This is pretty presidential, and the first comment is priceless.
Also, at least in my experience, Mexicans don’t like the term ‘Hispanics’ and prefer to be called Latinos.
Don’t tell Trump.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
“I might have tacos tonight”.
I nearly died laughing when I saw it. All it was missing was him calling them “the Hispanics”.
This is even better than when he wished everybody a happy 9/11, “even the haters and losers”.
Build a frigging wall around it, Donald.
Trump can’t help being Trump. His handlers are going to pull their hair out as the election slips every further and further away.
I had tacos for lunch today at the cafeteria because it was pretty miserable outside. Definitely would have rather had a bowl if it was an option.
Heading to a friend’s house in a bit for a get together. I’m sure we’ll toast to The Donald at some point over this with our margaritas. They deserve him.
There is no way he ate that dish either.
It’s actually a single bite ‘taco bowl appetizer’, but his hands are so small that they make it look huge.
Hmmm …
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/everyone-getting-todays-trump-tweet-totally-wrong
I wouldn’t even go that far. It’s trolling. Like everything Trump does, it’s for the attention.
I agree completely with Drum’s analysis:
And he understands the media as it is better than the media understands itself as they mythologise themselves. To understand this is to know why he seems impervious to media inquiry; they can’t admit their true motivations and instincts. They are trapped like bugs.
Drum might be giving Trump more credit for knowledge of the game and how to play it than he deserves.
And yet this tweet is at the top of the news cycle just about everywhere.
Trump is about to eat Paul Ryan for dinner. On the strength of:
Seems to me Trump understands the game pretty darn well and has already figured Ryan for the light-weight poster-boy of establishment misdirection and bait-switching. Can we say he’s picked the wrong guy? Note the editor’s choice of “punches” in the headline, from a Ryan sympathetic news source, no less. How long do you think Ryan will hold up against a public fight with Trump over policy? How much of Ryan’s “wonkish” budget double-talk survives public scrutiny? Ryan’s holding a pair of deuces and Trump is calling his bluff.
If Trump brings Ryan to heel the others will bend their knees easily enough; any recalcitrants will be punching their tickets and exiting the gravy train at the next stop.
Most of his game is “thinking/acting like a thirteen year old bully.” But I will give him credit for including a “what would Sanders say if he were less polite” tag. HRC usually fares well when men bully her (she employs several different tactics to do so), but Trump isn’t a one note bully and he doesn’t back down; so, he might be a tougher nut for her. It’s the “Sanders tag” that’s going to be his stronger weapon. Won’t be as easy for her to talk over, parse, and drone on and on when he hits her with one of these.
Of all the people Trump had to choose to pick a fight with next he chose Ryan. The one person who stands in a direct line between Trump and de facto control of the entire party. And also, conveniently, one of the weakest links in the establishment chain.
Watch Trump and the media build this up as a cage match just in time for Ryan to publicly cave. If I were Trump’s people my only concern would be that Ryan held his water long enough to make a sufficient example of him. Ryan must be wondering whom he must ask and what he must do to be allowed to keep his nads.
He didn’t choose to pick a fight with Ryan. He slammed Ryan after Ryan initiated the fight. If you go back and think about it, that seems to be his standard MO wrt to competitors. ie, Cruz places and ad using an old modeling photo of Melania posing nude, and Trump responds with an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz juxtaposed with a flattering photo of Melania. Rubio started the small dick attack. Trump doesn’t mind being shameless in a counterattack because generally whatever wounds he ends up with are fewer and more superficial than what his opponent gets. He has stumbled when he counterattacked a woman; so, HRC may be tougher for him than he and others expect.
He’s acting like an alpha male daring others to take him on and when they do, he pummels them. The order on who comes after him is the one currently in the strongest position or one of those so weak that he has nothing to lose in doing so. Cruz and Kasich laid low throughout the primary waiting for someone else to knock Trump out. Then when all the others had fallen by the wayside, Cruz had the choice of either losing or taking on Trump and possibly winning. He might have chosen Fiorina as his VP because she was the only candidate that scored a point when she tangled with Trump.
Trump usually counter-punches? It’s his style. Ryan gave him the opportunity on the back of a request from Trump’s campaign to meet. I’m trying to point out to you he could have taken a swing at any number of public detractors in the past twenty-four hours. He chose to respond to Ryan after laying a trap for him. Ryan is in a very uncomfortable spot with a wavering congressional cohort too soon for him to have crafted and put in place a defensive strategy, if he even had considered one.
The establishment’s trust in Ryan is misplaced and Trump knows it. This Trump vs Ryan thing is the next big chapter of this story. I’m betting he brings Ryan to heel quickly. Ryan will suck up to whomever holds the power if he can just figure out whom it is.
Interesting that you and I are viewing the same words and sequence of events and interpreting them very differently.
First is it important if Trump did or didn’t have a staffer reach out to Ryan’s office to initiate a meeting within less than twenty-four hours of his win in IN? And if such a contact did happen, does it matter if Ryan did or didn’t get the message?
Standard protocol is for those in leadership positions to initiate contact with a winner even if it’s for no reason other than to congratulate him/her. The ball was in Ryan’s court. However, it wouldn’t be out of character for Trump to get the ball rolling and from what I’ve seen of him, he always starts with carrots. When competitors reach a point where they do need to talk, it’s far from “laying a trap” for one party to initiate such a meeting. It’s also not out of character for Ryan to be a weasel; so, denying that he’d received a message from Trump seems plausible to me.
However, I would never characterize the following as Ryan giving Trump an opportunity to meet:
This was like, “Boy, you better come and tell me exactly how you’re going to fit in with us.” Not through any private and direct communication with Trump and not even through private messengers, but on TV.
Ryan chose fighting words in a public forum, and he knew that. Which is why he gave others a heads up about the pre-recorded interview.
Why would Trump ignore that from one of the few remaining top guys in the GOP in favor of swatting his latest pissant detractors? Seems to me that it was Ryan who got so full of himself that left himself wide open to being cut down a few pegs by Trump. Now with the ball shoved into Ryan’s gut, it’s his choice to work privately with Trump to sort out some details or try for another overhead smash into Trump’s face.
I’m agreeing with your analysis. Ryan miscalculated and gave Trump his opportunity. You and I can argue the tick-tock or ethics of the encounter but the outcome is pretty much the same.
Who persuaded Ryan to go on CNN in the first place? I’m guessing Trump has a bigger hammer, whomever it was.
I wonder what the “thumbs up” gesture is supposed to convey in this context. Perhaps “I’m ready to commence eating!”
It makes his hands look human-sized.
I enjoy the radio program, “Latino USA,” on NPR with Maria Hinojosa. She did a program recently where part of it discussed the use of the terms Hispanic v Latino/a. I don’t remember whether Mexicans prefer one over the other. Clearly, Trump doesn’t differentiate nationalities or cultures. All are the same dirty rapey crimey messicans to him, taco bowls and all.
When did the Donald even learn about Cinco de Mayo, and is it celebrated outside of the US southwest (I really don’t know)?
I agree with a prior commenter, the only thing that woulda made this even more offensive is if Trump had said “the Hispanics.”
What a tool.
Cinco de Mayo is now an American Business shopping holiday like Christmas and Easter. Got lots of e-mails today touting Cinco de Mayo sales.
Carefully. The grey area between mocking Trump and promoting Trump is the terrain he has been exploiting for decades. That this tweet, for example, penetrates down through every nook and cranny of various media markets and mediums is a feature, not a bug, and a disconcerting revelation of our collective weakness for folly. Welcome to Mr Trump’s Pandemonium Carnival, media queue over here…
Oops.I replied to myself, above, instead of you, with the link to Kevin Drum.
Personally I prefer to be called Hispanic than Latino.
It was my understanding that most people from south of the US prefer to be identified by their country of origin.
“Hispanic” was a construct of the Nixon administration, but seems to be the category used by the US Census.
In my family’s case we lived in Texas when it became a state so our country of origin is America.
I believe the census as of 2010 just tries to count us as “white.”
How odd that we cling to categorizing people in this country based on skin color.
Uh… this country?
Yeah, I keep forgetting that Americans/America hasn’t matured beyond middle school. That explains a lot about our cultural obsessions.
I hate to disappoint you, Marie, but what we’re talking about is a global phenomenon.
This portion of the thread is gold.
Noticed that the other participant in the discussion has been perfectly willing to categorize Americans by the color of their collective skins when complaining about the voting habits of some voting blocs in the Democratic Party primaries, and when sanctimoniously claiming how bad the policies of Obama’s Presidency has been for those voters.
Another model is the French one. It’s actually illegal to collect any census data about ethnic or racial background. That’s all consistent with the French concept of citizenship: they reject the idea of Hyphenated-Frenchman. But pretending that everyone is unhyphenated French is part of the reason for the alienation of millions of French people of North African origin.
“Hispanics” aren’t a race in the census categorization, but a distinct nonracial category. “Hispanics may be of any race” which is meant, I think, to deal with the issues of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans and blackness on the one hand, and Native vs. European origin for Mexicans, Central Americans, Ecuadoran, Peruvians etc.
Was picturing Trump filing for bankruptcy a 5th time the day Clinton/Sanders got the keys to the WH, then Trump showing up in bankruptcy court to face a Hispanic/latino judge and a woman prosecutor. Hopefully he’ll be wearing the tie with spilt taco sauce still on it.
One of the most fun things to do when I was young was introduce east coast visitors to Mexican food. Don’t think any of them asked for a second helping.
Will add that when I was young, there were no taco bowls or Hispanics. Didn’t see a taco bowl until 1979 — I’d ordered a tostada not knowing that taco bowls had come into being and were then called tostadas. Seems like a waste of a flour tortilla and a lot of oil to present a salad in a bowl that can’t be eaten or washed.
You’re not supposed to eat them?
Why would you? It’s like deep fried cardboard. If I’m going to indulge in anything deep fried, I’d like it to taste good enough to be worth all that extra fat. Hence, my fondness for fish and chips.
Freshly made tortilla (chips, tostadas, etc) are delicious.
Growing up skinny and hungry in Chicago, my eating habits probably resemble my dog’s, put a little sauce on it and I’ll eat anything I can chew.
Really? My introduction was in San Diego where a latino (then called chicano) supervisor took us visitors from the Bureau to a little place where all the customers were speaking Spanish for lunch. It was very inexpensive, not fancy and was, as billed, “the best Mexican food in town”. I LOVED IT!
My second Mexican meal was in Anaheim where a white contractor took us to a little residential house with a backyard full of picnic benches and customers, most in blue jeans. Almost as good as the San Diego place, but no Carta Blanca. Up in your neck of the woods, a Chinese-American supervisor from the Naval Air Rework facility in Alameda took us to a store front Chinese restaurant. We gorged on wonderful Chinese food brought to us by the beaming wife. We had a big group that time, about 20. We compared this to the sparse offerings in DC and were told by the supervisor, “Bad Chinese Restaurants don’t last long around here.” This was around $4 each (1970’s), all we could eat.
Now that you mention it, my experience of those from the Mid-West (even the steak, baked potato, corn, and white bread type) had no difficulty with Mexican food. It was the New York and New England people that had trouble with the spiciness.
Maybe in generations past. I lived in San Diego for a while and I found the food to be pretty damned bland. Lots of cotija cheese, though. I think it’s easy to forget that cuisine in Mexico is very regional. More so, I think, than that of the United States.
Well, I was raised on home made hot Italian sausage.
Now that I’m retired, I want to try my hand at making my own, but my wife is being a bit territorial about the kitchen.
Anecdote: I grew up in southern California. School busing in my city meant busing Mexican American kids to dominantly white schools, like mine.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/728309799667044352/photo/1
No. I won’t go there.
Next Stop:
Eating some watermelon at a rib joint with Ben Carlson and exclaiming:
“The Blacks Love Me”
——————-
It’s going to be a really crazy election girls.
…to celebrate King’s birthday.
After that he’s going to need to build a wall around Trump Tower.
But it will be yuuge and first class.
We picked the wrong candidate for this cycle.
The Republican Nominee Is Campaigning on a Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Plan That He Likens to the New Deal
He’s straight stealing from Sanders platform.
When the opposition has great material, steal it!
It’s like the Sanders platform, only with 100% more lying!