Perhaps as long as a giant yellow mural on the streets of DC leading to the White House, saying “Black Lives Matter”? Come to think of it, maybe the giant yellow mural is some kind of, oh I don’t know, metaphor?
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Tell you what, let’s review his statements and actions from January 2017 to present to get the full context of what he said…
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Nothing to apologise for. Debate is healthy
I beg to differ.
Nothing about the mayhem going on all around us in the US is “healthy.”
This ISN’T an esoteric thought experiment for so many of us marginalized and oppressed people… it’s real life, with consequences that affect us directly.
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JFC. Fuck this asshole.
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I originally wrote, “When psychopathy is mistaken for tone-deafness.”
Then I scrolled down and read the first reply. I am not quite so clever as I think.
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Your first post said to look at the broader context, in which @xeni’s headline is “inflammatory.” Except when you listen to the full context of the press conference, including the part where he shushed an African American reporter and celebrated the National Guard “tearing up” Minneapolis protesters, it’s actually much worse.
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Four sentences about equal treatment, with several phrases repeated, ad Trumpeam. But also following several paragraphs about using armed force to “dominate the streets”. So, which is worse, name-dropping George Floyd in 1/40th of a speech about job growth, or doing it in 1/40th of a speech about quelling protest? Hey, you don’t have to decide. It’s both!
Also, he followed the name-dropping with a sentence including the phrase " totally many trillions of dollars meaning three". The last thing we need to do is worry about distortion; Trump’s providing enough distortion. He rambled for 40 minutes, and said almost nothing of substance.
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It’s not as direct and clear cut as, “dominate the battlespace” yet economic violence is totally a thing, and if it even occured to someone to ask him, I am certain he would support it.
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Then why is he President?
Because reality might, but there are a lot of people in denial.
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Why do people keep trying to ruin various orange fruits for me?
Agreed. Let’s call him just Agent Orange, which is nothing like a sane person would love to breath, eat or drink, but after the protestors tear gassing seems so appropriate.
And btw, if I was in George Floyd’s family shoes, I’d publicly tell Trump to never ever dare to name him again.
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Because rich old White men desperate to hold onto power by any means necessary thought they could use him as a tool to achieve their goals, even if it meant burning down the country in the process… which is what we’re seeing now.
Feel free to call him whatever you want, and I’ll continue to do the same.
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- 78k votes in 3 counties.
- Rigged US electoral system.
- $billions in mainstream coverage.
- No Deep State there to prevent this.
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Jeff Bezos already has all the money so I say it’s time we stop playing Monopoly and do something more productive.
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Since 2016 or so, there are a few ugly lines of thought I have to force myself to repress on a regular basis, and one of them is: “I wonder if he’d have got this far if people still used the word ‘retarded’ in public conversation”
This is from an article in the Atlantic, from early November of 2019 (it’s mind-boggling how much has happened since then.)
The author is Peter Mehlman, who apparently had something to do with Seinfeld
This, so much this. If his daddy had not been rich, we would never have learned the name of Donald J. ⊥rump. He would have vanished into obscurity as a sleazy con man or two-bit gangster. He would have spent much of his life in prison, because he’s too stupid to actually do crime well.
But Fred ⊥rump, along with being a member of the Klan, also built a bunch of housing after WWII.
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Makes no sense, agreed, but can he get news outlets, toadies and backers to repeat his lies? No matter how appalling, transgressive, outrageous or impossible? Because that is AFAICT his singular goal on most days. Overton Window? Not just moved–it’s gone, man, way way gone.
I listened with fascination and creeping horror to this interview:
in which Anne Applebaum (her piece in The Atlantic: “History Will Judge The Complicit”) says:
… You’re not interested in truth or falsehood. You’re interested in making people agree with you. And that’s - you can call it a narcissistic instinct. You can call it an authoritarian instinct. But, you know, this is what Donald Trump, you know, has done since he first got to Washington…
This also from her caught my attention:
… these are the Vichy arguments, you know? These are the East German Communist Party arguments, you know, that you are not working as a normal bureaucrat or as a normal functionary. You are in a job to protect, somehow, your institution from the people who are running it. And, you know, it may be that, for a lot of people, this is a legitimate thing to do for some period of time, at least up until the point when you are no longer effective.
James Mattis decided he could no longer be effective. And he quit. And Gary Cohn decided he could no longer be effective. And he quit. They reached the limit of what they felt able to do. And, look; I know anecdotally and I know personally a lot of other people who have or are working inside the administration who are using that same kind of logic. And this is the logic of collaboration, of life in an occupied country. This is not how bureaucrats and politicians and political appointees have behaved in American governments in the past. [emphasis mine] …
… the Vichy argument. So when, you know, Marshal Petain - the leader of collaborationist France - took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that had been lost. He was arguing that he was collaborating with the Germans, you know, for good reasons because, you know, that was going to enable him to fight the real enemy, which was the French parliamentarians and socialists and anarchists and Jews and other leftists who he thought were undermining the nation. …
So this is very much how many Republicans, particularly in the Senate but also elsewhere, now talk. You know, OK, Trump is in many ways an existential, you know, danger. He’s a threat to democracy. He’s undermining our Constitution. He’s wrecking America’s position in the world. Nevertheless, these terrible - you know, the - whatever corrupt deals he’s doing, all of this shrinks in comparison - you know, by comparison to the horrific alternative, which is, you know, the liberalism and socialism and decadence and demographic change that would have been the inevitable result of Hillary Clinton’s presidency or another left-wing leader. So in other words, they can justify anything that Trump does on the grounds that the opposition is worse.
Sorry for the wall o’text here. Applebaum’s interview (there’s a transcript or you can just listen to the interview) was just spot-on re the modus operandi of the political bad-actors we are seeing in the U.S.
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I disagree; I think you are very clever indeed!
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dick tater tot, tantrump, and merkin von bankrupt are my go-to nicknames for the giant alien lizard squatting in the WH.
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