Category Archives: Trump
Presidential Trump and The Donald
On August 26, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto invited both American presidential candidates down for a visit.
Presidential Trump
Donald Trump jumped on the offer and met with the president last Wednesday. Trump Looked presidential. And they talked about presidential stuff, including “the wall.” But Trump says they didn’t discuss who would pay for it.
The Donald
That afternoon Trump gave a speech in Phoenix. And he looked, well, like The Donald. He blustered that he would make Mexico pay for the wall.
Being an actual president, Enrique Peña Nieto heard about this. He was not pleased. So he tweeted that the first thing he told Trump in their private meeting was there’s no way he’ll pay for the wall.
On Monday, September 5, Hillary got around to RSVPing President Peña Nieto’s invitation to her.
She declined.
Hillary’s Alt-Right Conspiracy Theory
In a speech on Thursday, Hillary updated her Vast Right-Wing conspiracy theory to an Alt-Right conspiracy theory. As a result The NYT reports the actual Alt-Right is thrilled.
Race Card
The speech was an attempt to trump Trump with the race card. She also accused The Donald of subscribing to dark conspiracy theories.
Putin Card
Then she played the Putin card by theorizing that Vladimir Putin is the “Godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism.”
By Friday afternoon the news was focused back on the Clinton Foundation. Paul Joseph Watson has a great YouTube sendup of Hillary’s speech, tinfoil hat and all, here.
Never Trump Media
A common thread among the elite media seems to be that Trump is so bad anything goes to stop him. Which is interesting, since The Donald brags that his electoral success so far comes from free media coverage.
Howard Kurtz picked up on the NeverTrump media movement in his August 9 Media Buzz column titled Media justify anti-Trump bias, claim he’s too dangerous for normal rules. Howie says some in the media “are flat-out making the case for unfairness—an unprecedented approach for an unprecedented campaign.”:
Liberal investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald recently told Slate that “the U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president”…
Now comes Jim Rutenberg , in his first season as media columnist for the New York Times. He’s a good reporter and I give him credit for trying to openly grapple with this bizarre situation.
But Rutenberg is, in my view, trying to defend the indefensible:
“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”
Then there’s Michael Goodwin in this New York Post column titled American Journalism Collapsing before our eyes:
The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.
And here’s historian Victor Davis Hanson:
The media somehow outdid their propaganda work for Barack Obama and have signed on as unapologetic auxiliaries to the Hillary Clinton campaign — and openly brag that, in Trump’s case, the duty of a journalist is to be biased.
NeverTrump Media
Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic isn’t having it. He explains why it’s difficult to cover Trump. Trump says provocative things like “Obama founded ISIS”. That’s not literally true – you can look it up. So what did Trump mean by it? That answer involves judgement and interpretation:
His strategic gambit was always and precisely to have things both ways.
By insisting that Barack Hussein Obama “founded” ISIS, knowing full well that his use of the word was unusual, inapt, and likely to mislead, then doubling down again and again when asked to clarify, Trump—who began in national politics by questioning Obama’s birth certificate—could again appeal to the part of his base that believes America is led by a secret Muslim foreigner who is allied with America’s Islamist enemies. And as even Trump acknowledged at the end of his interview with Hewitt, Trump willfully chose less accurate, more outrageous words to generate attention.
Having deliberately provoked with the repeated false statement that Obama founded ISIS, and deliberately inflamed with his reluctance to say he was speaking figuratively when asked to clarify, one Trump objective was achieved; having had things one way, he could move on to pretending, at the end of his Hewitt statement, that he was really just saying Obama had lost the peace all along, though he had directly rejected that notion moments earlier when Hewitt presented it.
Then, the next day, Trump sent out a Tweet with yet another contradictory explanation: He didn’t literally think Obama was the founder of ISIS; nor was he simply trying to express that Obama’s policies gave rise to ISIS; rather, when he said Obama founded ISIS, he was being “sarcastic,” but the media doesn’t get sarcasm.
All this deliberate, mendacious gamesmanship puts journalists in a very tricky position. If they merely report what Trump literally says, they’re accused of hyper-literalism. If they report what he reallymeans, judgment and interpretation are required.
Trump the Gardener
Another rich guy with “rice pudding between the ears” comes to mind. Maybe Trump is really Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers character in the 1979 movie Being There):
President “Bobby”: Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives?
[Long pause]
Chance the Gardener: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.
President “Bobby”: In the garden.
Chance the Gardener: Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.
President “Bobby”: Spring and summer.
Chance the Gardener: Yes.
President “Bobby”: Then fall and winter.
Chance the Gardener: Yes.
Benjamin Rand: I think what our insightful young friend is saying is that we welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, but we’re upset by the seasons of our economy.
Chance the Gardener: Yes! There will be growth in the spring!
Benjamin Rand: Hmm!
Chance the Gardener: Hmm!
President “Bobby”: Hm. Well, Mr. Gardner, I must admit that is one of the most refreshing and optimistic statements I’ve heard in a very, very long time.
[Benjamin Rand applauds]
President “Bobby”: I admire your good, solid sense. That’s precisely what we lack on Capitol Hill.
I like to watch.
Showing Up In Louisiana
According to CBS News, thirteen people have died and 30,000 have been rescued from homes and cars due to flooding in Louisiana.
President Obama doesn’t want to get in the way of the relief effort so he’s staying put on the golf course at Martha’s Vineyard. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards obliged by asking him not to come.
But the Baton Rouge Advocate doesn’t see it that way. The paper invited the president to come on down. A lead editorial was titled Vacation or not, a hurting Louisiana needs you now, President Obama:
Sometimes, presidential visits can get in the way of emergency response, doing more harm than good. But we don’t see that as a factor now that flood waters are subsiding, even if at an agonizing pace. It’s past time for the president to pay a personal visit, showing his solidarity with suffering Americans.
The press and politicians weren’t so cautious either when President Bush did a Katrina flyover in 2005. The Washington Examiner quotes Senator Barack Obama on the 2008 campaign trail:
“We can talk about what happened for two days in 2005 and we should. We can talk about levees that couldn’t hold, a FEMA that seemed not just incompetent but paralyzed and powerless, about a president who only saw the people from the window of an airplane instead of down here on the ground.”
Speaking of the campaign trail, Hillary can’t very well make a Louisiana appearance if Obama says he’d be in the way. So she’s visiting Martha’s Vineyard too.
80% of Success is Showing Up
All that island hopping left a flood victim vacuum. Donald Trump wasted no time filling it. Trump and Mike Pence were soon photographed helping unload a relief truck for the flood victims. And they didn’t seem to be in the way.
Now Obama says he’ll show up Tuesday.
Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad
ISIS is becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad.
Last week Trump called Obama the founder of ISIS. The next day Hugh Hewitt threw him a life line saying, “I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”
But The Donald doubled down calling Obama the “ISIS MVP” and adding Hillary as “cofounder” for good measure.
Mollie Hemingway in The Federalist points out that Trump has made the same claim for a long time. He did it three times in January and nobody made a big deal of it. Yet this time the media got all literal insisting that Obama did not actually incorporate ISIS.
Joe Biden claimed Republicans would put “y’all in chains”. That has yet to happen. Nobody took it literally.
Trump did say later in the Hewitt interview:
“I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why ISIS came about… If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS… Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.”
Still, Politifact gave him a Pants on Fire rating on the ISIS foundation issue.
Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad
Hemingway says the real point is that Americans are fed up with way Republicans and Democrats fight wars “where enemies receive decades of nation building instead of crushing defeats.”
Crowds are cheering Trump’s hard statements about Obama and Clinton’s policies in the Middle East because they are sick and tired of losing men, women, treasure and time with impotent, misguided, aimless efforts there.
She says Buzz Feed’s Andrew Kaczynski got more to the heart of what’s wrong with Donald Trump. He reminds us that Trump himself repeatedly called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
Does that mean ISIS has two daddies?
