monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Because environmentalists are such nice people....

“The EPA is a lightning rod. We get threats from both sides of the spectrum,” Sullivan added.

Because environmentalists are such nice people....

“The EPA is a lightning rod. We get threats from both sides of the spectrum,” Sullivan added.

“Some people believe the EPA is not doing enough to enforce environmental laws, and they’re upset about that. Other people think the EPA is doing too much, vis-à-vis enforcing environmental laws, and they’re upset about that.”

Or those who use the Bible to support racism.

Some of us still think [Trump's] attack on truth is a dangerous form of political corruption. The problem is not just the constant lies. It is the dismissal of reason and objectivity as inherently elitist and partisan. It is the invitation to supporters to live entirely within Trump’s dark, divisive, dystopian version of reality. It is the attempt to destroy or subvert any source of informed judgment other than Trump himself. This is the construction of a pernicious form of tyranny: a tyranny over the mind.

If someone happens to assassinate him, his body could be used to start a compost mound.

snood wrote:

If someone happens to assassinate him, his body could be used to start a compost mound.

By the looks of him he's already started.

Interesting, we call it compost heap.

Republicans and Democrats alike have been deluding themselves for some time about White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly. They were certain that Kelly was a “grown-up” who understood that the president the American people elected was hobbled — morally, intellectually, temperamentally — and it was Kelly’s job to steer the ship of state away from the rocks. He wouldn’t lie to the American people as President Trump did, these Kelly fans believed.

Recognition is now sinking in that Kelly is not so different than all the other politicians and officials who come in contact with Trump. To serve him requires suspension of integrity, and therefore those who serve become morally corrupted. (The sole exception to this seems to be Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who from day one simply refused to act as Trump’s political flack.) One can hear a palpable sense of sadness after last week’s events, a sense of disillusionment.

After Kelly came out to play defense for Trump over his handling of calls to Gold Star families, smeared Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) and refused to apologize, launched a Trumpian soliloquy about the good old days (when women were “sacred,” but not in the workforce) and elevated the moral stature of service members over mere civilians, it was hard to argue he was anything more than a Trump enabler.

Susan Glasser of Politico appearing on “Face the Nation” observed, “We’re not surprised Donald Trump behaved this way because it’s very consistent with what we’ve seen from President Trump throughout not only his presidency but his campaign. … I think it’s more surprising what we saw in a way from General Kelly. We learned more. One of the things that’s been apparent over the last couple of months that this underscored is that it remains Donald Trump’s White House and not John Kelly’s White House, even if he has imposed more discipline and more of a process, number one.

She added, “We saw that General Kelly, this week, shares more of Donald Trump’s agenda than we realized. … I found General Kelly’s comment to be surprising and even puzzling that he would have brought up in the same commentary about this incident with the Gold Star families this notion that in the good old days women were sacred.” She noted, “A lot of people have talked about the irony of working for a president who has been accused of this kind of behavior.”

Michael Duffy likewise related: “It was a classic damage-control operation by a White House chief of staff. And even though he seemed politically naive with that comment, I thought, I agree with you, he was also — he’s fundamentally a political person.”

Kelly’s fall from grace was swift and senseless. It was all so unnecessary; he need not have gone out to spin for the president.

The verdict on Kelly was remarkably negative, whether it was retired Gen. David Petraeus musing that Kelly was no doubt trying to figure out how to turn down the volume, or longtime GOP political strategist Matthew Dowd. (“The problem is that I have is, you ask the question is, does he know who he works for? He talks about the sacredness of Gold Star families and that we have lost that when he works for a guy that attacked Gold Star families and attacked John McCain as a prisoner,” Dowd said. “He talks about the sacredness of women, and he has somebody that said certain things on tape, things that were at best predatory, at best predatory, and has been accused by 12 or 14 different women of behavior. He says we lost the sacredness of religion, and he works for somebody that wanted to ban Muslims.”)

So from adult day-care shift supervisor to enabler in a short week, Kelly sacrificed a good deal of his utility to the president for nothing. In seeking to elevate the military above the rest of us, he ironically undercut his own stature as a guarantor of our democratic norms, as Trump critic Eliot Cohen wrote:

He pointedly discriminated among those asking questions, suggesting that only those who were Gold Star relatives or knew a stricken family had the right to ask him questions. Indeed, the White House press secretary later declared that it is improper for anyone to question a Marine four-star—a statement worthy of Wilhelmine Germany at its worst. … The real sting came at the end. He told those in the audience that he did not look down on them for not having served; rather people like him—again, the 1 percent—merely feel sorry for civilians. But his final shot—“So just think of that”—undercut the previous sentence. The contempt was unmistakable.

Those harboring unrealistic expectations about Kelly have learned once again: None of Trump’s advisers can make up for the deficits of this president; and with a lonely exception of Mattis, all of them look worse for having tried.

Donald Trump has a particular taste for the degradation of racial, ethnic and religious minorities and women — and God forbid those identities should overlap — as a way of playing out his personal sense of racial, sexist, and patriarchal entitlement. And as he degrades, he plays to those very same entitlements in the base that elected him.

This has manifested itself most recently in a despicable episode in which Trump became embroiled in a controversy — mostly of his own making! — over an unacceptable call he made to a pregnant widow of one of four soldiers killed in a still-murky attack in Niger.

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, a black woman, knew the fallen soldier and his widow and was in the car when the president called to offer condolences. Wilson seems to have correctly reported what Trump said.

This set Trump off and he issued a stream of lies to defame Wilson. The White House even sent its chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, out to defend the president. He, too, lied about Wilson.

When asked about Kelly’s lies, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was “highly inappropriate” to question a four-star general.

Aside from this not being a third-world military junta where a person in a high-profile political job can’t be questioned, this illustrates how Trump’s fetish for military generals also acts as an expression of his racial exclusion and preference for patriarchy. Military generals are a fraternity comprised almost exclusively of white men, according to a government report from 2011. How dare their word be questioned?

But there is no limit to the questioning of women in the Trump universe, no matter how high those women have risen, no matter the merits of their claims, particularly if the women are black or brown or if they have directly challenged Trump.

As Michelle Lyn wrote for Vogue.com last week:

“According to Trump’s sordid he-said-she-said turn of events, however, Wilson isn’t an elected official supporting a constituent and friend, she’s a ‘wacky’ woman. Just like Clinton and San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz were ‘nasty’; Brzezinski had a ‘low IQ’; Megyn Kelly has ‘blood coming out of her wherever”; and Jessica Leeds, who accused Trump of assault, ‘would not be [his] first choice.’

She continued:

“Women who hold truth to Trump’s power are often met with petty insults and cyberbullying (Paging Melania!) — but most of all, Trump and company brand them liars or assail them as absurd.”

One common thread is to reach beyond attacking these women on the merits of their claims to attacking the way they look. And this isn’t simply constrained to Trump himself; it is apparently in the bloodline. Donald Trump Jr. once referred to Congresswoman Maxine Waters as looking “like a stripper.”

Another strategy of dismissal is to portray these women as mere ideological, party-serving puppets, rather than as fierce advocates with their own opinions and power.

Trump tweeted, for example, that Mayor Cruz was “told by the Democrats that you must be nasty” to him.

None of this is out of step with what his base wants. Trump is advancing an agenda of white male identity politics and for those in his camp and in his corner, this is the dawn of a blissful new day.

Trump isn’t simply doing this on a personal level; he’s also doing it on the broader policy level.

At the same time that he’s pushing massive tax cuts for the top 1 percent, he is also seriously considering welfare reform. You may not fully comprehend the racial dimensions of this, so allow me to elucidate.

According to a Tax Policy Center report issued late last month about the Republican tax plan, in 2018, “Taxpayers in the top one percent (incomes above $730,000), would receive about 50 percent of the total tax benefit,” and by 2027, “about 80 percent of the total benefit would accrue to taxpayers in the top one percent."

And who exactly are the top 1 percent, demographically? Well, a 2011 analysis by The Grio found that they are 96.2 percent white, and a 2012 study found that about eight in 10 were men.

Contrast that with welfare, where the majority of recipients are women. Although white people are the largest group of recipients of most of the major government assistance programs, many white people, and Republicans in particular, don’t seem to realize this. A YouGov poll taken in January of 2016 found that a plurality of respondents and an even higher percentage of Republicans wrongly believe that black people are welfare’s largest recipients.

Much of the money is directed at white people, but most of the stigma is directed at black and brown people, and Trump is, like a multitude of Republicans before him, exploiting the misperception.

Donald Trump’s boogeymen are very often boogeywomen, and they are particularly primed for attack if they are black or brown.