I give you the next (geographically challenged) president of the United States. Let’s just hope he puts the Vice President in charge of who the military should bomb.
Oh, wait. That didn’t work out so well.
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I think Trump meant this as two seperate opinions, but failed to split them into two tweets.
The thing in Germany he’s referring to, is something that is used heavily by the far right in Europe to “prove” that all refugees are criminal. The German police states it didn’t have the means to have properly prevented it. It is a bad thing, all instances of sexual abuse are, but Germans have taken to the streets to protest both the sexual abuse as well as the racism that it sparked. The German police has a few suspects and will likely make a few arrests over the next few days. Trump is right that something bad happened, but is wrong about Germany being a criminal mess.
The thing that happened in France is something that Americans of all people should be familiar with. At least the police shooting someone part. Did they have to kill the man? maybe not, but given France’s recent history one can hardly blame the police responding the way they did.
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It’s perfectly obvious that he’s referring to 2 different situations in two different countries. He’s full of shit, obvs, but try attacking the point he’s making rather than trying to nitpick errors that he hasn’t made. If you have to resort to logical fallacy to attack Trump then you’re worryingly close to losing the argument.
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Are you kidding? I LOVE Trump. He’s going to single-handedly lose the next presidential election for the GOP. Do you have an idea how rare it is for a two term Democratic administration to be followed by another Democratic administration? Discounting successions from assassinations, it’s only happened four times in 44 presidents. Trump is making election history!
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Thinking Paris is in Germany is an understandable mistake. Germany itself has made it several times. Someone always corrects them.
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I’m not sure about whether he failed, he was trying to list reasons to support his argument that Europe is falling apart because of the Muslims/immigrants/liberals. It looks like a number of people weren’t actually aware of the events in Germany and misread his tweet, but if you read it in his stream of consciousness voice it’s not difficult to see what he’s saying. People should just admit that they didn’t read the international news that day and move on - Trump is still a racist asshat even if he knows where Paris is. As you say, Germany is not a criminal mess but as the scale of this was unprecedented in Germany, it’s not surprising that the police were caught on the back foot.
Kind of - I don’t expect anyone to bet that the explosive vest worn by a knife-wielding guy screaming “Allah Akbar” in a crowded area is fake, especially in Paris after France’s worst year of Islamic terrorism. There are cases of police overreach, but even without real explosives shooting him may have saved other people’s lives.
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To my horror, this is not limited to the ‘far right’.
The ‘far right’ are, over here, scary groups you stay far, far away from. Fingers crossed they stay small.
Slowly but steadily that opinion is creeping into ‘right’ or even center. Maybe my neighbor can say “You know, off course not all of them, but something of these stories… etc”. He did not, but I afraid this kind of opinions are getting more and more mainstream.
Scary as hell.
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This is why I think stories like this could be really significant in forming future opinions and policy. Ignoring abuse in order to avoid inflaming tensions is just another thing along with recent violence that gives people like Trump a false legitimacy. I really hope @Gulliverfoyle is right and Trump’s early success means a later routing for the Republicans, but I’m not sure that the right wing’s imminent demise is such a foregone conclusion on either side of the Atlantic.
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Oh, I don’t think the Right is going anywhere. My hope is that when they lose this election because they let Trump hijack their message and peel the facade off their rampant bigotry, it will serve as a wake-up call to stop their backward march into racism, sexism and xenophobia. Even if the GOP imploded completely, conservatism (social and fiscal) isn’t going to die with it. There are too many conservatives outside white middle-class America, here and abroad. But Trump is hastily alienating any loyalty they still had to the Republican party by laying naked the contempt with which the GOP has held them for the last half century.
Let’s be clear, Trump isn’t an outlier in the GOP establishment, he just doesn’t filter the message. I’m pretty sure he’s in this to promote his brand, and actually getting elected is a sideline for him. But because he’s unconcerned with the well-being of the GOP, he’s Trump-eting their increasingly bilious message loud and proud and without an ounce of concern for the consequences. In a bizarre twist of fate, the reality TV phenomenon may wind up being the cold shower the GOP has coming to it.
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When I read Trump’s tweets I usually go to Jimmy Fallon’s version of Trump’s voice. That really helps to understand what he is trying to say.
I’m not faulting France’s police for killing the man. But I will add that it is not very common, at least in the North West part of Europe, for police officers to shoot someone.
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Agreed, it is not just the far right anymore. However, as a European I have to say that Europe is far from the liberal/progressive place it once was. Since 9/11 people here have been pulling to the far right giving the European versions of Trump (and people far scarier yet) a much louder voice than ever (well, maybe not ever, but since WWII at least). Where hate speech was once deemed criminal and political figures faced legal repercussions because of it, now it seems everyone is throwing it under the umbrella of free speech and sees it as acceptable.
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In Europe, one of the trends seems to be having far right parties led by women, and women are a demographic that has historically had a lower representation and are now liable to see a lot more attraction in the far right’s arguments.
Anecdotally, my wife’s female co-workers are a lot less enthusiastic about welcoming refugees when they don’t feel that they are safe or that the government is as committed to dealing with issues as they arise as they are to controlling the narrative. This seems entirely reasonable to me and insinuations by some that anything less than complete acceptance is racism are failing to recognise nuance in people’s attitudes. In many ways that gambit relied on something like last week’s attacks not happening, so I do hope to see less romantic (yet still welcoming) voices prevail.
As an European to, I do see the same. And most of the media is playing the game to.
It is not only the umbrella of free speech, its for some opinions getting more mainstream and getting a shift of ‘opinions accepted’ form right to the left. Making room for more at the right. Like a stack.
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While I rarely agree with the conservative voice in American politics, I do think it’s important to have a dialectic between the Right and Left. Unfortunately, lately the Democratic party has been the Center and the Right, there is no Left to speak of here in our national political establishment, and the GOP has dived off the deep end into xenophobia and fear. The GOP’s self-destructive behavior is the only thing saving the Democratic establishment from its own incompetence.
It’s sad to see Europe following in our and the UK’s footsteps. But not all that surprising. Fear of outsiders has been the touchstone of conservative politics since at least the Peloponnesian War. Certainly there needs to be pragmatic approaches to international support of refugees and the human rights tragedies that send millions fleeing their homes. But when any discussion is drowned out by ultra-right-wing firebrands, the dialectic breaks down.
Trump is a symptom. I’m hoping he’s the heart attack that gets conservatism to join the 21st centrury.
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You know, somehow your comments give me an eerie feeling. At some points we seem to agree, and we do. But there is an underlying stream, and maybe thats the point we disagree.
I try to explain.
In my view (see my post above) there is a shift in acceptance of opinions. Its more and more socially acceptable, and people do, to say less or more racists things and behaving like that. There seems to be a looking glass at specific groups.
A different acceptance level if group a does something or when group b does exactly the same.
I read a nice piece written by a Belgian woman about sexual abuse, it boiled down to: “How on earth can we teach man coming from abroad to not touch our women, whatever clothes they wear, if they are alone or not. If the man in my country give the most bad examples possible?”
For years (many years) I’m trying to tell people that if you exclude one specific group, you probably will get a response. And highly likely not the one you prefer. Or prefer as a community.
I do not agree with the underlying idea that there is not enough attention for the negative sites of immigration and all of that. I think there is a (media) focus on the negative sites, not still sure why, maybe I will never know. But scapegoating, or sidetracking comes to mind.
Here I can totally agree with. But no idea how a dialog will be possible. Hopefully you are right.
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I’ve seen a good example of the media’s current focus on “the bad”, when a group of refugees from Central Africa were housed in a city not far from my home town. A few people had cases of a disease (not sure what exactly) and the media blew this up to massive proportions. “Are refugees bringing horrible diseases” was the message.
Then I spoke to someone who works at a local care home who said they had a breakout of that same disease there recently as well and it was “going around”. Since a lot of the people who volunteered at the refugee shelter also volunteered at care homes, they probably took the disease with them and it spread among some of the refugees.
It’s, in general, the same story but told through two different lenses. One toxic, the other reasonable; the media tends to choose the toxic one’s lately.
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Right now I don’t think it is, at least not in the US. The likes of Trump’s supporters drown out any dialog. But I believe there are a lot of small-c conservatives outside the demographic he’s targeting - either because he’s using them as a scapegoat or because they’ll eventually have to realize they can’t win by pandering exclusively to a fearful fraction of an increasingly minority group (namely middle-class white America) - and whatever political party carries the conservative torch, either in the US or across the pond, will need to move past the siege mentality currently dominating social conservatism. The 21st century is here, and conservatives will have to accept that. Whether specific parties like the GOP are a part of that or go the way of the dinosaurs is the existential question facing them.
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In the Netherlands this is called the “poldermodel” where two or more opposing parties talk about their issues and try to find a middle ground were everyone has some benefit. It has been a key in getting the 20+ political parties to get anything done and is the main ingredient in making unions work.
Lately, it seems people have hardened in their political ideology and refuse to give even an inch to the other side. You can see this very clearly in the US congress, but it is happening throughout the western world.
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It’s been morbidly fascinating to me to watch parliamentary style systems trend more towards the polarization that’s plagued my own country almost since it’s (relatively recent) inception. The constitutional founders of the United States had this idealistic aversion to political parties like the Whigs and Torries, but themselves ended up falling into the same trap almost immediately.
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