I’ve burned myself out on the #TrumpRussia issue for today. I’ve got a lot more fascinating stuff in the pipeline but each one of these pieces is exhausting to write. There’s a temptation to try to explain everything and tie it all together with a bow, but the blog format and length won’t allow that.
For my second piece today I will focus on something else instead. You’ve probably seen the headlines today about the dispute over who is going to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now that director Richard Cordray has resigned to run for office in Ohio.
Is Mick Mulvaney the acting director or does that honor go to Cordray’s deputy, Leandra English?
That’ll all get hashed out in fairly quick order.
Personally, I think Greg Sargent captured the nature of the controversy with this headline: Trump wants to destroy Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild. In other words, erstwhile OMB Director Mick Mulvaney has been tapped to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Leandra English is trying to fight back. Sargent managed to get Senator Warren to comment on the matter:
In her first interview on this standoff since it erupted, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — the agency’s creator — predicted that if Trump installs his own director, its mission could be hollowed out, emboldening further financial elite defrauding of consumers. Warren suggested that this is part of a pattern in which Trump has embraced conventional GOP plutocracy in betrayal of his campaign posture as a kind of working-class avenger delivering tough justice to predatory financial elites.
“This is about whose side President Trump is on — big banks, or working families,” Warren told me. “So far in his administration, he has chosen the big banks time after time. Is he going to stand up for the working families who helped elect him?”
The president decided he couldn’t let any of those accusations stand. So, this happened:
President Trump on Monday referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas” at an event honoring Native American Code Talkers who served in World War II.
“You were here long before any of us were here,” Trump said, standing beneath a portrait of former President Andrew Jackson. “Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”
Turning to the veterans, Trump said “but do you know what? I like you.”
The president made the remark in the Oval Office standing beside three Navajos who helped the U.S. Marine Corps develop a secret code during WWII.
The three Code Talkers did not react to Trump’s remark.
I can’t really muster the appropriate amount of outrage here, probably due to my aforementioned exhaustion. Just the portrait of Andrew “Trail of Tears” Jackson alone is enough to make my blood boil. But to make these elderly war heroes listen to a U.S. president make stupid jokes about Pocahontas is something beyond all forgiveness.
Yea but his base loves that shit
Right. Don’t forget that Scott Brown(isn’t he now the Ambassador to New Zealand or something?) started it. Trump isn’t an outlier. He’s the GOP, and they are him.
Agree. And there were several “pundits” sent out ASAP to adjure the Base that what Trump said was just a ha-ha “joke” and in no way was racist or disrespectful.
I’m sure all those Dittoheads were just fine with it. That’s who they are. It’s is who they have always been and who they intend to continue to be: deeply and irredeemably bigoted racists to their core.
It’s not Trumpism. It’s just the GOP. Same as it ever was.
Screw the – insert racist terminology for Native Americans here – . They should be kissing our white azzes for all the fabulous things we’ve done, ur, given to them.
I chat with a man in Finland on a regular basis, and he’s absolutely embarrassed for us. He knows that most of us in the States are decent human beings, and he also sees how Trump and the Republicans are destroying our stature around the world. And he sees the power that Putin and the Russians wield as they continue to build up the military presence close to his country.
Trump is an ignorant boor who childishly believes he can insult people who are smarter than he is, but he diminishes himself every time he tries to bring people down to his level. He sees himself as a clever man, when in fact he’s ignorant and stupid. And his ardent followers are as ignorant as he is.
I again ask myself What Would Obama Do? And I always know that it would always be the opposite of what Trump does.
You are aware that baiting your outrage, exhaustion, and inability to think of ways to fight back are exactly the strategy Trump intends to silence his opposition. That and dividing it against itself so that it fails to actually oppose.
The research and analysis that you have put into strengthening the case for Trump-Russia collusion this week have been outstanding if venturing into some strange areas that had not gained salience until now. Who for example was aware of Trump’s connection with the Italian Northern Front? Or cared before he offered his candidacy for President?
You write:
Precisely, Tarheel. Thank you. Booman…and most of the Trump critics…are not really aware of what is being done to them. And…it’s still working after these several years. I tried to point this out from the very beginning of Trujmp’s candidacy for the Republican nomination with my various “You Can’t Laugh A Clown Offstage” posts here, but…as seems to be the case with any number of leftinesses…most of this community simply didn’t get it. Instead, they have continued to whip themselves up into exhausting froths of outrage and then post information about how “tired” they are. The clickbait neocentrist leftiness media have a large part in all of this foofaraw, making hay over and over again while the TrumpShit/TrumpShinola shines ever darker.
I swear to you…I am more and more convinced every day that Trump’s real aim…and by extension Bannon’s, etc… is to cripple both parties, cause some sort of constitutional crisis and take over all power in DC. He’s only one year in and he’s managed to get about half of that done already. It’s not a coincidence that he has surrounded himself with generals.
Crazy like a fox.
AG
I have been trying, largely in vain, to convince my wife that spending every day consuming the latest Trump outrage that is on the TV is not doing anything to stem the tide of insanity. We need to be aware of what is going on, but there are much better ways to expend our energy to fight this than immersing ourselves in daily collective outrage, which simply saps all our mental and physical energy.
Hasn’t Bannon explicitly stated that this is his goal?
I have no links, but I am also under the impression that Bannon – probably more so than Trump, himself – really does want to totally obliterate both parties and smash the US federal govt.
Of course, millions of conservatives can be reliably counted on to clap and cheer as the US govt is burned to the ground because they’d be directed by Rush/Fox to believe that this will piss off the Libtards.
You write:
Yes, he has. Numerous times, in numerous ways.
Like this:
Of course, Bannon and his allies have (supposedly) been beaten back from influence in the White House. I have no faith in the truth of that. They may have simply been forced to make a temporary, fake retreat. Or maybe Trump disagrees with Bannon’s tactical approaches, but not his strategic one…essentially dismantling the existing government and its controllers. The only way that this dismantling can be accomplished is by breaking the two parties that run the government. Trump is simply subtler about how to go about this than is Bannon.
My own predictions on the outcome of this battle?
Either Trump is broken by the Mueller investigation or he is stopped (using any means necessary) by…Gulp!!!…the military and/or the intelligence people.
We shall see…
Won’t we.
Caught between the Scylla of the neocentrist forces, the Charybdis of Trumpism and some other third of forces that are not covered in Homer’s Odyssey?
Let us pray.
AG
That next to the last line above should read:
“Caught between the Scylla of the neocentrist forces, the Charybdis of Trumpism and some other third set of forces that are not covered in Homer’s Odyssey?”
AG
Since I had to look it up, I thought I would share.
foofaraw – |ˈfo͞ofəˌrô| informal
noun
1 a great deal of fuss or attention given to a minor matter.
2 showy frills added unnecessarily.
Note this all took place in the oval office with only press video/camara in attendance. Why? the donald unable to fill a room with the military to honor former members?
A new low to Trump’s ignorance. Are any words too stupid or narrow or contemptible for this man to utter?
No.
That this disgusting pig of a man couldn’t help but insult these heroes in such a racist way when they were asked to be there to be honored for their extraordinary service should be offensive to everyone who calls themselves an American.
That he is the President, and that there will be literally millions of “fellow Americans” who will not only find no fault with this behavior but actually revel in it, just shows where we are as a nation. And its not a good place.
That this is the only way this ignorant cretin delivers any value to his party in helping them “govern” and pass horrible legislation by generating outrage after public outrage to create distractions and run interference for them, and is rewarded and protected for it is truly telling regarding what the republicans have become.
I just hope this ends up being yet another brick among many removed from the public edifice of any respectability and legitimacy the GOP has left. And that they are made to pay for it in 2018.
If the electoral college failed to protect the nation from this destructive President I’m battling to understand its future utility.
If we are to do away with the electoral college what will replace it that will prevent a mass reaction to misinformation just prior to an election? Which was one of the reasons for the college in the first place.
Cooler heads were to prevail, but the choice of electors has been inadequate for that function. Given the last presidential election, I’m not inclined to give the average voter any more power to screw things up.
If ‘prevent a mass reaction to misinformation just prior to an election’ was its purpose it failed utterly. The dog that didn’t bark.
Exactly. So either do away with it and expect the same results or worse in another election, or fix it. Which is the better choice?
It failed of its intended purpose over a century ago.
Its new purpose is to anti-democratically benefit the rural white demographic and aid the Repub party. Nothing more.
What was once questioned as dubious archaism is now The Founders’ Greatest Achievement(tm)
I hope that fat orange fuck has a stroke and winds up like Ariel Sharon: dead-but-not-dead, in a vegetative state for years waiting to die, but no one will pull the plug. So he suffers and suffers and suffers.
Strikes me as a fairly feeble “striking back”, the usual demeaning racism coupled misogyny, a two-fer. Just file it in the “overt racism” file. And the “conservative” movement saw fit to charge Obama with “racism!
It seems the beloved Trumper is already running out of material; he better juice up the hate speech or the incompetent white electorate is gonna get bored. Trumper’s brain has such a dislike of the nation’s diverse citizenry that he can’t fail to denigrate an ethnic group even as he is supposedly “honoring” them. Either very clever or Tourette’s Syndrome, who can tell?
What’s most comic here is the placement of the WH budget director into this agency after a mere 10 months with the budget battle just getting underway. Pretty clear the “budget” isn’t too much of a Trumper priority, haha. It also follows the now inevitable Trumperian pattern of giving an agency to a person of no qualifications whatsoever as long as they want to wreck it and subvert its mission. All that matters, of course, is that the nominee is a loyalist stooge.
As for the (sooner or later) destruction of the CFPB, that was a foregone result as soon as the incompetent white electorate got their federal trifecta with the help of the failed constitution. Speaking of which, the Repub party is making a mockery of the constitutional requirement (Art II sec 3) that the executive “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and it doesn’t appear that too many customers of FailedNation, Inc. have a big problem with that, present company excepted. Certainly the useless corporate media doesn’t care.
Nor does the low energy rhetoric of the Dem party bespeak much fight. Yes, when, oh when, will Der Trumper “side with working families”??? Jeebus…I can name that tune in one note!