Trump's Charlottesville Press Conference Transcript 1
Ok, since I've apparently lost my marbles, I'm going to try to go through the Trump transcript piece by piece. I'm not used to siding with Trump--though I do think he pretty routinely gets treated unfairly by the press. But obviously I'm a bit freaked out by finding myself defending him when he's alleged to be defending Nazis and the Klan... I mean...I've defended their right to assemble and speak, of course...but if supporting them is what's at issue, obviously one doesn't want to make a mistake. And the same goes if there's a real possibility that the President of the United States is defending them..
[1]
So I want to thank everybody for being here. God bless you, God bless the United States. And if you have any questions, we have – Mick, you could come up here, please. Come on up. Mick Mulvaney. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.QUESTION: Why do you think that CEOs are leaving your manufacturing council?The question here:
TRUMP: Because they're not taking their job seriously as it pertains to this country. We want jobs, manufacturing in this country. If you look at some of those people that you're talking about, they're outside of the country. They're having a lot of their product made outside. If you look at Merck, as an example, take a look where – excuse me – excuse me – take a look at where their product is made. It's made outside of our country. We want products made in the country.
Now, I have to tell you, some of the folks that will leave, they're leaving out of embarrassment because they make they're products outside. And I've been lecturing them, including the gentleman that you're referring to, about you have to bring it back to this country. You can't do it necessarily in Ireland and all of these other places. You have to bring this work back to this country.
That's what I want. I want manufacturing to be back into the United States so that American workers can benefit.
(CROSSTALK)
QUESTION: ... wait so long (inaudible)?
TRUMP: I didn't wait long. I didn't wait long.
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP: I didn't wait long. I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct, not make a quick statement. The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement. But you don't make statements that direct unless you know the facts. It takes a little while to get the facts. You still don't know the facts. And it's a very, very important process to me. And it's a very important statement.
So, I don't want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a political statement. I want to know the facts. If you go back to my...
Why did Trump wait so long to issue a statement that rejected the Nazis et al. by name?
Trump has two responses:
(1) I didn't wait very long
(2) I wanted to carefully collect the facts
As for (1): I don't see any way to adjudicate this. It took him roughly two days. Not that long...but a long time if you think that the President has suggested a fairly thoroughgoing moral equivalence between the Klan and anti-Klan protesters, and you're waiting for clarification on the point. I'll leave it up to others to make a judgment on this one.
(2) seems like clear bullshit. That's not how Trump operates, and I don't see what facts one has to gather in order to say "Nazis are bad." I'm going to say we've got all the evidence we need on that one. The Nazis are so bad that there's basically only one group in the whole world that doesn't hate them...and that's the Klan. So no. I'm not buying this.
(Anon responds in comments that it was reasonable to want to know what had happened with the car attack on the downtown mall...even I thought it was plausible that the guy was fleeing an attack. True, but I don't think it's relevant. Trump was being asked to say "Klan bad." Normally this would be a strange thing to ask someone to say, but I think we all understand why he was being asked to say it under the circumstances. I don't think he was being asked to comment on the car attack.)
Comment:
We see in this first part one of Trump's main quirks, and it'll become significant farther down: he just rambles and "circle-talks" as they say. He throws up a kind of word cloud--not, I think, as a rhetorical tactic. It's just how the guy talks...and how he seems to think. He can't seem to help himself. He's never been taught to stop and think before he speaks. He just leaps straight to the babbling. This is bad, obviously.
Nothing damning in this chunk, I say. Just some fairly ordinary bullshitting.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:06 AM
4 Comments:
If you're the president, and a bunch of Nazis and KKK types have gone on a torchlit march with banners bearing your name and representing themselves as your supporters, and there's a widespread, non-fantastical suspicion that you're secretly sympathetic to them, or at least to people who are sympathetic to them, and pretty much every prominent member of your party -- the Republican Party -- has pretty much denounced these white supremacists for being white supremacists, and everyone is clamoring for you to make it clear -- it would only take a few words -- that you feel the same way, and you're well known for firing off emphatic tweets in the immediate aftermath of other events of, shall we say, national political concern...
then no, two full days is NOT 'not that long'. It's a scandalously long delay. Seriously, how is this not obvious? Do you think the massive amount of love he got from neo-Nazi websites for this is just weak, circumstantial evidence?
I hereby concede the point: two days is too long.
How is it not obvious to me? I'm afraid I can't answer that question.
Perhaps it's because (a) I don't fully appreciate the importance of the 'name names' requirement, perhaps in part because (b) (as I say below) I think the Saturday statement was pretty damn strong and clear: an unequivocal repudiation of the principles of racialism of all kinds. I simply don't see any wiggle room in it. But everyone else, including the white supremacists themselves, *does* see it. So it must be there.
Everyone else seems to have had it in the forefront of their minds that there were already grounds for suspicion that Trump was sympathetic to these people (via Bannon). (I concede that there are grounds for suspicion, but I could never actually believe it was true.) So I did not have those suspicions at the forefront of my mind. So I was merely paying attention to what he said when he said it. I did not see him as needing to overcome a presumption that he was sympathetic. I merely attended to his statements themselves. (Again: add to that that I thought that the Saturday statement was unequivocal.)
This fits with my overall hypothesis that my error must lie in not correctly linking his comments up with the big picture.
Do I think that the love he got from the Nazi websites is weak evidence? No, I've figured that into the above comments.
I *do* think that there's another explanation, and that's that it's wishful thinking on their part.
But, again, I'm not interested in pursuing the point. When everybody says that something like this is obvious, it's foolish to think that it's not obvious.
Winston, I hope that, in the unlikely event that I'm ever wrong about anything, I'll be as little ego-involved about it as you are here.
*Appear to be.
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