A president out of control
Stephen Collinson at CNN doesn’t mince words.
A combative and unrestrained President Donald Trump opened his authentic political soul, in possibly the most memorable news conference in presidential history, that is certain to become a defining moment of his administration.
It was supposed to be a routine event at Trump Tower in New York to tout the President’s infrastructure plan.
But the session quickly veered off course into one of the most surreal political moments in years as Trump unloaded about the fallout from the weekend’s protests by “alt-right” activists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Virginia.
Gesticulating with this right hand, Trump blasted what he called the “alt-left,” protested that he had already condemned neo-Nazis and parroted far-right talking points on the Confederacy.
He did do a lot of gesticulating with that right hand. It went up and down, up and down, like a mechanical toy.
On the substance, it was a performance that quickly emboldened white nationalist groups and appeared certain to heighten racial tensions and fear in the country.
There’s no chance that Trump’s political team can finesse this one, or walk it back.
But the tone and the spectacle of Trump’s unchained performance was equally stunning.
The unapologetic, stream-of-consciousness style of delivery left no doubt at all: This was the real Trump, not the scripted version who appeared in the White House on Monday and tried to clean up his initial failure to condemn white supremacists after the death of a counter-protester in Charlottesville.
His anger emerged in a torrent, as he obliterated any benefit of the doubt he earned on Monday, thought piling on thought, in a style the nation has become accustomed to from his Twitter feed.
Not exactly thought piling on thought. Those weren’t really thoughts. Stunted half-formed bits of thoughts.
In the most incredible moment, as he stood at a podium bearing the seal of the President of the United States, Trump tore at the nation’s racial fault lines by appearing to offer a pass to a racist and neo-Nazi movement.
“I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump said, returning to his original position about the protest in Charlottesville, saying that an extreme right demonstration in which marchers held torches and Swastikas and chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans contained some “bad people …. but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Trump accused counter-demonstrators of being as violent as the white supremacists.
“What about the fact they came charging — that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do,” he said.
“I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump said.
The President’s fury was first sparked when he was challenged by reporters on his handling of Charlottesville, evidence of how Trump’s extreme sensitivity to personal slights sometimes leads him into politically self-destructive behavior.
It was a display that will renew questions about the suitability of Trump’s temperament for the presidency, and at a time of increasing tensions around the world that will exacerbate fears he will be unable to control his emotions at a time of crisis as commander-in-chief.
Yes. He was indeed in a towering temper, and he made it crystal clear how unpleasant and frightening he can be.
The rant about taking down the statues of Confederate traitors is right out of the white supremacist Big Book of Grievances.
“You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
It did not take long for key figures in the extreme right movement to take comfort in Trump’s remarks, after the news conference appeared to nudge the President closer to an isolated spot on the far right of US politics.
“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa, wrote David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, on Twitter.
That’s where we are.
The overall impression of Trump’s performance was of a president out of control, who is captive to his whims and instincts and defies any attempt to manage him — including by his new Chief of Staff John Kelly.
“That was all him — this wasn’t our plan,” a senior White House official told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny.
One person who has spent time with Trump over the past 24 hours describes the President as “distracted” and “irritable” in his interactions with top aides. Trump felt pressured into the Monday statement by staff members, the person said. As he went about his day Tuesday, Trump was upset and repeatedly returned to the topic, the person said, culminating in the lobby press conference.
CNN senior political analyst David Axelrod compared Trump to a “runaway truck, there are no brakes, there is no reverse.”
Axelrod also questioned why Kelly and other Trump aides even allowed the President to appear before reporters on Tuesday, given their presumed knowledge of the state of his mood over the Charlottesville coverage.
But ultimately, Tuesday’s stunning appearance will be remembered for the sentiments that passed the lips of a President of the United States.
In the long and tortured history of a nation still trying to work through its complicated story on race, Trump’s meltdown will stand out, as a moment ripped from the darkest pages of history and transposed into the 21st Century.
In the process, he appears to have abdicated any claim to the traditional presidential role as a moral voice for the nation and the world.
That’s where we are.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1633004713384650/?type=3&theater¬if_t=notify_me_page¬if_id=1502865761158734
Time to start declaring him unfit, yes? I believe it’s in Article 25 of the US Constitution?
This is just unbelievable. The bottom has dropped out of political discourse.
Not only all that. Thirty years ago, a consortium involving Trump reportedly had a Sydney casino licence bid rejected on NSW Police advice on the grounds of Trump’s reported “Mafia connections.” As revealed in a report in the Murdoch press.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/trumps-bid-for-sydney-casino-30-years-ago-rejected-due-to-mafia-connections
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1633071883377933/?type=3&theater
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1633089056709549/?type=3&theater
I think a good term for what passes as thoughts in Trump’s mind would be “thots” – the smallest possible unit of cognition.
Every time I think he’s hit rock bottom, he manages to tunnel deeper. I’d got him down as purely out for himself – oh, I never thought he liked folks different to him, but I really thought when it came to a principle and his own self-aggrandizement, self would win every time. Now, I’m beginning to wonder, Does he not realise how he’s harming himself by refusing to take a side, even a watery, weak milksop side? Maybe not. Or is it that he really is all that Stormfront and their cronies want and believe?
In the past I saw him as vulnerable to being manipulated as a figurehead by the neo-nazi brigade. Now I’m wondering if he really is a Hitler, who actually wants the things that they want, who actually tries to inspire and lead them.
Al-jazeera English have dug up this video. It’s an American propaganda video made in 1943 warning of the dangers of fascism. 1943. Update the fashions and it could have been made yesterday.
https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera/videos/10155897809698690/?hc_ref=ARTBdBSDgQ1lsr2iwPBDNAKEbUgpwXyOm-wfphfU_zQrQlFnTINvDOIgMRmJ4AZewC8&pnref=story
An interesting Guardian article by Harry Leslie Smith, who points out he’s 94 and has actually seen all this before.
On Trump and the US’s “checks and balances”:
It’s well worth a read.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/14/1939-second-world-war-fascist-thundering-approach-hitler
That 17 minute film has been tagged as being from 1947. Hard to imagine the war dept. including anti-Black racism as early as ’43.
Also, very strange that it presents the Nazis as anti-Catholic, a convenient falsehood since so much of the American fascist movement was virulently anti-Catholic.
JD@#10:
How could Hitler be anti-Catholic? He was a Catholic by birth, and to this day never excommunicated or otherwise ceremonially drummed out.
Given the ease with which Catholic prelates have sidled up to fascist governments (Spain, Portugal, Latin America…) what could it matter to Holy Mother Church if Hitler was into it big time?
Omar, it’s even worse than the don’t-ask-don’t-tell relationship that your post implies. The Reichskonkordat was the first treaty the Nazis ever signed with anyone, and it’s still in force between the Vatican and Germany to this very day; the Catholic Church were, and remain, Nazi collaborators and profiteers.
Steamshovelmama,
My guess is that there are three factors at work behind Trump’s support for white supremacists:
1. Trump has a simple philosophy of never saying bad things about anyone who says nice things about him. White supremacists like him, so he doesn’t want to denounce them.
2. Trump has a child-like refusal to do what he’s told. The more people tell him he HAS to denounce these people, the more he wants to stamp his feet and show everyone that YOU CAN’T TELL TRUMP WHAT TO DO!
3. He’s a racist.
If I had to guess, I’d say that they go in that order. I don’t think Trump is obsessed with race in the way that Hitler was. I don’t think he spends a lot of time thinking about race. Of course, I don’t imagine he spends a lot of time thinking about anything. But I do think he’s a racist himself. There’s the influence of his father, his participation in his father’s discriminatory housing practices, his birtherism, and the way his rage seems to go up a notch when the target isn’t white. And he really likes to mention in speeches about how he has “good genes.” His uncle was an MIT scientist, donchaknow — really smart guy — therefore Donnie is smart, too!
Hm, I think the racism goes at 1 rather than 3. I think he’s pretty obsessive about it. Remember, he took out a full-page ad in the Times to demand the death penalty for the Central Park 5 – that doesn’t come cheap. And he was relentless with the birther shit.
While you definitely have to be a racist to push the birther stuff, I always figured that was still mostly fueled by the adulation he got for it, so I’m not sure how much that tells us. But the Central Park 5 thing is a really good point. He did that at a time when he was still trying to portray himself as a sophisticated New York centrist/social liberal, so it was kind of “off-brand.” Perhaps you’re right. At a minimum, there isn’t as much distance between my 1 and 3 as I thought.
@John#10
I’m not sure about that. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and “negroes” were needed for soldiers and war work so if US fascists were decrying them, it would make sense to include them in the whole stance. Remember this film is not specifically anti-Nazi in the German sense, but anti-home-grown-American-Fascism. Fascism was a huge movement from the 30s onward but it adapted itself to individual cultures and countries. US fascism was far more vocal about black people because there were proportionally a lot more in the US. European fascism didn’t like Black people but talked far more about Jewish people because they were a much bigger population that, historically, Europe had dealt with more often.
But, hey, 1943, 1947, the point still stands.
@Screechy Monkey #15
Yes, the, “don’t say bad things about people who say nice things about you,” may well be coming into play. I hadn’t thought of that aspect of it.
Your interpretation is pretty much what mine has been. Yes, he’s racist. But in that lazy, everyday, unthinking way (well, it’s Trump. He’s not going to have a thought out stance on it) that so many white people have. It takes commitment to be a neo Nazi. Although that doesn’t help much in the being-manipulated stakes. A few of the neo Nazi leaders are considerably brighter than their knuckle dragging foot soldiers (and that’s an insult to decent knuckle draggers everywhere).