As we move into the last few months of the 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton has taken a commanding electoral lead, so far ahead that if she lost every current remaining toss-up state, she’d still become the 45th president of the United States. So naturally Donald Trump has grown desperate and panicked—pathetically so.
He’s fired his second campaign manager, bringing on pollster Kellyanne Conway and Breitbart’s openly alt-right, bullying bigot of the moment Steve Bannon to his campaign. He’s decided to “soften” his signature issue (the mass deportation of 11 million people) to not so mass—and not so much deportation (but not quite amnesty). And now he’s talking not exactly about open borders, but floating the idea that law-abiding undocumented workers will be allowed to stay, maybe, if they pay their back taxes and/or do the hokey pokey. And it’ll be kinda like the plans previously presented by Jeb Bush, or John Kasich, or Marco Rubio. And it’ll be kinda like what President Obama has already been doing by deporting about 300,000 people per year, only with “more energy”—or not, or yadda yadda, blah blah blah ...
Clearly, it’s not so much of a “pivot” as it’s a shuffle to the left, a slide to the right, a twist kick and a twirling moonwalk in a circle around anything resembling a coherent policy.
But it’s an improvement, right? Trump has finally learned to “moderate,” or “modulate,” or maybe to finally “defibrillate” his flailing campaign before it’s just too late. Now we can finally get down to talking about policy. Now we can have a substantive debate on issues. Now we can ...
Oh, god damn it.
Trump: Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future. She doesn't care.
Dear sweet lord. Get your seat backs and tray tables upright: We have now fully entered the “I know you are, but what am I” phase of this campaign.
It’s almost like Trump believes he is now able to do a magic Jedi, Karl Rovian political jiu-jitsu trick of making his greatest liability into his opponent’s biggest problem. But the fact is that Hillary Clinton has a 93 percent popularity rating with African Americans, and if he think’s he going to attract any of their votes with this kind of appeal he’s got several other things coming. It’s laughable.
It’s also horribly sad, insulting, and infuriating as was made very clear by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, as he discussed Trump’s supposed “outreach” to African Americans with Trump “national diversity” chair/talky guy/shill/porch-negro/racism shield/whatever Bruce Levell.
The thing about this is that in order to be believed, you have to have a track record of not just words, but actions to back those words up. Sure, Trump has some black employees—as if that isn’t something he basically has to do anyway under federal law. But what else? Is that it? He’s not a bigot all the time, just some of the time—like when he opens his mouth?
The first question presented by Lavell after Blow said that Donald Trump is a bigot was, “Name one thing Donald Trump has said about African Americans”—again, ignoring his actual deeds, and as if all the things he’s said about Mexicans and Muslims somehow sit in a vacuum without having any impact or implications for any other group.
Name one statement that you’ve heard Donald Trump say about African-Americans,” challenged Lavell.
“First of all, be quiet,” said Blow, “the way I was quiet when you were talking. That’s how this works. It’s a dialogue.”
“Name one,” pressed Lavell. “Name one.”
After a moment of cross-talking and host Don Lemon urging Lavell to hold his tongue, Blow said in exasperation, “Who is this person? And why is he on TV?”
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Donald Trump is a bigot. There’s no other way to get around it.”
“Wow,” Lavell said.
“Anybody who accepts that,” he said, “supports it. Anybody who supports it is promoting it — and that makes you part of the bigotry itself. Now you have to decide whether or not you want to be part of the bigotry that is Donald Trump.”
He went on, “You have to decide whether you want to be part of the sexism and misogyny that is Donald Trump. You have to decide whether you want to be part of the bullying that would allow him to make fun of one of my disabled colleagues at the New York Times. You have to decide that. There is no other space for you. There is no place for you to say, ‘I’m going to put that to the side because I believe in conservative principles.'”
“Your party has now decided that this is your person,” Blow said. “This con man is your front man. And you have to decide whether you’re going to follow that.”
See, he doesn’t have to specifically say anything about African Americans (although he certainly has, more on that later). We can tell by all his ignorant comments about every other ethnic and minority group on the planet just how his mind works. Or rather, how it doesn’t.
Blow continued his rant the next day on CNN, going even further.
“First off, we have to stop calling this an outreach to black people,” Blow said. “It’s an outreach to white people.”
He went on to say that Trump’s condescending “What the hell have you got to lose?” approach to black voters is “the most insidious kind of bigotry.”
“It’s the kind of bigotry that says, ‘I will knock you down while I pretend to pick you up,'” said Blow. “It’s the kind of bigotry that says, ‘I am urinating on you and telling you to dance in the rain.”
Okay, then.
Now to get to specifics: What Donald has said just recently is that African Americans are poor, uneducated, their schools are falling apart, their cities are full of crime where they “can get shot,” and 58 percent of their youth are unemployed. Oh, and that Democrats have done nothing about it and don’t care. Yeah, all that. So why, oh why aren’t they flocking to that lovely uplifting message in droves?
“You SUCK. Now come with me if you want to live."
Now I talk about this often, so pardon me for those who've read this before as I do a flashback for everyone else.
Yes, 58 pervent of black youth are unemployed—because they’re youth. They’re in middle school and high school, they’re supposed to be unemployed. In fact, 49 percent of white youth are also unemployed, so what exactly is the point he’s trying to make here—that we should bring back child labor? Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for black college graduates is twice the rate for white college graduates. Are we to assume that someone who has enough get up and go to get a full four-year degree is “too lazy” to get a job after that? Or is it more likely something else is getting in their way? Something largely out of their control, if only we could put a finger on what that might be … hmm.
Any who.
It is true that African Americans have a poverty rate of about 26 percent, — although Trump has been strangely, and wrongly proclaiming it’s 40 percent — but it hasn’t always been that way, it used to be much, much worse. Like before Democratic President Lyndon Johnson began his “Great Society” programs when it was over 50 percent.
As you can see, poverty for African Americans came down from 56 percent to about 33 percent—a 20 point drop—during the 1960. It didn’t uptick until the 1980s under President Reagan, then went down again starting in 1992 during the Bill Clinton Administration to about 24 percent, only to rise yet again to about 30 percent under George W. Bush starting in 2007-08. The trend is fairly obvious.
According the Kaiser Family Foundation, poverty rates as of 2014 are: white—10 percent, black—26 percent, Latino—24 percent, and Asian—15 percent, which is an overall improvement during the Democratic presidency of Barack Obama compared to where we all were when George W. Bush left office. So yeah, it’s not perfect: We have not succeeded in eliminating poverty and obviously more steps need to be taken, but it’s been getting better under Democrats—not worse, as Trump falsely claims.
Another fact that Trump doesn’t get is that 26 percent (or even 40 percent) is not a majority. The vast majority of African Americans would be the 74 percent who aren’t living in poverty but are in fact in the middle class and moving on upward. No. Thanks. To. Republicans.
On unemployment by race, these are the trends for the past 10 years.
Again, as you can see there was a sharp uptick at the end of the Bush administration, peaking at 16 percent for African Americans in 2010. Those numbers are now down all across the board and have fallen to 9 percent for blacks during the administration of Barack Obama. This is certainly not what Donald Trump or his surrogate camp have suggested. In fact, most of the areas where African Americans have slipped behind in recent years, such as their rate of homeownership and the racial wealth gap, can be almost entirely attributed to the aftermath of the great recession and Republican obstruction—not the policies of Barack Obama.
There’s also a longtime but rarely understood stat from the Bureau of Justice Statistics on the lifetime likelihood of going to prison.
Among men, blacks (28.5%) are about twice as likely as Hispanics (16.0%) and 6 times more likely than whites (4.4%) to be admitted to prison during their life.
Many people see “6 times more likely thanks whites” and it’s Game. Set. Match for them. Issue closed. Nothing more to say, nothing more to see. But then again, while 28 percent may be a high number, it’s still isn’t a majority. What this figure also tells you is that 71.5 percent—the actual vast majority—of black men will never go to prison in their entire life.
Just focus on that thought, one that clearly fully escapes Trump and his band of sycophants. About three out of four of the young black men you might ever meet in your life has never been arrested and will never go to jail.
Odds are most of us will probably never meet a deadly “black criminal.” Most of us aren’t likely to meet Hannibal Lecter, Frosty the Snowman, the Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot, Kanye West, Gwyneth Paltrow, or their stunt doubles and doppelgangers either. Sure, bad stuff and extraordinary things can happen anytime, but there’s no real good reason to obsess about any of that. Using the exception to define the rule is counter productive.
And of course we have to recognize that all these crime numbers are impacted and skewed by police and their tendency to stop black people twice as often for minor offenses, even though there’s no evidence they litter, jaywalk, and run red lights more often. They still search them three times as often (even though they usually don’t find drugs or guns on them as much), use force against them four times as often (even when the crime is at the same level of violence) and have killed them during arrests and in custody about four to five times more often.
Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age.
Paired with official government mortality data, this new finding indicates that about one in every 65 deaths of a young African American man in the US is a killing by police.
It’s possible that all that, plus the tendency for black men to receive harsher and longer sentences, is what is feeding the “6 times more likely to go to prison” figure. And it’s figures like this (not just hateful racism, but misunderstood and misapplied statistical lies) that are exactly what is feeding how police behave in all the stop, search, arrest, beat, kill results we see above.
Sure, some of them may really be racist. But the point here is that it should be easier to change the practices and policies that lead to these skewed results, even among the non-racist officers, than change the heart and mind of each and every racist violent cop, or else get them bounced off the force. Both would be great but let’s start with what’s doable, then get to hunting out the guys who don’t want to be discovered as we go along.
As a result of all these issues, racism or not, if you’re black in America and you walk out your front door you could “get shot,” as Trump says—but there’s also actually a pretty good chance the shooter is a cop.
A lot of people like Trump called people who protested the killings of unarmed or non-attacking black men like Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Laquan McDonald in Chicago “thugs.” They like to say “blacks are more violent” as well as criminal and that’s why they die so easily at the hands of cops, while they simultaneously ignore the poverty thing we were just discussing and the known links between poverty, violence and crime that have been documented and closely linked, while race is hardly relevant at all based on the National Crime Victimization Survey.
Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) (39.8 per 1,000) had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households (16.9 per 1,000) for the period 2008–12, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. Serious violence (rape or sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault) accounted for a greater percentage of violence among persons in poor households (38 percent) than in high-income households (27 percent).
...
The overall pattern of persons in poor households having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for poor non-Hispanic white households (46.4 per 1,000) and non-Hispanic black households (43.4 per 1,000). However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels. Poor whites (56.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (51.3 per 1,000) in urban households had higher rates of violence than persons in all other types of households.
In summary, your chance of being a white victim of violent crime when poor in an urban setting is actually slightly higher (56.4 per 1000) than for poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1000). Now, neither of those numbers are acceptable, but it’s clear that simply trying to not be black is going to be a lot less effective crime stopping effort that not being poor. And we may see this increased violence among the black urban poor because they’re often more densely and intensely packed into small confined areas than others.
Black poverty didn’t just suddenly happen. It didn’t just fall from the sky and land on our heads. It was deliberately created, implemented, and maintained for more than two centuries. One of the main methods was housing discrimination, particularly racist red-lining—which isn’t truly a thing of past. There are cities in California whose homes have vestigial “white only” CC&R’s even today—and in 1972 Donald J. Trump was sued for racial housing discrimination while president of his father’s Brooklyn tenement buildings.
The really interesting thing is what he did with defense attorney Roy Cohn, who had previously worked with Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the ‘50s, to get out of it after local activists discovered a pattern of discrimination.
In the July 1972 test at Shorehaven Apartments in Brooklyn, the same superintendent who had rejected the black woman told the white woman who came later that she could “immediately rent either one of two available apartments,” according to testimony.
The tests played out across Queens and Brooklyn and revealed a pattern, the housing activists said in court filings. White testers were encouraged to rent at certain Trump buildings, while the black testers were discouraged, denied or steered to apartment complexes that had more racial minorities, according to the testimony.
The supposed reason for this policy supposedly instituted by Trump’s father was that they simply preferred to rent to Jews. In order to facilitate that they lied for years about Donald’s grandfather being from Scandinavia rather than Germany, which might have been off-putting to their preferred clientele. That’s a fact which is rather ironic, since Trump called Elizabeth Warren “racist” for claiming to be 1/32nd Native American, but I digress.
Discovering this pattern, the activists alerted the Justice Department, who dug even further and gathered witnesses from among Trump’s own employees.
The legal team went after the claims that Trump employees used coded language to refer to minorities. This case had originated in part from one employee, who told the government that he was instructed to mark rental applications from blacks with the letter “C” for “colored,” and that “he did this every time a black person applied for an apartment,” according to an affidavit from Goldweber. The employee said he didn’t want to be identified in the case because “he was afraid that the Trumps would have him ‘knocked off,’ or words to that effect, because he told me about their allegedly discriminatory practices,” according to the affidavit.
Trump and his attorney counterattacked, alleging that government lawyers had coerced their employees to lie by using threats of “locking them up.” They even had one sign an affidavit to that effect, and argued that FBI investigating the case “were like the Gestapo.” In the end they agreed to settle the case with a deal requiring the Trump organization to place ads declaring that they offered equal opportunity housing, and Donald—believe it or not—whined about it being too much to ask.
This advertising, while it’s, you know — I imagine it’s necessary from the Government’s standpoint, is a very expensive thing for us,” Trump said, according to a court transcript. “It is really onerous. Each sentence we put in is going to cost us a lot of money over the period we are supposed to do it.”
When government officials persisted, Trump said, “Will you pay for it?”
The two sides eventually came to terms. On June 10, 1975, they signed an agreement prohibiting the Trumps from “discriminating against any person in the terms, conditions, or priveleges of sale or rental of a dwelling.” The Trumps were ordered to “thoroughly acquaint themselves personally on a detailed basis” with the Fair Housing Act.
So they settled without admitting any wrongdoing and agreed to abide by a consent decree, then complained they had to pay for ads that made that audacious claim that Trump properties obey. the. law. That’s a promise they actually broke just three years later as again, potential black tenants were still being wrongly told there were “no vacancies.” The Department of Justice attempted more severe action but by 1983, a fair housing group survey revealed that two of Trump’s rental properties remained 95 percent white.
This reminds of the first rule of any laws passed, including civil rights laws: Just because a law exists doesn’t mean everyone is going to voluntarily abide by that law. Even if they get caught, it doesn’t mean they aren’t going to go on and violate it again. And again. And again. Laws don’t make all crime stop. They may slow it down, but it also makes some criminals get more sneaky and creative to avoid getting caught.
Meanwhile, just a couple years before this was happening with Trump and his father the serial discriminator, Hillary Clinton had chosen to go undercover to identify discrimination in southern schools.
Playing down her flat Chicago accent, she told the school’s guidance counselor that her husband had just taken a job in Dothan, that they were a churchgoing family and that they were looking for a school for their son.
The future Mrs. Clinton, then a 24-year-old law student, was working for Marian Wright Edelman, the civil rights activist and prominent advocate for children. Mrs. Edelman had sent her to Alabama to help prove that the Nixon administration was not enforcing the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to so-called segregation academies, the estimated 200 private academies that sprang up in the South to cater to white families after a 1969 Supreme Court decision forced public schools to integrate.
Her mission was simple: Establish whether the Dothan school was discriminating based on race.
So while Trump was discriminating, Clinton was directly fighting discrimination with a project that ultimately became the Children’s Defense Fund. In 1976, Clinton began working on behalf of a black convict who may have been wrongly sentenced to death by an all-white jury.
Hillary Clinton... becomes the director of the legal aid clinic (and a professor of criminal law) at the University of Arkansas. There, she spearheads a project to bring legal representation to inmates at Cummins Farm, one of the worst prisons in the state. In one case, she and her team file a 64-page amicus brief on behalf of HENRY GILES1, a mentally-impaired black man who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury.
Twenty years later Hillary would be first lady, helping to spearhead her husband’s crime bill. While it may have been well-intentioned, it was critically flawed as it greatly accelerated the 6 to 1 incarcerations rates mentioned above.
Around the same time when New York City police officials bullied and beat five young men—all of them minors—into a set of false confessions for a notorious rape in Central Park, Trump called on them to be executed. Then, when they were fully exonerated by DNA manyyears later in 2014, Trump claimed they shouldn’t be compensated for being wrongly convicted and jailed because he argued the detectives who coerced lies out of them in the first place should still be granted some credibility. He called the settlement a disgrace.
My opinion on the settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace. A detective close to the case, and who has followed it since 1989, calls it “the heist of the century.”
…
As a long-time resident of New York City, I think it is ridiculous for this case to be settled — and I hope that has not yet taken place.
Forty million dollars is a lot of money for the taxpayers of New York to pay when we are already the highest taxed city and state in the country. The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.
Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.
What about all the people who were so desperately hurt and affected? I hope it’s not too late to continue to fight and that this unfortunate event will not have a repeat episode any time soon — or ever.
Yeah, it was too late, but the dichotomy is striking. When Trump wants to get out of a legal jam he claims that law enforcement investigating him are “like the gestapo” and claims that their witnesses were forced into lying, but when that exact same thing happens to a set of black kids, and they have DNA that matches the real rapists who admits to the entire thing, Trump still doesn’t believe what all the facts are saying.
Besides all that he’s the lord, god, and king of the Birther movement. He wants to keep Muslims out of the country, and put the rest “in a database” which actually would include lots and lots of black people who happen to be Muslim, too.
Oh, and he thinks blacks are “lazy” and didn’t like them touching his money at his failed, bankrupt Atlantic City casino chain. In the ‘80s he would also have black dealers and workers pulled and hidden from the floor when he and his then-wife or some of his particularly snooty friends would arrive at the casino—out of mind and out of sight.
Now he was looking for work as a livery driver. Brown also used to work in the casinos, at the Showboat, bussing tables, and at Trump’s Castle, stripping and waxing floors. "When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor," he said. "It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back."
So sure, he’ll hire black people. But then he’ll pull crap like this, which is just about as racist as you can get, and still escape the notice of the civil rights division of the DOJ, which had previously come after Trump twice for essentially doing the same thing to potential black tenants.
The bottom line is that when he says to African Americans “What have you got to lose? Give me a chance,” he’s full of shit. Totally and completely. Hillary’s answer to this is correct: What you have to lose is “everything.” The people of Atlantic City found out what they could lose. Plenty. They lost their dignity and thanks to his mismanagement, ultimately their jobs and livelihoods. To paraphrase Blow, don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s a warm spring rain.
Democrats haven’t been perfect. But the party’s policies and efforts to bring the rate of poverty, crime, and violence down and improve the lives of all Americans have been directly opposed by Republicans, starting with the Affordable Care Act which has had a great positive impact for African Americans.
- Last year, an estimated 6 in 10 uninsured African Americans qualified for Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP), or lower costs on monthly premiums through the Health Insurance Marketplace.
- Many shoppers found coverage for less than $50 a month and nearly 7 in 10 found coverage for less than $100.
- 7.8 million African Americans with private insurance now have access to preventive services like mammograms or flu shots with no co-pay or deductible
- More than 500,000 African American young adults between the ages of 19 and 26 who would have been uninsured now have coverage under their parents’ plan.
- 2.3 million African Americans (ages 18-64) gained health insurance coverage, lowering the uninsured rate among African Americans by 6.8 percentage points.
- If all states took advantage of new opportunities to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, 95 percent of eligible uninsured African Americans might qualify for Medicaid, CHIP, or programs to help lower the cost of health insurance coverage in the Marketplace.
If Donald Trump became president all of the above would end for African-Americans and everyone else, only to be replaced by … uh ... something. Who knows?
As first lady, Hillary Clinton fought to create CHIP to bring health insurance to poor children, many of them African American. As senator, she co-sponsed 74 Bills from the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to laws to improve the protection of children against predators, improve veterans’ mental health care, one to give subpoena authority to the September 11 Victims Fund, a bill to help keep sexual predators off the internet, a bill to expand and improve traumatic brain injury programs, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King Congressional Gold Medal bill, the National Great Blacks Commemoration Act, and was instrumental in securing the $21 billion needed to rebuild the World Trade Center.
As secretary of state she sought to empower women around the world, helped negotiate an updated Start II nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia, negotiated a cease fire between Isreal and Palestine in Gaza, worked to help increase our exports to China by 50 percent, and spearheaded the effort to impose sanctions on Iran that brought them to the negotiating table on their nuclear ambitions.
And there was also bringing Osama bin Laden to justice.
Hillary Clinton in addition to laying our her own criminal justice overhall supports 6 out of 10 of the objectives for criminal justice reforms put forth by joincampaignzero.org on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement, while Trump only support 1 of those efforts—increasing body cameras for police—and actually suggests to make two of those issues worse than they already are.
As president she has pledged to protect and expand the ACA; to raise the minimum wage to at least $12/hr and higher in some states then index it to inflation to help bring the 75 percent of people on public assistance who are already working out of poverty and off the dole; to implement paid family leave for those working families; to eliminate the cost of public college tuition so they can educate themselves to improve their careers; to implement the Global Climate Agreement reached by President Obama which will continue to foster a boom in the green economy; and to implement comprehensive immigration reform that will, yes, keep the border safe but also “fairly and humanely” address the status of the 11 million undocumented people who are fully law abiding and contribute to our country, tax base, and economy every day.
Clearly there are many things to criticize and many outright mistakes, such as the Iraq War vote, Benghazi, the email server—all of which have been discussed nearly to death.
But Hillary Clinton has shown that she has the capacity to learn from those mistakes and move forward. All Donald Trump has shown is that he knows how to move from one lowbrow grifting scheme like Trump Steaks on to the next like Trump U (can’t call it “University” because it wasn’t one) or Trump Shuttle or Trump Vodka and now, the Trump Alt-Right movement.
She’s not going to get everything right, but he’s essentially guaranteed to get everything wrong. All he does is co-opt other people’s ideas and slap his name on them for branding purposes. Now he’s going to be the first openly bigoted demagogue U.S. presidential candidate to lose to a girl.
For a punk-ass misogynist egotist like him, that’s gonna sting. A lot.
Sunday, Aug 28, 2016 · 6:02:55 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
And then yesterday morning Trump managed to make this ridiculous ham-handed and clumsy “outreach” attempt even worse with the following horrifically insensitive tweet about the shooting of Nykea Aldridge a mother of four and also coincidently NBA star Dwyane Wade’s cousin.
Dwayne Wade's cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2016
And to make matter worse this tweet — which was generated from an Android phone — was soon deleted and replaced with another identically one posted via IPhone, only with Dwyane’s name spelled correctly.
So Trump, or whoever, posted this correction still hasn’t had a thought about the four children who’ve been left motherless, let alone the rest of her family including Dwyane, it’s just all about Trump?
It wasn’t until four hours after the original tweet that some condolences were finally posted — by someone, because this didn’t come from either the Android or the iPhone, it was created using an iPad.
So this is how much Trump thinks of black people? It takes him and/or his various minions four hours after he’s attempted to use their personal tragedy for votes — exactly the claim he made against Clinton when he called her a “bigot” — to finally drum up some pseudo compassion? A mere droplet of “compassion” that didn’t even probably come from him, but from someone else in his campaign or possibly even one of his kids?
Geezus Hussein Christmas.
I mean, he's done this before. He did it after the San Bernadino shooting, the Orlando shooting and when his chief spokesgoblin Katrina Pierson tried to blame Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the death of Captain Khan in Iraq — which was in 2004 while he was a State Senator in Illinois and she was a U.S. Senator — she somehow, magically, got to keep her job. This is a pattern with him. It’s his go to position.
I know it’s wrong to try and psychoanalyze someone without a degree, or at a distance, but I am sorely tempted to agree with David Plouffe on Meet the Press this morning. This man is a Psychopath.
“Wait a minute,” Todd interrupted. “Let me ask you, wait a minute. Do you really think — diagnosing people on air, and I assume you don’t have a degree in psychology. Is that fair? I mean we’re jumping to conclusions here and I think this is what has voters a little frustrated.
Plouffe replied with an adequate layman’s description of observable Trump traits.
“Well, listen. Grandiose notion of self worth, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse,” Plouffe recited. “I think he does, although I don’t have a degree.”
Yeah, after this I think so too. Or that he’s at least a high-functioning narcissist.