Tag: President Pig

  • The language used by him

    Trump of course is lying about it.

    I suppose he’s too thick to realize that all his many lies have the result that informed people won’t believe this one.

    Anyway, there are witnesses.

    Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said on Friday that the president did use the term “shithole,” repeatedly, during the course of the meeting on immigration — which Mr. Durbin attended. The senator described Mr. Trump as saying “things which were hate-filled, vile and racist.”

    In a Twitter post on Friday, just hours before the president was scheduled to sign a proclamation to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is Monday, Mr. Trump appeared to parse the language he spoke about immigrants from different regions of the world.

    The president wrote that he never said of Haitians, “take them out.”

    The president writes (i.e. tweets) a lot of things, and most of them are lies. There’s zero reason to think he’s not lying now.

    The White House has not denied his use of racially charged rhetoric.

    “I cannot believe that, in the history of the White House in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday,” Mr. Durbin said on Friday.

    In an earlier tweet on Friday, Mr. Trump said, “The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used.” His tweet did not elaborate on what “tough” language he used and did not provide a specific account of the meeting.

    The cake was not eaten by me. The window was not broken by me. The car was not crashed by me. The pussy was not grabbed by me. The innocence is all belong to me.

    The Times explains how it came up:

    Mr. Trump’s remarks, the latest example of his penchant for racially tinged remarks denigrating immigrants, left members of Congress from both parties attending the meeting in the Cabinet Room alarmed and mystified. He made them during a discussion of an emerging bipartisan deal to give legal status to immigrants illegally brought to the United States as children, those with knowledge of the conversation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting.

    When Mr. Trump heard that Haitians were among those who would benefit from the proposed deal, he asked whether they could be left out of the plan, asking, “Why do we want people from Haiti here?”

    The comments were reminiscent of ones the president made last year in an Oval Office meeting with cabinet officials and administration aides, during which he complained about admitting Haitians to the country, saying that they all had AIDS, as well as Nigerians, who he said would never go back to their “huts,” according to officials who heard the statements in person or were briefed on the remarks by people who had. The White House vehemently denied last month that Mr. Trump made those remarks.

    The Trump White House, like Trump, tells a lot of lies. Its denials, however vehement, are worth nothing.

    Representative Mia Love, a Republican of Utah who is of Haitian descent, demanded an apology from the president, saying his comments were “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values.”

    “This behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation,” Ms. Love went on in an emotional statement that noted her heritage and that said her parents “never took a thing” from the government while achieving the American dream. “The president must apologize to both the American people and the nations he so wantonly maligned.”

    “As an American, I am ashamed of the president,” said Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois. “His comments are disappointing, unbelievable, but not surprising.” He added, we can now “say with 100 percent confidence that the president is a racist who does not share the values enshrined in our Constitution or Declaration of Independence.”

    The reactions were extraordinary bipartisan rebukes to a sitting president, but they only fanned what has been a long-simmering debate over Mr. Trump’s views and talk on race.

    Or to put it another way, they underlined why he never should have been elected, and why his election was and is a national and global emergency.

  • The language of apartheid and race war and annihilation

    Gourevitch knows something about the language of apartheid and race war and annihilation – he wrote that book about the Rwandan genocide.

    Trump would be a génocidaire in a heartbeat if conditions were right. He would have no qualms about it.

    https://twitter.com/Evan_McMullin/status/951596801580261376

  • At what point is it enough?

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/951579003592245250

  • Staffers predict the comment will resonate with his base

    But wait, it gets even worse. Chris Cillizza has new details.

    On Thursday, in a meeting with a senators and House members on immigration, the President of the United States, asked this: “Why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?”

    Yes, he said “shithole countries” — apparently in reference to the fact that immigrants from places like El Salvador, Haiti and Africa were being protected in a potential bipartisan deal to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and secure funding for border security.

    What’s even more appalling is that the White House didn’t even try to deny that Trump used that slur, which was first reported in The Washington Post. In fact, in a lengthy statement from White House spokesman Raj Shah, the administration seemed to even defend the sentiment. “Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people,” said Shah.

    By calling other countries shitholes. That’s ok, we’re good, we don’t need that.

    But it gets even worse. Asked about the “shithole” comments, a White House official told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins this:

    “The President’s ‘shithole’ remark is being received much differently inside of the White House than it is outside of it. Though this might enrage Washington, staffers predict the comment will resonate with his base, much like his attacks on NFL players who kneel during the National Anthem did not alienate it.”

    Wow.

    Wow.

    So it’s just snooty elites, aka Washington, who object to a president’s racist outburst?

    And then…we know it will “resonate” with the tragically racist people Trump has been whipping into a frenzy for two years. We know that. That doesn’t make it ok. Saying racists will like it does nothing to make it not horrifying.

    The edge of the cliff is closer than I thought.

  • A man of wealth and taste

    Let’s get the take from somewhere else first. The BBC:

    US President Donald Trump has reportedly lashed out at immigrants in a four-letter Oval Office outburst.

    “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Mr Trump told lawmakers on Thursday, according to the Washington Post.

    The remark was reportedly in reference to people from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries.

    The White House did not deny the comment, which has been confirmed by other US media.

    Wow.

    We know that’s what he thinks, of course, but we didn’t all know he was quite that disinhibited.

    Democratic Senator Richard Durbin had just been discussing US temporary residency permits granted to citizens of countries hit by natural disasters, war or epidemics, say US media.

    According to the Post, Mr Trump told lawmakers the US should instead be taking in migrants from countries like Norway, whose prime minister visited him on Wednesday.

    Hahaha riiiight – why would Norwegians want to come to this shithole? This shithole presided over by a piece of shit?

    The New York Times reported three weeks ago that Mr Trump had said Haitians “all have Aids” during a June meeting about immigration.

    A backlash to his latest alleged remarks was swift.

    Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democratic lawmaker, tweeted: “I condemn this unforgivable statement and this demeaning of the office of the Presidency.”

    Another black Democratic lawmaker, Cedric Richmond, said Mr Trump’s comments “are further proof that his Make America Great Again agenda is really a Make America White Again agenda”.

    White and gold. Don’t forget the gold part.

    Mind you he doesn’t want to Make America Totally White Again because if he did that who would tend his golf courses?

  • Evidence

    Brian Stelter clarifies what Mika Brzezinski actually looked like last New Year’s.

  • Trump’s true self

    Michelle Goldberg points out that Trump is a pig.

    There’s a lot you can say about these tweets; among other things, it’s striking that Trump thinks that when journalists seek access to him, it means they like him. But I was most struck by Trump’s raw misogyny. Obviously, that’s not because Trumpian misogyny is anything new, but because, from the time he was inaugurated until this week, he’s mostly been holding it in.

    Trump does not get much credit for being disciplined, but for the last five months, he’s mostly checked his tendencies to leeringly appraise women’s looks, at least in public. (Vanity Fair did report in April that during a visit by the Japanese Prime Minister, “the president told an acquaintance that he was obsessed with the translator’s breasts.”) So far, there’s been no reported pussy-grabbing in the Oval Office, no stumbling in[to] women’s changing rooms or fantasizing aloud about female subordinates on their knees. Instead Trump, like other Republicans before him, has sublimated his misogyny into policies: expanding the global gag rule, sabotaging federal family planning programs, eroding enforcement of the law against gender discrimination in education.

    But the pressure and stress have been steadily increasing.

    When you’re under pressure, it can be harder to hide your true self. And Trump’s true self is a pig.

    She read my mind. President Pig is what I’ve been calling him all morning.

    On Tuesday, Trump interrupted a phone call with Ireland’s Prime Minister to sexually harass an Irish journalist named Caitriona Perry. Calling her forward, he said, “And where are you from? Go ahead. Come here, come here. Where are you from? We have all of this beautiful Irish press.” She stepped forward awkwardly and he looked her over. Then, returning to the call, he said with a smirk, “She has a nice smile on her face so I bet she treats you well.”

    Trump’s insult of Brzezinski is the other side of this connoisseurship. To Trump, women’s worth lies in their fuckability; it’s why he’s praised his own daughter by saying he’d sleep with her if they weren’t related. Trump’s tweet was meant to make Brzezinski seem grotesque and pathetic, a failure in the struggle to remain attractive—the only struggle that, in his eyes, really matters for women.

    Plus the bleeding thing, which again betrays his piggish revulsion at women for menstruating.

    I’m not sure that even well-intentioned men understand how relentlessly degrading this presidency is for many women. Having a man who does not recognize the humanity of more than half the population in a position of such power is a daily insult; it never really goes away. Perhaps this is why many women found the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale so resonant, even though Trump, the former owner of a casino strip club, is the last person one can imagine instituting a Calvinist theocracy. Gilead’s fictional dystopia captures our constant incredulous horror at finding ourselves ruled by thuggish, unaccountable woman-haters who appear to revel in their own impunity.

    Yep. It’s not an accident that I keep citing the way he talks about Elizabeth Warren and Alicia Machado among others.

    It is an incredible horror living in a country with that man as its executive.

  • Ten times harder

    The more I think about it the more staggering – and yet all too predictable – it is that Melania Trump’s people think it’s fine to justify his vulgar sexist vicious tweets by saying: “As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.”

    In fact you could read that as a captive Melania signaling to the rest of us. “I keep telling you – he’s an authoritarian bully who thinks he’s the only important person in the world.”

    But you can also read it more straightforwardly as his wife dutifully saying what he would say: nobody has any right to criticize The Great and Awesome Donald Trump, and if anyone does dare to criticize him, he will retaliate not with an equivalent response but with ten times more venom. You criticize him, he will tear you into pieces and feed you to the alligators.

    He has everything backward. He’s ignoring the fact that taking the job of head of state means having to put up with endless criticism and dissent and indeed mockery. He thinks it works the other way – that once you’re head of state  you have the power to force people to say you’re awesome.

    Not yet you don’t, Donnie. Not yet.

  • In unusually personal and vulgar terms

    The Times on Trump’s vulgar attack on a woman tv host:

    President Trump assailed the television host Mika Brzezinski on Thursday in unusually personal and vulgar terms, the latest of a string of escalating attacks by the president on the national news media.

    And women. There’s more than one pattern here. There’s Trump’s loathing and disgust at women as well as his hatred of independent journalism.

    The graphic nature of the president’s suggestion that Ms. Brzezinski had undergone plastic surgery was met with immediate criticism on social media. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, wrote on Twitter, “Mr. President, your tweet was beneath the office and represents what is wrong with American politics, not the greatness of America.” And a spokesman for NBC News, Mark Kornblau, wrote on Twitter: “Never imagined a day when I would think to myself, ‘It is beneath my dignity to respond to the President of the United States.’ ”

    In a statement Thursday morning, MSNBC said, “It’s a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty personal attacks instead of doing his job.”

    Ms. Sanders, in an interview on Fox News, defended Mr. Trump’s tweets.

    “I don’t think that the president has ever been someone who gets attacked and doesn’t push back,” she told the Fox anchor Bill Hemmer. “This is a president who fights fire with fire and certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by liberal media, and the liberal elites within the media.”

    No, this is not a president who fights fire with fire. It’s a president who fights criticism with vulgar sexist trashy personal insults.

    Jenna Johnson at the Post:

    President Trump lashed out at the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in two vicious tweets on Thursday morning, calling Mika Brzezinski “I.Q. Crazy” and claiming that she had a facelift late last year.

    Brian Stelter at CNN:

    Even by President Trump’s standards, these tweets were shocking.

    On Thursday morning, while MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” was on the air, Trump posted a pair of hateful tweets about co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

    …

    Trump claimed that Scarborough and Brzezinski courted him for an interview at Mar-a-Lago around the New Year’s Eve holiday.

    “She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!” the president wrote.

    He actually said yes, according to accounts of their meeting. Trump, Scarborough and Brzezinski mingled with guests and had a private chat.

    For the record, photos from Mar-a-Lago do not show any blood or bandages on Brzezinski’s face.

    Imagine my surprise to learn it was a lie as well as a vulgar trashy insult.

    Stunned commenters on social media noted that Trump targeted both hosts with his barbed tweets, but only opined on the physical appearance of the woman involved.

    Democratic commentator Maria Cardona, speaking on CNN, said it was part of a pattern of misogynistic behavior by Trump.

    And not what you’d call a subtle or stealthy one.

    Melania Trump is fine with it though.

    First lady Melania Trump is standing by President Donald Trump’s Thursday morning tweets criticizing MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski.

    No no no – don’t normalize it. He wasn’t “criticizing” them.

    “As the First Lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder,” the first lady’s communications director Stephanie Grisham said in a statement to CNN when asked about the tweets.

    Er…? That’s the definition of a bully.

    Also, it’s wholly inappropriate for an elected head of state. We’re allowed to criticize him, indeed it’s our civic duty to criticize him if he’s wrong or incompetent or a vulgar trashy misogynist bully.

    We’re living in a sewer in this country. A sewer.

  • A nation’s pride

    Ladies and gentlemen – the PRESident of the UNIted STATES!

    Hail to the Chief plays in the background

  • More Limbaugh than Lincoln

    Chris Cillizza on Trump’s non-presidential quality in light of his grotesque tweets last night and this morning.

    Trump tweeting things to forward his own agenda in the wake of terrorist attacks is nothing new. Following shootings in an Orlando nightclub that left 49 people dead, Trump offered this: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” After an incident of a knife-wielding man at the Louvre Museum in Paris, Trump tweeted: “A new radical Islamic terrorist has just attacked in Louvre Museum in Paris. Tourists were locked down. France on edge again. GET SMART U.S.”

    In short, the tweetstorm following the London attacks isn’t the exception, it’s the rule for Trump. Using these attacks to prove his political point is his default position not a one-time popping off.

    Trump’s responses are the latest example of how he is radically altering the idea of what it means to be “presidential.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s attacks on John McCain’s war hero status, his savaging of a Gold Star family, his wild exaggerations about his wealth and his seeming disinterest in the truth were all taken, at one point or another, as signs that he simply wasn’t “presidential” enough to actually win anything.

    That he wasn’t “presidential” enough because he wasn’t adult enough, or thoughtful enough, or decent enough. That he wasn’t “presidential” enough because he was deficient on every criterion you could think of – literally every single one. He was and is reckless instead of responsible, rude instead of civil, hostile instead of affable, ignorant instead of informed, belligerent instead of restrained…I could go on this way all night. Every moral and intellectual quality needed for the job, he has the opposite of, up to and including mere appearance – that godawful nightmare hair.

    And Trump has never stopped. His quintet of tweets on London are not only something that no previous American president would ever have said, they’re also statements that it’s hard to imagine any other leader in any other democracy around the world saying.

    They are more the statements of a conservative talk radio show host than they are of what we have come to think of as a president — bombastic, over the top and out of context. They are, by traditional standards, anti-presidential.

    Which, come to think of it, is a good way to describe Trump. He is sort of an anti-president — at least in terms of how we have always defined those terms. Trump’s attitude and approach in office is closer to Jerry Springer than to Gerald Ford. He’s more Limbaugh than Lincoln.

    And he, of all people, is in that chair.

  • They just called your number at KFC

    Was it a shove? Yes, of course it was a shove.

    Let’s break it down.

    A slow-motion viewing of the video indicates no words spoken by Trump as he approaches the group from behind. No “Excuse me” or “Pardon me.”

    Trump reaches out his right arm, grabs Markovic’s right shoulder and pushes him aside. Markovic looks surprised. Trump doesn’t acknowledge his existence as he moves past him. It’s as if Markovic isn’t there.

    Or, rather, it’s as if Trump is an arrogant bullying shithead who treats other people as things he gets to shove out of his way.

    Markovic abruptly looks back at Trump but gets no eye contact from Trump in return.

    Then he pats Trump on the back, or perhaps the arm, displaying a slight grin as Trump, at the front of the group, stands tall and adjusts his suit coat. Trump begins conversing with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite as Markovic looks on from behind.

    Look. That would be rude enough in a crowd of strangers, at a ball game or a protest or a conference – but this wasn’t that. This was a gathering of heads of state. It was a group of people who were there to talk and interact with each other. It was a group of colleagues. That makes Trump’s behavior all the more grotesquely and conspicuously rude. Starting a chat with Dalia Grybauskaite while both stand in front of the shoved aside Marković is kindergarten-level rude.

    White House spokesman Sean Spicer later told reporters that spots for the “family photo” for which the leaders were preparing were predetermined, as is usually the case — implying that Trump was not trying to get a better position, The Washington Post reported, but rather that he was heading for the position reserved for him.

    Half a second faster than he would have arrived anyway, when they weren’t going to take the picture without him even if it did take him an extra half second to get there. No. I think he was dismayed to find himself lost in a crowd instead of conspicuously out in front, and took out his dismay on this frightful little man who had the gall to be slightly ahead of him. I think that’s the kind of pig he is.

    As expected, the Trump shove captured the late-night shows.

    “The President Show” on Comedy Central depicted an exaggerated scene, replacing the Montenegro prime minister with the secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg.

    “Excuse me, excuse me, get out of my way,” the show’s Trump says to the secretary general, pushing him aside as they walk into a press briefing. “America first. America first.”

    Seth Meyers, host of “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” also riffed on the exchange, saying “Look at this guy. Wow.”

    “You’re a world leader at a meeting of dignitaries and you act like they just called your number at KFC,” Meyers said.

    “Me, that’s mine, the 12 piece,” Meyers said, mimicking someone pushing and shoving others out of the way.

    With two scoops of ice cream.

  • Get outta my way

    How Trump comports himself on the world stage:

    https://youtu.be/TL9XsHZmiys

    That’s Duško Marković he so rudely shoved aside so that he could push forward – Duško Marković the Prime Minister of Montenegro.

    He shoves him aside and pushes himself in front, and then sticks his chin in the air as if to remind everyone how important he is. It’s so ugly.

    Every single other person there is presentable and normal and polite – and then there’s this exaggerated piggish preening shoving bully of a man. He is a nightmare.

  • The rudest man on earth

    So in addition to everything else Trump behaves like a boor toward Angela Merkel.

    https://youtu.be/cAaMfl-Dn98

    Photographers ask “Handshake? Handshake?” Merkel says sotta voce to The Boor: “You want to handshake?” He ignores her and continues to scowl in the direction of the cameras.

    You always think you can’t loathe him more, and then he makes you loathe him more.