“What we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughing stock.”
Trump seized the opportunity to fling more mud in the direction of the US system of laws.
President Trump said on Wednesday that he would consider sending the suspect arrested after the terrorist attack in New York to the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and called on Congress to cancel a longstanding immigration program that he blamed for allowing the man into the country.
Or hey, why not put the suspect on a ship and tell the crew to throw him overboard in the middle of the Pacific?
The president’s comments came at the beginning of a cabinet meeting a day after an immigrant from Uzbekistan plowed a pickup truck along a crowded bicycle path in Manhattan, killing eight people. Asked by reporters if he would send the suspect to Guantanamo, Mr. Trump said, “I would certainly consider that.”
“Send him to Gitmo, I would certainly consider that, yes,” Mr. Trump said.
No one arrested on American soil has ever been sent to Guantánamo Bay, and no one captured on foreign soil has been sent there since 2008. Transferring the suspect from New York would raise a host of constitutional and legal issues, and it was not clear that Mr. Trump actually would follow through on the idea since his comment was in reaction to a question rather than part of his prepared remarks.
But even in response to a new question he hasn’t heard before, a minimally decent president should know better than to say that. Instead what we have is a racist monstrosity whose brain is rotting.
The remarks he had outlined in advance focused on immigration. “I am today starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program,” he said. “I am going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program.”
“It sounds nice,” he added of the diversity program. “It’s not nice. It’s not good. It’s not good. We’ve been against it.”
See what happened there? He read two written sentences in normal adult English, and then paused to comment in his own voice, and talked like a four-year-0ld.
The president also promised to toughen sentences against terrorists but did not specify how. “We need quick justice and we need strong justice, much quicker and much stronger than we have right now,” he said. “Because what we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughing stock.”
Said the president of the United States about the US judicial system.
Trump lashes out at US federal justice system as "joke" and "laughing stock." pic.twitter.com/Aa5vJumWvd
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 1, 2017
It’s worth watching to get the full venom and stupidity in what he said.
At a news conference updating the public about the attack, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York chided Mr. Trump for his tweets, saying they “were not helpful,” were not “even accurate” and “tended to point fingers and politicize the situation.”
“You play into the hands of the terrorists to the extent that you disrupt and divide and frighten people in this society,” said Mr. Cuomo, who is a Democrat. “And the tone now should be the exact opposite by all officials on all levels. This is about unification, this is about solidarity.”
What a wimp, right? Oh wait.
Democrats on Wednesday noted that Mr. Trump was quick to assail his political opponents and immigration policies less than 24 hours after the New York attack, even though his own White House declared it unseemly to talk about gun control policies in the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Las Vegas, in which a heavily armed American citizen shot and killed 58 people and injured hundreds of others.
“This is an unspeakable tragedy. Today is a day for consoling of survivors and mourning those we lost,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said at the time, scolding those who called for more gun control. “There is a time and place for political debate, but now is a time to unite as a country.”
Well that was different.
To me, that’s not even the biggest problem. It’s that, despite his constant attacks on the press, and the animosity he actively inflames between them and himself, Fuckface von Clownstick is apparently too bloody stupid, obtuse, and unimaginative to consider the idea that some of them may be laying traps for him with their questions. And he’s just blindly blundering straight into them. It’s not even like those traps are particularly subtle.
Why do his supporters think that he’s in any way capable of negotiating good deals for anyone, even for himself, if he can’t pick up on red flags the size of the fucking moon when dealing with even slightly sophisticated adversaries?
Karellen, I suppose that last paragraph is a rhetorical question? If not, well, I know a number (a rather large number) of his supporters, and, well, they don’t think he’s failing to pick up on red flags. They do not think sophisticated adversaries are worthy of him, because he is “authentic”. He is “real”. Mostly, they think the rest of us are morons and evil lunatics who want to turn this country over to feminists, cross dressers, and rock-n-rollers to run (actually, that doesn’t sound terribly bad to me compared to what we have now…time to get our campaign slogans ready).