Although politically, it feels like this clown has been in there for a lot longer, it has not even been one full year since Trump took office.
During that time, thinking and caring Americans have had to cringe, time and time again. There have been endless expressions of his idiocy. Nazis and white supremacist groups proudly marched on American streets and expressed their hope for the Trump presidency, and Trump had a difficult time condemning their violence. He keeps trying different angles for his Muslim ban on immigration, and keeps trying to bully his way to making that damn wall, which he falsely promised he would make Mexico pay for. Trump pulled us out of the Paris Accord, tried to bring back dirty coal energy (he failed), he made polluting America's waters more easy for corporations, and recently, he tried to impose virtually unlimited drilling off American shores. Plus, he sent that stupid tweet about how cold the temperatures were in the northeast, and suggested that we could use that global warming, betraying his obvious ignorance of science. He threatened to wipe an entire nation off the map before the entire United Nations, praised the healthcare system of a non-existent African nation before a room full of African leaders, he managed to piss of the Pope, and within hours of meeting European leaders, many of those same leaders quickly made public statements that they no longer felt that the United States was a reliable partner. And he doubled down on trickle-down, as President Clinton once said, with a tax break that clearly caters to the wealthiest Americans and to corporations, at the expense of everyone else.
You would think with credentials like that, that things maybe could not get much bleaker.
But of you thought that, then this weekend, you would have been proven wrong.
Clearly, this is a presidency that has consistently provided some staggering lows for the country. Yet, we reached new lows this weekend.
It started mostly on Friday, with the world reacting to something that President Trump actually said on Thursday, when he questions why the United States kept getting immigrants from what he called "shithole countries" (his words, not mine) such as Haiti and African nations. Notice that they were predominately black nations. He followed that undignified and racist statement by allegedly wondering out loud why the United States cannot get more immigrants from a country like Norway.
There were members of both parties at the meeting, and predictably, members of the President's own party claimed not to remember him saying these words. They did not deny that he said them, and the White House also did not deny it. In a statement on Thursday to Jim Sciutto of CNN, a White House spokesman said:
“Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people.”
The spokesman went on to say that Trump wants immigrants who can “contribute to our society, grow our economy and assimilate into our great nation.”
In what is starting to become an all-too familiar scene, the entire world was quick to condemn Trump's statement. Almost everybody at once saw it for what it was: a blatantly racist statement. Even members of Trump's own Republican party seemed unwilling to defend the President's comments, with Paul Ryan weakly referring to it as "unhelpful." Almost everyone agrees that these comments fell very short of the dignity of the office that this imbecile now holds.
Vox has an article wtih Ana Minian, an assistant professor of history at Stanford University and author of the forthcoming book Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration, and they discussed these recent comments by Trump with her, and asked her what these comments meant from a larger, historical perspective (see link to Vox article below). She believes that are echoes of a racist American immigration policy from decades ago.
“Part of what it means to say ‘we don’t want people from these countries is moving back to that very racist law that existed.”
“Part of what it means to say ‘we don’t want people from these countries is moving back to that very racist law that existed.”
Racism and President Trump fit together like a hand and a glove, don't they? But he also seems addicted to embarrassing the country, time and time and time again.
In a more subtle fashion, he did that again yesterday, Saturday, albeit under very different circumstances, and for very different reasons.
By now, almost everyone must have heard about the false alarm in Hawaii. People received a message saying that a ballistic missile was on it's way, that this was not a drill, and for people to seek shelter immediately!
It was not a real threat, and apparently occurred because someone did the wrong thing on a computer - something that should make everybody nervous. If it is that easy for something like this to happen in 2017, how hard would it be for people to hack into a system like that and cause more widespread panic? Obviously, since it made news, you can bet that some high tech computer people will likely be trying exactly that in the near future.
But I digress...
This obviously made news yesterday, because some people were really panicking. Why not? After all, this was an official announcement, saying that this is not a drill! I heard that one woman who felt sure that she was going to die sent her goodbye and I love you message to her daughter.
Obviously, this was a big deal. Where was President Trump?
On the golf course in Florida. And he stayed on the golf course and finished his game, even after learning about this!
This was close to being a real crisis, and certainly, it must have looked and felt that way to panic-stricken Hawaiians! But Trump did not let this bother him enough to drag his sorry, fat ass off the golf course. One can translate that into possibly suggesting that he does not seem to care too much when crises occur in places like Puerto Rico or Hawaii. In other words, places where there are a lot of non-whites, and where there are even fewer Republicans.
Maybe by the time that President Trump learned about it, it had already been determined that it was just a mistake, and not an actual attack on the United States. Still, when you learn that there is a mistake like this, and that people think that there is a real crisis going on, you might think that an elected President would feel it imperative to try and calm the people down, and if he knew that it was a false alarm, to then basically relay that message to Hawaiians, and let them know what is going on.
But he could not be bothered. He had a golf game to finish in sunny Florida. The message that Hawaiians received was at 1:09 p.m., yet the President did not leave the golf course until basically half an hour later!
He did not address this issue, even with one of his infamous tweets, the rest of the day! He did, however, tweet later in the day, once again ranting about Fake News and other such nonsense.
That seems telling to me about just how unfit this man is to hold the highest office in the land. Colonel Morris Davis put out a tweet of his own, which I think perfectly encapsulates what happened, and what the President's response - or rather, the complete lack thereof - essentially meant in a very real way:
Col. Morris Davis ✔ @ColMorrisDavis For 38 minutes American citizens in Hawaii braced for a ballistic missile strike ... and @realDonaldTrump continued his round of golf in Florida on his 120th taxpayer funded vacation day in less than a year.
https://twitter.com/foxnews/status/952257435191992320 … 2:19 PM - Jan 13, 2018 · Gainesville, VA
I'm tired of this President, and the horrific news stories and headlines that keep relentlessly gushing forth from the White House while Trump is in charge. This man is, always has been, and always will be a national disgrace, and as if he had not done a convincing enough job of it already, he seems to make a point of showing just how unfit he is on a daily basis.
After a almost a full year of regularly hitting all kinds of new lows, he somehow managed to reach even new low bars this weekend, on the eve of the day - January 20th - that will mark that he has officially been on the job for one full year.
Trump keeps whining about Fake News being unfair to him. But this man has been handed almost everything in life, and all he does is complain, whine. Frankly, many people - myself included - had a hard time viewing him as a serious candidate for the White House, and he truly feels like he lacks legitimacy as the President now. If anything, this weekend will go far to make the case even stronger that he has no serious or positive leadership skills for a country in desperate need of a real leader to at least begin to unite the country, and address the growing number of problems undermining it's greatness.
In a more subtle fashion, he did that again yesterday, Saturday, albeit under very different circumstances, and for very different reasons.
By now, almost everyone must have heard about the false alarm in Hawaii. People received a message saying that a ballistic missile was on it's way, that this was not a drill, and for people to seek shelter immediately!
It was not a real threat, and apparently occurred because someone did the wrong thing on a computer - something that should make everybody nervous. If it is that easy for something like this to happen in 2017, how hard would it be for people to hack into a system like that and cause more widespread panic? Obviously, since it made news, you can bet that some high tech computer people will likely be trying exactly that in the near future.
But I digress...
This obviously made news yesterday, because some people were really panicking. Why not? After all, this was an official announcement, saying that this is not a drill! I heard that one woman who felt sure that she was going to die sent her goodbye and I love you message to her daughter.
Obviously, this was a big deal. Where was President Trump?
On the golf course in Florida. And he stayed on the golf course and finished his game, even after learning about this!
This was close to being a real crisis, and certainly, it must have looked and felt that way to panic-stricken Hawaiians! But Trump did not let this bother him enough to drag his sorry, fat ass off the golf course. One can translate that into possibly suggesting that he does not seem to care too much when crises occur in places like Puerto Rico or Hawaii. In other words, places where there are a lot of non-whites, and where there are even fewer Republicans.
Maybe by the time that President Trump learned about it, it had already been determined that it was just a mistake, and not an actual attack on the United States. Still, when you learn that there is a mistake like this, and that people think that there is a real crisis going on, you might think that an elected President would feel it imperative to try and calm the people down, and if he knew that it was a false alarm, to then basically relay that message to Hawaiians, and let them know what is going on.
But he could not be bothered. He had a golf game to finish in sunny Florida. The message that Hawaiians received was at 1:09 p.m., yet the President did not leave the golf course until basically half an hour later!
He did not address this issue, even with one of his infamous tweets, the rest of the day! He did, however, tweet later in the day, once again ranting about Fake News and other such nonsense.
That seems telling to me about just how unfit this man is to hold the highest office in the land. Colonel Morris Davis put out a tweet of his own, which I think perfectly encapsulates what happened, and what the President's response - or rather, the complete lack thereof - essentially meant in a very real way:
Col. Morris Davis ✔ @ColMorrisDavis For 38 minutes American citizens in Hawaii braced for a ballistic missile strike ... and @realDonaldTrump continued his round of golf in Florida on his 120th taxpayer funded vacation day in less than a year.
https://twitter.com/foxnews/status/952257435191992320 … 2:19 PM - Jan 13, 2018 · Gainesville, VA
I'm tired of this President, and the horrific news stories and headlines that keep relentlessly gushing forth from the White House while Trump is in charge. This man is, always has been, and always will be a national disgrace, and as if he had not done a convincing enough job of it already, he seems to make a point of showing just how unfit he is on a daily basis.
After a almost a full year of regularly hitting all kinds of new lows, he somehow managed to reach even new low bars this weekend, on the eve of the day - January 20th - that will mark that he has officially been on the job for one full year.
Trump keeps whining about Fake News being unfair to him. But this man has been handed almost everything in life, and all he does is complain, whine. Frankly, many people - myself included - had a hard time viewing him as a serious candidate for the White House, and he truly feels like he lacks legitimacy as the President now. If anything, this weekend will go far to make the case even stronger that he has no serious or positive leadership skills for a country in desperate need of a real leader to at least begin to unite the country, and address the growing number of problems undermining it's greatness.
What a Fake President!
These are links to the articles that I used in writing this piece:
“What he said was basically a form of eugenics”: a professor on Trump’s “shithole countries” remarks by Jen Kirbyjen, Jan 12, 2018:
Donald Trump Stayed On The Golf Course As Hawaii Panicked by Mary Papenfuss, 01/13/2018:
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