Trump's Big CON: Even If He Is Not Racist, Trump Uses Racism

UPDATE IV:  "We have learned today that Stephen Bannon, the most prominent nationalist and friend to the alt-right in the White House, is on his way out. . .

Don’t be fooled.

Republicans will likely seize on Bannon’s ouster to argue that, in his heart, Trump isn’t really a racist. . .

Trump himself has said that he is 'the least racist person that you have ever met.' I could make a long and detailed case for why Trump is not in fact the least racist person you have ever met.

But this is the wrong question to ask. Not only can’t we know with absolute certainty what lies in Trump’s heart, but it also could not matter less. He’s the president of the United States — what matters isn’t what he feels but what he does and the kind of example he sets.

And by those much more important measures, Trump is the most racially divisive president in our lifetimes — and it’s not even close. "

Read the Washington Post, Steve Bannon is out. That’s good, but the problem is still Donald Trump., which notes:

"Let’s give ourselves a reminder of what President Trump has done just since becoming a candidate, setting aside his history as a private citizen:

    In the speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he attacked Mexican immigrants, saying 'When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.'

    He retweeted a racist graphic showing a dark-skinned man wielding a gun and listing bogus statistics alleging falsely that black people are responsible for the vast majority of homicides of white people. That was in addition to the multiple times he retweeted messages from the Twitter accounts of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

    Though immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, he put an intense focus on individual crimes committed by an undocumented person, telling lurid stories meant to inflame as much hatred as possible. After becoming president, he created the Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement office, whose purpose is to publicize crimes committed by immigrants.

    He repeatedly characterized African Americans as living in a hellish nightmare that could only be saved by him. 'You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?' he said. That statistic, of course, was bogus.

    He said that the judge presiding over his trial for fraud in the Trump University lawsuit (for which he eventually agreed to pay $25 million to compensate his victims) couldn’t be impartial, because 'He’s a Mexican.' The judge in fact is an American who was born in Indiana; saying 'He’s a Mexican' is no more accurate than saying about Trump, 'He’s a German.' But the idea that your heritage forever defines your identity and determines whether you qualify as a 'real' American is an old racist notion.

    He proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States, and even said he’d be open to creating a registry to track all Muslims in the country.

    His 'America First' slogan was a deliberate echo of the America First party of the early 1940s, which trafficked in anti-Semitism as it attempted to keep America out of World War II.

    For almost the entirety of the campaign he continued to hold to the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, the issue that enabled him to transform himself from a reality TV star into a political figure. In addition, he frequently questioned whether Obama could have fairly been admitted to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, demanding to see Obama’s grades to prove that he was actually qualified.

    His Justice Department is reportedly planning to seek out cases where it can sue universities for discriminating against white people.

    Soon after taking office, his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, made clear that the Justice Department would no longer concern itself with investigating police abuse of minority citizens, and has taken steps to pull back from the consent decrees the Obama administration negotiated with local police departments to improve their conduct.

    He made the ludicrous claim that he only lost the popular vote because 3 million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally, then set up a commission to 'investigate' the matter, the results of which will be used to further the Republican effort to make it as hard as possible for African Americans and other minorities to register and vote.

    On Thursday, he made another reference to a bogus story he told repeatedly on the campaign trail, in which Gen. John Pershing supposedly responded to terrorism by taking 50 Muslim prisoners and summarily executing 49 of them with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, on the theory that this would be particularly offensive to Muslims. So in addition to proclaiming his support for a fictional war crime, Trump is arguing that offending Muslim religious sensibilities is the way to fight terrorism (this from a man who says it’s a deep insult to Christians when a department store puts up a 'Happy Holidays' sign).

    And of course, not only has he now embraced the cause of monuments celebrating the Confederacy — a rebellion against the United States for the purpose of maintaining slavery — he has explicitly equated its leaders to the founders of the American republic, putting figures like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on the same plane as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Given this extraordinary record, no sane person believes that it’s some kind of accident that all manner of neo-Nazis and white supremacists have felt emboldened by Trump’s campaign, his election victory and his presidency to become more vocal and demonstrative than they ever have before.

Indeed, if you ask them that’s exactly what they’ll tell you. They regularly praise and celebrate President Trump, and say that his words and actions show that they no longer need to hide their ideology of hate."

UPDATE III: "James Murdoch, chief executive of 21st Century Fox, has pledged to donate $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League, according to an email he sent to friends. He told them, 'What we watched this last week in Charlottesville and the reaction to it by the President of the United States concern all of us as Americans and free people.' He continued: 'These events remind us all why vigilance against hate and bigotry is an eternal obligation — a necessary discipline for the preservation of our way of life and our ideals. The presence of hate in our society was appallingly laid bare as we watched swastikas brandished on the streets of Charlottesville and acts of brutal terrorism and violence perpetrated by a racist mob.' In pointed criticism of President Trump, he went on: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists. Democrats, Republicans, and others must all agree on this, and it compromises nothing for them to do so.”

The sentiment is lovely, and the money is certainly appreciated by those fighting anti-Semitism and bigotry, but the email reeks of hypocrisy, to be blunt. Murdoch seems blissfully unaware of — or in denial about — his family’s role in creating the Trump phenomenon, fueling the rise of a xenophobic, racist demagogue and continuing to fan the flames of his noxious populism, which has brought us to where we are. . .

Instead of giving the ADL what amounts to pocket change for James Murdoch, why doesn’t he clean up his own news operation? Fox News has, more than any other outlet, popularized birtherism, Trumpism and white grievance-mongering, creating an alternative universe for white, older, working-class voters whom Trump whipped into a frenzy. That might cost more than $1 million, but at least Murdoch could sleep well at night, look at himself in the mirror and tell his family that he is a patriot, not a guy who’s making a mint tearing apart the country."

Read the Washington Post, To curtail hate, James Murdoch must clean house at Fox News.

With a few few exceptions, the Republi-CON handwringers, who pandered to fear, anger, and hatred for years to win elections, are hypocrites.

UPDATE II:  How could The Donald equate Nazis, racisits and murder with those protesting the same?

Because "moral equivalence is an option — for those who are willfully blind to history and have a shriveled emptiness where their soul once resided."

Read the Washington Post, There is a shriveled emptiness where Trump’s soul once resided.

UPDATE:  In some respects, until very recently The Donald had diffent views.

"In 2015, Trump endorsed then-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s decision to remove a Confederate flag from the statehouse after the shooting in Charleston. 'I would take it down, yes,' he said. 'I think they should put it in a museum and respect whatever it is you have to respect.'

But Trump can never turn down a good wedge issue, if he’s convinced it will gin up conservatives: In November 2012, Trump said Mitt Romney lost the election because he was too 'mean-spirited' on immigration and toward Hispanics. 'He had a crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal,' Trump told Newsmax. 'It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. … He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.' Just months later, though, Trump was convinced by his advisers that an especially hardline on Mexican immigration was crucial to win the GOP nomination. So he went vastly further than Romney ever did."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s embrace of Confederate statues as a wedge issue underscores Bannon’s enduring influence.

"The truly shocking thing, looking back at what has been written and said since the events in Charlottesville, is that anybody is shocked. Donald Trump’s first appearance on the front page of the New York Times was in 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department sued his family’s real estate company for discriminating against black would-be tenants. In the 4½ decades since, he has used racial smears and stereotypes — Mexican rapists, sly Jews, lazy blacks — over and over again, in public, including during last year’s election campaign.

During that campaign, he, his sons and his campaign advisers tweeted and passed on anti-Semitic and racist memes, sometimes deleting them later and sometimes defending them. He was signaling constantly to those who held anti-Semitic and racist views, implying that he understood them, that he was on their side. 'But his grandchildren are Jewish' has always been a pretty thin defense, right up there with 'But some of his best friends are black.' And it doesn’t matter anyway: It makes no difference what this president (or any president) thinks privately about black or brown people, or which churches or synagogues his friends and family attend. What matters is something different: how the president uses racism in politics — and whether it works.

To date, Trump has used bigotry mainly as an electoral tool, to excite a relatively small group of supporters — let’s call them the alt-right because it’s a useful shorthand — and to persuade them to attend his rallies, to donate money, and above all to coordinate and staff (I suspect both as volunteers and professionals) his online campaign. This tactic was successful largely because the rest of his voters, mainstream Republicans, were not bothered by the tactics that Trump used to win the election. Either they didn’t see the online racism — not everyone uses social media, especially Twitter — or they found compelling reasons, such as hatred of Hillary Clinton or desire for a conservative Supreme Court, to overlook it.

The question now is whether Trump will go further, manipulating racism for political ends as others have done in other countries."

Read the Washington Post, Beware: Trump may use the alt-right to turn himself into the center.

Time to Remove the Monuments to the War to Perpetuate Slavery

A “a peaceful, nonviolent protester” from Pensacola attended the neo-Nazis and white supremacists rally in Charlottesville carrying his pistol and assault rifle to protect ‘the true history and heritage of the Confederacy and the American South.’

Our local congressman, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, says that removing a Confederate monument in Pensacola would be “whitewashing history."  President Trump would agree.

But Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward wants the monument to come down.

What might he understand that the others refuse to acknowledge?

More than 240 years ago, our country was founded on the principle of life, liberty and property protected by the rule of law, enshrined in the Constitution adopted in 1787. What many people forget is, at the time, property included people held in slavery, an abhorrent practice. The founding fathers knew the contradiction, but made a bargain with the understanding that the Constitution provided a peaceful method of change in the future by amendment.

As the U.S. moved toward that change to end and outlaw slavery, Southern states, which benefitted economically from free labor at the end of a lash, refused to accept this change and decided to create a new country that would protect their right to enslave people.

It wasn’t a War Between the States, to protect states’ rights, except to the extent it was meant to allow the continuation of chattel slavery. The Southern states said so, read their declarations of succession defending the practice and angry with the states that were refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. The Southern states were also being denied “equal rights” in the new territories, which meant the days of slavery were near an end. And many Confederate politician and soldiers freely acknowledged, before and after the war, that they would and did fight to stop the abolitionists who were rallying support to end slavery, which was so important to the way of life in the South.

These states renounced the bargain, rebelled and used violence and war to prevent that change. This was treason plain and simple. Thankfully they were defeated.

But in the years after, Southerners created an heroic myth, the Lost Cause, to convince themselves that the war was “just” and noble and the Confederate flag represented freedom, not slavery. Reconstruction was abandoned in the 1870s, and the terrorism of the freed men and women began in earnest. Jim Crow laws, violence, lynching, the KKK, and White Citizen Councils were just a few of the methods used. (Ask Rep. Gaetz and that young man celebrating his history about Rosewood, Florida.)

Confederate flags were adopted and monuments were built, many between the 1890s and 1930s. The whole point of these methods, and the Confederate flags and monuments, was to institutionalize and celebrate white supremacy.

Substantial movement toward equal protection under the law began in the 1950s, and continues today, despite the ignorance of some, and the efforts of others. (If “national unite” is so important, why the effort to undermine the right to vote.)

So Rep. Gaetz, tell me a little more about “whitewashing history,” I find your use of the term a little ironic.

Maybe that is the reason that young man who attended the rally has so little knowledge of ‘the true history and heritage of the Confederacy and the American South.’ If he is a peaceful, nonviolent protester, he should leave the pistol and assault rifle at home. Our understanding, empathy, laws and Constitution – not violence – are all that are needed for change.

And thank you Mayor Hayward for agreeing that it is time for Pensacola's Confederate monument to come down.

Trump's Big CON: Counter-Demonstrators Lacked a Permit

UPDATE:  "Trump should have left his Monday statement condemning white supremacists as his last word, 'but he just can’t stop himself, so he goes off without understanding the history of neo-Nazism and white supremacy. And those of us who had so much hope for him are just exhausted, because this is every day. People see it as a betrayal. Soon, he won’t have anybody, because when you start talking about Nazis and supremacy, who’s going to defend him on that?'" said Armstrong Williams, a conservative, African-American TV and radio talk show host and longtime supporter of Trump.

Read the Washington Post, Trump and race: Decades of fueling divisions.

"In blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville that left one person dead, President Trump twice asserted that the people protesting white supremacists and neo-Nazis lacked a permit, unlike the groups that gathered to protest the possible removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

But that’s turned out to be false".

Read the Washington Post, President Trump’s false claim that counter-demonstrators lacked a permit.

You can NEVER believe anything The Donald says unless it is verified.

Trump's Big CON: Trump's Brown-Nosers (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 10))

"On Thursday, Foreign Policy published a remarkable memo penned by a former staffer on President Trump’s National Security Council. The author, Rich Higgins, was forced out last month by national security adviser H.R. McMaster for composing it. The memo contends that the president is the target of a vast conspiracy spearheaded by so-called cultural Marxists, who have allied with Islamists and captured (among other groups) the media, the deep state, academia, 'global corporatists' and leaders of both parties. That Higgins worked for the NSC is disturbing enough. But more disturbing is that Trump, who saw the memo when it was passed to him by his son Donald Trump Jr., was 'furious' at Higgins’s removal — a sign of the scary conspiratorial depths the president is already descending to. . .

Trump’s paranoia echoes that of another president: Richard Nixon. Nixon rejected the Birchers publicly, but he shared the idea of a campaign against the president. 'Never forget, the press is the enemy … the establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy,' he said in December 1972. More frighteningly, as Nixon’s presidency ended in disaster, Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, worried about Nixon’s growing instability and increased drinking, told commanders that any order of a nuclear launch should be routed through him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Less than 50 years later, the Oval Office is at the center of a terrifying combination of delusions, a foreign policy crisis and nuclear launch codes. "

Read the Washington Post, This NSC ex-staffer’s memo is crazy. Trump’s reaction is more disturbing.

 Now repeat after me:  He's so pretty!

Trump's Big CON: The Wisconsin Foxconn Jobs CON

UPDATE:  Some think Wisconsin rubber-stamped the bundle of perks with with "no guarantee Foxconn will hold up its side of the bargain.

Kathleen Gallagher, executive director of the Milwaukee Institute, a technology-focused not-for-profit, pointed out that the company has previously pledged to open factories elsewhere that never materialized.

In 2013, Foxconn’s chairman said the firm would build a $30-million factory and hire 500 workers in central Pennsylvania — a promise that has not come to fruition. "

Read the Washington Post, Trump is celebrating the Foxconn deal. The people paying for it aren’t so sure.

"The deal President Trump called “incredible” and Gov. Scott Walker hailed as a “once-in-a-century” opportunity to bring the electronic manufacturing giant Foxconn to Wisconsin wouldn’t generate profits for the state until 2042, a new legislative analysis projects.

The state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a nonpartisan agency that analyzes proposed economic investments, looked at Walker’s bid last month to bring a new flat-screen-display factory to the state in exchange for a roughly $3 billion-incentives package.

Foxconn said it would break ground in southeastern Wisconsin and hire 3,000 workers there over the next four years, with the “potential” to create 13,000 jobs.

If the company hits that growth target, Wisconsin would break even after 25 years, said Rob Reinhardt, a program manager who worked on the report. If 13,000 jobs never materialize, it could take decades longer. . .

Wisconsin [already] has an unusually low unemployment rate (3.2 percent), which is significantly lower than the country’s 4.3 percent. Employers there already complain about having trouble finding workers. . .

If Foxconn fills jobs with workers from neighboring Illinois, where the unemployment rate is 4.7 percent, analysts predict the deal won’t start making money for Wisconsin until 2045."

Read the Washington Post, The Foxconn deal Trump championed won’t make Wisconsin money for 25 years, report says.

Trump's Big CON: Trump Has No Morality (or Principles)

 UPDATE II:  Why has The Donald been so successful, despite his lack of morality or principles?

His core supporters don't care, so he doesn't need them.

"Trump campaigned on the Palin model. In fact, he improved upon it. His identity was his trademark, rendering the constant shifts in policy goals and promises almost meaningless. His base saw in Trump what they wanted to see. Some saw a fighter who would stand up for them, others saw a vaunted truth-teller, and a few, truth be told, likely saw a potential white-nationalist hero. And he gave it to them: the image, the veneer, the blank slate upon which their deeply held dreams — for themselves as much as their country — could be written. His fans weren’t dissuaded by his past support for Democrats (including his 2016 opponent), or his lies, or his personal liberalism, or his crudeness, or his long history of mistreating small-business owners of the kind he claimed to champion, because his fans weren’t voting for Trump. They were voting for what Trump meant to them personally. . .

His popularity is cultural, not political, resilient to the notions of truth and fiction and to Trump’s own failures."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is Sarah Palin but better at it.

UPDATE:  "Seven months in, it’s clear that lying is not the disease afflicting us, just the most obvious symptom. The infection’s name is “getting away with it.”

The phrase 'getting away with it' didn’t even exist as an expression until the middle of the 19th century. It came into general use over the following few decades, coincident with the Darwinian phrase 'survival of the fittest' and Nietzsche’s 'God is dead.' In the 2012 book 'Missing Out,' in a chapter entitled 'On Getting Away With It,' psychiatrist Adam Phillips suggested we had, just in the last century, gone from regarding 'getting away with it' as immoral — perhaps a forbidden pleasure we might secretly admire, sometimes indulge, but could never approve — to its elevation to a highest-value goal.

In the chapter’s conclusion he writes, 'But what if getting away with it was a new moral principle or project? . . In this new morality — which sounds like a moral game, or a parody of the idea of morality — moral excellence would reside in being able to successfully exempt yourself from rules you have consented to. . . The Good Person would be replaced by the Impressive Person; and what would impress would be the breaking of rules without punishment. . . Where once there were the principled, now there would be the opportunists; the clever would displace the pious.' He all but foretold the election of President Trump. . .

When Trump gets away with flouting a rule, even as he pretends to consent to it, when he gets away with a lie, even as he pretends to consent to the commandment not to lie, he readily congratulates himself: by his own values — values our society broadly understands, and sometimes almost shares (sometimes in jest, sometimes in horror, sometimes with a delicious sense of trespass) — “getting away with it” is good, in and of itself. . .

The country is in a tough spot. But knowing what you’re up against is half the battle, and we know that Trump’s 'getting away with it' is a parody of morality."

Read the Washington Post, When ‘getting away with it’ is all Trump cares about.

"After a campaign gestated in birtherism, Trump was slow to condemn the likes of white supremacist David Duke, routinely spoke in coded racial language to energize a segment of people angry about the changing face of the country and condoned violence against those who disagreed with him, Trump, over the last four days, has proven that he is that same person as president.

And that person is the opposite of a leader. And that person is dangerous to this country's well-being.

Trump's comments at a press availability at Trump Tower on Tuesday not only revealed, again, his remarkable blindness to the racial history and realities of this country, but also showed his willingness to stake out morally indefensible positions as the result of personal pique.

Three days after insisting that the blame for the Charlottesville protests spurred by neo-Nazis and white supremacists lay 'on many sides,' and just a day removed from a more fulsome condemnation of those groups, Trump returned to his original position -- that this was a situation where both sides were wrong and the only people who disagreed with that were the fake news media. . .

That outcome is more than a failure of political leadership by Trump. It is a failure of moral leadership.

It is impossible -- given the last two years of Trump -- to conclude he is simply fumbling his way around on issues of race, gender and ethnic heritage. The mountain of evidence gathered suggests just the opposite: That he is purposely saying and doing things to make murky moral questions that should be crystal clear. And why is he doing it? For political gain.

That is the opposite of what being president of the United States should be. Hell, it's the opposite of what being a citizen of this country should be.

What Trump is doing is dangerous -- for our politics and for our moral fiber. To condone white supremacists by insisting there are two sides to every coin is to take us back decades in our understanding of each other. It is to undo decades worth of progress toward a freer and better country for all people.

To do so purposely to score political points or stick it in the eye of your supposed media enemies is, frankly, despicable."

Read CNN, Donald Trump's failure in Charlottesville wasn't political -- it was moral.

Trump's problem is that he has no persoanl morality.

He is guided only by personal, monetary and political gain.

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: When Loyalty Is Valued Above Principle and Honesty,

Trump's Big CON: What Might Have Been If He Only Had Ideas or Principles (Or Even Common Sense)

Trump's Big CON: What Might Have Been If He Only Had Ideas or Principles (Or Even Common Sense), CONt.

Trump's Big CON: He is a Performance Artist (AKA It's All About the Show, Explained, CONt. Part 4)

UPDATE:  "For his entire life, Trump has made grandiose promises and ominous threats — and rarely delivered on any. When he was in business, Reuters found, he frequently threatened to sue news organizations for libel, but the last time he followed through was 33 years ago, in 1984. Trump says that he never settles cases out of court. In fact, he has settled at least 100 times, according to USA Today.

In his political life, he has followed the same strategy of bluster. In 2011, he said that he had investigators who 'cannot believe what they’re finding' about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and that he would at some point 'be revealing some interesting things.' He had nothing. During the campaign, he vowed that he would label China a currency manipulator, move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, make Mexico pay for a border wall and initiate an investigation into Hillary Clinton. So far, nada. After being elected, he signaled to China that he might recognize Taiwan. Within weeks of taking office, he folded. He implied that he had tapes of his conversations with then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Of course, he had none.

Even now, as he deals with a nuclear crisis, Trump has made claims that could be easily shown to be false. He tweeted that his first presidential order was to 'modernize' the United States’ nuclear arsenal. In fact, he simply followed a congressional mandate to authorize a review of the arsenal, which hasn’t been completed yet. Does he think the North Koreans don’t know this? . .


'I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days,' Tillerson said on Wednesday. This was an unusual, perhaps even unprecedented statement. The secretary of state seems to have been telling Americans — and the world — to ignore the rhetoric, not of the North Korean dictator, but of his own boss, the president of the United States. It is probably what Trump’s associates have done for him all his life. They know that the guiding mantra for him has been not the art of the deal, but the art of the bluff."

Read the Washington Post, Trump has been making ominous threats his whole life.

"This was Trump in his element: At his luxurious private golf club here in Bedminster, the cameras trained on him, his vice president and national security advisers looking on admiringly, he parried queries — at times even gleefully — like a tennis player.

Engaging with people — journalists, advisers, friends and even foes — is Trump’s lifeblood. . .

The president’s exchanges with a small pool of traveling reporters lacked the formality of a full-fledged news conference. (His last was in February.) After each answer, he made eye contact with a reporter, as if to say, 'Gimme another!'

'It was like he was a dam that had suddenly burst free and he was able to unload a lot that was on his mind,' presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. . .

“This is what [Trump’s new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general]  will learn very quickly, which is when you put this guy in a cage and think you’re controlling him, things like this happen,” said one Trump confidant, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Also watching it unfold on television was Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. The moment, he said, was vintage Trump.

'President Trump is a performance artist and he loves being on stage. .?.?. He was very much Trump unshackled and unfettered and reveling in this moment,' said O’Brien, author of the 2005 book 'Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald.' . .

O’Brien said Trump 'was in his element,' but added, 'I don’t think it’s a good thing. Donald Trump in his element is someone who’s living in his own private Idaho, inside his own head. He’s constantly scripting how he sees the world and his role in it.' . .

Trump lives to be in the arena himself, said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser.

'He realizes that the best way for him to control his message is to be the message,' Nunberg said.

Read the Washington Post, ‘When you put this guy in a cage and think you’re controlling him, things like this happen’.

Trump's Big CON: Repeat Twice Daily: "He's So Pretty" (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 9))

"Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 a.m. and the follow-up, around 4:30 p.m. Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer both wanted the privilege of delivering the 20-to-25-page packet to President Trump personally, White House sources say.

These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, don’t contain top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.

One White House official said the only feedback the White House communications shop, which prepares the folder, has ever gotten in all these months is: 'It needs to be more fucking positive.' That’s why some in the White House ruefully refer to the packet as 'the propaganda document.'"

Read Vice News, Trump gets a folder full of positive news about himself twice a day.

Now repeat after me:  He's so pretty!

Trump's Big CON: He's Gotta Help His Supporters Hate, Hate, Hate, CONt.

UPDATE XIII: If you had any doubt, The Donald made it clear.

Read the Washington Post:

Trump puts a fine point on it: He sides with the alt-right in Charlottesville, which explained that to Trump, marchers "defending their 'heritage'" by chanting anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans (such as bigots, racist, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan) are the moral equals of those "those protesting their racism, hatred and belief in the inferiority of African Americans, Jews and other minorities";

Trump’s rhetorical ricochet on Charlottesville highlights basic truths about the president, which noted that:

Trump "does not like to be told what to say. He will always find a way to pull the conversation back to himself. And he is preternaturally inclined to dance with the ones who brought him. . .

[Then he] turned to one of his favorite rhetorical tools, using casual language to strip away any definite blame, any clear moral stand, and instead send the message that nothing is certain, that everything is negotiable, that ethics are always situational. 'You can call it terrorism,' he said. 'You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want.'";

Everyone working for Trump knows his Charlottesville response is an abomination, which stated that "the president adamantly defended his original statement that the fault lies with bigotry on 'many sides' and reiterated that 'there’s blame on both sides' for what happened. He said that the rallying white supremacists and Nazis had been treated 'unfairly' by the media, and that there 'were very fine people on both sides.'";

Trump just hit a new low, which explained that

Trump "after putting Nazis on the same moral plane as anti-Nazis, put the father of our country and the author of the Declaration of Independence on the same moral plane as two men who made war on America. Duke and white-nationalist leader Richard Spencer applauded Trump’s performance. . .

It’s more than words. The administration proposed eliminating the 'Countering Violent Extremism' program; officials argued that the effort should target only Islamist radicalization, not right-wing extremism. In June, the Trump administration canceled a grant to a group called Life After Hate, which rehabilitates neo-Nazis. 'At a time when this is the biggest threat in our country, to pull funding from the only organization in the United States helping people disengage from this is pretty suspect to me,' the group’s co-founder Christian Picciolini told me.

And now we have the spectacle of the president, in response to reporters’ questions, defending the character and motives of the neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville.

Trump, who has issued scores of tweets without benefit of accurate information, explained his initial unwillingness to single out the white supremacist who drove into a crowd of demonstrators: 'Before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.'

Trump, who has criticized others for failing to use the phrase 'radical Islamic terrorism,' declined to call the incident terrorism, dismissing the question as 'legal semantics.'

Asked about the culpability of the 'alt-right' in the Charlottesville attack, Trump replied: 'Okay, what about the alt-left that came charging them?'";

The nation can only weep, an editorial that stated:

"TUESDAY WAS a great day for David Duke and racists everywhere. The president of the United States all but declared that he has their backs.

When a white supremacist stands accused of running his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 19, Americans of goodwill mourn and demand justice. When this is done in the context of a rally where swastikas are borne and racist and anti-Semitic epithets hurled, the only morally justifiable reaction is disgust. When the nation’s leader does not understand this, the nation can only weep. . .

That car in Charlottesville did not kill or wound just the 20 bodies it struck. It damaged the nation. Mr. Trump not only failed to help the country heal; he made the wound wider and deeper.";

President Trump must go, which argued:

"Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon gave the most disgusting public performance in the history of the American presidency. Framed by the vulgar excess of the lobby of Trump Tower, the president of the United States shook loose the constraints of his more decent-minded advisers and, speaking from his heart, defended white supremacists and by extension, their credos of hatred. He equated with those thugs the courageous Americans who had gathered to stand up to the racism, anti-Semitism and doctrine of violence that won the cheers and Nazi salutes of the alt-right hordes to whom Trump felt such loyalty.

After several days in which Trump and his advisers wrestled with what should have been a straightforward task — condemning the instigators of the unrest that rocked Charlottesville, Va., this past weekend — Trump revealed the reason that finding those words was such a struggle. He, too, is an extremist.

No one who values the best of what the United States has stood for could watch without feeling revulsion, anger or heartbreak. . .

Every day Trump remains in office is a victory for the extremists. But in that same moment on Tuesday, Trump made it clear that to defeat the champions of hatred in the United States, he must go. That he also must go to preserve the United States’ standing in the world, to ensure the safety of our people and our way of life has also been made clear in the past week. It is now time that we follow his dangerous words with our own actions. It is why Heather Heyer was on that street in Charlottesville. We owe it to her and to ourselves to remove him from office as soon as the law permits. Trump himself has demonstrated the price of each day of delay."; and

What did you expect from Trump?, which pointed out:

"Plainly, the New York education system, Fordham University and Wharton School of Business have failed Trump, promoting him without ensuring that he possessed basic reasoning skills and a grasp of American history. But in these institutions’ defense, he is unteachable, we have learned. . .

Trump apologists have run out of excuses and credibility. He was at the time plainly the more objectionable of the two main party candidates; in refusing to recognize that they did the country great harm. They can make amends by denouncing him and withdrawing all support. In short, Trump’s embrace and verbal defense of neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be disqualifying from public service. All true patriots must do their utmost to get him out of the Oval Office as fast as possible."

Republicans, cut the outrage. It’s time to disown Trump., which suggested that:

Among other things, "Trump must be shunned and ostracized. He is not fit for polite company, let alone the presidency. He has demolished the rules of civilized behavior, and therefore should enjoy none of the ceremonial niceties that are extended to normal presidents.

Republicans’ words are insufficient and, at this point, insufferable. When we look back at this time, the only thing people will ask is: 'What did you do?' Republicans will need a better answer than 'I was outraged and gave tough quotes — on background.'

But hey, "source close to Stephen Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, said he was proud of the president’s performance Tuesday."

Read Bloomberg, Trump Drags GOP Onto Dangerous Ground, This Time Over Race.

(And don't forget Sebastian Gorka, another White House Trump aide, "who uses the platform to defend the embattled white man . . . [and] wore a medal from the Hungarian nationalist organization Vitezi Rend, a longtime anti-Semitic group that claimed Gorka as one of its own."

UPDATE XII:  Read the Washington Post, An ugly pattern is taking shape. Trump exaggerates certain threats. He plays down other ones., which states:

"Trump continually exaggerates the threat posed by immigration. . .

Trump appears to be reluctant to confront the far-right fringe threat — and the Russian threat to future elections."

The reasons are obvious.

But if you need a hint:

Read CNN, Trump has attacked just about everyone on Twitter. But not white supremacists.

Or read the Washington Post, I watched Trump all last year. His response to Charlottesville was no surprise., which notes that "[a] quiet wink at white supremacists followed by a belated condemnation fits the pattern he established in the campaign.

UPDATE XI:  Excerpts from WP, Trump acts like the president of the Red States of America:

"Compare Trump’s muted reaction to Charlottesville with his animated response last December to a similar incident in Columbus, another college town where an extremist plowed a car into a crowd of people. Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an Ohio State University student, drove a Honda sedan through a crowd outside a school building last November before emerging from the vehicle and slashing at people with a butcher knife. As president-elect, Trump flew to OSU to meet with survivors and praise the cop who shot the attacker. 'This is a great honor for me today,' Trump told reporters during the visit. 'We’re in a fantastic state that I love, Ohio.' One big difference: Artan was a Somali Muslim refugee. It's not even clear Trump has tried to call the mother of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. . .

In this context, Trump’s announcement that he is mulling a pardon for Joe Arpaio can be viewed as a strategic sop to mollify some of the most xenophobic elements of his nativist base. The president told Fox News in an interview published yesterday that he is 'seriously considering' a full pardon to the former Arizona sheriff, who was convicted last month of criminal contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order that he stop racially profiling Hispanics.

'I might do it right away, maybe early this week. I am seriously thinking about it,' the president told Gregg Jarrett. He called Arpaio a “great American patriot” who has “done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration”: “Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe? … He doesn’t deserve to be treated this way.”

Arpaio, who remains a 'birther' and has insisted he has proof that Obama was not born in Hawaii, lost reelection last year. He was an early Trump endorser — going to Iowa for the announcement — and linked himself closely with the GOP nominee — speaking in prime time during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. . .

In stark contrast to his caution after Charlottesville, it took Trump just 54 minutes to attack the chief executive of Merck by name on Monday morning after he resigned from the president’s manufacturing council. Kenneth C. Frazier, one of the few African American chief executives in the Fortune 500, touted the virtues of diversity in a statement. “I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism,” he said. “America's leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal.”

POTUS continued to use his social media bully pulpit to go after him last night . . .

Meanwhile, even after his speech yesterday, Trump still has not reacted publicly to a bomb that was detonated at a Minnesota mosque Aug. 5. Sebastian Gorka, a far-right nationalist on Trump’s National Security Council, defended his silence last week. 'There's a great rule: all initial reports are false,' Gorka said on MSNBC from the White House briefing room. 'You have to check them. You have to find out who the perpetrators are. … We've had a series of crimes committed — alleged hate crimes — by right-wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left. So let's wait and see.' (The governor of Minnesota had already declared the mosque attack as 'an act of terrorism' when Gorka said this.)

The president, of course, showed no such caution after attacks this spring in Paris and London. And don’t forget when he falsely described a casino robbery in Manila as a terrorist attack. Or his attacks on Mexican immigrants.

Finally, Trump’s botched response to Charlottesville should be viewed as another consequence of electing the first president in American history with no prior governing experience. 'Say what you will about politicians as a group, but it is striking how all of them, from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz, knew the right thing to say in response to Charlottesville,' writes Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. 'Running for office repeatedly tends to hone one’s rhetorical instincts. At a minimum, most professional politicians learn the do’s and don’ts of political rhetoric. Trump’s political education has different roots. He has learned the art of political rhetoric from three sources: reality television, Twitter and ‘the shows.’ His miscues this past week can be traced to the pathologies inherent in each of these arenas.' . .


'The president is confident that his lazy musings are equal to history. They are not,' [Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote in a column this weekend. 'Trump could offer no context for this latest conflict. No inspiring ideals from the author of the Declaration of Independence, who called Charlottesville home. No healing words from the president who was killed by a white supremacist. By his flat, foolish utterance, Trump proved once again that he has no place in the company of these leaders.'"

UPDATE X:  Want to understand what hate can do to victim and perpetrator,

Read the Washington Post, Three years ago, the Islamic State massacred Yazidis in Iraq. Why?, which noted that:

 "A recurrent theme in my conversations with Yazidis and testimonies of female survivors is that not only foreign fighters but also local Iraqis and Syrians, both men and women, were actively involved in their rape and enslavement. In the words of a survivor, 'They did not attack us because of their ideology, but to simply have the opportunity to rape us.'

While some Sunnis from the Sinjar area tried to protect their Yazidi neighbors, many others, including godfathers of Yazidi boys who were supposed to act as their protectors, participated in the enslavement of women and the robbing of the Yazidis and looting of their properties resulting in revenge attacks after the defeat of the Islamic State."

Then read also the Washington Post, Trump’s lasting legacy is to embolden an entirely new generation of racists.

UPDATE IX:  "Republicans need to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: Their party supported and still supports Trump, who feeds the monster of white resentment and who focuses their anger, fear and frustration on minorities.

The memes that immigrants are “stealing our jobs”; Christianity is a persecuted religion in the United States; Mexican immigrants are “murderers”; and millions of illegal immigrants voted in the election have given white nationalists rhetorical cover to propound their even more extreme racist views. Bannon and company have introduced in the Oval Office the “blood and soil” definition of nationalism, the suggestion that the media is the enemy of the people and a nonstop attack on the truth. They refused to abandon a presidential candidate who attacked a federal court judge on the basis of race, for heaven’s sake."

Read the Washington Post, Don’t argue with Pelosi on this one, Republicans.

Pelosi called Trump out, saying:

"'If the President is sincere about rejecting white supremacists, he should remove all doubt by firing Steve Bannon and the other alt-right white supremacist sympathizers in the White House.'"

UPDATE VIII:  "There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God’s sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you’re not a robot. . .

'It’s been going on for a long time in our country,' Trump said on Saturday. 'Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, this has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.'

If only. If only it had no place here. If only these statues had sprung up out of the earth on their own.

What did they think the mob was doing, gathered with torches?

Of course they gathered with torches, because the only liberty they have lost is the liberty to gather with torches and decide whose house to visit with terror. . .

Here we are in the year of our lord 2017 and the president of the United States lacks the moral courage to condemn Nazis and white supremacists. And they are not even making it difficult. They are saluting like Nazis and waving Nazi flags and chanting like Nazis and spewing hatred like Nazis. Maya Angelou was not wrong. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Especially if what that person is telling you is 'I am a Nazi.'

Barely, after two days, he has managed to mumble that their ideology has (should have) no place in our society. Silence sells hats, I guess.

[But for Trump, ] there is nothing more pathological than the desire to be liked by everyone all the time. If you are continually attracting Nazis and white supremacists, you shouldn’t say, 'WOW, everyone LIKES ME! Great!' you should ask yourself, 'Where in my life have I gone seriously wrong?'"

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s despicable words.

UPDATE VII: The Donald panders to and leverages racism. So he bears responsibility for the resulting violence.

"When does racism drive people to commit violence?

'The most likely predictor of that is exposure to a kind of ideology,' [Eric Knowles, a psychology professor at New York University who studies prejudice and politics] said. Most if not all people carry implicit biases and unexamined prejudices, he said, and some may harbor feelings of fear or resentment that they don’t express in public.

'But when people come into contact with an organized ideology that valorizes or glorifies an intergroup struggle like a race struggle — that scaffolds from people’s everyday prejudices into something altogether more violent,' he said."

Read the Washington Post, Why are people still racist? What science says about America’s race problem.

UPDATE VI:  The Donald isn't racist, he just likes to retweet racist rhetoric.

Read the Washington Post, Trump retweets right-wing provocateur known for pushing false conspiracy theories.

UPDATE V:  "Trump’s reaction Saturday to the Charlottesville hate-fest is an example of what I find so troubling. I never thought a president of the United States would hedge his bets when it came to denouncing racists and anti-Semites. There is abundant boilerplate for these incidents, whole attics of cliches, but Trump could utter not a one. Instead, he pushed out some mush about an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”

On Monday, the president toughened up. 'Racism is evil,' Trump said, no doubt at the urging of his aides. He denounced 'the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.' Nice try, but three days late and many dollars short. The stain of the original statement cannot be removed. It is the authentic Trump — the genuine embodiment of a president who has both identified a rage in part of the American electorate and validated it.

America has had these moments before. The reign of Sen. Joseph McCarthy comes to mind. He was a lying opportunist who exploited a Red Scare to ruin lives and careers. But for all his villainy, he was just a senator and, in due course, the Senate took care of its own. It censured McCarthy.

Trump, however, is vastly more powerful. His tweets dominate the news cycle. His claim that 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton and deprived him of a popular-vote victory has seeped into the Republican electorate. The Post last week reported that about half of Republicans would support postponing the 2020 presidential election until the problem is fixed.

That the problem cannot be fixed because it does not exist is almost beside the point. More important is the blatant disregard for both the Constitution and tradition. We hold presidential elections every four years. Always have. The president’s term is set by the Constitution. Look it up.

Simultaneous with the delegitimization of the electoral process has been a subversion of truth. It has been reduced to just another thing — something like an alternative to the 'alternative facts' of Kellyanne Conway’s invention. Trump’s incessant attacks on the press have taken a toll. The so-called mainstream media has for years been a GOP whipping boy, but now it is not merely in opposition, it is also corrupt. 'They’re lying, they’re cheating, they’re stealing,' Trump said during a rally in October in Grand Junction, Colo. 'They’re doing everything, these people right back here.' He was pointing to the press section. . .

Beliefs that used to be found only on the fringe of the far right have entered the Republican mainstream. The furious and unbalanced hatred of Clinton, the conviction that the election was almost stolen — all this and more have been given such legitimacy by Trump that neo-Nazis can march in Thomas Jefferson’s home town, confident that they have Trump’s support. They were wrong. They only had his indifference."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s America is not mine.

UPDATE IV:  "After two days, blistering criticism from his own party and tougher anti-white-nationalist statements from the company that makes Tiki torches and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Trump dragged himself to the podium for a statement that specifically condemned white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other racists. He had to begin with some self-congratulations on the economy — because his accomplishments are what he really cares about. . .

He read from a teleprompter. Speaking from his heart would have been impossible, given his obvious lack of passion and willful blindness over the past couple of days. He did not mention the 'alt-right,' nor did he announce he is firing Stephen K. Bannon, who once bragged he gave the alt-right a platform at Breitbart. He did not announce any specific policy measures. He did not apologize for his moral obtuseness. This was the weakest statement he could have gotten away with, 48 hours too late. Why did it have to come to this?

The white nationalists in Charlottesville did not hide their intentions. They were there to revel in the Trump presidency, which explicitly told them it was time to 'take their country back.' Former KKK grand wizard David Duke left no confusion as to his followers’ admiration for the president:

His invocation of the president’s name and campaign rhetoric makes the president’s equivocation all the more appalling — and revealing. Whereas any normal president or politician would renounce support from neo-Nazis and white nationalists, Trump — until forced to do so — would not criticize them, let alone refuse to accept their support. . .

Not to have rejected immediately the support or to tell the neo-Nazis they misunderstood his message shocks even the most jaded Trump critics and puts President Trump in a category of one — American politicians who gladly accept support from white nationalists, neo-Nazis and the alt-right (white nationalists with intellectual pretensions).

One might conclude from Trump’s foot-dragging and obsession with stoking racial tensions (e.g. his vote fraud commission, his crusade against legal and illegal immigrants, etc.) that, despite his apologists’ protestations, his campaign message was aimed at white resentment. Trump continues to tell those who want to 'take back their country' that 'their' country is being overrun by foreigners, non-Christians, non-whites. The majority of his followers had a more benign, non-racial interpretation (take the country back from liberals, elites, urbanites, etc.), but it surely hit home and brought out from the shadows Duke and his ilk. . .

Trump’s dance with the racists is therefore inseparable from his agenda. A nativist, populist president without the support of the most extreme defenders of Christian white America would be an impossibility."

Read the Washington Post, Why Trump had to be badgered to condemn neo-Nazis.

UPDATE III:  "Before he became a presidential candidate in 2016, the Manhattan builder spent the previous five years championing the racist birther lie that Obama was not born in the United States and, therefore, in the White House illegally. Then, on June 16, 2015, Trump set the tone for his presidential campaign when he said, 'They’re rapists' when talking about immigrants from Mexico during the announcement of his candidacy. And it has been all downhill from there with a candidacy that allowed right-wing hate to feel safe quarter and a presidency that lets it grow by pretending it’s not there.

Trump, the man who is oh so quick to thunder against radical Islamic terrorism, always gets cramps in his Twitter thumbs, loses his voice or suffers amnesia when white nationalists are involved. Like that time David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed him in February 2016, 'I know nothing about David Duke,' Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper. 'I know nothing about white supremacists.'

'This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back,' Duke said after he slithered his way into Charlottesville on Saturday. 'We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.'

Trump doesn’t have the moral clarity needed to immediately denounce Duke and his “take our country back” white supremacy. Trump doesn’t have the moral authority needed to make such commanding words stick. He ceded that moral high ground ages ago. And Trump has neither the interest nor the care to turn his words into deeds that heal the nation, especially with white nationalists like Stephen K. Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka just steps away from the Oval Office. Especially when he is pursuing immigration, justice and voting rights policies that further the goals of white nationalists."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s horrible and predictable response to white supremacy in Charlottesville.

UPDATE II:  Foolishly, some people thought of Nazis as "'crazy people, stupid fanatics. Unfortunately it was not so. They knew they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation.'"

Read the Washington Post, After Charlottesville violence, World War II anti-fascist propaganda video finds a new audience.

UPDATE:  "Why does Trump resist condemning white supremacy? The most obvious answer is that he’s encouraging the racism of some of his supporters, after a campaign that derived initial energy from his racist birther conspiracy theories and in many ways was framed around the narrative that white identity and white America are under siege. White nationalism is now alive and well in the White House; we are reaping the inevitable consequences. . .

[But an additional reason is that] Trump’s resistance appears rooted in part in an instinctual sense that so doing would constitute some form of capitulation. In his remarks, Trump repeated the phrase 'on many sides' in a pointed tone, as if to signal that he will not be bullied by any objection to his false equivalence or any pressure to single out anti-black racism. . .

The message that Trump surely received — one he surely continues to believe — is that there is no reason for him to capitulate to politically correct demands that he explicitly condemn racism towards any minorities. But this raises a profound problem. It is likely that Trump views this whole affair as being all about him — that is, as all about whether he will surrender to his foes. He seems incapable of grasping that amid such crises, his office carries with it certain very grave responsibilities to the American people. . .

Trump clearly recognizes no obligation to the broader public of any kind as a function of the office entrusted to him. This isn’t just racism. It’s also his megalomaniacal inability to envision that his role might require duties above and beyond his desire to deepen his bond with certain supporters (which of course is all about him) or the fact that he doesn’t want to be seen surrendering in some vague sense.

And this could have continuing consequences.  The Times reports that white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups are only emboldened by the weekend’s events, and predict that their movement is growing — which means we may see more of this going forward. Brian Beutler argues that Trump’s refusal to call them out by name may well reflect an active desire to empower these groups and, more broadly, to realize their vision. "

Read the Washington Post, Why is Trump reluctant to condemn white terrorism? It’s his racism — and his megalomania.

While fear, anger, and hatred has been a great Republi-CON campaign strategy for many years, it is, of course, a terrible governing philosophy.

And it has proven to lead to violence.

Read the Washington Post:

White House confronts backlash over Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville,

One group loved Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville: White supremacists,

‘Look at the campaign he ran’: Charlottesville mayor is becoming one of Trump’s strongest critics,

After Charlottesville: End the denial about Trump, which noted:

"It should not have taken President Trump’s disgraceful refusal to condemn white supremacy, bigotry and Nazism to make clear to all who he is and which dark impulses he is willing to exploit to maintain his hold on power. . .

There are not, as Trump insisted Saturday, “many sides” to questions that were settled long ago: Racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination and white supremacy are unequivocally wrong.

A president who cannot bring himself to say this immediately and unequivocally squanders any claim to moral leadership. . .

For make no mistake: No matter how accurate it is to say that neo-Nazis and Klansmen represent a repugnant fringe, the fact that our president has consistently and successfully exploited white racial resentment cannot help but be taken by citizens of color as a sign of racism’s stubborn durability.

The backlash to racial progress is an old American story, from the end of Reconstruction forward. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words from 1967 speak to us still: “Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro, there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.” This is what we saw this weekend.

The battles over Confederate monuments, in Charlottesville and elsewhere, reflect our difficulty in acknowledging that these memorials are less historical markers than political statements. Many were erected explicitly in support of Jim Crow and implicitly to deny the truth that the Southern cause in the Civil War was built around a defense of slavery. Taking them down is an acknowledgment of what history teaches, not an eradication of the past." 

Trump fires back after the CEO of Merck resigned from his manufacturing council,

Raise your hand if you are pretending to be surprised.

 Read also Trump's Big CON: He's Gotta Help His Supporters Hate, Hate, Hate.

Trump's Big CON: He's Gotta Help His Supporters Hate, Hate, Hate, Arpaio Edition

UPDATE:  "In his effort to create a reputation as 'America’s toughest sheriff,' Arpaio made blatant and illegal racial profiling the hallmark of his two decades in office. A 2011 Justice Department investigation found systemic and widespread discriminatory practices in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), covering both their interactions with the public and their operation of county jails. Not only were Latinos in the jurisdiction profiled, harassed, detained, and abused in myriad ways, but Arpaio also used the tools of his office to go after those who criticized him. . .

So that’s the person Donald Trump is considering making the first recipient of a pardon in his presidency: someone with a long history of racist actions and racist policies, who was finally convicted of a crime he proudly owned up to. Should anyone be surprised?"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s first pardon: An authoritarian racist who thinks he’s above the law?

Read also the Washington Post, Trump considers pardoning Joe Arpaio, and gives racists a reassuring wink, which states:

[A]fter deploying first delay and then false equivalence, Trump finally did denounce the racists and white supremacists who chanted his name in Charlottesville last weekend. It then took him only a few hours to give those same racists and white supremacists a nod and a reassuring wink. How else should we interpret a possible pardon for the sheriff who ran the most racist department the DOJ has ever investigated?

Don’t fret, alt-righters. Trump still has your back.

He's gotta help his supporters hate, hate, hate.

And one of his earliest supporters promoted racist birther conspiracies.

Read the Washington Post, Trump says he’s considering pardon for Joe Arpaio.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Explained, CONt. Part 3

"Every day brings new drama, but the Trump Show’s themes remain the same. He’s come to tell his people that everyone else is wrong and they are right.

'The change you voted for is happening every single day,' he proclaims, underscoring each syllable with a raised hand, as the crowd bursts into cheers. Behind him, two signs hang in the rafters of this small arena:

PROMISES MADE, reads one.

PROMISES KEPT, reads the other.

Washington is torn between paralysis and alarm. The Congress is at odds with itself and its president. The special counsel’s investigation gets hotter and hotter, and has just been taken to a grand jury. There is talk of a constitutional crisis.

Yet the Trump Show goes on.

The presidency in crisis! How can this possibly be sustained? Where will it end? What is going to happen? But the answer is right in front of us: It’s happening right now, on an endless loop. This is what’s going to happen, day in and day out—nonstop chaos, plot twists and cliffhangers, a furious, embattled president who finds new ways to shock while never seeming to change.

The show goes on. The ratings are terrific! Trump keeps campaigning for the election that happened nine months ago, determined to keep that feeling alive.

He lashes out at the Congress, including his own party’s failed health-care vote: “The Republicans and Democrats let us down on that.”

He laments the Russia investigation: 'A total fabrication.' It is, he says, 'just an excuse for the greatest loss in the history of American politics. It just makes them feel better when they have nothing else to talk about. What the prosecutors should be looking at is Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails.'

At that, the crowd erupts into a sustained roar, and the old, gleeful chants of 'Lock her up!' can be heard.

The message to the faithful is clear enough: You are on the hook for this. An attack on me is an attack on you. To stop believing would be a betrayal.

'They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of you,' he says. It’s us versus them, and them is everybody else.

Their T-shirts proudly proclaim their hatreds: TRUMPED THAT BITCH, DEPLORABLE ’N CHIEF, DEATH TO LIBERALS. A leering Trump head on the cartoon Calvin figure, pissing on a snowflake.

Outside, the protesters are massed on a corner, buffered by the riot police in their helmets and bulletproof vests. A middle-aged woman waves a HILLBILLIES AGAINST TRUMP sign as the afternoon’s summer storm clears.

The spectacle, by now, is deeply familiar. But it retains the power to shock.

This is the Trump show, the neverending Trump show, and we’re all still glued to our seats."

Read The Atlantic, The Trump Show Never Ends.

Read also The Atlantic, How America Lost Its Mind, which tries to answer the question:

"When did America become untethered from reality?"

Trump's Big CON: He Opposes Leaks

The Donald hates leaks, except when he loves them.

Read CNN, Trump retweets Fox News story containing classified info.

Trump's Big CON: 'I Saved Us', The Economy Edition

UPDATE III:  After just seven months in office, The Donald is claiming credit "record low" unemployment.

(You might remember that when he took office America was a 'rotten place, a decimated, destroyed and weak country'.)

"The short answer is that this is false. The unemployment rate in July was 4.3 percent. It was 4.8 percent in January, when Trump took office, so it was already rather low.

Moreover, six of the past 12 presidents could brag of an unemployment rate lower than 4.3 percent. It was as low as 4.2 percent under George W. Bush, 3.9 percent under Bill Clinton, 4.2 percent under Richard Nixon, 3.4 percent under Lyndon B. Johnson, 2.5 percent under Dwight D. Eisenhower and 2.7 percent under Harry Truman."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump’s claim that ‘unemployment is at a record low’.

Now repeat after me:  He's so pretty!

UPDATE II:  On Sunday, the Republican National Committee tweeted:

"GOP
@GOP

UNPRECEDENTED ECONOMIC GROWTH UNDER @POTUS!
7:07 PM - Aug 6, 2017

To be clear: 'unprecedented' means it has never happened before. This tweet strongly suggests that '1 million new jobs in six months' never happened before Trump took office. And that suggestion would be wrong — very wrong.

In fact, President Barack Obama actually saw slightly more jobs created in his final six months — 1.08 million — than Trump has in his first six — 1.07 million. And Obama also saw more jobs created than Trump:

    In the first six months of 2016 (1.08 million)
    In the last six months of 2015 (1.34 million)
    In the first six months of 2015 (1.37 million)
    In the last six months of 2014 (1.5 million)
    In the first six months of 2014 (1.5 million)
    In the last six months of 2013 (1.09 million)

Indeed, no matter how you slice it and what months you choose, there isn't even one six-month period after mid-2013 during which Obama didn't see at least 1 million jobs created. One million jobs in six months is not unprecedented -- it has become the norm since the recovery from the Great Recession really kicked in.

Which got me thinking: Maybe the RNC tweet meant the first six months of a presidency? Even then, though, Bill Clinton saw more jobs created -- 1.25 million — in his first six months in 1993. None other than Jimmy Carter saw twice as many created as Trump — 2.14 million — in 1977. And if you adjusted for today's population size, George H.W. Bush (about 900,000 jobs created in 1989) would also beat Trump's vaunted 1 million standard.

So three of Trump's six immediate predecessors had at least his jobs numbers in their first six months (again, population-adjusted in one of those cases). Two others — Obama and George W. Bush — began their presidencies in recessions."

Read the Washington Post, The RNC says Trump’s jobs numbers are ‘unprecedented,’ because words don’t matter anymore.

UPDATE:  "Trump hasn't actually done anything other than cut a few regulations, but he's made it sound like he's passed a new New Deal. ('No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days,' he rather ludicrously claimed.) He brags about a 'surging economy and jobs,' despite the fact that the economy and jobs are growing at exactly the same rate as before he took office. And, after disparaging the official unemployment rate as being 'fake' and 'phony' and 'totally fiction' while Obama was president, he has apparently decided that it's 'very real now.' In other words, Trump has done nothing and has congratulated himself for the economy Obama left behind.

Well, it's not just him doing the praising. Trump's new propaganda channel is, too. "

Read the Washington Post, For the last time, Trump hasn’t made the economy any better., which included this graph:

"Every president talks up the economy. It's part of a president's job to be America's cheerleader-in-chief. But half a year into Trump's presidency, the reality is the economy is solid. It's not booming. And there's no 'Trump bump' -- yet.

'On balance, it’s hard to see a Trump bump,' says Doug Holtz-Eakin, head of the right-leaning American Action Forum and an economic adviser to many Republicans. 'The economy is solid. It’s not spectacular.'

To see how the Trump economy is really doing, look at growth, jobs, wages and business spending. All of those factors are showing no change since the days of President Obama.

Yes, more Americans are getting jobs. Hiring in July was stronger than experts expected, with a net gain of 209,000 jobs. That's good news, but the pace of hiring is a tad worse than under President Obama. The economy has added 1,074,000 jobs since Trump took office. During the same stretch last year, the economy gained 1,246,000 jobs under Obama. The fastest growing job category last month was low-paying retail jobs. Trump used to slam Obama for only creating crummy jobs. Now that's part of the Trump story, too.

'On the jobs metric, there's no Trump bump,' says Chirs Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG bank in New York. 'It's pretty consistent with the final year of Obama’s administration.'

As for stocks: The market is going up. It gained more than 20 percent since Trump won the election. But Wall Street is not Main Street, and about half of America has $0 in the market. Numerous studies have shown that better stock returns don't mean a turbocharged economy is on the way with more growth and higher wages for the middle class.

The stock market may be going up, but wages are not. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently decried how middle class incomes were lower now than in 2000. He promised to change that, yet the jobs report that Trump called 'excellent' showed that wages only increased 2.5 percent in the past year. That's below America's historic average and the same pace that Obama achieved."

Read the Washington Post, America’s economy is solid, but there’s no ‘Trump bump’.

Trump's Big CON: Some of His Biggest Fans Are Fake (Maybe Russian Bots), And He Likes It (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 8))

UPDATE II:  Read also Heavy, Nicole Mincey: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.

It seems it took little time to catfish Trump.

Imagine how gullible he is with Putin.

UPDATE:  "For President Donald Trump, life is a constant positive feedback loop, punctuated by acute instances of narcissistic injury. He famously surrounds himself with yes-men, loyal insiders, confidants, and family members. He bristles at advisers who don’t tell him what he wants to hear, like National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, whom Trump has reportedly considered exiling to Afghanistan. Long after his election victory, he has regaled lawmakers, the C.I.A., journalists, and foreign heads of state about his unlikely electoral upset, and continuously points to the size of his crowds, which he often exaggerates. (A framed, panoramic photo of his inauguration crowd hangs in the press hall of the West Wing.) Nearly every morning, he watches the relentlessly pro-Trump Fox & Friends, retweeting clips and articles from the show and responding to segments with his own commentary online. Twice a day, Vice reports, he receives a folder 'filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.' White House staff call it 'the Propaganda Document.'

The feedback loop came full circle on Saturday when Trump, ensconced in his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club for a 17-day 'working vacation,' unwittingly amplified some 'fake news' of his own by retweeting and thanking someone who appeared to be a staunch supporter on Twitter. 'Trump working hard for the American people.....thanks,' the tweet from @Protrump45 read. The account appeared to belong to a woman named Nicole, or Nicole Mincey, or BlackGirlPatriot. She claimed to be a 'black pro-Trump conservative' with a Trump merchandise retail empire. Trump acknowledged her tweet by quoting it to his 35 million followers, adding, 'Thank you Nicole!'

By the end of the weekend, however, Nicole’s account had been suspended, indicating, according to Twitter’s terms of service, that it had been deemed 'spammy' or perhaps 'just plain fake.' Twitter users had become suspicious that she was actually a bot and not a real person. Some identified her profile picture as a stock image of a woman from a Web site called Placeit, a stock photo and logo mockup company. . .

Trump is, in many ways, the living embodiment of everything Barack Obama warned against in his farewell address regarding the negative effect of social-media echo chambers. . .

For Trump, confirmation bias isn’t a byproduct, or even a feature, of the media diet he has arranged in the West Wing. It’s a way of life, perfected over a lifetime of masquerading as his own spokesperson and decorating his real-estate properties with fake Time magazines featuring his face on the cover. Retweeting and responding to a fake pro-Trump account on Twitter is just the latest manifestation of a closed feedback loop that Trump, and now a coterie of White House staffers, guard zealously. The user @ProTrump45 is gone, for now, but Trump’s tweet, which contains a blank space where Nicole’s message would be, remains a monument to his monomania."

Read Vanity Fair, Trump Falls for His Own Propaganda Machine.

Read also New York Magazine, Nicole Mincey Wasn’t a Bot, But She Wasn’t Quite Real Either and TalkingPointsMemo, The Mystery Of Nicole Mincey, which includes a discussion of 'sponsored articles')

"Early Saturday morning, President Trump tweeted his gratitude to a social-media super-fan, -Nicole Mincey, magnifying her praise of him to his 35 million followers.

Here’s the problem: There is no evidence the Twitter feed belongs to someone named Nicole Mincey. And the account, according to experts, bears a lot of signs of a Russia-backed disinformation campaign.

On Sunday, Twitter suspended the Mincey account, known as @ProTrump45, after several other users revealed that it was probably a fake, created to amplify pro-Trump content.

The incident highlights Trump’s penchant for off-the-cuff tweeting — and the potential consequences for doing so now that he holds the nation’s highest office. Even as the president has railed against multiple investigations into Russia’s meddling in U.S. politics, he may have become Exhibit A of the foreign government’s influence by elevating a suspected Russia-connected -social-media user — part a sophisticated campaign to exacerbate disputes in U.S. politics and gain the attention of the most powerful tweeter in the world.

'The president doesn’t know whether it’s a Russian bot or not,' said Clint Watt, a former FBI agent and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, using the term for a fake Twitter account pretending to represent a real person and created to influence public opinion or promote a particular agenda. 'He’s just pushing a narrative, whether it’s true or false. This provides a window not just for Russia but for any adversary to both influence the president or discredit him.'"

Read the Washington Post, The curious case of ‘Nicole Mincey,’ the Trump fan who may actually be a Russian bot.

Trump's Big CON: He's Gotta Help His Supporters Hate, Hate, Hate

UPDATE:  "President Trump tweeted nine times this morning, attacking the 'failing' New York Times, other 'fake news' outlets (including the Washington Post), 'hoax Russian collusion,' and Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, as a 'Vietnam con artist' who 'cried like a baby.'

Today’s string of tweets represented Trump’s most voluble social media outburst since John Kelly, a retired Marine general, became his chief of staff just one week ago, promising to restore order to a chaotic West Wing and, in particular, to push the president’s tweets 'in the right direction.' On the social media front, Kelly is — not surprisingly to anyone who has even casually observed the president’s behavior over the past two years — off to a shaky start.

Today’s Twitter flare-up would seem to suggest that Kelly is destined to fail as Trump’s law and order chief of staff because Trump’s impulsiveness cannot be constrained.

But that’s not the real reason he cannot succeed. Rather, it’s because Trump’s base, and in particular, his media and social media base, thrives on West Wing dysfunction that is rooted in what is portrayed as an existential battle between Trump’s 'nationalist' staff and advisers, and the dreaded 'globalists' in his midst. Because Trump has displayed no real interest in taming that beast, and in fact seems to relish feeding it, any effort by Kelly to slap Trump’s hand away from Twitter will have little impact on the persistent unrest roiling the White House. . .

Trump signaled his continuing gusto for dividing the world into rivalries, including between the 'fake news' and pro-Trump media. 'Fake news' is on the side of the 'establishment' and the pro-Trump media is on the side of, and possibly indistinguishable from, the burn-it-all-d0wn Bannon camp. . .

Trump still takes to Twitter like the pre-Kelly Trump. That’s because Twitter is the place where Trump goes for affirmation, the place where Breitbart’s version of events gets repeated and retweeted, giving Trump a kind of safe space from the 'fake news' about Russia investigations and legislative disasters and all of the failures of his first six months in office. . .

Trump’s fixation with competition and feuding, ultimately, is what will make Kelly’s task impossible."

Read the Washington Post, John Kelly is doomed to fail. The reason why isn’t what you think.

The Donald thrives on affirmation and flattery, and the chaos created by fear, anger and hatred are his tools.

"Since a makeshift bomb tore through a Minnesota mosque early Saturday morning, President Trump has used Twitter, his preferred platform for communicating with the American people, to rail about “fake news,” attack a Democratic senator from Connecticut and insist that he’s working hard while vacationing in New Jersey.

One topic Trump has yet to address: the mosque attack at the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in the Twin Cities suburb of Bloomington, where several people were gathering for prayer. Nobody was injured, authorities said, but the attack has left the Muslim community feeling unsettled.

And Minnesotans and others are still waiting for the president to condemn the attack. . .

Silence after attacks where Muslims are the victims is not uncharacteristic for the president, who has been previously lambasted for a perceived double standard that critics claim he applies when denouncing terrorism. Attacks perpetuated by Muslims draw his attention and sharp tongue, they argue, while violence targeting Muslims is overlooked."

Read the Washington Post, Trump still has not condemned the Minnesota mosque bombing. Muslim leaders are waiting.

Trump's Big CON: Shamefully Criticizing the Military Service of Others

The Donald is at it again.

Read the Washington Post, In attacking Blumenthal, Trump opens himself to criticism over the military. Again., which notes that:

During the campaign, Trump criticized John McCain's military service, saying "He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured."

"When Trump registered for the draft at 18 in 1964, he had just graduated as a cadet from the New York Military Academy in Cornwall, where he played football and basketball.

On the campaign trail, Trump would claim it was bone spurs in both feet that prevented his service in Vietnam. His campaign said it was because of his high draft lottery number in 1969, although his medical deferment remained in place until 1972, when he received a permanently disqualifying deferment — a year before the draft ended and the war began to wind down. . .

[A] raunchy conversations with shock jock Howard Stern in 1997 revealed a particularly detached perspective on military service from the billionaire real estate magnate.

'I've been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there — it's scary, like Vietnam,' Trump told Stern about the effort to avoid sexually transmitted diseases in the '80s and '90s, as the AIDS crisis blossomed.

'It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier,' Trump said, to laughs and egging-on by Stern.

'I'm old enough to have gone through the '70s,' Trump said.

And he was. Trump was in Manhattan in the 1970s, spinning his inheritance into real estate gold. Blumenthal was stateside in a Marine Corps uniform until 1976. McCain was a prisoner for five and a half years until his release on March 14, 1973."

Read also the Washington Post, Questions linger about Trump’s draft deferments during Vietnam War.