A round up of Trumpian events 🖕🍊🤡

[Wanderfound]

Rania Khalek (RaniaKhalek)

#VichyDems

[RickMycroft]

Okay, replace his digital iPhones with steam-powered ones.

You heard him, chop-chop!

[Mitchell]

Oh for fucks sake.
The quote’s “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster”
Not “'He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself becomes only slightly less monsterous than them, so he may beat them in a popularity contest with the death cultists that worship monsters”

[Wanderfound]

From 2016:

Generic 2016 US Election Cycle Recycling Bin

The establishment Dems will: Try to blame this on Johnson, Stein and Bernie. Suggest that the Dems need to be more like Trump if they want to win.

And from Twitter:

[anon50609448]

(Not that it was, but why is she trying to convince me it was)

[anon29537550]

Trump says he’s thankful for himself on Thanksgiving

If you read this, that is not exactly the quote. Closer would be “I am so grateful that I have done such great stuff and I am such a great guy.” But that would have made for an awkward headline.

[FGD135]

[Wanderfound]

@anon50609448

So I assume that all of the centrists who have been gibbering about Susan Sarandon for the last two years will now also condemn Clinton? Surely they will be consistent…

/s

[MalevolentPixy]

Amy Spitalnick (amyspitalnick)

[d_r]

The Grauniad headline is a little bit clickbaity. What HRC actually says is that the recent populist successes in Europe, like the US, are fueled in part by a fear of immigration, and that to beat the populists there needs to be some clear policy that does not allow for unlimited immigration. In the article she also praises Merkel for Germany’s policy, excoriates Trump as a dangerous autocrat, and says that it is important for immigration policies to not be cruel. She also throws in a lovely dig at Steve Bannon.

“Tougher” seems to be a word slipped in by the journalist. Clinton calls for a “strong” immigration policy. I don’t think the words are interchangeable.

Here’s her actual statement in the interview about the kind of policy she’d support. There are a couple of points where I disagree (I think the US in any event is big enough to allow pretty much unlimited immigration, and I strongly strongly strongly object to the awful “must learn English” part), but I think the articulated position is hardly Trumpian:

Clinton articulated a position that she felt Democrats should adopt on immigration in the US, where there are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, as Trump exploits fear of migrants to inflame his political base.
Democrats, she said, must never stoop to treating migrants cruelly. “You deport the bad actors, you deport the criminals, you deport people who have some other kind of threat to our national security. People who have been here for a long time, you have a cut-off point and after that point, they have to learn English, they have to pay taxes, they have to follow the law, they have to wait in line, and you have a process.
“For people who then keep coming, you turn them back, unless they qualify for asylum, which has been in our law for hundreds of years.

[MalevolentPixy]

Chris Geidner (chrisgeidner)

[ficuswhisperer]

I hope that those in the TG community like Caitlyn Jenner that supported Trump take a long and introspective look into this and other recent actions of the Trump administration. Trump and his minions have repeatedly and overtly done everything in their power to dehumanize and try to strip away or deny any protections and I can only see it getting worse in the second half of his presidency.

Even worse is I don’t even think Trump really knows or cares what he’s doing with these policies - he probably doesn’t give it any thought at all. He’s just doing the terrible things his base and donors are asking of him.

[Melizmatic]

@ficuswhisperer

the second half of his presidency

…The second half of his four years.

[ficuswhisperer]

God willing.

[Melizmatic]

R’amen.

­

[mr_raccoon]

A Crafty Arab (acraftyarab)

[Wanderfound]

She also said this:

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Mrs. Clinton said in the interview with The Guardian, which was conducted before the United States midterm elections this month.

“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message — ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ — because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic,” she said.

While others responded:

Tanja Bueltmann, a history professor at Northumbria University in Britain who focuses on migration issues, said Mrs. Clinton’s perspective was “tragically misjudged.”

“Ultimately, immigration is not actually the problem that inflamed voters: Much more foundational issues, such as austerity, are the real reason,” Professor Bueltmann said. “Immigrants and refugees are simply the scapegoats populists have chosen to use to drive forward their ideas.”

&

“We must get the facts straight,” said Gerald Knaus, the architect of the controversial deal with Turkey. “Today in 2018, few irregular migrants reach the European Union.”

Mr. Knaus said that mimicking the approach of the far right only risked helping them. “Just getting tough without any strategy does the work of the far right,” he said.

[d_r]

Yes, she did. It is hard to argue with the fact that the rise of the right in Hungary, in Italy, and even in Germany is largely a racist reaction to the immigration there. Whether the underlying cause of their anger is something else is pretty irrelevant to the immediate goal of keeping the fascists from being voted in.

Centuries of imperial rule by European countries created the political and economic problems that are now chronic in places like sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. It is hard to see solutions to these problems that don’t have problems of their own, and I think that anyone who thinks that they have a clear idea of how to handle these problems is, like Trump or Farage or Bannon, a dangerous idiot. Clinton seems to me to instead simply be making a vague statement about how to address an immediate political issue.

If people jump on her statements and twist them around to make it look like she is blaming the immigrants themselves for these problems, well, it wouldn’t be the first time people have twisted what she has said, she should be used to it.

[alahmnat]

@d_r

Clinton seems to me to instead simply be making a vague statement about how to address an immediate political issue.

The problem is that the statement she made casts the “generous and compassionate approaches” of nations like Germany as the thing that need to come to an end, not that right-wing nationalists need to shut their fucking gobs. Her statement literally says that Europe has “done its part”, and they should now concede the argument on immigration in order to calm down the xenophobes.

[d_r]

@alahmnat

The problem is that the statement she made casts the “generous and compassionate approaches” of nations like Germany as the thing that need to come to an end, not that right-wing nationalists need to shut their fucking gobs.

I think she actually agrees with you on the latter; at least, her comments about Bannon are consistent with it. The context though is that she and Renzi and (inexplicably) Blair were asked specifically what to do about the rise of populism. Based on her personal experience, HRC does not seem to believe that leadership telling these guys to “shut their fucking gobs” will work.