A bit much even for Trump
Perfectly normal, not a problem, move along, don’t stand there gaping. Trump meets with off the charts lunatic right-wing activist who is married to a Supreme Court justice.
President Trump met last week with a delegation of hard-right activists led by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, listening quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military, according to three people with direct knowledge of the events.
For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration.
It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government.
Inappropriate, yes, but since Trump has put his entire family in charge of foreign policy, the economy, war, peace, the environment, education, and fashion, a mere meeting with Clarence Thomas’s spouse is a mere blip in comparison.
During the meeting last Thursday in the Roosevelt Room, which was attended by about a half-dozen White House aides, one woman argued that women should not serve in the military because they had less muscle mass and lung capacity than men did, according to those familiar with the events. At another point, someone said that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court determined in 2015 was the law of the land, was harming the fabric of the United States. And another attendee was dismissive that sexual assault is pervasive in the military.
It’s kind of touching that there are people who think Trump ought to be even more spitefully right-wing than he already is. What else can he do? Poison school lunches? Drop vials of flu virus from planes? Bomb the Grand Canyon?
The meeting was arranged after months of delay, according to the three people. It came about after the Thomases had dinner with the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, the people said.
Aw, they have a social life.
Ms. Thomas — whose group, Groundswell, was formed in 2013 to strategize against Democrats and the political left and meets weekly — joined others in prayer at the start of the meeting. Some members of the group prayed at different moments as the meeting continued. At one point, Mr. Trump pulled in his daughter Ivanka, a West Wing adviser, saying she would be beloved if she were serving a liberal president, instead of getting negative news coverage.
No, she really wouldn’t. Why? Because she’s a zero. She wouldn’t be as despised as she is now if she were not leeching off Daddy’s job and if she weren’t making corrupt use of that job, but she would still be dismissed, because she’s a zero. But then she wouldn’t have the job she has without the daddy-connection, because she is such a zero. What could her job be? Modeling? Selling shoes? Modeling and selling shoes at the same time? So, no, Trump is idiotically wrong as always, because there is absolutely no reason whatever that Ivanka Trump would have a significant job working for “a liberal president,” and if she did have such a job she would be far from beloved. Her best hope would be to be overlooked.
Ms. Thomas, who was said to have opened the meeting by informing the assembled White House staff members that she feared being open because she did not trust the people there, has long been more conservative than her husband, and has often provoked controversy.
In 2011 she formed a government affairs firm called Liberty Consulting, which drew criticism for boasting on its website that Ms. Thomas would use her “experience and connections” to help clients.
“What, you mean this Supreme Court justice over here? I’m not supposed to mention him at all? You liberals, so obsessed with not being corrupt and sleazy. Communists!”
More recently, she hired as an assistant a woman fired by the conservative group Turning Point USA for texting a colleague a year earlier that “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.” The woman, Crystal Clanton, was on the list of people Ms. Thomas’s group asked to have attend the meeting, the people familiar with the sit-down said.
She sounds nice.
She has long been more conservative than Clarence Thomas.
No mean feat!
The next time your phone rings, O.B., don’t be surprised if it’s Trump offering you a policy advisor role.
Does it really require more muscle mass and lung capacity to fly a jet, or drive a tank, or helm a submarine, or launch an ICBM, or any of the tens of thousands of military jobs not involving sheer brute strength?
YNNB, don’t you know all military people are lugging submachine guns through tropical jungles every minute of the day? That’s what they do in movies, right? No, even in movies some of them sit at radios or do hospital stuff or push buttons.
And there are a lot of women who could lug submachine guns through jungles…and a lot of men who can’t. (I used to lug a machete through a Texas forest, sometimes with a large GPS receiver on my back. Does that count?)
Acolyte,
The situation in the Situation Room could get so desperate, it could rapidly come to that. Maybe Trump will keep on sacking staff and advisors until all he has left is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, until she realises in turn she has a more important calling elsewhere.
Trump could do a helluva lot worse than make OB an offer, just to dig him back out of the mess he’s dug himself into.. We can only wait and see.
But in turn it raises a number of interesting further questions.
I remember one of the things the author of this book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spitting_Image
mentions is that part of the reason the ‘spitting on soldiers’ meme started was that the vast majority of men serving in the American armed forces had jobs that had nothing to do with combat (so felt the need to build up the personal challenges and traumas they faced). Most of the men coming back from Vietnam had spent their deployments doing things like (I remember this particular example) checking out surfboards from the leisure equipment storeroom. Not exactly the kind of work that demands muscle mass and lung capacity, even in an actual war zone.
Like I said, where the hell is that fiery asteroid?
My dad did his national service in the British Air Force. He was basically a chauffeur, driving brass between elaborately decadent parties in what is now Singapore. He faced exactly one situation in which he had to hold a gun outside training and that’s when the locals objected to the excesses in the Air Force compound and stood around outside the fence saying so, fairly politely. He had to walk up and down with a machine gun, looking scary until they went away.
I doubt his superior muscles and lung capacity helped him but perhaps he was selected for that job because of his male Rolls-Royce-driving-and-having-nightly-to-prevent-officers-from-raping-the-locals brain.
My father was in the Navy and went to Korea. He mostly stayed on board ship patrolling around the eastern Asian coastline. The stories he tells from his time in service are mostly of frequenting restaurants that gave discounts to men in uniform, and going to bars.
I don’t doubt there are plenty of women who could snap me in two like a matchstick. I’d be crap at lugging a submachine gun through jungles. Quite apart from “lugging” and the whole not-terribly-athletic-or-strong thing I’ve got going, I’d be stopping every other step to take macro photos of insects and spiders.
What, no plants? I do plenty of insects and spiders, but more plants than anything else. I can’t go a foot through a forest without stopping for a picture of something.
I’m more a bug person than a plant person (though I will take shots of plants I find particularly Interesting or Picturesque. The threshold for I or P in bugs is much lower, though.) I’d be on the lookout for birds, too, but I’m much better at getting good. frame-filling photos of bugs than birds. I know my limits…
YNnB, self knowledge is important. Pity more people don’t have it :-)