster’s death became a linchpin for conspiracy theories about whether the Clintons actually had him killed. A Slate review of Ruddy’s book described him as the “Inspector Clouseau of the Foster case—a determined, if bumbling, former New York Post reporter who has virtually single-handedly spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy buffs dedicated to the proposition that a foul and monstrous cover-up surrounds the circumstances of Foster's death.”

Curiously enough, Ruddy has since become a Clinton friend, and has donated large sums to the Clinton Foundation—a fact that earned him negative coverage in Breitbart last year. Ruddy defended the Clintons against claims made in Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash during the campaign; he told me he still has a good relationship with Bill Clinton.

Despite his early work on Clinton, like Trump, Ruddy himself is not an ideologue.

“He leans right in the way that I lean left but I think we like each other because we both believe in rebuilding the center,” said Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, a friend of Ruddy’s. “He’s a centrist Republican but I think he has a populist streak in him. But he’s not a hard-right guy. I don’t see him as a Breitbart-Bannon guy.”

“I’m not a registered Republican but I always said truth in advertising: My sympathies are with the Republican Party,” Ruddy told me. “I consider myself a Reagan conservative.”

The pace of Ruddy’s media appearances defending Trump has only increased since the Priebus incident. This past weekend, Ruddy again inserted himself into the middle of the biggest story: this time, Trump’s unfounded allegations on Saturday that Barack Obama’s administration ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower before the election.

“I spoke with the President twice yesterday about the wiretap story,” Ruddy wrote on Newsmax.com on Sunday. “I haven’t seen him this pissed off in a long time. When I mentioned Obama “denials” about the wiretaps, he shot back: ‘This will be investigated, it will all come out. I will be proven right.’”

But Ruddy’s defense of Trump went slightly awry. He had a rough time of it on Chris Matthews’s MSNBC show on Tuesday when Matthews pressed him on a story in Newsmax.com from 2016 that reported that Trump had met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a “VIP reception” with three other ambassadors—a significant tidbit considering the swirling controversy over Kislyak’s contacts with Trump campaign officials during the campaign.

“What is the crime even if he did meet with the Russians?” Ruddy asked. Ruddy also seemed unfamiliar with the Newsmax report Matthews was referring to. (“We publish like 10K articles a year,” Ruddy told me in an email later. “He referenced an article, it was actually a story we picked up from the Wall Street Journal, didn’t originate w[ith] us, he knew that and didn’t share that fact w[ith] the audience.”)

It’s a better time than ever to be a media mogul with a direct line to the president. A recent Washington Post column speculated that Ruddy might be trying to use his relationship with the president to re-position Newsmax for the Trump era in the face of ascendant competitors like Breitbart.

Or it could be simpler than that. “He’s a guy who likes knowing a lot of people,” said one friend of Ruddy’s who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He likes knowing Bill Clinton, he likes knowing Donald Trump. He’s fond of having a broad circle of famous acquaintances.”

“He’s got an eye to his brand, I guess everybody has to these days,” the friend said.

 

 

 

[fraurosena]

9 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Ruddy said he wouldn’t disclose the company’s exact finances but said the business is profitable, apart from the TV channel, which “has been losing some money but we like the progress we’re making.”

 

9 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

It’s a better time than ever to be a media mogul with a direct line to the president. A recent Washington Post column speculated that Ruddy might be trying to use his relationship with the president to re-position Newsmax for the Trump era in the face of ascendant competitors like Breitbart.

Well, this explains the need for free presiduncial advertising.

[WiseGirl]

From my 80+ year old mother when seeing 45 on the television. "He needs to be tried for treason" and "what an ass."

I am my mother's daughter but my language is a bit more colorful. 

[clueliss]

Supreme Court and the Electoral College.  (John Rogers is a screenwriter and showrunner - Leverage among other things)

[fraurosena]

Trump has sunk to an all time and disconcerting low. Today he retweeted a bot with a photo of a dead body, implying Nancy Pelosi supports the death. Twitter has now removed the tweet for disturbing content.

A screen cap of Trump's retweet is under the spoiler. WARNING: disturbing image. 

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Maybe we should fill the sand trap with quicksand...

 

[Alisamer]

On 7/5/2020 at 2:14 PM, Dandruff said:

I think someone needs to control the narrative.  He knows what history will have to say about him.

He wants this garden thing partly to distract people, and partly because he wants a statue of himself to go in it!  

[smittykins]

Trump criticizes Redskins, Indians over potential name change

Quote

President Trump on Monday criticized the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians for reviewing their respective names to potentially change them, saying the professional football and baseball teams were doing so only to be “politically correct.”

 

[47of74]

There’s a metaphor here isn’t there?

Quote

"Trump 2020" car barely made it out of the garage Sunday ... the freshly painted ride was totaled in a massive pileup just 16 laps into the Brickyard 400.

The scene was wild ... as several cars tried to squeeze their way onto pit road during the first few minutes of NASCAR's big race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway -- they all slammed into each other.

LaJoie was caught up in the middle of the mess ... and his "Trump 2020" car didn't survive -- suffering too much damage in the wreck to keep racing.

As for Sunday's race ... Kevin Harvick won the whole thing, while Bubba Wallace -- who had famously raced in a "Black Lives Matter" car earlier this season -- finished 9th.

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Becky]

26 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

Jesus. We are totally expendable to this administration. 

[Ozlsn]

9 minutes ago, Becky said:

Jesus. We are totally expendable to this administration. 

Works for wars, I guess that's where it comes from. Of course we don't usually send Grandma, or Uncle Steve who's just post-chemo, or Jen with her lung transplant, or Dylan in his wheelchair, or any of our other most vulnerable. 

To quote the earlier meme - Trump won't do anything until someone he loves catches it and gets really sick. So we're basically waiting for him to get it.

[Audrey2]

7 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

Works for wars, I guess that's where it comes from. Of course we don't usually send Grandma, or Uncle Steve who's just post-chemo, or Jen with her lung transplant, or Dylan in his wheelchair, or any of our other most vulnerable. 

To quote the earlier meme - Trump won't do anything until someone he loves catches it and gets really sick. So we're basically waiting for him to get it.

Truthfully, the only two people who MIGHT cause him to be concerned about this is Trump himself and Ivanka.

[Ozlsn]

Just now, Audrey2 said:

Truthfully, the only two people who MIGHT cause him to be concerned about this is Trump himself and Ivanka.

I'm not convinced about Ivanka... I think at heart she's also expendable.

[FiveAcres]

1 hour ago, Ozlsn said:

I'm not convinced about Ivanka... I think at heart she's also expendable.

It would be like when Thanos sacrifices Gamora to get an infinity stone. He would be very, very sorry about it.

[Dandruff]

5 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Appalling, of course, but they might be right - people are adaptable.  The death toll has become a constant backdrop and most are learning to cope with it.  Once the coping becomes a habit, it becomes (IMO) somewhat easier to not give it full attention - just enough attention to, hopefully, stay alive and functioning.

If 50,000 people get sick on Tuesday after 10,000 got sick on Monday, who feels five times worse on Tuesday?  How about Wednesday if "only" 10,000 get sick that day? 

I think the antidote to numbness is reminders about the individual human beings who are struggling.  Personal anecdotes, memorials, and discussion about the aftermaths.  Interviews with those who are being stretched to the limit.  Enough information made available to enable feeling without becoming unnecessarily overwhelming.  Numbness does have it's uses...it just shouldn't be able to be abused by the WH.

[Workingmom]

7 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

To quote the earlier meme - Trump won't do anything until someone he loves catches it and gets really sick. So we're basically waiting for him to get it.

Or maybe  (very, very big maybe) Ivanka

[fraurosena]

Lol!

Trump doesn't understand what is meant by 'the TikTok generation', and believes that by banning TikTok, he will eliminate his young teen problem. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

23 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Lol!

Trump doesn't understand what is meant by 'the TikTok generation', and believes that by banning TikTok, he will eliminate his young teen problem. 

 

With both Twitler's and Pompeo's levels of stupidity, I wouldn't have been surprised if they announced they were banning non-digital clocks, since they make a tick-tock noise.

[GreyhoundFan]

Actually, four more hours will be hard enough: "Four more years? Four more months will be hard enough."

Spoiler

If you had to pick the moment at which the modern Republican Party reached the zenith of its political dominance, it would be the 1984 landslide in which Ronald Reagan picked up nearly 98 percent of the electoral votes — one of the biggest blowouts in history.

“The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction,” Reagan said a few months later. “Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital — such as it was.”

Today, what Reagan once said of “the other side” could easily apply to the Republican Party, which in the course of four short years has remade itself in the backward-looking, intellectually incoherent image of Donald Trump.

There are still nearly 120 days to go until the November election — and it will surely feel more like 1,200. But at this point, polling both nationally and in the battleground states shows Trump falling further and further behind Democratic nominee-in-waiting Joe Biden.

What must be most worrisome for Trump’s strategists is the sharp slippage among two groups who supported him in 2016: seniors and white working-class women.

In recent interviews, when Trump has been asked why he wants a second term, and what he would do with it if he is given one, he has made it clear that he has no clue.

“Well one of the things that will be really great: You know, the word ‘experience’ is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience, I’ve always said that. But the word ‘experience’ is a very important word,” he told Sean Hannity last month.

How inspiring. Reagan’s second term, though scarred by the Iran-contra scandal, saw the achievement of some of his most ambitious agenda items: an overhaul of the nation’s tax system, a rewrite of its immigration laws to allow millions more to share in the American dream and a rapprochement with the Soviet Union that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Trump, by contrast, has no ideas — except to continue stoking the resentments and racism of his most ardent supporters. From the base of Mount Rushmore on Friday night and the South Lawn of the White House on Saturday, he turned the annual celebration of our nation’s independence into just another divisive and partisan moment.

At a time when the toll of Americans who have died of the novel coronavirus is nearing 130,000 and the number of infections is hitting new highs with each passing day, what was uppermost on the president’s mind as he began a new workweek?

Apparently not the pandemic. Over the weekend the president claimed falsely that 99 percent of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless,” and he continues to fantasize that covid-19 will simply “sort of disappear.”

No, Trump had another pressing concern. “Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX? That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!” Trump tweeted on Monday morning.

Wallace is the only African American full-time NASCAR driver. A rope tied in the shape of a noose was found in his garage at Talladega Superspeedway after he pushed the stock car racing association to ban the Confederate flag at its venues. It was later determined that the rope had been there for months, and was probably tied that way as a pull to open the garage door.

Wallace was not the person who discovered it or reported it to the FBI as a possible hate crime, yet the president is demanding an apology from him. At least as significant — probably more so — is the fact that the president is criticizing NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of hate and treason.

Trump has not yet had anything to say about Mississippi’s decision to remove that same emblem from the corner of its state flag. Nor has he acknowledged that Confederate statues and monuments should not be part of “our values, traditions, customs and beliefs” that he extolled at Mount Rushmore.

As the country tries to come to terms with the sins of its past and turns toward a future in which it moves closer to being the more perfect union that our founders envisioned, Trump is banking his reelection on clinging to a past that should have been left behind long ago. That is all he has to offer a nation in a time of crisis.

Four more years? Even four more months of this will be hard to bear.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting op-ed: "Donald Trump, the unbriefable president"

Spoiler

Chris Whipple is the author of the forthcoming book “The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future.”

In the wake of reports that Russia offered the Taliban cash bounties to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the question arises: What was President Trump told by his intelligence briefers, and when was he told it?

Another question may be as important: How does Trump absorb information? For decades, the president’s daily briefs (PDBs) have sounded early warnings on everything from enemy troop movements to pandemics to terrorist attacks. Yet under Trump, the president’s intelligence briefings have almost completely broken down. His oral briefings, given daily to most presidents, now take place as rarely as once or twice a week. These sessions often turn into monologues in which the president spitballs woolly conspiracy theories from Breitbart, Fox News and hangers-on at Mar-a-Lago, say intelligence officials who are familiar with his briefings. Convinced that the intelligence community is a “deep state,” honeycombed with traitors, the president rarely believes anything the CIA tells him.

In short, Trump is unbriefable.

To be sure, every president consumes information differently: Ronald Reagan read the PDB every morning but preferred movies — so the CIA created short film biopics of foreign leaders. Bill Clinton often skipped his oral briefing but devoured the PDB, scribbling questions in the margins. (He also read political thrillers and badgered his advisers about the real-world threats of bioterrorism and pandemics — which led to the establishment of the national PPE stockpile.) Barack Obama read the daily brief on his iPad and sent it back with detailed queries.

But Trump does not read the PDB. Or much of anything else, a former senior White House official told me. As his presidency began, it was an open question: Would Trump even bother to sit for CIA briefings? He didn’t, at first, and did so only after Mike Pompeo, then his CIA director, agreed to be there. Trump’s distrust of the intelligence services was stoked by their conclusion that Russia had intervened in the election on his behalf. Given his hostility toward the intelligence community, and his Twitter-sized attention span, Trump would be a challenge for any briefer.

Trump’s first briefer was Ted Gistaro, a widely respected career CIA officer on loan to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), where he oversaw the PDB. Gistaro, who has a calm demeanor and a healthy sense of humor, got almost nowhere — so the briefing team devised a show and tell. Pictures of New York City landmarks, agency briefers thought, might help Trump grasp threats. In an effort to explain the scale of North Korea’s nuclear program, the CIA built a model of the Hermit Kingdom’s underground weapons facility and put a miniature Statue of Liberty inside it.

But Trump preferred his own sources. In July 2017, he batted away the CIA’s conclusion that the North Koreans had developed an intercontinental missile that might soon be capable of reaching U.S. soil. How could the president be certain the agency was wrong? Because, he said, Vladimir Putin told him so.

Obama used to attend “Terror Tuesdays,” a special White House session to ensure agencies worked together to meet looming threats. Under Trump, the meetings were scrapped. Meanwhile, Trump removed his acting director of national intelligence, a deputy and the principal executive; the new DNI is a former Texas congressman who echoed Trump’s bogus conspiracy theories during the impeachment proceedings.

As a result, those within the administration who might challenge the president’s deeply held views are as rare as coronavirus vaccines. In January 2019, then-DNI Dan Coats made the politically fatal mistake of telling Congress that Tehran was in compliance with the nuclear agreement. Coats, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Gistaro were treated to an Oval Office tongue lashing and a tweet admonishing them to “go back to school.” This from a man who, prior to being elected, did not know the difference between the Quds Force — elite members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — and the Kurds.

Trump’s current briefer, Beth Sanner, a highly regarded, 30-year CIA veteran, has endured a bumpier ride than Gistaro. When news broke that the alleged Russian bounties were included in the PDB, the Trump administration issued its usual denials and obfuscations. First, the president claimed the so-called reports were fake news. Then, he told Fox News that the intelligence was not credible enough to be in the PDB. Then the story changed again: If the intelligence was in the PDB, the White House said, his briefer didn’t bring it to Trump’s attention.

It wasn’t the first time the White House had thrown Sanner under the bus. (In an early May tweet, Trump blamed his briefer for not sounding alarmed when she first spoke to him about the novel coronavirus in January.) But if Sanner had been routinely derelict in her duties, why hadn’t Haspel removed or replaced her? And why hadn’t national security adviser Robert O’Brien — who, along with other top aides, receives the PDB daily and presumably reads it — gone into the Oval Office, shut the door and briefed the president himself?

The answer is simple. The president is unbriefable. He will not listen to anything he does not want to hear.