Don’t expect the über-patriotic worshippers of Donald Trump to have any second thoughts about voting for him after this unsurprising revelation:
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
They won’t care. They’ll call it “fake news”, or worse, they’ll declare that they agree that gosh, they sure don’t want to see wounded veterans in their militaristic parades.
You know what wounds a democracy? Seeing demonstrably incompetent leaders, day after day, wrecking the country.
You know what undermines a democracy? A fawning press that makes excuses for bad leadership.
But what absolutely kills a democracy is when you lose all trust and confidence in your fellow citizens. My county is going to vote overwhelmingly for a dishonest, treacherous criminal in the next election, and that’s on them.
Oh boy. Here’s Trump’s response to military criticism.
Trump is killing Stars and Stripes while the Bannon associate he appointed to oversee Voice of America, Michael Pack, is turning that agency into Breitbart International, and Bill Barr is selling propaganda on TV. The fascist coup is in its final stages. https://t.co/5cNCrjI7lI
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) September 4, 2020
Shut down everything!
There was a time when people could at least claim that oligarch Trump was an unknown quantity, compared to oligarch Clinton and that he might be a pleasant surprise. Now, only a severely delusional person, or a propagandized ideologue, can extend Trump the benefit of a doubt. He has teased out the worst in america, and encouraged the racism, cruelty, and irrationality of the people. It’s impossible to deny anymore that the US is an empire of shitty people with shitty politics and a shitty electoral system designed to keep them in power. From here on out, let’s get what we deserve.
Pretty much any other president that America’s ever had, something like this would have been a scandal.
With Trump it’s just business as usual.
@1 – And teased out the worst within families. This has become my slow death, watching those closest to me descend into this madness as zealous participants. An episode of The Twilight Zone.
But, wait, wait! He’s going to pivot and become “Presidential” any day now! Any second…
There is no bottom to the depravity of this man or to that of his supporters. 40% of America is irredeemable.
There is a treatment for this cancer slowly killing our democracy. Eliminate the Electoral College. Implement nation wide automatic voter registration, like we have here in Oregon. Make vote by mail universal.
If you want to go the extra mile, make voting mandatory like they have in Australia. You vote or you pay a fine for not voting.
The first steps kill the GOP. That extra mile kills the DNC as well. It’s a good thing.
Regarding the dysfunctional blob of pathologies that is Trump’s personality, his niece suggests that his father -a racist, dishonest bully- wanted to shape Donald into his image, and boy did he succeed.
His gentler older brother was crushed and resorted to alchohol.
I recommend listening to ‘Do What I Say’ by Clawfinger , for how to never, ever raise kids.
It is as if Klaus Kinski ran for office, with Jimmy Savile as VP.
We’ve become desensitized to Trump by overexposure.
It’s not like we ever expect to hear anything good about him ever.
It’s a lot like Stalin.
One person dead from the Covid-19 virus is a tragedy.
187,000 dead from the Covid-19 virus is a statistic.
According to the BBC report, Trump says he hates “losers”. I guess he’s really going to hate himself come this November….
Re: Ray Seeya @ #5…
I kind of like what Mexico does (or did, haven’t heard about it in long while). Renewing a drivers license or car license is dependent on showing that you voted. That would probably be far more effective in the US than a mere fine.
The downside is that you get a lot of people voting that maybe shouldn’t because they have no clue who or what they are voting on. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t….
Russia put a bounty on American soldiers and he did nothing about it. A bounty on a dead Americans. Yet these folks will still vote for him. If it were a Democrat in the Oval Office, the Trump Party (formerly known as the GOP) would demand nuclear war. Yet, most everyone has forgot this already.
Cross posted from the Political Madness thread.
In other news: To win and take office, how big a margin does Joe Biden need?
Link
In 1933 in the Parliamentary election 17,277,180 german voters opted for the Nazi Party giving it 43%app of the total vote.
Are voters assumed to be innocent of their choice or should we assume some agree of responsibilty?
Oh, come on. Trump has had a great record as president. I mean he got the Affordable Care Act replaced with a medical system that works for all Americans*, he got a massive tax cut passed for everybody*, he got North Korea to denuclearize the peninsula and allow inspectors in to make sure they’re doing what they agreed to**, he forced the Iranians back to the negotiating table to keep them from destabilizing the middle east***, he saved the economy from the threat of a pandemic without significant loss of life*, and sent the stock market soaring to new heights. What more can you expect from a great president? That wall he forced Mexico to pay for is a fitting monument to his genius.
*except the losers
**in his dreams
***well, that’s still pending, but it’s gonna happen…any day now
@ fossboxer 3
Same here. My very military family going back generations on both sides.
I’ve told my parents that I’m not comfortable coming over or socializing until they are ready to start talking about serious things we’ve been avoiding as a family like politics. I told them I don’t know if they know what good people look like anymore.
Donald Trump and so much of what he’s wrought isn’t what my parents displayed as good when I was a child. I have to suppress negative feelings around them and I’m not doing that anymore.
Cross posted from the Political Madness thread.
Trump wants people to believe his denial about The Atlantic article. His lies about McCain make his task that much more difficult.
See also:
Two Senior Officials Confirm Trump’s Remarks About Fallen Soldiers To AP
Excerpt:
I completely agree, though it’s interesting to ask what would it take for Trump lovers to “quit” him. The only scenarios I can imagine are ones that won’t happen.
Some may remember that George W. Bush was well liked by Republicans, and that to question him was seen as questioning your loyalty for the US itself. The conventional narrative is that his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the forever-war that he started in the middle east are to blame for changing this. I agree they didn’t help him.
But I suspect what really did it was the fact that Bush made a serious effort towards immigration reform that was not entirely punitive and acknowledged the benefits of immigrants in the work force. This, more than anything, convinced the future Trump voter that George W. Bush was not one of them. He was part of the big plan to “replace” them (with competent, law-abiding, hard-working people of color who just happened to be born somewhere else, horrors!). The key to Trump’s success is the Americans who are “left behind”, i.e. those white people who did not get the memo in the 80s that we had moved to a service economy with the blessings of their cult leader Ronald Reagan, and woke up one day in the mid-2010s suddenly realizing that it was not a coincidence that their region had been called the “rust belt” in the decades since Billy Joel sung Allentown (which I was told in the mid-80s by a resident had moved to a successful service economy and Billy Joel was full of it).
Basically, if Trump were to show that he is not racist, that he is willing to criticize white supremacy, or that he agrees that large numbers of immigrants from “s***hole countries” are potentially good for the economy (and not just a handle that he bestows his blessings on for a convention video) then his supporters would finally abandon him. These things are not going to happen, but they will stick with Trump through thick and thin as long as he is “one of them.”
@12 The Electoral College and the Senate are both the product of maintaining white rule in a slave-holding nation, and what do you know, the founders were so clever they came up with a system that seems destined to preserve white-minority rule long after the abolition of slavery. I’m not sure if this is really a stable system. I mean if it was that easy, South Africa might still be an apartheid state. However, there is no question that those who are frightened of “changing demographics” are going to milk these constitutional kludges for all they’re worth. When I was more naive, I would have expected them to come up with some kind of half-baked justification for it, but they seem beyond this point. Rules is rules. (Except when the rules don’t benefit them, and then they’ll work the refs).
Trumpies also still love the uncorrected land-area map of “Red State America” featuring many large regions where literally no human being lives and others where very few humans are domiciled among “amber waves of grain.” I expect to see a lot of that in the aftermath of Trump’s electoral victory/popular defeat. (Which I still hope won’t happen, but we’ll see.)
raven wrote:
It’s more than a statistic … it’s about 46,000 Benghazis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-to-measure-trumps-record-in-units-right-wing-supporters-can-understand/2020/09/03/273d8b04-ee18-11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html
187,000 dead from the Covid-19 virus is a statistic.
It is also 62 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks killed.
It is 3.2 Vietnam wars of American dead soldiers.
If it weren’t for your “fawning” press, you wouldn’t even know about this. Of course we could yell “Liar!” at him every time he spoke, but he would ban us from his pressers until it was attended only by Fox. If you have a solution, I’m all ears. Don’t tell us to fact-check him. We do that, constantly. We keep a running total of lies. It isn’t the press that’s different. It’s the reaction (or lack of reaction) from members of his own party when he says and does outrageous things that would end any other politician’s career.
True enough. But we already knew about the video of him dissing McCain in 2015, at the “Family Leadership Summit” in Iowa, on the campaign trail, to much applause. Let that sink in for a moment. And some have already learned that, despite such comments, Trump won in 2016 and has maintained an approval rating around 40%, because we haven’t all been asleep for the past five years.
Maybe the press should catch up a bit and tell us about McCain being okay with us staying in Iraq for 100 years, for example. (Bush’s 50 years wasn’t enough, apparently.) Some people were upset about it at the time, but certainly not everybody. Give us the scoop about people like the author of the Atlantic piece, for example, who can’t seem to get enough of US imperialism.
I think that, when you send them off to die and murder for you in your endless bullshit wars, that seems pretty disrespectful to those who serve in the military. In comparison, some name-calling from another belligerent asshole doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Do these neoliberal types just want symbolic gestures and empty rhetoric from him, to make it all seem more palatable somehow, or is it about something else this time?
I would have thought that making decisions based on personalities instead of issues was what undermined democracy. Guess I was wrong. Whoops!
@21 The press is doing a better job acknowledging Trump’s faults than it ever did for George W. Bush (for instance) but really a lot of that is Trump’s own doing. If instead of declaring war on the media, he had just tried to meet minimal expectations of being a president, they were more than willing to treat him as legitimate. It took a long time to get daily headlines that reflect that fact that nearly every statement by Trump is full of inaccuracies and probably intentional lies. He would have only had to throw a small bone to prove he had “grown into the role” and he would have had a fawning media.
He also has Fox News, and that makes him less dependent on other media outlets. I realize he thinks they need to be more obsequious too, but they are trying their hardest.
Treating human beings as well, human beings, that is to say as if they and their lives matter and are important is…an issue!!!
Destroying a country that 329 million people call their home, including most of us, is…another issue!!!
For the first time in your life, you actually said something true.
I’m sure it was an accident and won’t ever happen again.
“Republicans are hypocrites and will vote Republican no matter how horrible the party gets” has not been news since at least the 1990s. What would be news would be “the Democratic Party has decided it’s no longer worth trying to peel off Republican voters, since they’re hypocrites who will always vote Republican anyway, and are going to campaign on getting their own base to vote, including a strong push for legislation — starting now, not some nebulous point in the future — their own base wants, such as single-payer healthcare, heavy bank and stock market regulation, and cuts to military and police funding”. Sadly, though, Democrats tacking to the right — and making nebulous promises that at some nonspecific point in the future they will do otherwise, not soon of course but after they’ve done whatever right-wing things they’re currently pushing for — is non-news just like Republicans being hypocrites.
@26
Correction Vicar. It’s been like this since the Southern Strategy began in 1968. 1968, the worst year in American history until 2020.
Got snowed under on e-mail today and delayed, as I’m feeling like crap anyway after a near-faceplant while getting some items from the pantry shelf. A storage box had a hanger poking out, hilarity and some gymnastics to ensure I at least got my knees and arms under me, requiring a mid fall 90 degree turn, while falling four feet from the offending box/hanger ensued. A standard martial arts arm slam down to transfer momentum helped avoid worse, but leaving my lower back feeling like the Great Train Wreck landed on top of my low lumbar spine and one shoulder has been telling me about what improbable animal ancestry I am derived from.
Why is this even news now? During the time frame involved, his opinions were open source news available for all to recoil from. From videos of his own speech and interviews.
The only thing really new is, his surprise about “who was the good guys” during WWII and confusion, which is understandable in a fascist, as to why the US joined the Allies, rather than the two nations that we did declare war upon, both allied with one another and one actually goaded into attacking us prematurely.
No, I can’t speak about the source with that last, it’s strongly hinted via aggregation of open source information from that time, but discussing it would place me into a severely harmful legal situation.
Hints: Trump hates those taken as POW’s, they’re losers, obviously the dead are losers in such a simplistic mindset.
Surprising, mildly, his astonishment that find such a thing of value, given his attending a military school for quite some time. That strongly suggests the lack of quality of such a school’s program, essentially worthless for anyone that’s a candidate for military service, typically geared toward officer ranks. But, it does explain why he thought a worthless, since it was unaccredited, university seemed like a good idea to him.
Overall, given his statements and longstanding behavior, I am honestly astonished that anyone found this a surprise. This is about as surprising as the amoral majority getting caught in their obvious amoral behavior and activities, resulting in their getting caught in hypocrisy. Which, a quick sign change and coat of paint, wait until attention drifts, return as evangelicals and rinse and repeat…
@Ray Ceeya #27, yeah, I remember 1968 rather well. Got to see my first race demonstration, walking down the major street oblique to our small street, to get the shot beat out of them by Philadelphia PD a couple of blocks after.
Given that I was born in late 1961, yeah, the age of watching and learning. Parents are surprised at how much their children are observing and learning.
Yeah, 1968 really sucked. Now, we have an SOB that’s making that year look like Christmas year ’round.
Makes me want to tie his shoelaces together while he’s at the podium.
Then, he’d be known as President Faceplant.
Marcus Ranum @1
oligarch Trump the unknown quantity, the only people that could make this claim were those pig ignorant of the various grifts with the Trump brand name. And the bankrupcies that happend. This includes the so-called papers of record.
PaulBC @24
‘The press is better in pointing out Trump’ failures than W Bush’s’
Bwa-ha-ha-ha … Wait, you’re serious? Let me laugh loader! … HA-HA-HA
consciousness razor @22
“…when you send them off to die and murder for you in your endless bullshit wars, that seems pretty disrespectful to those who serve in the military.”
Exactly right. US veterans and war dead are not suckers and losers, or heroes. They are victims.
patricklinnen@29 The press fawned over George W. Bush with a couple of notable exceptions, like Hurricane Katrina, and bought the Iraq War hook, line, and sinker. Look at Judith Miller’s NYT reporting if you don’t believe me. Interestingly, less prestigious media outlets like (now defunct) Knight Ridder did a much better job reporting on the fake intelligence going into the buildup to the war because they weren’t going to get “exclusives” anyway. The Bush administration had the media eating out of its hands at least for the first six years.
Is reporting on Trump adequately critical. No, clearly not. But it is simply not comparable to the way the press treated George W. Bush. They still want to rehabilitate him now as an amateur painter and “norm following” president. If you think this assertion is laughable, I can only suppose that you are very misinformed on the relationship between George W. Bush and most of the mainstream media (not just Fox News). And yes, he had critics in more ideological outlets, but the NYT simply failed to call out his lies in headlines the way they at least sometimes do for Trump.
@31
And the press doesn’t fawn over Trump and his anticipated,’Soon to act Presidential’ pivots? All Trump failures get flushed down the memory hole. The NYT writers sit on Trump failures until they are no longer of any values to maximize book sales, just like they did for good old W. The difference is that Trump has more failures to sweep under the carpet.
How many Trump cons were reported and then ignord, both before and during Trump’s term in office. So you can blow the ‘normalizing’ post W’s terms in office out your ear.