David Rothkopf: "Donald Trump Gave The Most Disgusting Public Performance In The History Of The American Presidency"
This lying and hysteria about what Trump said is actually making the guy look pretty good by comparison:
Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon gave the most disgusting public performance in the history of the American presidency. Framed by the vulgar excess of the lobby of Trump Tower, the president of the United States shook loose the constraints of his more decent-minded advisers and, speaking from his heart, defended white supremacists and by extension, their credos of hatred. He equated with those thugs the courageous Americans who had gathered to stand up to the racism, anti-Semitism and doctrine of violence that won the cheers and Nazi salutes of the alt-right hordes to whom Trump felt such loyalty.
After several days in which Trump and his advisers wrestled with what should have been a straightforward task — condemning the instigators of the unrest that rocked Charlottesville, Va., this past weekend — Trump revealed the reason that finding those words was such a struggle. He, too, is an extremist.
No one who values the best of what the United States has stood for could watch without feeling revulsion, anger or heartbreak...
Look, what Trump said is a matter of public record. These are just lies. Compare them to what was actually said. I mean...you don't like the guy...you didn't like what he said...you thought it was terrible...you thought it was a travesty...hell, you thought it deserves impeachment...whatever the merits of your case, you can hold those opinions if you like. But the delusional hysteria, the flat-out lying about what he said...that's just plain nuts.
For whatever reason I keep thinking back to the McEnroe-Williams dust-up. The facts in the case were clear. What McEnroe said was clear. There was virtually no wiggle room whatsoever...barely any room at all for intellectual dishonesty to operate...and yet...lies found a way... A trivial issue, a handful of statements, virtually no latitude for bullshit to get a grip...and it still turned into a massive argument.
What's going on here is basically the same thing--but with much more at stake, a much larger and more garbled set of assertions, a much bigger backstory, and about ten thousand times as much emotion in play.
I'm happy to be done with Trump. I don't like the guy one damn bit. And if I thought people were all just BSing to drag him down, that'd be one thing. But watching someone get dragged down by this madness...it's starting to seem worse than keeping him.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:26 PM
3 Comments:
Look, what happened in Charlottesville is a matter of public record. Trump's claims that the demonstrators included 'very fine people', that there were 'many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists', that the counterprotestors lacked necessary permits, are just lies. Compare that to what was actually the case. I mean...you don't like a section of the press...you didn't like what they said...you thought it was terrible...you thought it was a travesty...hell, you thought they deserve to be sued for defamation ...whatever the merits of your case, you can hold those opinions if you like. But the President's delusional equivocations, the flat-out lying about what happened...that's just plain nuts.
See what I did there? The issue isn't just whether Trump and the press said or did things they shouldn't have. An important part is how much airtime you give to outrage about the things Trump and the press respectively said or did that they shouldn't have.
Trump is the President. He took an oath to defend the Constitution. Part of his function is to bring the country together in times of crisis, and to reassure people who have reason to fear that they're not regarded fully as citizens, or that they are in danger of being persecuted, that their fears have no basis, and to reaffirm, when necessary, the nation's commitment to preserving the hard-fought, purportedly permanent, and worryingly recent consensual repudiation of the nation's violently, viciously white-supremacist past. The marchers in Charlottesville were united above all around an aspiration to undermine that commitment, to undo that repudiation. They publicly and emphatically identify themselves with viciously racist movements whose best-known purposes were the complete genocide of European Jews and the preservation of the brutal enslavement of black people. Three are quite a few Jewish people among the US citizenry, and very many of them are here because their grandparents' and great-grandparents' generations fled murderous persecution in Europe, which in many cases took the lives of many close relatives. There are a huge number of black people among the US citizenry, nearly all of them descendants of people who were all slaves about a hundred and fifty years ago, and very many of whom were emphatically second-class citizens by law until a few decades ago.
That the President of this country, who is already justly suspected of deliberately signalling to white racists a less than wholehearted repudiation of their racism, should say in a nationally televised press conference that a national night rally of US neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other white supremacists and anti-semites on the grounds of the University of Virginia included 'very fine people', should falsely assert that many of them were not white supremacists, and should wait two days before condemning the white supremacists qua white supremacists while virtually every prominent member of his party did so more or less immediately -- that a US President should do all this seems to me a much bigger story than the fact that the segment of the national media (who have taken no oath but are, mostly, usually, incomparably more committed than their President to accurate representation of the facts on the ground) notorious for hysterically self-righteous 'progressivist' bias and exaggerated accusations of racism, are manifesting hysterically self-righteous 'progressivist' bias and indulging in exaggerated accusations of racism.
So why are you always insisting that, however awful Trump's non-stop lying and inflammatory misrepresentations in favor of a gang of murderously hateful racists might be, the real story is the well-known ideological bias of a section of the media?
And if you're convinced that 'when uncharitable interpreters are given free reign and granted moral authority, you are fucked and no doubt', why do you instinctively latch onto an incredibly convoluted and tendentious interpretation of Trump's 'on many sides' remark, which I have not seem proffered by a single other commentator, even Sean Hannity, and which is instantly refuted by his intonation in the actual press conference footage?
Well, I wrote a massive reply to these points, but it was devoured by the system.
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