At a scheduled appearance from Trump Tower in New York City, Trump went off-script to defend right-wing demonstrators and rebuke what he termed “alt-left” for its role in the violence in Charlottesville.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the alt-right?” Trump said of the counter-protesters with “black outfits and baseball bats” at the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
“What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands? Do they have a problem? I think they do.”
Trump defended the Unite the Right rally’s decision to gather in protest of the removal of Confederate monuments, suggesting that this was a slippery slope to toppling statues of founding fathers and slave owners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Read more (8/15/17 4:45 PM
On Tuesday, David Duke, the one-time leader of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted his support for President Donald Trump’s statements on the “alt-left” during an off-the-rails Trump Tower press conference.
“Thank you President Trump for your honesty and courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville,” Duke tweeted, adding his praise for what he saw as the president’s bravery in condemning the “the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.” Read more (8/15/17 6 PM)
I have zero problems with taking down Thomas Jefferson statues
public statuary serves a different purpose from artistic and – idk what to call it, event-recording? – statuary.
i do have a problem with taking down statues of historically influential figures because they were problematic. that’s the same mindset that leads to the taliban dynamiting stone buddhas. statues of the founding fathers are put up because those people were causative agents for the existence of the country, not because they were behavioral role models. this is like wanting to take lead off the periodic table because it’s poisonous.
however, taking down statues of a defeated enemy is pretty standard, and it’s very weird that the united states had them up in the first place, considering the confederacy started a civil war and lost. they belong in museums, as historical record, rather than in public spaces as influential figures.
as for ‘right to protest’ and violence from antifa – both true, both completely irrelevant to the necessity of denouncing fascism. they had the right, under US law, to gather and talk smack; everyone had an equal right to counter-protest. none of that has a damn thing to do with whether it was a good idea for the goddamn president to ostentatiously refuse to denounce literal fucking nazis. repeatedly.
don’t let those smokescreen tactics fool you into shooting yourself in the foot, my darlings – the fascists would LOVE for your reaction to be restricting the right to protest, because they could use it against you. they’d LOVE for you to attack the constitution because several slaveowners were involved in writing it, because that constitution protects rights they want to take away from you. they’d LOVE for you to try to erase the national founders, because then you’ll look like crazy people to mainstream voters, instead of the sane alternative to fascist madness.
don’t let them confuse you into doing their job for them.
they literally gave that fucking child 5 lines in font size 24pt to fucking read out “nazis are bad” and this colossal failure of a human went on an honest to gods rant about how nazis arent all to blame because they’re just defending the statue and its a slipperly slope! george washingtong could be next!!!!!
Yeaaaah. It sounds like they brought some concerns to him about the military footing the bill for transition surgeries, and he decided to go against their wishes and just ban trans folks entirely. Holy hell.
i am led to understand that the backstory behind trump’s trans military ban is this:
so congress is hashing out their military spending bill, and there was a divide between conservative/moderate republicans over whether the pentagon should fund trans surgeries. in an effort to render the issue moot and help the bill along, house republicans asked trump to simply issue an executive order on the topic. the idea being, if there’s an EO about funding trans surgeries, then congress doesn’t need to bother debating or writing it into the bill one way or the other and they can finally move on to other matters
but trump fucked up; instead of putting an order restricting the military funding of trans surgeries, he declared he was completely banning trans people from service. this is not what congress asked for and it has turned the whole situation into a boondoggle. one republican aide has likened it to trump being asked to light a candle and setting the table on fire instead. this move may in fact endanger the military budget bill, and mire it in further debate on whether to overturn trump’s overreaching EO. add in the fact that trump does not like being told he fucked up, and will certainly dig his heels in, raising tensions between him and congress
so while it’s absolutely a malicious move that will endanger trans service members and will certainly further poison public discourse about trans people in general, there’s at least the silver lining that the order has been administered so incompetently that it’s going to throw a wrench into the republican agenda
i don’t like transphobia but i DO like watching the republican party flail helplessly around as the hideous monster they unleashed on the rest of us also stomps their plans flat too
oh the exquisite irony
This is a man who couldn’t pour water out of a shoe if the instructions were written on the heel apparently.
Never mind how much the Pentagon brass is enjoying getting their first notice of big sweeping new policies from Twitter.
As awful as the transgender ban is, something that deserves equally as much attention are the implications that follow the fact that no one knewthis was coming and he announced it on twitter.
45 announced this over a series of three tweets. The first tweet was this:
…and then there was a nine minute pause before the next tweet. No one knew what was happening. The Pentagon thought he might be about to announce strikes on North Korea. Imagine what North Korea must have thought for those nine minutes.
The phrase “unacceptable security risk” doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in describing just how monumentally stupid 45 was in the way he chose to announce this. Anyone who thinks anything about this is tolerable is an idiot.
202-456-1111
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Call the White House and express, in no uncertain terms, your thoughts on the current president’s vile attack on the rights of your trans siblings: Trans People Are Not A Burden.
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Picture: “WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER, WE HATE THE FUCKING PRESIDENT!,” AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP), New York City, 1990. Photo by Dona Ann McAdams (@leicalola), c/o Bronx Documentary Center. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #Resist
So, having listened to the whole thing and read Comey’s statement, the thing that struck me most was how much the hearing sounded like the questioning of a sexual assault victim.
By which I mean:
Comey was asked why he didn’t say, “No,” to Trump’s inappropriate requests.
Comey was asked why he didn’t refuse Trump’s calls or invitations.
He was asked if he instigated the private meetings.
He was asked why he hadn’t told anyone or asked for help.
Frankly, it was amazing he wasn’t asked what he was wearing.
The conclusions I draw from this are that, yeah, I pretty much believe Comey’s account. It sounds legit. I think it’s realistic that Trump uses predatory intimidation techniques in his business and political dealings, as well as in his dealings with women.
Comey’s account makes it pretty clear that Trump relies on two things when trying to manipulate someone to get what he wants.
First, he uses his power – in this case the office of President – as a deliberate intimidation technique. He silently uses his power to put less powerful people in situations where they cannot easily say no in the moment, because the potential harm to them seems too high to do so.
Pretty much every woman in the world will know what I mean by that.
Second, he relies on the expectation of the normal scripts of politeness in the people he targets, while already planning to break them himself. By which I mean, he deliberately puts people in a situation where not only does the power differential make it hard to say no, they also have to be deliberately rude in order to say no, and the resulting damage to their own reputation will likely be worse than to his.
It’s practically textbook sexual-predation technique, and we just got an eye-witness account of it on the stand by the then-head of the FBI. Scholars and historians are going to be chewing over this for decades. Wowser.
I have a swirling maelstrom of feelings about this. Obviously, it’s appalling that a sexual predator and bully is the President of the USA. It’s also just completely bizarre to hear a comparatively powerful white man express on the world stage the awkwardness and scriptlessness that’s felt in the moment of being targetted by a predator. It was practically word for word an echo of experiences I’ve had in sexually unwanted situations. I felt for Comey – no-one should have to deal with that anywhere, anytime, but particularly not in the workplace.
And perhaps the most astounding thing of all: I didn’t think any explanation could make me think Comey’s public announcements about the Clinton email-server investigation really were the lesser of two evils, but this testimony did offer a fairly compelling case for it. The larger implications of the context he found himself in, with the person he reported to either suspect or perceived to be so… ugh. He really did only have bad choices. The one he chose was still undoubtedly bad. But maybe silence really would have been worse. I’m glad I wasn’t the one in that hotseat.
American politics is such a fucking mess right now.
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