“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
-Orwell, 1984
Normally, I feel like people are way too liberal in calling things “Orwellian”, because I’ve seen people claim everything from speed limits to environmental laws to privately owned security cameras in stores as being “Orwellian”, but Trump, in this instance, is utterly Orwellian.
I think it’s the states that need to vote in new states, same as with a constitutional amendment. But with 23 governorships we’re off to a good start there.
Kavanaugh absolutely needs to be impeached. Trump will be gone in 2 years anyway, no need to bother with him, it’s too much time and trouble and won’t go anywhere in the timeframe. But we absolutely cannot have Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court for the next 25 years. That lying, self-aggrandising, misogynistic motherfucker has to go, and he has to be utterly disgraced and to go down in history as the scumbag he is.
I’ll bet you heard that Chief Justice Roberts is having the 10th Court of Appeals review Kavanaugh for ethics violations, right?
There’s no power in it – I’m not sure what Roberts’ endgame is, but I can’t imagine that a decent judge, even a conservative one who I disagree with all the time, wants that lying blowhard as one of his teammates. Maybe he wants to turn up evidence that a Democratic Congress could use to impeach the mofo.
I think Trump should be impeached anyway. It won’t go anywhere because we didn’t get the Senate, but it’s the symbolism of the thing. Make the Repubs go on record voting against impeachment for crimes ranging from tax evasion to treason, when they were all in favor of impeaching Bill Clinton over lying about a blow job. Tie Trump like a millstone around their necks and let him sink their re-election bids. We should save our powder against Kavanaugh for after we’ve got the Senate and we can actually successfully take him out. A symbolic impeachment won’t help us against that asshole; we need him gone.
It’s not your imagination: President Trump, who regularly makes a point of personally insulting public figures who challenge or displease him in any way, taps into an especially toxic well of vitriol when aiming his attacks at black Americans.
This week alone, Trump berated CNN correspondent Abby Phillip (“What a stupid question. But I watch you a lot. You ask a lot of stupid questions.”) He said of April Ryan, a reporter and CNN contributor who has covered the White House for 21 years: “You talk about somebody that’s a loser. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.“And at a post-election press conference, when Yamiche Alcindor of “PBS NewsHour” began to ask about accusations that his rhetoric may have emboldened violent white nationalist groups, Trump interrupted with, “I don’t know why you say that. That is such a racist question.”
The three women – all of them gifted, accomplished professionals – will be covering politics long after Trump has left the White House. They join a long list of athletes, entertainers, journalists and politicians who Trump routinely attacks as “dumb,” “not qualified” or some such insult.
None of this is subtle or secret; that would defeat the purpose. For Trump, loudly and publicly denigrating black figures is the whole point.
He is a classic example of a backlash politician: a leader who exploits real or perceived white anxieties by exhibiting a flamboyant hostility to the political and economic demands of black Americans. We’ve had a string of such politicians since the civil rights movement, and that is neither surprising nor coincidental: Like many social revolutions, America’s expansion of civil rights in the 1960s and ‘70s gave rise to a potent counterrevolution.
As columnist Bob Herbert later noted: “Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew. He was tapping out the code.”
…Trump has never renounced, or even acknowledged, the obvious racism of his birther falsehoods, and he never will. Birtherism – like talking about state’s rights in Mississippi – was a quick, convenient way to attract people ready to push back against black advancement.
“There was a shocking amount of resentment that a black family had been in the White House for two terms. I think it would be naive to overlook it — the irony that one of the legacies of Obama’s presidency was an enormous amount of resentment,” Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates said after the 2016 election. “I don’t think a Donald Trump could have emerged without a black president. Donald Trump tapped into and fueled and stoked an enormous amount of racial resentment. And Obama symbolized it.”
With Obama no longer in the public spotlight, Trump has to play backlash politics with whatever black targets of opportunity happen to be around. That is why he never misses a chance to attack Rep. Maxine Waters, Don Lemon of CNN or the black reporters in the White House press corps.
It’s a disgusting and dangerous business: April Ryan has been subjected to death threats in the wake of Trump’s verbal attacks. One can only hope the fever breaks soon, with the public signaling to political leaders that dividing and denigrating people is no way to lead a great nation.
Variously Backup 