Reports confirm Donald Trump's dad was arrested at Klan rally, and that those arrested were "berobed"

What your dad says? Sure, outside of more context, it’s unfair to hold that against the son.

But what about what your lifelong business partner says? What about what your self-proclaimed greatest role model says? Does none of this ever reflect back on you, no matter what?

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I believe you!

However, the NAACP doesn’t. They’re always so eager to buy into the talking points…

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Does none of this ever reflect back on you, no matter what?

In general it shouldn’t.

But I wouldn’t say that’s true no matter what.

If Trump’s Dad were kind and generous and a leader in the early civil rights movement, would you soften your views on DJT? Probably not because Trump has spewed enough hateful things that you can indict him with his own words. Well, if favorable ancestry can’t help Trump, why should unfavorable ancestry hurt him?

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Well you’re right, to the extent that we have enough data points that changing that one would probably not make a difference in the overall trend, but that’s not the same thing as saying that it would have no meaning at all.

And again, there’s a difference between judging a man based on the actions of his father, and judging a man based on his own actions, as they relate to his relationship with his father, and the business they ran together.

Plus, if Donald Trump’s position is that children should not be considered a reflection of their parents,I’d say that was somewhat undercut by the number of his own kids who were asked to speak at the convention.

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But consider Donald’s own words: "My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy."
If you don’t want his parentage to come into things, can it then excuse all the praise he has for the tutelage of a KKK member who ran highly racist housing? Because if I said my legacy had its roots in David Duke’s, and had nothing but positive things to say about him, I’m sure you would take that to reflect on me.

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When Lincoln was president, there were Radical Republicans. Any Republican who was like that today would be quickly replaced by a Tea Party candidate who has more in common with the Confederacy than Lincoln (who was a moderate in his party).

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Yes, the 1920s KIan wasn’t a fringe group of despised haters that used to lynch people; it was a large mainstream group of despicable haters that did lynch people. And Fred Trump wasn’t arrested for being part of a mainstream political movement, he was arrested for the violent riot which injured several police officers.

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When Lincoln was a republican it was a wholly different party. They were founded not long before Lincoln’s election, as an explicitly anti slavory party. Largely by more progressive elements decamping from the collapsing Whig party.

Today’s Republican Party is not that party. They began to shift and change after passage of the 13th and 14th amendments. As they had accomplished their goal, and reconstruction of the south began to curdle after Lincoln was killed. The party largely maintain distinct liberal/progressive and conservative elements within its coalition. As did the Democratic Party. But things kept shifting. Much of the progressive elements in the GOP decamped with Teddy Roosevelt for the Progressive/Bull Moose Party. Later to join the democrats as the parties restructured. Around the Civil rights era you see the Dixie Crats, pro Jim Crow racist southern democrats, decamp from the DNC. The whole George Wallace thing and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” deliberately attempting to attract this newly available block of voters and politicians. The modern GOP was effectively formed with Reagan’s campaign. Fulfilling the promise of the Southern Strategy, and tying in/playing to powerful conservative Religious movements. Which continually drove off more moderate elements through the 80s and 90s. Into the waiting arms of a DNC that was moving right in response to a significant rightward shift nation wide.

Today’s GOP has essentially no relationship to the Republican Party at its inception. Save two things. An anti-federalist bent left over from the Whigs, and close ties to big business developed in the post civil war era. The GOP is the party of Lincoln in name only. Otherwise it is essentially a collection of the off cast, hardcore conservative and regressive elements from nearly every other part of the political world. The racist elements ejected from the DNC, oppressive religious movement chiefly interested to removing the church state separation, and regulation averse entrenched money. United by that states rights myth, and a fondness for ideological purity.

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Yeah but see it’s not punishing someone to not elect them president. It isn’t a prize (though I’m sure Trump doesn’t understand that) or an entitlement. The American people should do what’s best for the country; what the candidates deserve is irrelevant to whether they should be president. No one deserves to be president.

I think it’s interesting to see where Trump first learned to be a white supremacist, but frankly he’s shown he’s that all on his own.

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What kind of a world do we live in, when the word berobed is used instead of the sensible alternative, robed.

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A wildering one.

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I lieve you are correct.

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I’m sure for some it simply means street cred.

When I used the define command on my Mac, this article came up. Meta!

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Which means you’d have to be an even bigger asshole than normal to get yourself arrested at a Klan rally.

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#notallklansmen

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I don’t think that’s a fair analogy. If Trump’s father was a saint, it would be largely immaterial to Trump’s overtly racist demagoguery (wow, spell checker likes that, is that really a word?).

But in this case his father’s activities cast Trump’s campaign in a new light. Where one might have wondered how much of Trump’s racist rhetoric was heartfelt and how much was pure cynicism, you can now start to infer that his racism is familial and deeply entrenched.

I think it’s important information that speaks to Trump’s character.

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I always assume they are made by the wimmin folk.

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Although it’s interesting, I put it in the context of “Bill Clinton’s dad was kind of a trainwreck right? Didn’t change my opinion of Bill Clinton”. However Clinton’s dad obviously abandoned the family quickly, so wasn’t really a factor, and in my mind, adds to the Story of Bill Clinton in a profound way. That he clawed his way out of the poorest community in Arkansas to become a Rhodes Scholar, Governor, then President. That’s impressive, /despite/ his father’s non-parenting.

In Trump’s case, I guess the context changes for me given how tightly woven he was in his son’s life and that he really had the chance to instill his “values” in Donald. When they got sued for racial discrimination, they got sued together. Father and Son, happy racist family.

Side note: I hadn’t really read much about Bill Clinton’s father before, since as I said it didn’t matter to me at all. The Wiki is pretty fascinating. Married four times in 8 years, gets Wife #3 pregnant before even marrying Wife #2, annuls the marriage to Wife #2, marries Wife #3 with a week to spare before the baby is born.

Oh yeah, Wife #2 was the sister of Wife #1, with whom he also had a child which he fathered after their divorce.

Wow.

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One key difference is that Trump has explicitly stated that his father was both an inspiration throughout his life and one of the primary sources of the values he’s brought to his entire career. In his acceptance speech at the RNC last month he had this to say about his pops:

My Dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew. I wonder sometimes what he’d say if he were here to see this tonight. It’s because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people. He was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers, carpenters, and electricians and I have a lot of that in me also.

Whereas this is the entirety of what Bill Clinton had to say about his father during Bill’s acceptance speech at the DNC in 1992:

I never met my father. He was killed in a car wreck on a rainy road three months before I was born, driving from Chicago to Arkansas to see my mother.

So even if Clinton’s father was an equally shitty person as Fred Trump, it doesn’t reflect nearly as bad on Bill as it does on Donald. It’s not a matter of genetics, it’s a matter of what values were passed on from parent to child.

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