He co-opted the military and took millions from the National Park Service to make a one-minute infomercial.
As former ethics adviser Walter Schaub tweeted, it was always going to be about this and filling up his hotel with suckers paying top dollar over the July 4t week-end.
His “greatness,” if you will, is based on creating fear and hatred
by digby
QOTD goes to Christopher Dickey on MSNBC this morning:
TRUMP (video): Together we are part of one of the greatest stories ever told, the story of America. It is the chronicle of brave citizens who never give up on the dream of a better and brighter future.
JANSING: What didn’t you like about that?
DICKEY: “Brave citizens.” I think the emphasis on citizens there misses the point of American history. The whole greatness of America is built on the idea of a nation of immigrants building a future together. A nation of immigrants. Something he shied away from. Not a nation of citizens, not a nation that excluded people, but a nation that included people and included their dreams. The possibility to build a future in the new world that was infinitely better than the future in the old world. That is what America – American greatness is based on.
And that is exactly what Trump wants to ignore because his greatness, if you will, is based on creating fear and hatred, a kind of rabid nationalism that George Orwell said “bears something in common with the idea that you can classify people the way you can classify insects.” Citizens, non-citizens, you don’t classify them by their dreams, by their possibilities, by their faith in America. You classify them as citizens and non-citizens.
Also:
DONALD TRUMP : The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge. Our army manned the [inaudible], it ran the ramparts. It took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory.
JANSING: … So, Chris, here’s what The Washington Post writes about yesterday, “Historians – at least the ones fact-checking the president on Twitter – were not impressed. One likened the speech to ‘an angry grandpa reading a fifth grader’s book report on American military history.’” It may just be the President, you know, he has some trouble reading the prompter and it was raining, so that’s, you know, not the most fun, I could feel the pain on that. But shouldn’t his speech writers know not to conflate the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, which happened in separate centuries?
CHRISTOPHER DICKEY [DAILY BEAST]: And throw in the airports as well. I mean, it was a pretty extraordinary muddle, historically. I think the real problem here is not only that the speech writers screwed up or the Teleprompter screwed up but that the President himself is oblivious to American history. He has a kind of, how shall I say, a delusional notion of what made America great and I think that was reflected in his completely ignorant remarks about American history in that segment.
His reading of the speech from the teleprompter was the first he’d heard of any of that history.
The humiliation of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib by putting women’s underwear on his head and taking pictures of it.
Remember this?
CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men —
LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
The impulses that led to the lawless sadism of Abu Ghraib are now appearing in the border camps in the United States. The torture is less violent, more subtle, but the appetite among those in power to humiliate and degrade is the same.
So is the obvious sense of impunity. That comes from the top:
US Customs and Border Patrol agents at a migrant processing center in Texas allegedly attempted to humiliate a Honduran migrant by making him hold a sign that read, “I like men,” according to emails written by an agent who witnessed the incident.
The emails — obtained by CNN — were sent to the agent’s supervisor and outlined the March 5 episode in which a Honduran man was forced to hold a piece of paper that said, “Me gustan los hombre(s),” which translates to “I like men,” while being paraded through a migrant detention center.
The incident is one of many, per the emails, in which the CBP agent allegedly witnessed several colleagues displaying poor behavior and management’s failure to act.
Asked about the incident, a CBP official told CNN, “I am forwarding to the Office of Professional Responsibility, the office charged with looking into these allegations.”
CNN has reached out to an attorney for the Honduran man for comment but has not received a response.
According to the emails, the agent, on-duty at the El Paso Processing Center, saw another agent give a handwritten note to a Honduran migrant and instructed him to walk in front of a group of other migrants who had also been apprehended.
An image, also obtained by CNN, shows a note with the words that read, “Me gustan los hombre(s).”
The witnessing agent saw the note, approached an agent responsible for writing it and another agent who was laughing. The witnessing agent told them their behavior was unprofessional, the emails say. Neither agent responded.
Seeing that the Honduran man was upset, the witnessing agent took the note away from him and provided him another without the derogatory phrase on it.
The witnessing agent in the emails names two senior Border Patrol agents and five other agents who also saw the alleged incident occur. The witnessing agent took the note to the senior agent in charge that night but the senior agent took no action, the emails said.
The allegations of the agents’ conduct come on the heels of a report by ProPublica this weekthat revealed a closed Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents that featured jokes about migrant deaths and derogatory comments about Latina lawmakers
The culture in the CPB and ICE — DHS in general — is sick. It needs to be completely rethought from the ground up. This is intolerable.
Why should the Democrats care about what women, people of color, youth and self-identified Democrats think? They clearly don’t matter.
The new Gallup Poll finds President Trump’s approval rate at 41% to 54%:
The June 19-30 Gallup poll, which asked those who approve and disapprove if they hold their opinions strongly or only moderately, found large majorities of both groups feeling strongly about their position. While similar to previous readings, the proportion feeling strongly on each side is at the high end of this measure — 71% of those who approve feel strongly, as do 81% of those who disapprove.
Interviewing for the latest survey began a day after Trump launched his 2020 re-election campaign at a large rally in Florida and ended the day he became the first president to enter North Korea, stepping across the border at the Demilitarized Zone for an impromptu meeting with that country’s leader.
Slim Majority Rejects Impeaching Trump
Gallup’s preceding poll, conducted June 3-16, put Trump’s job approval rating at 43%. In the same survey, the slight majority of Americans were opposed to Trump’s being impeached and removed from office over the findings of the Mueller investigation — something an increasing chorus of Democratic Party leaders have called for.
When asked for their opinion “based on what you know about Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump’s activities,” 45% of U.S. adults said Trump should be impeached and removed from office over the matter, while 53% said he should not be.
Republicans show similar attitudes on the two dimensions, while there is more separation for Democrats and independents.
Eighty-nine percent of Republicans in the early June poll said they approved of the job Trump is doing, and 92% thought he should not be impeached.
By contrast, 6% of Democrats approved of Trump and 18% said he should not be impeached.
Only 37% of independents approved, while 51% said no to impeachment.
More Want Trump Impeached Than Said So for Clinton, Nixon in Early Days
Trump’s impeachment number exceeds what Gallup found using a similar question for Bill Clinton throughout the Monica Lewinsky controversy, as well as for Richard Nixon at the beginning of the Watergate controversy.
For the entirety of Gallup’s trend on Clinton, public support for impeaching him never exceeded 35% (that was recorded in mid-September 1998), but it was as low as 19% in the initial reading in June 1998.
The range of support for impeaching Nixon in the early months of the Watergate investigation that led to Nixon’s downfall was similar to Clinton’s. From June 1973 to January 1974, between 19% and 38% of Americans agreed he should be “impeached and compelled to leave the presidency.” However, in April 1974, using a more complex question wording that defined the impeachment and removal processes, Gallup found support for removing Nixon at 46%. And by the final reading in late July — one week before Nixon resigned from office — support for removal reached majority level for the first time, at 58%. (See full Clinton and Nixon impeachment trends at the link below the Bottom Line.)
Majorities of Women, Nonwhites, Democrats Favor Impeachment
Americans’ support for impeaching Trump differs by subgroup, closely mirroring variations in his overall job approval rating. All groups that typically give Trump lower job approval ratings –women, nonwhites, young adults and Democrats — are more likely than their counterparts to say he should be impeached and removed from office.
As noted, Republicans’ views on impeachment closely mirror their views on his job performance, while there is more of a gap between the two measures among independents and Democrats. For most other groups, by about 10 percentage points, more believe he should not be impeached than approve of his job performance.
Bottom Line
Trump’s job approval rating thus far in his presidency has been extraordinarily stable, varying no more than six points from his term average of 40%. There has been some variation this year, with his approval rating dipping to 37% for two polls in January when the government was shut down and stretching to 46% in April after the release of the Mueller report and positive economic news.
One of the more insignificant myths of the Donald Trump presidency is the one that claims he was inspired to order a magnificent military parade in Washington after viewing the Bastille Day celebration in France in 2017. It’s true that Trump was excited by that parade was very excited by it and started making plans for a D.C. version on his way to the airport in Paris. But Trump had wanted the big tanks and marching soldiers and flyovers well before that.
According to the Huffington Post, he had requested a full-dress military parade for his inauguration and was told it couldn’t be done because of the infrastructure in D.C. He explained to the Washington Post around the same time that he had big plans for the future:
“Being a great president has to do with a lot of things, but one of them is being a great cheerleader for the country. And we’re going to show the people as we build up our military, we’re going to display our military. That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.”
So he’s wanted this for a long time, probably since he was a kid. Like his BFF Kim Jong-un, he believes that Big Military Pageants are a sign of strength and will instill fear in the hearts of his enemies.
The U.S. doesn’t do that stuff for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we aren’t supposed to be a military dictatorship that uses military pageants to scare its own citizens. Donald Trump may be the only person on the planet who believes the United States of America needs to prove its military might to the world with a big show of heavy armor and airplanes. Everyone else is fully aware that the U.S. has the most advanced, sophisticated and fearsome military on earth.
Trump alone believes that America has long been perceived as weak and poor and without defenses, and that the way to get respect once again is to spend lavishly on the military, start an incoherent trade war, suck up to every strongman dictator around the globe and tear up as many treaties and international agreements as possible while offending all our allies. If giving him a parade would stop him from doing all that, maybe we should have one once a month.
In the days leading up to Trump’s July 4 event, the press reported that the administration was scrambling to put this thing together at the last minute. The military wasn’t receiving intelligible instructions, there were many extra tickets, the airports were going to be closed and nobody knew if the roads and bridges in the D.C. area could hold the weight of tanks. We don’t normally do that sort of thing in the nation’s capital. And, needless to say, another corruption scandal erupted when it was revealed that the White House had enlisted the Republican National Committee to pass out VIP tickets to donors and friends of the president’s re-election campaign, just one in a long list of examples of using taxpayer money for political purposes.
And Trump has now tarnished the military, one of the last institutions in America that most people still hold in some regard, using it as a cheap prop to make himself look like one of the strongmen he reveres. At one point during his Thursday speech at the Lincoln Memorial, the fortunate son who got five deferments during the Vietnam War (including the famous, and likely fake, “bone spurs” medical excuse) actually exhorted young people to join the military “and make a great statement in life — and you should do it.” None of his kids ever joined the military either, of course. It was recently reported that Trump’s child support agreement for his daughter Tiffany stipulated that he would withhold all money if she joined the military.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump often complained about “the generals,” wondering why we don’t see the likes of George Patton and Douglas MacArthur anymore. He frequently shared the apocryphal story of Gen. Jack Pershing mass murdering Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, applauding his willingness to win by any means necessary. (This almost certainly did not happen.) Just this week, Trump congratulated an accused war criminal, Navy SEAL Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher, taking credit for his acquittal before a military court and basically slapping the military command down for having prosecuted him in the first place.
In the day to day, Trump treated Gold Star families with contempt, insulted POWs and other war heroes and played politics with thousands of troops, sending them to the border for no good reason. But he loves the pomp and pageantry of the military and the idea that it makes him look like a big strong man to be commander in chief. On Thursday at Lincoln Memorial he used military officers as cheap props, forcing them to stand beside him on the dais, appropriating their apolitical status for his own partisan purposes. On the Fourth of July.
His crowd loved it, of course. For all the talk about Trump and his followers being isolationist and anti-war, they are not. The right wing is the most militaristic faction in American life and they will happily follow him into any war he wants to wage. At the moment Trump is confused about all that. He’s been listening to the likes of Tucker Carlson, who is telling him that Republicans don’t like war (and the Democrats do), but understands on a visceral level that something about that doesn’t scan. Like all chickenhawks of the Vietnam era he wants to be seen as a heroic tough guy, but is scared to actually fight a war. So instead of giving his followers a war, he gave them a show.
Donald Trump is basically a carnival barker and a circus promoter. He’s just not a very good one. Just as his wildly expensive and amateurishly produced inaugural was basically a bust, so too was his big “Salute to America.” In fact, it was a sad and pathetic flop. What he had imagined as a grand display of military might along the lines of the Soviet-era May Day parades or Kim Jong-un’s North Korean tributes to Dear Leader ended up being a half-hearted air show with a handful of aircraft from each of the branches, accompanied by a fifth-grade primer on American history. It wasn’t a normal Trump rally, but it wasn’t a moving patriotic moment either.
As much as Trump tried to make it all a glorious paean to his leadership with the Blue Angels flying in formation over the Capitol to the strains of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the timing was off, the sky was drizzling and the energy was low. Unfortunately for Trump, his old nemesis John McCain had the last laugh. Again.
The Blue Angels tribute at McCain’s funeral in Annapolis was in every way more patriotic and inspiring.
The storms that dogged the acting president’s salute to himself on July 4th may portend economic trouble on the way. Donald Trump touts “his” economy as the best ever. That assessment depends on where one sits.
Stocks are at record levels. Great, if you own stocks. But not if you are one of the 40 percent of Americans still waiting to benefit from the longest recovery in American history. One health care emergency or unexpected expense can land workers such as Sommer Johnson on the verge of bankruptcy, the Washington Post reports:
“I keep hearing this is one of the best economies we’ve ever had and unemployment is down, especially among African Americans, which I am,” said Johnson, 39, who lives in Douglasville, Ga., an Atlanta suburb. “I’m looking around going, ‘Where is this boom?’ From where I sit, this doesn’t look like the best economy ever.”
[…]
“Just because folks on Wall Street think things are fine doesn’t mean most Americans feel like things are fine,” said Ray Boshara, director of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “When every day is a rainy day for millions of families, things are not fine.”
When Johnson’s future mother-in-law died just before the wedding, she and her fiancé faced a series of large expenses that quickly ate the modest life insurance policy and left the couple with mounting bills and a car repossessed.
Four in ten Americans struggle to make ends meet despite cheery news from Wall Street. As a prominent Democratic candidate for president reminds crowds, this economy works great for those at the top. For the rest, not so much.
As of this week, the U.S. Treasury yield curve has now been inverted for a full quarter—an incredibly dull-sounding turn of events that happens to be an unusually reliable warning sign that an economic downturn is on the way. The yield curve has flipped prior to each of the last seven official recessions over the past 50 years, without a single false-alarm during that stretch. If securities could talk, in other words, they’d be screaming bloody murder about trouble ahead.
Long-term U.S. government bonds normally return higher yields demanded by investors tying up their money for longer periods.
The yield curve inverts when the yield for short-term bonds exceeds that of long-term bonds. It is a sign investors anticipate “weak or nonexistent growth” ahead and little inflation.
Duke University finance professor Campbell Harvey cautions the yield curve is only one indicator. Yet the predictor has only given one false positive since the Eisenhower administration. It could take more than a year for a recession to manifest.
Meanwhile, manufacturing is “sputtering,” Associated Press reports, in part due to Trump’s China tariffs:
The pace of the overall economy is widely thought to be slowing sharply from annual growth that neared a healthy 3% last year. Even the job market itself, one of the pillars of the 10-year economic expansion, the longest on record, may be flagging. Job openings have grown just 2.2% so far this year, according to the jobs site Glassdoor. In 2018, openings had increased 9.8%.
Employers in some sectors of the economy are signaling less eagerness to hire. The construction industry, which had been adding jobs at an annual rate of more than 300,000 at the start of this year, is now adding positions at an annual rate of 215,000.
Payroll growth rebounded sharply in June as the U.S. economy added 224,000 jobs amid concerns that both the employment picture and overall growth picture were beginning to weaken. The unemployment rate edged up to 3.7%.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected nonfarm payrolls to rise by 165,000 after and the unemployment rate to hold steady at 3.6%. May’s initially reported growth of 75,000 had raised doubts about the durability of the record-setting expansion that began a decade ago.
All of which is of little interest to people more attendant to whether they can make their car payments. The Post continues:
Maddy Dannemiller is a nurse’s aide who lives outside Columbus, Ohio. She replaced her damaged car after her boyfriend hit a deer while driving it. Her payments jumped to over $450 a month. She supports three children on just over $10 per hour. Dannemiller rents from a relative who will cut her a break on rent payments, but she’s still falling behind on car and credit card payments, the Post continues:
“I’m 25, but I feel like I am in my late 30s,” Dannemiller said, shortly before heading to work. “Right now, I’m two months behind on my car payment.”
The acting president has no conception what that’s like. His economy is working great and he’ll insist it is even when it’s not.
There has been a lot of idle chatter going around for years that Trump is grooming his totally unqualified daughter Ivanka for VP. In a normal world we would dismiss such rumors as banana republic-style nonsense. But the way she was strutting her stuff at the G8 meeting and in South Korea last month and the weird unexplained behavior of Mike Pence this week, who knows? This wag on Medium points out that Pence is no longer necessary:
Donald Trump trusts Ivanka. Ivanka might as well be the vice president right now. There is nobody that Donald trusts more than his daughter. She is a part of him and has faithfully been by his side and never dares to say a negative thing about him. She lives by and understands what he means when he says that loyalty is everything to him.
Donald Trump does not need Mike Pence. Mike Pence was chosen for one reason and one reason only — he’s as close to a fundamental evangelical as you can get in politics. Donald Trump had a religious problem going into the election and he used Mike Pence (and Jerry Falwell Jr.) to give him that official evangelical checkmark of approval to get the evangelical vote. At this time, enough propaganda has been out there that he no longer needs Mike Pence. As long as Jerry Falwell Jr. is there to promote him as a man of God, that’s all he needs for that evangelical approval.
Donald Trump needs the women’s vote. Women are the largest group of people outside of the non-Christian population and non-caucasian population that do not approve of Donald Trump. Would a female vice president help soften that image and tip the scales? It may just enough. It’s a better option than Mike Pence that’s for sure.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented. After all, legend has it that Roman emperor Caligula planned to name his horse Incitatus as Senate consul. Why not Ivanka for VP?
Two days before President Trump commandeers the Mall to stage his grotesque celebration of American nationhood, the U.S. women’s national soccer team replicated the results of the original revolution, with a savvy and wilful defeat of England.
It’s important to pause and contrast these two events—Donald Trump’s efforts to rebrand the Fourth of July and the women earning a place in the World Cup finals. Trump’s blood-and-soil spectacle on the Mall is the culmination of an era in which the right has successfully hijacked patriotism for electoral gain, branding liberals and urbanites as inimical to real America. This U.S. team represents the charismatic refutation of that ugly variant of nationalism.
One of the reasons that I’ve become so enamoured with this team is because it has permitted me to feel an explosion of joy about the country, a sentiment that has felt especially alien these past few years.
Earlier in the tournament, I went with my wife and two daughters to watch the team play in France. Before a game in Paris, we walked to the stadium in our jerseys, singing about our country, aware that denizens of the city might sneer at this display of unabashed Americanism. But at a moment when there are very good reasons to feel national shame, I felt the opposite, wearing that shirt.
Trump is hardly a deviation from the narrative of American history that forms the spine of Jill Lepore’s recently published book, This America. She shows how deep the chauvinistic strain runs in the nation’s past. During these past two decades, the right has made an art of cynically tagging Blue America as enemies of the nation. Karl Rove elevated this theme in the political campaigns he ran on behalf of George W. Bush. “Liberals,” he blared, “saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”
Democratic political strategists were indeed soft in the face of Republican attacks. They pleaded with candidates to show up at NASCAR races and to squelch their true beliefs about gay marriage. Enjoying arugula and driving Priuses were sometimes depicted, both in political attack ads and even in mainstream media reports, as antithetical to the true spirit of the country.
But alongside this disturbing and engrained pattern, Lepore traces another strain of American patriotism. She doesn’t abandon the field to white supremcists and warmongers. Instead, she makes a circumspect case for what she calls “civic patriotism”—a more expansive, cosmopolitan expression of affection for the nation. The U.S. women’s team is the living embodiment of that spirit.
That’s because this team is a reminder of the best of the American ethos—the promise of ever-expanding equality, the spirit of reform that yielded Title IX and laid the basis for American female football supremacy, the carnival of individuality that is the team’s roster. At a time of despair, the players represent a form of not-so-utopian hope: how a community of different backgrounds and sexual orientations relate to one another with familiar affection. A lesbian activist who protests police brutality has become a national hero. Draped in the stars and stripes, this team demonstrates how civic patriotism has an equal claim to representing the country.
It is fitting that it has done so at a World Cup. That is, the players are proving their superiority within the confines of an international institution, as opposed to a World Series or a Super Bowl, which falsely and provincially posture as global events. Indeed, there’s a long strain of right-wing commentators denouncing soccer as a foreign incursion, the world’s attempt to bend the United States to its own tastes.
That this team has stirred so much affection, and garnered such high TV ratings, is testament to how cosmopolitanism has taken hold in a broad swath of the country. These players are a reminder of how, in the depths of a dark political era, it’s possible to love one’s country; they are an object lesson in how the values of liberal America can be patriotically trumpeted.
When Donald Trump indulges in his self-aggrandizing celebration this week, I’m going to choose to think about Megan Rapinoe with her arms defiantly spread in the air. I’m going to think about how the nation can still garner the world’s admiration, and how an idealistic vision of national community remains undefeated.
