Crowd size matters, therefore, let’s declare a trade war
Today is Friday, Jan. 27, 2017. It has been 80 days since America elected Donald J. Trump. He has been president for seven days. There are 1,376 days until the 2020 election.
№1: His inauguration speech was the darkest in American history.
By their very nature, first inaugurals are hard. In one speech, you’re supposed to outline your agenda, define how your administration will differ from the last one, and attempt to unite the country behind what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
The problem is, the defining issue of our time isn’t a particular issue. It’s not the economy or taxes or healthcare or war. It’s the toxic nature of our politics, and the orange man at the center of them.
Most of the 16-minute address was a prototypical Trump campaign speech about all the ways the nation is failing, offering few details about how he’s going to change it. Trump devoted three sentences to uniting us:
It’s time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget, that whether we are black, or brown, or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots. We all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American flag. And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty creator.
That’s a nice message.
But it’ll be forgotten, because the speech was designed to get “America first” and “American carnage” into as many headlines as possible.
The former is a direct reference to the anti-Semitic, isolationist motto used by American Nazis to oppose U.S. entry into World War II. The latter is a horrifying maxim fit for a gory Starz crime drama, not a presidential address.
№2: His press secretary, under Trump’s direction, used his first briefing to lambaste the press over the size of Trump’s crowds and a Tweet from a single “Time” magazine reporter
If you haven’t watched it yet, I encourage you to do so.
The rant was filled with lies, exaggerations, and accomplished only two things: pissing people off and ingratiating the president‘s boundless ego.
Sean Spicer is the man responsible for defending the president’s decisions to the press, the American people and the rest of the world. An antagonistic relationship between Spicer and the press is bound to fail.
Senior adviser Steve Bannon continued the relentless assault on the media later in the week:
“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday.
“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
Good luck with that.
Subscribe to your local newspaper.
№3: “Alternative facts.”
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command… and if all others accepted the lie, which the Party imposed, if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.
— George Orwell, ‘1984'
Side note: Chuck Todd and other TV personalities need to stop using the noun “falsehood” and start using the noun “lie.” It’s more accurate and you’ll save a syllable's worth of airtime.
№4: In a meeting with Congressional leadership, Trump again insisted he would have won the popular vote if millions of people hadn’t voted illegally, despite a total lack of evidence.
Later on, in a press briefing, Spicer confirmed that the president believes this to be the case, citing vague reports.
Trump’s ego cannot withstand the notion that more people voted for someone else, so he’s launching a federal investigation into the egregious voter fraud problem he’s decided our country has.
More people voted for the Methodist grandmother from Park Ridge. But the Park Avenue billionaire won. So be it. Trump should be proud and move on. The fact that he won’t points to a serious psychological problem.
His “evidence” of voter fraud is frighteningly racist and anecdotal, as described to the New York Times (emphasis mine):
Mr. Trump said he was told a story by “the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,” whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.
…
The three witnesses recalled Mr. Langer being the protagonist of the story, although a White House official claimed the president had been telling a story relayed to the golfer by one of Mr. Langer’s friends.
The witnesses described the story this way: Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.
Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.
Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, according to a version of events later contradicted by a White House official.
The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.
I call it Trump Logic.
My German friend couldn’t vote for me illegally, but some brown people near him were allowed to cast ‘provisional’ ballots.
∴ Millions of people voted against me illegally.
In fact, that’s a fine name for this blog: Trump Logic. Consider it so christened.
№5: He again threatened Chicago with “the Feds!” if the city doesn’t fix its crime problem.
There’s a weird talking point that bounces around the Internet that Chicago should “send in the national guard!” to fix the city’s gun violence problem. Trump seems to have globed onto this, attacking Chicago whenever he sees a report about the city’s gun violence on cable news.
There are things the federal government can do to help, as the city’s police chief pointed out in an interview Wednesday with the Chicago Tribune.
Johnson said he does not oppose increased assistance from the federal government — whether that would mean more agents from the FBI and ATF or more help geared toward youth living in Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods.
“We would use (federal funding for) mentorship programs, after-school programs,” he said. “Those are the things I think we can use.”
But Trump’s Tweet reads like a threat toward the nation’s third largest city, a place where only 12 percent of the population voted for him. And where protesters forced Trump to cancel a rally the last time he showed up.
It’s clear this isn’t meant as an olive branch.
№6: Half a dozen senior deputies at the State Department have resigned because they don’t want to work for Trump, leaving Rex Tillerson nobody to help him run the agency.
“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”
We’re going to lose a whole generation of people who believe in public service because we elected a man who doesn’t.
№7: He watches too much television, and doesn’t read books.
From a New York Times interview with the president:
His mornings, he said, are spent as they were in Trump Tower. He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel first in the residence, and later in a small dining room in the West Wing, and looks through the morning newspapers: The New York Times, The New York Post and now The Washington Post.
But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.
If you look at the times of his more inane Tweets this week, this pattern of early morning and late night TV makes sense.
He Tweets out an insane overreaction to what he’s seeing on cable news, and cable news then immediately start talking about his Twitter response to their reports. It’s a remarkable feedback loop that seems to accomplish nothing.
Regardless, I think we should all be happy to learn that the president can still find the time in his busy schedule to catch hour three of “Morning Joe.”
№8: Trump’s senior aides were using private email addresses until ‘Newsweek’ called them on it.
Not that I think anybody should care about what email address Kellyanne Conway uses to spout lies, but the Trump administration cast the first stone in this fight when they threatened to lock Hillary Clinton up for a similar oversight. So it’s worth mentioning that they’re not too concerned about holding themselves to the same standards.
№9: His use of Twitter caused the leader of a geopolitical and economic ally to abruptly cancel an introductory meeting.
Hours later, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto followed Trump’s advice, and abruptly canceled the meeting.
Let’s be clear: there is basically no circumstance in which Mexico will pay for the wall.
But they’re definitely not going to pay for the wall if the American president is a jerk to them about it.
They have politics south of the border too, and the Mexican president isn’t going to bow down to the almighty comb-over while Mexican children are bashing Trump piñatas to bits.
At a press briefing Thursday, Spicer said Trump would pay for the wall by instituting a 20 percent tax on Mexican goods, and remarkably, Republicans in Congress seem open to the idea.
It didn’t even take a week for the president to declare a trade war.
№10: He intends to publish a weekly list of all the crimes committed by illegal immigrants.
From the Executive Order itself:
To better inform the public regarding the public safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions, the Secretary shall utilize the Declined Detainer Outcome Report or its equivalent and, on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens.”
It’s worth pointing out that this is oddly reminiscent of a Brietbart.com section dedicated to “black crime,” launched and later discontinued during Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s reign as the website’s editor.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Nazis regularly published lists and photos of Jewish “criminals” in a state-run periodical called “The Criminal Alien.”
Just kidding, that’s Trump’s term. Goebbels called his “The Criminal Jew.”
I’ll say it again: Fascists are great at naming things.
Throwback Trump Tweet of the Week
Right back at you, Mr. President.
What did I miss? Tweet @bargnes.
