This was Donald Trump’s worst week. Which followed Donald Trump’s worst week. Which followed Donald Trump’s worst week. Repeat 30 times.
In his first week, Trump was merely ridiculous, fretting over the number of people who attended his inauguration. But any idea that it might be possible to ride out the Trump-storm and pick up the pieces in four years was quickly dashed. By the second week, Trump sat down to pass executive orders, including the first draft of his Muslim ban. and to insult both a federal judge and the Australian prime minister. From there, things don’t just spiral down, they raced into the depths with a pace that caught even Trump’s harshest critics by surprise. Flynn, Sessions, Comey’s firing, accusations of wiretapping and ‘unmasking,’ rising attacks on the press, secret meetings with Russia, more secret meetings with Russia, threats of nuclear war, and … Nazis.
We’re talking about Nazis. Not in the sense of pointing out Trump’s fascist positions, which some of us has been doing for quite some time. Nope. We’re dealing with a president who sticks up for actual swastika-wearing Nazis.
Also this week, Donald Trump repeated his tale of how General Pershing fought Muslim “terrorists” by dipping 50 bullets in pig’s blood, shooting 49 people, then sending the last bullet along with the sole survivor as a reminder. It’s a horrible tale, one that not only celebrates mass murder, but perpetuates myths about Muslims that are actively harmful to all sides.
Here’s a real story from the “Moro Rebellion.” The Moro were Muslims who lived in the southern part of the Philippines and who consisted of several different groups. To keep them out of the war while the US dealt with the Spanish and the main Philippine forces, the US signed a treaty with the Moro. Then the United States broke the treaty and took over their area. When the Moro fought back, American forces killed prisoners, burned towns, and employed regular use of torture—including the first use of waterboarding. Fighting continued. America then built a series of “Re-concentration Camps”—which were exactly what they sound like—to lock up the populace, in an attempt to drain the countryside of potential supporters for the rebels. Fighting continued. America stopped taking prisoners. “I want no prisoners,” said one general. “I want you to kill and burn. The more you kill, and the more you burn, the better it will please me.” Instructions were handed out to kill everyone over the age of ten. Fighting continued.
Finally, General Leonard Wood, who served in the Rough Riders along with Teddy Roosevelt, discovered that many of the Moro were hiding in the bowl of an extinct volcano called Bud Dajo. They had made a home there, along with their wives and children. Rather than attack directly, Wood used block and tackle to raise artillery to the lip of the volcano where he could shoot down on the village. When he opened fire in March of 1906, he killed somewhere between 600 and 900 people, most of them civilians.
And after that … fighting continued. Because that’s what happens when an area is held by an occupying force.
Okay, enough story time. Let’s go read some pundits.
Leonard Pitts on the how Trump fits right in.
Yes, last week’s violent demonstration by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, culminating in the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, made for a carnival of obscenity as sickening as it was riveting. But the thing is, it did not spring from nowhere.
And while your first instinct — unlike the moral imbecile in the White House — is condemnation, that’s the easy part. What you have to remember is that this is said to have been the largest public gathering of white supremacists in many years. There is, it seems, an unmistakable new energy on the extreme right.
Those furnaces have been carefully stoked, and their causes have been tied to “normal” Republican positions.
Without question, the most repugnant contribution to this new dawn of white supremacy comes from the Republican Party. It has called to these people, invited these people, for decades. It has done so overtly, with laws and statements demonizing LGBTQ people, Muslims, and immigrants. Republicans have also employed so-called “dog whistle” politics, coded words, policies and imagery that preserve deniability while speaking with implicit clarity to white racial and cultural fears. From the Willie Horton ad that helped George H.W. Bush become president to the suggestive white woman ad that helped sink a black candidate’s Senate bid in Tennessee, from photo ID voter suppression to birther conspiracies, from Newt Gingrich condemning a “food stamp president” to Paul Ryan’s complaining about “a tailspin of culture in our inner cities,” the GOP has seldom missed a chance to lay out the welcome mat for white supremacists.
Go read it all. But don’t wait till you’ve cooled down before you come back. Because if you do, you won’t be back.
David Motadel and American fascism.
The crisis years of the 1920s and 1930s not only gave rise to fascist movements across Europe – a moment captured in Ernst Nolte’s classic The Three Faces of Fascism – but around the globe. The United States was no exception.
Across the country, fascist and proto-fascist groups sprang up. The most prominent among them was the paramilitary Silver Shirts movement, founded by William Dudley Pelley, a radical journalist from Massachusetts, in 1933.
That includes the “America First” folks that provided the template for Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign.
The United States has never been immune to fascism. But many commentators still feel uneasy speaking about fascism in America. They still consider fascism to be foreign to American society. They often assume that American exceptionalism makes the country immune to any fascist threat. Fascism has no place in our master narrative of American history. Conversely, in most global histories of fascism, America is no more than a footnote.
This is a fascinating look at the history of fascism in the United States. I know I said go read all of Pitts’ piece, but go read this one, too.
Colbert King makes a case that even siding with Nazis is a distraction from Trump’s actual agenda.
How could anyone who has spent any time listening to Trump in recent years not come away knowing that what we have today in the Oval Office is a nasty, ranting and ignorant narcissist who toys with bigotry for votes, peddles lies, and thoroughly lacks human empathy and decency?
What Trump is doing is more fundamental than simply upholding fascism. He’s looking at the end of rule by law.
America, be on guard: Trump’s summons are being heard.
Rush Limbaugh spelled out the danger to Trump in a recent commentary. He told his vast radio audience that the Washington establishment is involved in a “silent coup” against Trump. “These people are trying to take this president out,” Limbaugh declared.
Nationally syndicated talk-radio host Michael Savage took up the call as well, with an ominous warning to his millions of listeners this month. Noting that “the left” is out to take down Trump, Savage threatened, “If it’s done through Mueller or any other source . . . there will be a civil war in this country.”
Many Trump supporters have already said there is nothing he could do that would lose their support. By pressing that limit over and over, Trump has lost some supporters, but perversely made his remaining base even more solid.
R. Derek Black on why white nationalists are even more dangerous than they seem.
My dad often gave me the advice that white nationalists are not looking to recruit people on the fringes of American culture, but rather the people who start a sentence by saying, “I’m not racist, but …”
The most effective tactics for white nationalists are to associate American history with themselves and to suggest that the collective efforts to turn away from our white supremacist past are the same as abandoning American culture. My father, the founder of the white nationalist website Stormfront, knew this well.
That’s a legacy you wouldn’t wish on anyone.
We have all observed the administration’s decisions over the past several months that aligned with the white nationalist agenda, such as limiting or completely cutting off legal and illegal immigration, especially of Hispanics and Muslims; denigrating black communities as criminal and poor, threatening to unleash an even greater police force on them; and going after affirmative action as antiwhite discrimination. But I had never believed Trump’s administration would have trouble distancing itself from the actual white nationalist movement.
From every indication. Trump doesn’t want to disassociate himself. The one time all week when he sounded completely phony was when he was reading the statement condemning racism.
Matthew Contenetti has not come to praise Steve Bannon.
Mr. Bannon is the latest in a long line of political advisers whose reputations are inflated after an election victory. Mr. Bannon may have given much thought to traditionalism and populism, may have publicized its themes as chairman of Breitbart.com, may be able to name drop René Guénon, Julius Evola, Jean Raspail, Neil Howe and William Strauss. But President Trump’s inflammatory response to the clashes and killing last week in Charlottesville, Va., made it clear that it is he, and not Mr. Bannon, who maintains a gut connection with his most die-hard supporters. The most important culture warrior in this administration sits at the Resolute Desk.
White supremacists are Trump’s most die=hard supporters? Sounds about right.
Roxane Gay on how some people should be ashamed to show their face in public.
Angry white men holding tiki torches and shouting their throats raw chanting “blood and soil,” spittle hanging from their lips. Angry white men, arms outstretched in the Nazi salute. Angry white men playing soldier, heavily armed in public. Nazi flags, Confederate flags, American flags, “Make America Great Again” hats. Bodies clashing. A slate-gray car barreling into people standing up to racism. Bodies flying.
Gay makes a confession that fits far too many of us.
Throughout the 2016 election, I did not do as much as I could have done to support Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid. I contributed money to the campaign, but I didn’t volunteer or try to get out the vote.
I did not spend nearly as much time volunteering for Hillary as I have in previous cycles. Not because I didn’t like Hillary. Because I was too confident. Will not make that mistake again.
The New York Times on the failing presidency of Donald Trump.
The rolling disaster of his presidency accelerated downhill last week with a news conference on Tuesday at which he seemed determined to sow racial strife in a nation desperate for a unifying vision.
Hey, we’re all searching for our own metaphor.
This, in essence, is where we are now: a nation led by a prince of discord who seems divorced from decency and common sense. The alarm bells were loud and swift. Five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered a rare rebuke, condemning race-based extremism in the military and the nation. Foreign leaders, from Secretary General António Guterres of the United Nations to Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, condemned intolerance and a failure of leadership in the White House.
David Von Drehle suggests that maybe it’s time for Trump to break up the band.
Evidence is piling up that Donald Trump does not really want to be president of the United States.
He certainly doesn’t look happy in the job. In his previous life, Trump met whomever he wanted to meet and said whatever he wanted to say. But like all presidents, he finds himself ever more isolated, and his displeasure shows on his face. The loneliness of the job — which so many of his predecessors have ruefully reported — is wearing on him.
It’s extra hard for Trump, because … nope, just kidding. Trump spits out everything he wants to say, much of it accompanied by declarations that “everybody” loved what he had to say at the previous article. Why should he go?
As some Trump associates tell it, he never intended to be elected. But having won the part, he doesn’t want to play it, a fact irrefutable after Charlottesville. Rather than speak for the nation — the president’s job — he spoke for Trump. Rather than apply shared values, he apportioned blame.
Which seems … pretty darn close to what he did during the campaign.
Julius Krein shows that at least one Trump voter is unhappy.
I supported the Republican in dozens of articles, radio and TV appearances, even as conservative friends and colleagues said I had to be kidding. As early as September 2015, I wrote that Mr. Trump was “the most serious candidate in the race.” Critics of the pro-Trump blog and then the nonprofit journal that I founded accused us of attempting to “understand Trump better than he understands himself.” I hoped that was the case. I saw the decline in this country — its weak economy and frayed social fabric — and I thought Mr. Trump’s willingness to move past partisan stalemates could begin a process of renewal.
That’s a pretty serious case of awful judgement.
Although crude and meandering for almost all of the primary campaign, Mr. Trump eschewed strict ideologies and directly addressed themes that the more conventional candidates of both parties preferred to ignore. Rather than recite paeans to American enterprise, he acknowledged that our “information economy” has delivered little wage or productivity growth. He was willing to criticize the bipartisan consensus on trade and pointed out the devastating effects of deindustrialization felt in many communities. He forthrightly addressed the foreign policy failures of both parties, such as the debacles in Iraq and Libya, and rejected the utopian rhetoric of “democracy promotion.” He talked about the issue of widening income inequality — almost unheard of for a Republican candidate — and didn’t pretend that simply cutting taxes or shrinking government would solve the problem.
Sorry, that’s not just bad judgement. That’s hallucinating. Trump showed no understanding of any issue, and failed to explain or support any of the positions they did take. This article also massively distorts positions of both Democrats and Republicans.
No wonder you voted for Trump. You weren’t interested in the truth.