His connection with the largely white Republican base
Today in Trump – it’s saying Obama founded IS.
“In many respects, you know, they honor President Obama,” Trump said Wednesday during a raucous campaign rally outside Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “He is the founder of ISIS.”
He then repeated the allegation three more times for emphasis.
Asked in an interview with CNBC on Thursday morning whether it was appropriate for him to call the sitting president of the United States the founder of a terrorist organization that kills Americans, Trump doubled down.
As Trump always does.
“He was the founder of ISIS, absolutely,” said Trump. “Is there something wrong with saying that? Why? Are people complaining that I said he was the founder of ISIS?”
Yes, Trump, there is something wrong with that: it’s not true. That’s why.
Trump has long blamed Obama and his former secretary of state — Hillary Clinton — for pursuing Mideast policies that created a power vacuum in Iraq that was exploited by IS. But in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, that message appeared muddled. Hewitt said that as he understood Trump’s comments to mean Obama created unstable conditions by withdrawing U.S. forces that allowed IS to thrive. Trump responded, “No, I mean he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player,” according to interview transcripts.
He was invited to walk it back and he said no, I really meant that ridiculous claim.
Trump lobbed the allegation midway through his rally at a sports arena, where riled-up supporters shouted obscenities about Clinton and joined in unison to shout “lock her up.”
Let me guess – they called her a cunt?
Trump of course is also a birther. I look back wistfully on a time when nobody dreamed he would grab for the presidency, but he was annoying us all by pushing that racist xenophobic dishonest ugly bullshit about Obama’s sekrit Kenyan passport.
Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.
But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.
That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.
“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”
The lying thieving cheating scum.
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.
In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.
And here he still is. It makes me sick.
Weirdly, the pseudo-left just loves to blame the Taliban and Al Qaeda on anyone and anything except its actual leadership. Though Russia always seems to get a pass.
By this logic, Abraham Lincoln is responsible for the Ku Klux Klan. After all he aggressively imposed his neo-liberal regime change on a ‘Sovereign Nation’ with its own Deeply Held Traditional Beliefs…
And there are still Far-Right fringies who’ll declare that ‘Pearl Harbor was an inside job!’
He so clearly thinks this is a strong point for him. He built up to and then repeated it several times in his rally; I don’t think this was just one of his ad libs. I think he truly figures that, since the media is going to seize on the most outrageous thing he says during every speech, he’d better make that most outrageous thing something negative about Hillary (and/or Obama), so that when the media spends the next 24 hours discussing it, they’re repeating his smear.
It’s like that old story of a politician telling an aide to plant a rumor about his opponent being a goat-fucker; “I just want to make the bastard have to deny it.”
To be clear, I don’t think this is a winning strategy for Trump. It’s a Slightly Stupid Strategy, which is an upgrade from what he’s been doing, but still not actually into the realm of Smart.
I sure am tired of this current iteration of “stranger than fiction”. Donald Trump is the punchline of a joke that stopped being funny a long time ago. Trump’s tone, inarticulateness and bullying alone are disqualifications enough. Continual fabrication of inflammatory bullshit just makes it that much worse. There appears to be no limit to his over-the-topness/under-the-bottomness. It’s like he’s created a new Overton Window with regards to lying. Except it works in reverse. Utter batshit-crazy, insane falsehood makes plain ordinary lying tame and acceptable by comparison. The degree of untruthfulness imputed to Hillary Clinton by Trump and his supporters is next to nothing compared to the fantastical falsehoods issuing non-stop from the orange clown. So plain ordinary lying should be more acceptable because of the tectonic shift in the “truthiness” window which The Donald has brought about, yet it’s Clinton who’s unfit for office. Go figure.
@#2
It ‘s in the realm of Smart for him to the extent that this might get the media to stop talking about his suggestions of assassinating Clinton. I can hardly believe I just wrote that sentence. There is just no pale beyond which he can go beyond.
I’m not even tired of it, I’m sickened / disgusted / terrified by it.
I apologize (sort of) for documenting it so frequently, but now that he’s a real and present danger…I feel as if it would be immoral to ignore him.
#5, Ophelia: It would be much worse to say nothing now and later regret the outcome. As disgusting as this whole freakshow is — and it beats anything before, possibly excluding Pol Pot but not by much — This One needs to be exposed as the naked kloun he is. We can only hope it will suffice. Before Catastrophe strikes again (Rwanda? Turkey? Beer Hall? Long list.)
#1, John: Sorry, you have lost me completely there. Perhaps our respective degrees of inebriation are incompatible. What the heck do you even mean?
#6
A pretty simple allusion, I’d have thought.
Blame the existence of a threat on those who noticed it before you? (e.g. all those anti-Nazi ‘warmongers’ of the 1930s)
See hostile movements and organizations through a self-centered filter that denies the possibility of their actually having motives and intentions that aren’t about us.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1247227035295755/?type=3&theater