Donald Trump’s presidency is causing one Guardian writer to come over all anti-democratic.
I turned off the radio after Obama said, in his final speech: “In 10 days, the world will witness a hallmark of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power from one freely elected president to the next.” I yearned for a leader who would say something like: “Hey, there was foreign intervention in this election, along with voter disenfranchisement, so maybe it wasn’t free and fair.”
You might recall when Barack Obama popped over to the UK to tell Britishers how voting for Brexit would relegate the country to the “back of the queue”? As Henry Kissinger put it: “Obama seems to think of himself not as part of a political process, but as sui generis, a unique phenomenon with a unique capacity.”
The Guardian writer adds:
We didn’t need to know the minutiae of the Russian intervention; we already knew that it raised questions so grave that the whole transfer of power should have been halted while it was investigated.
So is democracy not free and fair when it delivers the result you don’t want?
Only one tabloid leads with Donald Trump’ inauguration. The Mirror introduces the 45th President of the United States. “Now the world holds its breath,” it adds. Over pages 4 and 5 readers are told “IT COULD ALL GO VERY BADLY WRONG.” The paper produces a listicle: “20 reasons why Trump’s reign could be a disaster for USA & World.”
Across the page, we see a picture of the Obamas sharing a hug as they gaze out from the White House. The message is clear: the good times are over. The good people are gone.
Under Obama, the US facilitated around 2.5million deportations. A record.
This is not to undermine Obama’s achievements and record. As the New York Times reports, Obama pulled “the nation back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression”. This is to highlight monocular reporting of a man whose wife billed him as “a leader who’s going to touch our souls”.
Lest any reader not have got the Mirror’s point, its editorial thunders, “Reasons to be fearful.” Brian Reade delivers Trump’ speech as he imagines it. People are “subjects of the Trump organisation”. But didn’t we all buy into Obama’s world, the man whose identity was key to his success? When Trayvon Martin was killed by a white Hispanic vigilante in 2012, Trump opined: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”
So how do you follow that? What is Obama’s legacy? Is it Donald Trump? “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America: there’s the United States of America,” said Obama in 2004. Now what do you see in a country where ‘white man’ has become an insult more than an observation?
Once all eyes were on Obama the man not the party activist, a politico branded ‘The One’, by Oprah Winfrey; now they are on Trump and his identity.
More on the Donald Trump Death Cult – an occasional look at media chatter on Trump’s demise. The Star being news that the US President-elect will “DIE ON THE JOB”. Jeff Farrell hears that that Trump is at “Significant risk” of dying – “if the workload as the next US president does not give him a heart attack, his missus could”.
This news comes from two medics.
First up is Dr Karen Morton, billed as a “cardiologist”. There is no word that she’s ever met Trump let alone treated him. But Dr Karen has seen enough to tells us that Melania Trump will “make certain demands as a young woman in her prime”. Lest you think Dr Karen is a ghoul, she adds, “Let’s hope he doesn’t die on the job.”
The second expert is Dr Patrick Heck. He’s quoted as having told a medial conference: “He [Trump] is surely at a significant risk of a heart attack”.
Over the Express, Dr Karen is no longer a cardiologist, but “Gynaecologist Dr Karen Morton, of Dr Mortons”.
Dr Morton’s is a private medial service. We were quoted a fee of £10 per minute to speak to a doctor, after registering. An email consultation will set us back £25. The receptionist told us that, to the best of her knowledge, Dr Morton has not treated Donald Trump, father to a young child who will be surely delighted to know that such fine minds are discussing his dad’s death in the media.
It’s all done in the best possible taste, of course.
Did you see this tweet from Guardian journalist Monisha Rajesh, who also writes for New York Times? Order Order claims to have spotted the tweet from the “Train columnist at The Sunday Telegraph”:
Of course, that doesn’t men she is plotting to kill Trump. But, if true, it appears to monumentally stupid.
And she’s a freelance, not a Guardian staffer.
Anyhow, Anorak Law is a go: as soon as an American gain power the media discuss their murder.
When Barack Obama was elected US President in 2008, the news cycle was full of stories of his imminent assassination. We called it the Barack Obama Death Cult. Today we get a look at the assassination of President-elect Donald Trump. The Daily Star leads with news that “TRIUMP’S A DEAD MAN WALKING”.
Grassy Knoll writes in the Star of a “series of threats to gun him down”. Knoll, aka Ross Kaniuk, says would-be killers have made their threats on twitter. One tweeter notes;” My mum is talking about assassinating Donald Trump. Watch out guy my white suburban mother is coming for you.”
She’d best be slim, blonde and young if she wants to get close to The Don.
The idea bveing that don’t vote and get Predient Trump. Do vote and gt PResident CLinbton. Or, better, yet, just take a bus and tell the driver to take you back in time to when the US President had gravitas and the people’s trust.
The wife of the Deputy Director of the FBI got a wad of campaign donations from Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton ally.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received $467,500 in campaign funds in late 2015 from the political-action committee of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of the Clintons and, until he was elected governor in November 2013, a Clinton Foundation board member.
The embattled director of the FBI has been accused of covering up evidence of Donald Trump’s links to Russia while inflicting severe damage on Hillary Clinton, as Democrats hit back in a growing scandal involving her email server.
Having links to Russia is a crime?
Harry Reid, the Democrat leader of the Senate, accused James Comey of “a disturbing double standard” and, in a remarkably forthright letter, said he regretted supporting a man who he once believed was “a principled public servant.”
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and several conservative attorneys and legal scholars held a private forum last month in which they harshly criticized FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation just eight days before Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing his bombshell decision to review new emails in the probe. The event, billed as a discussion on “The Law after Comey’s decision,” featured several speakers including Mukasey, who served in the George W. Bush administration, hammering Comey over the legal precedent he set in concluding the email probe three months ago without charging Clinton with a crime.
FBI Director James Comey stressed in his letter to Congress Friday that investigators don’t know how significant the new emails may be. But even if they don’t implicate the Democratic presidential nominee, their mere existence could call into question testimony Abedin gave months ago about the email system.
FBI records reflect that she told investigators “that she lost most of her old emails as a result of the transition.”
During a June 28, 2016 deposition with the conservative Judicial Watch, Abedin also swore she looked for and turned over all devices she thought contained government work to the State Department.
“I looked for all the devices that may have any of my State Department work on it and returned – returned – gave them to my attorneys for them to review for all relevant documents,” Abedin said. “And gave them devices and paper.”
Why would she have 600,000 emails on a compute she shared with her dick pics husband?
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades….
I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.
Presidential Tat Watch spots this “Donald Trump Paddle Ball” on sale at the Gagosian’s Benefit for Clinton, Art For Hillary.
Designed by New York sculptor Elliott Arkin, the wooden paddle features a likeness of Donald Trump’s face. The mouth is open. The idea is that you smack the red rubber ball into Trump’s pie hole.
Arkin’s work references Koons’s Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer paddle ball game from 2000. “I often use existing contemporary works to satirize. Since Koons has made that print of the Mona Lisa for this event, I thought his Rudolph paddle ball was a natural fit for Trump,” he says.
Konn’s Mona Lisa repo costs Clinton fans – get this – $50,000.
To even things up, Arkin has also made a Hillary Clinton Flash Drive an 8 megabyte flash drive in the shape of a miniature Clinton. You pop off Clinton’s noggin – decapitate it, if you will – and reveal the device.
Whether the data storage device contains any data, like emails, say, or has been accidentally wiped clean by forces unknown is unsaid.
We’re still all waiting for the anything in Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails – released by WikiLeaks – to besmirch her reputation for being economical with the actualité (surely ‘a titan of truth’ – ed) . Of course, thousands of Clinton’s emails handled by a private server she maintained while in the top tiers of government were acciedntally destroyed. But something is seeping out. ZeroHedge says the State Department and the Clinton Campaign might be tighter than Vladimir Putin’s forehead:
Now, courtesy of the latest leak by Wikileaks, which earlier today released another 2,000 emails by Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, we may have stumbled on evidence of collusion between the State Department and the Clinton Campaign itself. In an email from close Hillary’s confidant Heather Samuelson, also known as “the Clinton insider who screened Hillary’s emails”, we learn the intimate details leaked by Samuelson regarding a FOIA request submitted previously by Judicial Watch regarding Bill Clinton speeches, which shows that virtually entire process was being “translated” over to Hillary’s campaign.
Who is Heather Samuelson? Politico noted on September 2015:
Hillary Clinton chose a former campaign staffer who followed her to the State Department to make the initial determination about which of her emails should be preserved as federal records, according to closed-door testimony by Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, a GOP source told POLITICO.
Why not preserve all of them?
Heather Samuelson, a lawyer and 2008 Clinton campaign staffer, worked under Mills and Clinton’s attorney David Kendall to sift through her ex-boss’ messages. She helped separate those that were purely personal, which were not turned over to the State Department, from those that were work-related.
The Daily Caller adds:
Most importantly, as we reported previously, Samuelson received DOJ immunity in exchange for turning over the laptop she used during the review of Clinton’s emails in 2014.
Here’s a question for Britons who want to abolish the monarchy: Trump or Clinton? And after them you most likely get their kids.
He’s back! The str of ‘thirdeaglebooks’ is a Donald Trump supporters. He’s written a song for Don. As the blurb says, this is the “unofficial” campaign song for the 2016 Trump-Pence Republican Presidential ticket. The official song will find this impossible to beat.
Take it away…. William Tapley (co Prophet of The End of Times)
How do we tell the story of reality TV star Donald Trump telling gibbering TV host Billy Bush “Grab her by the pussy“? The British news has made Trump’s “crass” comment (Express) the lead news story. Bigger than mass murder in Syria, desperate migrants and bellicose Russia is Trump’s “sex boast” (The Observer).
The Mirror looks at more pressing issues.
Trump is a story. The reality TV creation is news because he’s said something pathetic and is cheap to produce.
But should one comment scupper Trump’s White House bid?
Nick Kristoff opines in the NYTimes: “In fairness to Trump, other senior men in politics and business — John Kennedy and Bill Clinton come to mind — also sometimes showed a sense of entitlement toward young women.”
The digging for dirt begins.
Said Gennifer Flowers: “I just know what Bill told me and that was that he was aware that Hillary was bisexual and he didn’t care. He should know. ‘He said Hillary had eaten more p***y than he had.’”
In the Washington Post, we read:
Trump, facing a GOP exodus from his campaign and apparently desperate to change the subject, just retweeted two tweets from an account featuring the name of Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who publicly alleged in 1999 that Clinton had sexually assaulted her two decades prior. In both tweets, the Broaddrick account reiterates her accusation that Clinton raped her and accuses Hillary Clinton of enabling him.
Then, the country was presented with proof, incremental and suggestive at first, overwhelming and indisputable by the end of the decade, that Bill Clinton was an irrepressible and irresponsible sexual predator, at least by the moral and evidentiary standards established by feminist activists and the press corps that loves them. And, rather than face the consequences of applying their own principles consistently, they prostrated themselves to the Oval Office. Gloria Steinem raced to the pages of the New York Times to advance the “one free grope” rule. Susan Estrich, Susan Faludi, and countless other professional feminists defenestrated their principles in a desperate attempt to defend Clinton.
And can we blame the woman seen in the film when Trump went full frat house?
To the Mail it is not Trump’s ugly comment that could cost him the White House – it is elegant TV soap actress Arianne Zucker, a woman who diplomatically dealt with TV host Billy Bragg’s pathetic comments as to which of he or Trump she’d sleep with.
The obsession with Trump, the close monitoring of his every utterance, has reached the point that his political and media foes have – ironically – become important generators of support for him. Every time they tell Trump ‘you can’t say that’, he says it. Every time they demand an apology from Trump, he doubles down on it. Just by defying the strictures of political correctness, and not caving when challenged, Trump can look authoritative and daring.
We keep reading that Republicans have deserted Trump. Will his supporters care? No. Trump has turned the election into a referendum on the political establishment. Clinton should be miles ahead in the polls. Why isn’t she? Seen as untrustworthy by many, her policies should be more than ‘I’m not Trump’. Remember Bernie Sanders, who said failing to vote Hillary will lead to “more drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels.”
The Republican nominee Donald Trump spoke for 75 minutes and for most of his speech, he outlined a laundry list of every conceivable fear he could conjure. Radical Islam, immigration (legal, illegal, Mexican, Muslim, whatevs), stagnant wages, rising violence in the streets, and really terrible trade deals were among the litany.
The US Presidential campaign has a long way to run.
And like so much in Trump and Clinton’s lives, it is a race to the bottom.
WikiLeaks has released bits of speeches Hillary Clinton gave in the years before her 2016 presidential campaign. It was a lucrative tour. Private audiences paid her “at least $26.1 million in speaking fees”.
We get to see the speeches because versions of them appeared in emails now hacked, such as an account operated by Campaign Chairman John Podesta.
We love a cover up. But if we don’t find any juice, then so what? Aren’t private emails part of everyday conversations – some things we say are good and others less so. Do emails give us the full context?
Meanwhile Clinton’s rival Donald Trumps is in the mire over his attitudes to women, what the BBC calls “obscene remarks on women”.
In the video, posted by the Washington Post, Mr Trump is heard bragging to TV host Billy Bush about trying to have sex with a married woman as well as kissing and groping others.
A clip was part of unaired footage for an Access Hollywood segment ahead of Mr Trump’s appearance on the soap opera Days of Our Lives.
Said Trump:
“I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it. She was married. And I moved on her very heavily. I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phoney tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”
He then says when he sees a pretty woman he hones in.
Bush notes actress Arianne Zucker, who’s waiting for Trump outside the bus. “Your girl’s hot as s***, in the purple,” Bush said.
“Whoa!” Trump replied. “Whoa!”
“I’ve gotta use some Tic-Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump continued. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”
“Whatever you want,” said another voice believed to be Bush.
“Grab them by the pussy,” Trump replied. “You can do anything.”
All unedifying stuff. But what do we have but Clinton talking to the paying fans and what Trump calls “locker-room banter”?
Listen in. Language is NSFW. Trump is revolting. Bush is sleaze personified.
Trump has now apologised. Well, sort of. He said: “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course – not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.”
His apology is not for his comments rather for your taking offence at them. It’s a remarkably dishonest approach to saying ‘sorry’.
Expert to hear lots now on Bill Clinton’s attitude to women and Jill Harth, the woman who sued Trump over an alleged sexual assault. The Guardian dished the dirt:
She first met Trump in December 1992 at his offices in Trump Tower, where she and her then romantic partner, George Houraney, were making a business presentation. The couple wanted to recruit Trump to back their American Dream festival, in which Harth oversaw a pin-up competition known as American Dream Calendar Girls. Harth described that meeting as “the highlight of our career”.
But in other ways, it was something of a lowlight: Trump took an interest in Harth immediately and began subjecting her to a steady string of unwanted sexual advances, detailed by Harth in her complaint.
She claims that in January 1993, Harth and Houraney were visiting Trump’s Florida mansion. She alleges:
“He pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress again, and I had to physically say: ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’ It was a shocking thing to have him do this because he knew I was with George, he knew they were in the next room. And how could he be doing this when I’m there for business?…
“Trump did everything in his power to get me to leave him. He constantly called me and said: ‘I love you, baby, I’m going to be the best lover you ever had. What are you doing with that loser, you need to be with me, you need to step it up to the big leagues.’
“He was constantly working on me during that time and that took a toll on me. But I moved on. I’m a forgiving type person, OK? I’m a Christian, I moved on.”
He denies the allegations.
America waits to elect one or the other of what must be the least appealing choice since Michael Barrymore asked “Top, Middle or Bottom?”
When Donald Trump had his hair ruffled on the telly, Armando Iannucci thought it “beyond satire”.
What could Trump do that could be un-presidential? Well, he could carry on doing what he’s doing – being a TV show creation building towards the big shark jump.
Barons says it’s all for the cameras. And we love it.
The audience for the confrontation [first Presidential debate] could exceed 100 million, not far short of the 112 million viewers for the biggest U.S. sporting event, the Super Bowl. And if folks get together for parties on Monday with chicken wings and beer, maybe this debate will match that total.
According to the Strategas political team led by Daniel Clifton, that would be about half again the 67 million viewers that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney drew in their first debate in 2012 and nearly twice as many as the 52.4 million who tuned into Obama’s first face-off with Sen. John McCain in 2008. Indeed, Monday’s face-off is likely to shatter the record set in 1980, when 80.6 million watched Ronald Reagan’s first bout with Jimmy Carter.
Iannucci says President Trump is no longer a joke: “I used to say I was very sure, but I’m kind of sure.”
Trump bills himself as a anti-Establishment candidate. Why does that chime? “Who would want to be politician?” says Iannucci. “You’re not allowed to earn a certain amount of money, or go on holiday, or buy some dog food and put the receipt in the wrong place. You do anything wrong, and you’re just scum.”
Compare and contrast Hillary Clinton’s opinion of millions of Americans. She said the words at a New York fundraising do:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic. you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Now listen to Barack Obama in 2008:
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.”
And Hillary Clinton’s response:
“I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America. His remarks are elitist and out of touch.”
You can’t win an American presidential election without the deplorables’ vote. Deplorables are America’s biggest minority. They might even be the American majority. They may or not be racist, homophobic and so forth, but they know they’re deplorable. Deplorable, and proud…
They might even forgive Hillary for losing tens of thousands of compromising emails on an illegal private server and then repeatedly lying about it in a way that insults the deplorable intelligence of the average voter. But the one thing you can’t do is spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They’ll never forgive you for that. They’re hurting, and they rankle at candidates who rub their faces in it.
Clinton’s staffers started handing out stickers saying “I’m not bitter” and she went on to win the primary by nine points. She ultimately lost the nomination by a convincing margin.
What of the lasting damage to candidate Obama from this revealing insight into this elitist character? In the general election, Obama won Pennsylvania by 10 points. He took God-fearing Virginia by 6 points, and gun-loving Indiana by 1 point.
Many people see the choice of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee as a disaster for the Republican Party. Maybe. That out of the chaos of 17 Republican candidates we get Trump because of a disconnect between the Republican base & the money-men is one thing. But, for the entire Democratic political & cultural establishment to get together & choose Hillary as their only possible standard-bearer is a rot of an entirely more profound order. The fact that within the Democratic Party the only faction that resisted Hillary’s spell was the space-cadet Left under Bernie Sanders just makes the total picture all the more horrifying.
Amanda Marcotte has a message for Trump supporters. She writes in Salon:
A modest proposal: Trump has it all wrong — to prevent crime, we need to do some “extreme vetting” of men
It’s not all immigrants who need vetting. It’s just the male ones. We should only let the women in. At least that’s what she might be saying:
There are, however, two groups of people who really do commit crime, especially violent crime, at wildly different rates: Men and women.
According to FBI crime statistics, men are arrested for roughly three-quarters of all crimes. When it comes to violent crime, the stats are even worse. Nearly 9 out of 10 people arrested for murder are male. Ninety-nine percent of rape arrestees are men. Men are arrested for 8 out of 10 aggravated assaults.
If Trump is right and the crime rate is serious enough of a problem to compel us to abandon basic human rights so as to subject certain groups of people to monitoring and legal intimidation, then it’s not immigrants we should target. It’s men.
Amanda. Spot on. But the forces of law and order already know it. They watch men far more than they watch women (via):
Rather than stating the bleedin’ obvious and missing the truth of it, Amanda might care to campaign for more female police officers (via):
Female cops accounted for just 3.4 percent of officers involved in the “83 most serious lawsuits” against the LAPD from 1986 to 1990. While the stats suggested that female cops aren’t reluctant to use force, the commission reasoned, they’re not nearly as likely to use excessive force. “With some exceptions, female officers interviewed believed they were more communicative, more skillful at de-escalating potentially violent situations and less confrontational,” the report reads. “A suspect’s defiance and disrespect of an officer often gives rise to use of force by an officer. Many officers, both male and female, believe female officers are less personally challenged by defiant suspects and feel less need to deal with defiance with immediate force or confrontational language.”
….
Policing remains one of the most male-dominated professions in America: in the 1970s, about 97 percent of American cops were men, and in 2013, that had fallen only to 88 percent, meaning that the police force is even more gender imbalanced than the active-duty military, which was 84.9 percent male as of 2014. And while there are way more men than there are women policing American streets, the gender disparity for police use of force is even greater. Paquette reports that of the 54 officers that have been charged with killing someone with a gun while they were on duty, just two have been female.
And sex crimes?
Deborah Friedl has 30 years with the Lowell Police Department in Massachusetts, and she is now deputy superintendent of police there, the first woman to hold that job. For at least a decade, she and an international cadre of women police leaders, including The National Center for Women and Policing in the U.S. have been promoting research showing that the best way to reduce rates of violence against women, sexual assault, rape, and homicide is to hire more women officers.
Maybe the new arrivals could be encouraged to join the Thin Blue Line?
Donald Trump will screen and screen until America, the enemy and every one is sick.
He reminds us of Violet Elizabeth Bott, the spoilt nightmare in Just William books. She wants to get her own way, too. She will “scream and scream” until she’s sick. Why? Because she can.
For the third issue of HUP comic in 1989, cartoonist Robert Crumb turned his eye on real estate tycoon Donald Trump, “one of the most evil men alive”. Crumb despised the 1980s greed he saw embodied in “venal” Trump. In 1991, Crumb left the USA for a Trump-free life in bucolic France.
Intolerance of alternative viewpoints is spreading to places that make me, a moderate and a liberal, most uncomfortable. Only last year, we saw an online petition to ban Donald Trump from entry to the U.K. It garnered half a million signatures.
Just a moment.
I find almost everything that Mr. Trump says objectionable. I consider him offensive and bigoted. But he has my full support to come to my country and be offensive and bigoted there. His freedom to speak protects my freedom to call him a bigot. His freedom guarantees mine. Unless we take that absolute position without caveats or apologies, we have set foot upon a road with only one destination. If my offended feelings can justify a travel ban on Donald Trump, I have no moral ground on which to argue that those offended by feminism or the fight for transgender rights or universal suffrage should not oppress campaigners for those causes. If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on them grounds that they have offended you have crossed the line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justification.
Marry Anne Noland’s obituary was published in Virginia’s The Richmond Times. She’d rather die than vote for Clinton or Trump:
NOLAND, Mary Anne Alfriend. Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68.
For his first act as the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump strode on stage, extended his arms and conducted the crowd through a chorus of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
“We need to put our miners back to work!” he shouted Thursday to the crowd of more than 12,000 in the sunken, cavernous concrete Civic Center here. Hundreds of miners invited by the campaign to sit behind his podium rose in an extended standing ovation.
They love him. He’s local. Hell, he’s local everywhere:
Mr. Trump spent extended riffs going after Hillary Clinton, repeatedly referencing her comments about wanting to put the coal industry out of business (her campaign says she misspoke). He called the Clinton Foundation “disgusting,” referred to the investigation into her emails as secretary of state and Bill Clinton’s role in creating the North American Free Trade Agreement, and made a thinly veiled joke about Mr. Clinton’s infidelities.
“The Clinton administration, of which Hillary was definitely a part,” Mr. Trump said, continuing, “she was a part of almost everything. Almost, I say, not everything. Almost.”
He paused for a beat, as the crowd grew into a mix of laughter and cheers.
“Terrible,” Mr. Trump said, a wry joking tone in his voice. “I didn’t think the people of West Virginia thought about that. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Terrible, terrible people.”
…
Mr. Trump even donned a hard hat after receiving the endorsement of the West Virginia Coal Association, miming using a pick and shovel, before taking it off and risking his carefully crafted hair.
“You know you’re not allowed to hair spray anymore because it affects the ozone,” he said.
He added, in an allusion perhaps to his campaign’s overall slogan: “Hair spray’s not like it used to be. It used to be real good.”
The so-called rust belt states — in the north-east and midwest — are ripe for the picking. Trump does best in areas where the death rate among white people under 49 is highest — the downtrodden working class. Many of these people traditionally vote Democrat, but they have been voting for Bernie Sanders — Hillary Clinton’s Left-wing rival for the Democrat nomination — rather than Hillary herself. She lost the Michigan contest to Sanders, just as she lost Indiana to him this week.
Yes, Sanders is a socialist and Trump a billionaire plutocrat. But on trade — protection of American jobs — Sanders and Trump are on the same page.
Add a dash of Trump’s xenophobia and he’s in business.
Those who voted for Sanders because he speaks up for the little guy might well feel that Trump is closer to their hearts than Hillary.
So toxic is Donald Trump that even seeing his name reduces students to jellies. To Georgia, USA:
Emory University students say they are “in pain” and “afraid” after someone left pro-Donald Trump chalk messages on their Atlanta campus, according to the student newspaper. “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe” here,” The Emory Wheel quoted one unnamed student as saying. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well. … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”
The chalkings appeared overnight, saying “Trump 2016,” according to the newspaper. About 40 students held a protest demanding action from the administration, chanting “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!”
That Emory comedy club. What a hoot. It is a parody, right? Wrong:
“I legitimately feared for my life,” Paula Camila Alarcon, a freshman at Emory who identifies as Latino, told The Daily Beast. “I thought we were having a KKK rally on campus. It was deliberate intimidation. Some of us were expecting shootings. We feared walking alone,” freshman Jonathan Peraza added.
College president Jim Wagner met with the students, who expressed anxiety that the writings were threats to their safety rather than political speech, considering Georgia’s Republican primary was held earlier this month.
“The students shared with me their concern that these messages were meant to intimidate rather than merely to advocate for a particular candidate, having appeared outside of the context of a Georgia election or campus campaign activity,” Wagner wrote in a university-wide email Tuesday. “During our conversation, they voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.”
Jim Wagner might be beyond parody. How the hell did he get a job in education?
Nicholas Longtin: “I saw the Photoshop of Donald Trump with mouth eyes and I had to see what that would look like in full motions video. It’s horrifying. You have been warned.”
